Personalized Supplement Advice vs. Personalized Supplement Subscriptions

The personalized supplement category has split into two models that sound identical in marketing and behave very differently in practice. Knowing which one you are buying is the single most useful thing you can work out before handing over a card.

Model one: the personalized subscription

You complete an assessment, sometimes including blood work, and the company formulates and ships its own products to you each month. The convenience is real: one pack, one delivery, no decisions.

The structural issue is equally real. The assessment is run by the company that profits from the answer, and the answer is always some combination of its own products. A recommendation to take less, or to take nothing, is not commercially available to them.

Model two: advice, not products

You pay for the analysis itself. The output is a protocol telling you what to keep, drop, re-dose and re-time, and you buy whatever remains wherever you like. There is no product line to protect, so "cut four of these and save the money" is a perfectly normal recommendation.

The trade-off is that you handle your own purchasing. For people who already buy supplements anyway, that is not much of a cost.

Questions worth asking either model

• Does the provider make money from the products it recommends?
• Can the recommendation ever be "take less" or "take nothing"?
• Are per-ingredient doses disclosed, or hidden inside a blend?
• Is timing specified, or is it one daily pack?
• Can you keep the protocol if you stop paying?

Which one fits you

If you want the decisions taken away entirely and do not mind a single-source answer, a subscription is a reasonable purchase. If you already spend money on supplements, suspect some of it is wasted, and want a recommendation with no commercial pull behind it, the advice model is the one designed for you. That is the model we run.

Keep reading

• 7 Signs Your Supplement Stack Is Wasting Your Money
• Supplement Timing 101: What to Take Morning vs Night
• The Most Common Supplement Pairing Mistakes We See in Audits