Find the good

Owners, founders, officers and stockholders of companies often extol the virtues of their respective businesses while highlighting the positive features and benefits of those businesses. These attributes are often presented with the best intentions and, for the most part, have been found to be true in a majority of times but too frequently are merely words spoken by less reputable sorts who are incapable of supporting their rhetoric with proof or facts.

That having been said, I want to discuss a few facts relating to the things considered good for our health and well-being; but I don’t suggest you to take my word for what is being asserted here. Instead, it would be more satisfying and enlightening for both of us if you do your own fact-checking after which you will be empowered to agree with what I present as facts or disprove them based on your own factual grounds. You may find this white paper a good source of scientific information.

Getting involved

A company with which I am associated encourages us to “Make Way for the Good,” and that statement has been scrutinized by many of the people I work with as well as my family members who, along with a few friends prior to me joining the company, did our own checking before taking any steps to become members. The concern most of us voiced in relation to that question is, “what good?”

In other words, what is the “good” being referred to in that statement? In attempting to further analyze the statement and find an answer to this question, the first thing we all had to acknowledge and agree to is the fact that “good” is not “bad,” and then proceeded to talk about what the “good” in that statement was referring to.

The second step took us all to the company’s website to determine what was being promoted and we learned that it was health-related, so we surmised that the “good” being referred to in that statement was most likely indicative of a health-related product or a number of such products. Understanding that there were – and still are – literally millions of health-related products available for sale (some by prescription and some not) we had to figure out what made these products good enough to be placed in the category of the many other health-related products which were considered good by health and medical experts; but we also understood that this effort was going to be very exhaustive, time consuming and difficult; so we had to narrow down the list of health-related products we would be researching.

FDA and the “why”

The narrowing down process helped us to identify the particular category of health-related products this company specialized in and found that dietary supplements was the best description that could be attached to them. Keep in mind that we hadn’t yet joined the company in any serious way or capacity because we hadn’t yet completed our self-motivated research process to determine exactly what “good” meant.

One important thing we did learn was that dietary supplements were not then, and still are not, determined effective (or ineffective) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before they are marketed, so this presented another challenging question we had to deal with before completing what we had come to label “our company qualification process.” So we were now stuck at, “why?” Why does the FDA not make such determinations about dietary supplements?

While we hadn’t yet gotten an answer to that question, we were able to ascertain other relevant facts about these products so we will provide that information here and get back to the “why” later in the article. Here’s what we learned while attempting to determine the “good” of dietary supplements. According to the National Institutes of Health – Office of Dietary Supplements:

The governing law

The majority of adults in the United States take one or more dietary supplements either every day or occasionally. Today’s dietary supplements include vitamins, minerals, herbals and botanicals, amino acids, enzymes, and many other products. Dietary supplements come in a variety of forms: traditional tablets, capsules, and powders, as well as drinks and energy bars. Popular supplements include vitamins D and E; minerals like calcium and iron; herbs such as echinacea and garlic; and specialty products like glucosamine, probiotics, and fish oils.

We considered this information invaluable in our research to determine the viability, credibility and reputation of the company we’d been invited to form an association with. But we were far from the end of our search since we hadn’t even found an answer to our “why” question relating to the non-determinative posture of the FDA as it relates to dietary supplements. So we continued until learning the reason dietary supplements are not required to be subjected to FDA determination. It was provided in a statement directly from FDA’s website.

The statement reads, “…Whatever their form may be, DSHEA places dietary supplements in a special category under the general umbrella of “foods,” not drugs, and requires that every supplement be labeled a dietary supplement.” DSHEA is an acronym for Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994…”, and it is the law which governs and regulates dietary supplements.

The conclusive answer

So we had our answer to the “why” and could then proceed with the prequalification process, the next step of which required us to study and analyze the type of dietary supplements offered, the ingredients of each, and the benefits which can be derived from each. So we proceeded to do just that by purchasing a package that contained all the company’s products – except one – which we obtained information about via a separate transaction – and began a study of what the products consisted of and how those ingredients contributed to them being beneficial. To be continued…

The continuation is now available in the post titled, T. F. G. Continued.

Please read Salvation, the post which follows this one for some insight into the effect one product had on this writer. Thanks!