How Sláinte scores capsules, tablets and gummies.
Supplements rarely carry a nutrition panel, so the score looks at what surrounds the vitamin or oil you are buying: the coating, the fillers, the sweeteners and the form each nutrient comes in.
What the colours mean
The score is not health advice. It does not tell you whether you need a supplement. That is a question for your GP or pharmacist.
Both are daily multivitamin tablets. One has a few fillers. The other is coated with titanium dioxide and coloured with two colourings that carry a warning in the EU.
Better choice · 1 of 2
Seven Seas
50
/100
Sláinte Score
Good
Covers the basics, but some of the minerals are the cheap kind your body barely absorbs.
Scored on the ingredient list: what surrounds the vitamin or oil, and the form each nutrient comes in.
39 ingredients on the label
Nothing here is high risk, but 2 ingredients are worth watching.
Rugby
15
/100
Sláinte Score
Bad
The vitamins are fine. The artificial colouring is the problem.
Scored on the ingredient list: what surrounds the vitamin or oil, and the form each nutrient comes in.
20 ingredients on the label
4 ingredients on this label carry a high-risk flag, starting with FD&C red #40 lake. That is what holds the score down.
This is exactly what you would see after scanning each one. Both are scored on the real label.
The worse the ingredient, the more points it takes away. A red one takes away 30, a green one takes away nothing. The final score is whatever is left.
Many tablets list two or three similar fillers, such as magnesium stearate and calcium stearate. They are really one issue, so the first takes away its full points, the next two take away about a third as much, and any more take away almost nothing.
Highest possible score 64, if it has sugar or glucose syrup as one of its first two ingredients
Highest possible score 49, if it has one ingredient restricted in EU food, such as titanium dioxide
Highest possible score 24, if it has two or more of those restricted ingredients
Each dark bar shows the highest score a product can get if it breaks that rule. Even if everything else on the label is fine, it cannot go past that number.
This is the real ingredient list for barcode 8006540687383, the pack a Sláinte user scanned, run through the same scoring the product page uses.
Each coloured block is a share of the ingredients on this label, grouped by how worrying they are.
The circle shows where its final score of 50 lands: red is Bad, orange Poor, yellow Good, green Excellent.
Capsules, tablets, softgels and gummies do not have to show a nutrition panel per 100 g, and most do not. So we look at the rest of the label: what holds the tablet together, what form each nutrient comes in, and what the format adds, such as sugar in a gummy or sweetener in a fizzy tablet.
Protein bars, shakes and powders that show a full nutrition panel are scored as food, because that is how you eat them.
| Nutrient | Your body takes in more of these | Less of these reaches you |
|---|---|---|
| Magnesium | Citrate, bisglycinate, malate | Oxide |
| Zinc | Gluconate, citrate, picolinate | Oxide |
| Vitamin E | d-alpha (natural) | dl-alpha (made in a lab) |
| Vitamin D | D3 (cholecalciferol) | Both D2 and D3 are fine |
The weaker form is not harmful. It just means less of what the label promises reaches you, so it takes away 4 points.
| Risk level | Points taken away | What lands here | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | 30 | Removed from EU food, colourings that need a warning on the pack, sources of trans fat | Titanium dioxide (E171), tartrazine (E102), hydrogenated oil |
| Moderate | 12 | Sweeteners, sugar-based formats, thickeners still being reviewed | Sucralose, glucose syrup, carrageenan (E407), PEG |
| Low | 4 | Fillers, powders that help tablets run through the machine, weaker nutrient forms | Magnesium stearate, silicon dioxide, magnesium oxide, dl-alpha tocopherol |
| No concern | 0 | The vitamin or oil itself, plain capsule shells, natural preservatives | Fish oil, vitamin D3, gelatin, plant cellulose capsules, mixed tocopherols |
Some ingredients are not in our list yet. We show them as 'not rated yet'. They never count as clean, and the score tells you how much of the label we could check.
| Rule | What it does | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Similar ingredients | The second and third of the same kind count at 30%, later ones at 10% | Three similar fillers on one label come from the same choice at the factory |
| Floor | A label can lose at most 85 points | Keeps the very bottom for restricted ingredients |
| Sugar first | Highest possible score 64 if sugar or glucose syrup is in the first two places | At that point you are mostly buying a sweet |
| One restricted ingredient | Highest possible score 49 | A tidy list should not hide titanium dioxide or a warning colouring |
| Two or more | Highest possible score 24 | Several on one label says something about how it was made |
| No full list | Fewer than 3 ingredients, or fewer than 2 we recognise: no score | A partly read label is not enough to score |
EU supplement law (Directive 2002/46/EC) does not require a per 100 g nutrition panel, and a fish oil capsule eaten two at a time would make no sense on one anyway. What you can compare between brands is what the capsule or tablet is made of.
No. Whether you need vitamin D or iron depends on you, and that is a question for your GP or pharmacist. Sláinte scores how cleanly the product delivers what it says it contains.
EFSA concluded in 2021 that it could no longer rule out harm to DNA from E171, and the EU removed it from food in 2022. Some supplements still use it to whiten the coating. It adds nothing for you, so one is enough to hold the score at 49.
Not always, but when sugar or glucose syrup is in the first two places the product is mostly a sweet, so it is held at 64 or below. A sugar-free gummy with a clean list can score well.
Dose is printed per serving and varies a lot between brands. Sláinte shows what the label declares but does not reward a higher dose, because more is not automatically better and some vitamins have upper safe limits.
Every score is worked out by these rules and nothing else. Brands cannot pay for a better score or a place in the swaps. If you think we got one wrong, tell us and we will check it.
