Choosing A Digestion Supplement: Seven Checks

The instinct in this aisle is to read the ingredient names and look for ones that sound researched. It is the wrong instinct, because almost every bottle contains at least one ingredient with a genuine literature behind it, and the name tells you nothing about whether this bottle delivers it.

What separates the bottles is disclosure. A label either tells you enough to check it against published research, or it does not. Seven questions cover almost all of it, and none of them requires knowing anything about botany.

The checks are also a disclosure test rather than an efficacy test, and keeping those two apart is the whole discipline. A label can pass all seven and still be a product that does nothing for you. What it cannot do is pass all seven and leave you unable to find out.

Two passes, two half-marks and three failures. The scorecard was written first and applied afterwards.

That is a poor scoreline, and printing it on the website that sells the bottle is the only thing that makes the two passing rows worth anything. A page that scored its own product seven out of seven would have been describing a different product.

It is also worth being precise about what the failures are and are not. None of them is a safety finding. Every one of them is a disclosure finding: the label withholds figures a buyer would need to compare this capsule with the research behind its ingredients.

Check one and check three are really the same failure twice. 11 entries share 250 mg, so no individual figure exists, and the blend total is far below the doses the research used for its two best-evidenced members. Bijkerk ran 10 g of psyllium and Martoni ran ten billion CFU. A quarter of a gram, split eleven ways, cannot hold either.

Check four is the one a buyer can do least about. A probiotic with no count is not a quantity, and there is no way to infer one. Being last in the blend means it is the smallest of the eleven, which is the only information available and is not a dose.

None of the three is unusual in this aisle. Proprietary blends are everywhere and uncounted probiotics nearly as common. That is a reason to apply the checklist to every bottle rather than a reason to excuse this one.

Five rows here and the full twelve are on the ingredients page. Reading the two columns together is the whole exercise, and it is available to anyone with the label in front of them.

Naming the plant part is rarer than it should be. A great many labels write an ingredient name and stop, which leaves a buyer guessing at the one detail that decides whether the research applies. This panel commits on every botanical entry, and the commitment cuts against the seller in at least one place: naming oat straw rather than oat makes clear that the beta-glucan literature does not attach.

A 60-day window is long enough to be used. A bottle is thirty capsules at one a day, so the window covers a first bottle and most of a second. A buyer who starts on the day of purchase has a full month of evidence with a month of window left, which is a genuinely testable arrangement rather than a decorative one.

There is a third thing worth crediting that the checklist does not have a row for. The blend prints in descending predominance, which is a labelling requirement rather than a kindness, but it does mean the order carries information: oat straw is the largest entry and the probiotic the smallest.

The checklist was not written for this product and works better on others. Three patterns turn up often enough to be worth naming in advance.

The transparent panel with small numbers. Every active carries its own figure and every figure is well below the researched dose. That passes check one and fails check three, and it is more honest than a blend because the failure is visible.

The single-ingredient bottle at a real dose. Bulk psyllium husk passes checks one, two and three without effort and has no probiotic row to fail. It also tastes of very little and is unpleasant to drink, which is the reason it loses to capsules in practice.

The blend with a celebrity ingredient. One well-known name at the top of a long list, a total for the group, and a sales page built around the one name. Check one and check six between them cover it.

Whatever the bottle, write the trial dose beside the label figure before anything else. That single habit settles more purchases in this aisle than any amount of reading about mechanisms, and the companion guide sets out the doses the research actually used for each class.

• Whether the product works for you. The checklist tests disclosure, not effect, and a label can pass all seven and do nothing.
• Whether the ingredients are of good quality. No label says, and no seal on a pack answers it either.
• Whether a blend's proportions are sensible. That is the manufacturer's business and stays there.
• Whether you should be taking anything at all. A symptom that is new or persistent belongs with someone who can examine you rather than with a shelf.
• Whether the price is fair. Cost per day is a separate calculation and a simpler one.

The checklist is a disclosure test rather than an efficacy test, and keeping the two apart is the whole discipline. The MedlinePlus herb index covers what is known about individual plants, Rao and Brenner covers what the over-the-counter options are graded at, and the companion guide covers what the evidence supports class by class.