Pick up most sports supplements and look for the dose of the ingredient you actually care about. Often you can’t find it. It’s hidden inside a “proprietary blend”, a single number covering ten ingredients at once, so you have no idea whether the good stuff is a real dose or a sprinkle for the label.

There is usually one reason to hide a number: it isn’t a number worth showing.

SYNAPS lists every active ingredient and its amount, the same on the website as on the back of the pouch. No blends, no hidden doses. Here is how to read any label, ours included, so you can judge for yourself.

Three things to check on any supplement

1. Is the dose disclosed, ingredient by ingredient? If it says “Focus Blend 1,200 mg” without breaking down what’s inside, you cannot tell if the active ingredient is present at a researched amount or a token trace. Fully-disclosed labels have nothing to hide.

2. What form is each ingredient? Form matters as much as amount. “Magnesium” can mean several different compounds that the body absorbs differently. We list the form of each ingredient so you, or your GP, can look it up. We’d rather you check than take our word for it.

3. Does the marketing match the evidence? Be wary of any brand claiming a single ingredient is a miracle, or using the words “clinically proven” without a study you can read. Real nutrition is modest and multi-pathway. If a claim sounds too clean, it usually is.

What we can and can’t say

We hold ourselves to that last test too. Some SYNAPS ingredients have strong human research behind them, omega-3 for memory and attention, B vitamins for mental energy, CoQ10 for energy and recovery. Others are included for their established biological role even where the trials in healthy young people are thinner. We tell you which is which in our science write-up, rather than dressing every ingredient in the same confident language.

That is a strange thing for a brand to do. We think it is the only honest one. You are deciding what to give a child on the days their brain works hardest. You deserve the real picture, not a sales pitch.

SYNAPS is currently the subject of a university clinical trial at Macquarie University. When it reports, we’ll share what it found.

SYNAPS supports brain health for sport. It does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.