I don't say this to be provocative. I’m saying it because it took me a really long time to figure out, and I wish someone had told me sooner.
Most of what we've been taught about supplements is take this capsule, drink this shake, mix this powder and it’s built around a format that was never designed with absorption in mind. It was designed around manufacturing convenience and shelf life.
That's not a conspiracy, it's just how industries develop. Pills and powders are cheap to make, easy to store, and simple to market. Whether they actually work as well as they could is a separate question that doesn't always get asked loudly enough.
The bioavailability problem
Bioavailability is the measure of how much of a substance actually reaches your bloodstream and becomes active in your body. For a lot of common oral supplements, that number is way lower than most people assume.
Magnesium oxide is the cheapest and most common form of magnesium you'll find in supplements and has a bioavailability of roughly 4%. That means about 96% of what you swallow passes through without being absorbed. Vitamin C in high doses has a very similar issue and absorption drops significantly as the dose increases. Many B vitamin formulations suffer the same problem also depending on the form used.
Your gut is not a perfect delivery system unfortunately. It was designed to extract nutrients from food, slowly, over a long digestive process. It was not designed to rapidly absorb concentrated synthetic compounds.
The format is the problem
Here's the thing nobody in the supplement aisle wants to tell you, a great ingredient in a poor delivery format is still a poor supplement. You can spend a lot of money on high-quality actives and lose most of the benefits simply because of how they're delivered.
Transdermal delivery exists precisely because of this problem. By bypassing the digestive system entirely and delivering directly through the skin into the bloodstream, you remove the gut as a variable and the ingredient gets to where it needs to go, at a steady rate, without competing with stomach acid or gut barrier function.
This is why medicine has used transdermal patches for decades, for nicotine replacement, for hormone therapy, for pain management. Not because it's exotic but simply because it works better.
What this means for how you supplement
It means asking a different question when you buy a supplement. Not just what's in it, but how it actually gets into you.
The label on a capsule tells you the dose, but it doesn't tell you what percentage of that dose your body actually uses and that number depends entirely on the form of the ingredient and the delivery method.
We built TruePatch because we got tired of supplementing on hope. Every patch is built around ingredients that are suited to transdermal delivery, at doses designed to be effective and in a format that gives your body the best chance of actually using them.
That's not a revolutionary idea. It's just the obvious one that nobody was executing on properly.
— Dylan, Founder, TruePatch