Guides
Two guides, neither of them mostly about SodaPeak. One is about what a proprietary blend is permitted to hide and what its total still gives away. The other is about why the last ingredient on a label tells you more than the first.
Both guides are written to work on any supplement label, not just this one. They cover the same regulation — 21 CFR 101.36 — from two directions: what a blend may omit, and what its printed order still forces to be true.
SodaPeak appears in both, at the end, as a worked example. If you are holding a different bottle, the arithmetic is identical and the only thing that changes is the total and the number of names under it.
The two guides
Reading a proprietary blend
What 21 CFR 101.36(c) actually permits a label to withhold, why blends exist, and the one calculation that turns a hidden split into a set of upper bounds you can check.
What ingredient order means
Descending order of predominance by weight: what it requires, why position one tells you almost nothing, and why the last position on the list is the most informative line on the panel.
Reading a proprietary blend — what is in it
A proprietary blend is a lawful labeling device. The regulation lets a manufacturer declare one total for a group of ingredients and list the names underneath without individual amounts, provided the group is given a name and the names are in descending order of weight. The guide sets out exactly what that permits, what it does not permit, and the stated reason for it — protecting a formula from being copied — alongside its effect, which is that a reader cannot tell a generous formula from a token one. It ends with the three questions worth asking of any blend and a set of worked examples on this product.
What ingredient order means — what is in it
The shorter of the two, and the more immediately useful. It explains what “predominance by weight” means once extracts and carriers are involved, proves the divide-by-position ceiling in two lines, and then spends most of its length on the limits of that method: it gives an upper bound, never an estimate, and an ingredient can sit far below its ceiling without anything on the label changing.
SodaPeak’s blend, specifically →The ceilings, worked out →Shorter pieces on the same subject →
How to read any supplement label, in five steps
This works on a bottle you are holding in a shop, without a phone. It takes about ninety seconds.
Turn it over and find the Supplement Facts panel
Not the front, not the marketing, not the website. The panel on the back is the only part of the packaging with a regulation behind its layout, and it is the only part that has to agree with what is in the capsule.
Read the serving size before anything else
Every figure on the panel is per serving. If the serving is two capsules and the bottle holds sixty, the bottle is thirty days, not sixty. If the directions elsewhere on the label say one or two, then half the panel’s figures are also a valid reading of it.
Count the ingredients that have their own number
Anything with a milligram figure of its own is disclosed. Anything under a blend heading is not. The ratio of the first group to the second is the fastest single measure of how much a label is telling you.
Divide the blend total by each position
Position one can be the whole total; position two at most half; position eight at most an eighth. Those are ceilings, not amounts. Write them in the margin and compare them with any dose you know.
Read the last line of the Other Ingredients
This is where the capsule shell, the flow agents and the fillers live, and it is where a vegetarian claim, a gelatin capsule or an allergen quietly contradicts the front of the bottle.
Step four is the one that does real work, and it is why both guides below exist. It converts a list of names into a set of numbers you can test against the literature, without needing anything from the manufacturer that they have not already printed.
What the method cannot do
It cannot tell you how much of anything is actually present. Every figure it produces is an upper bound, and an ingredient can be far below its ceiling with nothing on the label changing at all.
It also cannot tell you whether an extract matches the material used in a trial. That needs a standardization figure — an icariin percentage, a eurycomanone figure, an elemental boron content — and most labels, including this one, state none.
Where these guides go next on this site
The guides are general. Three pages here apply them to the bottle in front of you, and they are worth reading in this order.
- The label, transcribed
- Every line on the bottle back as printed, with the asterisk marks written out as words and the footnote that explains the empty %DV column.
- The milligram budget
- The divide-by-position ceiling applied to all eight ingredients, with the lowest studied human dose beside each one. One position forbids its own dose outright.
- The mutual-exclusion proof
- The result that follows from the ceilings: saw palmetto and boron cannot both be at a studied dose, whatever the split turns out to be.
There are three shorter pieces on the blog as well, on what a ceiling is, on the word proprietary, and on why the fourth position matters more than the first three on this particular label.
Why these guides are mostly not about SodaPeak
This is a merchant’s site and these are the two pages on it with the least product in them. That is deliberate, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving to be guessed at.
A guide written around one product teaches you that product. The regulation, the arithmetic and the limits of the arithmetic are the same on every supplement label printed in the United States, so a guide written around those travels with you to the next bottle you pick up — including a competitor’s, and including one that scores better than this one on the method.
The second reason is that a method is checkable and an opinion is not. Everything in both guides can be verified against the regulation and a calculator. If our reading of SodaPeak is wrong, the method will be what shows it, and we would rather a reader held the tool than took the conclusion.
Where the product does appear
Each guide ends with a worked example on this label, because an abstract method is hard to trust until it has been run on something. The examples are the last section of each guide and they are marked as examples.
Everything in those examples is division done on two printed figures: a blend total of 1,200 mg and a position number between one and eight. No figure in either guide was supplied by the seller.
What neither guide can settle for you
Both guides produce upper bounds and nothing else. It is worth knowing in advance which questions they will leave exactly where they found them, so that you do not read a ceiling as an answer.
- How much of an ingredient is actually present. A ceiling is the largest amount consistent with the label. The real figure can be anywhere below it.
- Whether an extract matches trial material. That needs a standardization percentage, and most labels, including this one, state none for anything.
- Whether the product works. Dose arithmetic can show that a studied dose is impossible. It cannot show that a possible dose does anything.
- Whether the contents match the panel. That needs a certificate of analysis for the lot. None was supplied for this product, which is recorded on testing and quality.
- Anything about identity, purity or contamination. No arithmetic on a printed panel reaches any of those.
What the guides do settle is narrower and firmer: whether a particular dose is available at a particular position. On this label that question has a definite answer for one of the eight ingredients, and the answer is no.
References
The sources behind the numbers on this page.
- 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
- U.S. Government Publishing Office21 CFR 101.5 — Food; name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor — eCFR.gov · source
See the SodaPeak packs
One, three or six bottles. The price is on the seller’s checkout page, because it is the one figure this site was never given — and a figure we were not given is not a figure we will print.
Shipping and the guarantee term are shown at checkout. This site publishes no number it was not able to verify.