Choosing A Blood Sugar Supplement: Seven Checks

Nobody can tell from a label whether a formula works. Almost nothing in this category has been trialled as a finished product; what exists is trials of single ingredients, at doses chosen by researchers, in populations chosen by researchers.

What a label can be tested for is whether it gives you enough information to judge it. That is a real test, most products fail parts of it, and the failures are informative in a way a marketing page never is.

The seven checks below are ordered by how much they tell you. The first two are worth more than the other five put together, and a product that fails both is one you cannot evaluate at all, whatever else it does well.

Answer all seven and you have a score out of seven that is comparable across products, which is more than any star rating in this category offers. A product scoring five is not better than one scoring three; it is more legible, and legibility is what lets you decide for yourself.

Two passes, one partial, four failures. The score is printed here because a scorecard that exempted its own product would not be worth carrying anywhere.

Four failures out of seven is a poor score and it is the honest one. Any reader is entitled to ask why a website selling this bottle would print that, and the answer is that the alternative is a scorecard nobody can trust on any product, including this one.

Check one is the heaviest of the four. Seven named extracts is genuinely more than a proprietary blend gives you, and it is genuinely less than a panel. Marketplace reports describe the actives grouped in a blend of about 121 mg — a figure from those reports rather than from the bottle, and a total for all seven plants together. One horse chestnut comparison used 600 mg of that single plant a day.

Check two is the one this whole website is organised around. The front panel sells glucose metabolism; the plants inside are the set a vascular clinic uses. The mechanism page works through both readings, and neither one is dishonest on its own. Together they are a mismatch worth knowing about before paying.

Check five is smaller and more annoying. Without a servings figure, two products at different prices cannot be compared on cost per day, which is the comparison that actually matters. Two drops out of 60 ml is a small fraction of a bottle, so the practical answer is that a bottle lasts a long time — but that is an inference rather than a figure.

Check seven is the one this desk finds most irritating, because it is the cheapest to fix. A GMP seal that names its certifying body is checkable in a browser in thirty seconds. One that names nobody asks for trust and supplies no route to verify it. The quality page audits all four seals one row at a time.

Check three is a real pass and worth crediting. A great deal of this category prints “hawthorn extract” and stops. This artwork distinguishes leaf from fruit from seed from root across all seven plants, which is what makes the comparison in the failing rows possible at all. Without it nobody could tell which literature applied.

Check six is the other pass and it is the practical one. There is a telephone number with a person on the end of it, a named returns address and a five-step procedure written down. The steps are here. The window length is set on the seller’s listing rather than printed on this website, which is a limitation rather than a failure: it is read at the checkout before you confirm.

Check four is a partial and the reasoning is worth showing. The trials behind these plants used standardised oral extracts, mostly capsules or tablets, at hundreds of milligrams a day for weeks or months. A botanical liquid taken as two drops after a meal is an oral route, which is the same direction of travel, at an amount nobody has stated. Same route, different scale, unknown by how much.

Run them in order and stop early when you can. A product failing checks one and two cannot be evaluated, and the remaining five are decoration on a decision already made.

Check two is the one most people skip and the one that most often changes a purchase. It takes five minutes: write the ingredient names down, search each with the word “trial”, and note what the outcome measure was. An ingredient whose trials measured something unrelated to the bottle’s name is the single most common finding in this category.

Check five is the one that saves money. Cost per day, not cost per bottle, is the only comparison that survives different pack sizes and different serving schedules, and a label that will not let you calculate it has made that choice deliberately.

And check seven scales beautifully across a whole shelf. Photograph the seals, then look for a certifying body name on each. The seals that carry one can be checked; the seals that do not are art.

• Whether the formula works. A label can pass all seven checks and still be a bottle with no trial behind the finished product, which describes almost everything on this shelf.
• Whether the amount in the bottle is the amount on the panel. That is a laboratory question, and a printed figure is a declaration made at manufacture.
• Whether an ingredient suits you personally. Existing conditions and an existing medication list are a conversation with whoever manages them.
• Whether the price is fair. Cost per day is a separate calculation, and a cheap bottle of the wrong plant part is not a bargain.
• Whether your readings need something else entirely. That is the one question worth answering before any of the other six.

Keeping the disclosure question and the efficacy question apart is the whole discipline of a scorecard like this one. MedlinePlus on blood glucose covers what the common tests measure, the ADA's glycaemic goals chapter covers what targets are set from them, and the companion guide covers what the evidence supports ingredient by ingredient.