How these pages are built
Stacky’s public catalogue carries figures published by a named authority, metadata the catalogue holds, and attributed third-party text. It carries no opinion of ours. These are the rules, written out so you can check the pages against them.
Stacky is an organisational tool, not a medical device. It does not provide medical advice, and nothing on these pages says what any substance or product does. Talk to a doctor or pharmacist before starting, stopping or changing what you take.
What the catalogue holds today
Counted from the catalogue when the page was built.
Where the numbers come from
Intake figures come from two authorities and nowhere else: the European Food Safety Authority and the Office of Dietary Supplements at the United States National Institutes of Health. Every row on a substance page carries four things — which of the two published it, what kind of figure it is, the population the authority stated it for, and a link to the authority’s own document, so you can read the figure where it was set.
| Authority | What Stacky reads from it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| European Food Safety Authority EFSA, European Union |
Dietary reference values and tolerable upper intake levels, as published by its scientific panels. | efsa.europa.eu → |
| NIH Office of Dietary Supplements NIH ODS, United States |
Recommended dietary allowances, adequate intakes and tolerable upper intake levels, as published in its fact sheets. | ods.od.nih.gov → |
EU rows come before US rows. Stacky is made in Portugal and the site is served into the EU. The order is the only difference: no row is preferred and none is left out.
Nothing is averaged, converted or reconciled. The two authorities reach their figures separately and do not always agree. Where they differ, both are shown, each labelled with the body that published it. A blended number would be a figure nobody published.
Only a tolerable upper intake level sets a ceiling. A recommended or adequate intake describes what an authority considers enough for a population; it is not a limit. The pages never treat one kind of figure as the other. Tiles are coloured by the kind of figure, and by nothing else.
What gets a page
Three rules, each a property of the record rather than a judgement about the substance, product or brand.
A substance gets a page when an authority has published an intake reference for it. That is 54 of the 200 substances in the catalogue. The rest are tracked in the app; a page for one would be a name, a category and a handful of links.
“None established” is an answer, not a gap. It appears when an authority examined a substance and set no figure. A substance with no row from either authority has no page.
A product gets a page when it is a verified entry in the catalogue with a named brand and at least one declared ingredient. User-submitted rows never get a page: what a person takes is health data, and a row they submitted can be linked to them. Medicines are excluded. An entry with no declared ingredient has nothing to show.
A brand needs three such products to have a page. A brand page is a list, and a list of one is not a page.
What is never published
The catalogue holds more than these pages publish. This is what is held back, and why.
| Never published here | Why |
|---|---|
| A recommended dose of our own | Stacky is not a body that may set one. Every figure on the site is one of the two authorities’, presented as theirs. |
| An evidence grade, a score or a ranking | A grade is a verdict on whether something works, and a verdict is a claim. No page here says best, top or recommended. |
| The catalogue’s own description and benefits text | Written for the app, unsourced, and phrased as what a substance is for. A sentence saying what a substance is for is a claim whoever wrote it. |
| Any goal or condition a substance is associated with | The association is a scheduling aid inside the app. Printed beside a substance name in public it reads as a statement that the substance acts on that goal, and where the goal is a condition it reads as a disease claim. |
| The level recorded on an interaction | In the app it is a sorting cue. Beside two substance names on a public page, a word such as beneficial is a verdict on a combination. The source’s own description and the scope it stated say the same thing without one. |
| Any judgement that an amount is high, low, safe or sufficient | Only the body that published a limit may classify an amount against it. The pages carry the figure and its authority, nothing more. |
| A comparison of a product’s declared amount against a published limit | The same classification, performed by juxtaposition. Putting a label figure next to a ceiling on a page carrying a brand name says something about that product that no authority said. Both numbers are on this site and a reader can hold them together; we do not do it for them. |
| Prices, shop links, vendor links, affiliate links | Stacky has no commercial relationship with any brand in the catalogue. A buy link is a recommendation, whatever the words around it say. |
The app shows some of these to the person using it. There, the reader has installed a tracker, entered what they take and can be asked a question back. Here the reader is anonymous, and a page is permanent: indexed, quoted and screenshotted long after it was written. So the public pages hold a stricter line than the app.
How the study list is built
Stacky has 930 study rows indexed against substances. A title reaches a public page only if it passes all four rules below. Given the same titles and these rules, you would produce the same page.
| The rule | What it removes |
|---|---|
| The title itself names the substance, or one of the alternative names recorded for it. | Papers returned by a keyword search that are about something else. A page headed with one substance and listing a study about another would be false. |
| The title does not name a disease or a clinical condition. | Papers about the substance that are framed clinically. The rule covers treatment and patient vocabulary as well as named diseases. |
| The title is a real title rather than a reference-work stub. | Fragments of a few words that carry no study. |
| Each title appears once. | Repeats of the same paper. |
The second rule removes papers that are about the substance. On some substances it removes every one, and the page then shows none and says so.
Why the second rule exists. A title naming a condition beside a substance name reads as a claim about that condition, whoever wrote the title and whatever the paper concluded. Stacky may not make that claim, and a disclaimer does not undo an implication the page itself creates.
A bibliography is not in itself a claim: an unranked, unsummarised, attributed list assembled by a rule the reader can see is a statement about the literature, which is why the rule is printed beside each list. A study’s presence is not a statement that the substance does what the study set out to test; some of the papers listed concluded it did not.
The full list stays in the app. Nothing is deleted; the filter decides what is published, not what is kept. Browse the substance references →
What a product page is
A product page shows what the manufacturer declares on its label, as recorded in Stacky’s catalogue: 189 products across 19 brands.
Nothing on a product page has been measured. A declared amount is a statement the company made on its packaging, reproduced and attributed to it. Each page says where the figure came from and how to correct it.
Where a manufacturer does not publish an amount, the page says so, and says it differently from an amount Stacky has not yet recorded. The first is a fact about the label, the second about the catalogue.
What a product page never carries: a ranking, a score, an endorsement, a price, a shop or vendor link, an affiliate relationship, or a comparison of a declared amount against a published limit. No product on this site is recommended over another, and no product is on this site because anybody paid for it to be.
The container on the page is the app’s own drawing, made by the same rules, so a tube is not shown as a bottle. It is an illustration, not a photograph. Browse the product catalogue →
How to correct something
A figure can be mistyped, a label misread, and an authority can revise a table without telling anyone who copied it. All three will happen here.
Write to support@stacky-app.com with the page and what looks wrong. We check it against the source the row names and correct the catalogue, so the fix reaches the app as well. If the source has changed, we follow the source.
If a page reads as advice, as a claim, or as a comparison, that is worth the same email. These rules are the standard Stacky asks to be held to.