All six HoneyPower ingredients and the dose each one was studied at
The long version of the dosage table, one plant at a time, with every trial named.
Why supplement labels hide their doses, and how to read one anyway
Proprietary blends, label dressing and the four checks that take a minute each.
Pick up almost any multi-ingredient supplement and you will find one of three things on the back: a full Supplement Facts panel with a number beside every ingredient, a proprietary blend with one number covering eight ingredients, or a list of names with no numbers at all.
Only the first tells you what you are buying. This article is about why the other two exist and what you can still work out when you are handed one.
What a proprietary blend actually is
A proprietary blend is a legal way of declaring a group of ingredients under a single total weight. The label lists the ingredients in descending order by weight, gives one combined figure — "Male Vitality Blend, 750 mg" — and stops.
The stated justification is trade secrecy: a competitor could otherwise clone the formula. That argument has some force for a genuinely novel formulation and very little for a blend of six botanicals anyone can buy in bulk.
The practical effect is that you cannot tell whether the 750 mg is 700 mg of the cheap ingredient and 50 mg spread across the rest, or something balanced. Since the ingredients are listed in descending order, you know the first one weighs the most, and that is the entire information content of the panel.
Fairy dusting, and how to spot it
"Fairy dusting" is the industry term for including an ingredient in an amount far below anything that was ever studied, so its name can appear on the label and in the marketing.
It is rarely provable from the outside, which is the point. What you can do is compare: look up what the ingredient's published human trials used, then ask whether the blend total could possibly contain that much of it alongside everything else on the list. When a blend totals 750 mg and one of its eight ingredients was studied at 1,500 mg on its own, the arithmetic answers the question for you.
We ran exactly that exercise on HoneyPower in our ingredient-by-ingredient breakdown, where four of the six plants were studied at gram-scale doses and two capsules hold roughly a gram and a half in total.
Label dressing
A related move: including a long list of ingredients at token amounts so the label reads as impressive. Fifteen names implies fifteen mechanisms. In practice a formula with fifteen ingredients in one capsule has, at best, one or two at meaningful amounts and thirteen along for the label.
The counter-intuitive rule is that shorter lists are usually more honest. A product with three ingredients and three numbers is making three checkable claims. A product with fifteen and no numbers is making none.
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Check Price On The Official SiteFour checks that take a minute each
1. Is there a number beside every ingredient?
If yes, you can evaluate the product. If the numbers are inside a blend, you can evaluate the first ingredient and guess at the rest. If there are no numbers, you are being asked to trust rather than to check — which may be fine, but you should know that is what is happening.
2. Look up the trial dose for the two ingredients you care most about
You do not need to check all fifteen. Pick the two the product is really being sold on, search PubMed for the ingredient plus "randomized", and read the dose in the abstract. Ten minutes, and it recalibrates everything else on the label.
3. Check whether the mechanism was ever tested in people
"Inhibits PDE5 in vitro" and "improved erectile function in a randomised trial" are separated by an enormous amount of work that mostly has not been done. A test-tube finding is a reason to run a trial, not a result. Look for the words "randomized", "placebo-controlled" and a participant count.
4. Read the claims for the word "supports"
Dietary supplements in the US may only make structure/function claims — "supports healthy energy levels" — and must carry a disclaimer stating the FDA has not evaluated the statement. Any product claiming to treat, cure or prevent a condition is either a drug or breaking the rules. "Supports" is not a weasel word; it is a legal category, and reading it as a promise is the commonest mistake buyers make.
What none of this tells you
An honest label is not the same as an effective product, and a vague label is not the same as a useless one. A full Supplement Facts panel showing 25 mg of an ingredient studied at 1,500 mg is transparently telling you it will do nothing. A blend that hides its numbers might contain sensible amounts.
The difference is that in the first case you know, and in the second you do not. That is the whole of what transparency buys you, and it is worth paying something for.
The honest bottom line
If a product will not tell you how much of something it contains, the default assumption should be that the amount is not impressive — because a company that had an impressive number would print it. That is not cynicism, it is just how marketing works. Every other claim on the bottle is there because someone decided it helped sales.
That reasoning is why our HoneyPower review spends its longest section on a table of other people's doses rather than on what the bottle says about itself.
