Day: March 3, 2023

• Amazon is the largest retailer of dietary supplements, with more than $10 billion in annual sales

• Independent testing conducted by NOW Foods revealed many supplements sold on Amazon are “subpar quality”

• In one example, nearly all of the 400-mg dry capsule CoQ10 tested contained much less of the active ingredient than advertised on the label — and in some cases, none at all

• NOW Foods has tested 175 supplement products sold on Amazon, finding not only problems with potency but also with adulteration and contamination

• Even after being notified, both Amazon and the FDA continue to allow the sale of supplements that in some cases contain none of the active ingredients listed on their labels

An estimated 77% of U.S. adults take dietary supplements, according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition,

most commonly in the hopes of “improving” or “maintaining” their overall health.

When it comes to selling dietary supplements, Amazon is the leading player, with more than $10 billion in annual sales.

This money may be going to waste, however, as independent testing conducted by NOW Foods revealed many supplements sold on Amazon are “subpar quality.”

“Vitamins should help people’s health and not do any harm,” Dan Richard, VP of global sales and marketing at NOW Foods, told Natural Products Insider. “We’ve seen low potencies, fraudulent labeling, high microbial contamination, high heavy metal levels, and beef gelatin capsules mislabeled as vegetarian capsules. Each of these is a problem.”

In full disclosure, the testing was conducted by supplement maker NOW Foods, which began the investigation in 2017 “after the company noticed its position on the online platform declining — while brands with no or low brand recognition were climbing in popularity.”

It began with coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which is used by every cell in your body, especially your heart cells. Richard became suspicious when he noticed 400-milligram (mg) doses sold in dry capsule form.

“I knew that CoQ10 is too sticky to encapsulate on high-speed machines,” he told Natural Products Insider. “When I looked at the prices, which were ‘too good to be true,’ I asked our lab to test these and see if the products were legit. As I suspected, they were not.”

Nearly all of the 400-mg dry capsule CoQ10 tested contained much less of the active ingredient than advertised on the label — and in some cases, none at all. In follow-up tests conducted in 2020, NOW used high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to test 10 CoQ10 brands, revealing similar results.

None of the samples tested contained the potency listed on the label. Further, five of the 10 samples had less than 20% of the labeled potency. In two of the samples, no CoQ10 was detected.

“As a business partner of Amazon, we did report this information to them and hope they will take action,” Richard said. “Additionally, NOW has provided this information to other supplement brands, FDA, and to trade associations.”

NOW conducted additional testing in 2022 to determine if the supplements that tested as low potency had improved. Seven out of eight brands tested still had low potency, and some were using deceptive labeling to misrepresent the contents. Richard stated again in 2022:

“NOW has reported these findings to Amazon directly, as we did previously, but the problem products continue to be sold, and often as a ‘Sponsored’ (paid marketing) featured products. NOW plans to send a copy of this report to Amazon, NPA trade group, FDA and FTC. Low potency brands do harm to consumers everywhere, as well as to honest businesses that make and sell quality products.”

NOW Foods has tested 175 supplement products sold on Amazon, finding not only problems with potency but also with adulteration and contamination. Specifically:

• Acetyl-l-carnitine — NOW tested seven largely unknown brands, finding none met label claims and most were labeled incorrectly. According to NOW:

  “It seems that virtually all known brands label Acetyl-l-Carnitine properly, which is “Acetyl-l-Carnitine (from Acetyl-l-Carnitine HCl)”. This is correct in that ALC is about 85% elemental & it takes 600mg of the ALC HCl form in order to make label claim of 500mg ALC.

  Unfortunately, almost all small brands on Amazon label incorrectly in order to get the higher 500mg label claim. This is very misleading and a deceptive way to compare similar products.”

• Alpha lipoic acid — Out of 13 brands tested, they combined to average 69% of the label claim. Two of the products tested contained just 5% to 8% of the potency claimed on the label.

• Curcumin — NOW tested 23 product samples purchased from Amazon in June 2021. Heavy metals, including cadmium and lead, were revealed, along with adulteration with synthetic curcumin, which is derived from petrochemicals. “In total, 12 out of 23 outside products tested failed either for potency, containing synthetic curcuminoids, heavy metals or used [animal] gelatin caps instead of the claimed veggie caps.”

• Glutathione — Among 19 brands tested, three failed to meet potency claims and two had issues with heavy metals.

• Magnesium glycinate — NOW tested 16 samples, finding most did not include the chelated form as claimed. NOW explained:

  “Magnesium chelates, such as magnesium bisglycinate or glycinate, have excellent water solubility and lack a laxative effect. The fully reacted chelates are better absorbed and more expensive than other forms and thus, are at risk for substitution with lower quality material, such as magnesium oxide and magnesium carbonate, simply blended with glycine.”

