EndurElite Chief Endurance Officer Matt Mosman discusses the dirty practice of supplement companies using proprietary blends in their products. Here's how endurance athletes can spot proprietary blends and why they should avoid them at all costs.
Video Transcription:
Why Athletes Should Never Buy A Supplement That Includes A Prop Blend
Good afternoon EndurElite family, a fast Matt Mossman, the endurance supplement and nutrition guru coming at you today to talk to you about something very, very serious.
So, give me a minute to put my serious face on. Hold on one minute. How was that for a serious face?
Sorry, totally can't do the serious face thing, but we are going to talk about something serious today, and that is proprietary blends found in supplements.
Now, a lot of you watching this video already know what proprietary blends are, but for those of you who don't, today what we're going to discuss is what a proprietary blend is, how to spot a proprietary blend in a supplement, and then why you should be avoiding proprietary blends if they're found in a supplement.
What does proprietary blend mean?
Now, in the simplest sense, a proprietary blend is when a supplement company makes a product, and say they put 10 ingredients in this product, but they don't list the individual amount of every single ingredient.
Instead, what they'll usually do is they'll take those 10 ingredients for example, they'll shove it into some blend that has a fancy name like Super Energy Fast Blend, they'll put all those ingredients in there, and off to the right-hand side you'll see the total amount of all the ingredients as opposed to the amounts of each single ingredient.
The Real Reason Supplement Companies Use Prop Blends
Now, why would they do this?
The typical excuse you're going to get from a supplement company when they have a proprietary blend, and you ask them, it goes something like this, "Well, we made this proprietary blend to hide our super duper secret formula so no other supplement company can steal it from us."
This is a bunch of poppycock. That's right, I said poppycock, and here's why.
I could take any supplement out there, send it off to a lab to be tested for $200, and I could find the exact amount of every single ingredient in that product.
Now, the real reason why they do proprietary blends is basically to save them money and rip you off.
How to spot a proprietary blend
Now, let's go back to our example of the super duper energy blend where the total amount of ingredients would be 25 grams, and let's just say within this blend they have things like caffeine, beta-alanine, choline, and, you know, maybe some other endurance ingredients in there.
So, what these companies will usually do is they'll put the cheapest ingredient first, and then they'll have the other ingredients in a lot lower doses than that first ingredient.
So, what a lot of these companies will do, and this is perfectly legal, is out of that 25 gram blend we're talking about, that first ingredient can account for 24.9999 gram of that total proprietary blend, and the rest of the ingredients could just be fairy dusted in there and at the end of the day that just saves them a lot of money on spending, well their own money on quality ingredients, saving them a dollar at your expense.
So, that's why you should really, really avoid any kind of supplement that has a proprietary blend in it, because more than likely you're not getting the efficacious dosing of certain ingredients to have any sort of effect on your athletic or endurance performance.
So, that's the down and dirty on proprietary blends and why you should avoid them. If you have a friend out there who's using supplements with proprietary blends, please share this video with them.
If you want additional content like this, and a plethora of other information on endurance training, nutrition, and supplementation, head on over to the EndurElite blog at www.endurelite.com.
Check us out on Instagram and Facebook at EndurElite, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. All right my endurance friends, until next time, stay fueled, stay focused, and stay fast.
