Proprietary Blends: What Supplement Labels Don't Tell You

If you read supplement labels for long enough, you'll notice a phrase that appears everywhere and explains almost nothing: proprietary blend. RetraBurn uses one — twenty-one ingredients grouped under a single heading. So does most of its competition. Understanding what that phrase permits is probably the single most useful piece of label literacy you can pick up.

What the rules actually allow

Under US dietary supplement labelling regulations, a manufacturer combining multiple ingredients may declare them as a blend. In that case the label must show:

• The total weight of the blend
• Every ingredient in it, listed in descending order by weight

What it need not show is how much of each individual ingredient the blend contains. That single omission is the whole story.

Why manufacturers do it

The stated reason is trade secrecy: a fully disclosed formula can be copied by a competitor in an afternoon. That's a legitimate commercial concern, and it's why the rule exists.

The less flattering reason is fairy dusting — including a trace of an impressive, expensive or heavily marketed ingredient purely so it can appear on the label, while the bulk of the blend consists of something cheap. A blend lets a product advertise twenty-one ingredients without revealing that nineteen of them are present in amounts too small to do anything.

Both motives produce identical labels. From the outside, you cannot tell them apart.

Doing the arithmetic

You can't calculate individual doses, but you can often bound the problem, and it's worth learning how.

Suppose a product declares a 500 mg proprietary blend containing twenty ingredients. Even distributed perfectly evenly — which never happens — that's 25 mg each. Now compare against the research: green tea studies use several hundred milligrams of catechins, carnitine trials use one to three grams, African mango trials use 150 mg twice daily. The arithmetic doesn't work. It can't work. There is no way to fit twenty research doses into 500 mg.

In practice the distribution is heavily skewed: the first two or three ingredients usually account for most of the weight, and the tail is close to nothing. Which brings us to the one genuinely useful piece of information a blend does give you.

Descending order is your best clue

Because ingredients must be listed by weight, position tells you something. The first ingredient is the most abundant; the last is the least. If the ingredient you're buying the product for appears near the end of the list, that's informative, and not in a good way.

It's a blunt instrument — descending order tells you rank, not ratio, and the gap between first and second could be enormous or negligible. But it's better than nothing, and most people never look.

Reading RetraBurn's label with this lens

RetraBurn's blend opens with maca root, African mango seed and grape seed extract, and runs through to monoammonium glycyrrhizinate, GABA, L-tryptophan and L-carnitine HCl near the end. Chromium picolinate is declared separately at 7 mcg, outside the blend.

A fair reading: the front of the list is where most of the material is. L-carnitine appearing late suggests it is present in a much smaller amount than the multi-gram doses used in carnitine research. We can't prove that, and we're not claiming to — but it's the reasonable inference from the information the label provides, and it's the kind of inference worth making before you buy anything.

Five questions worth asking about any supplement

1. Are amounts disclosed? Fully transparent labels are a genuine mark of confidence. Their absence isn't damning — most of the market uses blends — but it's a point against.
2. How many ingredients, and how big is the blend? Fewer ingredients at real doses beats a long list at token ones, every time.
3. Where does the ingredient you care about sit in the order? Front or back?
4. How do the numbers compare to the research? Look up the studied dose. Then look at what you're being offered.
5. What does the marketing promise? The more dramatic the claim, the more carefully you should read everything else.

The bottom line

Proprietary blends are legal, standard, and often perfectly innocent. They also make it impossible to verify whether you're getting a meaningful dose of anything. That's not a reason to avoid every product that uses one — you'd rule out most of the category — but it is a reason to keep expectations proportionate and to buy on the strength of the refund policy as much as the ingredient list.

References

• FDA — Dietary Supplements
• NIH Office of Dietary Supplements — All Fact Sheets