alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I've been using AI to analyze every supplement on the market
Hey HN! This has been my project for a few years now. I recently brought it back to life after taking a pause to focus on my studies.
My goal with this project is to separate fluff from science when shopping for supplements. I am doing this in 3 steps:
1.) I index every supplement on the market (extract each ingredient, normalize by quantity)
2.) I index every research paper on supplementation (rank every claim by effect type and effect size)
3.) I link data between supplements and research papers
Earlier last year, I took pause on a project because I've ran into a few issues:
Legal: Shady companies are sending C&Ds letters demanding their products are taken down from the website. It is not something I had the mental capacity to respond to while also going through my studies. Not coincidentally, these are usually brands with big marketing budgets and poor ingredients to price ratio.
Technical: I started this project when the first LLMs came out. I've built extensive internal evals to understand how LLMs are performing. The hallucinations at the time were simply too frequent to passthrough this data to visitors. However, I recently re-ran my evals with Opus 4.5 and was very impressed. I am running out of scenarios that I can think/find where LLMs are bad at interpreting data.
Business: I still haven't figured out how to monetize it or even who the target customer is.
Despite these challenges, I decided to restart my journey.
My mission is to bring transparency (science and price) to the supplement market. My goal is NOT to increase the use of supplements, but rather to help consumers make informed decisions. Often times, supplementation is not necessary or there are natural ways to supplement (that's my focus this quarter – better education about natural supplementation).
Some things that are helping my cause – Bryan Johnson's journey has drawn a lot more attention to healthy supplementation (blueprint). Thanks to Bryan's efforts, I had so many people in recent months reach out to ask about the state of the project – interest I've not had before.
I am excited to restart this journey and to share it with HN. Your comments on how to approach this would be massively appreciated.
Some key areas of the website:
* Example of navigating supplements by ingredient https://pillser.com/search?q=%22Vitamin+D%22&s=jho4espsuc
* Example of research paper analyzed using AI https://pillser.com/research-papers/effect-of-lactobacillus-...
* Example of looking for very specific strains or ingredients https://pillser.com/probiotics/bifidobacterium-bifidum
* Example of navigating research by health-outcomes https://pillser.com/health-outcomes/improved-intestinal-barr...
* Example of product listing https://pillser.com/supplements/pb-8-probiotic-663
Comments
Do you include the EU market as well?
Monetize it with Amazon or other affiliate links, and provide dollar per effective dose for a given set of desired supplements.
This seems more like cataloguing than analyzing
I'd love to see a project that actually analyzes every supplement on the market to make sure it actually contains what it claims to, contains it at the listed dosage, and to show anything else found (heavy metals for example). That's not something AI can do for us though since it'd involve physically collecting and testing samples.
U GOT A WAYK00L BB0ARD D00DZ!
I borowed my brothers vic-2O to read ur bboard!!1!
Suplements r important 2 me after mom fed us nothing but enfamil
It looks like my doc says i got "Irritable Biff Syndrome"
So I gonna order some of these (do they accept Minecraft or RuneScape money??
UGOT WAYK00L BB0ARDZ, D00DZ!!
B1FF B1FF
B1FF ... B1FFUnfortunately, none of these data are usable because (in the US, at least) there is no oversight on labeling accuracy for nutritional supplements.
That means I can dump woodchips into capsules and sell them as Multivitamins with 12 vitamins & minerals, and nobody would be the wiser.
There is more rigorous testing being done in underground steroid + peptide communities than in legal nutritional supplements.
Crazy world where you can trust vialed peptides from China more than something you bought on Amazon...
found a bug searching for "collagen":
Failed to execute 'removeChild' on 'Node': The node to be removed is not a child of this node.
Something broke. We're working on it, but in the meantime, try reloading the page. If that doesn't work, come back later.
Error ID: b846e2e2ba3b483ab93f10e72ef76820
NotFoundError: Failed to execute 'removeChild' on 'Node': The node to be removed is not a child of this node.
at ds (https://pillser.com/assets/entry.client-DWgmqxdv.js:1:112074)
at gs (https://pillser.com/assets/entry.client-DWgmqxdv.js:1:113602)
at ys (https://pillser.com/assets/entry.client-DWgmqxdv.js:1:113850)
at gs (https://pillser.com/assets/entry.client-DWgmqxdv.js:1:113728)I picked Vitamin D as it was an option on the main page. The cheapest offered was $1.1/mg.
Costco (https://www.costco.com/p/-/kirkland-signature-extra-strength...) sells Vitamin D at less than half that price. On Amazon, the two pack of those is even cheaper.
Just an observation.
There is big money in supplements, so I don't think it will be difficult to monetize.
This is fantastic! I've been doing this manually for years. My main focus is always what does the research show about xyz supplement on gut bacteria.
Please don't take any products down due to shady legal threats! Won't this compromise nearly the entirety of the value proposition?
Cripes.
> Shady companies are sending C&Ds letters demanding their products are taken down from the website.
That's surprising because it seems like you just have a review site? What's the issue? Or is it just bs threats?
1. dangerously unwise area to apply "AI" given all its known problems, and whats at stake
2. I tried using that site and immediately saw problems and broken behavior. The "Ask AI" feature (sounds pretty key?) literally did nothing. and doing a search for say aspirin yielded results that... had no aspirin! no brainer to bail out fast
I've fucked myself up so much over the years with supplements. Wish I could go back 30 years and tell myself to just eat real food. B6 toxicity for instance is crippling. That being said these days I just take two things: vit K2 and magnesium.
> Technical: I started this project when the first LLMs came out. I've built extensive internal evals to understand how LLMs are performing. The hallucinations at the time were simply too frequent to passthrough this data to visitors. However, I recently re-ran my evals with Opus 4.5 and was very impressed. I am running out of scenarios that I can think/find where LLMs are bad at interpreting data.
It's nice to see an AI-centric Show HN product that uses proper evals and cares about data quality.
How did you build your initial data set that you're using for the evals? Bootstrapping a high quality data set is one of the hardest parts of really knowing how an AI product is performing.