For decades, consumers have equated vitamins and mineral products with self-medication for many common health complaints. When purchasing a dietary supplement, a review of the product label is a de facto visitor to a health care practitioner.

Recent action by various states’ attorney generals, most notably the New York State Attorney General, have highlighted that despite a lack of “good science” on their part, there are genuine concerns about the accuracy and reliability of product labeling.

There is an ongoing discussion about the need for review of current labeling requirements and how these might be upgraded to provide more useful and appropriate information to consumers.

Typically, product labeling shows the minimum amount of an ingredient in the product, but since the product is required to contain this amount at the time of expiry, a product may contain more of that ingredient at the time of manufacture to allow for the stability of the ingredient in the product. This means that during the life of the product, the amount of the ingredient may decrease — but never below the amount stated on the label.

In most products, such as traditional tablets or capsules, this amount may be small, but in other delivery systems — like the increasingly popular gummy, which is the fastest growing sector of the industry — the so-called “ingredient overages” may be significantly higher because of processing conditions, like high temperatures during their manufacture.

A consequence of this is that those overages might be inappropriately high for some customers, especially when products like gummy vitamins may be targeted to customers as young as 3 years old.

The reverse may also be a problem — for example, if a manufacturer does not put an expiry date on a product so the label shows the amount of an ingredient at the time of manufacture. In this case, the product could become “under potent” with time, and that under potency might result in the product being ineffective in terms of customers’ expectations.

In addition to improving customers’ understanding of label statements through new practices, another approach is improving the stability of ingredients to reduce the amounts of overages that are necessary to maintain a label’s claim over time.

In this context, Lycored, an international wellness company that has been at the forefront of mastering a seed-to-product process for two decades, offers technical solutions on their gummy-specific microencapsulation technologies for brands looking to reduce overages while increasing stability and shelf life of products that incorporate their ingredients.

Recent studies have shown microencapsulation shields ingredients exposed to high temperatures and cross-interaction with a greater degree of ingredient protection, which allows manufacturers to reduce overages and build consumer confidence in the accuracy of labeling.

While it’s clear such technologies improve product quality, it’s often difficult to know if a product uses such technology.

Additional considerations consumers should take into account to help assist with purchasing decisions without the guidance of a health care practitioner include:

— Look for simple formulations. The more ingredients a product contains, the less likely it is to be well-studied — both in terms of its activity and its stability.

— Products that state they contain an ingredient that has been clinically studied may be overly representing the value of the study if the product contains additional ingredients that were not included in the study. Look for terms like “clinically-studied product.”

— Use the Internet carefully as a source of information and/or education. Everything in today’s society is available to us on the Internet, but there’s little in the way of a reasonableness filter. Be careful of sellers who don’t provide details about what’s in the product they’re selling. Be careful of words and terms such as “best” or “highest quality,” since these have no definition — and even the worst companies with the poorest quality use them about the products they’re selling.

The implications for the dietary supplement industry are significant. Already, there’s a shift toward more transparency and consistency in labeling, which translates to an increase in the number of new products that speak to an educated and passionate consumer base looking for improved natural supplement options. To this end, the industry is steadily rethinking its approach to product labeling — especially accuracy — to create a more stable and controlled dosage of ingredients in the vitamin products we use for our daily intake of these important nutrients.

Alan E. Butcher, PhD, consults on dietary supplements.

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The Misrepresentation of Ingredient Potencies in Vitamin Products originally appeared on usnews.com