ABOUT US - OUR STORY
Hello my name is Stan Haley and I welcome you to Greenwood Health Systems.
Thanks for taking the time to visit with us today. While it may take you a few minutes to read all of this, I hope you will consider it time well spent.
Although Rene and I launched Greenwood back in 2000, the genesis of our company actually goes all the way back to when I first became interested in nutritional supplements as a consumer in 1980. Basically back in those days, I would purchase various products, consume them and then wonder why they apparently provided me with little or no beneficial effects whatsoever.
As a result of those experiences, I started studying everything I could find on the benefits of different ingredients (tough to do before the Internet was invented) and then looking for products that at least contained worthwhile ingredients.
By 1990 I thought that I was a very well educated consumer, with access to a range of products that I believed were worth the significant amount of money I was spending on them each month.
Little did I know that was about to change………big time.
In 1991, a chance meeting with an almost 70 year old Master Herbalist and Kinesiologist (who looked about 45), at a conference organized by a nutritional supplement company I was involved with, very quickly showed me how little I actually knew. Graydon was one of the speakers at that conference and the company owners were less than impressed with his short presentation. He committed the crime of informing the audience, that while the company had very good products, those products could instantly become much more effective if the company made a few minor formulation changes.
After his presentation, I was lucky enough to get his phone number, before he was informed that he had just become an ex distributor for the company and escorted off the property. Apparently the company owners were totally uninterested in having their “perfect” product formulations questioned by anyone, at any time.
As I was intrigued by his comments, I called him that next week and he invited me to visit with him. That visit lasted 10 hours and was the start of our friendship. It was also the beginning of my true education on the subject of understanding all of the steps required to produce incredibly EFFECTIVE nutritional supplement products.
Over the next couple of years this ongoing education taught me:
That, while ingredient choices are important, the quality of those ingredients is far more important.
That, combining certain specific ingredients, in the correct amounts, can produce a synergistic effect that is far, far greater than the individual benefit of each ingredient.
That, unless the ingredients used in a formulation are present in efficacious / therapeutic quantities, they are doing nothing more than looking pretty on the product label.
That, the use of chemical based excipients in products, not only have zero benefits, they can actually be harmful.
The Lessons are Incorporated in Our Products
Our ingredient choices are critical.
While we routinely source our ingredients from countries all over the world, we flatly refuse to use any ingredient sourced from China. Many ingredient suppliers in that country are, shall we say, a little loose with the facts about the actual quality of their products.
Another perfect example is the source of the B12 we use in our formulations. Pick out just about any product containing B12 and you will probably see that the source of the B12 is the synthetic form called Cyanocobalamin. We only use Methylcobalamin, which is the natural form, as it is far more bioavailable and effective than Cyanocobalamin. It is also far more costly, which is why most companies do not use it.
When you achieve ingredient synergy, the results it produces are spectacular. A great example of a synergistic effect with ingredients may be found in our Ellagic Insurance Formula product. While Ellagic Acid and Graviola are great individual super-antioxidant ingredients, combining them produces results far in excess of their individual benefits. Those benefits can make a significant difference in the overall levels of health and well-being of the products consumers. There is a reason why many of our clients who were first diagnosed with stage 3 and 4 cancers over 10 years ago, are still using The Ellagic Insurance Formula on a daily basis today.
The routine use of non-therapeutic amounts of ingredients, by so many supplement companies, is my greatest pet peeve in this industry. This extremely common practice is known as “Fairy Dusting”. In simple English, Fairy Dusting means putting an ingredient (that permits the manufacturer to make a legal label claim) into a product formulation in such a small quantity, that it’s presence is functionally useless.
A perfect example of this practice is a company with a basic vitamin / mineral product, that heavily promotes the fact that their product contains Lycopene. Their advertising goes on and on about a clinical use of Lycopene study that generated significant results for heart health.
