LTH: A New Chapter of Wellness and Supplements

The journey to optimize your health and become the strongest, most resilient and best version of yourself is a lifelong one. It’s the cumulative sum of daily choices encompassing who you surround yourself with, what you eat (or don’t eat), prioritization of sleep and stress management techniques, frequency and balance of exercise and movement, subjective and objective ways you assess your internal health — and the quality and type of supplements you take.

Sometimes, the best choice in a given set of options is obvious. Other times, it’s clouded by varying opinions from celebrity doctors, personal physicians, news outlets, and social media influencers. When every source of information says something different, it’s hard not to be confused.

The information around supplementation, in particular, is a prevalent source of confusion and contradiction. But because now perhaps more so than ever supplementation is necessary for us to be sufficiently nourished, it’s important to be able to sift through the noise and find quality products you can trust.

The Truth About the Supplement Industry

The supplement industry has rightfully earned its shady reputation. For decades, grassroots organizations have publicized their findings of supplement contamination, missing active ingredients, and prevalence of cheap fillers and undisclosed additives. Any internet search asking “are supplements dangerous” quickly churns out dozens of stories and articles highlighting worst-case-scenarios that have come true.

Contrary to popular belief, dietary supplements are regulated. In 1994, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) regulations were put into place, establishing regulation for Good Manufacturing Practices with Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight. There’s marketing claim oversight from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with partnership with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ).

However, at the time these regulations were enacted, there were approximately 4,000 supplement companies. Now, 30 years later, there’s an estimated nearly 100,000 (a nearly 25X increase) with almost no changes to regulation.

From a quality control standpoint, the structure of the regulation can be compared to the regulation of speed limits: companies only get it in trouble when they get caught. It’s more reactive than proactive, which results in a lot of money-hungry, cost-cutting bad apples producing products that may be well-marketed but are low quality (at best) or dangerous (at worst).

How LTH Started

Bahram Akradi, the founder and CEO of Life Time, has always had an intense passion for health. Decades ago, he decided to send the supplements he was personally taking to a third-party lab to better be able to speak to their quality with confidence. To his surprise and disappointment, the lab results were abysmal and showed that despite his best efforts with careful selection as an educated customer, they did not contain what they said they contained.

It was at that moment that he decided that Life Time would produce its own supplement line, and LTH was born to provide a menu of solutions that we could trust and feel good about recommending. (Learn more: “All About LTH: The Story of Life Time’s Nutritional Supplement Line.”)

Quality Always Starts With Ingredient Selection

When you know what to look for, much of the indication of the quality of a supplement is found right on the label. While it doesn’t speak to the company’s manufacturing standards, sourcing, and transport, it can serve as an initial glance to see if they are prioritizing efficacy for their customers over profit for themselves.

For example, vitamins and minerals have forms that are more activated and easier for the body to utilize than their synthetic counterparts. Often, these superior forms are more expensive from a raw material standpoint, resulting in lower-quality manufacturers choosing synthetic forms in an effort to maximize their profits by cutting costs.

When it comes to colors, sweeteners, and flavors, there are both more natural and synthetic options. For other products, there may be necessary anticaking agents, preservatives, and fillers that may be needed for product quality, performance, and safety. This category, too, has more favorable options versus more questionable ones.

Here are a few ingredient highlights of LTH products:

• LTH Multivitamins only supply the most active, usable forms of micronutrients. For example, you won’t find synthetic folic acid for vitamin B9, but instead the more readily assimilated methylated form.
• The anchovy sourced and used for LTH Glow Omega-3 Fish Oil is caught at a fishery located directly next to the manufacturer, eliminating the need for it to travel long distances to Norway to be sold by brokers (and risk rancidity during transport). The fishing practices also have oversight by independent research groups that measure the biomass of each catch. If there’s a “juvenile” catch of younger fish, all fishing is immediately halted to not disturb reproduction and support sustainability.
• Key ingredients in LTH Rewind Collagen Elixir and LTH Revive Grass-Fed Colostrum are upcycled, which is the creative reuse and transformation of by-products of other industries into active, new, and powerful material of greater quality. This is an important sustainability practice that is good for the earth.
• LTH Whey Protein, LTH Revive Grass-Fed Colostrum and LTH Prime Collagen Peptides are sourced exclusively from grass-fed, pastured cows instead of feedlot cattle — free from hormones, synthetic pesticides, and antibiotics.

