The front of a supplement bottle is advertising. The back is a document. Almost everything you need to judge a product is printed on the back, in six-point type, in a format that has barely changed in thirty years — and almost nobody reads it, which is roughly the arrangement the industry has settled into.
It takes about ninety seconds to read a supplement facts panel properly once you know what you’re looking at. Here is the order we’d go in.
1. Start with the serving size, not the dose
The first line of the panel tells you what a serving is, and the second tells you how many servings are in the container. Everything below is expressed per serving, so a bottle claiming 400mg of an ingredient may be doing so across four capsules taken twice a day.
This matters twice. It changes the real dose you’re getting, and it changes the real price — a ninety-capsule bottle at a three-capsule serving is a thirty-day supply, not a three-month one. Divide the price by servings, not by capsules, before comparing two products.
2. Look for the words “proprietary blend”
A proprietary blend lists several ingredients together under a single total weight. Legally, the ingredients must appear in descending order by weight — but the individual amounts stay hidden.
In practice this is almost always used the same way. The blend leads with something cheap and bulky, and the ingredient the packaging is actually selling you sits at the end of the list, present in an amount that would look embarrassing if printed. A 500mg blend can contain 480mg of rice flour and 2mg of the interesting thing.
If a formula is worth taking, disclosing the doses can only help it. The blend exists to solve a problem the manufacturer has, not one you have.
There is a legitimate version of this argument — a genuinely novel ratio a competitor could copy. It’s rare, and it doesn’t apply to a magnesium blend.
3. Treat %DV with suspicion
The percentage in the right-hand column is the percent of the Daily Value: a reference amount originally derived from the intake needed to avoid deficiency across a population. It is a floor, not a target, and for several nutrients it has little relationship to the doses used in research.
So 4,000% DV of vitamin B12 sounds alarming and usually isn’t meaningful, while 100% DV of magnesium may still be below what any study on magnesium and sleep actually used. Read the milligrams. The percentage is context, not a verdict.
You’ll also see ingredients with no %DV at all — botanicals, amino acids, probiotics — because no Daily Value has been established. That’s normal. It just means the number in milligrams is the only information you’re getting.
4. Read the form, not just the nutrient
This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that separates a useful bottle from a decorative one. “Magnesium” isn’t an ingredient — magnesium oxide, magnesium glycinate and magnesium citrate are, and they behave differently once swallowed.
- Minerals: look for chelated or bisglycinate forms rather than oxides. Oxides are dense and cheap, which flatters the label and not much else.
- Folate: L-methylfolate is already in the usable form; folic acid has to be converted first, and not everyone converts it efficiently.
- B12: methylcobalamin over cyanocobalamin, for the same reason.
- Vitamin D: D3 (cholecalciferol) rather than D2, ideally alongside K2.
Better forms cost more per kilo, which is exactly why their absence tells you something about the rest of the product.
5. Finish with “Other ingredients”
Below the panel, in a separate line, sits everything that isn’t an active: capsule material, flow agents, binders, sweeteners, colours. It’s the least glamorous line on the bottle and often the most revealing.
Some of what’s there is unavoidable — a capsule has to be made of something, and a small amount of a flow agent keeps a production line running. What’s worth noticing is the length of the list relative to the actives, and whether it contains things you were specifically trying to avoid: gelatin in a product marketed as vegan, titanium dioxide, artificial colours in a capsule nobody will ever see.
The ninety-second version
Serving size. Any blends? Milligrams, not percentages. What form is each nutrient in? What’s in the other-ingredients line? If a label survives all five, it was probably built by someone who expected it to be read.
That’s the entire standard we hold our own labels to — which is why we print every active at its exact dose, and why there isn’t a proprietary blend anywhere in the range. You should be able to check our work.