Following NOW’s (Bloomingdale, IL) report earlier this year of CoQ10, acetyl-l-carnitine and SAMe supplements with alarming quality and labeling problems sold on Amazon, NOW has identified similar serious failings in the phosphatidyl serine (PS) category, the company stated.

NOW purchased and tested a group of PS products on Amazon, choosing this particular supplement for several key reasons. According to SPINS data, NOW is the leading seller of PS in natural food stores, and the company knows the product well. NOW staff noticed that its PS sales were declining on Amazon, and investigated. NOW found that the top selling brands on Amazon were offering prices that averaged 70 percent below NOW’s already discounted prices. Knowing that the prices looked “too-good-to-be-true,” it made sense to test and verify potencies. Because PS is an expensive supplement, the incentive is high for marketing brands to put extra funds into Amazon-sponsored fees. NOW had previously tested examples in this and other categories and found these semi-private label brands sold exclusively on Amazon to display faulty labeling and be of poor quality. When most quality brands sell 100 mg PS as the standard potency, it’s questionable to see high potencies such as 400 mg or 500 mg.

NOW’s initial analysis of simply reading label information found multiple problems. PS is a complicated supplement, which makes it easier to have confusion. Many of the brands included in this report list a high potency, such as 500 mg, on the front label (and Amazon’s keyword) panel, yet the side panel often states that amount per 2 or 3 capsules.  Others were more deceptive by adding things such as “Phosphatidyl Serine Complex” in order to show a high potency value, even when the actual potency of PS would only be 20 percent of that number.  Here are some examples:

A total of 43 samples were purchased on Amazon, generally three bottles of each brand, and tested to verify results.  Three of these were NOW brand and results on these were 100 to 108 percent of label claims. Of the remaining non-NOW brands, two samples were discarded when results revealed 2.5 times the label potency claim so it was suspected these products were spiked with added Serine in order to fool testing. Two samples passed potency (not included in this report), while 36 samples failed. Of the 36 failures, 17 of these products contained less than 10 percent of the labeled value.

“That’s a shockingly poor failure rate, but not really a surprise based upon our previous experience testing supplements sold on Amazon,” said Dan Richard, vice president of global sales and marketing. “Amazon has to find a way to raise the bar on products they sell, especially today with people buying more supplements from Amazon in order to stay healthy.”

The results are reported in the chart below, which NOW tested by HPLC both by their in-house labs and independently at Eurofins Labs.

For more information, visit www.nowfoods.com.