The news that many supplement brands being sold on Amazon are selling subpar, misleading and potentially dangerous products comes as Amazon’s share of the market soars. No other retailers even come close to touching Amazon’s $10 billion in annual supplement sales.

The closest competitor brings in about $6 billion in annual sales, while a few others bring in over $1 billion.

The COVID-19 pandemic was what drove Amazon’s breakout years in 2020 and 2021.

Daniel Harari, cofounder of ClearCut Analytics, told Natural Products Insider that the pandemic led to a “four- to five-year acceleration in a matter of months” of people transitioning from shopping in-person to shopping online. Now, Amazon accounts for up to 80% of vitamin, mineral and supplement sales.

Amazon’s clout in the supplement market means that it yields incredible influence if it pulls products from its virtual “shelves.” Such was the case in 2020, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suddenly cracked down on N-acetylcysteine (NAC). The FDA claimed it was excluded from the definition of a dietary supplement, as it was approved as a new drug in 1963,

before it was marketed as a dietary supplement or as a food.

Retailers, including Amazon, pulled supplements containing NAC from their shelves in response, as the FDA’s move meant NAC could no longer legally be marketed as a supplement, even though there were no fewer than 1,170 NAC-containing products in the National Institutes of Health’s Dietary Supplement Label Database at the time.

Draft guidance released by the FDA in April 2022,

however, included verbiage suggesting the FDA would not be enforcing their policy that NAC cannot be marketed as a dietary supplement, even though it was technically still illegal to do so. In August 2022, following the FDA’s release of its final guidance, Amazon “quietly notified” supplement makers that it was resuming the sale of NAC dietary supplements.

Another reason to be very choosy about where you get your supplements is that multinational corporations — like Bayer, Nestle, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble and Clorox — are buying up supplement companies at a frenzied pace. In 2018, there were 83 such transactions. This rose to 137 in 2021.

For instance, Nestle Health Science, a division of Nestle, now owns:

• Pure Encapsulations

• Douglas Foods

• Garden of Life

• Vital Proteins

• Nuun

• Wobenzym

• Persona Nutrition

• Genestra

• Orthica

• Minami

• AOV

• Klean Athlete

• Bountiful, which owns Solgar, Osteo Bi-Flex, Puritan’s Pride, Ester-C and Sundown

“Several of these brands are higher quality supplement companies,” Alliance for Natural Health USA noted. “What will happen to them now that they are owned by mega-corporations that have not historically had core natural health principles as the foundation of their businesses? We’ve spoken to several of the largest and highest quality brands that have not been purchased; they have confirmed that larger companies have made several unsuccessful attempts to purchase them.”

Why are there continued attempts to make supplements drugs and for mega-corporations to acquire their makers? “Where there’s money to be made, big players will want to cash in,” Alliance for Natural Health explained.

The end result for consumers could be disastrous, however, including restricted access to supplements and inferior products on the market.

It’s already apparent by NOW’s investigation that you can’t use tech companies like Amazon as a barometer of supplement quality. In the U.S., the supplement industry is viewed as largely trustworthy by the majority of adults (79%).

However, access to high-quality supplements is continually being threatened, not only by unscrupulous manufacturers, corporate mergers and acquisitions, but also by legislation.

In April 2022, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Mike Braun, R-Ind., introduced the Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2022.

The Act would require supplement makers to provide information about their products to the FDA, including (but not limited to):

• A list of all ingredients

• An electronic copy of the label

• Allergen statements

• Health and structure/function claims

Known as mandatory product listing (MPL) for dietary supplements, supporters claim it’s a way for the FDA to know what products are on the market and what ingredients they include. But opponents suggest the move, which is burdensome for small supplement companies, could ultimately give the FDA more power to ban supplements from the market.

What’s more, it’s possible MPL could turn into a tool for premarket approval, which the FDA could use to keep dietary supplements off the market. Daniel Fabricant, president and CEO of the Natural Products Association (NPA), explained to Nutritional Outlook:

“The thing is, if the safeguards were there” — meaning language built into the bill to clearly state that the law doesn’t let FDA reject any database submissions — “they would be specifically spelled out. They would say, ‘Hey, nothing in this act would allow the Secretary to remove an ingredient that isn’t the subject of final agency action.’

… That would give you a safe harbor, but we haven’t seen any language here that would present that [in the current bills].”

MPL could also bring the U.S. closer to adopting universal limits on supplement dosages and formulas — a move that would also restrict consumers’ access to therapeutic levels of such products.

