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How To Compare Two Supplements When Only One Prints Its Amounts

By The Mindsaves Editorial Desk · Reviewed September 19, 2026 · 7 min read · Reading a label

Stand in front of two bottles where one publishes every milligram and the other publishes only names, and the comparison people reach for is the one that cannot be made. Six others can, and most of them matter more.

The comparison that stalls, and why to drop it quickly

Two bottles, both promising the same thing. One prints five ingredients with five figures beside them and a total on the bottom line. The other prints eight names with nothing beside them. The instinct is to work out which is stronger.

There is no way to do it and no honest substitute. You cannot assume the unprinted formula is generous, and you cannot assume it is thin. A list of names is the same shape whether the herb in it is at the top of the published trial range or a long way below it, and a page that guesses in either direction has invented the number it is comparing.

So drop it, quickly, and spend the attention on the six comparisons that do resolve. Between them they decide more of the outcome than a milligram figure usually does.

Six comparisons that work without a single figure

Six comparisons, all of them answerable from two web pages and two cartons, none of them requiring a figure that either seller has chosen to withhold.

There is a seventh, and it is the one people skip because it feels like grievance rather than information. Whether a seller publishes the amounts before the sale is itself a comparison, and it is a fact about the seller rather than about the formula. It does not make the formula worse. It does tell you which of the two purchases you can evaluate from the sofa and which one you can only evaluate once the parcel is open.

The arithmetic you can always do

Cost per day is the comparison that survives every pack ladder, every bonus and every struck comparison price, and it takes ten seconds.

MindSave is one capsule a day and thirty capsules a bottle, so a bottle is a month and the arithmetic is unusually clean.

Prices read from the seller’s own page on 19 September 2026 and printed with that date. The checkout shows the live figure, with any shipping, before a card is asked for.

Run the same two divisions on the other bottle and the comparison is finished. A product taken twice a day from a sixty-capsule bottle is also a month, and a product taken twice a day from a thirty-capsule bottle is a fortnight at twice the headline price. Pack ladders are designed to make that hard to see and division makes it easy.

The pricing page carries the ladder in full, including the seller’s own struck comparison prices, which are printed as the seller’s figures and nothing else.

Comparing evidence records rather than strengths

This is the comparison that repays the most effort and almost nobody makes. Two ingredient lists can share a name and still be making very different promises, because the research behind a name has a shape: a duration, a population and a set of outcomes that moved beside a set that did not.

Every amount below is the amount a published study gave. The MindSave sales page prints no amount for any of the eight names it lists, so none of these figures describes what is in the capsule.

Take two names from this label as a worked example.

Bacopa monnieri has the longest record of the eight. Its trials gave 300 to 450 mg a day of a standardised extract, every included trial ran twelve weeks, the subjects were adults without dementia or significant cognitive impairment, and the effect showed on nine of seventeen tests of memory free recall with little sign of enhancement in other cognitive domains. The meta-analysis that followed would not admit a trial of less than twelve weeks at all, which is a finding about onset as much as about effect.

L-tyrosine looks similar on a list and reads completely differently in the literature. The clearest positive result gave 2 g a day to twenty-one military cadets during a demanding combat training course, and the group on tyrosine did better on a memory task and a tracking task after six days of that. A trial in twenty-four healthy adults aged 61 to 72 gave a single dose of 150 mg per kilogram of body weight and found no change in response inhibition across the group, with the effect becoming increasingly unfavourable as age rose. The United States military’s own graded review of fourteen studies could make only a weak recommendation in favour for cognitive stress, and concluded that the available evidence is insufficient to make confident recommendations.

Same list, same typeface, two records that point at different situations. One is about twelve weeks of ordinary days and the other is about a week of an extraordinary one. A buyer comparing two labels is better served by that distinction than by any figure either seller might have printed.

Where a printed figure really is decisive

Having said that names carry you a long way, there is one place where they do not, and it is worth being exact about it.

Supplemental niacin has a tolerable upper intake level of 35 mg a day for adults, and vitamin B6 has one of 100 mg a day counting food and supplements together. Those are ceilings rather than targets, and they are the two figures on a cognition label a person can push past by accident, because the same nutrients turn up in a multivitamin, a B-complex and a focus formula at the same time.

So a product that prints its B6 figure can be added to a stack on paper, and a product that does not print it cannot be. The practical answer is to count what you can read and see how much headroom is left, and then to read the panel of the one that publishes late as soon as it arrives. That is the same arithmetic either way; only the order changes.

A method, in the order it works

1. Write down both serving schedules and ask honestly which one you will still be doing in six weeks.
2. Divide capsules by capsules a day for both. Divide price by that answer. You now have two cost-per-day figures and they are comparable.
3. List the names the two products share, and the names only one of them carries.
4. For the two or three names that actually drew you in, look up how long the trials ran and who was in them. Duration and population are published even when an amount is not.
5. Read both guarantees to the end, including who pays return postage and whether any minimum period of use is attached.
6. Add the shipping line to the pack you would actually buy, not to the pack in the advertisement.
7. Then decide, and keep the receipt somewhere you will find it.

Seven steps, no laboratory, no guesswork about a figure nobody published. The choosing guide on this website runs a nine-point version of the same exercise and scores this product against it, including the two points where it is marked down.