How to interpret the label of supplements?

Learning to interpret the labels of vitamin supplements will provide us with a series of information that was previously incomprehensible to us. Thanks to the labels we can not only know essential aspects such as contraindications or expiration date, but we can also program our supplementation in an adequate way, attending to the particular demands of our organism. There are a series of nomenclatures that are common to each supplement, these nomenclatures show us data such as the daily amounts we should consume, the manufacturer's data, the amount of nutrients per serving, among others.

During the development of this guide we will be analyzing some of the most important elements that you should know when reading a label on a vitamin supplement. In this way, it will be much easier for you to understand the information provided and use it to help you plan your daily supplementation.

Daily Value (DV)

Dv or Daily Value is one of the most commonly used nomenclatures on vitamin supplement labels. It is used to highlight two fundamental aspects. The first is the amount of that specific nutrient your body needs to meet its daily requirements. The second information provided by the DV is the percentage of the nutrient's requirements covered by each of the supplement's services. When we talk about serving, we refer to the unit that we are going to consume; it can be a tablet, a teaspoon, a capsule or any other format. To better understand what we have mentioned above, we will illustrate what we have said with the following example:

If the supplement indicates a DV vitamin A 30%; this represents that each unit of the product presents 30% of the amount of vitamin A that our body needs daily.

Units of measurement in mg or IU

The most common units of measurement for vitamin supplements are mg and the unit known as IU or International Units. Most likely, in most cases, you will find the milligram (mg) unit to indicate the amount of each nutrient in a service. However, there are some vitamins that are often represented by IU as a unit of measurement. IU is not a unit that indicates weight, as is milligram, gram or kilogram. IU is a unit of quantity, it seeks to express the amount of that nutrient that has been concentrated in each serving.

The higher the IU, the higher the potency and concentration of the particular nutrient. The problem is that this unit of measurement is very complex to analyze and causes numerous doubts among consumers. It is not so easy to convert IU to mg, so it is difficult to know if the amount we ingest