Are Your Supplement Doses Actually Effective? How to Check

Adding a famous ingredient at 5–10% of its studied dose lets a brand put it on the front label at almost no cost. The product isn't counterfeit and the ingredient list isn't false — it just can't do what the marketing implies. This is the single most common failure mode in supplements, and no amount of brand trust or third-party purity testing catches it, because purity testing verifies what's in the bottle, not whether the amount matters.

A few anchors, straight from the trial doses (individual needs vary — these are what studies used, not personal recommendations):

• —Creatine monohydrate: 3–5 g/day maintenance in strength trials.
• —Ashwagandha: 300–600 mg/day of standardized root extract in stress and cortisol RCTs.
• —Berberine: 900–1,500 mg/day split across meals in metabolic studies.
• —EPA+DHA (fish oil): 1–2 g/day combined in cardiovascular trials — check the EPA+DHA line, not the "fish oil 1,000 mg" line.
• —Collagen peptides: 2.5–10 g/day in skin and joint RCTs — a 100 mg capsule is roughly 1–4% of that.

A fair scoring curve is steep at the bottom: below ~25% of the studied dose an ingredient contributes almost nothing and should score near zero; 50–75% earns partial credit; at or above the studied range earns full credit — and there is no bonus for megadosing, because more isn't better once you're past the trial range and closer to upper limits. That's exactly the curve BioStacks applies to every ingredient.