Proprietary Blends and the Dose You Cannot See

A proprietary blend may be listed as a single total weight with its component ingredients named in descending order by weight. Individual amounts are not required.

The stated justification is trade secret protection: a manufacturer that spent money developing a ratio does not want to hand it to competitors. That is a real commercial interest.

The concern is pixie-dusting: including an expensive, well-marketed ingredient in an amount far below anything studied, while cheap bulk ingredients make up the weight. The label is accurate; the impression it creates is not.

Because only the order is disclosed, an ingredient listed second could be 40 percent of the blend or 0.5 percent of it. Both are consistent with the same label.

Descending order gives you real constraints. The first ingredient is at least the total divided by the number of ingredients. The last is at most that same figure. With five ingredients in a 500 mg blend, the last-listed cannot exceed 100 mg.

Compare that ceiling with the dose used in whatever research the brand cites. If the studied dose is 300 mg and the maximum possible here is 100 mg, the citation is decorative.

Sometimes one ingredient is disclosed separately outside the blend, which lets you subtract and narrow the rest considerably.

Blends are more defensible where the ingredients are cheap and non-controversial, where the total is meaningful relative to studied doses, and where the brand publishes a third-party certificate confirming key actives.

They are least defensible where a headline ingredient is expensive, where the blend total is small relative to the studied dose of any single component, and where the marketing leans entirely on one named ingredient.

Prefer full disclosure where you can get it. Where you cannot, do the division and see whether the best case still supports the claim. If the arithmetic does not work, no amount of formulation language rescues it.