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More than half of Americans say they are regular consumers of vitamins and other supplements. The business generates tens of billions of dollars per year, but there's.

Also a whole lot of confusion about whether supplements are of value at all. One of the biggest names in the vitamin business has invested billions of dollars into a state-of-the-art supplement center right here in Las Vegas. The I-Team’s George Knapp got a tour and an earful from the head of the Dr. Vita operation. Well, here's an example. You both heard this story today. A new study, a comprehensive study, was announced by an Australian university showing that vitamin B3 can have a significant effect in fighting against skin cancer. We can probably predict that a month from now or so, another study will tell us the exact opposite of that. It is confusing and infuriating for consumers. But it's no accident, according to the outspoken businessman who founded Dr. Vita, he's made a fortune selling vitamins, but admits the ones most of us are taking are probably worthless.

Wayne Gorsek

Well, the shocking part to me, George, um, is I can go to jail in America. Uh, I can be rated, uh, with armed federal agents. Uh, I can have my inventory seized and destroyed. I can be put out of business. Um, I can be sued in civil courts, uh, by the government beyond criminal, uh, and be made out into a criminal for telling the truth in America.

Narrator

Wayne Gorsek is a political conservative with the rhetoric of a fiery revolutionary. He bristles at the federal law, which prohibits him from making specific health claims about the products he sells vitamins, herbs, and supplements under the brand name, Dr. Vita.

Wayne Gorsek

They're limiting our first amendment rights where we can't tell our customers the truth about our products. Uh, we have to water it down…

Narrator

Gorsek is ready to debate anyone about the proven health benefits of vitamins. He began researching nutrition at an early age, started a garage based supplement business that blossomed into the largest online vitamin retailer in the world. Then left it and started over with Dr. Vita. A sprawling facility in Las Vegas, that might be the most advanced of its kind anywhere.

Wayne Gorsek

I took 30 million of my at risk capital, uh, that I earned from the success of my prior company, and I put it into my, my new company, including state of the art manufacturing.

Narrator

The facility looks like a cross between a hospital and a spaceship. Employees and visitors don surgical suits and masks. The facility produces a line of Dr. Vita products, but also handles production of other company's products. This machine can produce 180,000 capsules per hour. This one analyzes raw materials down to the molecule to confirm, for instance, that turmeric really is tumeric.

Wayne Gorsek

It’s state of the art for detecting the, literally the fingerprint of the vitamin or the mineral or the herb. It's 100% with vitamin, uh, and various nutrients accuracy.

Narrator

But he knows many of his competitors are not so careful. The supplement industry is rife with exaggerated claims and below standard merchandise. Earlier this year, the industry was rocked when the attorney general of New York went after four of the largest retail chains for selling supplements that contained very little of what they claim to be. Gorsek thinks the A.G used the wrong test to make his point, but he's done similar tests on rival products.

Wayne Gorsek

It's got a thousand milligram on the label, but yet the active was only 1%. It only had 1% active, uh curcuminoids uh, which to me, you might as well take a placebo.

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It gets worse. He says, if you're taking a daily multivitamin from most of the major brands, you're probably wasting your money.

Wayne Gorsek

A typical vitamin being sold at a major retailer is being sold at two and a half cents per day. Uh, the cost to manufacture that vitamin is less than 2 cents. Uh, do you really think that product's gonna work?

Narrator

For decades the debate has raged about whether supplements are of any value. The medical establishment, including the big drug companies have largely argued that supplements are worthless, that there's no evidence they produce any positive health effects. Big pharma and medical societies have even alleged that taking vitamins can cause cancer. The supplement industry has fired back with its own studies, including a global assessment by Frost and Sullivan, which says the evidence is overwhelming. Proper levels of vitamins and nutrients could reduce major diseases and save billions per year in healthcare costs, multiple studies show, for instance, that vitamin D can reduce the risk of cancer and help alleviate depression. Gorsek says the most telling proof of all is that most of the major vitamin brands are now owned by drug companies. And he says, it's no accident the levels of active ingredients in multivitamins are far below what's needed to benefit your health.

