Labdoor - Scooby's Home Workouts

A lot of people seem to be relying on labdoor these days to choose their supplements … and thats good? Maybe. Yes the supplement industry is completely unregulated so the only way to make sure you are not getting poisoned with mercury or arsenic is to have the supplements you take batch tested. Its why I suggested using USP verified products years ago but the problem is that so few products are USP verified. There is a big difference between how USP Verified and labdoor are funded. With USP Verified, the manufacture of the supplements pays to have their product routinely tested and then gets to put a “USP Verified” sticker on their label, pretty straight forward. The problem with USP verified is that its hard to find any supplements tested by them. Labdoor on the other hand makes its money primarily from selling supplements although they do also sell $150 yearly access to full reports. Every page has a link where you can buy the supplement.

I definitely applaud the responsible business model used by labdoor and hope that they take all the business away from bodybuilding.com whose only goal seems to be quarterly profits at your expense. Labdoor is kind of a non-sleazy bodybuilding.com in my opinion. The one potential problem I see with labdoor is the inherent conflict of interest. I have no information at all that indicates that labdoor is anything other than a fine, well run, honest company – all I am saying is that the temptations to increase profits are there. If the hottest selling supplement at bodybuilding.com is “Myseidsdiol”, if it tests bad then there might be a temptation to work with the manufacturer and re-run the test till results warrant an “A” rating.

The biggest problem I have with labdoor though is that they do not list the test date. For me, that is the biggest red flag of all. Manufactures change their ingredient sources all the time so a test that was run 2 years ago is of no value whatsoever. I know that they want to have a reason for people to buy their $150 premium service with access to the full lab reports – I understand that and support that. What bothers me is that giving an “A” rating to something that was tested over a year ago is giving people false assurance of the safety of the supplement they are taking. Question for anyone who has purchased the $150 access from labdoor, how old are the test results for the top 5 creatines? How old are the test results from the top 5 protein powders? Please post to facebook.

A third option for finding good supplements is consumerlab.com and I like their business model best of all. Both Labdoor and USP Verified have a potential conflict of interest built into their business model. Labdoor makes money by selling supplements and USP Verified makes money by charging manufacturers. In ConsumerLab, its 100% subscription driven so its basically the consumer reports of the supplement world – thats a good thing! There is no way they can profit from either good reviews or bad reviews and I like that model. Again though, what is critical is how recently the testing was done. If a supplement wasn’t tested in the last year, the results are worthless in my opinion.

On my “todo” list is to subscribe to both these services and see how recent their test results are, will do it this summer. If you subscribe to either of these, please let me know on facebook how recent the tests are!