How to read a Supplement Facts panel
Six things to look at, in order. Most people look at the front of the bottle, which is the only part designed to persuade them.
To read a supplement panel: find it, read the serving size before anything else, check the amounts against researched doses, look for a proprietary blend and divide its total by each position, read the Other Ingredients line, and divide the price by the number of daily servings.
The front of the bottle is marketing. The back is information, and it is regulated in format so that it can be compared.
The front is marketing, the back is information
Every supplement bottle has two sides doing different jobs. The front is designed by people whose job is to make you pick it up. The back is regulated, standardised and boring, and it is where everything useful lives.
That is not a criticism of the industry; it is how packaging works everywhere. But it means a buyer who reads the front is reading the part written to persuade them, and a buyer who reads the back is reading the part written to inform them.
The method below takes about five minutes on a bottle you are holding, or two on a product page that publishes its panel. It works for any supplement in any category.
Step one: start with the serving size
Every other number on the panel is measured against the serving. Read it before you read anything else, because it changes what all the other numbers mean.
- A 500 mg amount in a one-capsule serving and a 500 mg amount in a four-capsule serving are very different products.
- Divide the capsule count by the serving size to get servings, and check it against the servings-per-container line. If they disagree, something is wrong.
- Servings are how long the bottle lasts. CogniMary is 60 capsules, a two-capsule serving, 30 servings, thirty days. Clean arithmetic.
- A large serving size is not automatically bad. It is often what an honest dose requires, and a one-capsule serving of a formula with twelve ingredients should make you suspicious rather than pleased.
Step two: read the amounts, then the percentages
Amounts are facts. Percent Daily Values are comparisons with a reference intake, and they are much easier to make look impressive.
| How it is written | What it means | How it reads |
|---|---|---|
| 240 µg vitamin B12 | An amount | Neutral |
| 10,000% Daily Value | The same amount against a 2.4 µg reference | Enormous |
| “High potency B12” | Nothing measurable | Marketing |
Scroll this table sideways →
All three describe one row on one panel. Only the first is usable, and the second is the one that ends up on the front of the bottle.
A percent Daily Value above a few hundred percent is worth a moment's thought, not because it is dangerous — usually it is not — but because it tells you the formulator is aiming at a number rather than at a dose.
Step three: find the proprietary blend
If the panel has a line that says “Proprietary Blend”, or a brand-sounding name followed by a single milligram figure, this is the step that matters most.
- Note the total. That is all the ingredients in the blend put together.
- Count the names indented underneath it.
- Remember the names are in descending order of weight. That is required, not optional.
- Divide the total by each ingredient's position to get the most it can weigh. Position one can be the whole total; position eight can be at most an eighth of it.
- Compare each ceiling with the dose that ingredient was studied at.
That is the whole technique, and it takes about a minute with a phone. Applied to CogniMary's 635 mg blend it produces the ceiling page, where six of eleven ingredients turn out to be unable to reach their researched dose.
Step four: read the Other Ingredients line
The line under the panel is where the capsule material, the fillers and the flow agents live. It answers questions the marketing never raises.
- Gelatin
- An animal product. If a label says gelatin capsule, the product is not vegetarian, whatever the leaf on the front implies.
- Rice flour, maltodextrin, microcrystalline cellulose
- Fillers. Ordinary, and a clue about how full the capsule actually is.
- Silicon dioxide, magnesium stearate
- Flow agents and lubricants. Present in most capsules and not worth worrying about.
- Titanium dioxide, artificial colours
- Worth noticing in a product you will take daily for months, particularly if you would rather avoid them.
- An allergen statement
- Legally required for major allergens. Its absence is not proof of absence, and a direct question to the seller is the only reliable route.
Step five: check the standardisation
For a plant extract, the weight alone does not tell you much. Two ingredients at 300 mg can differ by a factor of ten in what they actually deliver.
- A standardisation looks like “[NLT 20% Bacosides]” or “standardised to 24% flavone glycosides”. It names the active fraction and the minimum amount of it.
- An extract ratio looks like “10:1”, meaning ten parts raw herb produced one part extract. Useful, but not the same as a standardisation.
- Neither means you are buying weight of plant material, and the trial dose probably does not apply.
- A standardisation on a blend ingredient is a good sign about the formulator's intent and still does not tell you the amount.
CogniMary prints standardisations for two of its eleven blend ingredients — bacopa and green tea — and those are exactly the figures the trials used. That is a real point in its favour, and it runs straight into the amount problem.
Step six: price it per day
Bottle prices are not comparable. Cost a day is.
- Take the price of the bottle.
- Divide by the servings per container.
- That is your cost a day.
- Compare it with buying the two or three ingredients you actually wanted, individually, at published doses.
The last step is the one that ends most purchases in this category. Many multi-ingredient formulas cost more per day than buying the two ingredients you cared about at doses you can verify.
The five-minute version, on one card
Turn the bottle over. If there is no Supplement Facts panel, you have already learned the most important thing about the product.
If there is one: serving size first, then the amounts, then the blend total divided by each position, then the Other Ingredients line, then the price divided by the days.
Everything on the front is downstream of those five numbers. A label that publishes them is not automatically good, but a label that hides them has told you it would rather you did not check.
Order CogniMary from the official website
Sixty capsules, thirty days, and a panel you can read before you buy. Start with one bottle so you can see the price and the guarantee term before you commit to six.
No price was published to this website. The figure is on the checkout page.
References
The sources behind the numbers on this page.
- U.S. Government Publishing Office21 CFR 101.36 — Nutrition labeling of dietary supplements — eCFR.gov · source
- U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationDaily Value on the Nutrition and Supplement Facts Labels — FDA.gov · source
- U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationQuestions and Answers on Dietary Supplements — FDA.gov · source
- Kongkeaw, Dilokthornsakul, Thanarangsarit et al. — 2014Meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials on cognitive effects of Bacopa monnieri extract — Journal of Ethnopharmacology · PMID 24252493 · source
What the front of the bottle is for
It is worth understanding the front of a supplement bottle rather than dismissing it, because knowing what each element is doing makes it easier to ignore.
- The claim line
- A structure-function claim with an asterisk. Written to stay inside what a supplement may say, and not evaluated by anyone.
- The bullet list
- Usually three benefits. Note that they are almost always the same three across a category, because they are the claims that are safe to make.
- The botanical illustration
- Decoration. On this bottle it is a rosemary sprig, and rosemary is not on the panel.
- The word “Premium” or “Advanced”
- Has no definition. Compare it with the magnesium form on the back.
- The count
- The one genuinely useful number on the front. Divide it by the serving size to get days.
That last row is the bridge between the two sides of the bottle, and it is the reason the count is the only front-of-pack figure worth reading first.
Practising on three labels
The method sticks faster if you run it once on purpose rather than the first time you need it.
- Pick three products in any category: one you own, one a friend owns, and one from a search result.
- For each, write down the serving size, the days per container and whether there is a blend.
- For any blend, divide the total by the position of the ingredient the marketing is built around.
- Look up the researched dose for that one ingredient.
- Compare. Then look at the price per day for all three.
Fifteen minutes, three labels, and the method is yours. It is the single highest-return fifteen minutes available to anyone who buys supplements regularly.
Run it on CogniMary too. Our own answer is on the ceiling page, and if you get a different one we would like to hear about it.