If you suffer with osteoarthritis in your hands, here’s some good news from FACTS (Finger osteoArthritis Chondroitin Treatment Study).  Researchers report that daily supplementation with chondroitin sulfate is both safe and effective in reducing hand pain and improving function in hand osteoarthritis.

In the six-month placebo-controlled, double-blind study, the 80 patients who took 800 mg daily of chondroitin had significantly greater reduction in hand pain compared with 82 patients who took placebo. There’s more good news: chondroitin also was significantly better at improving morning stiffness. Patients who took chondroitin did not, however, see a significant improvement in grip strength compared with placebo. Read more »»

How do you know if you are getting all the vitamin D your supplement claims on its label? Unless the product has been analyzed by an impartial laboratory for purity and quality and it comes with a certificate of analysis guarantee, you don’t.

Neither the Food and Drug Administration nor any other state or federal agency routinely evaluates vitamin D or any other nutritional or herbal supplements to ensure their quality. “Quality” means:

• the product contains the amount of the nutrient claimed on the label

• the product is not contaminated with substances such as lead, and

• that supplements in the form of tablets or capsules disintegrate properly in the body

No one likes to get cheated, but when it comes to buying nutritional supplements, consumers are being cheated all the time. Here we focus solely on vitamin D, partly in reaction to a preliminary report from Johns Hopkins University (June 14, 2010), in which a research team from University reported what they found when they evaluated ten over-the-counter vitamin D supplements. Read more »»