A label might say inositol, or magnesium, or a plant name. Each of those is a category, not the thing that was tested.

Dose matters. A trial run at 4,000mg says nothing about 500mg of the same substance. So does form: magnesium glycinate and magnesium oxide are absorbed differently, and a study of one is not a study of the other.

What to look for: a dose and a form. Where a product claims research without giving both, no published trial can be attached to what is in the bottle.

These two get used interchangeably in supplement marketing, and they are not remotely the same thing.

A clinical trial tests whether something works in people, usually against a placebo, and is published somewhere others can check it.

A patent is a legal claim that an invention is new and useful. It is granted by a patent office rather than a journal. It does not require the invention to have been tested in a single human being, and it is not peer reviewed.

Both are real documents, and both are checkable. But "patented ingredient" is not saying what most people hear when they read it.

"Insufficient evidence" means there are not enough good trials to judge. It does not mean something was tested and shown not to work. Those two readings get treated as the same and they are not.

"Low quality evidence" is not a verdict on how carefully a trial was run. It is a rating applied to a whole body of research, and it is marked down when the studies are small, short, inconsistent with one another, or funded by someone with an interest in the outcome. A field can lean consistently towards a benefit and still be rated low quality, because the two judgements — which way it points, and how much confidence to place in it — are made separately.

A decent clinical trial costs six figures. A company will fund one only where it can own the result — which means owning the thing being tested. So an ingredient house registers a specification, trademarks its name, funds the trial, and the name becomes the asset. Anyone can buy a generic extract. Only one company can sell its own branded one.

Two things follow from that, and they pull in opposite directions.

An ingredient with no published research has not necessarily failed. More often nobody could own the answer, so nobody paid to find out.

And an ingredient that does have published trials is genuinely better documented. Paying more for it is rational. When a brand uses an ingredient with decades of published human research behind it, that research is real, it cost real money, and it is worth something.

Some of our ingredients grade well. Some grade poorly. We publish both. A low grade does not mean an ingredient is useless — it means we cannot show you a study, and we would rather say so than reach for a phrase like "clinically studied" that does not survive being checked.

Where we could not read a study in full, we say that too, and list it as unread. It costs nothing, and it is the clearest signal we can give that the list is not curated.

Nothing here is a claim that our products treat, prevent or cure anything. UK law is strict about what a food supplement may say, and rightly so.

Where a claim is authorised in law we state it in the exact words the regulation permits, attached to the specific nutrient that carries it. Everywhere else we describe what is in the product and how the research behind it was done.

In Belle Balance, four nutrients carry authorised claims: magnesium, vitamin C, vitamin B6 and chromium. Inositol is not one of them. We cannot tell you what our inositol does. We can tell you exactly how much of it is in there, and how that compares with the amount the research uses.