Why I Built FormulaForge: A Chiropractor's Case Against Supplement Sprawl

By Dr. Brennan Commerford, DC

I've been practicing chiropractic medicine for years. In that time I've watched hundreds of patients walk in carrying bags of supplement bottles—8, 10, sometimes 12 different products rattling around in a plastic grocery sack. They set them on my desk with a kind of hopeful exhaustion. "Tell me I'm doing something right."

Most of the time, I couldn't.

Not because they weren't trying. They absolutely were. These were people paying $150, $180, sometimes over $200 a month on supplements. They were reading labels, watching health content, asking their friends what worked. They were committed. But the stack they'd assembled—often over years, one bottle at a time—was working against them in ways that weren't obvious until you knew exactly what to look for.

That's the story of why I built FormulaForge. Not because I wanted to be in the supplement business. Because I spent years watching a completely solvable problem destroy people's confidence in their own health decisions—and I got tired of having no better answer than "let me see if I can find you a better version of each of these."

The Problem I Kept Seeing

Here's what I was looking at, again and again.

A patient comes in with chronic fatigue and poor sleep. They're already taking magnesium. Have been for two years. I ask which form. They hand me the bottle: magnesium oxide. I keep a neutral expression because I've learned that making patients feel foolish doesn't help anyone. But inside I'm thinking: oxide absorbs at 4%. Four percent.

They're taking 500 mg a day. Their body is using roughly 20 mg of it. The recommended daily intake for an adult male is around 420 mg. They're effectively deficient on paper and in practice—and they're paying for a bottle that's mostly inert filler in their body. The supplement industry is not lying on the label. It says magnesium. It's magnesium. What it doesn't say is that the form they chose is the cheapest, least bioavailable option available.

Then there's the folate situation. I cannot count how many patients I've seen on a basic B-complex containing folic acid—the synthetic form—who have MTHFR variants that affect their ability to convert folic acid to its active form. Research suggests 40% to 60% of the general population carries at least one copy of a common MTHFR variant. If you're in that group, the folic acid you're taking may be providing minimal benefit, and studies indicate it may actually compete with active methylfolate at the receptor level. The form matters enormously. But the label says "Folic Acid 400 mcg" and that sounds perfectly fine.

Same story with B12. Cyanocobalamin is the cheapest, most shelf-stable form. It requires multiple conversion steps to become active in the body. Methylcobalamin is the form your nervous system actually uses. The difference in cost to manufacture is a few cents per serving. The difference in bioavailability and neurological availability is significant. Yet walk into any pharmacy and you'll find cyanocobalamin on nine out of ten bottles.

None of this is a conspiracy. It's economics. Lower-grade forms are cheaper to source. Consumers aren't trained to read for form differences. And nobody in the retail supplement space has an incentive to explain why the product they're selling you is suboptimal—that would just send you to a competitor.

So patients were left building stacks based on whatever was available at Costco, whatever a podcast mentioned, whatever a friend recommended. Sometimes they hit on good ingredients by accident. More often they were assembling an expensive, redundant, low-bioavailability collection of bottles that was giving them just enough of something to make them feel like they were doing something.

The Moment It Clicked

The moment I stopped thinking about this as a patient education problem and started thinking about it as a systems problem happened with one particular analysis.

A patient—I'll protect her privacy—came in with a stack of four bottles she'd been refining for almost three years. She was thoughtful about it. She'd done research. She was spending $229 a month. When I worked through the actual ingredient quality, bioavailability estimates, and form grades, her stack scored 8.8 out of 10. That's genuinely good. She'd done better than most.

But when I mapped those same T1-grade ingredients—the actual best-form equivalents of what she was taking—into a consolidated formula, the number came out to around $37 a month. Same quality. Same active compounds. One product instead of four.

The gap wasn't ingredients. The gap was packaging, branding, and distribution margin. She was paying $229 for what could cost $37, not because she'd been deceived, but because the retail supplement market is not designed to consolidate and optimize. It's designed to sell individual bottles with compelling label copy.

I sat with that for a while. Because if that math holds even roughly across a broader population—and in my experience it does—then patients are collectively wasting enormous amounts of money and getting inconsistent results for it. And the solution isn't telling people to read more labels. The solution is building something that does the analysis for them.

That's when I started building FormulaForge.

What FormulaForge Actually Is

FormulaForge is not a supplement brand. I want to be specific about that because it changes everything about how to think about what we do.

