Guidelines for Choosing a Quality Nutritional Supplement

Chiropractic treatment often involves more than the manual manipulations you receive from your chiropractor during a session. It also involves lifestyle changes (or rather: improvements) that can help enhance and maintain the benefits received in a chiropractic session throughout your day-to-day life.

One such lifestyle change that might come up for you is in the area of nutrition. Your chiropractor might recommend certain dietary changes and/or the addition of one or more vitamins or nutritional supplements to your daily routine. Should vitamins be recommended, you’ll want to know how to choose the best nutritional supplements to fill those needs.

To assist in that end, we offer you the following insights into the process of determining the quality of supplements you have to choose from.

The criteria we use at this office for establishing a supplement’s quality are:

• Manufactured in a Certified Facility– with established quality assurance and controls
  • Pharmaceutical certification – ensuring the supplement is pharmaceutical grade
  • 3rd-Party Certified for GMP (or Good Manufacturing Practices) by:
    • the NPA – National Products Association
    • NSF International – National Sanitation Foundation
    • or TGA – Therapeutic Goods Administration
• Tested and Analyzed – for qualities like purity, effectiveness, and potency; tested both In-House and Independently:
  • Purity certified
  • Identity certified
  • Purity-assayed
• Scientific Research – including Human Trials

• Bio-Available – Bio-availability is the extent to which the nutrient in question is able to be absorbed by the appropriate cells and put to use by the body in the intended manner.

• Natural Ingredients – made of purely natural compounds from all-organic sources, and containing:
  • no artificial ingredients
  • no synthetics
  • no allergens

• Proper Labeling – the Food and Drug Administration now requires that the packaging for all nutritional supplements contain a Supplement Facts label much like the Nutrition Facts panel on packaged food, which must include:
  • expiration date
  • manufacturer’s contact info
  • ingredients w/amounts listed

If you ingest a vitamin that doesn’t meet the above-listed standards, it may very likely pass right through your system un-utilized and flush right out of you as waste. Besides depriving your body of the intended benefits of taking the supplement in the first place, this also:

• makes your body work harder than necessary to process and move the inadequate supplement through your system
• wastes your hard-earned money on supplements that don’t give you the benefits you paid for
• could potentially discourage you from trying supplements again, even if the right supplements could do you worlds of good

It is also important to note that taking the wrong vitamin (one you don’t really need) can displace or use up other vitamins and minerals that you do need.  Be sure to discuss with us any nutritional supplement you are taking or are considering taking so that we can make sure it won’t interfere with your treatment, your healing, and your overall health and wellness.

The vitamins carried in our office have been investigated and approved by our office before recommending to our patients.