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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2022 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: J Food Compost Anal. 2021 Jun 25;102:104058. doi: 10.1016/j.jfca.2021.104058

Modernization of the National Institutes of Health Dietary Supplement Label Database

Leila G Saldanha 1, Johanna T Dwyer 1, Richard A Bailen 1
PMCID: PMC8336909  NIHMSID: NIHMS1718537  PMID: 34366563

Abstract

Launched in 2008, NIH’s DSLD (https://dsld.nlm.nih.gov/dsld/) currently catalogs information printed on over 125,000 (historical and current) labels of dietary supplement products sold in the U.S.. The database is maintained and updated continuously, and new versions deployed regularly. The new home page includes a prominent search bar and counter that displays the number of searchable labels in the database. The redesigned website yields near-instantaneous label retrieval, a more attractive layout of information, tailored search filters and download options, and the ability to view data in pictorial formats resulting in a much-improved user experience. The modernization of the DSLD ensures that this NIH resource has new forms of data delivery to meet the needs of App developers and data scientists, and improved performance for users. The DSLD is updated frequently to reflect the products sold in the rapidly evolving U.S. dietary supplement market.

Keywords: formulations, labels, database, NoSQL databases, DSLD, dietary supplement label database, NIH, botanicals, nutrient intake, dietary supplements

1.0. Background

When Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act (DSHEA) in 1994 it created a new category of products called Dietary Supplements, which were to be regulated as a subcategory of foods (103D Congress, 1994). Like foods, preregistration was not required before these products could be introduced in the food supply. As a result, there is no official record of dietary supplement products marketed in the U.S. Thus, the only sources for this information are databases created by public and private entities, which acquire the information through a variety of mechanisms, such as voluntary submission by manufacturers and marketers of these products, and through internet searches.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) reported recently that over 50% of adults and about 75% of older adults use dietary supplements (Mishra et al., 2021). Given this high usage dietary supplement composition databases are needed to document their contribution to intakes of nutrients and other bioactive constituents and determine the health effects of these substances.

2.0. DSLD history

The Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) is a public use database, created, maintained, and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS). The DSLD resulted from specific language ODS received from Congress in 2004, which encouraged ODS to develop, create, regularly update, maintain, and make available to government and research entities a database of all dietary supplement labels sold in the U.S. (Committee on Appropriations. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies, 2003).

Products labeled as Dietary Supplements are added to the DSLD. The database includes labels from current and discontinued products, which are retained for research use. Priority is given to the labels of products of interest to the DSLD Federal Partners, such as products consumed by National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) participants. The labels in the database are updated regularly. Labels from discontinued products or products that can no longer be marketed for safety reasons or be labeled as Dietary Supplements, e.g. energy drinks, are moved to the Off Market category. Most labels are acquired under contract through the Therapeutic Research Center, Manufacturers’ Connect program.

Figure 1 presents the major events in its development. A DSLD prototype, feasibility, and project meeting held in late 2008 sought input on the prototype developed by Abt Associates, Inc (contract awardee). The prototype was demonstrated in 2009 in collaboration with NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM). The first version was deployed in 2013 had about 17,000 labels. This version of the DSLD was a legacy Java Server Pages application that stored information in a relational Structured Query Language database (MySQL) format. All versions of the DSLD have captured the image and all information printed on product labels, including their formulations and label claims. The DSLD also offers users a variety of search and download options, and links to Federal resources, including tailored PubMed searches.

FIGURE 1:

FIGURE 1:

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Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) Timeline

The next milestone in the development of the DSLD was the adoption of select LanguaL codes in 2014. LanguaL is a structured vocabulary for describing, capturing, and retrieving data, developed to facilitate the integration of databases (Danish Food Informatics, 2020). It was originally developed for foods but was modified to incorporate codes to describe dietary supplements (Saldanha et al., 2012). The four descriptors integrated into the DSLD, i.e., product type, product form, intended target group, and dietary (nutrition and health) claims, are useful search options for filtering labels in the DSLD.

In 2017, after receiving Congressional language urging it to do so, ODS launched a mobile version of the DSLD. This improvement includes a redesign of the website made after consideration of comments sought through a Federal Register notice (National Institutes of Health, 2015) and usability testing of the website (Potischman et al, 2017). The data management system was not updated in the 2017 DSLD improvement efforts.

3. 0. Modernized Database Design and Features.

The 2021 modernization efforts of the DSLD included 1) Updated design features, 2) Improved ingredient categorization system, 3) Updated data management system, and 4) Updating and revision of all the static or fixed text to reflect the 2016 dietary supplement labeling regulations which are captured under the Resources tab in the database.

3.1. Updated design features

The modernized DSLD utilizes the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS), which was developed for the federal government to build accessible, mobile-friendly government websites (General Services Administration). As a result of the technological improvements, the site will be visually more attractive and easier to navigate, and will give users more options to download the labels in the database. The redesigned yields near-instantaneous label retrieval, a more attractive layout of information and search features, and the ability to view data in pictorial formats, resulting in a much-improved user experience. The modernized DSLD is patterned after the PubMed site (National Library of Medicine), which features on the Home Page a prominent search bar and counter that displays the number of searchable labels in the database. The user is next taken to the Search page which gives the user options, through a variety of left-hand search features, to filter the search results. These filters include narrowing the results by when the labels were added to the database, sorting labels by their status On or Off Market, and by the type of product, product form, intended target group, and dietary claim. Users are also given two options, Label and Table, to view search results. The Label view prominently displays the image of the label and may be more useful for use by practitioners. The Table view, which is a tabular format, lets the user see more information at once, and compare and sort information listed in the table. Users will have the option to download their customized search in three file formats as comma-separated values (CSV), Microsoft Excel (XLSX), or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files. The entire database can also be downloaded or shared as JSON files.

