Why position four matters more than position one

For a 1,200 mg blend of eight, the ceilings run like this:

Scroll this table sideways →

Three quarters of the fall happens by position four. After that the curve flattens and each further position takes away comparatively little, which is why a long ingredient list does not keep producing new information as it goes on.

The consequence is that position four is usually where a blend first becomes interesting. It is far enough down for the ceiling to be genuinely restrictive, and far enough up that the ingredient is still one the product is sold on.

Four of the eight ingredients on this label have no established human dose at all, so their positions cannot be judged in either direction. Nettle root is not one of them. It has trial literature, a stated duration and a dose, which is precisely why its ceiling can be tested against something.

The trial that supplies the dose is also unusually relevant to a blend called Test Boost. It measured urinary symptoms, and it measured serum testosterone as well — and reported testosterone unchanged. So the ingredient is at a dose its position forbids, for an effect the literature did not find in the direction the product name implies.

Two separate problems on one row, and only the first is arithmetic.

Divide by the position and you get a ceiling. That reading runs down the list, and it gets sharper as it goes, which is the whole of the case for position four. The last row supports a second reading that runs back up the list, and it is the more powerful of the two.

Descending order means no ingredient may be lighter than one printed below it. So a figure attached to the final position is a figure attached to every position above it: if the eighth ingredient weighs at least X, then all eight weigh at least X each, and the blend weighs at least eight times X. A number at the bottom of a list puts a floor under the whole list.

That is why the two rows worth holding side by side on this panel are the fourth and the eighth. They are interesting in opposite directions.

Nettle, fourth — a ceiling that forbids

The division gives 300 mg and the lowest verified dose is 360 mg. The ceiling sits below the dose, and the row is settled downwards with nothing assumed beyond the total and the position number.

Boron, eighth — a floor that costs

Roughly 60 mg of chelate is what the 3 mg of elemental boron used in the literature corresponds to. Eight positions at 60 mg is 480 mg, and a 1,200 mg blend can afford that, so the panel permits it. What the permission spends is room higher up the list.

Spend that room twice and the panel contradicts itself. Saw palmetto is printed third with a lowest studied dose of 320 mg, so positions one to three would weigh at least 960 mg between them, leaving at most 240 mg for positions four to eight. Boron at 60 mg in position eight puts a floor of 300 mg under those same five positions, and 300 is more than 240.

Neither figure is a measurement and nothing here says which of the two ingredients is the short one. What the floor establishes is that the panel cannot be read generously twice over — and that is a conclusion a blend label was never designed to hand across.

The practical lesson is to read the last row first. Its ceiling is the smallest number the arithmetic produces, and its floor is the only thing on a blend label that says anything at all about the positions you were told least about.

The mutual exclusion, in full →All eight positions, divided →

The sources behind the numbers on this page.

1. U.S. Government Publishing Office21 CFR 101.36 — Nutrition labeling of dietary supplements, including the proprietary blend and descending-order requirements — Code of Federal Regulations · source
2. Safarinejad — 2005Urtica dioica for treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia: a prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study — Journal of Herbal Pharmacotherapy · DOI 10.1080/J157v05n04_01 · PMID 16635963 · source
3. European Medicines Agency — 2012Assessment report on Urtica dioica L. and Urtica urens L., radix (EMA/HMPC/461156/2008) — EMA.europa.eu · source
4. Men, and colleagues — 2016A systematic review and meta-analysis of Urtica dioica for benign prostatic hyperplasia — African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines · DOI 10.4314/ajtcam.v13i2.17 · source
5. Brown, Wang, Hajduczok et al. — 2019Pharmacokinetics and safety of icariin in healthy adults: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled dose escalation — Natural Product Communications · DOI 10.1177/1934578X19856789 · source
6. Nielsen, Hunt, Mullen, Hunt — 1987Effect of dietary boron on mineral, estrogen, and testosterone metabolism in postmenopausal women — The FASEB Journal, volume 1 · DOI 10.1096/fasebj.1.5.3678698 · PMID 3678698 · source
7. NIH Office of Dietary SupplementsBoron — Health Professional Fact Sheet — ods.od.nih.gov · source