How to choose what nutritional supplements you really need

Four billion people use herbal medicine to treat health conditions and improve their overall health, according to the China News Service.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is practiced in over 160 countries. Britain and Canada each have 3,000 TCM clinics; Australia has 4,000.

One billion dollars changes hands yearly just for raw ginkgo biloba leaves, according to Medical News Today.

People know about the benefits of using Nature as their source of medicine, and finally, more and more members of the scientific and medical communities are taking notice, as my previous articles about scientific studies on ginger and the African violet Viola yedoensis point out.

It's no longer a case of a professional health care provider saying "herbs don't work." It's now simply a question of "What is the best natural product to use for a specific patient's needs, and does the product I'm using have the quality I expect?"

Here are a few tips on choosing a quality nutritional supplement:

• Choose products from an established manufacturer that's been around awhile.


• Choose a company that produces their products using Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), a standardized set of manufacturing practices established by the National Nutritional Foods Association (now the Natural Products Association).


• Look for expiration dates on vitamin products. Vitamins easily oxidize.


• Make sure all herbal ingredients listed on the label specify what part of the plant is used. There is no law against creating a product that utilizes parts of a plant that don't contain the active bioactive properties that you're buying the product for. Plants contain many parts — for example, roots, leaves, berries — but not all parts of any specific plant are therapeutic.


• Avoid low-priced, mass market and store brand herbs, vitamins and other nutritional products. Priced cheaply to make them attractive to shoppers, these low-priced, high-profit products are often really incredibly expensive, when you realize that their potency is usually so low that a recommended serving provides you with only a tiny percentage of the traditional dosage or recommended serving of a quality product. I recall finding a mass-market gingko biloba product on sale at a "dollar store" a while back. When I compared it to a $25 bottle of a quality product, I discovered that the cheaper product would have to cost over $300 to actually equal the potency of the quality product.

Don't jump onto every new fad that comes along. Don't simply "try" a bottle of whatever herbal product is in today's news.

Back in my days in health food stores, I had such mixed feelings seeing a customer come in for the latest trendy herb, expecting one bottle to cure a health problem he or she had had for years. I was happy the customer was there, and was willing to try herbs, but their expectations were often too high, and they wouldn't maintain their enthusiasm for the herb or for even the general concept of natural health. Herbs work, but they don't necessarily work overnight. We live in a "right now" world, and sometimes our expectations are askew.

Your health care professional can guide you to a set of simple lab tests — a finger prick for blood and a urine sample — that will show you exactly what bio-processes in your body aren't functioning properly. Test results will recommend specific nutritional supplements that will improve your health and get your body's chemistry and metabolism back on track. Take the time and spend the money; it's smarter than just popping capsules of the latest herbal product, hoping they will quickly fix what ails you, and in the long run, it's much less expensive than repeatedly "trying" new supplements.

Complementary Medicine | Natural Health | Nutrition | Herbal Supplements | Nutritional Supplements | Dr. David Ross, ND, CNHP | DrDavidRoss.com