Bruce Daggy, PhD, FACN, Chief Science Officer & SVP R&D, Shaklee Corporation explains our 30-day “Feel-Amazing” guarantee.
At Shaklee, we offer a 30-Day Feel-Amazing Guarantee because we are confident that most people will feel the effects of a nutritional upgrade in a very short period of time. The reasons are simple. Study after study has shown that most of us are not getting the RDAs from the foods and beverages we consume, much less what we would need for optimal health. Therefore, most of us have nutritional gaps—despite our best intentions.
One of the benefits of a good supplemental program is that it works for almost everyone. Unlike medications that can work in some people but not in others, vitamins and minerals do the same job in your body that they do in mine. A good multivitamin is almost universally beneficial—especially for filling in those nutritional gaps.
Nutritional gaps are a bigger deal than you might think. That is because even small nutritional gaps can have troublesome effects, especially over time, on many body systems. This is why good supplements build health over time: they help to ensure your body has what it needs for optimal functioning.
But what about when someone says that they did not feel better after 30 days? Well, of course we would refund their money if that’s what they want. But as for the why, I chalk most of it up to perception.
I have had the opportunity to work with many elite athletes in my career and I would say that they are almost universally more perceptive than the average consumer. They notice how any change in their diet or routine changes their bodies. But we (in the general population) are often not as attuned to our bodies as elite athletes.
I can’t say that I noticed a difference with my Shaklee program in the first month. But after I’d been taking the products more than a year, I realized issues I had struggled with for more than ten years were gone. I’d even say that my mood is better, and I certainly have more energy. All these things happened gradually, and I wasn’t necessarily aware when I first started to change. But what I’d say now is that my simple daily nutritional habit has paid great dividends.
Sometimes I wish we had access to a time machine where we could go back “test” a version of ourselves taking vitamins our whole lives and compare that to another version of ourselves who never took vitamins at all. How different those two versions of ourselves would be—especially as we (they) grew older.
While no scientist has yet built a time machine, scientists do use population studies to compare different groups of people taking (or not taking) vitamins and we can make assumptions based on these studies.
Our own Landmark Study, conducted in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, shows us that long-term supplementation—at least with high quality supplements—can have a dramatic impact on health. The people who supplemented for 20 years or more were remarkably healthier than those who took just a multivitamin or no supplements at all – not just showing better nutritional status, but also healthier cholesterol and triglyceride readings, lower homocysteine, and lower c-reactive protein, among other positives.[i] And we often hear from people who do notice that they feel better quickly. When we introduced the Life Plan program, over 90 percent of participants reported that they felt better in 21 days.
To anyone who did not notice a change after 30 days, I would suggest they continue taking the products and wait. Some nutritional changes take time: low blood iron can take weeks to improve, low vitamin D can take many months to reverse, our bones take months to get organized after proper supplementation to begin building bone density again. Not to mention that keeping our hearts and brains healthy is a lifelong pursuit.
I’ve also heard from people who didn’t notice any difference when taking supplements who do notice a difference when they stop taking them. They were gradually improving all along and didn’t notice until they stopped the supplements.
Good supplementation is becoming more of a necessity in modern life; without it, we’re all at risk for nutritional gaps. Let’s hope the 30 days is just a beginning of lifelong support for your better health!
[i] Block G, Jensen CD, Norkus EP, Dalvi TB, Wong LG, McManus JF, Hudes ML. Usage patterns, health, and nutritional status of long-term multiple dietary supplement users: a cross-sectional study. Nutrition Journal. 2007 Oct 24;6(1):30.