Wayne Gorsek

Why are they putting out products proven not to work? Why are they doing that? In my opinion, uh, they are doing it so that you get sick and need to buy their drugs, which they make 10 times more revenue, and they make a hundred times more profit.

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The preponderance of evidence from medical studies, he says, shows definitive benefits from optimal levels of vitamins and nutrients. But for every positive study, someone comes out with a negative one. Gorsek thinks the studies funded by drug companies can be tailored to get the results they want. Supplements rarely if ever kill the people who take them, but prescription medicine claims more than a hundred thousand American lives per year.

Wayne Gorsek

Doctors are taught, from medical school on, that only drugs can treat or cure a disease. Um, and they were taught that vitamins are expensive urine, essentially and you get all the, um, uh, all you need out of your diet, which is not true. In America there is a financial incentive for you to get sick.

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The vitamin debate will go on, but here's something found by our I-Team colleague, Steve Kanagher. Several surveys of medical professionals were done to see how many of them take supplements. About 70% of doctors take them sometimes- more than half of doctors are regular users. It's nearly 80% for nurses, and among dieticians 94% take supplements. You can read Steve's full report and see links to many of the studies pro and con on our website. When choosing a multivitamin, the basic rule is you get what you pay for. Tomorrow at 11, what the FDA says about supplements and the big money that dictates national health policies. Basically you can't cram all the stuff you need into one single pill.

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There you go.

Newscaster

Yeah, it's true. Well, it's amazing. Fascinating.

Newscaster

Sure. Thanks George.

Newscaster

Thanks George.

Newscaster

Americans spend more on healthcare than the next 10 nations combined. Twenty percent of our gross national product goes into health related expenses. And yet the US ranks pretty low in several key health categories. One problem critics say is that we tend to focus on treating disease rather than preventing it. Seventy percent of Americans take prescription medications, but we pay far less attention to better nutrition, which could help prevent illness. Tonight. George Knapp of the I-Team gives us an inside look at a cutting edge vitamin company whose founder thinks American health is being held hostage to profits.

Wayne Gorsek

Sso we are the first and maybe the only nutraceutical company in America to have this latest, greatest technology.

Narrator

Wayne Gorsek is justifiably proud of the high tech Wonderland of a facility he's built in Las Vegas. He's not a doctor, but his doctor Vita brand is vying to set a new standard for the supplement industry, which has had its share of problems. The operation is a maze of stainless steel and glass, and has as many quality controls and safety measures as a drug company facility, in part, because Gorsek sees them as the real competition.

Wayne Gorsek

Yeah, we're now spending 3 trillion a year, uh, in excess of 3 trillion a year on healthcare, 330 billion a year on drugs, which most of them have deadly side effects. They don't cure anything in most examples.

Narrator

Big pharma and American medicine are almost schizophrenic when it comes to vitamins and supplements. Thousands of scientific studies have documented specific health benefits from optimal levels of vitamins and nutrients. Surveys show that most medical professionals use supplements themselves, but the official position of the establishment is that they do no good. To confuse things even more Gorsek says big pharma now owns nearly all of the major brands of supplements. Most of the multivitamins are all but worthless he alleges because the amount of active ingredients packed into a single tablet is far too low to be of much benefit. His company produces what Gorsek says is a far superior product, but it's difficult to get it on the shelves of major retailers.

Wayne Gorsek

The drug industry throws so much money, uh, at the retailers to control that shelf space. And then they throw so much money at marketing on TV and magazines, you name it.

Narrator

Big pharma spends $24 billion per year on marketing more than is spent on drug research. And it goes not only into TV ads for specific drugs, but also in all sorts of payments to doctors, medical schools, everyone. The industry earns billions in profits by selling products that kill more than a hundred thousand Americans per year, which prompted some critics to label it as the new mafia. Gorsek says the drug companies play rough. When doctors in Australia complained about side effects from the now infamous drug Vioxx its makers plotted ways to quote, “neutralize” or discredit the critics. TV’s popular, Dr. Oz, who often advocates the use of supplements, was recently blasted by a panel of doctors, nearly all of whom had financial links to drug companies. Gorsek says the FDA, which supposedly regulates the drug companies is an ally instead.

