Most B complexes pack in thousands of percent more than you need. Here's why we didn't — and what we put in the space instead. From our in-house nutritionist.

when i sat down to design our Mushroom B Complex, the first decision i made was a decision not to do something.

i didn't want to go overboard with the B vitamins.

that might sound odd coming from someone who spends most of his working life arguing that food supplements should be meaningfully dosed. and i do believe that. a supplement that contains a token amount of something is a waste of everyone's money. but the B vitamins are a particular case, and somewhere along the way the industry stopped treating them like one.

the number on the front of the bottle

walk along any health food shelf and pick up a B complex. turn it over. you'll very often find figures in the thousands of percent — 5,000%, 8,000%, sometimes more, across every single B in the formula.

it looks impressive. it isn't.

the B vitamins are water-soluble. with the notable exception of B12, which the liver holds in reserve, the body doesn't stockpile them the way it stockpiles the fat-soluble vitamins. take more than you can use in a day, and a good deal of the surplus is simply excreted. you are, quite literally, paying for something that leaves the building.

which is the real argument for B vitamins, and it's a better one than the big number implies: because the body doesn't hold large reserves, it wants a steady, daily spectrum — from a varied diet, and from a supplement that turns up every day without fail. consistency, not spectacle.

a meaningful dose, and what we did with the room

so that's what we built. sensible doses of the full spectrum — still comfortably above NRV, still doing real work, but dosed to what the body can actually put to use rather than to what looks good on a label.

and we used the methylated, active forms. this matters more than the size of the number. the cheap forms of the B vitamins have to be converted by the body before they can be used, and not everyone converts them equally well. the active forms arrive ready to work. it's a subtler kind of quality — it doesn't shout from the front of the bottle — but it's the difference between a dose that's present and a dose that's available.

doing it this way left us room in the capsule. and rather than filling that room with more B6 than anyone needs, we asked a different question: what could we put in there that mirrors what the B vitamins already do?

two mushrooms, chosen to mirror

that question gave us the rest of the formula. and the answer wasn't filler, and it wasn't decoration. it was two mushrooms chosen precisely because they shadow the same territory the B vitamins occupy — so that everything in the capsule pulls in one direction rather than three.

organic lion's mane. we call it the most popular mushroom in the forest, and we mean it — it's the one we're asked about at the counter more than any other, by some distance. revered in traditional practice for centuries, and still the mushroom people come looking for by name. ancient wisdom, modern mind.

it sits beside the B vitamins that contribute to the normal functioning of the nervous system and to normal psychological function. the mushroom and the vitamins, pointing the same way.

cordyceps. prized for centuries in the high Himalaya, gathered at altitude by people whose living depended on endurance, and associated in that tradition with stamina and staying power. a mushroom with a working history, not a marketing one.

it sits beside the B vitamins that contribute to normal energy-yielding metabolism and to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue.

that's the architecture of the whole thing. every mushroom in this formula mirrors something the B vitamins already do, and every B vitamin is dosed to be used rather than excreted. nothing is in there to look good on a label.

the question we're asked most

we designed this for energy and for nerve health. that's what it does, and that's where most people find it.

but it isn't the question that keeps coming back to us at the counter.

the question we're asked most about the Mushroom B Complex is about hormones — and the answer isn't a happy accident. it's in the formula, and it was put there deliberately.

vitamin B6 contributes to the regulation of hormonal activity. that is an authorised health claim, and it is one of the reasons B6 is in this formula at all. ours is P5P — the active, methylated form, ready to work the moment it arrives, at a dose that means something. we could have used the cheap form at a token level and ticked the box. we didn't, and this is exactly why.

so when people find their way to this one for reasons that aren't printed on the front of the bottle, there's no mystery in it. it's a formula built to do several things at once — and it's doing them.

and it smells like dark chocolate

one last thing, and this one was an accident.

anyone who has ever taken a B complex knows the smell. that unmistakable, pungent hit when you crack the lid — the reason a lot of people give up on them without ever saying so.

ours doesn't do that. open the jar and what you get is something closer to dark chocolate: deep, earthy, faintly cocoa-ish. a nod, we think, to the mushrooms inside.

we can't claim we planned it. but we're not complaining.

a new hormonal hero?