NOW Supplement Label Transparency: Minerals & Amino Acids
How does NOW® report minerals and amino acids content on its labels?
At NOW, we believe that transparency is an integral part of quality. That’s why we try to be as thorough and accurate as possible when labeling our products. For our minerals and amino acids in the supplement facts section of our labels, you can find two ways we display that information depending on the raw material we use to make the supplement.
Why do we have two different displays to report minerals and amino acids on labels?
To answer this question, we first need to go back to basic chemistry:
For mineral products
Minerals used in supplements typically come in different forms: as salts (sodium chloride, for example) or as organic† minerals (chromium glycinate, for example), which means that the elemental mineral that we want to use in our supplement is combined with another compound to provide a stable and bioavailable form of said mineral for encapsulation or tableting. The elemental mineral plus the added compound (citrate, glycinate, lactate…) form a complex that has a mass (weight) that is the sum of the weight of the elemental mineral plus the weight of the added compound. The weight of the non-mineral part of the complex is often significant.
When you take a mineral supplement, you want to know exactly how much of the elemental mineral you are getting, so it is important that labels reflect that information accurately.
Whenever possible, we display on the label both the total weight of the mineral complex and the weight of the elemental mineral. However, for some products we do not report the weight of the complex itself. The reason is because it may vary from batch to batch in some products, and these normal variations render our labeling inaccurate.
For stand-alone amino acid supplements
Most of our amino acid products are either formulated as free-form amino acids or complexed with HCl (hydrochlorate). HCl accounts for some of the weight of the amino-acid-HCl complex. When you take an amino acid supplement, you want to know exactly how much of the free amino acid you are getting, so it is important that labels reflect that information accurately.
As a consumer, you want to know how much of the elemental mineral or free amino acid you are getting when taking our supplements. These amounts are displayed in the column titled "Amount Per Serving".
You can also read in parenthesis below the elemental mineral/amino acid name, the form of mineral/amino acid used in our product.
†The word organic here does not mean the mineral is obtained from organic farming. It means it is complexed with a molecule that contains at least one carbon atom.
