Holistic Alternatives, Inc.

There’s a lot of confusion and hype regarding enzyme strength and potencies. Wild claims and huge numbers are being claimed to enhance the saleability of otherwise average or mediocre products. And often, like the chart at the left, numbers are used that aren’t easily compared or only lead to confusion. So how can we cut through the fog to compare enzyme products?

Well the first and most important step is to find out what quantities of the product we are dealing with. To do that we need to look at product labels. If you look at the ingredient panel on the top of the right side of a label you will see something that looks like the table below-

Look at the “serving size” on the label. The “serving size” tells the consumer that the ingredients listed on the label below this section are the amounts contained per serving. In other words, if you want to know how much of an ingredient is actually in a single tablet or capsule you need to take the amount  of the ingredient shown on the label and divide by the number of capsules or tablets in the serving size.

For example, an important ingredient in enzyme formulations is α-chymotrypsin. It might be listed in several ways so we’ll choose a common way strengths are listed. One label we look at says there are 3 mg of α-chymotrypsin per serving and we look at a second lable and we see the same thing. But on closer examination we see that product “A” lists the serving size as 1 tablet while product “B” lists the serving size as 2 tablets. Because the serving size for product “A” is shown as 1 tablet we don’t need to do anything. We already know the amount of α-chymotrypsin per tablet is 3 mg. In product “B” we need to take the 3 mg of α-chymotrypsin and divide by 2 for the number of tablets in the serving size. This means that product “B” contains only 1.5 mg of α-chymotrypsin per tablet. By this exercise we see that product “B” is actually only half the potency of product “A.”

In the next part of the series we will examine how to compare different kinds of activity units.