Natural supplements (part three)


Let the buyer beware when it comes to those all-natural supplements: here is an unregulated industry which takes non-uniform plants from undocumented locations and prepares them using an undisclosed method. The final product is a highly uniform capsule with a bland and deceptively reliable appearance. The nutraceutical industry’s structure—or lack thereof—is an absolute fright, but try not to worry. It’s actually tremendously expensive to poison your customers. There’s a much better return on investment in peddling something worthless and harmless in capsule form.


Believe it or not, I’m not against supplements! I just can’t stand the thought of you being led along by the nose, spending your hard-earned money on bogus items and then battling your long-suffering pet to get them down the hatch. I think supplements might have a place in the care of your cat or dog; you just have to arm yourself with the best information available. If you’re very lucky, there’s a holistic veterinarian in your area… but these are in relatively short supply. Get on the web, but make sure to utilize reputable sites. Don’t rely too heavily on a single site. Use caution at a site that markets the product, of course. Because they have a vested interest in gaining your approval, use them as a starting point and validate your findings elsewhere. Spend the bulk of your time at URLs ending in .gov or .edu. Be sure to visit pubmed, which is a library of medical reports written and reviewed by scientists. Some good information comes from web sites that are written by veterinarians, but exercise a little bit of caution with sites that are written entirely by a single person, regardless of their qualifications. It might be useful to read testimonials, but the vast majority of them are posted by people with no scientific background and little to no objectivity. Sadly, testimonial pages and bulletin boards provide a fertile ground for artificial inflation of one’s medical expertise. If you don’t know who to trust or where to go for solid facts, ask your veterinarian to help you look into it.


Once you’ve obtained some basic information and approached your doctor for validation, make sure you buy from a trustworthy source. How on earth would you know? A handful of independent companies have positioned themselves to address the quality and safety of nutraceuticals. They are NSF, USP, and ConsumerLab. Look for their seals on supplement labels to indicate that independent testing was conducted (and yielded satisfactory results). Not every product on the shelf has been tested, so the absence of a seal doesn’t mean that particular item has failed in some way. While there are other companies and groups testing these products, many will have a conflict of interest (i.e., selling or advertising the product in question). Be fastidious in your research and discriminating in your purchase. I sincerely hope you will find just what you’d hoped for in a nutritional supplement.


Dr. M. S. Regan