Nutrition Industry Executive reached out to Nena Dockery, scientific affairs manager of Carthage, MO-based Stratum Nutrition, and here’s part of what she had to say.

NIE: In a study published in July 2024 in JAMA Network Open, allegedly only 11 percent of nearly 60 tested supplements provided the amount of key ingredients listed on the label. Was this a fluke? How do you ensure accuracy between labels and the actual product?

Dockery: Unfortunately, the JAMA report was probably not a fluke. And the cause of the discrepancy has several valid explanations. First, not all supplement companies are reputable. They may be more interested in the profit margin than in quality and are willing to cut corners to make another dollar. Less devious but with the same results, are companies (frequently manufacturers) that don’t really know the details about the ingredients in the products they are manufacturing. Natural ingredients, more so than synthetic ones, are susceptible to degradation over time and under certain conditions. Temperature and humidity are the main culprits for ingredient degradation, but other factors, such as a detrimental interaction with another ingredient in the formula or the use of inferior ingredients that contain little or no active components also provide an explanation. Ideally, finished product manufacturers only use ingredient suppliers who are attentive to the quality of the ingredients that they supply.

Reputable ingredient suppliers will often perform regular shelf-life testing on their ingredients to ensure that the active components are still present. Shelf-life testing can provide the necessary information for establishing a valid expiration date, thus helping to avoid label discrepancies due to reductions in active components that occur over time. Expiration dating must be substantiated, and declaring an expiration date can be tricky when the product contains a combination of ingredients with varying levels of stability. Vitamin C is notoriously finicky because it is vulnerable to degradation from water activity, alkaline pH, the presence of oxygen, and even metal ions.

Over-formulation is often used to ensure that an ingredient will always test out at or above the label-declared level, but this does carry a certain amount of risk. An ingredient that is present in a product at levels far beyond what is declared on the label can be just as detrimental to the efficacy of the product. However, in the past over-formulation was about the only way of ensuring any level of accurate labeling for non-spore forming and human-derived probiotics that are very susceptible to degradation by heat, water activity, and the pressure used in many manufacturing processes. But in recent years, microencapsulation techniques have greatly improved the shelf survivability of probiotics, along with the use of spore-forming species that are not as susceptible to environmental factors.

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