Spotting Vitamin Frauds
It can be hard selling vitamin treatments, as a lot of people tend to write off any treatment with the word “natural” in it as a scam. Unfortunately, people form these stereotypes because a lot of the products out there are just that. So how can you spot a fraud from the real thing? Well, one telling sign that you should always look out for is the infamous “big list of ingredients”.
People that know about vitamin formulation understand that having the right vitamins in the proper proportion makes all the difference. 400 mg of vitamin C may help you. 400 mcg of vitamin C will do absolutely nothing for you. Sadly, the average vitamin customer doesn’t know much about the science behind supplements, and there are no shortage of scam artists looking to take advantage of those customers. Thus, you get a lot of products on the market that try and throw in every vitamin, mineral and herb that could possibly help a certain affliction. These are the type of products that will never work. You might as well just throw your money away.
It’s not enough simply to have beneficial ingredients. You have to have them in strong enough doses, with supporting ingredients that aid rather than diminish absorbency. Take an acne vitamin treatment that includes all the B-vitamins plus vitamin C. That might sound good on paper, but in order for this treatment to have enough of those ingredients to actually help you, each pill would have to be the size of your thumb. That’s not going to happen, so instead what you get is a worthless treatment that has trace quantities of a dozen different vitamins in concentrations too low to make any difference. There are a lot of ingredients that simply aren’t going to make any difference unless you take them in significant doses. And also, many vitamins actually compete for absorbance. Taking them together can lead to your body absorbing less of what you really need.
Vitamin frauds aren’t going away, because there’s always going to be some customer who looks at the label, notices “this product has X ingredient that the other product doesn’t”, and buys the product with the bigger ingredient list. But you don’t have to fall for this trap. When you see a supplement with an ingredient list a mile long, be smart. Be skeptical. Does it look like the product has a definitive active ingredient? If so, there may be hope. But if what you’ve got is basically just a cocktail of everything plus the kitchen sink that some website said helps with your affliction, then do yourself a favor and save your money. Look at proven products like Clear5 or 5-Hour Energy and you’ll notice that they keep the ingredient list to the essentials, providing strong doses of exactly the vitamins that make a difference.
I was once one of those gullible buyers, and several years back I even packed Clear5 with more ingredients than we have today (twice as many, and it cost the same price to produce, by the way). We found that the added ingredients actually made our product less effective, and we cut them. So remember, don’t be fooled by a product just because it has a long, seemingly impressive list of ingredients. If every vitamin under the sun is packed into a supplement that calls itself a treatment, it’s almost definitely a scam.