A supplement brand has a financial interest in you buying their product. They formulate for margin. They brand for shelf appeal. Their incentive is not necessarily to give you the exact combination of the highest-bioavailability forms at the lowest cost. Their incentive is to build a brand you trust enough to repurchase.

FormulaForge is a formulation platform. We start from your specific situation—your current stack, your health goals, what you're actually spending—and work backward to what would genuinely serve you best. That means using practitioner-grade ingredient forms, real bioavailability data from published research, and a system that consolidates redundancies rather than selling you more products.

Here's how it works in practice.

You upload your current supplement labels. Our platform processes each ingredient, identifies the specific form (not just "magnesium" but "magnesium oxide" or "magnesium glycinate"), grades it against the research on that form's bioavailability and therapeutic effectiveness, and scores your overall stack. You see, for the first time, what you're actually absorbing versus what you're paying for.

Then you can build. You tell us your health goals. We map those to the ingredient forms with the strongest research support. Where your current stack has gaps, we flag them. Where you're duplicating the same compound across multiple products, we consolidate. The result is a personalized formula using the same ingredient grades you'd find in a practitioner dispensary—without the practitioner markup, without the branding premium, without the four-product redundancy.

This is what I wanted for my patients. Not another brand asking them to trust a label. A tool that shows its work.

Why "Science-Backed" Is Not a Marketing Phrase Here

I know "science-backed" has become one of those terms that means almost nothing because everyone uses it. Let me tell you specifically what it means in the context of FormulaForge, because the difference matters.

Every ingredient in our system is graded through what we call a tier structure. T1 ingredients are the highest-bioavailability, best-researched forms of a compound. T2 ingredients are solid secondary options with strong research support. T3 ingredients are forms we can work with but that require a considered reason to use over T1 or T2. The tier assignment isn't marketing copy. It's a reflection of the published literature on absorption rates, therapeutic outcomes, and clinical applicability.

Magnesium glycinate is T1. Magnesium oxide is not—not because we have a financial incentive to steer you toward a more expensive form, but because the research on oxide's absorption rate versus amino acid chelate forms is consistent and not particularly close. We follow the research.

The same applies to folate forms, B12 forms, vitamin K variants (K1 versus K2, MK-4 versus MK-7), and the many cases where the label says "Vitamin D" without specifying D2 versus D3—a distinction that has meaningful implications for conversion efficiency in the body.

There are no proprietary blends in FormulaForge formulas. A proprietary blend is a mechanism that lets a company list ingredients without disclosing exact doses. It protects their formulation IP at the cost of your ability to evaluate what you're actually getting. We don't do that. Every ingredient in every formula is disclosed at the exact dose. You know what you're getting. You know why it's at that dose. You can look up every reference we used.

I'm also going to be direct about something: our system will not recommend a dose that hasn't been validated against established safety and efficacy ranges. We work with a 10-gate validation process that checks every ingredient-to-formula relationship for safety parameters before anything makes it into a formulation. This is what "science-backed" means to us. Not a marketing statement—a process commitment.

The Industry Isn't Broken. It's Misaligned.

I want to be careful here because I don't think the supplement industry is populated by bad actors. There are excellent companies making excellent products. The problem isn't malice. The problem is structural misalignment.

The retail supplement market rewards differentiation through branding, not differentiation through clinical quality. A company that invests heavily in high-bioavailability forms, rigorous third-party testing, and conservative dose formulation is competing for shelf space against a company that invests in label design and influencer marketing. The consumer, not having access to analytical tools, often can't tell the difference at point of purchase. So the market signal that should reward clinical quality gets muted.

Meanwhile, practitioners who do know the difference—functional medicine doctors, naturopaths, pharmacists, chiropractors like me—are typically selling supplements through a dispensary model with significant markups. The knowledge gap gets filled, but at a price that excludes a large portion of the population that would benefit from it.

FormulaForge is an attempt to close that gap without requiring a patient to book an appointment and pay a consultation fee just to find out their magnesium form is suboptimal. The analysis should be accessible. The formulation should be transparent. The pricing should reflect what things actually cost to produce, not what a brand can extract from a consumer who doesn't know there's a difference.

Join as a Founding Member

We're in beta. That means two things.

First, we're actively building, and founding members have direct access to us—to me personally—in a way that won't be true at scale. If you find something confusing, if your analysis surfaces a question you don't know how to interpret, if you want to understand why a particular ingredient landed in a particular tier, I want to hear from you. This early feedback is shaping the product in real time.

