Q and A

 

Q: A few years ago, you had some interesting articles in Life Extension magazine about quality assurance testing for your products at independent labs. I remember the point about it being a very difficult task for many reasons.

Do you send all of Life Extension’s products to independent labs for analysis of potency, purity, impurities, etc.? If so, how often? How many different manufacturers are producing Life Extension branded products? Do you ever intend to develop manufacturing facilities for your own products?

A: Over the last three years, we have greatly enhanced our in-house ability to evaluate our own work. The reason for this is that too many independent labs lack the competency to assay new ingredients. An example is SAMe. ABC News did a report (using an independent lab) showing that Nature’s Made and our brand contained 280% of potency. This is absolutely false. We put in no more than 110% of potency in our SAMe products and would go broke if we put in any more. What this report actually revealed was that Nature’s Made and ours were the only brands with full label potency, since their assay methodologies were showing 40% higher false results. We will use independent labs to verify our in-house results, but we do it now less often because of the confidence in our own ability. We use two primary contract labs. We are physically located in the larger of these facilities and have our own quality control expert on the labs’ premises to verify pharmaceutical-grade nutrients are used, that the products contain uniform amounts of ingredients, that the products are maintaining stability, etc. We have outside people who assay raw materials before they even get into our product, primarily using our lab, or other labs who may be better equipped to conduct a certain type of assay. The Life Extension Herbal Mix is literally hand produced at a separate facility, and no commercial lab wants to follow the laborious protocols for making this product.