The Crazy, True And Scary Facts About The Supplement Industry.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey, everybody, it's Ben Greenfield. And I was just actually, before we even began recording, having a fascinating discussion with today's guest about how your protein powder may not actually have in it what you think it has in it. And while it may not be crushed up beetles and bugs, unless you're using that brand new fangled cricket protein stuff, there may be some issues with your protein. So before we even jump into Neil Thanadar, my guest's story and what it is that he does. Neil, what's going on with protein powder, man?

All right, so there's something called amino acid spiking. And so what you would expect when you see one of those fancy products on the shelves at your local supplement store is 100% whey protein isolate. And what we're seeing is that a lot of products don't actually live up to those claims. Many of them have maybe 30, 40, 50% protein, and the rest of it are amino acids. If you had a free amino acid like taurine or glycine or glutamine added to your product, you're actually only getting in terms of a full spectrum of amino acids that you really need only 30 to 40% of what you think you're getting.

Is that because that's just like, cheaper to make that way or is that just poor quality control?

So it's many times cheaper and it's actually due to a very interesting FDA loophole. So the FDA actually only requires that manufacturers test the nitrogen content of their products. And so to a nitrogen test, amino acids or 100% pure whey protein isolate look the exact same, but to a more complex test, which is the kind of testing that labdoor runs, we can actually see the difference between the two.

Interesting. Okay, cool. And before you guys run for the hills thinking that Neil is a protein powder salesman and he's about to tell you, but wait, there must be a better way. He's not a protein powder salesman. He actually runs a fascinating website that tests supplements for their quality. It's basically a totally unbiased website that's doing some really cool things. So it's called Labdoor and it's over @labdoor.com. and Neil's gonna fill us in about what that is and what they do because it's actually a pretty cool resource for you. But before we jump into that, Neil, what's your story man? What's your background? Were you like a biology major back in college or something like that?

Yep. So it's actually chemistry and molecular biology. And so actually grew up in. My dad ran testing labs my whole life. Growing up, that's what I thought I wanted to do. And I just loved the science behind these kinds of analytical laboratories. You basically could take any product, put it in the lab and break it down to all of its components, from the best active ingredients all the way down to the smallest parts per million parts per billion contaminant. When I got out of school, that's what I knew how to do. I started a laboratory and we did basically a lot of work for pharmaceutical companies. We became an FDA registered lab and that meant we were able to do the method development, stability testing for these companies. And so we could, we would be the ones who actually put that expiration date on your product. We knew whether a product needed to be pulled off the shelves and retested.

Gotcha.

So we were actually qualified to do all of that testing. And what we actually found out while running that lab is that supplement companies aren't put up to the same standards. But what's happening is the manufacturers themselves, they wanted either themselves or much more likely they wanted their competitors to be set up to these standards. And so they would buy all of their competitors products, ship them to our lab and say, tell us what's wrong with all of these products. And so we would, and we'd find all these problems. We would find energy drinks with caffeine levels well over 200 milligrams in a two ounce shot. We found these protein powders that had high amounts of lead in them. We found fish oil products that had less than half as much Omega 3s as they claimed. And we just had to ship that information out to the manufacturer that paid for it. And so what I really wanted to do is say let's turn this business model on its head and say let's have consumers pay for it. Let's have the consumers drive what's tested and let's have them get the information delivered directly to them. And that's what labdoor is.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. So at labdoor, exactly what happens, like are you guys going out and walking into, you know, whatever Walmart and Costco and just grabbing the stuff off the shelf Taking it back and testing it or what's kind of your protocol or the ringer that you would put a supplement through when you get your hands on it?

Yep. So the first thing we would do is actually buy a product directly from a retail site. And that's really important to us. I think a lot of places manufacturers want us to kind of hand pick a sample and send it to a lab, but we want to get exactly.

The same manufacturer so they can a manufacturer of a supplement, if they want to have their supplement checked out by a lab, it's not the lab that gets to pick it. Like a manufacturer can just pick something off the whatever they want and send it into the lab to test.

Exactly. And in some cases they test it in very special ways. So like for fish oil, they'll do a vacuum sealed chilled package directly to the lab in just perfect conditions. And we don't want to do that.

We know that these are sending it to somebody's house via ups, taking two weeks and having it sit in a hot box for 14 days, of course.

