Buying A Brain Supplement With No Proprietary Blend: Why It Matters

Flip over almost any supplement bottle and you'll eventually run into the words "proprietary blend," followed by a list of ingredients with no individual amounts. That single line is one of the most common ways cognitive supplements obscure underdosing.

Why proprietary blends exist

A blend lets a company list an impressive-sounding ingredient without disclosing how much of it is actually inside. A formula could contain a fraction of a milligram of an expensive, well-studied compound next to a large amount of cheap filler, and you'd have no way to tell from the label.

What full transparency looks like

A brain supplement without a proprietary blend lists every ingredient and its exact amount. That's the standard Memodyne is built on: six named ingredients — Ginkgo Biloba Leaf, St. John's Wort Extract, Bacopa Monnieri, N-Acetyl L-Carnitine HCl, Huperzine-A and Phosphatidylserine Complex — each included for a stated role, nothing folded into an unreadable blend.

What to do with the information

Once you can see actual amounts, you can compare them against the doses used in published research on that ingredient. That's the only real way to judge whether a formula is likely to do what its marketing claims. It takes a few extra minutes of reading a label, but it's the difference between an informed purchase and a guess.