Beware of the Proprietary Blend!

If some of the foods available in a supermarket only showed you the total grams of the protein, carbs and fats on the nutritional label, without telling how how much of each Protein, Carbs and fats were in there, would you buy it?

If all the label told you was that “this product contains 100grams of total nutrition” how would you be able to tell how much of that 100grams is Protein? How much is carbs? Or how much is fat? Just that the sum of these three would equal 100grams. Would you buy the product?

Is there 1 gram of protein, 98 grams of fat and 1 gram of carbs? NO protein at all and perhaps 50 grams of carbs and 50 grams of fat? Your guess would be as good as ours!

Now turn to the back of your supplement where the Nutritional Information is. Do you see the word “Proprietary Blend” on the label? There’s a good chance that if it was made overseas, especially in the USA, that it will have. If all your supplements at home are from an Australian owned company that develops, blends and packages all their own products, such as Bulk Nutrients, then you have nothing to worry about.

If you’ve just identified a product sitting at home with the words “Proprietary Blend” printed somewhere on the label, you’ve just bought a product without knowing how much of each ingredient is in there! It’s the exact same scenario that we just explained about the “100 gram” supermarket product. A ‘Proprietary Blend’ only states what the TOTAL of ALL the ingredients are in the product while making sure each individual ingredient dose is hidden.

A typical case would be for something like a Pre Workout. You turn your supplement package to the side, check out the nutritional panel to see how much Creatine, Beta Alanine, Citrulline Malate, BCAAs etc is actually in your product and then become very confused.

Well, you are not the only one and it’s due to the use of what the industry commonly calls “proprietary blends.”

These (which incidentally are actually illegal in Australia according to our foods standards code) give companies the luxury of including many ingredients, but giving no indication to what the actual doses are.

So, is there 3000mg of Beta Alanine in there or is it 30mg? 5000mg of Creatine or 2mg?

You could literally sit there forever trying to guess, however we speculate (albeit with great confidence) the inclusion of ingredients is determined by cost rather than quality.

Ingredient prices vary massively, and while more expensive ingredients don’t always work better, some ingredients that work very well cost a lot more than others.

A good example is if a company formulated a product, which contained Citrulline Malate, Creatine, Beta Alanine and Dextrose (which is basically a sugar). If the product contained those at equal ratios it would cost a company more than 1000% more in raw ingredients compared with a product, which was 90%, Dextrose and fractions of the other ingredients.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with Dextrose, it is a great carbohydrate for those who want carbs, one of the most effective, however we all know it is very cheap compared to other ingredients. The more of it in a product, the higher the profit margins for a company. If the Pre Workout you buy is 90% Dextrose, you’d rather be informed so you can just go and buy raw Dextrose and save some dollars by adding it in yourself.

So, we know Proprietary blends should be avoided (assuming you want to know what you are paying for? Believe it or not, some people don’t care!) and we know that we need to be told what dosages each of our ingredients are in our products to be able to determine if it will be effective or not so what can Bulk Nutrients offer?
Bulk Nutrients offer products in doses that are clearly printed, displayed clearly and easy to understand which means we don’t use Proprietary Blends – so you’ll know exactly what is in there. Being an Australian run and owned company, there is no way around this – dosages MUST be displayed not hidden as they are in a Proprietary Blend label.

To sum up, rest assured with a Bulk Nutrients bought product, you have

– No proprietary blend labeled products, so you know exactly what you are having. (we assume your body is important to you).

– Doses that are clearly labeled for you to see individually.

If you’re concerned you’ve been using a Proprietary Blend product and would like to ask us some questions about it or anything you’ve read in this article, you can reach out to us on technical@bulknutrients.com.au