@pipeworx/nih-supplements

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nih-supplements/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 5

NIH fact sheets for vitamins, minerals and a few botanicals — uses, safety, interactions with medications, references — plus real supplement product labels from NIH’s Dietary Supplement Label Database, and NCCIH’s herb safety/science summaries for the many popular herbs ODS itself doesn’t cover.

Tools

• supplement_factsheet(name, level?) — a topic’s ODS fact sheet: what it does, whether it works, safety, and interactions with medications. level is consumer (short, default) or professional (long, clinical, with a references list).
• supplement_factsheets(query?) — the bundled list of ~45 topics ODS publishes a fact sheet for, and which reading levels each has.
• supplement_labels(query, limit?) — search real product labels (brand, ingredients, amounts, claims) from the Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) by product, brand, or ingredient.
• supplement_label(id) — one product’s full label detail: ingredient amounts, other ingredients, manufacturer contact, precaution statements.
• herb_at_a_glance(herb) — NCCIH’s “Herbs at a Glance” science-and-safety summary for ~56 popular herbs (turmeric, ginkgo, echinacea, garlic, ginseng, milk thistle, St. John’s Wort, and more) that ODS does not have its own fact sheet for.

Auth

Keyless. All three upstreams (ODS fact sheets, DSLD, NCCIH) are open NIH sites with no API key.

Data sources

• https://ods.od.nih.gov/api/ — ODS fact sheet XML API (?resourcename=<slug>&readinglevel=Consumer|HealthProfessional&outputformat=XML). Trap: a fresh call from a browser-shaped User-Agent returns real XML; a rapid second call from the same client comes back HTTP 200 with an HTML bot-check page instead of data — same status code, no error, completely different body. Never trust an HTML-shaped 200 from this host as a “not found”; it means “slow down and retry”. This pack handles it with a per-isolate cache plus a floor between outbound calls (spacedFetch/MIN_GAP_MS in src/index.ts) — don’t remove that if you touch this file.
• https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/list-all/ — there is no live endpoint that lists every fact sheet (the obvious one 403s; the sitemap carries no fact-sheet URLs), so the ~45-topic inventory (ODS_TOPICS in src/index.ts) is bundled by hand from this page, read once on 2026-09-07. Almost every topic uses the same slug for both reading levels — level is a separate query param — except two: “Dietary Supplements in the Time of COVID-19” and Chromium each use a different slug per level, which is why the inventory stores consumerSlug/professionalSlug per topic instead of one shared slug.
• https://api.ods.od.nih.gov/dsld/v9/search-filter?q= — DSLD label search, keyless JSON. hit._source carries brandName, fullName, productType, allIngredients, claims, netContents, offMarket.
• <https://api.ods.od.nih.gov/dsld/v9/label/> — DSLD label detail (not documented anywhere findable; discovered by pattern-matching the search API’s _id field on 2026-09-07). Carries ingredient amounts (ingredientRows[].quantity[]), other ingredients, manufacturer contact, and the precaution/warning statements printed on the bottle.
• <https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/> — NCCIH “Herbs at a Glance” pages. No JSON-LD, __NEXT_DATA__, or XHR/API was found (checked 2026-09-07), but every page’s content <h2> carries a stable id attribute — background, how-much-do-we-know, what-have-we-learned, what-do-we-know-about-safety, keep-in-mind, for-more-information, key-references — verified identical and in the same order across 5 herbs (ashwagandha, echinacea, garlic, ginkgo, turmeric). That is the “sections are stable” condition required before building a bounded prose extractor over these pages (docs/herbal-sources-scope.md §2); it passed, so herb_at_a_glance ships. The ~56-herb list (NCCIH_HERBS) is likewise bundled by hand from nccih.nih.gov/health/herbsataglance, read once on 2026-09-07 — there is no live index for this either.
• German Commission E (the ABC English translation on herbalgram.org) is not ingested — it’s a copyrighted 1998/2000 work with no reuse terms on the page. If you need it, link the URL; don’t scrape or mirror the text.

Tools

• supplement_factsheet — A specific vitamin, mineral, or supplement’s NIH fact sheet — what it does, whether it works, safety, and interactions with medications. Sourced from NIH’s Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS). Two rea
• supplement_factsheets — The bundled list of ~45 topics NIH ODS publishes a fact sheet for (vitamins, minerals, a few botanicals) — what to pass as name to supplement_factsheet, and which reading levels each has. Optional `
• supplement_labels — Search real supplement product labels — brand name, ingredients, amounts, claims — from NIH’s Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD). This is what’s printed on a bottle, not the science behind an in
• supplement_label — One product’s full DSLD label detail: manufacturer contact, every ingredient with its amount, other (non-active) ingredients, and the precaution/warning statements printed on the bottle. Takes the num
• herb_at_a_glance — A popular herb’s science-and-safety summary from NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) ‘Herbs at a Glance’ series — what the science says, side effects and cautions, a