Abstract
In the European Union (EU), food supplements are regulated as food and their use is expanding rapidly. There is no enforcement to ensure that good manufacturing practices (GMPs) are followed during production but manufacturers are fully responsible for their products. Recently, the safety and quality of supplements available in the market has come into question. In our surveillance, we examined coenzyme Q10 content of 58 food supplements available in three EU member states or from Internet stores using high-performance liquid chromatography methodology. While some of the tested supplements contained almost exactly the same quantity of active ingredient as labelled, one-third of the products contained <70% of the labelled content. In the food supplements obtained online the medium content was lower than in the products purchased in pharmacies. To protect the consumer and assure the safety and quality of products, the market authorities need to exert better control. In addition, it would make sense to enforce additional requirements to ensure GMPs are followed in the manufacturing process of food supplements.
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the staff of the Cell Physiopathology and Bioenergetics Laboratory at Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain, where chemical analyses of all the food supplements were performed, especially Prof. Dr. Juan Carlos Rodríguez Aguilera and Ana Cortés, Dr. Anita Kušar (Nutrition Institute) for her help with the literature search, Lenka Glavič for help with the collection of samples and Murray Bales for providing help with the language. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The present study was conducted as a non-commercial research project and financially supported by the Nutrition Institute Research Fund (ID-M09).
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Pravst, I., Žmitek, K. The coenzyme Q10 content of food supplements. J. Verbr. Lebensm. 6, 457–463 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00003-011-0704-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00003-011-0704-5