And so that's really what people are taking. And so we want to make sure that the stability lasts that long. Right. And so that's the first thing we do. And so we buy all these products, we bring it in and we actually do all of the work here. We'll actually take pictures of all of the products. So everything on the site, we actually do that ourselves. And then we get it into an FDA registered lab. And that's where the kind of, the really fun begins, where we're starting to break down these products. We look at every active ingredient and then we look for really key purity concerns. So if it's a fish oil, mercury and PCB are big issues. If you're looking at a creatine powder, we can look at creatinine and other kind of breakdown products of creatine. And so finding all of the stuff that's supposed to be on that label, make sure that that's accurate and then making sure that the product is as pure as it claims.

Okay, so tell me, tell me about what kind of stuff you find in supplements. Like when we're talking about contaminants and things like that. Just because I think a lot of people maybe, you know, it's kind of woo woo when you say maybe something is contaminated or whatever. But what exactly are we talking about in terms of chemicals you see that you might not want to see?

So it's something as simple as a protein powder that has too much sodium two or Three times what it says on the label. Or it could be something really as complex as water.

Why would that be an issue? Why would like two to three times as much sodium?

So one of the things that we're finding with protein is that if you're starting to look for gains, if you're trying to gain muscle, you're trying to put on a little bit of good mass, you may think that you're actually making a gain when you actually could just be getting bloated by a lot of excess sodium. And so that's something that we've seen in muscle products, for example.

So it may not be like if you have a bad reaction like a whey protein, it might not be the whey protein. It might be that just has like crap loads of extra sodium in it.

Exactly.

Interesting.

You may actually think that you're gaining weight. Right. You may actually feel like you've actually put on a little bit of mass. But it's actually significantly. It could not actually be that case.

Was that doorbell somebody delivering supplements to your door?

It probably was. We've been testing, we're trying to get up to basically 50 to 100 products per month tested in our facility.

Wow. Wow. So how many people are there? I mean, is this just like this huge lab where you guys are constantly testing supplements or what kind of an operation is this?

So we actually have seven of us in San Francisco that are doing all of the technology work, so the web, mobile applications.

Okay.

And then we basically got the ability to use the lab that we, that I founded in Michigan that continues to do a lot of the work for us. And so that's about a, a 25 person facility. But not all of them obviously are doing all of our testing all the time.

Okay, I want to hear what you're doing with all of this information that you're getting. But first, before that, is this just a huge labor of love or. I mean, is there like how can you make money doing this, just testing supplements?

Absolutely. So the two things that we've been doing, the key thing is for consumers, we really followed the open table style model. If you look at OpenTable, they're just the best destination for all of this information about these restaurants. And then the way they make money is basically they have the ability to make a reservation on their site and basically they make a percentage of that reservation. And we've basically got the exact same model. So you do all your research. We've got our scientific reviews, we've also got user reviews. And when you're ready to make a purchase, we basically just have a buy it now button that right now just connects you to Amazon. It'll eventually connect you to any retailer that you're interested in. And then those retailers basically give us a percentage of those sales.

Okay, I see that now. I'm like, you have a bunch of rankings here for like energy and fish oil and protein. So if I went to research what was the best I could get the product report on your site and then if I wanted to buy it from there, it's just kind of like an affiliate based system basically.

And we really like that because it basically connects our business model directly to helping consumers. If we're the best, most trusted resource, you're actually going to buy through us and we're able to get a percentage on that.

Yeah, I like it. It's kind of like, I don't know if you've seen examine.com but they're a really good source for kind of finding out the actual research, like the peer reviewed research behind certain supplements and supplement stacks. And that's another website, it's kind of similar. You can go there and do all your research and it's like, you know, you have an opportunity to get what it is that you're looking for at this site as well. It's very, very similar. But your website is way different in that you're actually testing these products for contaminants. So once you test and you measure the active ingredient content and you identify these potential contaminants, then what happens? Like how does it go from that to your website?

Sure. So we actually built really early on in the process basically calculations and algorithms to take that information and turn it into a single grade and ranking. Because I think what we've always found out is that sometimes there's so much information out in the supplement space and we didn't want to be just one more place that shows up on your nightly news talking about contaminated supplements, but actually said something where we, we actually need to translate this into something consumers can understand. And so basically we do all these calculations. We have an A through F grade and then we rank each product in a category by both quality and value. And we see that actually consumers are pretty evenly mixed between the two. There's basically almost 50, 50 buy based on quality or value.

