7 Things to Look for When Choosing a Supplement

A massive three in four Americans take nutritional supplements, according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition. But how do all those people choose which supplements to take?1 After all, there are over 100,000 options for consumers to consider in the U.S. alone.2

At Innerbody, we spend countless hours reviewing scientific literature to support or condemn a litany of supplemental ingredients, and we scrutinize thousands of products to determine which companies have goods we can confidently recommend to our readers.

That process has taught us that there are seven critical things to look for when you’re shopping for a new supplement, so we thought it’d be useful for us to share our hard-earned wisdom with you. The next time you want to add a new supplement to your regimen, keep these things in mind:

1. Evidence of efficacy
2. Strong safety profile
3. Reasonable cost
4. Ease of use
5. Good company reputation
6. Safe manufacturing
7. Strong return policy

Let’s take a closer look at each to see why it matters.

How can you know a supplement will work for you before trying it out? Well, you can’t know for sure — which is why the 7th attribute in this list is so important — but there are some ways to tell what your chances are. There are also sources of information you simply can’t trust. Don’t get your scientific recommendations from TikTok videos, company marketing materials, or user reviews.3 These are anecdotal, at best, and outright lies and manipulation at worst.

The best source of information for a supplement's potential efficacy is rigorous scientific research on its ingredients, much of which is available for free on sites like PubMed, the repository of published, peer-reviewed research kept by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).4

Let’s say you want to start taking a fish oil supplement to help with inflammation. You could type in a phrase like “fish oil inflammation” and find dozens of useful studies (e.g., a 2002 review that supports its use).5 Those studies will contain information like doses and regimens that worked well for different causes of inflammation, from muscle injuries to osteoarthritis. Also, try to limit your search to studies conducted in humans whenever possible.

Here are some core questions to ask that can help you identify whether a supplement might work based on what studies show:

Equally important to efficacy is safety. Fortunately, the research you review in search of efficacy markers can also show you critical safety information. Some studies exist exclusively to evaluate safety. Others include safety information as part of larger studies looking at efficacy or mechanisms of action.

If you have any medical conditions or take other prescription medications or daily supplements, you should do a search online for interactions or contraindications with whatever supplement you’re considering. And, of course, speak to your doctor before beginning a new regimen.

How can you know what’s a good price and what’s a rip-off? You’ll need to compare the top brands on the market, ideally using a list you’ve curated by scrutinizing potential efficacy and safety as described above.

With that done, the best thing you can do is break down the cost by bottle or month, then by dose, and finally by ingredient. This can reveal the true cost of a supplement, as sometimes a higher price might actually be a better deal.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of two made-up magnesium supplements to show you how a product that costs more up front might save you more money in the long run:

As you can see, Brand A's magnesium supplement is less expensive in terms of base price ($15 versus $20), but it divides its suggested 500mg dose into two 250mg capsules. It also has the same number of capsules per bottle as Brand Z does, but Brand Z’s capsules contain twice the magnesium.

As a result, you can get twice as much magnesium from Brand Z for only $5 more than you’d pay to get a bottle of Brand A’s product. (Of course, if 250mg is sufficient magnesium in your supplement routine, then Brand A at half of its suggested dose would be a better choice for you.)

How do you take a given product? Is it a single enormous capsule that might be hard to swallow? Is it a drink mix that tastes awful or contains untenable amounts of sugar?

Your evaluation of a product’s ease of use will come down to personal preference, but it’s a critical thing to consider before you make a purchase. If you’re bad at swallowing pills, as many people are, look for things like drink mixes or gummies instead.7 Just keep in mind that some powdered mixes don’t come with scoops, necessitating a difficult measuring process with each serving, and studies rarely use gummies or drinks to establish safe, effective doses.

If you’re fine with pills but have a hard time keeping to a schedule, make sure the product only asks you to take it once per day. Some supplements require multiple doses throughout a day or ask you to time them in the vicinity of meals or sleep, which can be burdensome.

How can you tell if a company is trustworthy? There are some nuanced indicators of trustworthiness, but there are also some important red flags that can signal the opposite.

Here are a few red flags that a company might not be worth your trust:

• Overblown medical claims: Most companies push the boundaries of truth in their marketing efforts, but claims of curing diseases, prompting whole-body transformation, or “legal alternatives” to otherwise illegal substances are red flags.
• Suspiciously inexpensive products: If a price seems too good to be true, it is.
• Numerous spelling and grammatical errors: Suspicious companies are often based overseas, and the writing on their websites can be riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. An occasional mistake isn’t a red flag, but over a dozen certainly is.

You can also check with websites like Trustpilot or the Better Business Bureau to see how companies respond to criticism and read real customer reviews.

The FDA doesn’t regulate supplements the way that it regulates pharmaceutical drugs.8 But the organization has created standards and guidelines known as Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMP or GMP) to which the best manufacturers adhere. If a company makes it known that its manufacturers adhere to these guidelines, you can expect a good baseline of product safety.

Some companies go further, having their products tested for things like purity, potency, heavy metals, or microbial contamination, and they’ll often go into detail about this on their websites.

Some companies won’t accept any kind of returns for any of their products. This is the worst-case scenario. Others have return policies that are not money-back guarantees; you can return the products only if they’re unopened. Better, but still far from ideal.

Some other companies offer money-back guarantees that are too short. They might give you 14 days to try a product that takes two months to start working. The best money-back guarantees are the ones that give you enough time to try a product and see if it works for you before the return window closes. If the research says a supplement can show efficacy in as little as four weeks, and a company offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, that’s a good system.

If you're searching for a supplement, you may want relief soon. When it comes to your health, the time that you can dedicate to vetting your supplement options is time well spent, but there are major challenges to being an informed consumer of nutritional supplements. For one thing, it can take hours or even days to digest the volumes of scientific data that exist for a single ingredient, let alone compare the attributes of what's often a host of competing products. Complicating matters further, lots of published scientific data lives behind paywalls that are wildly expensive for the average person to surmount.

That’s why we at Innerbody Research are here — we have the access and the expertise to do that leg work for you, to synthesize mountains of complex information into something you can more quickly absorb. We spend the hundreds of hours researching, and we'll also physically test these products ourselves, providing feedback on everything from efficacy and taste to customer service.