Each is checked against a source linked from the label page. They are ordered by how much they should change a decision, not by how bad they look — and two of the ten are in this product’s favour.
01Ninety-five per cent of the formula is inside a proprietary blend with no amounts.
The capsule holds 601 mg of declared material. 570 mg of it — about 95% — sits in a single row headed Proprietary Blend, listing six ingredients and not one amount. This is lawful: the FDA requires the blend’s total weight and its ingredients “in descending order of predominance by weight”, and only ingredients with an established Daily Value must be itemised individually. The label follows that rule exactly. The consequence is that the two ingredients you can check are the two smallest, and the six you cannot are everything else.
02The descending-order rule still forces a ceiling on every ingredient. Here they are.
If six items are listed in descending order of weight and total 570 mg, then the item in position n cannot weigh more than 570 divided by n — otherwise the items at or above it would already exceed the total. That gives: L-citrulline at most 570 mg, L-carnitine at most 285 mg, pine bark at most 190 mg, maca at most 142.5 mg, grape skin at most 114 mg, saffron at most 95 mg. None of those six numbers is printed on the bottle and all six are forced by it. They are ceilings rather than amounts, and the true figures could be far lower.
03The L-carnitine ceiling is a quarter of the lowest studied dose — of something the body already makes.
The NIH is unusually direct about carnitine: “Healthy children and adults do not need to consume carnitine from food or supplements because the liver and kidneys synthesize sufficient amounts to meet daily needs.” Where it is studied for exercise, the doses are 1 to 4 grams, and the NIH’s summary of that literature is that “the evidence on supplemental carnitine’s effectiveness for performance enhancement is mixed, and additional investigations are needed”. The ceiling here is 285 mg — at most a quarter of the lowest of those doses, and possibly a great deal less.
04The niacin percentage is right, and the form of niacin is not stated.
Vitamin B3 (as Niacin) — 20 mg — 125% is arithmetically correct: the FDA’s Daily Value is 16 mg. It is also below the NIH’s Tolerable Upper Intake Level of 35 mg. What the row does not say is which compound it is. Nicotinic acid and niacinamide are both “niacin” and only one of them flushes; the NIH puts the threshold at “thirty to 50 mg or more nicotinic acid”. At 20 mg neither form is likely to cause trouble, which is why this is finding 4 rather than finding 1 — but a naming convention that covers two different compounds should name the one in the bottle.
05The zinc percentage is right too, and the form is the least absorbed of the common ones.
Zinc (as Zinc Oxide) — 11 mg — 100% matches the FDA’s Daily Value of 11 mg exactly. The NIH compares the forms plainly: absorption from zinc citrate or gluconate is “approximately 61% in young adults; the absorption from supplements that contain zinc oxide is 50%”. Every zinc product quotes content rather than uptake, so the label is not doing anything unusual — it is simply that of the common forms, this is the one on the wrong side of that comparison.
06It is grape skin, not grape seed — and the monograph is about the seed.
The blend names Grape (Vitis vinifera) Skin Extract. Naming the plant part is good practice and most labels in this trade do not bother. It also means the research file a reader is most likely to find does not apply: NCCIH publishes on grape seed extract, a different part of the plant with a different chemistry. Nothing here says the skin does not work; it says that the obvious place to look it up is about something else, and this desk found no monograph for the skin at the bodies it uses.
07Four of the six blend ingredients have no monograph at the sources this desk reads.
L-citrulline, pine bark extract, maca root and saffron stigma extract return nothing at the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements or NCCIH under the names printed on this label. That is a statement about what can be cited here, not a verdict on the ingredients: absence of a monograph is absence of information. Combined with the blend, it means four of the six rows have neither a published amount nor a citable file — so nothing at all can be said about them, in either direction.
08No standardisation is printed for any of the four botanicals.
Pine bark, maca, grape skin and saffron are all extracts, and an extract without a standardisation figure is a weight of unspecified concentrate. A standardisation names the compound the research measures and the proportion of the extract that is it, which is what lets a reader convert a label figure into a research figure. None of the four carries one. The label does name the species and the plant part for every botanical, which is better than most — it is the next column that is missing.
09The distributor is a city, a state and a zip. There is no street.
The label reads Distributed by: Maxorin, Aurora, CO 80011, with a telephone number and an email. There is no street address, so there is nothing to post a letter to. This desk has now seen that same city and zip — Aurora, CO 80011 — on the distributor block of an unrelated brand in a different category, which is worth recording without drawing a conclusion from it. Separately, a print code reading EVRB_420_01_080626 appears along the edge of the artwork; it is a production code for the label file, not an ingredient and not a claim.
10The marketing template is shared with an unrelated brand, and the review block is layout copy.
A second pack reached this desk in the same batch, for a chewable oral-health tablet from a different company. Its “Inside” graphic is the same six boxes in the same arrangement with the same six labels as this product’s, and its “How it works” graphic is the same three numbered steps. Only the colour and the bottle change. The review blocks match too: 4.5 out of 5 here against 4.6 there, 1,125 written reviews against 925, both with a “most wait 3–6 weeks” line and eight named customers. This site publishes no rating, no review count and no testimonials.