"Since vitamin aren't regulated, how would I know that the calcium and B-12 vitamins I am taking contain the exact amount of ingredients as stated on the label?"
The only way to know for sure if your calcium and B-12 contain the exact amount of ingredients as stated on the label is to send the product off to a laboratory for analysis. The process typically takes several weeks and can cost from a few hundred dollars to well over a thousand dollars, depending upon the number of ingredients being tested.
Another option is to ask the consumer affairs department of your supplier supplier (Cooper Complete, Centrum, CVS, NOW, etc.) to provide you with a certificate of assay for the products. (This is an easy process in a small company like Cooper, but it may be difficult to find someone in a larger company who knows what you’re talking about and can provide you with the information.)
When a supplement is made, good manufacturing standards will have the facility test the raw materials used in the product before mixing to make sure the product is actually what it says it is. If we think of this like baking, and bread calls for yeast, salt, flour and water, the process essentially making sure that the ingredients we’re pulling out of our cabinet are actually yeast, salt and flour (not sugar or corn starch, for example). In the world of supplements, the manufacturer will also test the product to make sure that the ingredient is in the concentration that was specified and that there aren’t any additives or contaminates. After the manufacturer has determined that the ingredients are “as stated” they can then be used in a product. Once the product is blended together and in tablet/capsule/softgel, it’s going to be tested again to make sure that the completed product looks right.
All this said – blending together products is not that different from making chocolate chip cookies. Even if we use a scoop or measure out the portion so that each cookie is the same size, it’s not that unusual to find a slightly different number of chocolate chips in each particular cookie. So, on average each cookie may have 5 chocolate chips. There are slight variations in supplements, no differently than in cookies. When we have a batch of product (which can be thousands of bottles) we’ll pull a couple of bottles from the line and test the finished product.
I’m attaching a certificate of assay for calcium where you can see that in our latest batch of calcium, there are 264.50 mg of calcium citrate in each tablet checked. Our ingredient panel for Cooper Complete Calcium Citrate states that each tablet is 250 mg of calcium citrate. Because of variances in blending/mixing the product together, the specifications for the manufacturer are actually that the tablet contain a minimum of 225 mg calcium citrate and a maximum of 312.5 mg calcium citrate. With 264.50 mg of calcium citrate, this batch of product passes and is approved.
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