Micrograms where you expected milligrams
The commonest way to put a fashionable name on a panel without paying for it. Check the unit on every botanical line.
How To Read A Supplement Facts Panel
Seven checks, in order. Our own product passes five and fails two, and we say which is which.
Quick answer
Before buying any supplement, check seven things on the panel: the units on every line, whether every ingredient has its own amount, what form each nutrient is in, whether the printed percentages match the FDA's Daily Values, whether any amount approaches an upper limit, what is in the other-ingredients line, and whether the biggest ingredient matches what the front of the container is selling. JellyRock passes on units, on printed amounts, on forms, on upper limits and on the other-ingredients line, and fails on the percentages and on the last check.
The seven checks, in order
Run them in this order. The first two take seconds and eliminate most products.
Read the units, not the numbers
Milligrams and micrograms differ by a factor of a thousand, and the eye reads the ingredient name rather than the unit. A panel listing an ingredient at 80 mcg is listing 0.08 mg of it. This is the single most common way a label misleads without saying anything untrue.
Count how many ingredients have their own amount
Divide the number with a printed milligram figure by the total. Anything under half means most of what you are buying is taken on trust. A proprietary blend prints one total and the members in descending weight order, and nothing else.
Read the form of every nutrient
Folic acid and methylfolate are not interchangeable. Magnesium oxide and citrate are not either. The form is in brackets after the name and it decides how much of the printed amount actually reaches you.
Recalculate every printed percentage
Take the amount, divide by the FDA's published Daily Value for that nutrient, multiply by a hundred. The FDA publishes the whole table for free. This takes two minutes and it is the check almost nobody runs.
Check every amount against its upper limit
The NIH publishes a tolerable upper intake level for most nutrients that have one. Folic acid is 1,000 mcg a day from supplements and fortified foods. Iodine is 1,100 mcg. If one serving is a large share of a limit, that changes how you stack it with everything else.
Read the other-ingredients line
This is where you find out whether a capsule is gelatin or cellulose, whether a gummy is set with gelatin or pectin, and what colourings and fillers are present. It is the line most buyers never reach.
Compare the biggest ingredient with the front of the container
The largest number on the panel tells you what the product actually is. If the front of the container is selling something the biggest ingredient cannot deliver, you have found the gap, and it is usually the only thing you needed to find.
How JellyRock scores on its own checklist
We publish this because a checklist our own product passes on every line would not be a checklist.
| Check | JellyRock | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Units read correctly | Beet root and pomegranate are 80 mcg, not 80 mg | Pass for the label, which prints the unit honestly. The reader has to catch it. |
| Every ingredient has an amount | 8 of 8. No proprietary blend | Pass, and it is the product's strongest feature. |
| Forms disclosed | Pyridoxine HCl, cyanocobalamin, folic acid, potassium iodide, all named | Pass. The forms are all printed, which is what lets anything else be checked. |
| Percentages match the FDA's Daily Values | 4 of 7 do not: folate, B12, B6 and added sugars | Fail. Folate is out by a factor of two and a half. |
| Amounts against upper limits | Folate is 60% of the folic acid upper limit in one serving | Pass on the number, with a caveat: the label gives no hint of it. |
| Other-ingredients line read | Gelatin, titanium dioxide, and a typo for magnesium stearate | Pass for disclosure. Both of the first two are worth knowing. |
| Biggest ingredient matches the front | 1,000 mg of apple cider vinegar, on a jar selling masculine support | Fail. This is the whole story of the product in one line. |
Five passes and two fails. The two fails are the two that matter most, which is why the editorial score for this product is 2.4 out of 5 despite the panel being unusually well disclosed.
How to recalculate a percentage, worked once
This is the check that found four errors on our own label, and it is genuinely two minutes of arithmetic. Here it is, worked end to end.
The FDA publishes a Daily Value for each nutrient in a reference guide on its own website. For folate it is 400 micrograms of dietary folate equivalents. For vitamin B12 it is 2.4 micrograms. For vitamin B6 it is 1.7 milligrams. For iodine it is 150 micrograms. For added sugars it is 50 grams.
Take the amount printed on the panel, divide it by the Daily Value, and multiply by a hundred. That is the percentage that should be printed beside it.
On our own label: folate is 1,000 mcg DFE. Divided by 400 is 2.5, so 250%. The panel prints 100%. Vitamin B12 is 2 mcg. Divided by 2.4 is 0.83, so 83%. The panel prints 100%. Vitamin B6 is 1.4 mg. Divided by 1.7 is 0.82, so 82%. The panel prints 88%. Added sugars are 4 g. Divided by 50 is 0.08, so 8%. The panel prints 6%.
Iodine is 100 mcg. Divided by 150 is 0.67, so 67%, and the panel prints 67%. That one is right, and it shows the check works in both directions.
Why bother
Because a percentage is the only number on a panel that most people actually read, and it is the number most easily got wrong. Two minutes of division tells you whether the rest of the label was checked as carefully as it should have been.
Six red flags on any supplement page
None of these is proof of anything on its own. Two together is a reason to close the tab.
A front label the panel cannot support
The single most useful check in this guide. If the biggest ingredient does not match what is being sold, nothing else on the page will fix that.
A doctor with no verifiable name
A photograph and a title is not a credential. If a name cannot be checked against a register, treat the endorsement as decoration.
“FDA approved”
The FDA does not approve dietary supplements before they are marketed. This phrase is either an error or a knowing misstatement, and neither is reassuring.
A countdown timer
Urgency manufactured by software. A real discount does not need a clock, and a clock that resets when you reload is telling you something.
A price that only appears at checkout
You should know what something costs before you enter a card number. We are saying this on a site selling a product that does exactly this, and it is still true.
About the product behind this blog
JellyRock Premium Formula is an apple cider vinegar gummy: 1,000 mg of vinegar complex, four vitamins and minerals, and two botanicals at eighty micrograms each. Every amount is printed, and we publish the awkward ones as plainly as the rest.
Order NowRead the label firstThree checks to run after you buy, not before
The seven checks above happen before money changes hands. Three more are worth running afterwards, and almost nobody does them.
First, check the jar against the panel you were shown. A product page and a physical label should match line for line, including the units. If they do not, that is worth a phone call before the first serving, and it is easier to resolve in the first week than in the sixth.
Second, write down the date you started and one sentence about how things are. It takes thirty seconds and it is the only defence against a memory that quietly reshapes itself around a purchase. At week six you will want to compare against something written rather than something recalled.
Third, find the return window and put its end date in a calendar. This matters most when the trial period is long and the window is short, which is exactly the situation with a three-to-six-week product behind a standard marketplace window.
The check nobody enjoys
At the end of a fair trial, read what you wrote on day one and answer honestly. If nothing has changed, that is an answer, and continuing past a fair trial out of hope is the most expensive habit in this category. It is also the one every seller quietly relies on, including this one.
What to do when a product you want fails a check
Not every failure is fatal, and pretending otherwise would make the checklist useless. The useful question is which check failed and how much of the product it covers.
A percentage that is out by a few points is a rounding argument and changes nothing about how you would take the product. A percentage out by a factor of two and a half, on a nutrient with an upper limit, is worth knowing before you stack a multivitamin on top.
An ingredient at a fairy-dust amount is a small failure if it is a minor supporting name on a panel that doses everything else properly. It is a large failure if that ingredient is the reason you were buying.
The check that is genuinely disqualifying is the last one: if the biggest ingredient on the panel cannot deliver what the front of the container is selling, no amount of good behaviour elsewhere on the label fixes that. Our own product fails that check, and it is why its editorial score is 2.4 rather than 3.5.