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Vitamins - where to buy

YYZ-KMG (4 posts) • 0

Can anyone tell me where in Kunming I can purchase vitamins?

I extended my stay in Kunming and I will run out of my supply before I go back home. I need these for fertility purposes :(
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I'm looking for:

- High quality Wholemega Fish Oil capsules (preferably organic, but I'll take what I canget!)

- Coenzyme Q10

bluegrass14 (126 posts) • 0

We have been getting vitamins and supplements (even certain grocery items) on www.iherb.com.

If you spend over $40usd, you get free shipping from the US to China, and it only takes around 11-14 days to arrive (you'll get better quality at cheaper prices).

Alien (3819 posts) • 0

Get them from virtually any pharmacy, that's what I've been doing for 2-3 years..

finlay (10 posts) • 0

It's been suggested that vitamins are available at any local pharmacy. Can anyone recommend a reputable brand? I just read an article on google claiming that 40% of the vitamins in the states do not contain the advertized potency. I can only imagine what the percentage in China would be.

Alien (3819 posts) • +1

Well, the ones I take seem to work. I buy them at the Jian Kang Yao Fang (Health Drug Store) - many branches, one near the end of Wenhua Xiang near the back entrance to Yun Da and the Yun Da Guesthouse- lots of varieties of a couple of brands. You can get a discount card too.
If I were more careful about what I eat - balanced daily diet, all that - I wouldn't bother with them, but I'm lazy.

Geezer (1953 posts) • 0

In Feb 2014, I did an analysis of Vitamin C costs. These calculations were at 6.21¥ per USD.

I had my son send me a bottle Costco brand vitamin C, 500 tablets, 1,000mg tablets. My cost, including shipping was $34 U$D.

I compared the cost of two domestic vitamin C products and two imported vitamin C products I found on Nan Ping Jie:

Costco 214¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00007 U$D

Domestic A 108¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.01496 U$D

Domestic B 198¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00674 U$D

Import A 239¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00087 U$D

Import A 98¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00350 U$D

Chinese labelling is not always clear. The size of the tablet will be clearly given but to find the amount of Vitamin C per tablet requires careful reading. Both domestic brands were 100 mg tablets but one contained only 11.8 mg 'C' per 100 mg tablet and the other 32 mg 'C' per 100 mg tablet.
Nearly all the vitamin C sold in the US originates in China.

Aspirin can be found in 50 and 100 mg tablets and the cost per mg is much cheaper than the US 325mg tablets.

In China Tylenol is hard to find and quite expensive. It also doesn't look right.

Full disclosure: One of the imported vitamin C product is well known to me. I brought a Taiwanese business guy, a Chinese scientist living in the US and a Vietnamese born pharma company owner, together to design, manufacture and distribute standardized TCM pills. Their products were to be exported to China. I found only their line of Western vitamins for sale.

lemon lover (1006 posts) • 0

First let's be clear that these mega doses of vitamins are completely unnecessary and mainly an American obsession hyped up by companies that make big money out of it. Certain vitamins such as A and B6 are even dangerous in to high doses.
Price fixing of vitamins even resulted in one of the highest fines the European Union ever charged because so much money was made this way.
The only vitamins you might need, unless on medical indication, is vitamin C if your lifestyle leads to a low natural vitamin C intake.
Here in China as well the industry likes to make an extra buck by selling you vitamins at high prices. To do so they have nice colourful packaging etc. You will find these products at eye height in the pharmacies.
But you can just buy "normal" vitamin C as well but you have to get on your knees and really look for them at the bottom shelf. (The staff often tries to hide them as well behind closed doors because they don't make profit on it).

Look for the tiny little plastic pots that say "vitamin C tablets" in English and Chinese.
The price is something like 2.5 kuai per 100 tablets of 100mg (this is about twice your daily need) which makes it 0.00375 USD per dose or 0.0000375 USD per mg so you can compare it with Geezer above. (Brand KPC Kunming Pharmaceutical Company)

lemon lover (1006 posts) • 0

@finlay
Dosing in pharmaceuticals has to be within 5% of the stated dose in order to comply.
So if your tablet contains 94 mg or 106 mg instead of a 100 then they don't comply. For critical medication a precise dosing might be important but for a food supplement for which most of these vitamins are used it is less important. It does therefore not surprise me that 40% is off the mark. If you sell your vitamins as food supplement then you don't have to stick to this 5% up and down bandwidth. More so because most producers of vitamins are not pharmaceutical companies but just cowboys who like to make a quick buck. How do you do that: You buy bulk vitamins in China by the container load add starch powder and role your own line of made in America tablets.
Go to Alibaba and put in Vitamin C and you will see prices as low as 0.00003 USD per mg and lower (3 USD per Kg). Corn starch is even cheaper.
(Note that there is even cheaper stuff but this is not pharmaceutical grade but food supplement grade or intended as preservative)

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