Now, while that study and the results obtained are totally genuine, here is the kicker. That study was conducted using 3 GRAMS of Lycopene daily, not the 600mcg of Lycopene, that a daily dose of their product actually contains. To put it bluntly, you would need to take their product every day for 5,000 DAYS (13 Years) to obtain 3 grams of Lycopene from it.
BTW: Under our current labeling laws, this practice is totally legal. You can literally walk up to a mixing vat containing 100 KG of ingredient material, with a pinch of another ingredient between your two fingers, sprinkle it into the mix and then legally list it on the label.
On the subject of labeling laws, there is one aspect of DSHEA that drives me up the wall. We use a lot of proprietary blends in our formulations (primarily to protect disclosure of the exact amount of each ingredient used in our formulations from those who would love to be able to copy them) and in those blends we are required to list our ingredients by descending order of weight, not activity.
What this means, for example, is that if we use 200mg of a 20-1 standardized herbal extract, we can only add the 200mg actually used to the total weight of the blend that is shown on the label. I wish we could show that the 200mg, 20-1 extract, actually equates to using 4 GRAMS of the raw herb. If we could, some of our product labels would look a LOT different.
As an example, look at the Supplemental Facts Panel for our Adaptogens product on the left (right click on the image). While the Adaptogen blend is listed at only 1155.8mg, the activity is actually over 10 GRAMS.
One other crazy aspect of labeling laws is the permissible 10% over / under presence of ingredient listed. In simple English, if you list an ingredient as being present at 100mg, it is totally legal to have anywhere from 90mg to 110mg actually present. Care to guess which way many companies go with this nice little loophole?
BTW: We receive a Certificate of Analysis for each batch of each product manufactured and those CoA’s routinely show our ingredients are present at an average of 105% of the listed label claim. This means that we actually include ingredients at a rate of up to 15% higher, than we are legally required to supply.
Excipient choices are critical. If you are unfamiliar with the term, “Excipients” are the preservatives or the flowing and binding agents used in the manufacturing of nutritional supplements. They are required to be listed on product labels in the “Other Ingredients” section of the label.
Our choices regarding the excipients we use are very simple. We produce totally “Clean Label” products that contain no chemical based excipients whatsoever. As an example, instead of using Magnesium Stearate as a flowing agent, we use the much more costly, totally natural, Organic Rice Bran instead. We also incur the extra production cost to encapsulate our products in vegetable capsules, not gelatin capsules.
So, why did I decide to start Greenwood. The simple answer is, that by 1999 I was tired of being asked to leave yet another supplement company for having the audacity to publicly suggest that if they were prepared to spend a VERY small amount of money tweaking their product formulations, those products would become even more effective.
I was told, that if I did not like what they were doing, I was welcome to go and start my own company and learn the hard way, why the average consumer was far more interested in obtaining the lowest possible price for a product, than they were in paying extra for the best possible formulation of that product. I was also bluntly told by the CEO of that company, that, in his opinion, if I tried to market products at the prices necessary to make a profit on my totally unnecessary additional production costs, I would be out of business within a year.
Well, 22 years later, we are still in business and as our product return rate (from unhappy customers) is less that one in every five hundred bottles we sell, I am still laughing about his not so accurate prediction.
Thanks for taking the time to read all of this. I sincerely hope that you now have a better understanding of why our products are so widely recognized as being phenomenally effective and why our unconditional 30-day money back guarantee on them is so rarely used by our clients.
Stan Haley
President, Greenwood Health Systems, Inc.
We Enjoy an Impeccable Business Reputation
We are extremely proud of the fact that we have held an A+ rating with the BBB for the past 19 years.
One of the reasons we hold this exceptional rating, is that we have not ever had a single consumer complaint lodged against us. We ship orders in a timely manner and we honor our unconditional 30-day Money Back Guarantee on our products.
To read their full report on our company, please click on the BBB image.
CONTACT US
- Phone: 620-665-7900 M-F 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM (CST).
- Email: support@greenwoodhealth.com
- Mailing Address: PO Box 797 Hutchinson, KS 67504.
