Guide
How to read a proprietary blend
The most useful thing this product teaches has nothing to do with this product. A proprietary blend hides every individual amount — and the same rules that permit it force a hard ceiling on every ingredient in it. Here is how to compute one, and how to tell when you are not entitled to.
The method in one line: divide the blend total by the ingredient’s position in the list. The FDA requires blend ingredients “in descending order of predominance by weight”, so if six items total 600 mg, the third cannot exceed 600 ÷ 3 = 200 mg. The method rests entirely on one thing: that the order was printed on a Supplement Facts panel.
The rule, in the FDA’s words
Nothing here is a trick. The labelling rule itself supplies the arithmetic. Here is the paragraph, from the FDA’s Dietary Supplement Labeling Guide, reproduced without cuts.
FDA — Dietary Supplement Labeling Guide, Chapter IV
“You must identify proprietary blends by use of the term “Proprietary Blend” or an appropriately descriptive term or fanciful name. On the same line, you must list the total weight of all “other dietary ingredients” contained in the blend. Indented underneath the name of the blend, you must list the “other dietary ingredients” in the blend, either in a column or linear fashion, in descending order of predominance by weight.”
Three requirements sit in that paragraph. Name the blend. Print its total weight on the same line. List the constituents underneath in descending order of predominance by weight. There is no requirement to print an individual weight, which is why a blend of six can carry one figure — and why complaining about the practice produces nothing while reading it carefully produces numbers.
Why the order forces a ceiling
Descending order means the first-listed ingredient weighs at least as much as the second, and so on to the last. From that, plus the total, an upper bound follows for every position. The argument is short enough to check in your head.
The whole of the reasoning
Suppose the ingredient in position n weighed more than the total divided by n. Every ingredient above it weighs at least as much as it does, so those n ingredients together would weigh more than n times the total divided by n — that is, more than the whole blend. Impossible. Therefore the ingredient in position n cannot exceed the total divided by n.
It needs no chemistry and nothing beyond the two things every compliant blend must print. It also has a useful shape: the bound on the first ingredient is the total itself, which tells you nothing, and it tightens with every step down. In a blend, the interesting arithmetic is at the bottom.
The division, six times
Six divisions on the blend in front of us. The total is 600 mg and the positions run one to six, in the order the six names are printed.
| Position | Ingredient, as printed | The division | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boswellia Serrata | 600 ÷ 1 | 600 mg |
| 2 | Curcumin | 600 ÷ 2 | 300 mg |
| 3 | Horse Chestnut | 600 ÷ 3 | 200 mg |
| 4 | Gotu Kola | 600 ÷ 4 | 150 mg |
| 5 | Quercetin Phytosome | 600 ÷ 5 | 120 mg |
| 6 | Ginger Extract | 600 ÷ 6 | 100 mg |
The first row is no use: bounding the largest ingredient by the whole blend tells you nothing, and reaching 600 mg would require the other five to be absent. Nor can the six be attained at once — at their individual ceilings they total 1,470 mg, nearly two and a half times the blend. Each bound is true separately; together they are far looser than reality.
Every bar here is conditional. The FDA’s descending-order rule applies to the Supplement Facts panel, and this product has no panel. The order used above is the order the marketing graphic and the seller pack happen to print the six names in. If that is also the weight order, the ceilings are 600 mg divided by each position. If it is not, the bars mean nothing. On every other product this desk covers the rule can be leaned on; here it cannot, which is why the chart is drawn with the caveat attached rather than in a footnote.
Where the method gets its authority
Now the part most explanations of this method leave out.
Go back to the quotation and look for the noun the requirement attaches to. It is a nutrition labelling requirement, from the chapter of the FDA’s guide about the Supplement Facts panel. Descending order is something a panel must show. Nothing governs the order in which six ingredient names are arranged in an advertisement.
So the method has two inputs and one hidden premise. The inputs are the total and the position. The premise is that the list you are reading is the panel’s list. Where it is, the arithmetic is compulsory and the seller cannot argue with it. Where it is not, the arithmetic still runs and produces the same six numbers — but they rest on a designer’s layout decision rather than on a declaration.
