Standard Process FAQ

It's a Wisconsin supplement company that's been around since 1929. They own a 420-acre organic farm in Palmyra and grow a lot of their own raw ingredients. The catalog is huge — about 300 products — and most of them are whole-food concentrates rather than the synthetic-isolate stuff you'd find at NOW or Nature Made. The catch is you can't just buy it. You have to go through a practitioner. That's the whole reason most people end up confused about the brand.

The company decided in the 1930s that the catalog was too complex for retail self-prescription, and they've held the line on it ever since. So to buy it, you need a chiropractor, naturopath, integrative MD, dietitian, or acupuncturist who's got a Standard Process account and orders for you. Yes, you can find it on Amazon. No, you shouldn't buy it there — counterfeit and expired stock are real problems on the gray market. The brand actively goes after resellers.

It means the vitamin C in your bottle came from actual acerola cherries or alfalfa, not from a vat of synthetic ascorbic acid. The B vitamins came from nutritional yeast, not from synthetic cyanocobalamin made in a chemistry plant. The argument is that the original whole food brings along cofactors — bioflavonoids, enzymes, trace minerals — that your body uses to actually absorb and utilize the nutrient. The counter-argument is that you get much smaller doses that way. Whether that matters for you depends on what you're trying to do. The ingredients page walks through it.

Mostly no, with some specific exceptions. Glandulars are dried whole-organ products — bovine adrenal, thyroid, ovary — used at low doses. PMG extracts are a proprietary Standard Process thing from the 1940s, made from animal organ nuclear material. For healthy adults, both categories are well-tolerated at label dose. The exceptions matter: if you have autoimmune thyroid disease (Hashimoto's, Graves'), if you have a beef allergy, if you have any active autoimmune condition — clear it with your doctor first. The bovine source is New Zealand BSE-free certified herds; the company has the documentation.

Three patterns mostly. One: people doing the 21-Day Purification Program get headaches, fatigue, and loose stools in the first 3-5 days. That's mostly the calorie cut, not the product per se. Two: people on glandulars sometimes feel wired or have trouble sleeping, especially if they're stacking on top of caffeine or thyroid meds. Three: people on the MediHerb stuff occasionally get herb-class allergic reactions, particularly the ragweed-cross-reactive ones. The side-effects page walks through it.

Honest answer: depends on the SKU. Catalyn — their flagship multi-vitamin from 1929 — has no real substitute and the price is fair. The MediHerb line really is on par with the best practitioner-channel herbals out there. The glandulars and PMG are unique to the brand; you can't get them elsewhere, so the comparison is harder. The 21-Day Purification Program is genuinely labor-intensive and you're paying for both the product and the protocol. Other SKUs — the price premium versus retail alternatives is harder to justify.

Versus Garden of Life and MegaFood: the farm-to-tablet sourcing is more vertically integrated, the excipient profile is cleaner (no magnesium stearate, no titanium dioxide), but you pay more and you can only buy it through a practitioner. Versus Thorne and Pure Encapsulations: also practitioner-channel, but they lead with isolated bioidentical nutrients (methyl-B12, K2 MK-7); Standard Process leads with whole-food concentrates and has the glandular line nobody else does. Versus NOW: different philosophy. NOW is high-dose isolated synthetics at retail price.

The full Standard Process write-up at Dr. Bell Health walks the catalog SKU by SKU with the practitioner's take on which products are worth the premium and which aren't.