Question

New dietary supplements do not undergo the same rigorous approval process as new medications. You performed a redox titration to determine the percentage of a component in a dietary supplement and in a medication. When you performed repeated trials, your percentages varied widely for the supplement but were very consistent for the medication. Why do you think this happened?

Answer 1

In case of supllements for dietry we use a whole amount of source for the particular dietery. While in case of medication we use directly the chemical by titration.

Fo example let us consider the use of citric acid as dietry supplement and citric acid in medication.

For dietry supplement we may use any citrous fruit directly, and the amount of citric acid in different pieces of citrus fruits will vary, so it may vary the results by titrations.

While in case of medication we will use the extracted citric acid form such fruit and it will be an exact amount.

So amount of sample will be incosistent from the source to source of the dietery supplementry, however in case of medication we will use an exact prescribed amount of chemical for medication.