<strong>Dear Jill:</strong> Could you look into this issue of vitamins not being labeled accurately anymore? I just bought a vitamin C supplement that said it contained more active ingredients than the one I was using last month. But when I got it home and really looked at the bottle, it said that I now needed to take 2 pills to get the same ingredients that I had in one pill of the previous kind. These new ones have half the ingredients that my old bottle did, so I have to take two every day, making this 60-count bottle only good for one month instead of two. <strong>— Kurt J.</strong>

Last week, I featured a reader’s email that pointed out a labeling change on a bottle of nutritional supplements, pointing out that the milligrams advertised on the front label of the package may no longer necessarily reflect the active ingredients in a single capsule or tablet, but instead may be advertising a total serving size in milligrams.

This is a confusing change, and that reader’s email was not the only one I’ve received about this apparently recent shift in how vitamins and supplements are advertised. In researching this column, I turned to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s guides for nutrition facts on labels for supplements. With numerous readers pointing out this change, I wondered if the FDA had changed its guidance on how supplement sizes are labeled.

However, I was unable to find any specific change that stated that manufacturers could label supplements based on serving size instead of pill size. It appears to be something that brands are doing to make the product size on the front label appear larger and more attractive than the individual pill size in milligrams.

So, I headed to a local pharmacy to look at a variety of supplements and see what I might discover.

In the vitamins and supplements aisle, I did indeed notice that a variety of manufacturers are now putting a milligrams size on the labels that does not correspond to the pill size, but rather, the serving size. In some cases, the labeling gets even more confusing.

For example, I saw two bottles of dried cranberry supplement – same brand, same manufacturer. One 60-count bottle read “500mg per capsule,” selling for $9.88. Right next to it, another 60-count bottle read “Extra Strength Cranberry – 15,000mg equivalent per capsule” and was selling for $8.88.

Why was the “Extra Strength” variety a dollar cheaper than the apparently smaller, 500-milligram capsules? I was about to find out.

Turning both bottles around, I looked at the Nutrition Facts portion of the label on the back. The 500mg bottle read “Serving Size: 1 Capsule. 500mg organic cranberry extract.” The 15,000mg, “Extra Strength” bottle read “Serving Size: 1 Capsule. 300mg cranberry concentrate, a 50:1 concentrate equivalent to 15,000mg of fresh cranberries.”

What misleading labeling! The so-called “extra strength” variety contained 300mg capsules, containing 200mg less active ingredient than the 500mg variety right next to it. I thought it was also extremely misleading to label the front of the bottle as 15,000 milligrams of anything, being that was actually being touted as a fresh cranberry equivalency.

With so many products downsizing these days due to inflation, I also wonder if this creative labeling is a way to make supplements look larger or appear to have more contents than they actually do. Just as a box of cereal or a bag of potato chips can be downsized and sold in the same-sized package with fewer contents inside, a 60-count vitamin supplement could still contain 60 pills, with each pill now containing half the active ingredients than it previously did.

Just as we need to be diligent shoppers reading labels and watching packaging and serving sizes, we must become increasingly more discerning when shopping for vitamin and nutritional supplements too. (An especially daunting task, considering the small print on some of those bottles!) I found this to be an especially-eye-opening column to research and write, and I appreciate all of the readers who suggested the topic to me.