These days, almost all of us will have taken some kind of health supplement at some point in our lives. Whether you used omega 3 fatty acid, a multivitamin or a protein shake; supplements are everywhere and they are very well marketed at that.
And while some people will argue about the usefulness of certain products, supplements on the whole are certainly no bad thing in theory. Unfortunately, most of us just aren’t getting enough balanced nutrition from our regular diets and the result is that we feel low on energy and mood and may even be developing diseases and conditions that could be avoided. And if you’re planning on building more muscle, burning more fat or competing as an athlete, then you’re going to need all the help you can get.
The next step then, is choosing your supplement. And with so many companies all pushing their various products, it can be impossible to know where to start. So what do you do?
You look at the back label and you find out exactly what is in each product. Then you do your research and you learn what those ingredients do and how much of them you need to get any benefits.
Ultimately, the name on the front of the packet and the claims that the product make aren’t worth anything. Any company can call itself ‘Health Extreme’ and claim that it ‘May Help Health!’ but at the end of the day, what we’re interested in knowing is the science.
How to Choose Your Supplements
So you take your supplement, you turn it over and you start looking at the ingredients. You notice that you’re getting 20mg of this, 30mg of that and 200% of your RDA on those. This is great.
Then you read down a little further and you notice it says ‘proprietary blend’. So what does this mean?
Well, that all depends on who you ask. Because there are two very different answers: there’s what the product companies want you to believe and then there’s the truth.
What the product companies want you to believe is that the ingredients are ‘proprietary’ because they’re secret. They want to maintain the illusion that they have stumbled upon a magic formula that’s really powerful and that they don’t want their competitors to know about. It’s like the Colonels secret KFC recipe.
Often these proprietary blends will have exciting names like ‘Power Performance Matrix’ or ‘Synergy-Growth Complex’. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel and it gets us excited to gulp the product down.
The Problem With Proprietary Blends
So this all sounds great. Who wouldn’t want a product that’s packed with a secret formula called ‘galvanizing destruction blend’?
Unfortunately, the reality is a lot less glamorous. The real reason for proprietary blends is not that the company doesn’t want its competitors to know its secret formula. Rather, the reason is that the company doesn’t want you to know the formula (this is the formula that you’re eating bear in mind).
Why don’t they want you to know? Simple: it’s probably not very good.
When you check the proprietary blend on the back of the packet, the good news is that you’ll still be able to see the specific ingredients, just not the quantities.
So normally, what you’ll see is something like this:
Proprietary Blend: Ultra Maximus Power Protoform Blend (Arginine Alpha-Ketoglutarate, Creatine Monohydrate, Beta Alanine, Caffeine, Bitter Orange, Glutamate, Vitamin B6).
The ingredients are also listed in order of weight, so the higher the item on the list, the more of that thing you’re getting. You should also be given the total weight which might be something like 4,150mg.
This is in comparison to a non-proprietary mix, where you’ll get a full list of each individual ingredient and the exact quantity being used.
What you’ll notice 9/10 times when looking proprietary blends is that they pack everything into them. The proprietary mix will often be a list of 5 or more ingredients but at the same time, the total weight won’t be all that high.
The bottom line? You’re not getting very much of anything. And as a result, it likely isn’t all that effective.
Even if it is, you have no way of testing that or knowing it for sure. Almost always, you’ll notice that this list places the cheapest ingredient up the top and all the more experience-but-impressive-sounding ingredients down the bottom. This means that you might well be getting 1mg or less of many of the ingredients!
Seeing as the company has had to divulge the ingredients anyway, there’s really not any motivation for them to hide the precise quantities other than to trick people into buying something that sounds better than it is.
In the worst case scenarios, the proprietary blend might have sugar and water in it. In this case, you can’t be sure that you’re not getting mainly water!
Doses Matter
This is really bad news because doses really do matter. For one, many ingredients simply don’t do anything unless they exist in high enough quantities. Often the so called ‘benefits’ of a particular ingredient are based on studies that have been conducted on rats and mice. What you need to remember is that rats and mice are barely a fraction as big as humans. Therefore, the equivalent dose needs to be very high for humans to see anywhere near the same benefits.
At the same time, you need to know doses for your own records. This is particularly true if you intend on stacking multiple supplements as you might this way be at risk of overdosing if both products contain high amounts of the same ingredients. The only way you can possible know this is by buying products that divulge specific quantities.
And apart from anything else, this is simply a matter of principle. After all, you are buying a product that you intend to consume. Don’t you have a right to know what’s in it?