What A Supplement Facts Panel Has To Say

What the guide actually requires

FDA’s Dietary Supplement Labeling Guide is written as a list of questions. Three of them decide everything a buyer can learn from a bottle.

Note what Q34 concedes and what it still demands. A seller who does not want to publish six figures may publish one — but it must be a real total, and the order of the list then tells you which ingredient is the biggest and which is the smallest.

Why a graphic is not a substitute

HoneyPower’s listing graphic is a competent piece of design. Six tiles, six photographs, six names in clean type. It tells you the product contains honey, ginseng, maca, tribulus, horny goat weed and black pepper extract.

What it cannot tell you, because nothing requires it to, is whether the maca is 500 mg or 5 mg. Those are two completely different products and the graphic is identical for both.

A list of names tells you what to look up. A panel tells you whether looking it up was worth your time.

What the gap costs, in order

1. You cannot compare to research. Every published dose is a number. Comparing needs two.
2. You cannot assess an interaction. A pharmacist asked about black pepper extract will ask how much, and there is no answer.
3. You cannot compare two products. Two bottles naming the same six ingredients could differ by a factor of a hundred.
4. You cannot tell whether you are paying for ingredients or for a photograph of them.

The two-minute fix, which is yours not theirs

The panel exists. It is on the bottle, because it is required to be. The only thing that happened here is that nobody put a photograph of it in the material this site was given.

So the fix is mechanical: when the bottle arrives, turn it around, read the Amount Per Serving column, and write the six figures into the empty panel on this site’s home page. Two minutes, and you have the document the marketing did not give you.

Questions

• Is it legal to sell a supplement without publishing the panel online?

  Yes. The requirement is on the label, not on the advertising. A seller can market a product with a list of names and no amounts, and the panel on the bottle is where the quantities live.

• Does a proprietary blend mean they are hiding something?

  Not necessarily, and plenty of reputable products use one. It does mean you get one number instead of six, and the honest reading is that it protects a formula from being copied while also preventing a buyer from checking a dose. Both of those are true at once.

• What if the bottle arrives and there is no panel at all?

  Then something is wrong, and the order desk is the first call. A dietary supplement sold in the United States is required to carry one.

Sources

1. Dietary Supplement Labeling Guide, Chapter IV: Nutrition LabelingU.S. Food and Drug AdministrationThe document this whole site is about, and the reason the absence of a panel matters. Question 30: “You must list the quantitative amount by weight per serving immediately following the name of the dietary ingredient.” Question 3: “You must list the names and quantities of dietary ingredients present in your product.” Question 34 covers proprietary blends, which must carry the total weight of the blend and list its ingredients in descending order by weight. The guidance is marked “Contains Nonbinding Recommendations.”
2. FDA 101: Dietary SupplementsU.S. Food and Drug Administration“The FDA does NOT have the authority to approve dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness, or to approve their labeling, before the supplements are sold to the public.”

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