While it’s not comprehensive, here’s a quick comparison of what to look for on a supplement label as a first-pass check:

Ingredient Amounts

One other important callout about ingredient selection is dosing.

Active nutrients and ingredients have an associated cost, and some companies make the deceptive decision to skimp on active ingredient amounts (including amounts below what has been shown to make a meaningful health difference), yet use flashy marketing and loud labels to claim that their product contains said ingredient. This practice is referred to as pixie-dusting.

All LTH supplement ingredients are in science-backed, therapeutic doses designed to increase efficacy so they actually make a real difference. There’s an entire team of experts, scientists, dietitians, and trainers behind the formulas to help take the guesswork out for you.

What You May Not Know About Manufacturing

Once a product is formulated, it needs to be made into a final product, and there exists a wide range of manufacturing methods, processes, and conditions.

When raw materials first arrive from a raw material supplier, a common industry practice is called skip-lot testing, meaning the manufacturer tests every three to five batches to make sure they received what they ordered. At LTH, every batch of raw material is quarantined and tested for identity, purity, and strength before heading to the manufacturing line. Unfortunately, this step is necessary as some raw material manufacturers have been caught keeping “test/no test” lists of manufacturers as a sneaky way to sell their sub-par batches to the no-test companies.

Inside the manufacturing facility itself, processes ideally should be tightly regulated and controlled at every step. Our LTH team frequently visits our manufacturing partners in person, gowning up in lab coats and hygienic gear to observe the runs of product and continuously innovate.

Here are a few manufacturing practice highlights for LTH products that go above and beyond what’s industry standard:

• Multivitamins are weighed every five minutes during manufacture to ensure dosing accuracy
• Powders are screened for more than 70 chemical residues
• Additional testing is done for yeast, mold, and pathogenic bacteria
• Powders are run through 36 tests for heavy metals
• All packaging is 100 percent recyclable at home and is swabbed by manufacturers to check for safety

Final Product Testing

Regulations require a documented process to produce a final product. At LTH, we believe that’s not enough to ensure quality.

Every lot of LTH products is tested and confirmed with a scientific document called a Certificate of Analysis (COA) to ensure the label matches exactly what’s in the bottle. Then, it’s sent out for additional third-party testing from NSF, a respected independent product testing organization, to ensure it meets strict standards for your protection. The NSF certification involves unannounced inspections, regular onsite inspections and product retesting, and thorough evaluation of every step in a product’s development. (Learn more: “What Is NSF Testing for Supplements?“)

Product Transport

When we pick up a bottle of supplements off a shelf, it’s easy to forget that it had to be transported and stored before making its way into our hands. And since dietary supplements are sensitive to heat and humidity, it’s important that they weren’t stored in a hot, non-supplement-specific warehouse or transported in ways that are potentially unsafe.

The LTH product line is transported and stored in tightly temperature- and humidity-controlled environments through its entire journey to ensure it’s at its highest freshness and potency by the time it’s in your hands. We take a lot of pride in ensuring that we own the entire process of the LTH supplement line from A to Z.

Ready to Give LTH a Try?

We all want to be healthy, and in today’s modern world, it’s hard. The nutrient levels in our food supply aren’t what they once were. Couple that with issues that increase nutrient demand (such as stress, poor sleep, cumulative exposure to environmental pollutants, and more), and our bodies and minds are at risk of missing what they need to function optimally, let alone thrive.

The entire LTH wellness, assessment, and supplement line was born out of desire to counter the industry and offer solutions that are unquestionably and consistently trustworthy. LTH takes out the guesswork and is designed to take your further — whether you’re trying to feel better, perform better, or optimize health.

Start on a better path with LTH right here.