The Food & Drug Administration has tested some products and found that they didn’t contain the levels of CBD that were advertised on the products and others that contained pesticides, heavy metals, and even THC.

While the government organization claims to be looking out for the public interest, they are not doing a very good job of it. There are a ton of companies out there that are either buying CBD isolate and mixing it into whatever shit product they can find (regardless of quality), or worse, just relabeling products as containing CBD when they don’t.

So customers are either buying sub-par products that could contain other chemicals that would hurt them, or they are paying $25 for a $2.50 bottle of lotion labeled as having CBD inside.

It begs to be asked, “How do I know the CBD product I’m buying is what it says it is?” My first recommendation is to buy the products online after thoroughly researching them.

When I am vetting a CBD product to include in my online CBD marketplace, I ask the brand a lot of questions:

If these brands don’t answer any of the questions above the way I want them to, they are not included in my store. When doing your own research into brands and asking these questions, if you find that you don’t like the answer, don’t buy their products.  There are a lot of options out there!

There are two very different types of CBD – isolate and full spectrum. To explain the difference between them, I need to explain something called the entourage effect.

CBD is called a cannabinoid, and it is one of many such compounds found in the hemp plant. THere are also a lot of other chemical compounds called terpenes. These terpenes are found in a lot of other plants, including spices, and are usually the chemicals that give plants their smells and tastes.

It is theorized that these different compounds are designed to work together, as nature intended them. This whole plant effect makes the different compounds work together synergistically to bring about the benefits the individual compounds may be capable of when interacting within the body.

In order to get the full plant effect of the different cannabinoids and terpenes found in hemp, you want to use a CBD product made with CBD called full spectrum. This means that the CBD was left in its natural state with the other compounds that came along with it during extraction.

CBD isolate, on the other hand, is a white powder that is pulled out of the hemp plant in an extraction process carried out in a lab. It is designed to eliminate any of the other cannabinoids or terpenes found in the hemp plant. It is purely the CBD compound and nothing else.

CBD isolate makes it much easier to precisely dose a product because it can be precisely measured and mixed with the other ingredients.

I would also like to mention hemp seed oil. This oil is a product of extraction from hemp seeds, and it does not contain any CBD or other cannabinoids or terpenses. It is almost a trash oil, like cotton seed oil.

Make sure when you are reading over the ingredients list of a product, it doesn’t contain hemp seed oil, or only hemp seed oil. You want to see hemp oil or cannabidiol oil or isolate as an ingredient listed.

Because CBD can be used in so many different products, the other ingredients that go into those products become important when making a purchase decision.

If you are looking for quality and safety, you want to use products that are made from plant-derived ingredients as well as organic ingredients whenever possible.

Make sure that your products are free from GMOs, parabens, petroleum products such as petroleum jelly, or animal products such as lanolin (sheep skin oil).

Use products that contain essential oils for scenting as well as plant based carrier oils such as MCT oil, avocado oil, or coconut oil.

There are processes that are used in any production chain that most of us don’t think about. But if we are alert shoppers, we can research into the products we use. For CBD products, I want to know how the hemp is grown.

This is a big part of my product, and I want to make sure that they are using growing practices that align with my values such as green friendly farming without using chemicals or habitat destruction.

I want to make sure the products I buy are not tested on animals in any way. That every step of the process is cruelty free, to me, to animals, to the planet. I want to support sustainable practices that are important for our future.

So I look for brands that share these values with me so I can support their efforts when I buy CBD products.

Going back around to the FDA, while they claim to be looking out for the best interests of people, they can do nothing to prevent someone from buying a bad product. The advice that I’ve written here is more than anything I found on the FDA website.

It’s like they adopted the policy that no data is bad news, and we just don’t know how CBD will help anyone because there is no data backing up any claims.

They acknowledge that millions of people are looking to CBD for a number of reasons, and they want to address these needs. But they seem to have adopted an attitude that it’s just best if you don’t use CBD.

They don’t acknowledge that there is also no data showing horrible, adverse effects experienced by the millions of people that are using CBD. In fact, their regulations are trying to suppress even our anecdotal stories about how CBD is helping us in our lives.

Commercial entities are not allowed to use these actual testimonials on their products or marketing materials anywhere.

In a scathing article written by Jannelle Lassalle, the FDA lacks the credibility to be the authority on the CBD products that consumers most assuredly want to have access to.  If you’d like to learn more about the legalities of CBD and the FDA’s role in regulating CBD products, read our article – Is CBD Legal?

Whether or not you agree with this sentiment, buyer beware.  Make sure you do your own research so you know what you are buying is safe and delivers what it says it will.