How we assess a supplement before we mention it

Why this page exists

We earn a commission on some of the products mentioned on this site. When a reader buys through one of our links, we are paid. That is an incentive, and incentives work on people whether or not those people intend them to.

The honest response is not to claim we are somehow above it. It is to build something that constrains the incentive, then publish that thing so you can check whether we followed it.

This is that thing. It is a screening standard, not a promise. It sets out what has to be true before a product is named here at all, what we count as evidence, and what puts a product out of scope no matter what it pays.

Very few sites in this category publish a standard. That is usually because they do not have one.

The two filters every product passes or fails

Two questions come before everything else. Both are pass or fail. There is no partial credit and no averaging one against the other.

Claims risk

Could we repeat this product's claims to you without transmitting something we cannot substantiate?

Every supplement arrives with a story attached. If that story contains assertions we could not defend, we have only two options: repeat them, which we will not do, or spend the whole article dismantling them, which is not a review, it is a correction. A product whose marketing runs a long way ahead of its evidence fails here even when the ingredient itself is perfectly unremarkable.

Audience fit

Is this genuinely for someone reading this publication, or does it simply pay well?

A product can be legitimate, competently made and still entirely wrong for a 58-year-old trying to hold on to the muscle they have. Commission rates have a way of making that second question feel like it has already been answered by the first. Asking it separately, and in that order, is the only real defence against it.

A product that fails either filter is finished. We do not go on to price, testing or comparison, because there is nothing left to compare.

How we label evidence

Not everything on a page is the same kind of thing, so we mark each claim by where it came from.

• Verified independently. We checked it against a source with no commercial relationship to the seller.
• Platform-reported. A figure the selling platform publishes, such as marketplace statistics. Useful, but the platform is not a neutral party.
• Vendor claim. The seller says so. Reported as the seller's assertion, never as established fact.
• Our judgement. Our reading of a situation the evidence does not settle.

The last category is the one that matters. Judgement is labelled as judgement and never blended into evidence. Where we think something and cannot prove it, the sentence says we think it. A publication that hides its opinions inside its evidence is not being careful. It is being slippery.

What does not count as independent verification

This section is specific on purpose. Each of these is a recurring pattern, and every one is built to look like third-party confirmation while being paid placement.

• Affiliate review sites. A site earning commission on the product it is reviewing is not a second opinion. It is the same opinion, twice.
• Paid press releases syndicated onto real news and finance domains. The distribution is bought. A recognisable masthead in the URL confirms that a wire service was paid, and nothing else.
• Promotional PDFs parked in upload directories on university and government domains. Anyone with upload access, or an unsecured submission form, can put a file on those servers. The document is not endorsed by the institution. It is merely sitting on its hardware.
• Posts dropped onto unrelated trade forums. A supplement thread on a forum for plant hire or dentistry is a link-building artefact, not a discussion.
• Documentation platforms and file hosts used as review pages. When the review lives on a note-sharing service or a document host, the author has chosen a platform with no editorial gate. That was the point of choosing it.
• Advertorials on real publications. Paid, occasionally labelled, and where they are labelled it is usually in small grey type above the headline.

A government or university URL is a red flag in this category, not a green one. Those domains get chosen precisely because they look authoritative.

When one turns up in a product's evidence list, it tells us that someone involved understood exactly how the appearance of credibility is manufactured, and went to the trouble of manufacturing it.

What does count

• Consumer protection platforms with real review volume and a claimed profile. Volume matters, and so does whether the seller has claimed the profile and replied on it. A seller who ignores complaints in public is telling you how they handle them in private.
• Subject-matter communities that existed before the product. A forum, group or thread with years of history and no stake in the answer.
• Credentialed professionals, particularly when they criticise a product they could have earned from. A dietitian or clinician who declines to promote something, and explains why, is giving up money in order to say it. That is the most valuable signal available to us and it is not close.
• Unrelated manufacturers publishing technical data. A raw ingredient supplier or contract manufacturer with no interest in this particular brand's sales.
• Buying the product ourselves. Where the cost is trivial against the stakes, we buy it. It settles questions about labelling, delivery, billing and the returns process that no amount of reading ever will.

The four cheap tests we run first

These take about twenty minutes between them and separate more than hours of reading does. We run them before committing time to anything else.

1. Does the seller have a claimed profile on a consumer protection platform, with volume? No profile at all, on a product sold at scale, is itself an answer.
2. Is the creator traceable outside their own sales funnel? We are looking for a named person with a professional history that exists somewhere other than the page selling the product.
3. Is the product distributed anywhere other than its own funnel? Sold through a single sales page and nowhere else is a deliberate business model, and it tells you what that business is optimised for.
4. Do the seller's own earnings claims reconcile with the platform's reported data? Affiliate recruitment pages advertise figures. Marketplaces publish their own statistics. When the two disagree, one of them is being managed.

Most products that fail, fail here, quickly and cheaply.

What disqualifies a product outright

No amount of commission moves any of these.

• A fabricated or untraceable creator. A name with no history behind it, or a stock photograph attached to a biography.
• An undisclosed paid endorsement. A seller who leaves a material connection unstated has already shown you what else they are comfortable leaving out.
• A deadline or scarcity claim that is not honoured. If the countdown resets when you reload the page, the seller is lying about something small in order to practise lying about something larger.
• No published terms for the people promoting it. Where affiliates are never told what they may and may not say, the seller has chosen not to know what is being claimed on its behalf.
• Documented billing harm. Unauthorised charges, refused refunds, subscriptions that resist cancellation.
• A guarantee that does not do what the page says it does. We read the conditions, the window, who pays return postage and what has to be sent back.

What we do not claim to be

We are not clinicians. We are not a testing laboratory. We do not assay products, we do not run trials, and we do not diagnose anything at all. Nothing on this site is medical advice.

Where a question is genuinely clinical, the honest answer is that it belongs with your doctor, and we would rather say that than dress a guess up as guidance.

We also get things wrong. When we do, we correct the page and date the correction rather than quietly editing it and hoping.

How we make money

There is no third way. We do not take payment for coverage, we do not sell placement, and we do not accept sponsored posts.

A product that fails this standard does not get covered, regardless of what it pays. That is the whole value of writing the standard down first: we decided what would disqualify a product before we knew which products would be disqualified, so we cannot now quietly move the line and tell ourselves we did not.

If you think we have broken this standard on any page of this site, tell us, and name the page.

Related: EAA vs BCAA, what matters after 50 applies this standard to a specific product category. Protein after 50 covers the food-first ground we would rather you start from.