I've been buying Natural Vitality Natural Calm Magnesium for over a year now and just recently Labdoor posted their results. I'm wondering if the arsenic levels are too high. It seems to me though that this isn't something I should be too worried about.
Label Accuracy
- Magnesium content was measured at 691.2 mg per serving, 97.5% over its 350 mg label claim.
- Note: This product's lab-measured serving size (2 teaspoons) mass was recorded at 5.33 g. However, the Supplement Facts label claims a 2 teaspoon serving with a mass of 4 g. The lab measured 921mg of magnesium per 5.33g sample mass. We scaled that down to 691.2 mg per 4g serving for the purposes of our calculations.
Product Purity
- This product recorded 1.598 mcg of total arsenic per serving. California's Proposition 65 does not establish a Maximum Allowable Dose Level (MADL) for total arsenic. In 2003, California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) proposed a draft oral MADL for the inorganic component of arsenic at 0.1 mcg per day*.
- This product recorded 1.163 mcg of cadmium per serving. California's Proposition 65 sets the Maximum Allowable Dose Level (MADL) for cadmium at 4.1 mcg per day.
- This product recorded 0.229 mcg of lead per serving. California's Proposition 65 sets the Maximum Allowable Dose Level (MADL) for lead at 0.5 mcg per day.
- This product recorded less than 0.08 mcg of mercury per serving. California's Proposition 65 does not establish a Maximum Allowable Dose Level (MADL) for mercury. In 1994, the OEHHA proposed a draft MADL for methyl mercury at 0.3 mcg per day.
- * Our analysis measures total arsenic per product serving. Currently, intake limits for total arsenic have only been established for drinking water. The only available guideline for arsenic in supplement products is a 2003 proposed limit from California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) on the inorganic component of total arsenic. Generally, inorganic arsenic species are considered more toxic than their organic counterparts.
Labdoor contracted Covance, an FDA-registered laboratory owned by LabCorp, to perform purity and label accuracy testing on 36 magnesium supplements. The results for this product are as follows
Upon publishing our reports, we received an email from a Natural Vitality representative who wanted to see the Certificate of Analysis (CoA) for their product. We sent them the Covance CoA for their product (included at the end of this statement).
Unbeknownst to us, Natural Vitality has been a customer of Covance for nearly a decade. When they found out that these results were generated by Covance, they used their influence with Covance to breach our laboratory records and convince a Covance scientist to reinterpret their results, double the serving size, and recalculate mineral and heavy metal values. Covance’s recalculated results are as follows:
Different magnesium supplements tested at vastly different arsenic levels, ranging from less than 0.01 mcg per serving to more than 1.00 mcg per serving. We think this is important information for consumers to know when researching a supplement, and it is why we included it in our grading system.
