By Abhishek Singhh | Published on abhishekschauhan.com
As seen on: ANI News · Outlook Business · The Print · News X · The Tribune · MSN · The Daily Guardian
You picked up a supplement. Read the label. Felt reassured. Bought it.
The label was the product. The biology was optional.
This isn’t a fringe problem. It’s the business model.
The Number That Should Have Made News
In 2024, The Print published findings from a peer-reviewed study in the journal Medicine that analysed 36 popular protein supplements sold in India. The result: 70% were mislabeled. 14% contained toxins.
Not 7%. Not some obscure brands in a grey market. Seventy percent of mainstream, widely sold, shelf-facing supplements that Indians buy every day — with inaccurate information on the label.
That story ran. Generated some outrage. Then the industry moved on.
Because the industry had no incentive to stop.
I’ve spent years formulating supplements — building Just What Works™ under Elara Biosciences, and working across five wellness brands. What I’ve seen from the inside is worse than what that study captured. The mislabeling is a symptom. The real disease is that the Indian supplement market was never designed around what works biologically. It was designed around what sells visually.
What “Designed for Labels” Actually Means
When I say a supplement is designed for the label, I mean this precisely:
The formulation decision starts with the marketing claim, not the evidence. Someone decides the product will say “supports immunity” or “boosts recovery.” Then ingredients are reverse-engineered to justify that claim at the lowest possible cost.
The result is what the industry calls a marketing dose — an ingredient included at a quantity too small to produce any biological effect, but present in sufficient quantity to appear on the label.
Ashwagandha is a good example. The evidence-backed dose for KSH-66 standardised extract (the form that actually has clinical data behind it) is 300–600mg. Walk into any pharmacy and pick up three ashwagandha products. Check the dose. You’ll find 100mg, 150mg, 200mg. Sometimes listed as “ashwagandha root extract” with no standardisation percentage — which tells you nothing about the actual active compound content.
The consumer reads “Ashwagandha” on the label and feels informed. The brand checks the ingredient box. Nobody benefits biologically.
The Regulatory Gap That Makes This Legal
India’s nutraceutical market operates in a grey zone that brands exploit deliberately.
FSSAI regulates supplements as food, not drugs. This means efficacy claims don’t require clinical proof. A brand can say “supports joint health” without a single study backing the formulation. A 2025 government panel recommended bringing health supplements under stricter drug laws — a proposal that would require companies to submit labels alongside product claims at the time of licensing. It hasn’t happened yet.
AYUSH certification applies to Ayurvedic products, but classical formulations and synthetic Ayurvedic marketing are often conflated deliberately. A product can carry an AYUSH stamp while being far removed from any classical formulation protocol.
The gap between what FSSAI permits and what biology requires is exactly where most Indian supplement brands live.
This isn’t an accusation. It’s an infrastructure problem. And until the infrastructure changes, the consumer pays the price.
The Sleep Recovery Problem Is the Same Problem
My second article — picked up across outlets including ANI News, The Tribune, and MSN — asked a question that should be obvious but isn’t: why are Indians sleeping more than ever but recovering less?
Sleep tracking is at an all-time high. Eight-hour nights are no longer aspirational — they’re achievable for more people than before. And yet recovery metrics are worsening. Energy levels, cognitive clarity, muscular recovery — all declining relative to sleep duration.
The supplement industry’s answer? Melatonin. Magnesium glycinate. Ashwagandha. Sleep blends with 14 ingredients on the label.
The real answer is more uncomfortable: most of the products people are taking for sleep and recovery either contain the wrong form of the active ingredient, an insufficient dose, or both.
Magnesium is a perfect case study. There are at least eight forms of magnesium used in supplements. Magnesium oxide — the cheapest, most common form — has roughly 4% bioavailability. Your body absorbs almost none of it. Magnesium glycinate or magnesium L-threonate, which have clinical evidence behind them for sleep quality, cost significantly more per gram and are therefore underused.
The label says magnesium. The biology says oxide. The consumer sleeps just as badly and concludes that supplements don’t work — when the truth is that that supplement didn’t work.
What Honest Formulation Actually Looks Like
I’ll speak from my own practice because that’s all I can speak to honestly.
At Just What Works™, every formulation decision starts with a question: what does the evidence say, at what dose, in what form, for what outcome? If the evidence isn’t clear, the ingredient doesn’t go in. Not because we’re purists, but because putting an ingredient in at a marketing dose is worse than not including it — it creates a false sense of efficacy and erodes the consumer’s ability to evaluate what actually works.
This means our products have fewer ingredients than most competitors. It means some formulations take longer to develop because we won’t move until the mechanism is understood.
It also means we’re not competing on label density. We’re competing on outcomes.
That’s a harder market to build. It’s the only one worth building.
What to Actually Look for on a Label
If you’re buying supplements in India right now, here’s a practical framework:
1. Check the form, not just the ingredient. Magnesium? Which form. Ashwagandha? Is the extract standardised, and to what percentage of withanolides? Curcumin? Is it paired with piperine or in a liposomal form? The ingredient name is the beginning of the information, not the end.
2. Look for the dose. Research the clinically studied dose for the ingredient you’re evaluating. If the label dose is less than 50% of what the studies used, treat it as a marketing dose.
3. Avoid proprietary blends. A proprietary blend lists ingredients together under one total weight. This legally allows a brand to include 490mg of a cheap filler and 10mg of the active ingredient, while listing both. Avoid them unless the brand separately discloses individual ingredient weights.
4. Third-party testing is not optional. Look for COA (Certificate of Analysis) availability. Any brand worth trusting should be able to produce batch-level testing data on request.
5. If the marketing is louder than the science, walk away. A brand that leads with “revolutionary,” “breakthrough,” or “clinically proven” in the headline and buries the actual formulation details is showing you its priorities.
Why This Matters Beyond Supplements
This isn’t really about supplements. It’s about what happens when an industry scales faster than its integrity.
India’s wellness market is projected to cross ₹1.5 lakh crore in the next five years. Hundreds of new brands are entering every month. Most of them will be designed for labels.
A few of them — the ones worth watching — will be designed for biology.
The consumer who learns to tell the difference will spend less, absorb more, and recover faster. The brands that build around biology will outlast the ones built around labels. That’s not idealism. That’s just how markets eventually self-correct.
We’re in the messy middle right now. The correction is coming.
A Final Word
I published two articles last month — covered by ANI News, Outlook Business, The Print, News X, The Tribune, MSN, and The Daily Guardian, among 160 outlets — making the case that most supplements are designed for labels, not biology, and that India’s sleep recovery crisis is partly a formulation problem.
The response told me this conversation is overdue.
If you want to go deeper on any of this — specific ingredients, how to evaluate a brand, or what the evidence actually says on sleep and recovery — subscribe below. I write one post a week. No filler. Just what I’m actually thinking about.
Abhishek Singhh is the founder of Just What Works™ (Elara Biosciences), JeevRasa, The FarmPURE, ReEarthy, and SuppleFoods — five wellness brands built on one shared belief: the wellness industry has a honesty problem. He writes on supplement science, D2C brand building in India, and Ayurveda as a serious industry.
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Abhishek Singh is the founder of Just What Works and a passionate entrepreneur in the nutraceutical space. Through his brand and writing, he shares practical business strategies, wellness insights, and real-world lessons from his own startup journey. His work helps readers cut through noise and focus on building businesses — and lives — that truly work.