1. Supplement ingredients lists do not tell you the whole picture
“Ingredients labels are supposed to tell you how much is in there but they don't always get it right because some of them are using subpar manufacturers who simply can't technically ensure that the right doses of all the ingredients. Secondly, most supplements are pretty non-functional, they're just vitamins and minerals or some people call them trace elements and they're designed to give you the correct daily dosage but there's no evidence that they actually do anything. In fact, multivitamins are amongst the most common category of supplements to have no benefits at all. That's been proven again and again.”
2. There are no minimum dosage guidelines for supplement manufacturers
“They don't have to do anything. In fact, if any ingredient is very expensive and then typically what some unscrupulous manufacturers will do is say it contains ingredient X, which people think is a good thing, but it's present at way below the dose that was shown to be effective in the clinical paper. There's an awful lot of very shoddy products around."
3. Many supplement brands dose well below the clinically proven level
“Some extracts and compounds are very expensive and if a company is geared towards cutting costs, including nominal amounts is one of the ways they will do it. These companies know that the people who obsess about a particular extract will look for the inclusion of that extract. Only then, when you look closely at what's in the supplement, it’s dosed way below the level that was shown to be effective in clinical trials. So there's a label claim but now there's nothing to back that up.”
If a supplement provides half of a clinical dose, you do not get half the benefit
“It doesn’t work like that. You may get none, you may get at all. You can't generalize because different actives work in different ways. If an ingredient is scientifically proven to work, it will have done so at a specific amount and it's imperative that you're taking that full proven amount. ”