What supplement labels say — and what they don't.
Most supplement marketing is technically true and practically useless. A label can name a researched ingredient without telling you the dose. A page can cite a study that was run on something other than what is in the bottle. Neither is a lie. Both leave you unable to check.
The Ingredient Brief exists to close that gap. We read the panel, we read the research behind it, and we tell you which parts you can verify yourself — and which parts nobody can.
Start here
How to read a Supplement Facts label
The panel, line by line, in the order you should actually read it — and the two lines most people skip.
What a proprietary blend does and doesn't tell you
It discloses presence and order. It withholds dose. Here is the thirty-second check that tells you whether a claim is even arithmetically possible.
Why evidence for an ingredient isn't evidence for a formula
The most common and most expensive inference error in this market — and the one question that defuses it.
The four things we cover
Label Literacy
Reading the panel: serving sizes, proprietary blends, amount versus presence, and the terms that sound meaningful but aren't.
Ingredients
Standardized extracts, ratios, potency, and what third-party certification actually verifies.
Evidence
Association versus causation. What “clinically studied” refers to. How a real study gets turned into a claim it never supported.
Buying Basics
Comparing two labels without being fooled, and the questions worth asking before you type in a card number.
How this site is funded — and why we say so up front
Some pages on this site are advertising. They are labelled as advertising at the very top, before the headline, and they carry affiliate links: if you buy through them, we earn a commission.
Our editorial articles — everything in the four sections above — carry no affiliate links and no commercial CTAs. They exist because a reader who can read a label is a reader we cannot mislead, and we would rather be the site that made you harder to sell to.
The full policy is in our Advertising & Affiliate Disclosure and our Editorial Standards. We are not a review site, we do not publish star ratings, and we do not claim to have personally tested products we have not tested.