Look up almost any supplement sold through affiliate pages and you will find several sites describing it, each confident, each with a slightly different ingredient list. Occasionally the lists have nothing in common at all. Somebody is wrong, and the pages themselves never mention it.
Here is the method for working out which one to believe. It takes about five minutes, it needs no expertise, and it is the same method whatever the product.
Step one: ask which list has numbers on it
A list of ingredient names is a claim. A list of ingredient names with a milligram figure against each is a claim that can be tested. The difference matters more than the length of the list.
Names alone are free. Anyone can write “ginkgo biloba, phosphatidylserine, B complex” about a memory supplement without ever having seen the bottle, because that is what memory supplements generally contain. Amounts are much harder to invent convincingly, because amounts have to add up.
Step two: check whether they add up
This is the whole tiebreaker and it is just addition. Take the individual amounts, total them, and compare against the serving total the same page states. If they reconcile, whoever wrote that page was reading something real. If they do not — or if there is no serving total to check against — you are looking at a list assembled rather than transcribed.
It catches a surprising amount. Pages that invent an ingredient list almost never bother to invent a consistent one, because nobody expects a reader to sit there with a calculator.
Step three: look for the tells of a guessed list
- No amounts anywhere. Not one figure against not one ingredient.
- The category's greatest hits. For a memory product that is ginkgo, phosphatidylserine, B vitamins, gotu kola. For a weight product it is green tea, garcinia, raspberry ketones. A list made entirely of the obvious names is worth a second look.
- No serving size, no capsule count, no directions. A page written from a real label picks up that furniture without trying.
- Round numbers only, where amounts do appear. Real panels have 47 mg and 15.47 mg on them.
- No photograph of the panel itself, only the front of the bottle.
Step four: prefer the source with something to lose
The seller's own product page is marketing, and it will present the formula in the best light it can. But it is also the page that has to be defensible if a regulator or a competitor reads it, and it is written by people who have seen the panel. An affiliate page has neither constraint. That does not make the seller honest; it makes them accountable, which is a different and more useful property.
What the method cannot do
Reconciling arithmetic proves a list is internally consistent. It does not prove the list is what is inside the capsule. A panel can add up perfectly and still misdescribe the contents, and the only way to know that is third-party testing that most of this category does not publish.
So the honest conclusion is narrower than it feels: you can identify which of several conflicting sources was written by someone looking at a real label, and you should then treat that as the best available account rather than as proof.
The one source that outranks everything
The printed panel on a bottle that has actually been delivered to a house. Photograph it. It settles every argument on every page including this one, and if it contradicts what you read before you bought, that is worth telling the page that got it wrong — the good ones will change.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. This article is general information and is not medical advice.