Health Insights · 4 min read
What a “proprietary blend” actually hides
The phrase is legal, common, and tells you almost nothing. Here's how to read past it.
OriginLife · 23 Aug 2026
Turn over most supplement bottles and you'll find a line like: "Proprietary Focus Blend — 1,200mg" followed by a list of ingredients. It looks like disclosure. It isn't.
What the number does and doesn't tell you
The 1,200mg is the total for every ingredient combined. The individual amounts aren't stated. A blend can lead with an impressive-sounding botanical and contain a few milligrams of it, with cheap filler making up the rest of the weight.
Ingredients are usually listed in descending order by quantity, which is the only signal you get. It tells you the ranking, never the gap. First place could be 1,100mg or 300mg.
Why brands use them
The standard defence is recipe protection — that publishing doses lets competitors copy the formula. In practice, ingredient lists are already public and dosing research is published. What the blend protects is the margin.
How to read a label instead
Look for a per-ingredient amount next to every active. Compare those amounts against the doses used in the research you can find for that ingredient. If a formula lists 50mg of something studied at 500mg, the number is decorative.
That standard is why OriginLife has no proprietary blends in any formula. Every active ingredient is printed with its dose, because a dose you can't see is a dose you can't evaluate.
Every OriginLife formula is dosed at clinically studied levels and third-party tested.
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