Independent supplement ratingsUS and Canada · Updated weekly
A ratings desk for a category that has spent thirty years grading its own homework.
A ratings desk for a category that has spent thirty years grading its own homework.
The supplement business runs on a handful of repeatable tricks. We take them apart so you can spot them from the ad.
The offer is $4.95 and the charge is $89.61 a month later. The free-trial billing trap taken apart step by step, and how to spot it before you hand over a card.
The patterns that give away a manufactured five-star wall: the language, the timing, the dates that cluster — and where the honest reviews actually hide.
Why a “#1 rated testosterone booster” story in a news tab is an advertisement, who gets paid to syndicate it, and how to tell one apart in about five seconds.
The supplement business does not invent new deceptions very often. It reuses a small set that keep working: a trial that bills you, a wall of reviews nobody wrote, a press release dressed up as journalism. Each investigation here takes one apart in enough detail that you can recognise it from the ad, before any money moves.
We document how a scheme operates — the billing terms buried in a checkout, the language patterns that give away a manufactured review, the syndication networks that turn an ad into what looks like news coverage. We do not name private individuals, and everything here is drawn from public sources: filed complaints, regulatory actions, and the pages themselves.
That framing is deliberate. A named-and-shamed list ages badly, because the operators change names faster than anyone can update a page. The mechanism does not change.
If an offer has already caught your eye, read the piece that matches the pattern rather than the product. The free-trial billing trap covers the $4.95 offer that becomes an $89 monthly charge. Manufactured reviews covers the five-star wall. Sponsored press releases covers the "#1 rated" claim you found in a news tab.
For products that are real but oversold rather than fraudulent, the rankings are the better tool — most disappointing supplements are legal, honest about their contents, and simply underdosed.