Pills, Powders & Liquids Which Form Is Best?

What’s the Difference?

The efficacy of a supplement depends on a host of factors—primarily, the physical and chemical stability of the active ingredient, the types and amounts of fillers added to it, and how fast it travels from your stomach to your small intestine, where it gets absorbed into your bloodstream. Aggressive marketing by supplement companies makes it confusing to try to pick out effective supplements, and dosage form is one of the factors most often overlooked by consumers. The information I’m about to share will help you differentiate between pill, powder, and liquid products so that you can select the supplements that deliver the most optimal results.

DEFINING DOSAGE FORMS:

PILLS:

Pills can be tablets or capsules. Tablets are solid dosage forms prepared by molding or compression, and they comprise a mixture of active ingredient(s), diluent (aka filler, to increase the final size), and other excipients (non-active ingredients) that improve the ability of the mixture to be formed into a tablet (binding agents, lubricating agents, etc). Capsules are soluble two-piece shells (usually gelatin or veggie caps) that hold a specific amount of loose powder containing many of the same things that a tablet contains.

Pros: Pills offer the most physical and chemical stability, have the lowest variability in content of API, are cheap to package and ship, and are highly portable.

Cons: The dissolution step takes longer than the other formats, pills can cause local irritation to GI mucosa (because there’s such a concentrated amount of active ingredient making contact with the stomach lining), and they aren’t ideal for supplements whose active ingredients aren’t very potent.

POWDERS:

These are self-explanatory; you buy a small container of pre-workout powder and use a little scoop to add the powder to water. Most pre-workouts are offered in this format.

Pros: Contents don’t have to be compressed (unlike tablets), and they have faster absorption than tablets.

Cons: Powders are easily affected by humidity and microbial contamination, the taste can be difficult to mask/requires addition of sweeteners, they require mixing, and the dosage is more variable than tablets due to sifting of smaller particles.

LIQUIDS:

These aren’t as common in the supplement industry because they’re inconvenient for manufacturers, retailers, and consumers.

Pros: They have the fastest absorption.

Cons: They are susceptible to microbial growth, have the shortest shelf life, are the least convenient to transport, and are the least cost-effective.

PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL STABILITY

Some compounds (active ingredients) are elusive and easily break down into other compounds with just a little bit of heat, moisture, or sunlight. (This is why prescription vials are most often an orange-brown colour; it prevents UV rays from coming in and facilitating photochemical reactions.) The main concern is moisture (hopefully, the chain of distribution is maintaining tight control over temperature and sunlight). Of the three dosage forms, tablets are the most resistant against moisture. Loose powders have more surface area in contact with the external environment, and the fillers used in loose powders (flavourings, diluents, etc.) are more hygroscopic, meaning that they attract more moisture from the environment. This causes the powder to cake up, which makes it more difficult to dissolve when you add it to water, which means less of it actually absorbs into your bloodstream through the small intestine. With liquid products, the fact that the active ingredients are immersed in an aqueous solution means that they decompose faster than dry forms, and they’re far more susceptible to microbial growth.

FILLERS

The technical term is “excipient,” and it refers to inactive or inert materials that comprise the majority of the final product. Fillers add size to a final product (can you imagine how hard it would be to accurately measure 0.2 grams of pure caffeine powder before your workout?) and provide flavour, colour, and microbial resistance. Different dosage forms require different additives. For example, a tablet formulation contains binders such as cellulose and methylcellulose to assist in keeping all of the ingredients together during compression, and disintegrants such as starch and polyvinyl pyrrolidone to assist in dissolving the tablet once it arrives in the stomach. 

ABSORPTION

Perhaps the most important factor that separates the different forms of supplements is explained by a field called pharmacokinetics. Whether we’re talking about a synthetic prescription, a pharmaceutical, or a naturally occurring compound, everything we put into our body goes through the stages of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.

The dosage form of a supplement (pill, powder, or liquid) determines how quickly it gets absorbed by your body. To illustrate this concept, an overview of the process of digestion is helpful: Whatever you consume orally travels into your stomach, where digestive enzymes and stomach acids break it down into its simplest components. When the stomach contents are sufficiently broken down (this generally takes between 15 minutes and two hours, depending on how much content is present), the valve separating the stomach from the small intestine opens and allows the passage of the dissolved stomach contents to enter the small intestine, where 95 percent of absorption occurs. Before the substance gets to your main bloodstream, it’s shuttled to the liver, where you lose a fraction by way of metabolism. The fraction you lose depends on the substance; some chemical structures are heavily metabolized (converted) into inactive components and only 10 percent makes it to your bloodstream, while other structures are barely changed by your liver enzymes and 90 percent of the dose is able to exert activity.

The stage that is most affected by dosage form (pill, powder, or liquid) is absorption. A pill needs to disintegrate into small particles, which then have to dissolve into stomach juices, while a powder that has been added to water in a shaker cup has surpassed the disintegration step, and a liquid, of course, has already surpassed both disintegration and dissolution.

Liquid is by far the fastest acting format, but it comes at the price of poor stability, low portability, and higher cost. For supplements that need to be absorbed as quickly as possible (pre-workouts, vasodilators, fat burners, post-workout carboloaders), liquid > powder > pill.

When is it most beneficial to take a supplement in pill form? When dosing needs to be as exact as possible, when taste is unbearable, when you need the product to be identifiable and portable (e.g., while travelling), or when you don’t require a fast onset of action and want to be economical (vitamins and herbal remedies such as those for liver health are good examples).

Loose powders provide the best balance of absorption rate and product stability. They are close to liquids in terms of absorption rate, but far more stable, cost-effective, and portable. Follow the tips below to keep your supps fresh and achieve even better absorption rates with powder formulations.

GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR SUPPLEMENTS

• Store them in a temperature-neutral spot, away from sunlight and changes in humidity (the pantry is an ideal spot).

• Leave the desiccant pack in the bottle. It absorbs moisture from the environment and keeps supps fresh.

• Always close lids tightly.

• For loose powders, shake the container periodically; different ingredients have different particle sizes, and over time, smaller particles sift to the bottom.

• When mixing loose powders in liquid, shake the mixture vigorously and allow it to sit for a minute so that the particles can thoroughly dissolve.

• When possible, take your pre-workout supplements (stimulants, fat burners, vasodilators) on an empty stomach 20 minutes before working out; this ensures that the active ingredients have left the stomach and entered your bloodstream just in time for your workout.

• If you cannot have an empty stomach during this time frame, avoid fats—they significantly increase the gastric emptying time. It takes the stomach roughly two hours to break down fats before the stomach contents can be emptied