Vitamin supplements are a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. Everyone seems to think they need supplements to ward off cancer or heart disease or just to promote well-being. While it used to be pharmacies and drug stores that sold a few dietary aids, these days grocery stores and department stores alike have gone into the vitamin supplement business.
If you Google vitamin supplement, it brings up over 8 million pages. Eight million! While I’m not going to count them, I strongly believe that the majority of those eight million pages are there to sell vitamin supplements and not merely to provide information about them.
Multi-level marketing (MLM) has infiltrated the vitamin supplement business in a big way. Quackwatch.org states on their website that more than 100 MLM companies are selling health related products. Many of these are comprised of the vitamin supplement business. Some distributors aren’t even interested in making money, they merely join so they can get a discount on their own products.
There’s a lot of danger lurking in this kind of vitamin supplement business. Would you want the responsibility of telling your friends, neighbors and others that this particular vitamin supplement is really good and makes you feel really good and prevents really bad stuff from happening to you when you know nothing about where this vitamin supplement came from? Regulation of the vitamin supplement business is sadly lacking but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has busted more than one of these companies for making false claims.
My doctor refers me to a vitamin supplement business every now and then. It is a brick and mortar store that he is familiar with, he writes down the name of the supplement, including brand name that I need to get and he explains to me why I need this particular vitamin supplement. I feel relatively safe buying supplements like this, on the advice of my doctor. I don’t want my neighbor, who has no idea of my medical history or what other medications I might be taking, to promise me that her abc-xyz product from her vitamin supplement business is just what I need.
If you decide to operate a vitamin supplement business, pay close attention to the products that you carry. Pay even closer attention to any claims that you might make as to their effectiveness. Learn more about the flim-flam artists in the vitamin supplement business by going to the FTC and FDA websites. It may open your eyes as to what is really going on in the vitamin supplement business.
