Glucosamine Chondroitin Joints does it work?

Glucosamine Chondroitin Joints does it work?

I asked an Orthapedic Doctor about this the other day and he brushed it off like these things are just another way to make money. He said he does not believe it really helps to take these type of supplements although he did admit that a out 30% of the people feel that it helps them feel better. Many will say that is the power of your mind but what would it matter?

My friend Denis told me to try it a few years ago when I was having problems with my joints and I took one bottle and felt great and then I did not have to get any more for a couple of years. I am not using a liquid derived from shrimp and crab.

You should be careful because not all the brands are created equal nor do all the brands even have what they claim to have. I joined a pay web site a few years ago that required you pay a membership. It was consumer labs and they test all sorts of vitamins. I checked and many of the Glucosamine Chondroitin supplements claimed to have specific amounts when they really did not and consumer labs even found some brands that claimed to have both and only contained Glucosamine and no Chondroitin at all. This concerned me. The Amway vitamins have always passed the test and the ones from SAMS and COSTCO had as well the last time I checked.

There were brand names that are well known that they found lead in and that was a big deal on the site although I never heard anything about it in the paper or news. There was another children's vitamin that also failed their tests and apparently the company agreed to look into it and fix the issue but I never heard anything about that on the news either.

We did our own experiments where we took a popular pink vitamin and put it in just a glass of water and we took one of our natural vitamins and did the same and after one hour the pink pill was entirely still intact and the natural vitamin was almost all dissolved. One of our friends brother's worked for a sanitation company where he emptied portable toilets and he found many of those undissolved vitamins in those toilets and that concerned all of us. In a class I went to they also said that the vitamin companies will send their representatives out to collect the expired bottles only to send those same pills back to the companies to reprocess them. They call them REGRINDS and they told us to break those pink pills in half and see if you can see pink flecks and that would indicate that they had been ground out and made into new vitamins. This is also a problem.

The Amway Double X vitamins cost about 50 dollars for a month supply but I don't take them twice a day as recommended but I take them once a day and I have found that if I take them later in the day I have trouble going to sleep because I have more energy so one month supply lasts me 2 months.

The studies recently done showed that specific vitamins are more important than others and there was no real proof that multivitamins do much good at all. They do recommend as did the orthopedic doctor that I spoke with that people take calcium and Vit D.

My wife's neurologist recommended that my wife take 2000 mg of Vitamin D per day, 400 mg of B2 every day and we could not even find that a a normal store but we had to go to a health food store. He also is having her take CO Q 10 everyday along with IRON since she is low. His approach is much different than most doctors. He also gave us two books to deal with migraine headaches that recommend specific foods to eat and not to eat. He told her to avoid alcohol, caffeine and sugar.

So when reading though so many complicated articles and books about vitamins and trying to figure out what would be good and what would be overkill I try to narrow it down to how it makes me feel to figure out what works for me and for my family. My wife hates taking pills so sometimes liquid works better for certain people. We have tried many of the miracle juices such as Mangosteen and Noni juice and Cactus juice etc.... The claims are made that they fix just about everything. Once again we come back to power of suggestion and there may be some of these items that actually help but with so much hype it is hard to narrow it down. They want you to join some network and buy the juice for 40 or 50 and then get others to join so they all can make tons of money and it never works like they say it does.

I have a friend that has written several books about juicing and he recommends vegetable juice in the morning and fruit juice in the afternoon. He has a PHD and looks great for his age and claims it is all due to his diet. He eats very little meat and only in winter and he juices all the time. He eats lots of vegetables and not much sugar. He avoids alcohol and he does not smoke either. He gets a moderate amount of exercise and he is about 73 right now and looks like he is 50. He always has energy and I suppose some of us are just like that, where we don't gain too much weight and for others it seems to be more in their propensity to gain weight no matter how they eat so we need to do what is right for us.