HN Explorer

Show HN: I've been using AI to analyze every supplement on the market (pillser.com)

94 points by lilouartz ↗ HN
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

25 comments

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wordglyph
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.
autoexec
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.

nebula8804
Sounds expensive to test every podunk brand on Amazon. Maybe just the big brands that claim to be accurate like Bryan Johnson's Blueprint.
gavinray
Unfortunately, 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...

bionhoward
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)
amelius
There is big money in supplements, so I don't think it will be difficult to monetize.
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(comment deleted)
Aurornis
> 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.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
tayo42
> 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?

syngrog66
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

bigwheels
Please don't take any products down due to shady legal threats! Won't this compromise nearly the entirety of the value proposition?

Cripes.

kilna
Monetize it with Amazon or other affiliate links, and provide dollar per effective dose for a given set of desired supplements.
zingababba
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.
B1FIDO 

  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 B1FF

       B1FF ... B1FF
!!! B1FF ‽ B1FF
krupers
I just searched the most popular/researched supplement of all time: creatine. There is a mistake in the data there: the Wellnesss Code Whey Protein indeed contains creatine, but not 2g per container, but 2g per serving (that is correctly reflected). Error is easily spotted due to the price per gram being an extreme outlier. That is perhaps something you can look for when evaluating the data gotten from the LLM.
lilouartz
There is interesting context here. The first version of Pillser was focused on very narrow area of supplements, and specifically, supplements sold in the shape of pills (therefore the name "Pillser" [pill search]). However, it kinda snowballed from there, and powder substances were one of the last things I've added. The evals need to be expanded to have more examples specifically around powder substances. However, that's a fix I know how to implement and will prioritize.

Thank you for sharing the example that you've found!

e40
How did you get around the legal issues?
austinjp
Please seriously consider *not* using ads to generate revenue. We need to return to other models rather than just slapping ads on everything. Be the change you want to see in the world. Do you really want to see more ads?

Have a look at https://examine.com as the closest site I can think of in this space, and check out their revenue models.

Onavo
Without ads, you are just gatekeeping it from poor people. You can make the premium ad-free, but making the free version ad-free is basically asking for the price of the premium version to be raised to subsidize everyone else.
rceDia
Great resource for categories and research on supplements. Because supplements in U.S. are in the "wild west" of regulatory oversite, its important to know ingredient efficacy and ingredient purity. Consumer Labs (pay for subscription) offers some testing on selected products. Need to tweek "purchase from other market" -not all markets are "Out" as indicated.
midnitewarrior
idk if you invented this but "add a ? to the end to get an AI response" seems like a convention that should catch on.

Well done!

stevofolife
I’d love to hear your domain expertise—specifically which supplements you’d recommend avoiding, which ones are generally worth taking, and whether there are any brands or products you trust. I imagine you’ve picked up a lot of insights beyond the technical side as well.

I think it will be nice if there is a summary of that somewhere on the website. It was the first thing I was looking for.