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Products

• How do I know your vitamins are of good quality?

  Due to the way the nutraceuticals industry is regulated (read more below), it is often up to the individual brands and manufacturers to set and maintain high quality standards. But how do you separate the marketing lingo and certifications from what’s real? We’ll explain.
  
  The first step is making sure that wherever your supplements are manufactured follows Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) as laid out by the FDA to ensure public safety. These standards ensure that your products are made in a clean, hygienic and consistent way. The facility should also be held accountable by a third-party auditor or certification body. One of the largest organizations that provides this certification is NSF, which conducts regular audits and inspections of our manufacturing facility, at least once a year.
  
  We are also certified by the Gluten-Free Organization, who also conducts annual inspections of our facility to ensure that no gluten-containing ingredients are being used in our products and that ingredients are stored in such a way that prevents cross-contamination.
  
  Another important part of quality for us is sourcing ingredients that are both easy for your body to absorb and use, and responsibly sourced where there are concerns about provenance and sustainability. We use highly effective wild Norwegian fish oil that’s also certified sustainable. It’s good for you and good for the planet! You can find more detailed information here. We also cite some of the leading research that led us to our decisions.
  
  Finally, we’re open about the data behind our products, such as lab tests. We test our ingredients and every batch of our finished goods, which is not standard practice in an industry where third-party tests are largely voluntary. We make all of that information available to you so you can trace every single batch that we make.

• Are your vitamins FDA approved?

  The FDA’s role in the approval and regulation of dietary supplements is often misunderstood. Unlike with pharmaceutical drugs, the FDA does not approve or disapprove of any vitamin or supplement product.
  
  Rather, the FDA works with nutraceuticals as a subset of food, not drugs. This means they enforce rules on various benefits claims that manufacturers can put on their supplements, prevent dangerous products from being sold and defines Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) that keep the public safe. They also require supplement brands to have the standard disclaimer about not preventing or treating diseases.
  
  All of this means that it’s largely up to the brands to set and maintain strict quality standards.

• Where are your vitamins made?

  We make and store our vitamins out of our head office in Fullerton, California. We also have a satellite office in Denver, Colorado for customer support, sales and marketing.

• Are your vitamins vegetarian or vegan?

  All of our supplements are made with high quality beef gelatin that’s full of important amino acids. This means that our vitamins are not appropriate for people who follow a 100% plant-based diet.
  
  Our R&D team is always evaluating new materials for softgel production. Most vegetarian softgels in production right now are low-yield and made with ingredients such as carrageenan that people may be sensitive to. This combination of factors means that we may not be able to provide our vitamins at a value-conscious price.
  
  As technology moves forward in leaps and bounds, we’ll be watching this space, and you’ll be the first to know if we offer plant-based softgels.

• Where do you source your ingredients?

  One of the most important aspects of high quality for us is sourcing ingredients that are both easy for your body to absorb and use, and responsibly sourced where there are concerns about provenance and sustainability. We use highly effective wild Norwegian fish oil that’s also certified sustainable. It’s good for you and good for the planet! You can find more detailed information here about each ingredient we use, where we source it, what form we use and why.

• Why do you use titanium dioxide?

  We use the larger molecule that's typically used in food, rather than the nanoparticles you find in other household products. These types typically don't accumulate in or bypass the intestinal wall due to size. The larger molecules provide that white pigment. The nanoparticles are not that good at producing the bright white cast, which is why they are put into cosmetics and sunscreen, rather than as food coloring.
  
  The most well-known of these IBS studies were conducted on mice in a University of Zurich study in BMJ. The study abstract does acknowledge this difference in size in different TiO2 substances. Many more studies need to be conducted in order to come to a definitive, policy-changing conclusion, preferably on humans rather than mice, and with full double-blind trials. We await these studies to be done.
  
  References: http://gut.bmj.com/content/66/7/1216
  https://www.fda.gov/forindustry/coloradditives/coloradditiveinventories/ucm115641.htm#ftnote7
  https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/160914

• Why do you use plastic bottles and not glass bottles?

  We made the conscious decision not to use glass as it is heavier and more fragile to ship, resulting in a larger carbon footprint due to additional protective packaging and heavier shipments. Furthermore, the PET we use is BPA-free. PET plastic bottles are the most commonly recycled plastic in the world, with high rates of recycling all over the world. Our PET bottles are dark, which means they block UV light and protect the efficacy of the ingredients within. The caps are made of aluminum and recyclable.