Reading Any Supplement Label

These five checks take about two minutes at a shelf or on a product page, and they work on any supplement in any category. Use them on GlycoAid as well; that is the point of publishing them here.

1. Find the serving size first. Everything on a supplement facts panel is per serving, and a serving is not always one capsule. A bottle of ninety capsules at three per serving is a thirty day bottle, not a ninety day one. This single check catches most misleading price comparisons in the aisle.

2. Look for the word proprietary. If it appears, individual amounts are not published and no research dose can be verified. That is lawful and extremely common. It is also a limit on what anybody, including the seller, can honestly claim.

3. Read the order of the list. Ingredients are in descending order by weight. If the ingredient the advertising is built around is the last name in a long blend, that tells you something the marketing will not.

4. Check whether trial doses are being quoted. A page that cites a study dose for an ingredient sitting inside an undisclosed blend is quoting a number that is not on the label. This is the fastest way to sort honest pages from dishonest ones.

5. Read the other ingredients line. Capsule shell, flow agents, fillers. Vegetable cellulose means a vegetarian capsule; gelatin does not. Nobody reads this line and it is where the vegetarian and allergen answers actually live.

What none of this settles. Whether the product works for you. The label tells you what you are buying and the price tells you what it costs. The first is checkable in two minutes and the second in one. The third question takes a month, which is why the length of the guarantee is worth reading as carefully as the panel.