Hi Liz,
I avoid all supplements sourced from China, unless they have full cGMP certification and are backed by US companies the use pharmacuetical quality control methods in their production process.
The one small cost in the form of requiring the buyer to educate themselves a bit and learn which of the many supplement companies are consistently reliable and trustworthy from the much smaller percentage that have repeated problems and questions quality control track record, is the very worthwhile price paid to insure we have a large range of important nutritional supplements available in the dosage forms needed for therapeutic efficacy.
Its is simply not that hard to do one's homework and find out how many very reputable and trustworthy firms there are in this field. Those in the press and influenced strongly by Big Pharma lobbyist, whose mission of total regulatory control over the supplement industry, and who overly- emphasize and overly-dramatize the very real but relatively few outright fraud or misleading practices that are revealed from time to time, mostly from fly by night kind of outfits, never discuss the detailed and very costly steps the many top flight supplement companies go through to insure consistently reliable potencies and purities from their products.
You never hear one story about any of these companies or products that make p the vast majority of the supplement industry and mostly hear the bad news accounts of people cooking up Body Builder or Stimulant enhancing supplements in their basement and selling them over the internet and in some health food stores that cut corners or are outright cheating. But these stories do not reflect the quality of the industry, unlike what the sensational news reports would have us believe from their breathless reports.
The bottom line still remains that of all ER and hospital reports of adverse events over the last 10 years up through the last accounting I saw in late 2011, there had been ZERO deaths and very few serious health events reported in the US from commercially available nutritional supplements taken as directed.
Compare that to the track record of pharmaceutical drugs and the many 100,000s of deaths over the last ten years is so far off the charts compared to the issues that still need to be cleaned up in the supplement industry, that there isn't even a debate on the relative risks between the two industries.
Im all for improved self policing of the supplement industry and there have been big strides taken in that effort in recent years, but there will always be at least a relatively few people/companies who will try to take advantage of the lack of draconian regulations to make a fast buck at the buyers expense, but with a little bit of due diligence you can easy and safely protect yourself from such relatively limited shenanigans without risking losing our access to the many wonderful supplements through FDA regulations when they cant even properly regulate and test the drugs they let through the pipe stream every year! And we could lose access to many if not most of those really great products that can potentially be so helpful to so many of us who take the time to learn how they work and how they should be used.
Shannon