How to read a Supplement Facts panel in about a minute

A Supplement Facts panel is a legal document pretending to be a nutrition label. Once you know which lines are load-bearing, reading one takes about a minute and it works on any jar in the aisle, not just this category.

Begin at the top, with serving size and servings per container. Everything below is per serving, and a generous-looking panel is sometimes a two-scoop panel. If a jar says 60 servings and the directions say two scoops a day, that jar is a month, not two. Work out the daily amount before you compare anything, or you will compare a single serving against someone else's double.

Now go down the ingredient column and look for the word blend. A proprietary blend is a group of ingredients printed with one weight beside the whole group. It is legal, it is common, and it means the amounts are not disclosed. The rule is that the names inside a blend appear in descending order by weight, which sounds like disclosure and is not: the first name could be almost all of it and the last a dusting, and both are printed the same way. When you see a blend, the honest reading is that you know what went in and not how much.

Count what is left. If a panel lists ten ingredients and every one carries its own number, you can add them up and check the total against the serving size. If they do not add up, something unlisted is making up the weight. That arithmetic is the single most useful thing you can do with a label, and most panels will not survive it.

Look at the form of the plant ingredients, not just their names. Leaf, juice powder, extract and concentrate are different products from the same plant at the same milligram. An extract will say its standardization — a percentage of the marker compound — and that number is what makes a dose comparable to the trials. A whole milled root at 200 mg and a standardized extract at 200 mg are not interchangeable, and a label that tells you which one it used is doing you a favor.

Read Other Ingredients, which sits under the panel in smaller type and is where the answer often lives. This is where maltodextrin, rice flour, silica, natural flavors, stevia and citric acid appear. None of those are in the panel above because none of them are what you are buying. A short Other Ingredients line is a good sign. The word none is a better one.

Check what the organic claim is attached to. Certified organic as a finished product is a different claim from organic listed against a few ingredient lines, and the second is far more common. A finished-product certification means the formula was certified, not just some of its inputs. Two ingredient types cannot carry the seal at all under USDA rules — enzymes and probiotics are not crops — so a jar containing either will never be 100% organic, and a label that explains that rather than rounding up is telling you something about how the rest of it was written.

Last, look for a strain name if there is a probiotic, and a unit if there is an enzyme. Probiotic effects are strain-specific, so "10 billion CFU, five strains" with no strain names and no per-strain counts is a number without a referent. An enzyme needs an activity unit — GDU for bromelain, for instance — because milligrams of an enzyme say nothing about what it does.

Nine lines, one minute. Serving size, daily total, any blend, whether the amounts add up, the form of each plant, Other Ingredients, what the organic claim covers, strain names, enzyme units. Run it on whatever you are about to buy. Run it on this one →

Daily Greens and Adaptogens

$59.95/JAR · $53.96 SUBSCRIBED · 30-DAY SUPPLY

30-DAY RETURNS · OPENED OR NOT · RETURN LABEL COST COMES OUT OF THE REFUND

More in the Journal