Proprietary Blends: What Supplement Labels Hide

Pick up almost any pre-workout, fat burner or test booster and you will find a line that looks something like this:

Proprietary Blend .......... 5,250mg
(Ingredient A, Ingredient B, Ingredient C, Ingredient D, Ingredient E, Ingredient F, Ingredient G)

That single line is doing a lot of work. It tells you the combined weight of seven ingredients. It tells you nothing whatsoever about how much of each one you are getting.

Why this is allowed

In the United States, dietary supplement labelling requires that ingredients be listed, and that the total weight of a blend be disclosed. It does not require that the amount of each individual ingredient within that blend be broken out.

The stated rationale is trade secret protection — a brand argues that publishing exact ratios would let a competitor clone the formula. That argument is not unreasonable in principle. In practice, it is used far more often to conceal how little of the expensive ingredient made it into the tub.

The one clue you get

Ingredients within a blend must be listed in descending order by weight. That gives you exactly one piece of information: the first ingredient is present in the largest amount.

Consider that 5,250mg blend of seven ingredients. It is entirely possible that it contains 5,000mg of the cheapest bulk ingredient and roughly 40mg spread across the remaining six. The label would be completely accurate. The order would be correct. And the six ingredients the marketing is built around would be present at doses far below anything that has ever been studied.

This practice has a name in the industry: pixie-dusting. Include a trace of something impressive so it can appear on the label and in the advertising, without paying for a dose that would do anything.

How to read a label in thirty seconds

Look for the words "proprietary", "matrix", "complex" or "blend" followed by a single milligram figure and a bracketed list. That is the pattern.

Then take the headline ingredient — whichever one the front of the tub is shouting about — and search for the dose used in research on it. If the entire blend weighs less than that single ingredient's studied dose, the maths has already answered your question.

Finally, check where the ingredient sits in the order. If the one you are buying the product for is listed sixth of seven, it is present in a smaller amount than five other things, and you have no idea how much smaller.

A worked example

Suppose a pre-workout advertises citrulline for pump. Research on citrulline for exercise performance has generally used several grams per serving.

Now suppose that product's label reads "Performance Matrix 3,000mg" with citrulline listed fourth in a list of eight. Even in an unrealistically generous split, citrulline cannot be near the researched dose — there simply isn't room inside 3,000mg once three other ingredients have taken larger shares.

The product is not lying. It contains citrulline. It just contains an amount that no study would have bothered to test.

What full disclosure looks like

The alternative is straightforward: every active ingredient listed individually, with its own milligram figure beside it, so the arithmetic is available to anyone who wants to do it.

That is how every Neurolab formula is labelled. Wrath states 6,000mg L-Citrulline, 3,200mg Beta Alanine, 1,500mg Betaine Anhydrous, 750mg Agmatine Sulfate and 400mg of total caffeine as separate line items. Block lists eleven individual glucose-disposal ingredients including the DigeZyme digestive enzyme complex. There is no blend line on any of our labels, because there is nothing we need you not to see.

It is a more expensive way to build a supplement. Once the dose is printed, you have to actually put it in.

Two things this doesn't mean

A proprietary blend is not automatically a scam. Some formulators genuinely do protect a ratio they have spent money developing, and some blended products are excellent.

And full disclosure is not automatically a guarantee of quality. A brand can disclose every dose and still have chosen mediocre ingredients or unimpressive amounts. Disclosure gives you the information to judge. It does not do the judging.

But it does move the burden. With a disclosed label, a bad formula is visible to anyone willing to read. With a blend, you are asked to take it on faith — and faith is expensive at sixty dollars a tub.

The short version

Turn the tub around before you buy. If the doses are individually printed, you can evaluate the product. If they're inside a blend, you are evaluating the marketing. More on how we manufacture and test on Our Quality.

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.