Inside supplements: become supplement savvy with this essential information about what goes into nutritional products

Muscle & Fitness/Hers, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Brian Rowley

How do you find the supplements with the best ingredients?

So many nutritional products are on the market these days, you may reel you have little on which to base a decision except marketing, testimonials from store employees and a price tag. Yet a supplement's true value often depends on hidden factors, such as where it came from and what other ingredients are present. As with any recipe, the quality depends on the ingredients and how they were prepared.

Although you can't learn everything about a product, you can make an informed decision if you know how to recognize signs of quality. To help you, we've created eight benchmarks of supplement quality called "green lights" (not all green lights apply to all types of supplements; choose the ones that best serve your values and long-term goals). By scanning for green lights, you can zero in on the most dependable nutritional products and find the ones that might serve you the best.

GREEN LIGHT NO. 1: CHOOSING THE ACTIVE INGREDIENT

The first step in choosing a dietary supplement is to find out what your goals are, and whether a supplement is the best way to achieve them. For example, a woman who takes thermogenic herbs but seldom exercises will probably achieve the greatest amount of additional fat loss by getting to the gym more often as opposed to changing supplements. Along the same lines, its important to have a psychiatrist rule out bipolar disorder before you take St. John's wort for depression; other treatments would be more appropriate.

Just the same, dietary supplements are an effective, convenient way to correct nutritional weaknesses, support athletic performance and

prevent age-related diseases in some cases. Once you've decided that a supplement is right for you, get a list of brands that contain the active ingredient you're interested in, and check with your doctor or pharmacist to make sure it won't interact with any existing medications you may be taking. It may also be important to know how the active ingredient affects pregnancy (in case it happens), health conditions, specific allergies, the clotting time of your blood (if you have surgery planned or are taking aspirin or Motrin IB), and any children in your environment if they have access to your supplements.

GREEN LIGHT NO. 2: UNDERSTANDING THE LABEL

The second positive sign is if the supplement lists the active ingredient you want, along with the amount. For herbs, we recommend products that give the species name in the ingredients. The most well-tested forms of echinecea, for example, are Echinacea purpurea, Echinacea angustifolia and Echinacea pallida, in that order; other species may or may not be as useful. The label should also mention from which part of the plant the active ingredient is extracted. For echinacea, the roots are most commonly used, but other parts of the plant can successfully provide active ingredients as well. Most important, the label should give both the name and amount of each active ingredient. For example, a standardized echinacea extract that reads "4% echinosides (10 mg)" per 250 mg capsule gives both the active ingredient (echinosides) and how much is there (10 mg). Even for crude herb preparations, it's nice to know how much active ingredient you're getting.

The same is true for minerals; examples of clear language include "magnesium 100 mg," "100 mg magnesium (as aspartate)" and "100 mg magnesium from aspartate." In all three cases, it's obvious that 100 mg of actual magnesium is present.

On the other hand, "100 mg magnesium aspartate" would be confusing, as it's not clear whether you're getting 100 mg of actual mineral or 15 mg of mineral plus 85 mg of aspartate. In fact, the last interpretation is correct. That's because 85% of the weight of this particular compound is the aspartate, which is much heavier than magnesium. Because most people would assume they were getting 100 mg of the mineral itself, no green lights for products where the amount of active ingredient is hard to figure out.

Choosing vitamins is less complicated than choosing herbs and even minerals. That's because nearly all of the world's vitamins come from several multinational drug companies that provide extremely high-quality products to supplement manufacturers at low cost. Although vitamins can be extracted from food or other natural material, doing so is prohibitively expensive, which is why supplement companies sell synthetic varieties almost exclusively. One exception is Vitamin E, of which a natural-source version can be made using a byproduct of the vegetable oil industry. Natural-source Vitamin E appears in the ingredients as d-alpha tocopherol (acetate or succinate), while synthetic Vitamin E is dl-alpha tocopherol (acetate or succinate). Both forms of the vitamin are safe and effective against free radicals, with the natural form being more potent and the synthetic form being less expensive.

GREEN LIGHT NO. 3: PILLS THAT DISSOLVE

To be absorbed, a supplement must first dissolve in the gut. To ensure that the pill's contents are both released and well-dispersed for absorption, most supplement companies do disintegration and dissolution testing on their products. This helps companies avoid creating "bedpan pills," or tablets that pass through consumers' bodies intact and unabsorbed. Although listing the dissolution time on the label isn't essential (especially for capsules and powders for which dissolution isn't as great of an issue), it's nice to have, especially for tablets that might be harder to dissolve. These include those that have "pharmaceutical glaze," "food glaze," "ethyl cellulose" or "enteric coating" mentioned on the label, as well as those containing binders like cellulose.