On this product the premise fails
There is no Supplement Facts panel. None appears on the bottle artwork, in any marketing graphic, or in the seller pack. The six names and the 600 mg figure both come from a graphic headed How Lymph Flow Works, three of whose four captions are cut off mid-sentence. This site therefore prints the six ceilings with the word if in front of every one of them, on every page, and treats the condition as an open question rather than as a footnote.
What to do when there is no panel
Most guides do not cover this, because on most products it does not arise. Five steps, in order.
- Say so, first and plainly. A missing panel is not a detail to work around. It is the largest single fact about the product, and any figure published afterwards has to be read in its light.
- Note where every number you do have was printed. A quantity on a panel is a regulated declaration. The same quantity in a sales graphic is a sentence somebody wrote, and it may well be accurate — but nothing compels it to be.
- Run the arithmetic anyway, and attach the condition. A conditional figure with its condition printed beside it is more useful to a reader than no figure. A conditional figure printed bare is worse than nothing, because a reader will carry it away as a fact.
- Write the question that would resolve it. Here it is one sentence: are the six ingredients listed in descending order of weight? A yes promotes every ceiling to a fact; a no deletes them all.
- Check what else the panel would have carried. A missing panel usually takes other things with it. On this product it takes the ingredient list off the label entirely, and there is no Other Ingredients line either — so on a liquid, no carrier, solvent, preservative or sweetener is named anywhere.
Step five is the one buyers underestimate. The panel is not only where the amounts live; it is where the list lives. Take it away and the six names become marketing copy, which is what they are here.
What a ceiling is not
This is where people who have just learned the method go wrong, in both directions.
A ceiling is not an amount. “At most 200 mg” is a statement about a list; “200 mg” is an invention. The 600 mg could be boswellia at 590 with five traces beneath it, or six roughly equal slices, and every document supplied would look identical.
A ceiling is not a typical value. There is no distribution here to be typical of. Nothing published distinguishes a ginger extract at 100 mg from one at a tenth of that.
And the asymmetry is total. The method gives an upper bound and never a lower one. You can show that an ingredient is not large; you can never show, from a blend alone, that it is not vanishing. That is what a proprietary blend costs a reader — and on a product with no panel, the cost is higher still, because even the upper bound comes with a condition attached.
Doing it on any bottle
Find the Supplement Facts panel
If there is not one, that is the finding, and everything below becomes conditional. Say so before you say anything else.
Read the blend line and the total
It sits on the same line as the blend’s name and it has to be there. No total means no arithmetic.
Count positions and divide
Total divided by position, in whatever units the total is printed in. A whole blend takes about a minute.
Label each answer honestly
At most, every time. If the list was not on a panel, add the condition as well: if this order is by weight.
Set each ceiling against a published dose
NCCIH and the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements are where to look. If a ceiling already sits below the studied range, you have your answer without ever learning the amount.
Run it here: 600 mg across six ingredients gives a best case of 600 mg for boswellia — and NCCIH records that “boswellia serrata extract in doses up to 1,000 mg daily has been safely used in several clinical trials lasting up to 6 months”. So the best case for the best-placed ingredient, on the most generous reading, already sits below the range the trials used, and every ingredient below it sits further below. That comparison is drawn on the label page.
Checking a breakdown against the bounds
There is one more use for the ceilings, and it only arrives if a manufacturer publishes the figures. The bounds are how you audit them.
- Every declared figure must sit at or under its bound. A breakdown putting the ginger at 200 mg is not describing a 600 mg blend in which ginger is sixth.
- The parts must sum to the printed total. Not approximately — a blend total is a declared weight.
- The order must match. If the published figures put the fourth-listed ingredient above the second, one of the two documents is wrong — and on this product, finding which would itself answer the descending-order question.
- The units must be per serving. A breakdown given per bottle, or per millilitre, is not comparable with a figure declared per serving until it is converted — and on this product a serving has no stated volume, so that conversion cannot be checked.
A breakdown failing any of those four tests is not a breakdown of the product in front of you. That is the practical reason to compute ceilings even when you expect the real numbers later: they are the only independent check a reader has. The contact page sets out how to ask for them.
Ask for the panel, and ask about the horse chestnut
A 2 fl oz bottle of liquid drops, two droppers a day, and no Supplement Facts panel on anything supplied with it. The only quantity that exists — 600 mg of blend a serving — is printed in a marketing graphic. No price was supplied either; the live figure and the 60-day return terms are on the seller’s checkout screen.
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