Three fibers or one? What a fiber-gummy label tells you — and what it leaves out.

Here's a test you can run in a supermarket aisle in about ninety seconds. Pick up any fiber gummy. Turn it over. Now try to answer two questions from the label alone: how many kinds of fiber are in this, and how much of each?

On most of them, you can't. And that's not an accident.

“Proprietary blend” is legal, common, and completely uninformative. It lets a brand list impressive-sounding ingredients in order of weight without ever telling you the amounts — so a formula can be 95% the cheap thing and 5% the thing in the marketing, and the label reads identically either way.

You are not being careless when you can't tell. You're being told a total and asked not to ask for the breakdown.

Every gummy needs something to set it — a gelling agent. It's the least glamorous line on any supplement panel, and it is the one most brands would rather you skimmed past. Some use gelatin, which quietly makes the product non-vegan. Others use a seaweed extract. Almost nobody puts it in the marketing, because there's no version of “here's our gelling agent” that sells.

Ours is carrageenan. It's extracted from red seaweed, it's what makes the gummy a gummy, and it's printed on our label with its exact amount. We're telling you in an ad, which is roughly the last place you'd expect to hear it.

Soluble and insoluble fiber do different jobs. A gummy built on a single fiber is doing half of what the word on the front of the pouch implies — and “5 g of fiber” on a label tells you nothing about which half.

Seya Fiber uses three, and here is the whole breakdown, which is the entire point of this ad: 4,500 mg resistant tapioca fiber, 950 mg prebiotic soluble fiber, 200 mg cellulose. That's 5,650 mg total — 16% of your Daily Value, which makes it a good source. Alongside them, in the same three gummies: 80 mg magnesium citrate and 100 mg ginger root, both of which support healthy digestion.

An advertorial that only wins is just an ad wearing a lab coat, so: three gummies is more than the two-a-day competitors advertise, and some people would rather take fewer. If you specifically avoid carrageenan, ours is not for you, and we've now told you that twice. We hold no third-party certifications — none, not one — and any brand showing you a seal we don't have is telling you something true about themselves that we can't match yet. And we have no customer reviews, because we haven't launched and have never sold a pouch.

We're also not going to tell you how fast you'll feel something. We don't have a finished-product study, and a timeline without one is a guess with a calendar drawn on it.

You don't have to take our word for any of this, and you shouldn't — we're the ones selling it. Take the ninety-second test instead. Turn over whatever you're already buying and see whether it will tell you how many fibers are in it, how much of each, and what sets the gummy.

If it does, that's a good brand and you should keep buying it. If it won't, you've learned something an ad can't tell you.