The Better Supplement was built—and is actively maintained—by people who have taken supplements for more than a decade. When we got into this, biohacking was only beginning to enter the mainstream, useful information was scarce, and finding it was much harder than it is today. Some of these things have not changed over the years, and some actually got worse as the supplement market grew.
Over the years, we collected fragments of information and data from across the internet in spreadsheets, notes, and folders of saved YouTube videos. Doctors, researchers, and other experts would recommend a supplement or a specific form, but the studies behind the recommendation were often missing from the description. This site began with the questions we kept having to answer for ourselves.
“Which supplement is best?” was rarely the first real question
- Does this actually work?
- Do I even need it?
- Will it improve the thing people online—or in a book—claim it will improve?
Those questions were only the beginning. Each answer raised more questions, and there was no obvious person to ask or easy way to get reliable answers. Our small-town family doctor either did not know what to make of this or did not want to have that conversation with seemingly healthy people in their thirties who felt that something was off but could not quite say why. We had to make these decisions for ourselves, and it was not easy.
Even after gathering enough information to decide, “Yes, I’ll try magnesium for a while and see whether it helps my sleep,” we would land on a supplement store page and be bombarded with 10,000 of this, 7,000 of that, 9,000% of the Daily Value, recommendations split across 15 capsules throughout the day, and other label and marketing tactics. The FDA regulates dietary supplements, but it does not approve supplements or their labels before they are sold to the public. That makes careful label reading especially important. The FDA explains that distinction here.
We had prior experience in marketing, copywriting, advertising, physical products, and label design. That helped us recognize some of what was happening and made shopping for ourselves a little easier, but every new type of supplement still required far more research than a store page would usually support. Good thing we like reading. Books such as Dave Asprey’s The Bulletproof Diet were interesting and even cited studies behind certain supplement claims, but URLs printed on paper did not make the research trail easy to follow.
We kept finding answers that stopped making sense too early
When we reached product-specific questions—“Which magnesium amount is elemental?”, “How much EPA plus DHA is in that gram of fish oil?”, or “Does ‘clinically studied’ refer to this extract at this amount, or merely to an ingredient with a similar name?”—a new layer of challenges appeared. Most supplement manufacturers and non-brand retailers do not maintain the complete information trail. A manufacturer may link to a study or two, but its website is not always where people shop, either because it does not carry everything they need or because another store is more convenient.
Then we would try to reconcile the label with the studies, which raised still more questions. Many papers were behind paywalls or available only through academic portals we could not access as ordinary consumers. We often started with partial information. The studies would disagree, too. They might use different chemical forms, different amounts, different people, or different outcomes and still be summarized as if they had answered the same question. We found ourselves reopening fact sheets, trial tables, Supplement Facts panels, and sometimes setting a paper aside because a 12-person trial “on the dark side of the moon,” measured over a single hour, was simply too narrow to answer our question.
How YouTube changed the information landscape
The growth of biohacking, the self-improvement movement, wellness influencers, doctors running their own YouTube channels, and frequent health guests on broad-topic podcasts made the information landscape even more complicated. A podcast guest could give a confident amount without naming the paper behind it, and the promised links to the research in the description of the episode are rarely actually there.
Among the channels and shows we have followed for ideas and claims to investigate are Huberman Lab, FoundMyFitness, The Diary of a CEO, and BioLayne. They are starting points and attributed viewpoints.
So we did something about it
The Better Supplement is our attempt to organize the information, check the research behind it, and make it understandable. Modern tools let us search, compare, and validate more of the material we can access, then make the result useful to someone else.
We connect the question a reader arrives with to the amount and form that matter, the limits of the available evidence, and the product facts that help determine whether buying a supplement makes sense at all. When credible sources disagree, we show the disagreement and say which questions remain open—or when we simply could not find a good answer.
How we use AI to help make sense of it all
AI tools have played a large role in turning this website into something real. They help us gather and organize information, compare claims with studies, and work through more material than we could manage unaided. When those tools became useful enough for the job, we gave them the notes, sources, and research we had accumulated over the years and began building a repeatable process around a problem we already understood.
We do not treat AI output as evidence. Claims still have to lead back to public guidance, a research paper, a product label, or a clearly attributed expert conversation. When sources disagree or an answer remains uncertain, we try to show that too.
What “better” means to us
Our goal with this project was to allow us to make better-informed decisions and to bring clarity to a world of misleading labels, inconclusive science, influencers making vague claims and aggressive marketing strategies. We wanted clarity and agency.
Better is a decision where the compound is named correctly, the amount adds up, the evidence matches the claim, and the tradeoffs are visible. It is a supplement that fits the outcome we have in mind and makes sense for us as individuals.
We do not set out to declare a manufacturer the winner or call any one product “best”. We will praise a company or product for label clarity, dose transparency, fair pricing, convenience, or another factor when it earns that praise.
In some cases, we may link to a product whose presentation we dislike if its Supplement Facts panel still gives us enough information to verify the form and amount and the product otherwise does the job.