One of the bottles we sell has “25,000,000 mg” printed on the front. That is twenty-five kilograms. The bottle weighs about three hundred grams.
We still sell it. We just will not repeat the number.
That figure is not a typo and it is not unusual. It is the logical end point of a market where labels compete on the biggest number anyone can print, and almost nobody checks. Once you know the three ways it is done, you cannot unsee it — and you will start reading every supplement label differently, including ours.
Trick one: the compound weight
Magnesium glycinate is magnesium bonded to glycine. The magnesium is about fourteen per cent of that molecule. So a capsule advertising 1000 mg of magnesium glycinate contains roughly 141 mg of actual magnesium.
Both numbers are true. Only one of them is the reason you bought it. Guess which one goes on the front.
Trick two: the blend weight
When a label says 5000 mg and the ingredient is expensive, that figure is usually the whole blend — the active plus whatever cheap powder is standing next to it. Our own Urolithin A is sold this way, and we say so on its page: the 5000 mg is the blend, not the isolated compound.
Fish oil does the same thing with concentration. A 3600 mg fish oil at thirty per cent purity and a 3600 mg fish oil at sixty per cent purity are the same number on the front and double the difference in EPA and DHA, which is the part with the evidence behind it.
Trick three: the number is simply invented
Which brings us back to twenty-five kilograms in a three-hundred-gram bottle.
So what do we do about it?
Three things, on every product page in this shop.
- The elemental dose goes on the front. Not the compound weight, not the blend. The smaller, truer number.
- When the useful number is buried, we dig it out. Our cholesterol formula has “3600 MG” on the bottle. The part that actually lowers LDL is 1500 mg of plant sterols inside that blend — so 1500 mg is what our page leads with, because it is the figure health authorities recognise.
- When a label makes a claim we cannot stand behind, we print the claim and then disagree with it. One of our bottles says “Clinically Proven Works in Hours.” Our page quotes that and adds: we have not seen the trial that would support it. A night-time formula says “Sleep Well & Shred Fat.” Our page says the melatonin is real and the fat-burning is not something we will claim.
The obvious question
If we think a label is nonsense, why stock the product?
Because the product and the packaging are two different things. The capsules in the keto gummies bottle are apple cider vinegar and fruit extract, which is a perfectly ordinary thing to sell. It is the marketing around them that is fictional. We can fix the marketing. We do that by telling you what is actually in the bottle, what the evidence does and does not say, and where we think you should keep your money.
Sometimes that means our own page argues you out of the purchase. We would rather lose the sale than borrow the trick.
Every claim on this page is drawn from labels of products we currently stock. The relevant product pages carry the same figures.