What "proprietary blend" actually means

Walk into any vitamin aisle and look at the back of three "heart support" bottles. Two of them will list their formula as a proprietary blend — a single line item, a single milligram weight, and underneath it, a comma-separated list of ten or twelve ingredients in no particular order.

What that line is telling you, technically, is the total combined weight of every ingredient in the blend. What it is not telling you is how much of any specific one is in the bottle.

The legal sleight of hand

FDA labeling rules require companies to disclose individual ingredient amounts — unless those ingredients are part of a "proprietary blend." Then they only need to disclose the blend's total weight. So a 500mg "Heart Support Blend" can legally contain 480mg of a cheap filler (say, rice flour) and 20mg spread across the eleven actually-active botanicals on the label.

You will find no way to tell, from the label alone, which of these is happening.

Why companies use it anyway

The industry will tell you proprietary blends "protect formula secrets." This is mostly mythology. The real reasons are simpler:

• Cost engineering. If a company pays for 50mg of a clinically-studied dose but the bottle on the shelf has 5mg, hiding that gap is essential to selling it at a margin.
• Headline ingredient theatre. A blend lets a brand list "hawthorn" and "CoQ10" and "L-arginine" on the front of the bottle, while the actual amounts of those ingredients are too small to do anything.
• Inventory flexibility. If the price of one botanical doubles next quarter, the company can quietly reformulate without changing the front-of-bottle claims.

The studies that don't transfer

Every clinical study you'll see cited on a heart supplement website was done at a specific dose. Hawthorn berry trials show effects at 300–900mg/day. Beetroot nitrate studies use 5–8mmol of dietary nitrates. Vitamin K2 (MK-7) trials use 90–200mcg.

If a proprietary blend totals 400mg and contains eleven ingredients, the math is unforgiving: there is simply not enough room in the bottle for any of those ingredients to be at a clinically meaningful dose.

How to read a real formula

The label you want shows each ingredient on its own line, with its own weight, in its own units (mg, mcg, IU). It will look longer. It will look denser. It will look — and this is the point — verifiable.

You should be able to take that label, search the ingredient name and dose, and find the published study it's hitting. If you can't, the formula isn't being honest with you. And if the formula isn't being honest with you, the brand isn't either.

— Pepperton publishes every dose, every batch, every test. The label is the same as the spec sheet. There is nothing in the bottle we are unwilling to defend in writing.