Method · 26 June 2026 · 4 min read
What we left out
The ingredients that tested well in a dish, did nothing in a person, and never made the jar.
A formulation is defined by its exclusions at least as much as its contents. Here is what did not make it, and why, because the reasoning is more useful than the list.
Iron
Widely deficient in some groups, actively harmful to supplement blindly in others. It needs a blood test, not a guess, so it is not in TN-02 and will not be.
Collagen
Digested into its constituent amino acids before it reaches anywhere near your skin. The trials showing a skin effect used doses an order of magnitude above what fits in a capsule, and the mechanism remains unclear even in those.
Most adaptogens
Ashwagandha survived our review for stress endpoints, then failed our sourcing requirements twice on heavy metals. It will go back in when we find a supply we can test to our own limit rather than the legal one.
Proprietary blends
Not an ingredient, a practice. A blend lets a label list impressive names without saying how much of each is present, which usually means one is present and the rest are dust. Every amount in the Tonic range is printed individually.
The standing rule
If the best available evidence is a cell study or a rodent model, it is interesting and it is not going in a product people take every morning for years.