So people will buy something cheap even if they know that's low quality and that they're going to be eating it.

Well, the thing that we kind of find out is something that let's say it's the number four product on the quality side, but it's okay.

So it's like they're trying to get that optimum combination of quality and affordability.

Yep. And so that's what we consider our value calculation. So, like, if it's the fourth best product, but it's the 20th most expensive product, you're actually getting really great value there.

Okay, so now I want to ask you some scary questions because I'm on your website and I see you've got things ranged from like A, all the way down to D. So I've got your multivitamins page up right now. And by the way, it doesn't look like you've analyzed the multivitamin that I take yet, the Thorn one. So you guys need to. You gotta get some of those in stock. I'd send some to you, but it doesn't sound like that satisfies your criteria for receiving a vitamin supplement. Okay.

So.

But you've got some on here that are rated D. What would make something like a multivitamin rank as a D with your protocol? What kind of stuff is in there?

So we would look at. In some of these cases, we're looking at preservatives, artificial colors. Those are definitely things that could be of an issue to us. We're also looking at.

I see that Centrum gets a D. Sure.

And some of it's preservative, some of it's artificial colors. Some of it could just be inaccurate labels. And so we've had products that really that were either. That were actually 90% below or 90% above their label claims for some of these ingredients. And that's actually. There's a lot of reasons that could happen. One of the kind of the simplest reasons it could happen is that the manufacturer just didn't put enough of an ingredient in. But the other parts of it could be like a product, like a vitamin C, for example. Vitamin C actually degrades over time. And so if you bought a product a year after it hit the lab, even if a manufacturer meant to put the product in there and they didn't really kind of pay attention to stability, that vitamin C could be mostly or all gone by the time you actually take the product. Wow. Wow.

Okay. So I'm looking at proteins. You've got muscle milk as a D. And I've always told people that muscle milk is not all that great for them. But I haven't seen this before. You say on here, it's got 358% higher levels of sodium than what it says on their label.

Yes. And Holy cow. And the amazing part about that and it's, we've seen that the ready to drink products, those shakes that you get, yeah, those usually are worse offenders than even the powders. But in this case the powder was bad as well.

I've been wary of those ever since. I used to be sponsored by the bodybuilder. It was similar to Muscle Milk. I'm blanking on the name of it now. It was, I was one of those man in a can pre mixed protein shakes. They would send me like cans and cans of it to my doorstep when I was bodybuilding and I would be crapping out a straw all week long and just be like red in the face and have acne and all this stuff and I swear I got pretty swole. I put on a lot of muscle. But I've suspected since back in that day that that stuff is not all that great for you, the pre mixed protein powders.

And for us I think it's something where you just don't even notice. Right. You may have a negative reaction to it. So you may think that you can maybe guess and maybe you don't ever take it again, but there's always going to be that new generation of people who are going to take that product and look at it on the shelf and say, oh, that looks easy. Oh yeah. And that's part of labdoor's job is just say for the first time we're just going to publish all of this information and then you can do with it what you want.

Yeah, okay. Vitamin D. You've got vitamin D on here ranked from A down to D. What would make something like a vitamin D rank poorly?

So the vitamin D products were actually the best on average out of all of the categories. So the vitamin Ds actually, I think 17 out of 20 of them actually were in the A range and so many of the products were actually very good. I know that that category, I think what's very interesting to us is we find that the simpler that the formulation is, the better the products do.

Yeah, Actually I see that now like the worst ranked vitamin D on your website only has a C plus.

Yep. And then the second from worst is actually an A, A minus. Right. And so you. It's a lot. It's basically just it's the simpler the product formulation is. There's a lot less that can go wrong in manufacturing.

But when I look at like your top rated vitamins, like you have Carlson Labs here as your top rated vitamin D, do you ever take into consideration, for example in this case, vitamin D toxicity or an imbalance of vitamin D in relation to vitamin A or vitamin K. Do you pretty much primarily look at the supplement and then not really look too much into whether or not it's balanced well with the things that would naturally need to be accompanied by that in the human body?

