What are the differences between cheap and expensive dietary supplements?
In: Chemistry
If they have the same ingredients and same form, there will be no difference in the actual result. Vitamin C is vitamin C, there is no better or worse quality vitamin c. (Assuming that what is labeled is what actually is inside, but thats a different problem).
In more expensive supplements there might be more expensive ingredients, but in general you should keep in mind that a high retail price of a product does not necessarily be caused by a high manufacturing cost.
Just because something is expensive it does not necessarily mean that it contains more expensive or better ingredients or is more expensive to produce.
For a potential placebo effect of the supplements, the more expensive ones might have a stronger effect, as your brain expects a better result from the more expensive one. But that is just a result of your brains imagination, and not caused by the actual ingredients (even though this can have an actual effect on your health and state of mind).
In the US they are almost totally unregulated as long as they are called “supplements” and do not make any specific health claims.
What this means is that there could potentially be no difference whatsoever. A manufacturer can put the exact same pills into different bottles to capture both budget and boutique markets and there is nothing stopping them.
There isn’t even a requirement as to how much of the active ingredient is present or thatbis is consistent feom one dose to the next.
The entire dietary supplements field is the wild west.
As others have said, yes, “supplements” in the US, at least, are unregulated and could be anything. However.
There’s a concept called “bioavailability” in drugs. You sometimes can’t swallow these things directly because digestion gets in the way. In that case, the pill or tablet or whatever is swallowed in a form that’s intended to be chemically altered to another form during digestion.
For example, vitamin C comes in ascorbic acid, calcium ascorbate, and liposome-encapsulated (and other forms). All digest down to a form of absorbable vitamin C but according to a random article on the internet I found, the later has more “absorbable” quantity of it compared to the others. Meaning, for, say, a 2mg pill of vitamin C, more or less of some percentage of that is actually absorbed and the rest discarded.
Vitamin C is still vitamin C, but the form you take determines how much of that “5000% DV!!!!” you can actually ingest. More expensive ones might use the forms with higher bioavailability.
Or not, at least in the US.
And don’t get me started on if the entire pill is actually active ingredient and not just filler. If you break even the most expensive drug in half perfectly, you may not have 50% of the active ingredient in both halves. I imagine most countries are actively controlling the total amount in actual drugs so you get the whole 10mg or whatever in prescriptions. Regardless of its distribution throughout the pill, it just has to all be *there*. But US supplements? Good luck.
I would absolutely not take supplements unless told to by a doctor. Even better if said doctor actually determines through a test if the supplement actually raised levels of said thing in your body. The placebo effect is very real and very strong.
This is a little more than ELI5, but one of the biggest problems with *cheap* generic drugs is the quantity control, or lack there of.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10391121/
Primarily, it’s in their marketing budget.
An expensive dietary supplement will run ads, have nice slick packaging, sit on the good shelves at the shop right at your eyeline, pay off influencers on social media to push their product, they may also have paid for some research so they can reference that in their ads to convince you it’s the real deal.
Latest Answers