3 replies to this topic

[Veritas C. & E.]

I am looking into buying Resveratrol, and concerning those products who have only a certain amount of it I was wondering if one could find the exact composition of the remaining amount (not only what else there is in it, but also how much, up to trace amounts)? Is there public FDA info one could find about this? Perhaps some of you guys have analyzed products yourself?

I am looking into this specific product (http://www.revgeneti...esveratrol.aspx) but I am also really interested in this question as a whole. I am a bit concerned about those who are sensible to life extension and yet absorb about 200 grams/year of stuff they don't directly want to absorb (for those who use 50% products). Even 99% purity seems quite at odds with such a goal in sight, depending on what constitutes the remaining 1%. I would be heavily concerned with 1/10,000th of that concerning heavy metals for instance. Do some of you absorb chelation agents along with it or do you consider that in any way (it would seem less risky to use the purest product available without chelation agents than to use such agents in conjunction with bad product, I must admit)? What about wholly nontoxic but potentially carcinogenic excipients in the long term?

I strongly mistrust the food and drug industries, at least for their limited conscience/understanding of their own business (non-financial wise), even in their best regulated states (Western Europe/Scandinavia). And I must say I see the U.S. food and drug industries as public suicide compared to those. Yet I would trust U.S. manufactured drugs more than their Chinese equivalents (and probably the great majority of those Resveratrol products are manufactured in China, even if they are supposed to respect "extremely lax" U.S. standards for import).

Perhaps we could all arrange to share such info for each product, if available, in a centralized location such as the product chart found in another part of this forum, and also communally analyze data concerning excipients for each product?

I am also interested to know how you guys feed yourselves on a day to day basis (besides occasional meals outside your everyday environment)? Do you analyze the ingredient list at the back of each product you buy at the supermarket? I do this in France, Sweden, Florida, and Mass., and I discard >90% of industrial products (except for basic ones), including organic food, for improper ingredients (my g.f. has little doubt I am crazy at this point). Yet I am wholly ignorant about human biology and biochem and probably I would discard/regulate intake of many more ingredients if I was more aware about this.




PS: I'm not sure I posted this appropriately. The manyfold aspects of this topic will certainly make it at least partly well-located and partly not. I read somewhere that one should avoid posting product names, so I did. I used a link instead, hopefully it's ok...

[Veritas C. & E.]

Anthony, could you answer some of these questions?

[maxwatt]

The label should list ingredients in descending order of content.
Resveratrol 98 or 99% does have other things, eg moisture, a trace of emodin, perhaps, and anthocyanins that occur in the plant it is extracted from. Maybe a little polydatin, or glucocides of resveratrol. All things found in the plant and pretty innocous, unless the emodin is too high. There may be traces of the extractiion vehicle, such as hexane, but it is cheaper to extract with ethanol. Methanol would be an undesirable vehicle, and AFAIK no Chinese manufacturers are using it. So there will be trace amounts of whateer they use to extract, and probably a little moisture. Getting down to parts per million, you may see some trace heavy metals; these are tested for, or should be, and be low enough to pose no hazard.

Much resveratrol is synthetic, brewed by genetically modified yeast or bacteria. What the trace substances in that might be, I cannot say. Perhaps whatever they feed the organisms, and some biological by-products. Probably safe, if the purity is 99%. But unless the manufacturer is testing every batch, for dozens of things, you never know.

But most manufacturers do not want to poison their clients customers. It's bad for business.

[Veritas C. & E.]

Thanks for you answer Maxwatt!

Well the manufacturer of the product I was looking at independently tests for Arsenic, Cadmium, Mercury, and Lead (whose levels seem to be fine). But what about aluminum for instance, or more rare heavy metals?

I'm also concerned with the fact that a client who assumes he/she is ingesting a product sold as 99% Resveratrol actually absorbs only 63,6% of resveratrol+whatever else. It is certainly legal and all products are labeled that way within the industry, but it's still misleading the customer. Assuming that the capsule/whatever is biologically neutral to our body still doesn't make it 99% resveratrol. "Yes, but the resveratrol within the product is 99% pure" --> If you make up a product with 2% resveratrol and 98% cocain, I can assure you that the resveratrol within the product is 100% pure, the effects, however, may be an iota different from that of 100% resveratrol. Every pure part of every whole is 100% pure, that doesn't make the whole 100% pure.

The problem lies in the framework that society has created for drugs/food/complements. The manufacturer I'm referring to is pushing the envelope with respect to the competition, and this has a cost for him. He can recover part of that cost in the form of Marketing, but the more he will push the envelope the less it is rational for him it is to do so, and the less viable it is for his company. In fact, what is rational for him to do is to do as little as possible in terms of pushing the envelope and as much as possible in terms of marketing the fact that he does (in this way, he can and should actually recover many times the cost of pushing the envelope). The more you move above average in terms of the quality that the client very imperfectly perceives, the less sound it is for you, and because there will always will be manufacturers who don't mind being way under average, this will always lead the quality spectrum of any such product down to slightly above the legal bottom. And as a consequence, the spectrum lies where the legal bottom determines it should lie. There is no efficient market, no customer "super-awareness", that will magically move that spectrum at a point far above the legal minimum for such a product. Thus putting a low standard is tantamount to creating a low level of living conditions.

The fact is that it isn't bad for business to poison your clients, as long as effects manifest long after the product was acquired and when it is not attributable to the specific product. And even if it was bad for business in the long term, managers shouldn't care. There is a triple moral hazard problem (client->company->decision maker). There is little chance that a company from which I could buy resveratrol today still exist in its current form when I'm 80, if it does its management will have changed a lot, and even if it was unchanged that will never affect their business (how will I ever know?). People who are concerned about longevity should be concerned about trace amounts of some compounds present in their food, manufacturers shouldn't care at all as long as these amounts lie somewhere below the legal limit.