Digestive Enzyme Supplements: Buying Guide
Following from our article on digestive enzymes, in this series we’ve added some useful pointers and tips that might be useful when ordering or buying your next digestive enzyme supplement.
Understanding what you are reading when you are buying digestive enzyme supplements shouldn’t be that difficult. Here we have made that really easy.
In our digestive enzyme series, we have also put together a review of what we consider as the best or top 5 digestive enzyme supplement products.
If you haven’t already read the article on digestive enzymes and how they can improve your health, or our review of the top 5 digestive enzyme supplement products then you can find those here.
Something you won’t hear talked about a lot is supplement industry regulations. Most suppliers use internationally recognized manufacturing standards, using GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) techniques. These standards are strict and really expensive to maintain, with rigorous testing constantly per batch production.
This is similar to ‘guilds’ who set a workable industry standard in the market. Make sure to buy your products from an ethical and reputable company.
Another tip is to look for product fillers or excipients on the labels, products with large numbers of filler are generally considered poorer in quality. Additives can have adverse effects in people, such as allergic or immune responses. While many top-shelf digestive enzyme products available over the counter are potent and of high quality, the digestive enzyme products with the highest potency are available via prescription. We will not be rating those here. Your medical practitioner should be able to discuss those with you.
The main quality indicators for digestive enzymes are the unit of activity and potency. Digestive enzyme products usually state the weight of enzyme on the label. This tells you how much is in the product and is usually in milligrams (mg). Digestive enzyme activity is also a quality measurement to look for. Under FDA (USA) regulations, only the weight of each digestive enzyme in the product is required to be labelled.
“The main quality indicators for digestive enzymes are the unit of activity and potency.”
You should look to get the best value for money that you can, or the highest activity unit per serving of enzyme. While it is difficult to be really accurate about enzyme activity, because of digesting temperatures and digestive tract acidity or Ph, the FCC units listed on the product label give you an indication. A higher number in front of the FCC unit means a higher activity of digestive enzyme breakdown.
When looking at the FCC unit, the initials on the label after the number give an abbreviation of the larger molecule in your food that the enzyme breaks down.
Any enzymes that break down starch (from sugar) for example, are labelled as DU. Enzymes that attack lipids are labelled FIP and proteins labelled HUT.
This way you can find the best digestive enzymes, across all products, based on their activity or how much they break down a food molecule. You can’t really compare activities of enzymes that breakdown different food molecules, for example starch or sugar enzymes (DU) vs protein digesting enzymes (HUT). You can only really compare the same types of enzymes across the different products. Some enzymes can breakdown multiple molecules and this is usually stated.
You also have a choice between coated or enteric enzymes and none-coated enzymes. Enteric or coated enzymes have a powder lipid coating. Why might this be?
The nature of the stomach area of your digestive tract is acidic. While this helps some types of enzyme, this reduces the activity of some digestive enzymes. Acid can even breakdown other types of proteins or enzymes. To make sure the enzyme gets to the correct area of the digestive tract some products and digestive enzymes have these protective coatings.
Some reports claim enteric coatings carry health risks. These reasons are open for debate currently, we’ve personally heard stories of some allergies to certain excipient coatings. While this is an exciting technology from our point of view, this is something to be aware of.
This should clarify a lot of industry jargon and help you to find the ideal product for you. Also you should now understand the product you are taking a bit better if you aren’t already taking digestive enzymes.
Below you can navigate back to our articles main page. Or you can native to some more useful articles in our series on digestive enzyme supplements.
We also have an article on top tips when shopping for general health supplements.
