How One Chemist is Calling Out the Supplement Industry

If you think the Wild West is dead, you haven’t taken a stroll down the dietary supplement aisle lately. Here, in the unregulated frontier of wellness, products are operating on the “honor system,” which, as any parent or professor knows, is a system highly susceptible to creative interpretation.

Enter Dr. Gene Hall, an analytical chemistry professor at Rutgers University, who has taken it upon himself to be the sheriff of this lawless land. Armed with a Ph.D. and an arsenal of high-tech gadgetry that would make a Bond villain jealous, Dr. Hall is on a crusade to find out exactly what is inside that expensive bottle of “Krill Oil” you just bought.

Spoiler alert: It might not be krill.

The “Fish” Oil That Got Away

Fish oil is incredibly popular for a very logical reason: we all want the brain-boosting benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, but very few of us want to eat a tin of anchovies for breakfast.

However, Dr. Hall’s team made a rather distressing discovery when they aimed their analytical chemistry instrumentation at the market. Using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF), and Raman spectroscopy from HORIBA, they found that the “fish oil” in many supplements isn’t exactly the natural triglyceride form you are hoping for.

Instead, the oils have been chemically altered. In fact, about 80 percent of the products his team tested had been chemically modified without notifying the consumer. Some of these substitute ingredients contained synthetic products that can be harmful to vital organs, and others contained fatty acid ethyl esters, which are specifically not recommended for pregnant women.

It turns out that “Krill Oil” is one of the worst offenders.

“Many products are labeled as Krill oil, but they have no Krill oil in them,” Hall noted.

Even when the industry hypes up the benefits of these tiny crustaceans, the supplements often fail to deliver the promised amounts of EPA and DHA.

“If you eat a normal diet, you get about maybe 10 times more EPA and DHA,” Hall said. “The dietary supplements, to me, are useless.”

Seeing Red (Or Not) With Salmon Oil

The team also put salmon oil under the microscope, or, more accurately, under the spectrofluorometer.

Genuine salmon oil contains a very specific, beautiful red pigment called astaxanthin. When you place natural salmon oil into HORIBA’s Aqualog® (now renamed Veloci) spectrofluorometer, that pigment fluoresces beautifully.

So, Dr. Hall went shopping, bought a whole bunch of salmon oil supplements, and ran them through the Aqualog. The result? He found “gross mislabeling” across the board. If your salmon oil isn’t glowing with the right signature, it probably means your “salmon” is just a very convincing imposter.

From Fake Fish to Flavored Water

Having successfully ruined our confidence in marine lipids, Dr. Hall has now set his sights on the brightly colored world of infused sports drinks and bottled water.

Currently, his lab in Piscataway, New Jersey, is covered in dozens of these beverages. He is using the HORIBA Aqualog to take a “fingerprint” of the liquids to see if the fluorescent structure of various flavors from the same manufacturer matches up, or if the labels are essentially works of fiction.

The Aqualog excites the sample at one wavelength and shows the emission at another, creating a contour plot on a computer monitor.

“It has a unique fingerprint,” he said. “If two samples are very similar, they should have the same excitation-emission fingerprint based on all of the many hundreds of compounds that are present.”

He is building a library of these fingerprints. This means if he buys the exact same product from a different store, he can check to see if the fluorescent intensity matches, creating a brilliant new method for quality control.

“As a consumer, you pay for these infused water samples. And if they don’t have what the label claims, the product is misbranded, and you’re not getting what you paid for,” he said.

Heavy Metals and Fake Handbags

Just to ensure we are thoroughly terrified of everything we consume and touch, Dr. Hall also uses a HORIBA XRF spectrometer to look for lead in glass packaging.

By analyzing fluorescent X-rays, the XRF can determine the elemental composition of materials like beer bottles, wine bottles, cooking oil bottles, and water bottles. Hall is finding a significant amount of lead in these containers, which poses a serious problem when acidic ingredients sit in the bottle and leach that lead into the product you are about to consume.

And if you thought you were safe just shopping for fashion accessories, think again. Dr. Hall has even aimed his tech at counterfeit designer handbags bought on the street. It turns out that the cheap fake leather (or “pleather”) used to make these knock-offs often contains lead acetate.

So, the next time you consider buying a deeply discounted designer bag or a suspiciously cheap bottle of miracle fish oil, remember Dr. Gene Hall. Somewhere in New Jersey, he’s pointing a light at a contour plot, proving that if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably doesn’t contain any krill.

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