A Healthy Source of Vitamin C
Everyone is pumped about acerola cherries. Rightfully so, as it’s the richest source of Vitamin C out there. A single cherry yields a whopping 75mg of Vitamin C. As any of our loyal fans know, we don’t get excited about supplementing with Vitamin C – its “effectiveness” is blown way out of proportion – but we are HUGE advocates for Vitamin C rich foods. They have lots of health benefits because of the varied forms of ascorbates, as well as bioflavonoids and other important antioxidants and nutritional goodies. Acerola cherries are highly perishable, so powders are a great option with their long shelf life.
Leave it up to the supplement industry to ruin a good thing though.
Acerola cherries are expensive. Therefore a concentrated, minimally processed powder of Acerola cherries should be even more expensive. That doesn’t sit right for supplement companies’ mission for big profits. What do you do if you want to sell a natural product and make lots of profits? You use cheap raw materials!
Case in point: A local customer brought something to us that proved our skepticism and standards are warranted. We want to show you what we found…
Your Cherry Powder Is Lying To You
What color do you envision when I say Acerola cherry powder? Hopefully red, but darker orange or rust-like color would work fine. Here’s a healthy acerola cherry powder:
Our customer brought us an Acerola cherry powder that looked like this:
That isn’t the actual picture of the product from the customer. No, it came from the manufacturer’s website. This illustrates this is not a one-off event, but an indication of accepting and admitting poor quality. Right out in the open, for all to see, is visual proof that their powder is either highly processed acerola cherry which is now devoid of nutritional goodies, or it never was acerola cherries and was just an adulterated product.
What’s worse? Right next to the picture is the following list of ingredients, included below for posterity:
The first three ingredients of the “Acerola Berry Powder” are synthetic chemicals.
Here’s salt in the wound. Look at the second ingredient. Ascorbic acid is synthetic Vitamin C. They are spiking their fake acerola powder with Vitamin C to make it APPEAR to be real acerola powder. This is why we stress eat here at Woodstock Vitamins!
You Wanted Healthy, You Got A Spiked Supplement
You buy Acerola cherry powder for the benefits you’d get eating the cherry – all the naturally occurring nutritive compounds. You don’t buy it for processed and dehydrated juice powder with synthetic Vitamin C. Fake powder. Fake vitamins. Fake supplement. Nowhere NEAR the benefit you’d get from a real acerola cherry powder.
One last point. Price does not correlate with quality in the natural products industry. The spiked product costs a customer $57 per lb. The well-made product is $17.99 per lb.
Whenever you are in the market for any natural product, these are the things you should be aware of. Know that these companies take great lengths to present a product one way – “Acerola Berry Powder” as it is labeled – but in fact are giving you something VERY different. This product came from a health food store. It was expensive. Are the manufacturers and stores who recommend these products intentionally misleading you, or are they willfully ignorant of this? Either way, consumers lose.
Always choose a company that diligently tests the supplements they are selling. At Woodstock Vitamins, we always put the quality of our products and our customer’s health above all profits. We check our suppliers and hold them to the highest standards, ensuring all the products we provide are pure and true to their label claims. This is our “Vitality Approved” promise!
Just trying to keep it real…
Just trying to keep it real…
Neal Smoller, PharmD
Owner, Pharmacist, Big Mouth
