What A Proprietary Blend Hides

Pick up almost any supplement in this category and you will find the words proprietary blend followed by a single number. On GlycoAid that number is 500 mg and it covers fourteen ingredients. Understanding exactly what that does and does not tell you is the most useful ten minutes you can spend before buying anything in this aisle.

What the law requires. A manufacturer must declare the total weight of a blend and must list every ingredient inside it, in descending order by weight. It does not have to publish the individual amounts. That is lawful, it is longstanding, and it is used by a very large share of the industry.

What the ordering gives you. Descending order means the first name carries more than the second, which carries more than the third. On this label that means Berberine carries the largest share and licorice root the smallest. It does not tell you whether the gap between them is ten milligrams or three hundred.

Why that matters more than it sounds. Published research on these ingredients was done at specific doses, usually one ingredient at a time. Berberine trials commonly use several hundred milligrams a day of berberine alone. Cinnamon studies use grams. Alpha-lipoic acid research typically runs 300 to 600 mg. Each of those figures on its own is at or beyond the entire 500 mg of this blend.

That does not mean the product does nothing. It means no study can be pointed at and claimed for this capsule, and anybody who does so is filling in a number the label does not give.

The three questions worth asking of any blend. Is the total weight plausible for the number of ingredients? Are the well-studied ingredients near the top of the list or buried at the bottom? And does the page selling it quote trial doses as though they were in the bottle? The third question sorts honest pages from dishonest ones faster than anything else.

Why blends exist at all. The stated reason is formula protection: publish every amount and a competitor can copy the product exactly. That is a real commercial concern. It is also convenient cover for underdosing, and there is no way to tell from the outside which of the two you are looking at.

GlycoAid uses a blend. This site says so on the homepage rather than in the small print, and every ingredient page repeats it. That is the best available position when the underlying number simply is not published.