Enter your numbers
44 questions. Questions that only apply to some people appear once your earlier answers decide that they do.
How this is calculated
Formula version lll-supplement-stack-1.0.0
The member ticks the supplements and medicines they take. Each supplement is looked up in a catalogue that records its active-ingredient groups and an indicative monthly retail cost. Any interaction row whose two members are both present fires, sorted by severity; any active-ingredient group claimed by more than one item is reported as a duplicated active. Evidence grades are injected by the caller and default to UNGRADED, and grade F produces an explicit stop warning. Costs are summed, with items lacking a cost figure reported separately so the total is never silently understated. Grades, the interaction table and costs are all injectable parameters of `checkSupplementStack`.
What it cannot do
- No doses are collected, and nearly every interaction here is dose-dependent.
- The default interaction table is a starter set of about eighteen rows, not a pharmacological database. Absence of a flag is not evidence of safety.
- Three rows are marked LLL editorial rather than sourced to a fact sheet.
- Evidence grades are placeholders unless the application injects real ones.
- Costs are LLL indicative retail estimates in USD and are not cited prices.
- Timing, formulation and bioavailability differences between products are not modelled.
Sources
- NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, Health Professional fact sheets (Vitamin K, Vitamin E, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Zinc, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium)View source (opens in a new tab)
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health: St John's WortView source (opens in a new tab)
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health: MelatoninView source (opens in a new tab)
- LLL evidence grades are injected by the application from the LLL evidence library; this calculator declares the shape only
The formula version is pinned so that a result you saved or shared can be reproduced. When we change a coefficient, the version changes and old results stay attributed to the version that produced them.
Questions people ask
- Is a missing interaction a safe interaction?
- No. Absence from this list means we have no evidence of an interaction, which is not the same as evidence of no interaction. Supplement interactions are poorly studied and under-reported. A pharmacist reviewing everything you actually take is better than any tool.
- Why is something I have read a lot about graded low?
- Because attention and evidence are measured separately here, and the gap between them is the most useful thing on many of our pages. A high-hype, low-evidence supplement is the most common item in a stack.