Junky vitamins are often passed off as quality, and many times are endorsed by a physician or celebrity. There are many tricks that low-quality supplement companies use to hide their poor quality, spending more money on marketing than on what is under the hood.

As a leading nutritional expert and owner of   carbon negative concrete  a dietary supplement company, I am often asked to explain the subject of quality. Because so much is out of the view of the consumer, including the details of the raw materials used in any product, the best way to get a handle on the subject is to look at a company's multiple vitamin and mineral products. This can help you see through the spin and understand the company's actual production philosophy.

Being able to understand what's on the label of multiple vitamins, you can quickly tell the difference between a quality product and a cheap product. Get started by looking at the minerals in both the multiple vitamins and multiple mineral products of any company.

Beware of Really Cheap Minerals

Minerals are vital nutrients for health, required for numerous enzymes in your body to work properly. Minerals in food are at low levels due to excessive processing of food, poor farming that depletes our soils, as well as the use of pesticides that interfere with the natural sulfur cycle - leaving us not only with chemically adulterated food but food that has lower nutritional value. It is now common sense to supplement fine-quality minerals, including important trace minerals.

These minerals are in any company's multiple vitamins as well as bone-related products. Minerals from the ground are referred to as inorganic, whereas minerals in plants or crops are structured by living cells and thought of as organic (different from how the word organic describes food that doesn't contain pesticides).

The cheapest form of calcium is gym chalk, otherwise known as inorganic calcium carbonate. Other ground-up rock forms of cheap calcium include bone meal, oyster shell, or dolomite. Another cheap form is calcium gluconate (9% calcium and 91% sugar glucose). These forms of calcium require large amounts of hydrochloric acid to make bioavailable, thus they have poor absorption (which is why they are used as over-the-counter antacids). Once in your body they are not very biologically useful and run a risk, depending on your underlying health, of calcifying your arteries, causing alarming breast lumps, gall stones, or kidney stones. There is little chance such poor-quality calcium will help your bones.

Magnesium oxide is the cheapest form of magnesium, often appearing in products using low-quality calcium. Oxides need antioxidants to deactivate them once they are absorbed. There is no excuse for using a mineral form that uses up valuable antioxidants, unless of course, you could care less about the person taking it. Products containing inorganic calcium carbonate and magnesium oxide belong in the trash - most likely with any other product made by such a company.