Ever since the passing of the 1994 Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act (DSHEA) in the US, Supplements have been excluded from federal regulation. One of the negative aspects of this lack of regulation is that certain unscrupulous companies have taken these loose regulations for granted, allowing them to produce their product in less than optimal conditions. As a result, the Supplements can be contaminated with lead, arsenic, mercury, pesticides, steroids, and other substances.

Due to the FDA’s lack of oversight on Supplement companies be careful when purchasing over counter Supplements at your grocery or health food store. Often, ingredients labeled on the bottle do not even match what is actually in the pills because nobody is policing these Supplement companies. The only way to catch these companies is for independent testing firms to run tests on their own dime to find out which companies are honest and which are fraudulent. Recently the National Institutes of Health revealed that most glucosamine and chondroitin products sold in the United States are low quality, less glucosamine and chondroitin is put in the pill than what is printed on the label, and do not contain research proven dosages.