Who writes this, and where the numbers come from

Who

Cristian Cojocaru. I built Verdict, I write every post on this site, and I read the labels myself. The app is Verdict: Supplement Scanner and this site is VerdictStack, at verdictstack.app. Both names refer to the same thing.

I am not a doctor, a dietitian or a pharmacist, and nothing here should be read as though I were. What this site offers is not clinical judgement. It is arithmetic done carefully on numbers that are printed on a tub and then compared against published ones, which is a smaller claim and a checkable one.

How a number gets onto this site

Every dose quoted in a post is taken from a photograph of that product's supplement facts panel. None of them are recalled from memory, and none are reconstructed from what a product is generally understood to contain.

That rule is enforced in the app as well as in the writing. Photograph the front of a tub and Verdict refuses to score it, because a recalled figure and a measured one look identical once they are printed side by side. A product it cannot read comes back as unreadable rather than as a guess.

When a post compares two products, both panels are ones this site has already published. When a figure would require inventing a dose for a real product, the post does not get written.

Which limits the doses are measured against

A dose on its own means very little. Every number here is compared against a published figure, and the source is named rather than implied.

• United Kingdom. Nutrient Reference Values, and the safe upper levels published by the Expert Group on Vitamins and Minerals in 2003. EVM levels apply to what you take in supplements.
• United States. FDA Daily Values, and the tolerable upper intake levels set by NASEM. NASEM levels apply to your total intake, including food, which is a different measurement from the UK one and is labelled as such.
• Caffeine. The 400mg a day quoted for healthy adults by both EFSA and the FDA.
• Everything else. The amounts actually used in published human trials, quoted as a range, because most research uses one.

The two countries' upper levels are not the same kind of number, so the site never converts between them. It states which one it is using.

What this site does not do

It does not diagnose anything, treat anything, or tell you that you need a supplement. It will tell you that a product contains 750mg of an ingredient where published trials used 3000mg to 6000mg. What you do about that is not something a label reader can answer.

It also stops short of telling you to stop taking something. Reporting that a multivitamin already covers the B12 in your B complex is a fact about two labels. Telling you to drop one of them would be advice, and that is a different thing to be giving.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, I would rather know. Reference limits get revised, brands reformulate without renaming, and a panel can be misread. Support has the address, and a correction gets the post edited with the change noted rather than quietly replaced.