How To Read A Proprietary Blend Panel

A proprietary blend is a group of dietary ingredients printed under one heading with a single total weight beside the heading and no weight beside any name inside it. The dietary supplement labelling rule permits it and sets the conditions: the heading is identified as a blend, the total is declared, every ingredient in it is named, and the names are listed in descending order of weight.

So a blend is not a secret list. Every name is there, in a fixed order, with a real number attached to the group. What is missing is the one thing a reader wants — how that number divides.

Three things, and they are worth having. It gives the combined weight of everything in that group. It sets the absolute maximum any single name in the group could be. And added across the groups, it tells you how much of a serving is dietary ingredient at all.

That last one is the most useful and the least used. Four blends on the tub this desk sells declare 2,259.5 mg (about 2.26 g) between them, against a scoop of about 3.2 g. Roughly seven tenths of the serving is declared ingredient and the rest is flavour, sweetener, acid, salt and flow agent — a ratio a buyer can reach in one subtraction and almost never does.

It says something about the shape of a formula too. Nine names sharing 1,000 mg is a different build from five sharing 755 mg, whatever the split turns out to be.

Two numbers can be derived honestly from a blend total and there are no others. The ceiling is the whole blend: no name inside can weigh more than the group does. The floor is nothing at all — the rule sets an order rather than a minimum.

That is why every comparison on a blended label has to be written as a ceiling. Saying an ingredient is present at a certain amount is an invention. Saying it cannot exceed a certain amount is arithmetic on a printed number, and it is the strongest true statement available.

Every figure in the third column is the whole blend. Each named item shares it with four others, so the real share is smaller.

The last column is doing something specific. It says that even in the impossible case where one name is the entire blend and the other four weigh nothing, the amount would still be a fraction of what the published work used. When the ceiling already falls short, the split has stopped mattering.

The names inside a blend are printed in descending order of weight. That is a requirement rather than a convention — and it is the most under-used line on a supplement label.

It means the first name weighs at least as much as every name after it. It means the last name in a group of nine can be no more than a ninth of the group, because the eight above it each weigh at least as much again. And it means a name you hoped to find near the top is telling you something when it appears near the bottom.

What it does not give you is the split. Descending order fits a formula where one name takes almost the whole weight and one where all of them are close to equal. Read the order as a ranking, not a ratio.

It means no reference intake has been set for that ingredient, so there is no percentage to print. It does not mean the ingredient is unstudied — and it certainly does not mean any amount of it is fine.

The contrast is usually on the same panel. Selenium here is declared at 1 mcg and printed as 2% of the Daily Value, because a reference intake exists: the adult allowance is 55 mcg a day. The botanical blends beside it carry no established Daily Value, because no such figure exists for beet root or dandelion.

Under the panel sits a line of ingredients that are not dietary ingredients: flavours, acids, sweeteners, anti-caking and flow agents. No amounts are given there and none are required.

In a capsule that line is short and light. In a powder it can be most of the serving, because the powder has to taste of something and pour freely.

It can also hold something that belongs in the formula. Resistant dextrin sits in that line here, and it is a fibre of the same family as the fructooligosaccharides inside the Gut Health blend.

One number bounds all of it. Total carbohydrate is declared per serving, and every fibre in the tub sits inside that figure whether it is in a blend or in the line below. On this label it is 3 g, which caps the fructan content of a scoop at a quarter of the amount the constipation trial used. MedlinePlus is also plain that increasing fibre too quickly leads to gas, bloating and cramps.

Two reasons are given and both are real. A published split is a recipe a competitor can copy in an afternoon, and a blend total lets a formulator shift between suppliers as harvests and prices move without reprinting the label.

Neither is sinister and the practice is lawful. That is worth saying plainly, because the alternative reading of a blend heading is that something is being hidden.

The cost falls on the reader. A buyer who wants to know whether an ingredient is present at the amount a trial used cannot find out.

Four headings: a 1,000 mg polyphenol group of nine fruit and root powders, a 755 mg gut group of five, a 450 mg liver group of five, and a 52.5 mg probiotic group, with a 2 mg line beside them for a single named organism. Nineteen plant names, 2,259.5 mg (about 2.26 g) declared.

The ceilings on the three botanical groups already sit under the published amounts for the ingredients most people are buying them for, and the order says beet root leads the polyphenol group and cassia cinnamon leads the gut group. The precision is real — and it stops one column short.

The panel page prints it line by line, and the dosage section carries the whole ceiling table. The companion guide, powder or capsule, takes the other half of the question.