If you’re doing any vitamin shopping, especially if you’re shopping in the highly competitive and heavily trafficked Internet market, you will undoubtedly find thousands upon thousands of supplements available to you, many of which offer a completely different list of benefits from the next even though they’re supposedly the same vitamin. How can you tell which brands are nature made vitamins and which ones are packing an extra boost of chemicals and compounds you don’t want?

For example: let’s say that you’re looking for completely original nature made vitamins bereft of additional ingredients, but you see a vitamin C supplement promising “increased levels of energy and stamina.” Things might not be kosher here. Sure, C provides a boost of energy, but it’s not exactly a metabolism-boosting product by itself.

Overall, it’s not quite as simple as looking at a list of vitamin C benefits & side effects and seeing if they match up with what the site is attempting to sell you. You’ll actually have to dig a little bit deeper to make sure that the company isn’t stuffing a bunch of caffeine or other drug-like substances into their vitamin supplements for an added boost.

Especially when dealing with the weight-loss industry, companies have a bad habit of throwing a bunch of extra stuff into their vitamins. On their own, vitamins are produced naturally in the foods we eat, so they can be concentrated in laboratories and delivered in pill or liquid form via supplements. Buy by adding in a few other key ingredients, companies can advertise them with bonus results.

We’re not saying that these are necessarily dangerous. But it’s still important to know what you’re getting. If you want 100% authentic vitamins with no extra substances in there, then make sure you carefully read the labels of every manufacturer to ensure that they’re all natural.