Nutricost Review & Third Party Testing Analysis

Nutricost provide a low cost option for buying supplements, especially when compared to some of the more reputable and expensive brands such as Thorne and Pure Encapsulations.

We currently mention Nutricost options on the site because they represent an affordable option.

However, it’s natural to ask, does this lower price come with a cost? Do Nutricost products contain what they say they do?

In this brief article we want to present what we currently understand about Nutricost.

Now, when it comes to testing supplements there are two main sources of information:

1. “Certificate of Analysis (CoA)” documents from the Brand – This is where the brand gives the supplement to a third party to test and report back on the results. There’s at least 3 problems with these:
   • You can’t easily verify the CoAs without contacting the testing company, as they’re typically PDFs which are easy to fake.
   • It’s hard to know if the testing company did the job properly – the best you can do is trust their reputation.
   • Typically these CoAs are paid for and obtained by the supplements company, who can play “games”. For example, if a batch fails a CoA test, they can just decide not to share those results (and instead re-test later). Or, they can submit only batches of a product they know to be good.
2. Independent testing companies – These are interesting because they (typically) don’t have a financial stake in the outcome of the testing, which is likely to lead to more trustworthy results. Perhaps the oldest and most well-known of these is Consumer Lab.

Therefore, in this brief article we’re going to look at Consumer Lab’s testing results for Nutricost.

To date, they have tested 12 products by Nutricost.

They typically test:

1. That the product contains what it says it does (including dose)
2. That it doesn’t contain contaminants. Exactly what contaminants they test for depends on the product, as some products are more prone to certain things than others.

The 10 Nutricost products that passed Consumer Lab testing (“Approved”) without issues were:

• DHEA, D-Mannose, Glycine – Unflavoured, Grass-fed whey protein isolate, L-Citrulline Malate 2:1 – Unflavored, L-Glutamine – Unflavoured, Nattokinase – 2,000 FU, Organic Beet Root, Performance BCAAs, Phosphatidyl Serine

Then, they found 2 products with issues, specifically, they either didn’t contain as much of the product as they said they did, or they contained the product, but it didn’t have as much of the active component in it than they believed it should have (the latter can be an issue with plants/herbs):

• CDP Choline and Goldenseal Root

Now, it’s worth noting that Consumer Lab is a paid service. If it wasn’t, I could share more details. However, for those you’ll need to sign up at Consumer Lab and support their work.

So, 10 out of 12 Nutricost products tested without issues.

In an ideal world you’d want a brand that passes with flying colours 100% of the time, every time. However, in practice these results are actually re-assuring to me.

When it comes to supplements, the absolute worst outcome is that you consume a product that contains something harmful, as that’s the complete opposite of the intended outcome. Fortunately, none of their tests showed that to be the case.

The vast majority (10/12) contained what they said they contained without contaminents.

Then, 2 products either contained less than what they purported to contain, or the herb didn’t contain as much of the active ingredient as Consumer Lab expected.

On the face of it, that doesn’t sound great, but now let’s put it into context compared against some other brands Consumer Lab have tested randomly:

Only Thorne above has a perfect record, the others all had some number of products that didn’t meet Consumer Lab’s approval.

Have any questions or comments about the above? Perhaps another data source for Nutricost testing? Please leave them below in the comments.