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. Work out what a blend is actually telling you
A blend lists several ingredients together under a single total weight. Legally they must appear in descending order by weight, so you get the running order and you get the total — what you don’t get, on that line alone, is the split between them.
That is worth reading carefully rather than reacting to. Blends are how a lot of real formulation gets packaged: a delivery system built around one active, a standardised branded complex supplied and studied as a unit, an enzyme or probiotic component specified by activity rather than by weight. The question isn’t whether a panel has one. It’s what sits around it.
- The total weight. A 500mg blend cannot hold a 400mg dose of two different things. The arithmetic is a check in itself.
- The running order. Descending weight means whatever is named last is the smallest thing in the group — including, sometimes, the ingredient on the front of the box.
- Standardisation. “Ginger extract, 5% gingerols” or “6 billion CFU” pins down the potency of that component wherever it sits in the blend.
- What’s declared outside it. Vitamins and minerals carry their own line and their own %DV. Those amounts are exact whatever else the panel is doing.
A blend on its own is neither a red flag nor a reassurance. It’s a question, and the rest of the panel usually answers it.
The version worth walking away from is the one where the blend is the formula: nothing standardised, no amounts declared anywhere on the panel, and the ingredient the packaging is selling you sitting at the end of the list. That is a blend doing a marketing job, and once you know the four things above it reads very differently from one doing a formulation job.
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. What any blend is telling you. 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 every product page sets out what a serving contains, the form each nutrient is in, and the research the dose came from. You should be able to check our work.