Companies offering both products and useful information

• CFS Nutrition. This company, founded by a canary, offers products products particularly designed to meet our needs — as well as...
  • a wealth of useful information, including references with abstracts
  • an email discussion list called Metals
• Jo-Mar Labs- specialists in amino acids. Their information, mostly on the page for each product, is brief but helpful.

Organizations offering information and evaluation

• American Botanical Council, publishers of HerbalGram Magazine. Partial information free, more by subscription.
• Botanical.com Home Page
• ConsumerLab.com
  • They do independent tests of herbal, vitamin, and mineral supplements.
  • In addition their Natural Pharmacist Encyclopedia contains information from other sources (with references), on
    • Herbs and supplements
    • Conditions
    • Drug interactions (how natural substances interact with medications)
  • The most complete information is available if you subscribe, at $17.95 per year. Complete single-product reviews are $5.95 each. Email newsletter is free.
  • Great information, buggy site. If you can't get to a page you want, poke around; you may get there from another page.
• Flora Herb and Supplement Encyclopedia — cites research but without clearly identifying which study the text refers to. Search engine (on encyclopedia front page) is limited.
• Herbal Information Center — "descriptions of the most common herbs, and how they can be used to treat today's health problems. ...also ... information about vitamins, minerals, health and nutrition."
• HerbMed - "an interactive, electronic herbal database – provides hyperlinked access to the scientific data underlying the use of herbs for health. A project of the Alternative Medicine Foundation, Inc, provided as a freely available, public resource. An enhanced version of HerbMed® is available for licensing." This version is wonderful!
• Holistic-online.com — an extensive site with information on many kinds of alternative / complementary therapies, integrated medicine, etc.
• Medicinal Herbs Online — site somewhat buggy. Lists many herbs; info for each is speicfic but brief . Search engine.
• MotherNature.com's Safety Check by Drug Name — includes references. Pages may load slowly.
• NAPRALERT — see "University of Illinois at Chicago / NIH Center for Botanical Dietary Supplement Research" below.
• NutritionFocus.com — Vitamins. Minerals. Herbs. Amino Acids, Neurotransmitters, etc. Oils, Fatty Acids, Lecithin, etc. Antioxidants (including bioflavonoids) and much more, including news. Search engine.
• Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases — complete listings of chemicals in an herb.
• Purple Sage — medicinal herbs and their uses. Info on phytopharmacology. Bibliography but no references. Search engine.
• Southwest School of Botanical Medicine — Michael Moore, Director
• The Special Nutritionals Adverse Event Monitoring System (SN/AEMS), from the U. S. Food and Drug Administration / Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition / Office of Special Nutritionals. Searchable database from 1993.http://www.moducare.com/research.html
• SupplementQuality.com —
  • Information, including news, editorials and interviews, from the Dietary Supplement Quality Initiative on
    Research & testing
    Standards & regulation
    Political action
  • Their information is basically very good but occasionally I notice they don't consider all the ramifications of the subjects they treat. For example they recommend taking beta-carotene instead of retinol for Vitamin A supplementation, because high levels of retinol are linked to increased hip fractures in the Nurses' Study.
    • However some people don't metabolize beta-carotene well, and in order to supplement Vitamin A must use retinol.
    • In addition, the women studied in the Nurses' Study were not representative of a cross section of women in the larger population. Nurses by the nature of their profession are in a high-stress, unhealthy lifestyle. How this variable interacts with the variables that are measured for a given purpose ... is never considered.
• University of Illinois at Chicago / NIH Center for Botanical Dietary Supplement Research in Womens' Health: For a fee offers NAPRALERT (NAtural PRoducts ALERT), "the largest relational database of world literature describing the ethnomedical or traditional uses, chemistry, and pharmacology of plant, microbial and animal (primarily marine) extracts." Apparently a small selection is made available for free.