dietary supplement pill bottles

The bottle of dietary supplements you pick up casually with the "Blue Hat" or overseas import label printed on it is never a simple container. It is a triple collection of efficacy promises, regulatory boundaries and consumer awareness - it can neither be directly equated with drug efficacy, nor is it a "printed decoration" without any reference value.

Last week, I helped my mother clean up the storage shelves and found seven or eight unopened bottles of dietary supplements, including vitamin C that I grabbed for 9.9 yuan from the live broadcast room, kudzu powder given by relatives that is said to "lower blood sugar", and "sheep placenta supplement" recommended by her little sister who dances in the square. "Essence Tablets", each bottle design is more fancy than the last, and the efficacy of the large prints is more bluffing than the last. When you turn to the back, you can see that either there is no blue cap label, or the small words "This product cannot replace medicine" are shrunk in the corner, and you can't see it without reading glasses.

In the past two years, I helped a friend’s brand register and declare imported dietary supplements, and then I realized that this small bottle has so many rules that it can fill three pages of A4 paper. For example, the font size of the efficacy claims of Blue Hat products cannot be larger than the product name, and the warning must be printed in bold and bold on the most eye-catching lower third of the bottle. Even the ingredient list must be sorted from high to low content, which almost fails the review. At that time, they reported a grape seed essence, but because the words "antioxidant" were printed two sizes larger than the product name, they were sent back and reprinted 30,000 bottle stickers, resulting in a loss of less than 100,000 yuan.

The industry has actually been quite noisy about the bottle design of dietary supplements. Most cross-border e-commerce bosses are "minimalist" and dare not print a word on the bottle except the brand name, ingredient list and shelf life. All content related to efficacy is placed on the product details page, for fear of stepping on the red line of domestic supervision and being targeted by professional counterfeiters for claiming compensation. The plainest bottle of Coenzyme Q10 I have ever seen. The entire brown bottle is bare, and even the product name only has a small LOGO printed on it. Those who didn’t know better thought it was a laboratory reagent bottle. But when it comes to offline pharmacy channels, the brand has a completely different idea. It belongs to the "consumer-friendly" group. It wants to make big icons of "Calcium Supplement", "Liver Protection" and "Moisturize Eyes" on the bottle. After all, there are many elderly people in the offline customer base. It takes 3 seconds to pick it up and glance at it to know what this thing is for, otherwise it will not be put in the shopping basket at all.

It’s quite helpless to say that when I was doing nutrition science popularization in the community, I saw many supplement bottles piled in the medicine cabinets of the elderly. They looked almost exactly the same as the bottles of regular anti-hypertensive drugs and anti-diabetic drugs. They were all white bottles with black characters, and some even had similar patterns on the bottle caps. Last year, an old man took Sanwu's "Ginkgo Leaf Extract" together with antihypertensive drugs. He felt dizzy and was taken to the hospital. Only then did he discover that an excessive amount of antihypertensive ingredients had been secretly added to the bottle of supplements. The ingredient list on the bottle didn't even mention it.

Many people don’t know that the material of dietary supplement bottles actually has hidden secrets. For example, ingredients that are easily decomposed by light, such as vitamins and probiotics, are all made of brown PET bottles with a light blocking rate of ≥90%, and they feel much thicker than ordinary beverage bottles. There is also the kind of child safety cap that you have to press down to unscrew. It is not installed casually. The state stipulates that as long as it contains iron or folic acid, a single excessive intake of supplements that may cause the risk of poisoning must be equipped with a safety cap. A while ago, a mother complained to me, saying that her child unscrewed the iron tablets without the safety cap, secretly ate half of the bottle, and had to go to the hospital to induce vomiting.

Of course, many people on the Internet now say that "the labels on the bottles of dietary supplements are all deceptive." This statement is actually a bit absolute. Regular blue hat products are randomly tested by the market supervision department every year, and the error in ingredient content cannot exceed ±10%. If you can find the test report by scanning the traceability code on the bottle of the product you buy, it is basically reliable. But if you are buying an overseas model purchased across the border, you have to be careful - dietary supplement supervision in many foreign areas is a registration system. As long as it does not contain banned ingredients, it can be put on the market without having to do content testing in advance. The "each capsule contains 1000mg vitamin C" printed on the bottle may actually be less than half.

Next time you pick up a bottle of dietary supplements, don’t stare at the big words “whitening,” “anti-aging,” and “improvement of immunity” printed on the bottle. First, turn over and look for a blue hat label or the traceability code of an imported product. Then, pinch the texture of the bottle. If it’s soft and the printing is blurry, just throw it away as soon as possible. After all, the contents of this small bottle are not jelly beans, but something to be eaten into the stomach. It is better to spend an extra three seconds to take a look than to run to the hospital with a bad stomach, right?