Meanwhile, both Amazon and the FDA continue to allow the sale of supplements that in some cases contain none of the active ingredients listed on their labels. Richard continued to Natural Products Insider:

“When cheating brands win sales, quality brands, of course, lose and market prices are set falsely too low, making it a challenge to maintain market share with a quality product. So the brands committed to selling quality products take a financial hit, and consumers are cheated of both their money and the health benefits they think they are getting …

Unfortunately, the track record of cheating brands, Amazon’s ineffective quality program and FDA inaction each lead to the conclusion that cheating will continue.”

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Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.

If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.

• Investigative journalist Whitney Webb reveals the inner workings of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the driving force behind The Great Reset

• Beneath WEF’s benevolent surface, it becomes clear that corporatism and, more aptly, fascism, are its modus operandi

• WEF’s Board of Trustees is packed with powerful and prominent representatives from government and multinational corporations like BlackRock, Salesforce and Nestlé

• WEF supports the “merging of man and machine,” or transhumanism, and its Fourth Industrial Revolution aims to use wearable and implantable technology to surveil your thoughts and launch a digital dictatorship

• Once implemented, a digital dictator ship will be almost impossible to escape from; one way to stop it is to not comply or utilize these technologies

Curious about the inner workings of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the driving force behind The Great Reset? Set aside 30 minutes to watch investigative journalist Whitney Webb speak with MintPress News in the video above.

Every year in January, WEF holds its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

The 2023 theme was “cooperation in a fragmented world,” with WEF noting, “The world today is at a critical inflection point. The sheer number of ongoing crises calls for bold collective action.”

Their actions, however, while carefully packaged to appear altruistic — and steeped in warm-and-fuzzy buzzwords like “green” and “sustainable” — will ultimately propel its small circle further into power while all but guaranteeing a downtrodden populace. If you so much as dip your finger beneath WEF’s surface, it becomes clear that corporatism and, more aptly, fascism, are its modus operandi.

WEF often speaks about the “transformative potential of public-private partnerships.” According to WEF:

“The private sector needs to speak the language of social change, and the public sector needs to create economic incentives to harness the private sector’s innovation and expertise to address society’s challenges. With shared goals, targeted action and monitored impact, we can move beyond dialogue and aspiration to the co-creation of a more inclusive, prosperous and sustainable future.”

It sounds good in theory. But what, exactly, is a public-private partnership? It’s when private entities like multinational corporations join with the public sector, putting the two on equal ground. The problem is that most politicians receive money and other favors from these same multinational corporations, so many facets of the government are essentially owned by these corporations.

In this way, Webb says, “It’s really more of a private-private partnership, and what you have there is essentially a means of implementing specific policies being controlled, more often than not, by the corporate sector and promoting what is essentially a fusion of the private and public sector.”

Webb compares this ideology to that of Benito Mussolini, founder of Italy’s National Fascist Party:

“Mussolini … defined his particular brand of fascism in the early and mid 20th century as corporatism emerging of private and public power. Looking at it through that frame of reference essentially the World Economic Forum … is promoting a fascistic ideology around the world.

They have a habit of creating policies through both the public-private partnerships that are housed within the World Economic Forum and affiliated with but external to the World Economic Forum.

Those policies are given then to governments around the world, and many governments around the world have a lot of prominent officials who in the past have been trained by the “leadership programs” of the World Economic Forum and its affiliates.”

Many have heard of Klaus Schwab, WEF cofounder and chairman. But it’s also important to delve into WEF’s Board of Trustees, which is packed with powerful and prominent representatives from multinational corporations. It includes:

• Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

• Al Gore, former vice president of the U.S

• Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO

• Marc Benioff, cofounder and CEO of Salesforce

• Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé

• One of the cofounders of the Carlyle Group, which has extensive intelligence connections

“These are the people that are essentially driving this public partnership model around the world, and they have very specific policy agendas that, again, the WEF drafts — policy papers and white papers. These are sent and then implemented by governments around the world,” Webb says.

This includes a strategic alliance WEF entered into with the United Nations in 2019, which called for the UN to “use public-private partnerships as the model for nearly all policies that it implements, most specifically the implementation of the 17 sustainable development goals, sometimes referred to as Agenda 2030.”

Agenda 2030 is composed of 17 sustainable development goals with 169 specific targets to be imposed across the globe. While “sustainable development” sounds like a perfectly reasonable goal, this noble sounding verbiage hides a hideous truth, as these plans are not what they claim to be.

