Gelagen Reference Guides

Two reference pages sit apart from the rest of this website. Everything else here describes one product. These two describe the shelf it stands on, the nutrients that keep reappearing across it, and the checks that separate a label you can argue with from one you cannot check at all.

The checklist is the one to take to a shop. The category guide is the one that explains why the checks come in that order.

Neither guide names another product. A comparison between two jars means printing claims about a label this desk has not read, so both pages describe patterns instead: what a kind of name implies about what is inside, what a blend total can and cannot tell you, and what a panel has to print whatever the front of the jar says.

The checklist ends by scoring Gelagen against its own eight checks, with the misses in the same table as the passes. A checklist that only ever returns a pass is a sales page with numbered paragraphs, and the rows this product does not win are the ones a buyer would otherwise meet after paying.

Three kinds of reader get something different out of them. Somebody holding three jars wants the checklist and the first two checks. Somebody who has already bought one wants the category guide, because the questions that arrive in week two are about the tissue rather than the label. Somebody buying for a parent wants the declarables in check six, which are the two things worth mentioning to anybody else involved.

Neither page assumes any background. Reference intakes come from the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, the labelling facts come from the regulations themselves, and the general approach follows NCCIH’s guidance on using dietary supplements wisely, which is also the best half hour of reading for anyone new to this aisle.

Longer pieces on the same subjects live in the journal: how to read a Supplement Facts panel, what a biotin number is worth, how long this category honestly takes, and what a printed amount does and does not tell you.

Five posts, each following one question to the end:

• How to read a Supplement Facts panel in two minutes. The fields in the order they are printed, what the percentage in the second column is a percentage of, and why a few rows carry no percentage at all.
• What a biotin number on a label is actually worth. Where the numbers on this shelf came from, what biotin does for somebody genuinely short of it, and what the record shows for everybody else.
• Why hair and nail supplements are slow, and how slow. Turnover in the three tissues, what the first week can honestly tell you, and the one case where the clock behaves differently.
• A brand name is not an ingredient list. What a name on a jar is allowed to be, what the collagen research is actually about, and the thirty-second check that settles what is inside.
• Planning a sixty-day supplement trial that works. Four dates written down once, one line a day, and why the date you have to decide on arrives before the window closes.

A post and a guide do different jobs. A guide is written to be used, with a jar in your hand and a minute a check. A post takes one question, follows it past the point where the answer stops being convenient, and prints the table that settles it.

Two of the five sit directly behind these pages. The panel-reading post is the long form of the first check on the checklist, and the biotin post is the long form of the section the category guide gives to one nutrient.

None of the five assumes a background in nutrition. MedlinePlus keeps a plain-language page on dietary supplements, and it covers in ten minutes what all five take for granted.

The journal is not in the menu and not in the footer. It is reached from here, from the pages whose subject it extends, and from the sitemap.

The checklist is the more practical of the two: take it to any label on the shelf and it will separate the ones that print their amounts from the ones that do not.

There are two passes, and the first is quick. Turn the jar over, find the Supplement Facts panel, and check that every name on it has a number beside it. That is the whole of check one, it takes about twenty seconds, and it decides whether the other seven have anything to work with.

The rest take roughly ten minutes with a phone to hand, because most of them are comparisons: an amount against its published reference intake, a claim against what this category is allowed to say, a price against what the same jar costs per day in a larger pack.

Read them in whichever order fits. Somebody who has never bought anything on this shelf is better served by the category guide first, because it explains why the timetable belongs to the tissue rather than to the formula, and that makes several of the checks obvious instead of arbitrary. Somebody with a jar already in front of them should start with the checklist.

One of the eight cannot be done in a shop. Check five asks whether anything has been published on the finished product, and the way to answer it is to search the product name beside the word trial and read what comes back. A result that is about one ingredient, in a different form, at a different amount, is an answer of no.

A mixed result is still a result. None of the eight checks is a veto and nothing on the shelf passes all of them. What the list is for is making sure that whatever you trade away is something you chose, before the money rather than after it.

Where the checklist scores Gelagen, the numbers behind every row are printed in full elsewhere on this website: the thirteen amounts with a reference intake beside each on the label page, and the seller’s own guarantee wording, both sentences of it, on the guarantee page. A score nobody can audit is an opinion with a table around it.

NIH’s consumer sheet on dietary supplements is the other thing worth reading once. It is short, it is free, and it covers the fact that products in this aisle are not approved before they are sold, which is the assumption behind more than one of the eight checks.