OptiCore Pro Supplement Facts: The Full Label

Serving size: one capsule. Servings per container: 30. The dagger on the last row is the label's own mark for a row with no established Daily Value.

Sixteen rows carry an amount and a percentage. The seventeenth is the proprietary blend, which carries a total of 179.5 mg and a dagger where the percentage would be, because a blend of eleven botanicals has no single Daily Value to be measured against.

Percentages above a hundred are ordinary in a multivitamin and are not a warning. A Daily Value is the amount considered sufficient for most adults, so 250 per cent of thiamin means two and a half times a sufficient amount of a water-soluble vitamin the body clears readily. Biotin at 8,333.5 per cent is the row where that reasoning starts to strain, and it gets its own section below.

• P-amino Benzoic Acid (PABA)
• Horsetail extract – Equisetum arvense L., whole plant
• Fo-Ti – Polygonum multiflorum, root
• Bamboo extract – Phyllostachys nigra, leaf
• Stinging Nettle – Urtica dioica L.
• Chinese Peony – Paeonia lactiflora, root
• Spirulina – Arthrospira platensis, whole plant
• Saw palmetto – Serenoa repens
• Plant sterols from Soy Bean – Glycine max
• Alfalfa – Medicago sativa, herb
• Barley grass – Hordeum vulgare L., whole herb

Eleven botanicals in printed order, sharing one total of 179.5 mg. That is how a proprietary blend is written, and it is permitted: a manufacturer must name every ingredient and must give the blend's total weight, but need not divide the total between the members.

The consequence for a reader is arithmetic rather than mystery. Every name is visible, so nothing is hidden, but no member can be set against the amount its own research used, because that comparison needs two figures and the label supplies one.

For scale: split evenly, 179.5 mg across eleven is about 16 mg each. The horsetail trial used 900 mg a day of dried extract on its own. The plant sterol work runs at 2 to 3 grams a day. Even the most generous possible split leaves every member well below the amounts its literature is built on.

Every line above is quoted from the bottle rather than summarised.

Four inactive ingredients, and none of them carries a dose. Rice flour fills the rest of the capsule, hypromellose is the shell itself, magnesium stearate stops powder sticking to the tooling, and silicon dioxide keeps it flowing. A capsule needs all four or something like them.

The allergen line is the one that rules people out rather than asking them to weigh something. Soy is declared because the blend contains plant sterols derived from soy bean, and anyone avoiding it should treat this product as unsuitable without further reading.

A per cent Daily Value compares the amount in one serving with a reference figure set for adults. It is a labelling convention rather than a dose recommendation, and it answers one question: how does this compare with what a typical adult needs in a day.

Water-soluble vitamins are where large percentages are commonplace. Thiamin at 250 per cent, pantothenic acid at 300 per cent and B12 at 250 per cent are all ordinary multivitamin amounts, and all three clear through the kidneys rather than accumulating.

Biotin at 8,333.5 per cent is a different order of figure. The Institute of Medicine set an Adequate Intake of 30 micrograms a day for adults and no upper intake level, specifically because straightforward toxicity has never been demonstrated. That is not the reason the number matters.

The reason it matters is laboratory. Biotin at supplement amounts interferes with a large family of immunoassays that use a biotin and streptavidin binding step, which includes some troponin, thyroid and PSA tests. A review of the mechanism sets out how it works, and the side effects page gives it the room it deserves.

The seller ships a graphic headed INSIDE OPTICORE PRO which features six nutrients: Vitamin A (Beta-carotene), Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid), Vitamin D, Vitamin E (DL-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate), Thiamin (Mononitrate) and Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine HCl). The printed panel carries seventeen rows.

Both things can be true without anyone being dishonest. A marketing graphic picks six recognisable names for a sales page; a Supplement Facts panel is a regulated format that has to carry everything. The point of saying so here is simply that the graphic is a selection rather than a summary, and a reader who treats it as the formula will be missing ten quantified rows and a 179.5 mg blend.

On this website that graphic is used as a scene image rather than as an ingredient source, and every ingredient statement is read out of the panel above. Where the seller's page and the bottle disagree about anything, the bottle is what arrives in the box and the bottle governs.

The same rule settled two other questions on this site. The seller's page names no ingredients at all, and the panel names every one, so the panel is the ingredient list. And the guarantee is 60 days rather than the longer figure that circulates in some places, because 60 is what the seller prints on its pack cards, in its terms and in its refund policy. The guarantee page sets out the terms in full.