Astral Codex Ten

LabDoor

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LabDoor

Article

LabDoor is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 05, 2022 and October 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “The two biggest sites I know of in this space are LabDoor and ConsumerLab”; “Labdoor analyzes 30 brands of magnesium supplement”; “Labdoor was in error here”. It most often appears alongside Ashwagandha, Ayurvedic, Bacopa.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: October 05, 2022
  • Last seen: October 26, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 05, 2022 · Original source
A few companies do Consumer Reports style analyses of supplement brands. For a fee (or sometimes for free, supported by ads), they will analyze supplements and tell you what they find. The two biggest sites I know of in this space are LabDoor and ConsumerLab.
Some people have criticized LabDoor. They claim they have limited transparency, and that their ranking system is bad: they subtract points for companies that go slightly over the amount of product on a label (eg they say they have 100 mg active ingredient, but actually have 120 mg). But it’s impossible to always hit an exact target (eg 100 mg of ingredient) and reputable companies will make sure that they’re more likely to exceed the target by a little bit (eg have 120 mg) rather than go below it. These kinds of mild excesses aren’t dangerous and are considered industry standard, but LabDoor penalizes them as much as serious errors. [EDIT: LabDoor responds here]
Inline links: have criticized, here
Labdoor analyzes 30 brands of magnesium supplement. 25 earn As, 3 earn Cs, and 2 flunk. Of the two that flunk, one has only 60% as much magnesium as claimed, and the other has almost 3x as much magnesium as claimed. No product has an unsafe amount of heavy metals, although the worst have between a third and half of the government’s safety limit.
Inline links: analyzes 30 brands of magnesium supplement
Open Thread 245
October 09, 2022 · Original source
1: Neil Thanedar of LabDoor doesn’t agree with the way I characterized his company on my post on supplements and has a response up here. I have edited the post slightly to be more noncommittal until I can explain my reasoning - which I hope to do on a Highlights From The Comments post eventually.
Inline links: my post on supplements, a response up here
Highlights From The Comments On Supplement Labeling
October 26, 2022 · Original source
The LabDoor and ConsumerLab analyses I mentioned in this post also checked for heavy metals; most of the products were at undetectable levels, and none were at dangerous ones. Still, this was just one or two dozen, and maybe a product needs some level of reputability to even make it to LabDoor, so let’s look at Diddly’s links.
5: Neil Thanedar of LabDoor writes (on Twitter):
Inline links: Twitter
Hi Scott. I'm the founder of Labdoor. I am a big fan of your writing and believe you have made a major error here based on misleading information.
Inline links: Labdoor