Are the more expensive vitamins really higher quality than generic? How can I tell the quality of vitamins I purchase?

I wouldn’t eat any of that garbage. Do you really think laboratory manufactured powders and swill pills are better than fresh foods? Can you not get your daily vitamins from the food you eat? Fruits, veggies, rice and beans are all you need to stay healthy.

They are in the dollar store for a reason. They could be: discontinued product, product not stored at correct temperature and rejected by name brand, counterfeit, relabeled, out of specification.
Walk around the store and look at how many of the product are direct ripoffs made to look like the original product with the clever modification of the font. Diel soap, Suane shampoo. Duracall batteries.
I’m not singling out Dollar Store. Big Lots, Dollar Tree, etc. are the same.
OTOH, what do you expect for a dollar?

just go to any drug store. get Centrum or Nature made If you are male and over 21 look for the formula WITHOUT iron, it’s better for your heart. If you are female use the one WITH iron.
dollor for dollar Centrum is the best all purpose Multivitamin/mineral.

You’d have to look at test results of organizations like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports

Change your diet…eat more whole foods, fresh fruit, veggies and whole grains and your problem will be solved. No pills needed. Research food combinations too as combining certain foods together will enhance your bodies ability to process and absorb those lacking nutrients.

For years, my wife and i have been buying our mulitvitamins from Dollar General Store. we have never had a problem and do not expect to. these vitamins are the exact same brand as in CVS, Walgreens, etc. the only difference is the price. we have compared the ingredient levels and they are identical. the only difference is the price. Dollar General’s price is about one third of regular drugstore prices. the expiration date on the bottles are always 2 years ahead and most of their vitamins are name brand. i see no difference.

Other than looking at Consumer Reports, as @mattbrowne suggested, I don’t know that there’s really any way to gauge the quality of the ingredients. Some multivitamins do have additional ingredients that do other things, like digestive enzymes that make them easier on your stomach – in that case, those ingredients would be listed on the label, and it often indicates what they do (enzyme, antioxidant, etc.).

I’ve done a lot of research into different vitamin brands and what proportions of vitamins different brands have, and I agree with @12_func_multi_tool – Centrum is the best all-around vitamin I’ve found. Be careful not to get anything that contains enormous amounts of a particular vitamin (like 1500% of the recommended daily allowance) – with many vitamins, more is not better!

If your doctor says you’re deficient in several different vitamins, I’d agree with the answers above about changing your diet too. Some people do need vitamins to make sure they get enough of a particular thing (like it’s harder for vegetarians to get enough iron, so taking a supplement is a good idea, just to be safe), but you should be able to get most of what you need from a good diet. If you don’t know a lot about planning balanced meals, I highly recommend reading Laurel’s Kitchen – the cookbook itself is geared towards vegetarian diets, but the last third of the book is basically a guide to vitamins and minerals, what each of them does, and how to work them into your diet. Even if you’re not a vegetarian, chances are the part of your diet you need to work on is the non-meat part anyway, so I think it’s a great resource for everyone.

@Cruiser, yes, whole foods do help alot, but you miss out on the extra fortification they put in processed foods. So I skip the processed garbage, and eat whole foods, and use supplements. For me, since I don’t have much digestive enzymes, I have to take that too, or I’ll never absorb anything.

@worriedguy and @sdeutsch, who said anything about dollar stores? ?? (Edit) I just re-read the question for the 3rd time and found the reference to $ store. Sorry. I always go to a health food store, and buy top quality. In general, I get liquid when I can get it, next choice is powder, and last choice is a tablet, like Centrum. For those of us with digestive issues, the easier it is to break down, the better chance you have of absorbing it. And, there is a reason Centrum and others like it is not sold in a health food store.

@davidbetterman Unfortunately, the conventionally grown food we eat is grown on depleted soil. Even if it’s fertilized, because of the farming methods and the type of fertilizer, conventionally grown foods are missing trace minerals that naturally occur in Organically grown foods.

The tough thing is, organically grown foods are so often so spoiled by the time we find them in the store, there’s hardly much food value there. That, and they are often limited in selection.

