Comment · Wed, April 10, 2024 · ND Owner
Question about Microbial Test Standards
Original post in this thread
ravenjac · 0 points
To be clear, I'm just asking for clarity with this post since I don’t know anything about the technical things I’m talking about.
I’ve been thinking about buying from ND (Mag Glycinate specifically), but I saw this comment on a random post irt ND Shilajit. I won’t link it because I don’t want to put a random person on blast lol.
“The limits are absurdly high. They allow cadmium up to .5ppm and Mercury up to .5ppm you can find many many brands that will prove levels many multiple times lower. The lead and arsenic would be good compared to a resin version. Next their allowance on their microbial test is so high I've literally never seen anything like it. yeast mold <1,000 cu/g normal amount that you can find with many other companies is <10cfu/g. Coliforms is <100cfu/g compared to everyone else's 10. There is no date or lot number or signature associated to these in-house tests also.”
So I looked at some other companies’ COAs, like Life Extension (Mag Threonate), Double Wood (Mag Threonate), [Nordic Nat…
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
WTF is that guy on about?!? We use the limits set by both USP and the AHPA.
The limit is 10,000 CFU (10^4) for extracts. The NSF limits for non-extracted botanical ingredients is 10,000,000 CFU (10^7)! That's 1,000 times higher than our limits. That dude saying he has literally never seen anything like it is batshit retarded. I'll directly link the USP section on it as well.
http://ftp.uspbpep.com/v29240/usp29nf24s0_c2023.html
In L-Theanine, ND allows <10,000 cfu/g aerobic plate count (only says it conforms); Liftmode allows <1,000 cfu/g with a result of <10 cfu/g.
Liftmode's spec is the same as ours...
https://liftmode.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/LM-L-Theanine-Capsules-31545-COA.pdf
That's the same 10,000 CFU spec we have, because that's what USP and the AHPA recommend. His comments are conflating spec sheets with COAs, too.
yeast mold <1,000 cu/g normal amount that you can find with many other companies is <10cfu/g. Coliforms is <100cfu/g compared to everyone else's 10. There is no date or lot number or signature associated to these in-house tests also.
The <10cfu/g is the detection limit of the method, not the spec. That's exactly our result on our shilajit, too. That's just the lower limit of the USP <62> method. So he is ranting about nothing, as our result is the same as their result. You can't compare specs to results.
As for heavy metals, we have VERY strict limits.
For example: In Mag Threonate, ND allows <0.5 ppm of the heavy metals except for Lead (<0.2 ppm). In Nordic Naturals’ Magnesium Complex, it looks like they allow more Arsenic, Cadmium, and Mercury. (<3.21 ppm; <1.31 ppm; <0.64 ppm).
We always set our specs to meet the strictest of of Prop 65, and those are just the specs. The actual results are always much much lower.
Here is our magnesium L-threonate results.
You can see it was non-detect for all the heavy metals. They are <0.0400ppm for lead, <0.1000 for aresenic, and <0.0100 for mercury. These are the machine detection limits. This means these are the limits in which the machine physically can't detect the metals below them. This is what most of our products come out at, even though the specs are higher. You have to set specifications based on defined limits and daily dosing recommendations. That doesn't mean your products contain that, though. Most of the time they are much lower, or non-detect in this case. Moreover, magnesium isn't one prone to heavy metal contamination, so I have no idea how Nordic Naturals' those higher amounts. I could see higher amounts in something like bacopa, as that pulls it in from the environment it grows in. However, magnesium doesn't have that issue. It should be non-detect like ours is.
So this is all just a result of people ranting about things they don't fully understand. Our products meet the strictest specifications. You can even see on the Life Extension COA you posted. They don't give you heavy metals results. They merely calculate the limits that Prop 65 sets, and says that it conforms to them. This makes it look lower to consumers who don't know what they are looking at, whereas we give actual ppm numbers. It's all the same shit, though. It's Prop 65 setting the strict limits. Maybe we should start reporting things like Life Extension does. It clearly is working on consumers.