How Counterweight tests and scores supplements

Who we are

Counterweight is a small independent publication that reviews direct to consumer supplements. Counterweight Media Group, LLC was registered in 2019 and we publish from Peoria, Illinois. There are three of us. We are not a laboratory, we are not a clinic, and we do not run trials. What we do is buy the product at retail like any other customer, take it for long enough to have an opinion worth reading, read the label against what the published research actually says, and write down the result including the parts that are unflattering.

Adrian Kessler, MS, CNS leads the reviews and writes the ingredient sections. Nora Vosburgh runs the reader data: collecting ratings, cleaning duplicates, and building the tables you see on each review. Neither of us is your doctor and nothing we publish is medical advice.

What we buy, and how

Every product we review is bought at full retail with our own money, through the same checkout any reader would use. We do not accept free samples, we do not accept review copies, and we do not let a brand see a review before it publishes. If a company ever contacts us about a review after publication we will say so on the page in question.

We buy the middle package where one exists, usually a two or three month supply, because the smallest package rarely covers a fair trial and the largest one is a bad recommendation to make before testing.

How long we take it

Eight weeks is our standard for anything sold for weight, metabolism or appetite, because the honest answer to almost every product in that category is that nothing meaningful happens in the first fortnight. Shorter tests reward stimulants and punish everything else. During a test the reviewer logs weight twice a week on the same scale at the same time of day, records an evening appetite rating, notes sleep quality, and writes down anything that feels like a side effect on the day it happens rather than from memory afterwards.

One person taking one product for eight weeks is an anecdote recorded carefully. It is not a clinical trial, and we say so on every review rather than dressing it up as science.

The eight criteria, and how they are weighted

Each review scores the same eight criteria from 1 to 5. The published score is their average, rounded to one decimal, with no thumb on the scale afterwards.

• Effectiveness, what actually changed during the test and in reader reports
• Onset and energy, how quickly anything is noticeable and what it feels like
• Appetite or the product's primary claimed effect, judged against its own marketing
• Tolerability, side effects reported by us and by readers
• Ease of use, how likely a normal person is to finish the bottle
• Value for money, per serving cost against comparable products
• Label transparency, whether doses are published and claims are proportionate
• Support and refunds, the guarantee terms and what reader reports say about honouring them

Label transparency carries the same weight as effectiveness deliberately. A product that works but will not tell you what is in it is a worse purchase than the marketing suggests, and in this category the omission is usually a choice rather than an oversight.

How we handle reader ratings

Reader ratings come from the submission form on each review and from public buyer feedback we collect and read by hand. Duplicates and obvious spam are removed. Submissions that read like marketing copy are removed. We do not remove a rating because it is negative, and we do not remove one because it is glowing. Percentages in the tables are calculated on the cleaned set and rounded to whole numbers, so a column occasionally sums to 99 or 101.

Two honest limits. These are self reported experiences from people who chose to write in, which skews toward strong opinions in both directions. And the figures we publish are our own tally, not an audited dataset from a third party platform, so treat them as a well kept record rather than as certified statistics.

Corrections

If a price changes, a guarantee changes or a label finally publishes its doses, we update the review and change the date at the top. If we get something wrong, we fix it in place and say what changed. Corrections and complaints go to [email protected] and we answer them.

How this is paid for

Counterweight is reader supported through affiliate links. When a review links to a manufacturer's official site and you buy, the manufacturer pays us a share of that sale and your price is unchanged. We are paid the same commission whether a review scores a product 4.6 or 2.1, which is the specific reason a bad score costs us nothing to write. The full arrangement is set out on how we get paid.