The Problem with the Supplement Aisle
Walk into any health food store or open any supplement website and you’ll find the same pattern: enormous health claims, tiny disclaimers, and an ingredient list that requires a chemistry degree to evaluate.
Joanna Bacchus spent years as a supplement consumer before she became a supplement founder. And the experience left her with a specific frustration: not that the products were necessarily harmful, but that it was structurally impossible to know whether they were actually working.
“I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on supplements,” she tells Nour Abochama. “And I genuinely couldn’t tell which ones were doing anything. The labels gave me no real information. The claims were vague. The doses weren’t transparent. I was just hoping.”
That frustration became BioStrips — a supplement brand built around dissolvable strips with transparent dosing, published testing results, and a commitment to making the connection between ingredient and outcome legible to actual humans.
What “Proprietary Blend” Actually Means
One of the industry practices Joanna found most frustrating — and that Nour, from her laboratory background, corroborates — is the proprietary blend.
A proprietary blend is an ingredient list where multiple active ingredients are grouped under a single category with a combined weight. You know the blend weighs 800mg. You don’t know whether the active ingredient you care about is present at 750mg or 50mg.
Why brands do this: The stated reason is competitive protection — brands don’t want competitors to replicate their formula. The actual effect is opacity: consumers can’t evaluate whether a product contains effective doses.
What effective doses actually look like: Research on common supplement ingredients has established effective dose ranges. For example:
- Ashwagandha (KSM-66): Clinically studied at 300–600mg/day
- Lion’s Mane: Studies use 500–3,000mg/day
- Vitamin D3: Deficiency correction typically requires 2,000–5,000 IU/day
- Magnesium glycinate: Sleep and relaxation effects studied at 300–400mg/day
When these ingredients appear in a proprietary blend totaling 300mg alongside ten other compounds, every ingredient is almost certainly underdosed.
“The brands that hide doses often know the doses aren’t meaningful,” Joanna says. “If your product works, you want consumers to know exactly what’s in it and why.”
The Labeling Honesty Problem
Beyond proprietary blends, Joanna identified several labeling practices that obscure rather than inform:
Front-of-pack vs. back-of-pack storytelling. The front of a supplement bottle is marketing. The Supplement Facts panel on the back is regulatory. The two often tell different stories. A product marketed as “an advanced immune formula with 15 clinically studied ingredients” may contain those 15 ingredients at doses far below those used in the studies that produced the marketing claims.
“Clinically studied” vs. “clinically effective.” A brand can call an ingredient “clinically studied” if any published research exists on it, at any dose, in any population. Whether the ingredient is present in their product at the studied dose is a separate question — and one the brand doesn’t have to answer.
“Natural” and “whole food” sourcing claims. These terms carry marketing weight but limited regulatory definition. “Natural” has no FDA definition for dietary supplements. “Whole food” vitamin C means the vitamin C is derived from a whole food source — but if it’s present at 10mg, it’s still doing very little regardless of its origin.
Form matters. Not all forms of an ingredient are equally bioavailable. Magnesium oxide is cheap and common; magnesium glycinate or magnesium threonate are more bioavailable. Folic acid is the synthetic form of folate; methylfolate (5-MTHF) is the active form directly usable by the body, including people with MTHFR gene variants. A label that says “Folate (as Folic Acid)” and a label that says “Folate (as 5-MTHF)” contain different products despite identical names.
What Third-Party Testing Actually Verifies
Here is where Nour’s perspective as a laboratory professional adds essential context.
Third-party testing for dietary supplements — the kind conducted at ISO 17025 accredited laboratories like Qalitex — verifies specific, measurable parameters:
Identity testing confirms the ingredient is what the label claims it is. Botanical ingredients are particularly prone to adulteration and mislabeling — HPLC, mass spectrometry, and DNA barcoding are used to confirm identity.
Potency testing confirms the ingredient is present at the labeled concentration. A supplement claiming 500mg of ashwagandha should contain 500mg ± a reasonable tolerance.
Purity testing screens for contaminants: heavy metals (lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury), pesticide residues, microbial contamination, and undeclared substances (pharmaceutical adulterants, which appear in some weight loss and sexual performance supplements).
What testing doesn’t verify:
Third-party testing confirms what’s in the bottle. It doesn’t verify the clinical effectiveness of the formula, the bioavailability of the ingredients in the specific form used, or whether the studied dose has been achieved. A supplement can pass all testing criteria and still be physiologically ineffective because it uses low doses, poor forms, or ingredients with limited evidence.
“Testing is the floor, not the ceiling,” Nour explains. “It confirms the product is safe and contains what it claims. Whether it works is a separate question that consumers have to evaluate on the basis of the ingredients, doses, and evidence.”
BioStrips’ Approach to Transparency
Joanna built BioStrips around several specific transparency principles:
Full-dose disclosure. Every ingredient is listed with its individual dose — no proprietary blends. The dose corresponds to clinically studied ranges.
Form specificity. Ingredient forms are disclosed (methylfolate, not just folate; magnesium glycinate, not just magnesium).
Third-party Certificate of Analysis for every batch. Published on the website, accessible by batch number. Consumers can verify what they were sold.
Delivery form innovation. The dissolvable strip format was chosen for bioavailability — bypassing first-pass metabolism for certain ingredients, allowing faster absorption compared to capsules, and improving compliance (people actually take things they find easy to take).
“I wanted to build the brand I wished existed when I was a consumer,” Joanna says. “That meant making the things I wanted to know as a consumer — dose, form, testing results — the foundation of how we communicate.”
How to Evaluate Any Supplement Brand
Based on this conversation and Nour’s laboratory perspective, here is a practical framework for evaluating supplement transparency:
1. Check for individual ingredient doses. If the label shows a “proprietary blend” with a single combined weight, you can’t evaluate dosing. Move on.
2. Verify the form. For key nutrients (folate, magnesium, B12, iron), the form determines bioavailability. Look for the specific chemical form in the Supplement Facts panel.
3. Request a Certificate of Analysis. Any brand conducting third-party testing should be able to provide a CoA for the product batch you’re buying. If they can’t, they may not be testing.
4. Cross-reference the claim with the dose. Find the clinical study the brand is referencing. What dose was used? Is the dose in their product comparable?
5. Look for the testing credential. USP Verified, NSF Certified for Sport, Informed Sport — these are third-party programs that conduct independent testing and auditing. They’re not perfect, but they indicate a brand that has invested in external verification.
6. Check adverse event history. The FDA maintains a database of warning letters and recalled products. Searching a brand name in that database takes two minutes.
Key Takeaways
- Proprietary blends conceal individual ingredient doses and are frequently used to hide underdosing of key actives
- “Clinically studied” does not mean “present at the studied dose” — verify the dose independently
- Ingredient form matters: methylfolate vs. folic acid, magnesium glycinate vs. magnesium oxide, are meaningfully different products
- Third-party testing verifies identity, potency, and purity — it does not verify clinical effectiveness
- Certificates of Analysis should be available on request for any tested product
- Brands committed to transparency disclose individual doses, specific ingredient forms, and third-party testing results
This article is based on Episode 21 of Nourify & Beautify with Joanna Bacchus of BioStrips. Watch the full conversation on YouTube or listen on Podbean.
