Glossary
What the abbreviations on a supplement label mean
Supplement packaging is full of abbreviations nobody explains and numbers that describe something other than what they seem to. We have grouped them: omega-3 separately, then vitamin D, minerals and the rest. Without judging which is better.
Omega-3
Most misunderstandings about supplements come from one thing: the number on the front of the package almost never means what the buyer thinks it means. Below, we break this label into parts.
13 terms
Vitamin D
Vitamin D has the simplest maths of all supplements and can still be confusing. It all comes down to two units that describe exactly the same thing.
6 terms
Magnesium, zinc, iron
With minerals, everything depends on one distinction: whether the number describes the mass of a salt or the mass of the element itself. The difference can be sixfold.
10 terms
Vitamin C
Vitamin C seems like a category without traps — until ordinary powder is compared with a liposomal product that costs several times more.
6 terms
B vitamins
This is the only category in which one ranking cannot be built, because each of the eight vitamins has its own reference value and there are two units: milligrams and micrograms.
7 terms
Collagen
For collagen, the number on the package most often describes the mass of a sachet, not the amount of collagen itself. These are two different values and are rarely equal.
7 terms
Creatine
Creatine is the easiest category to compare and at the same time the one in which it is easiest to overpay for a form that differs from monohydrate mainly by name.
6 terms
Probiotics
Two capsules labelled “10 billion bacteria” can contain entirely different things. The strain and the point at which the manufacturer measured that number decide it.
7 terms
Label and calculations
These few terms recur in every category. Without them, even a correctly read table can be misleading.
9 terms
Where these data come from
Every value we compare comes from labels and from manufacturers\x27 pages. We give the source for each one, and when a manufacturer does not declare something, we say so plainly instead of putting in a dash or guessing the number from a ratio.
More on what decides the order of products is in the How we rank section. The calculations themselves are in the omega-3 calculator.