Topical vitamin C
Strong laboratory rationale, a thin and short human trial base, and a formulation problem that most of the marketing quietly ignores.
Read the reviewAn independent review of natural ingredients, immunity and preventative skin health. Every claim gets a qualitative evidence grade, and when a popular ingredient turns out to rest on very little, we say so on the page rather than in a footnote.
Grades attach to claims rather than to ingredients, which is why a single ingredient can carry several of them.
Eight ingredients and topics, each opening with an evidence grade and a claim-versus-evidence table. Three of them carry grades their markets will not enjoy.
Strong laboratory rationale, a thin and short human trial base, and a formulation problem that most of the marketing quietly ignores.
Read the reviewThe one topical category where the human trial base is deep enough to justify the confidence. Also the one most people abandon before it works.
Read the reviewThe most tolerable active in common use, with a plausible mechanism and a human trial base that is broader than it is deep.
Read the reviewOne of the fastest growing supplement categories in the UK, resting on a trial base whose funding pattern should give any reader pause.
Read the reviewThe clearest example on this site of a claim that is well supported for one group of people and unsupported for everybody else.
Read the reviewA nutrient whose necessity is beyond dispute and whose supplement marketing rests on a claim the evidence does not make.
Read the reviewThe most scientifically interesting weak evidence base on this site. Excellent laboratory work, very little of it demonstrated in people.
Read the reviewA genuine and fast moving research field, and a marketplace selling conclusions the research has not yet reached.
Read the reviewFour commitments that between them describe the whole editorial position.
No scores out of ten. Four named grades describing the depth, consistency and independence of the human research behind a claim.
No fabricated author, journal, sample size, p-value or effect size appears here. We describe the shape of an evidence base, which is what can be stated without misrepresenting it.
An ingredient can be essential in deficiency and useless above it. Both are true, and collapsing them into one verdict destroys the information you needed.
Several categories reviewed here have very large markets behind them and carry Limited grades. We would raise them if the evidence arrived.
Four pages that make the rest of the site usable: what the grades mean, how to read research yourself, why natural is not a safety claim, and what UK law actually requires of a supplement.
Four grades, applied to claims rather than to ingredients, with the reasoning shown.
The reasoning error this publication exists to correct, set out with the cases where it has caused harm.
The regulatory reality behind the shelf: what has been checked, what has not, and what the wording on the label is doing.
Nine questions that will tell you more about a study than the headline ever will.
No advertising. No affiliate commission. No sponsored content. No samples accepted. No company previews a grade or can have one changed. We do not review named brands or products at all, which removes the mechanism by which a review site becomes a shop.
There is one disclosed exception and we declare it rather than bury it: four archive articles each carry a single editorial link, placed by our own writers and never sold, and each of those pages carries a publisher disclosure block naming Northbank Media. Every other page carries no commercial link and says so. The full position is in the editorial policy.
We email when a grade is revised, a new review is published, or a regulator does something that alters the picture.
We email when a grade changes or a new review is published. Nothing else, and no product recommendations, because we do not make any.