Most supplement guides are, at their core, sales funnels. The recommendations exist because someone earns a margin on them. The advice is generic because personalisation is expensive and takes effort. The evidence standards are vague because specificity creates accountability, and accountability is inconvenient when you want to recommend everything.
The result is an industry that profits from confusion. The more you don't know, the easier it is to sell you something. The harder it is to verify a claim, the more freely it can be made. This is not a description of the worst actors. It describes the structure of the market.
We built Distil because we found this genuinely frustrating. We could not find a place that would tell us, honestly, what was worth taking for a specific person with a specific profile, without trying to sell us something on the back of it. So we built the thing we wished existed.
The report we generate is designed to inform, not to maximise spend. That produces some concrete choices: in how we source, what we include, what we tell you to avoid, and what we tell you not to buy. Each of those choices is documented below. Not as brand positioning. As a record of what we actually do.
Most supplement guides tell you what to take. Ours also tells you what not to buy, and why, for every compound in your stack.
The supplement market is full of inferior forms: low-absorption minerals, outdated vitamin isomers, extracts that differ from what was used in clinical trials. A guide that tells you to take Magnesium without specifying the form is sending you toward a product that may deliver under 4% of its stated dose. That is not helpful. It is closer to the opposite.
Every compound card in your report includes a "What to avoid" section with specific, named reasons. It also includes exact UK search terms, not to direct you to a preferred retailer, but so you can find the right product from anyone.
We have no affiliate links. We earn nothing from what you buy. The search terms exist entirely to help you find a product that matches the clinical form, dose, and specification in your report.
Most supplement guides show you their inclusions. Ours shows you its exclusions too: which compounds were evaluated, scored, and placed below the threshold for this profile, and why.
This matters for two reasons. First, it lets you verify the reasoning. If a compound you expected to see is absent, the report explains its absence rather than leaving you to wonder whether it was overlooked. Second, it demonstrates that the selection process is real. A guide that recommends everything has not selected anything.
For every compound that was considered but not included, the report documents why: insufficient evidence for this profile, superseded by a better-evidenced alternative, deferred because it depends on the foundation being established first, or excluded for a safety reason. Deferred compounds are explicitly revisited at the 12-week reassessment point.
Showing your reasoning is how you earn trust. Hiding it is how you sell more.
Some compounds are only worth taking if a deficiency or imbalance is confirmed. Others should be calibrated against a baseline before you start. Your report includes a blood work section specifying exactly which tests matter for your profile, why, and what result you are aiming for.
Sometimes that information changes what you need. Ferritin below 50 µg/L is associated with cognitive symptoms and fatigue even when haemoglobin is within the normal laboratory range, and most GPs do not routinely test for it, or explain this distinction. If your ferritin is low, that is a different intervention than if it is adequate. We include this because it is the right information to give, not because it maximises your stack size.
In some cases, the blood test result means you need fewer compounds than the report initially recommended. We include the blood work section anyway. The goal is accurate information, not maximum spend.
A list of compounds is not a stack. A stack is a set of compounds whose doses, forms, and timing have been adjusted for what every other compound in the set is doing.
Magnesium Glycinate at 400mg elemental delivers approximately 2.4g of glycine as a co-amino acid nightly. A naive glycine recommendation would be 3–5g before bed for sleep. But when Magnesium Glycinate is already in the stack, the standalone Glycine dose is set at 3g, because the total cross-compound glycine is tracked and the combined 5.4g is the effective dose, not 3g and 5g independently.
Similarly, Zinc is placed at lunch, not because lunch is when zinc is conventionally taken, but because zinc and magnesium compete for the same intestinal transporter. Taking them at the same meal reduces the absorption of both. Separating them by meal slot is a coordination decision, not a timing preference.
Phosphatidylserine is placed in the morning specifically because this profile has a sleep goal. Taken in the evening, it can impair sleep onset in some individuals. The compound is beneficial; the timing is where the personalisation happens.
This coordination runs through the entire stack. Nothing in your report is a generic recommendation pasted onto your profile. Every dose, every timing, every form has been set in the context of everything else.
The questionnaire distinguishes between two distinct sleep problems: difficulty falling asleep (onset) and waking during the night (maintenance). These are different physiological problems, addressed by different mechanisms, requiring different compounds, often at different times of night.
A recommendation of "take something to help with sleep" that does not make this distinction may address one problem while missing the other entirely. Worse, a compound that helps onset can sometimes impair maintenance, and vice versa. Getting this wrong is not a minor issue.
Your report identifies which subtype or combination applies to your profile and selects compounds specifically for that mechanism. If you have an onset problem, the primary targeted compound is L-Theanine, which promotes alpha-wave activity and reduces sleep latency. If maintenance is the issue, Ashwagandha, timed to the evening, addresses HPA axis dysregulation and the night-waking pattern that often follows elevated evening cortisol.
The same compound at the wrong time, or the wrong compound for the wrong subtype, is not personalisation. It is a guess with good packaging.
Before any compound is recommended, the report analyses your dietary baseline across every nutritional dimension relevant to your goals. This is not a formality. It changes what gets recommended.
If your dietary calcium intake from dairy is adequate, a calcium supplement is not added to your stack, even if it might theoretically provide some benefit. If your choline intake from eggs is sufficient for your age and goals, standalone choline is not recommended. If your B12 absorption looks fine from your omnivorous diet, a standalone B12 is not included on top of the B Complex.
The dietary baseline also informs dosing. If you eat oily fish once a week, your Omega-3 dose accounts for that contribution, rather than treating you as if your dietary EPA+DHA intake is zero. If you are a moderate alcohol drinker, that affects magnesium demand. If you skip breakfast, that changes how fat-soluble compounds are timed.
The goal of this analysis is to recommend supplements where they genuinely add to your diet, not where your diet already covers the need. A shorter stack that addresses real gaps is more useful, and more honest, than a longer one that pads out something already adequate.
We will tell you when food is a better answer than a capsule. We will show you what was considered and rejected, and why. We will give you exact search terms so you can buy from any retailer. We will flag the blood tests that matter before you spend, even if the results mean you need fewer things than you thought.
None of that serves our commercial interests. All of it serves yours. That is what the report is for.