Wayne Gorsek

For a lot of the people that control and run the FDA, come out of the pharmaceutical industry and, or go into the pharmaceutical industry, have ties to the pharmaceutical industry…and, you know, they, they want to make the, you know, that, drugs are really a, monopoly on treating disease.

Narrator

The FDA is ostensibly neutral on vitamins. On its website It advises consumers to beware, prohibits sellers from making specific health claims, and will go after supplements that are either contaminated or otherwise harmful. Gorsek says his facility exceeds all FDA standards. He even pays to have periodic inspections by an independent authority, NSF, which makes the results public. Gorsek thinks the only way America will ever get a handle on runaway health costs is by focusing on prevention, instead of more costly treatment. Supplements could reduce disease he says, which might be the reason they are denigrated by the medical industry.

Wayne Gorsek

You could reduce healthcare costs, um, disease rates, 50 plus percent based on the published medical literature. And that would take half of their income, uh, and maybe 80% of their profits of the doctors, the drug companies, the hospitals and, and take it out of their pockets and back into the consumer's pockets.

Narrator

George Knapp, 8 News Now.

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The Dr. Vita brand is sold mostly online. Wayne Gorsek says the only retailer which carries another of his brands is Costco. His advice when choosing what supplements to take is to avoid the standard multivitamins. And instead look for supplements, which offer many times the official minimum daily requirements. It requires consumers to do a bit of research on their own. We have several links on our website and a lot more information about both sides in the great vitamin debate.

At Nature's Lab, our goal is to exceed the highest quality standards in every step of our production process. Our state of the art lab uses superior technology coupled with the expertise of our highly qualified pharmacists, chemists, microbiologists, and PhDs. Guaranteeing you receive the quality supplements you trust. All Nature's Lab, raw materials and finished products go through rigorous testing. Before leaving our facility. We conduct pathogen testing for E coli, salmonella, staph, yeast and mold.

We conduct stability testing on all of our products in controlled chambers, crosschecked with real time testing to ensure every product meets label claims from the day of manufacturing through the expiration date on each bottle. We use the most accurate elemental detection instrument available, the Agilent 7900 ICP-MS. This instrument detects elements such as lead cadmium, aluminum, mercury, and more. It is highly sensitive and measures samples down to the parts per trillion, far beyond other competing technologies.

We also use the most advanced form of high performance thin-layer chromatography to confirm and establish identity of raw materials. Our HPTLC system allows for precise sample application and software controlled evaluation to detect the presence of any adulterations or fillers, so you can trust what's on the label. We utilize FTIR analysis. This machine passes infrared light through a given botanical sample to map its unique molecular fingerprint, which we then test against a controlled standard to guarantee that each raw material meets our high quality standards. With the LIJ-2 disintegration tester we test how long it takes a capsule to dissolve in the digestive tract, which ensures that our capsules dissolve in the timeframe for optimal absorption. With our RO-Tap sieve shake we measure particle size of any given powder, which allows us to create smooth non-granular encapsulations that are easy to swallow and evenly distributed.

We also conduct bulk density testing to determine powder compressibility. This helps Nature's Lab minimize waste and pass these savings onto our customers. We are highly dedicated to research and development at Nature's Lab. Our R and D team pairs knowledge with technology to create optimal formulas and customized flavors. This is where science meets art in our lab. At Nature's Lab, we believe everyone deserves the highest quality dietary supplements on the market. With medical and natural research in mind, we develop products that help our customers live a healthier lifestyle. Our superior quality standards, cutting edge instrumentation and machinery, and our team of knowledgeable experts is what truly sets our lab and our products apart from the rest. Nature's Lab - superior ingredients, superior products.