Common questions we came across whilst researching our osteo biflex review
There are a lot of different versions of Osteo Bi Flex, so we'll do our best to cover off the most popular here.
Starting with the ingredients that are common across most all of the Osteo Bi Flex products.
Glucosamine HCL is both one of the most effective ingredients in Osteo bi flex and the one that causes the most problems. Meta analysis of multiple studies suggest that it is beneficial for a subset of people [1], but does not work for everyone. And to top it off side effects we're present in many cases, most mild, but there were some severe ones as we have reffered to several times throughout our Osteo bi flex review. Glucosamine HCL is the purer and stronger form of Glucosamine, which is normally supplemented as a sulphate, a dosage of glucosamine sulphate at 1500mg would be fine and is standard, but HCL is around 4 times purer. This does lead to a slight increase in the supplements performance for some people, but it is also the reason for a lot of the Osteo Bi Flex side effects complaints.
Boswellia is marked as an effective anti inflammatory [2] it's included in most of the best joint supplements, and it's well tolerated across the board, Osteo bi flex get the dosage right, no complaints here.
Now we'll get onto the ingredients that are only present in OsteoBiFlex Triple Stregnth.
Chrondroitin/MSM these are good ingredients, but the Chrondroitin has a similar effect to the glucosamine, and it makes it a bit redundant when you already have so much glucosamine. The other catch is we'd have liked to have seen a higher dosage as 275mg of the two combined is a little low if they're going to be included. With MSM needing to dosed 10X more at least.
Lastly we have the sections which will vary wildly between the different types of Osteo Bi Flex, the vitamin blends
The most popular vitamin blend with Osteo Bi Flex customers is ( Vitamin C, Manganese & Sodium) and that's less than ideal to say the least. This blend is a bit of a failure, we'd typically expect to see vitamin D in a joint supplement as it's a common deficiency (nearly half of all Americans) and a lack of it causes joint pain. The vitamins included will help, but far less than a vitamin D supplement would[3].
That said there is a version which contains vitamin D3, but this only has vitamin D3 in it and not the vitamin C or Manganese which have been shown to be effective for helping joint pain particularly vitamin C for arthritis[4].
Perhaps most unfortunately however, is that when they looked at additional vitamins they didn't look at vitamin K which has been shown to slow the progression of OA. A vitamin D, K and C version would've been much better.
References
1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686334/
2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7368679/
3 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5372953/
4 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8543556/
5 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7281970/