Last week Nutrabio CEO Mark Glazier shed some light on an area of the industry that is worth reading up on. It is all about rounding in protein powders, as it turns out there is a federal regulation where supplement companies need to round a product’s total amount of protein to the nearest gram unless its less than a gram.
A good example of how this works would be with a supplement claiming 25g of protein per serving on its label. According to Mark Glazier’s informative post, the rule requires brands to round protein to the nearest gram when there is more than 1g, so while that 25g could be exactly 25g of protein, it could also be 24.51g.
If 24.51g doesn’t sound all that bad, it gets worse when you scale it up for an entire tub. 490mg of protein is exactly 1.96% less, which when worked out on something like a 70 serving tub of protein, means you’re losing out on just less than one and a half servings.
Another trick Mark Glazier points out is when you see lower amounts of protein per serving with a higher number of servings. While that isn’t something we see all that often, it can push the issue to the extreme. Something with 10g of protein per serving could be 9.51g, and seeing as the same rounding rule would apply you’d be missing out on 4.9%.
Following on from that discussion, Mark Glazier has announced that he is once again going to lead the way in transparency and honesty for the consumer. In the coming weeks, alternate supplement facts panels called True Facts will be added to the Nutrabio website for products that have been legally required to round their numbers.
Nutrabio’s True Facts panels will have supplement’s raw protein numbers on them, so consumers know how much they’re actually getting as well as the rounded amount. The brand plans on adding the True Facts to both nutrabio.com as well as its third party lab test database checkmysupps.com.
