Proprietary blends and fairy dusting: how labels hide the doses

What is a proprietary blend?

Pick up a pre-workout, a focus capsule or a greens powder and you will often see a long ingredient list grouped under one name with a single total weight beside it, something like Focus Matrix, 1,200 mg. Under that heading sit eight or ten ingredients, but no individual amounts. That is a proprietary blend.

US labeling rules let a manufacturer group ingredients into a blend and declare only the total weight of its other dietary ingredients: the botanicals, amino acids and specialty compounds that have no Daily Value [1][2]. Vitamins and minerals that have a Daily Value still need their own amounts [1]. The usual reason given is trade secrecy, and sometimes that is fair. The problem is that the same rule lets a company hide how little of the costly active ingredients it used.

One rule works in your favor. Ingredients inside a blend must be listed in descending order of predominance by weight [1][2]. The first is the most abundant and the last is the least. You cannot see the numbers, but you can see the running order.

What is fairy dusting?

Fairy dusting means adding a trendy ingredient in an amount far too small to do what the research says it does, just enough to print the name on the label. The marketing borrows the ingredient's reputation; the customer gets a sprinkle.

Here is how a blend hides it. Suppose a Recovery Matrix totals 5,000 mg and lists creatine first, then betaine, then a string of extracts. Creatine is effective at a few grams a day [3]. With creatine first in a 5,000 mg blend, there may be a real dose of creatine and very little of everything after it. The extracts at the end of the list, the ones doing the heavy lifting in the advertising, may be present in amounts no study would call meaningful.

A blend does not have to lie about what is inside. It just has to stop telling you how much.

How do you spot a thin blend?

You cannot get exact doses from a proprietary blend, but you can reason about it from what the label does show.

• Look for the words proprietary blend, matrix, complex or formula followed by one weight and a list with no amounts per ingredient.
• Compare the blend's total weight with the studied dose of its headline ingredient. If the whole blend is 500 mg but it features an ingredient usually dosed at 2,000 mg, the math does not work.
• Read the order. Anything near the end of a long blend is present in small amounts. If the star ingredient is listed last, be skeptical.
• Divide the total by the number of ingredients. Ten ingredients sharing 600 mg average 60 mg each, far below the studied dose for most of them.
• Prefer products that disclose every dose. A label that lists each ingredient with its own amount has nothing to hide.

Is every proprietary blend a red flag?

No. Some blends combine ingredients whose ratios are a real trade secret, and some are listed as a blend for tidiness while still being well dosed. The red flag is not the blend itself; it is a blend whose total weight is too small to hold effective amounts of what it advertises.

When a label shows you 200 mg of an ingredient and the research used 200 mg, you can judge whether the product is worth buying. A label willing to hide its doses may also be using the cheapest form of each ingredient, because nobody can check. If a brand will not show you the numbers, that absence is the information.