So right now we are looking at the supplements independently, the same way an analytical lab would. The thing that we've really focused on is right now everything on the site would be what I would consider a global ranking, a global grade. We're basically taking studies that have the average of all humans and saying based on that and our testing, these are the best products. But our goal has always been to move from a global number one to a personal number one. So we want to actually understand what is your diet and maybe you can connect in your food tracking, tell us what other supplements, tell us what medications you take, and let's start trying to get a better kind of fuller understanding of who you are to the point where we know there's a difference between a triathlete and someone who's much more sedentary. Some of that's vitamin D. You're outside more. We can start figuring those things out. But some of them are significantly more complex. How does your diet, plus your exercise, plus your supplements all fit together? But to me, it feels like a scientifically and medically, it seems like a solvable problem. It's just something that we're going to have to work on very hard.

Okay, so a ton of people take fish oil, and that's actually one of the things that I recommend quite a bit to people, especially athletes. Now, when you're looking at fish oils, what exactly do you look at? Is it just like how much EPA is in it? Do you look at oxidation? Like, what are the things that people should be taking into account on something like a fish oil? Because so, so many people use fish oil.

So we look atso the same way as all the other products. We're looking at purity and potency. So we're looking at not just the total Omega 3 content, but yes, we're also looking at EPA and DHA specifically and seeing how those levels match up. We also look at mercury and PCB levels in 30.

Is there like an optimum range for EPA and DHA that you look at or do you just see if it matches what they say? It's on the label.

So we've looked at a lot of different optimum ranges. And the problem is there's basically no one single medical report that says this is exactly how much EPA and DHA you can take. And so largely we're comparing them to the labels and we're generally comparing them to the recommendations that you should get at least 1 to 2 grams of total omega 3s. And so those are the recommendations that we're following right now. But beyond that, we're also looking at oxidation. So we actually can run tests on primary and secondary oxidation to see if a product has A, either started to go bad or B has actually already started the oxidation process.

Interesting. Have you found that the way that. So you're ordering these or getting these products the same way that a consumer might get them off the shelf? Have you found there's a difference between like a fish oil that comes in a bottle versus in a packet versus in a canister or anything like that?

So we try to be very careful with, with light based oxidation and oxygen based oxidation. And so both of those are going to be significant issues. The liquid products, even though that's something that wasn't as big of an issue in our testing, you would expect the products that are in like one big liquid container to potentially have more risk of oxidation because you're now instead of with a capsule, you're just exposing that one capsule to the air. As soon as you take it with a liquid product, you're kind of opening and closing that bottle on a regular basis. And so, so definitely air is a big issue that people should consider. And lights and others. The storage conditions are very important. We try to store these products really carefully. But it should make sense that basically the capsulated products would actually score better on these types of oxidation and freshness tests than the liquid based products.

Gotcha. Okay. And then you've got energy and energy drinks. Now this is kind of interesting because obviously you got everything from like rockstar to interesting. How come you mixed energy gels in with energy drinks? What's the rationale there?

So right now we've got kind of a limited set of categories. And so sometimes we've got like the recovery shot will eventually go into a different category.

Yeah, okay, gotcha.

But for now we've kind of put them together. So we've put in the strips and the gels and the drinks and the shots all in one category. Eventually we would expect the same way that protein will eventually split up into mass gainers and shakes versus powders. But for now, basically because we have so many limited categories, we want to kind of bring all those products together. Wow.

Gouroctane got a D. I know. A Ton of triathletes and marathoners and stuff that use Goo Roctane. Why would that have a D?

So one of the things that we actually found on that, and that may actually be due to the category is that it basically, relative to the energy category, it didn't pull in a lot of. Basically a lot of high quality energy. So that's actually something that could be. It may actually be something that could be better fit in a recovery category.

I'm looking here at the breakdown though, it also exceeded 20% variance. Does that mean that it didn't have in it what it said, what the label claimed?

Yep. So basically what we're seeing is it's basically had lower. The label actually was pretty low. And we also were a little bit worried about its preservative there. So that was kind of a. They had one of the watch list ingredients. But I think for this product could do better in its own category. That's kind of one of those products where you're taking Roctane for an entirely different reason than you're taking Monster. Sometimes its efficacy score isn't as great because it's competing against products with four or five times as much caffeine as it. But it's worth understanding. Why is that label accuracy so bad? How could things get better with that? And I think one of the things we're trying to figure out is how to get products like this and how to get this information not just to consumers, but we're increasingly getting. Every time we release these stories, we get calls immediately from the manufacturers. And so we are. In some cases we're just trying to. The first thing we do is just get them as much information. We get them the lot and batch numbers, the expiration dates, and then they can go in and do some quality control. But really over the long term, we want to be being that resource, that place where the same way that the FDA sets standards for a lot of these other industries that we can go in and say this is the standard of quality and this is the standard quality that every consumer is now going to see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. You'll probably get a call from GOO after this. I actually, I used to. Or there was one day where I had 46 Goo Roctanes in a single day. It was during an Ironman triathlon. Actually added it up. It's a lot of Roctane. What else would cause an energy drink or an energy compound? Like, I see myo energy here, the Mio energy stuff that also got a D. Would that be the Same reason or are there other things like contaminants and stuff?

