Reading A Supplement Label Properly
Last updated · 17 September 2026
The most useful two minutes you can spend on any supplement happen with the bottle in your hand, not on the brand's website. Here is what to look at, in order.
Line one: serving size
Read this before anything else, because every number below it is stated per serving — and a serving is not always one capsule.
A bottle of 60 capsules with a two-capsule serving is thirty days, not sixty. A product whose ingredient amounts look impressive at four capsules a serving is a different proposition from one delivering the same figures in one. This is the single most common way price comparisons go wrong.
Mind Honey is one capsule, thirty capsules, thirty days. That is deliberately boring and it makes the arithmetic trivial.
Line two: the proprietary blend, if there is one
A proprietary blend is a group of ingredients given a collective name and a single total weight, with no individual amounts disclosed. It is legal and it is common.
What it hides is proportion. A "1,200 mg Cognitive Matrix" might be 1,150 mg of one cheap filler ingredient and trace amounts of the five impressive ones listed after it — and the label would be entirely accurate. Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, so the first name in a blend is the bulk of it, but you cannot tell whether "first" means 40% or 96%.
The same blend, two very different bottles
Line three: "other ingredients"
Below the main panel sits a smaller list — capsule material, flow agents, fillers. It is worth thirty seconds if you have an allergy, avoid gelatin, or react to a common excipient. It is also the line that tells you whether the capsule is vegetarian, which the front of the bottle often does not.
What the panel cannot tell you
Three things, and knowing them keeps expectations honest:
- Whether the dose is a studied one. An ingredient present at a fraction of the amount used in research is still accurately listed.
- Whether the extract matches the research. Standardisation and extract ratio matter enormously and are often absent from the label entirely.
- Whether the product has been tested. Almost no finished supplement has been through a trial, ours included. A panel describes contents, not evidence.
Why our own list is on the bottle rather than this site
Because formulas are revised between production runs, and a webpage cannot track that. The panel on the bottle in your hand is the only version guaranteed to describe that bottle. Where our site and your label disagree, the label is right — which is the same standard we would want applied to anybody else's product.