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Comment by tiffanyamykuo | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys! Co-Founder of Multiply Labs here. We want to make staying healthy and energized a lot easier with your own personalized supplement pill! Happy to answer any questions here!

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As someone who has to take a LOT of supplements under supervision of a doctor, this would be great. Unfortunately, of the 7 supplements you offer that I actually take, you can't even get them in a high enough concentration to replace any supplement that I'm taking. I guess these are just for healthy people without any actual deficiencies? B12 for example, is basically impossible to overdose on but your 100mcg is useless to me when I inject about 2CCs of it a week, and your 100mg of Vitamin C is useless to me when I take 2 grams a day. Can't take the B9 because my MTHFR problems make me require Folinic Acid instead. I take 5,000IU/day of D3, and I have no idea how much "0.05 mg" is since D is measured in International Units.

The other, less common supplements I take like Acetyl-L-Carnatine, L-Arganine, and R-Alpha-Lipolic-Acid, you don't offer.

No offense but you sound like perhaps not the common market

Hello! Thanks for your detailed feedback! For all of the vitamins and minerals that we offer, we can put 100% of the recommended daily value in the Multiply Pills. These values are determined by the National Institutes of Health, and they can be expressed either in mg or in IU (there are equivalence tables).

About Vitamin B12, if you need to inject it for medical reasons you should definitely continue to use your medications. About Vitamin C, 2g/day is 2000% of the recommended value. We plan to include the possibility to increase the dosage beyond 100%, but we will not reach such extreme values as they are not recommended for the vast majority of the population. Finally, about the additional supplements that you mentioned, we do let our customers suggest us new supplements to include in the Multiply Pill. Our list of supplement is not static, and we will expand it including the supplements that meet our scientific standards (validation in the medical literature) and have sufficient demand!

> they are not recommended for the vast majority of the population

> meet our scientific standards (validation in the medical literature)

There is mounting evidence[1][2][3][4][5] that only people with known vitamin deficiencies and the supervision of a doctor should take vitamins. They're not even just a placebo -- in many cases they can be dangerous.

It seems as though you'll be capitalizing on what is increasingly revealing itself to be a shady, snake-oily industry. You actually have irresponsible, untrue, and potentially dangerous statements on the front page of your website, including the ideas that people should take vitamin D[6] or that Omega 3s boost brain function[7].

1. http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20131216/...

2. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dont-take-your-vitamins/

3. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2014/01/13/the-to...

4. http://greatist.com/grow/why-you-dont-need-a-multivitamin

5. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/dont-take-y...

6. http://theconversation.com/the-sun-goes-down-on-vitamin-d-wh...

7. http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/omega-3-fatty-ac...

I am sorry, but your post is inaccurate. You are literally claiming that we said or wrote things that never appeared on our website (nor in our minds, for that matter). Here are our actual positions, explained in more detail. In order: 1) Our position is that the privileged source of nutrients should be a healthy diet, whenever possible. In many cases, though, customers who have a healthy diet still want to integrate their nutrition with supplements (for example, getting all of the daily recommended omega 3 from fish is sometimes impractical). For this reason, we offer customers the possibility to personalize their supplements, so that they will add to their Multiply Pill exactly what they need, and nothing more! This approach is completely different from the standard multivitamins, that just overload their products with high quantities of supplements in the “one-size-fits’all” approach. 2) The number of people with some sort of vitamin deficiency is surprisingly high, even in the US (one example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271531710... ). In these cases, once more, our approach can provide these customers with exactly what they need, without unnecessary additions. 3) We do not claim that vitamins or omega 3 boost brain function. Please review our website. You are confusing us with other products/companies, that are less careful about their sources. 4) The supplement that we include for productivity is caffeine. As with all of the other supplements, rather than suggesting a pre-fixed dosage, we let customers pick exactly the quantity they want. And we can also add our unique control of the release time of the caffeine (the release performance of our functional containers is backed by our peer-reviewed, award-winning publications: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1773224715... and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378517316... ). If you can’t access these publications because your institution is not subscribed to ScienceDirect, we’ll be happy to send you the pdf’s!

Related HN submission, also from The Macro:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12306284

First of all, this technology combined with the personalized manufacturing process is pretty incredible. Are there any plans to go beyond two stages of release? Or have the technology work for longer timeframes like 8 hours? Or an XR version, where a total amount is continuously released over a longer timeframe? These would all be desirable.

Additionally are there plans to have other nootropics included on your supplement list? I'm sure r/nootropics would love to experiment with this if the cost is reasonable and the methods of release are interesting.

Yes - the physical limit is 4-5 compartments so there are definitely plans to go beyond two. Longer timeframes depend on your digestive system - the outer bound is the maximum time before the pill moves through this system. XR version would be pretty awesome (kind of like a 'caffeine drip') - stayed tuned on that as we have some interesting stuff in the pipeline. As far as nootropics go, right now we are only planning to ship the fully formed capsules with our supplements inside.

Hiring for data? Seems like the potential for massively distributed research is there especially since feedback is a natural part of the process.

Yup, we will be using data to hone your pill based on your needs! If you are interested in working with us, ping us at info@multiplylabs.com.

I think this is a cool idea. As a vegan I take a few supplements at different times of the day, and it would be nice to have to only take one pill, even if that came at a premium.

On that note, are your products vegetarian and/or vegan friendly? I'm curious especially about the pill itself (gelatin?), the omega 3 (fish oil?), and the vitamin D3 (lanolin)? Thanks!

Our pill can be vegetarian or vegan depending on the supplements you choose! The pill shell of the pill is a pharma-grade polymer (not gelatin), omega 3 is derived from fish (though we are considering a plant option) and vitamin D3 is lanolin.

How will you prevent any issues with incompatibilities between supplements you put in the same compartment? Are you investigating this at all?

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