Agenda 2030 is aimed at reducing middle-class’ consumption of basic goods and energy, which includes limiting, with an eye toward eliminating, property rights and private ownership for future generations, along with targeting such “luxuries” as ownership of electric appliances and motor vehicles along with suburban housing and air conditioning. Webb adds:

“It’s worth pointing out that in the late ’90s at the World Economic Forum annual meeting, the then-head of the UN, Kofi Annan, essentially said that the World Economic Forum had been in part responsible for what he referred to as a silent revolution at the UN, where the UN, instead of championing the public sectors of the world, which is how most people think of the UN, they would instead begin to prioritize the needs of the businesses of the world …

So multinational corporations … over the past several decades — the World Economic Forum being a major part of this — the United Nations has been pushed to essentially prioritize corporate needs over public needs.”

Investigative journalist Johnny Vedmore has dug deeply into Schwab and his family history, revealing that Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, ran the Ravensburg branch of a company called Escher Wyss during WWII, producing “different components needed by the Nazi war machine … and the Nazi atomic bomb program.”

Vedmore revealed three of Schwab’s mentors — John K. Galbraith, a Canadian-American economist, diplomat and public policy maker, Herman Kahn, who created concepts on nuclear deterrence that became official military policy, and Henry A. Kissinger, who recruited Schwab at a Harvard international seminar, which was funded by the U.S. CIA.

“If you have a decent knowledge of Klaus Schwab’s history, you will know that he attended Harvard in the 1960s where he would meet then-professor Henry A. Kissinger, a man with whom Schwab would form a lifelong friendship,” Vedmore explained. Further:

“There were three extremely powerful and influential men, Kissinger among them, who would lead Klaus Schwab towards their ultimate goal of complete American Empire-aligned global domination via the creation of social and economic policies.

In addition, two of the men were at the core of manufacturing the ever-present threat of global thermonuclear war … their paths would cross and coalesce during the 1960s … they recruited Klaus Schwab through a CIA-funded program, and … they were the real driving force behind the creation of the World Economic Forum.”

Early WEF affiliations can also be tied back to the Club of Rome, which aligned with neo-malthusianism — the idea that an overly large population would decimate resources — and was intending to implement a global depopulation agenda.

No discussion of WEF would be complete without delving into transhumanism, a term coined by Julian Huxley — brother of Aldous Huxley, who wrote “Brave New World.” Julian Huxley, however, was the president of the British Eugenics Society and an ardent supporter of eugenics ideology, Webb says.

A decade later, he wrote a book, “New Bottles for New Wine,” explaining that advances in technology had led to a “new eugenics,” which he referred to as the “merging of man and machine,” or transhumanism.

“Ever since then,” Webb says, “transhumanism has picked up steam. A lot of its supporters were people that historically have had ties to the eugenics movement. The Rockefeller Foundation is a really good example of that.”

Schwab is another, who developed the term the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which brings in human-machine symbiosis.

One of Schwab’s top advisers, transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari, Ph.D., openly admits data might enable globalists to do more than “just build digital dictatorships.” Via technology in the form of wearables and implants — like brain chips — the idea is to one day surveil your very thoughts.

“Humans are now hackable animals,” Harari said. “Humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so whatever I choose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will — that’s over.”

Webb explains:

“Harari has made the point that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is different from past industrial revolutions because … in the late 19th century you had two classes — the exploited and the unexploited. And he says, in contrast, now the Fourth Industrial Revolution will mean there will be three classes — the unexploited, the exploited and the irrelevant.

And he argues that it’s much better to be exploited than irrelevant. In this scenario, the unexploited would be the oligarchs of society … he’s essentially admitting that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a recipe for neo-feudalism, one that’s managed by extremely invasive, advanced technology.”

Eventually, the goal is to make implantable devices capable of reading your thoughts as commonplace as cellphones are today:

“Harari, at World Economic Forum meetings, says the point that technology gets into your body and is capable of surveilling your thoughts is the line that the world crosses into digital dictatorship — where the leadership will be able to know what you really think about them and what you really think about issues. And if you don’t agree — to use his words — you’ll end up in the Gulag the next morning.”

The implications of mass surveillance policies being promoted by WEF is an unconstitutional monitoring of dissent, with the intent of stamping it out. Big Tech is working with military and intelligence agencies toward this end, including using what’s known as “predictive policing” to detect “pre-crime.”

This describes the use of AI algorithms that comb through data on individual’s internet activity to “profile you and decide if you ay commit some sort of crime in the future.” “If we invite surveillance onto and into our bodies, we are crossing a red line into a tech-fueled dystopia that … would result in a digital dictatorship that, once implemented, will be almost impossible to escape from,” Webb says.

So, what can you do? “The most obvious way to stop it would be to not comply or utilize these technologies that can be used to surveil you in these ways,” she explains. “A lot of this technology is marketed as convenient,” such as biometric data, but “the more of us that don’t comply, the less successful this agenda will be.”

Subscribe to Mercola Newsletter

Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.

If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.