The only solution is supplements, unfortunately. I hate to take pills and gooey stuff, but I do it anyway.

I take vitamin code men’s formula daily vitamins. Two in the morn two in the evening. These are encapsulated raw organic whole foods, designed for absorption. Before them after a long days work I would feel soreness behind my eyes. Now lots more energy. Generally more focused. New chapter I hear is good too and less expensive,

Having a good diet is key – many vitamin deficiencies can be solved that way. As far as supplements go there are better brands than others and they don’t have to cost too much more but they shouldn’t cost a dollar. My nutritionist recommended a couple of companies to us that she trusts and we trust her – Nature’s Plus, NOW, Solgar, Health from the Sun. There is a difference in supplements because some use chemical components and those aren’t so readily absorbed by the body and some use actual existing biological components and those your body loves more.

If you need to make sure the whole foods store will have TwinLabs Once Daily, a few dollars more than what I said before. As a plus you can get your whole foods there too, just as was suggested by a few

Found this Consumer Reports overview of a Feb 2006 article on multivitamins. You can’t get past the first page if you’re not a subscriber, but that first page says they tested 18 dollar store brands and found several that did not dissolve adequately, and more than half didn’t have the dosage in them that the label claimed. If you want more info, you should be able to read a copy of the article at your local library – they usually keep those old CRs on hand.

@MagsRags thank you. I will invest in a higher quality vitamin then.

As to suggestions about diet, I am trying. I am seriously having trouble absorbing things and even though I eat, I still test deficient. Some things are very hard for me to digest. I was thinking of investing in a juicer, that it would make things easier to break down. Still working on it and I thank you for your concern.

@escapedone7 Well, whoa there, now that you add more details it is easier to see why it wouldn’t be so easy for you, given your situation. Stay strong, get supplements and live our the rest of your life happier than before. and it’s not easy to get nourishment…for any of us…it takes lots of research, books, experiences…discipline…many of us are under nourished and we don’t realize

@escapedone7 ; I agree with @Simone_De_Beauvoir ; The better brands are following stricter guidelines and have better potency.

@snowberry Have you tried probiotics?? It helped my son dramatically.

@escapedone7 Try taking digestive enzymes. Anyone deficient in digestive enzymes will have a hard time absorbing nutrients. I’ve also found that simply taking apple cider vinegar with my food (yep, it’s not the tastiest) helps me that way. If you decide to do this, use raw unfiltered organic apple cider vinegar, and dilute it in water OR down it straight (yech) and immediately rinse your mouth out with fresh water. The strong acid will rot your teeth over time if you don’t rinse right after.

@cruiser Yes, I take the probiotics, but it’s something I have to do all the time, because the natural pH of my gut is not what it should be to keep the critters alive very long. ACV helps to normalize it, which helps some.

I get my vitamins from www.vitacost.com . You get to spend all the time you need reading ingredients and buyers’ comments. I also do not take hard pills like Centrum. Only capsules. Some people think Centrum is great because it has air time. Imagine trying to get that big hard pill to dissolve and they’re way too large to swallow for most. I also take digestive enzymes, Coq10, D3,
Resveratrol and fish oil. Sometimes I take turmeric and Alive! whole foods vitamins.

@Aster Whenever I purchase anything on the internet, I check the Better Business Bureau and ripoffreport.com. I did that for Vitacost, and it indicates quite a number of problems. It says there were 56 complaints about sales practices, which I find most alarming. There are other more reputable websites. Here’s that link for the BBB. http://www.bbb.org/south-east-florida/business-reviews/health-care-products/vitacostcom-in-boca-raton-fl-20000991

I also make a point of checking ripoffreport.com (they show 11 complaints against that company).

Daily vitamins are a good idea, our foods today are so commercialized they don’t give us everything we need. Fruits and vegetable don’t stay on the plant long enough to get all the nutrients. Vitamins make up for some of that. To learn more watch Food.ink it follows your food back to its origin. Be ready it’s disturbing.