Q: I’d like to try taking fish oil, but I get confused with all the different products available. How do I choose a good quality supplement at a reasonable price?
With hundreds of plant and animal based products available, not only as individual agents but also in various concentrations and combinations, making a choice among so many can seem overwhelming. And if you find it for sale in a health food store, pharmacy aisle or website, it must be safe and effective, right?
Not necessarily. Unlike a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, a dietary supplement manufacturer has very few rules to worry about. Before a prescription medicine can be sold in the United States the manufacturer has to provide documentation to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that their particular drug or drug combination is reasonably safe and effective and manufactured according to established standards of purity and quality. Manufacturers of dietary supplements can just make a bunch of product, put a label on it and immediately start selling it. This lack of regulations has encouraged an explosion of natural products made for and marketed to the general public.
It wasn’t always this way. In 1994 Congress passed the Dietary and Supplement Health and Education Act, creating the dietary supplement industry practically overnight. Products that qualify to be considered a “dietary supplement” are treated more like a type of food than a medicine, which means they have very few rules the manufacturer has to follow. This has resulted in significant differences in standards of manufacturing and unacceptable variations in the quality and potency of products available.
Fortunately, there’s now a way to determine whether the bottle of supplement you are interested in purchasing has been manufactured according to good manufacturing standards, similar to the stringent requirements of prescription and non-prescription drugs. Remember the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval? In 2001 a similar sort of validation called USP verification was started to address the problem of uneven quality of dietary supplements.
When a manufacturer can show that their product is made with the same standards used by pharmaceutical manufacturers, they earn the right to put the USP Verified mark on the label of that product. Those standards are decided on by a group called the United States Pharmacopeial Convention, also called the USP., in 2001 the USP started a new program to address the uneven quality of dietary supplements.
The USP is a non-profit organization created in 1820 by a small group of 11 physicians dedicated to ensuring the purity, identity, strength and quality of foods, medicines and dietary supplements. With nearly 200 years of experience in establishing quality manufacturing standards, this independent scientific group is entrusted by the FDA with creating and standardizing standards for quality in manufactured medicines, food ingredients, and dietary supplements.
According to the USP website at www.usp.org, the USP Verified mark on a label of a supplement indicates that it contains only the ingredients listed on the label in the amount and potency specified, that it doesn’t contain any harmful levels of specific contaminants, will break down and release its active ingredients into the body within a specified amount of time, and has been manufactured according to the FDA’s current Good Manufacturing Practices using sanitary and well-controlled conditions and procedures.
When you are shopping for fish oil, look for the USP Verified seal on the label, which assures you that the product is made according to good manufacturing standards.
To see what the seal looks like and to review supplements that already have earned the USP Verified designation, go to www.usp.org/usp-verification-services/usp-verified-dietary-supplements. One surprise that I found was that the Kirkland Signature brand of fish oil carried by Costco stores is USP Verified.
