The one line on this panel that does not recompute

Exhibit 01

One line, four figures, and a contradiction between two of them

This post is about a single line of a single panel. It carries four pieces of information, two of them cannot both be true, and settling which is which takes the reference table FDA publishes and one division.

Take the scale of it first, so nothing later reads as alarm. A microgram of vitamin B6 is a very small quantity of a very ordinary vitamin, and the difference between 1.7 mcg and nothing at all harms nobody. This post makes no claim about anybody’s health, and the cautions page carries the material that does.

What the line is worth is narrower. The unit a nutrient is declared in is not a house style and the percentage beside it is not an opinion: both are fixed by a table a reader can open. This panel carries no proprietary blend. No group of ingredients shares one declared weight, so every amount on this site is the manufacturer’s own printed figure and none had to be derived from a declaration order. So this is a finding about something the label printed, in full, in the wrong unit.

Exhibit 02

Three sentences of regulation, and one division

Nothing here depends on a judgement about the formula. It depends on what the reference table says, on the fact that a panel is bound to it, and on how the result has to be expressed.

Put the four together. The table gives milligrams and 1.7 mg. The panel is bound to the table. The printed amount is 1.7 mcg, so against the published Daily Value it is 0.1%, which rounds to 0%. The panel prints 100%.

The gap is a factor of 1,000. A percentage out by a point could be a different table or a rounding convention. A percentage out by a thousand is a unit.

Exhibit 03

Why the other three lines are the real evidence

A single wrong percentage proves little on its own. It could be a different table, an older Daily Value or a careless labeller. What rules those out is the three lines printed above and below it.

Vitamin D3 is the easy case, because the units match: 20 mcg against a 20 mcg Daily Value is 100% and the panel prints 100%. Folate 383 mcg DFE against 400 mcg DFE is 95.75%, an awkward number, printed as 96%. Vitamin B12 2 mcg against 2.4 mcg is 83.33%, another awkward number, printed as 83%.

Notice the direction of both roundings. 95.75% would read better as a round hundred and 83.33% as a round eighty-five, and neither was nudged. That is the argument for the word typo: a panel written from a different table does not get three of four lines right and miss the fourth by 1,000.

Exhibit 04

Two readings, and this post does not choose between them

Knowing that the line is wrong is not the same as knowing what it should say. There are exactly two candidates and nothing supplied with this stock decides between them.

The first is the likelier on the face of it, because 1.7 mg is the Daily Value itself: a labeller typing the reference figure into the amount column would produce this line exactly. But likelier is not established, and a page that announced the amount would be publishing a figure the bottle does not carry.

So the panel is transcribed as printed, on the label page and here, and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved. The label wins on what it says; the regulation wins on what the unit means. 1.7 mcg against a 1.7 mg Daily Value is 0.1%, which rounds to 0% - not the 100% printed beside it.

What a reader might also want is not published: no corrected artwork or errata notice reached this desk, and the order desk on +1 (302) 200-3480 is the only party that could ask upstream.

Exhibit 05

What this finding is, and the four things it is not

A labelling finding is a narrow thing, and saying how narrow is part of publishing it.

• Not a recall. No recall, enforcement action or warning letter appears in anything this desk opened, and this site claims none.
• Not a safety finding. Nobody is harmed by a microgram of vitamin B6. One sentence comes first, because a careless page here would do real harm. Nothing on this site says or implies that this bottle will damage anybody’s nerves. The intended 1.7 mg is about one 59th of the Tolerable Upper Intake Level, and the amount printed on the panel is a thousandth of that again.
• Not a finding about the other nine lines, and not a claim about what is in the capsule. A panel is a document.

It is worth saying what it is. It is the cleanest kind of finding there is: a printed figure, a published table, one division, and a result anybody with the bottle in their hand can reproduce.

And it is sharpened by its surroundings. This panel carries no proprietary blend. No group of ingredients shares one declared weight, so every amount on this site is the manufacturer’s own printed figure and none had to be derived from a declaration order. This is not a label that hid its amounts and got caught. It printed every one and then put one in the wrong unit, which is why another post in this series is about what the panel does properly.

NIDDK owns this condition and publishes the sentence these pages treat as the most important on them: “For safety reasons, talk with your doctor before using supplements or any complementary or alternative medicines.” ^NIDDK Peripheral neuropathy has causes that need diagnosing, and some of them are treatable.