So that one was a lot based on. There was an artificial color issue there. There was a lot of watch list ingredients in that product. And I don't know if you've ever. So what we actually do. This is kind of an interesting little insight into what Labdro does. We actually buy extra versions of all these products. And in some cases, we actually test one or multiple batches of the product in house. Just like literally us individually doing user reviews. And it's something that you can actually tell just from tasting a product. Like Mio, you can start. You can taste this like absolute chemically taste.

Oh, you mean you test them by drink? Like you're not doing independent testing, like with your lab equipment. You're actually using yourselves as guinea pigs.

Every once in a while we basically just try these things. Right. Sometimes we'll just like take one bottle and just like as if we're like professional taste testers. Right. Like try all these different things. I remember no one got through the Mio taste test. We gave everyone a couple ounces of a drink and everyone was just. You can kind of have this immediate sense of artificial flavors that just kind of hit you. Some of those products, I think in general, just how we talked about different categories have different highs and lows. And the energy drink was kind of skewed lower than the rest. And I think a lot of it was due to all of these chemicals that are put into those products.

Yeah, you guys need to hire that out. You need to just like get an intern or a college student or something there to just feed stuff to all day long, just keep them in a cage and kind of toss little supplements in and see what colors they change and what happens to their energy levels.

We try not to do it too much because we. The problem is we know exactly what's in these products, so we try to limit our own exposure to it as well.

It's crazy. So what do you take for, like, if you wake up in the morning, are you using supplements or is this just totally scared you away from using any supplements at all?

Yeah. So that's actually something that's really important to talk about is that we've talked a lot about the kind of the negative issues about the industry, but there are some definite positives. So once you find a fish oil product that's actually a high quality, a grade product that is most doctors, I personally tell people to take fish oil. You've personally told people to take fish oil? It's a great product to take as long as you can find the right one. And so I actually do take fish oil right now, and I pulled it right off the top of Labdoor's list. Same thing with a multivitamin. So those are the two that I take every single day. And I'm actually about to start taking a probiotic. And as a quick tease, we're actually releasing our probiotics within the next two weeks. And so we'll actually have data on that as well.

Okay. Give us some kind of a spoiler, dude. Throw us a bone. Tell me what you're taking or what you guys have found to be just freaking awesome for a probiotic.

So we haven't. So I haven't actually started taking the products yet, but we have seen a few products. A Renew Life product scored very well, but we found a number of products that were just. Were just excellent. Hit all their label claims. Wow. And so we were looking tough to.

Do with the billions of probiotic bacteria that you have in a single capsule.

Yeah. The probiotics was the highest variation in highs and lows that I'd ever seen. You're talking about places that's had one that claimed 1 billion and had 50 billion. Right. You were seeing the opposite. You were saying things that had that claimed 10 billion and were under a billion. It was all over the place. And so it's absolutely the category that I think you need Labdoor the most. Just because it was just these incredible variations.

Yeah. I need to have my wife send you some of her kimchi. We can add that into the probiotic category.

We get so many of them.

That's my primary source. Yeah, you got to start doing foods now. Like all these functional foods and nut butters and man, all sorts of potential here. This is pretty cool. And you guys have a magazine on the website. You have all your rankings, all your products. I like it. If folks are listening in, Labdoor.com is the place to go to. Check this out. Pretty cool resource, Neil. Anything else you want to share with folks who are listening in?

The last thing is actually that we are putting in big updates into our iPhone and Android apps actually today. And so be a great place to basically take these kinds of reports into the store with you so you know exactly what you're buying, even when you're in retail.

Okay, cool. Nice. I'll link to all this over in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you want check it out. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Labdoor and you can check it all out. So Neil, thanks for coming on the call man.

Thanks for having me. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice. Sa.