If you supplement your diet by taking a multivitamin each daily, congratulations, that is a good thing. You are concerned about your health and taking care of your body. A good multivitamin will help you do that. You get extra credit if you make sure your mate also takes them, too.

Taking a multivitamin can help you maintain and boost your good health. It is about the best thing that you can do for yourself.

But there are some things that you need to consider:

Is Your Vitamin Natural or Synthetic?

Do you know if your synthetic multivitamin is as good as its advertising says it is?

Could you be gambling with your health by taking “their” word for it? If you are taking a multivitamin, this is something you definitely want to find out.

Don’t make the mistake of shopping for supplements at discount stores or large chains like Wal-Mart or Walgreen’s. According the Dr. Mercola, "In my opinion, these are classic examples of companies that primarily use cheap synthetic supplements.

Synthetic alternatives to whole foods are known as “isolates”. Your body will only absorb a small percentage of an isolate form of vitamins and minerals — and utilize even less (Your body absorbs much more of the whole food form.) On top of that, there may be side effects, depending on the quality of the isolate.

Don’t sell yourself short! Many retail outlets and online sellers are primarily interested in your money, not your health. Supplements are not their specialty.

You wouldn’t go to your local burger joint for a nice filet mignon, would you? The same attitude should apply to your health products.

Consider these items when choosing a supplement:

Additionally, the ingredients many companies use are not only synthetic, but there is a likelihood they may not have been thoroughly tested for purity and potency confirmation — and may have come from overseas. (80% of all Vitamin C comes from, you guess it, China.)

The manufacturers will often base their claims solely on the word of their suppliers.

The suppliers’ word may be good enough for them, but is it good enough for you and your family?

I don’t think so!

That is why I chose the manufacturer of my product very carefully. It meets the most stringent standards in the industry today, ensuring that the end product is exactly what it says it is on the label!

Is Your Supplement Made by a Company That’s ISO and NSF Certified? You’d Better Find Out!

Do you know just how many things can actually go wrong when a supplement is being made? Any one of them can produce an inferior product.

And it doesn’t take much — an oversight here, a little corner-cutting there, and before you know it, the quality of your supplement is headed downhill.

To prove to you that a product is made using the highest standards available, a manufacturer will voluntarily submit to exhaustive — and costly — auditing of their processes to achieve important certification.

So call, write, visit the website, or whatever it takes to find out whether or not your multivitamin is made at an ISO or NSF certified facility.

Why?

Because you may be wasting your money (or worse) by believing in a product that doesn’t meet the highest standards in the industry.

Don’t take anything for granted when it comes to your health. Every detail is worth your attention… What would be worse than putting your trust and health in the hands of a vitamin only to find out years in the future you took the wrong one?

What If the Raw Materials Used by Your Vitamin Supplier Weren’t Fully Inspected and Certified?

Believe me, you don’t want to get this one wrong.

It is the RARE company that actually has an aggressive quality control process. One that will confirm and INDEPENDENTLY validate that their raw material is identical to what the certificate of analysis from the supplier of the raw materials used to make the supplement claims it to be.

In fact, there may even have been pesticides used on the raw materials that could have slipped by a less-than-thorough check. The supplier’s word may have been good enough, as opposed to a thorough examination being done.

Unfortunately, their word just isn’t good enough for the manufacturer of my multivitamin.

You see, they’ve voluntarily adhered to the Vendor Certification Program (VCP). This ensures the quality of the raw materials used in my product.

So why don’t other manufacturers adhere to this program?

What If Your Vitamin Supplier’s Quality Control Procedures Are Lower Than Industry Standards?

Let me reiterate: If every manufacturer of supplements met high quality control standards, they’d all be bragging about their ISO certification. Somehow, they remain strangely silent…

ISO and NSF certifications mean superior quality control.

It means you can rest easy, knowing that the ingredients are checked many times throughout the process for contamination that could occur at any point during the manufacturing process.

It means that environmental conditions such as heat and humidity were appropriate throughout the process, which could also radically decrease the quality of the supplement you will eventually swallow.

It also means that your supplement wasn’t manufactured on the same equipment as banned substances or allergen-containing foods, and that the personnel involved in the process are highly aware of those substances…

Do you see the pattern here?

Would you eat in a restaurant that wasn’t clean and thoroughly inspected?

Of course not. So why settle for a supplement that might have been created under less-than-ideal conditions?

ISO and NSF standards ensure that the quality of your product is top notch. Does your multi boast ISO or NSF certifications? Mine does.

The personnel involved in the manufacturing process may not be fully trained for the particular testing or manufacturing equipment that they are working on.

But they would be if the facility was ISO and NSF certified. They would also be supervised throughout the entire manufacturing process. The manufacturing company I chose uses PhD’s to supervise their manufacturing process.

As a matter of fact, their supervision teams provide continual on-site training for every shift.

So find out if your multivitamin company is ISO or NSF certified. The few minutes it takes will be well worth it, for your security and peace of mind.

But what — exactly — do ISO and NSF certifications mean?

The term “ISO 9001” refers to a detailed set of quality management standards that the company must adhere to in order to meet the requirements of certification.

The more rigorous ISO 17025 provides a third-party accreditation of the onsite laboratories.

The supplement is tested onsite by hard-working PhD’s to guarantee the final quality of the supplement you eventually purchase —throughout the entire manufacturing process.

I searched long and hard to find the best company out there. I think I succeeded because the company I finally selected has won the NutriSearch Gold Medal of Achievement, an award given by an independent third party agency. Of the over 1,400 products tested, only 4 manufacturers of those products won the award.

But what may be the “ace” of all of them is this — being approved for NSF Good Manufacturing Processes (GMP) certification.

ISO 9001, ISO 17025 and  NSF

NSF International is an independent, not-for-profit organization. This body of audit and inspection is one of the most comprehensive and quality driven initiatives in the nutrition industry.

They are committed to making the world a safer place for consumers.

They work hard to make sure that you don’t have to question the safety — or quality — of your product.

Very few companies can boast this claim.

The FDA wants all manufacturers to someday adhere to Good Manufacturing Processes for dietary supplements. In fact, the FDA has recently ruled that, depending on company size, manufacturers have until up to 2010 to achieve GMP adherence.

However, the manufacturer I chose is YEARS ahead of the curve, as it has already been certified! And it did so voluntarily…

But this is the technical side of choosing a quality multivitamin. There is also the matter of ingredients.

As you’ll see, I chose naturally sourced ingredients wherever possible. In fact, I chose all of the ingredients in my Whole Food Multivitamin based on two factors. Factor number one: the ingredients are based on whole or raw foods. The second factor is their high bioavailability*.