3 good websites to use to look up supplements....

Today's post: Friday, 5-2-2008

Have you ever read or heard about a new supplement and entered that supplement name into one of the search engines?

All too often you get pages of websites that sell that supplement or that have the ad to sell the supplement – but NO information. And, if you do get information, it’s on a website that sells that supplement -- so it may or may not be completely accurate.

What the supplement is best used for or its other uses, one of which may be important to you, any known drug interaction effects, & how much it is useful to take for various reasons, etc, sometimes one of sales sites has that info at least some. But this often doesn’t happen or all show up.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have easy to find & useful information about supplements that you could go to directly?

Here are 3 websites I’ve found to do a good job on at least some of the supplements I’ve looked up on them.:

1. Wikipedia is often the best one of the 3.

Some of the chemistry explanations are very technical & hard to follow. But I find it is the best one to start with. Their entries tend to be very thorough & complete. They give you enough info that you may not need the other two sites for some supplements.

For the ones that are or very easily could be supplements that are important for you to use or consider using, you have enough information to already be familiar with the basic info when you look at the other two websites or sales pitches for the supplement you are researching.

However, their HUGE advantage is that they virtually always have a listing & info for a supplement you look up !! A related advantage is that the info you get is relatively up to date.

You can go to www.wikipedia.org & go directly to the search box on the very first page; check the language is English in the box to the right; enter the supplement name in the search box & click the go button that has the > symbol or hit enter on your keyboard.

I have Yahoo as my default website page; & it also works to enter
the name of the supplement AND Wikipedia in the search box there & hit enter.

2. A major online seller of supplements is www.vitacost.com

There is a search box at the left of the initial page just under their stylized Vitacost.com name. Simply click on Health Library -- the default is to look up products with that supplement. And, one good way to use this website as a resource is to look up the products just after you look up the information on the supplement.

This website also tends to have most supplements & be reasonably up to date. The information is useful & sometimes complete enough for what you wanted to know. The drawback is that it is neither as complete or well organized as Wikipediaor the third website we discuss next.

3. What if you are looking up a well known supplement that sells well & has been around for years & you want well thought out easy to follow info that includes:
what the supplement is thought to be good for,
which of its purported benefits have the best & track record are best supported by research,
what dosages or amounts are often used or recommended,
any cautions or special info you need to know about that supplement,
& any known drug interactions?

And, it’s OK with you if the info is possibly two or three years out of date?

In that case, try www.wholehealthmd.com ; click on the Reference Library link in the middle of the page; click on supplements on the box on the upper right hand side of that page & it takes you to the alphabetical list of the supplements they cover. They also have the letters of the alphabet so if you want to look up a supplement late in the alphabet such as selenium or turmeric, you can go to S or T without having to scroll through the entire list of supplements.

The bad news is that where there have been important new studies done in the past year or two on a supplement, they likely won’t have arrived in this set of information.

And, they mostly only list the most common & well known supplements.

In some ways however, it is the best of the 3 for going directly to what you most want to know in an easy to follow way. So if there has been no new info on that supplement, it’s been around for a few years & is well known, it can be a great resource.


As you can see, if you look up a supplement on all 3 sites, you can get a very good understanding of the information about that supplement if it appears on all 3 sites. And, by including Wikipedia in the set, you’ll virtually never come away with no info at all no matter how new or little known the supplement is.