On the back of a lot of supplement tubs there is a line like this: Calm Focus Matrix, 620 mg. Underneath, in smaller type, five or six ingredients in a row with no amounts. That is a proprietary blend. The number is true. It is also close to useless, and it is meant to be.
What a blend is
A proprietary blend is a group of ingredients under one name with one total weight. They are listed in descending order by weight, and that is all you are told. The first is the heaviest, the last the lightest, and anything in between could be almost anything.
Proprietary means "ours". The brand is saying the recipe is a secret, and the law where the blend was born, mostly the United States, lets it keep that secret as long as the total is printed. Indian rules do not. FSSAI requires the amount of each ingredient with a nutritional or physiological effect to be declared. One number for five ingredients does not meet that, whatever the tub says. You will still see blends on imported tubs, where it is how they do things, and on Indian packs that are betting nobody checks.
Why brands use them
The polite reason is to protect a formula from copying. Anyone with a lab can find out what is in a capsule in an afternoon. A blend does not stop a competitor. It stops you.
The real reasons are cost and marketing.
A blend lets a brand put an expensive, well-known ingredient on the front of the tub and a pinch of it inside. The name does the selling. The amount, which would give the game away, is folded into the total.
A blend lets cheap bulk do the heavy lifting. If the first ingredient is inexpensive, rice flour, maltodextrin, a cheap herb powder, then most of the 620 mg is that, and the interesting names further down are dust.
A blend lets the recipe drift with raw-material prices without a reprint.
And a blend lets a long list of names sit in a small capsule. Twelve ingredients in one 500 mg capsule sounds generous. It is about 42 mg each if they were equal, and they never are. A tub like that at 1,800 rupees a month is expensive rice flour.
How to spot under-dosing
You cannot see the amounts. You can see the total, and you can find out what the research used.
Start with the first ingredient. It is the heaviest, so it has the best chance of being at a real amount. Find the amount the studies on it tend to use. If the whole blend weighs less than that, everything else in it is a sprinkle.
Then add up the usual amounts of every ingredient named. If the sum is bigger than the blend total, at least one of them is under. Usually most of them are.
Look at where the cheap ingredient sits. If a filler or a bulk powder is first, the blend is mostly filler by definition.
Read the words. Matrix, complex, system, stack, formula, support blend. A trademark sign after a made-up name. None of these is illegal on its own. All of them are a sign that a number is being withheld.
And check the total against the capsule. A 2,000 mg blend in one small capsule is not possible, and a label that claims it has a bigger problem than the blend.
A worked example, with made-up numbers
This is an example. The product does not exist and the numbers are invented to show the arithmetic.
Imagine a tub of stress capsules. The label says: Calm Focus Matrix, 620 mg per serving, containing ashwagandha root extract, rhodiola root extract, L-theanine, chamomile flower, lemon balm leaf.
Now the amounts the research tends to use, roughly: ashwagandha root extract, standardised, 300 to 600 mg; rhodiola root extract, standardised, 200 to 400 mg; L-theanine, 100 to 200 mg; chamomile and lemon balm, a couple of hundred mg each as extracts.
Add the low ends: 300 plus 200 plus 100 plus 200 plus 200 is 1,000 mg. The blend is 620 mg. At least 380 mg of research-level ingredient is missing before you open the tub, and probably much more.
Here is one recipe that fits the label perfectly: ashwagandha 500 mg, rhodiola 60 mg, L-theanine 30 mg, chamomile 20 mg, lemon balm 10 mg. Ashwagandha is at a fair amount. Everything else is there for its name. Here is another that also fits: ashwagandha 200 mg, rhodiola 180 mg, L-theanine 120 mg, chamomile 100 mg, lemon balm 20 mg. Now nothing is at a studied amount. Same label, same 620 mg, same price.
Now the plain version of the same product. Ashwagandha root extract, 5 percent withanolides, 300 mg. Rhodiola root extract, 3 percent rosavins, 200 mg. L-theanine, 100 mg. Three lines, three numbers, 600 mg, nothing withheld. The short list is often the tell. Ashwagandha products in India run from roughly 6 to 20 rupees a day, and the label is the only way to know whether the extra is buying extract or a name.
The blend's quiet cousin
One more number that hides another. Magnesium bisglycinate 500 mg is not 500 mg of magnesium. The glycine carries most of the weight; the magnesium is roughly 14 percent, so 500 mg of the compound is roughly 70 mg of the mineral. A tub shouting 2,000 mg is roughly 280 mg elemental, and on one Indian forum thread a 550 mg capsule was said to hold roughly 120 mg once the brand was asked. Magnesium oxide is roughly 60 percent magnesium by weight, which makes a label look generous, and it is absorbed poorly, which is why it does not do much. The honest line names the mineral, the form and the elemental amount: magnesium, as bisglycinate, 200 mg elemental. Anything less is a blend of one.
What to check on your label
- Every active ingredient on its own line with its own amount in mg or mcg, as Indian rules require.
- No word like matrix, complex, blend or formula followed by a single total.
- The first ingredient in any list is a real ingredient, not a filler.
- Herb extracts standardised, with the percentage printed.
- Minerals given as the elemental amount, not the weight of the compound.
- The amounts fit the capsule size claimed.
- If there is a blend anyway, its total is at least bigger than the studied amount of its first ingredient.
Then read ours the same way: see the label
