What are the differences between cheap and expensive dietary supplements?
In: Chemistry
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.
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