A Systematic Narrative Review of the Evidence for Labeling of Natural Health Products and Dietary Supplements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: It is not clear what information is needed on labels of natural health products and dietary supplements to support informed consumer choice and use of these products. Aim: The purpose of this review was to explore if/how label information impacts consumer decision-making about food, over-the-counter drugs, and natural health products/dietary supplements and to make recommendations about how this evidence may be applied to natural health products/dietary supplements. Method: A narrative analysis of a systematic review was performed. Medline and Embase databases were systematically searched to identify relevant studies from 1985 to February 2018 for all available English-language articles. This was supplemented with hand searches of the reference lists of review articles. Results: One hundred and fifty-one studies met the inclusion criteria, and after excluding review articles, 127 were included in the analysis. The findings from the studies were categorized into three main themes: (1) impact of labeling on consumer behavior (the majority of studies found that changes in label format or information had little to no effect on consumer behavior such as purchasing); (2) consumer comprehension of label information (significant proportions of consumers were unable to accurately interpret information found on natural health product/dietary supplement, over-the-counter medication, or food labels); and (3) label formatting/design, including standardization of information in fact tables (standardization, front-of-pack, and contrasting color panels were preferred and best attracted consumer attention). Conclusions: Many consumers did not regularly read product labels, nor understand the information they read on those labels. There was evidence that consistency of information was preferred by many consumers. Font size clearly impacted consumers' ability to read and understand the information on labels and this needed to be balanced with the amount of information required on labels. There was evidence that symbols that are simple and used sparingly are helpful in providing direction to consumers. Finally, regardless of what information was on the label, changing labels alone was unlikely to have a significant impact on consumer behavior.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".