Another improved design feature is easier access to the tailored PubMed ingredient searches. In previous versions of the DSLD, these tailored searches were obtained by clicking on an ingredient name under the Supplement Facts tab within a product label view. In the modernized DSLD, the Browse Ingredients tab will now provide direct access to these tailored PubMed searches and other resources for that ingredient, such as the ODS factsheets. As with previous updates to the DSLD, user experience was sought to test the design and search options features.

3.2. Improved ingredient categorization system.

Simply said the declaration of dietary ingredients on dietary supplement labels is messy. As described in other papers (Saldanha, et al. 2018; Saldanha, 2018), when Congress created dietary supplements as a new category of foods, it also defined it as a product containing “dietary ingredients”. Some dietary ingredients have Daily Values, such as vitamins and minerals, but most dietary ingredients, such as botanicals, used in the formulation of dietary supplements do not have Daily Values. Currently, there are Daily Values for only 35 dietary ingredients in dietary supplement products (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2020). For these 35 dietary ingredients, the FDA has provided by regulation and guidance documents how they should be declared on product labels and the units that should be used to declare their amounts. Thus, there is a level of standardization for these dietary ingredients. For all other dietary ingredients, the FDA gives companies a great deal of flexibility on how these dietary ingredients can be declared on product labels. For example, they can be declared as components of blends, but the amount of each dietary ingredient within each blend need not be declared (Saldanha et al., 2018). The FDA also requires that companies use the nomenclature described in Herbs of Commerce for declaring botanicals on labels. However, there are several editions of this text and there is not always agreement on nomenclature between versions, as was the case with cinnamon (Saldanha et al., 2016).

Given the need to integrate the DSLD with food and medicine databases, there is currently a concerted effort to improve the ingredient classification system used for the DSLD. These improvements include reflecting changes to nutrient declarations specified in the recent labeling regulations. Another improvement is assigning Unique Ingredient Identifiers (UNIIs) to dietary ingredients (Peryea et al., 2021). UNIIs are generated by FDA’s Global Substance Registration System (GSRS) housed at the NIH (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2019). The decision to implement UNIIs was based on an analysis of publications that cite the DSLD. This analysis showed that the primary users were researchers in informatics, pharmacy, medicine, and toxicology (Saldanha et al., 2020, poster at NNDB). These improvements to the ingredient categorization system will also improve user search and download experiences and contribute toward health information technology initiatives.

3.3. Updated data management system

The DSLD was modernized as the original Java web architecture system is no longer supported. The modernized version features a JavaScript-based front-end application that utilizes the USWDS and data retrieval functionality based on an Application Programming Interface (API). The new NoSQL backend datastore uses the JSON file format powered by an Elasticsearch search engine. The NoSQL format provides options more suited to DSLD’s datatype datasets, i.e., structured documents with unnormalized data, and new forms of data delivery to meet the needs of app developers and data scientists. JSON can be more readily integrated with other databases that use the JSON file format. Since it is a text file, it can easily be sent to and from a server and is in a data format that can be used by any programming language.

4.0. Conclusions and Next Steps

The lack of a mandatory product registration system and a standardized or structured product labeling system will continue to pose challenges for dietary supplement databases that are dependent on the voluntary submission of labels and entry of information printed on the product labels by those managing for the database. Going forward the focus of the DSLD will continue to be:

  • Efforts to make labels categorized as On Market in the DSLD reflect the products currently sold in the U.S. This will include a label gap analysis to compare DSLD label data to public label data to identify labels missing from the DSLD and reach out to the companies behind missing labels and encourage participation in the project’s voluntary label submission process.

  • Conducting ongoing user-centered research to inform improvements in the design of the public website and the delivery of the “big data” sets accumulating in the database.

  • Improving user search and download of labels experience

  • Meeting the needs of app developers and data scientists

  • Integration with food, nutrition, health, and medicinal databases.

Highlights.

  • The technological updates will make it easier to navigate the DSLD, which contains over 125,000 (current and historic) product labels.

  • The modernized DSLD features a prominent search bar on the Home Page, which then takes the user to the Search page which gives the user options, through a variety of left-hand search features, to customize the search results.

  • Users will have the option to download their customized search in three file formats or the entire database can also be downloaded or shared as JSON files.

  • The new site will include an improved ingredient categorization system to improve integration with food and drug/medical databases.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge with thanks our contractors at Abt Associates, Inc., Rockville, MD, and Therapeutic Research Center, LLC, Stockton, CA, for their work on this project, and the DSLD ad hoc Federal group for their contributions to the design and content of the DSLD.

Funding

This work was supported by the Office of Dietary Supplements, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda MD.

Abbreviations:

API

Application Programming Interface

DSHEA

Dietary Supplement Health Education Act

DSLD

Dietary Supplement Label Database

FDA

U.S. Food and Drug Administration

GSRS

Global Substance Registration System

JSON

JavaScript Object Notation

NHANES

National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys NIH, National Institutes of Health

NLM

National Library of Medicine

ODS

Office of Dietary Supplements

SQL

Structured Query Language

UNII

Unique Ingredient Identifiers

USWDS

U.S. Web Design System

Footnotes

Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

This paper was submitted as an oral presentation at the 41st National Nutrient Databank Conference from 16 to 18 November 2020.

Conflict of Interest

None

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