Second, founding member pricing reflects the beta stage. We're not charging premium pricing for an unfinished product. The goal right now is to get the platform in the hands of people who will use it seriously, tell us what's missing, and help us understand what actually changes how they make decisions about their health.

Here's what you get as a founding member:

• A free, full analysis of your current supplement stack — every ingredient graded, every form evaluated, every redundancy flagged
• A personalized formula recommendation based on your specific health goals
• Full ingredient transparency — no proprietary blends, no hidden doses
• Practitioner-grade ingredient forms at direct-to-consumer pricing
• Access to the FormulaForge team during beta for direct support

If you've been spending money on supplements and wondering whether they're actually working, this is the analysis you've needed. Not because I'm trying to sell you a different supplement—but because you deserve to know what you're actually absorbing.

Analyze Your Supplements Free

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't FormulaForge just another supplement brand?

No, and the distinction matters. A supplement brand formulates a fixed product line and sells it to anyone who buys. FormulaForge is a formulation platform—we start from your specific stack, your goals, and your current spending, and build from there. The end result is a formula personalized to you, not a shelf product designed for the median consumer. We're also fully transparent about ingredients and doses, with no proprietary blends. You can see every milligram of everything in your formula and look up the research behind every selection.

How do you know which ingredient forms are actually better?

Every tier assignment in our system is grounded in published research. For example, the bioavailability difference between magnesium oxide and magnesium glycinate is documented across multiple absorption studies. The clinical evidence for methylfolate versus folic acid in individuals with certain common genetic variants is well-established in the peer-reviewed literature. We don't use marketing language like "superior formula" without being able to point to the specific research that supports it. Our ingredient grading is a reflection of the evidence, and we're transparent about where the evidence is strong versus where it's more preliminary.

Can I keep some of my current supplements?

Absolutely. The analysis isn't designed to tell you everything you're doing is wrong. In fact, most people are doing some things right. The goal is to identify where your current stack has gaps, where the form grade is significantly dragging on your investment, and where you're paying for redundancy. In some cases, one product in your current stack might score well enough that we simply confirm you should keep it. The analysis is honest, not promotional.

Does this replace working with a doctor or practitioner?

No, and I want to be clear about that as a clinician. FormulaForge is a tool for optimizing your supplement stack. It is not a diagnostic tool, it does not interpret medical test results, and it does not replace the judgment of a healthcare provider who knows your full medical history. If you have a complex health condition, are on prescription medications, or are making significant changes to your supplement regimen, I always recommend doing that in conversation with your doctor or a qualified healthcare practitioner. What FormulaForge does is give you better information to bring to that conversation—and better ingredients when you're ready to formulate.

References

1. Schuchardt JP, Hahn A. Intestinal absorption and factors influencing bioavailability of magnesium: an update. Current Nutrition & Food Science. 2017;13(4):260–278.
2. Coudray C, Rambeau M, Feillet-Coudray C, et al. Study of magnesium bioavailability from ten organic and inorganic Mg salts in Mg-depleted rats using a stable isotope approach. Magnesium Research. 2005;18(4):215–223.
3. Gaby AR. Natural approaches to epilepsy. Alternative Medicine Review. 2007;12(1):9–24. (On folic acid vs. methylfolate conversion in MTHFR variants.)
4. Frosst P, Blom HJ, Milos R, et al. A candidate genetic risk factor for vascular disease: a common mutation in methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase. Nature Genetics. 1995;10(1):111–113.
5. Watanabe F, Yabuta Y, Bito T, Teng F. Vitamin B12-containing plant food sources for vegetarians. Nutrients. 2014;6(5):1861–1873.
6. Heaney RP, Recker RR, Grote J, Horst RL, Armas LAG. Vitamin D3 is more potent than vitamin D2 in humans. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 2011;96(3):E447–E452.
7. Geleijnse JM, Vermeer C, Grobbee DE, et al. Dietary intake of menaquinone is associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease: the Rotterdam Study. Journal of Nutrition. 2004;134(11):3100–3105.

Medical Disclaimer: The information in this article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Dr. Brennan Commerford is a Doctor of Chiropractic; this content reflects his professional perspective and experience but is not a substitute for personalized medical evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment. Supplement recommendations vary based on individual health status, medications, and clinical context. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making significant changes to your supplement regimen, especially if you have a medical condition, are pregnant or nursing, or are taking prescription medications. The bioavailability estimates cited in this article are drawn from published research and represent population-level findings; individual results may vary. FormulaForge formulas are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.