How We Vet Products
The bar a product clears before we link to it
Why product links exist at all
Ration is free to read and free to track with. Affiliate commissions — a small cut when you buy through a link we recommend, at no extra cost to you — are one of the ways we plan to keep it that way. As of today, no affiliate placements are live; this page publishes the rules before the first one is, so you can hold us to them.
What a product must clear
A product appears on Ration only if we would name it with no commission attached. Beyond that, it must match the evidence on the page that recommends it: the same form and a comparable dose to what the cited studies actually used, a fully disclosed label with no proprietary blends hiding amounts, and third-party testing (such as NSF or USP) wherever it exists — if a pick lacks it, we say so next to the link. Commission size plays no role in which products are chosen or how they are ordered.
The five rules
Every affiliate link on Ration follows five non-negotiable rules:
- Never inside the evidence. Product links never appear in the research, mechanism, or sources sections of an article — anywhere you are weighing claims, there is nothing for sale.
- Always in a clearly marked box, below the content.Recommendations live in a visually separated “Vetted products” block after the article, never disguised as ordinary links in the text.
- Disclosed before you scroll. Any page that contains affiliate links tells you so at the top, in plain text.
- Marked for machines too. Every affiliate link carries the
rel="sponsored"attribute, so search engines know it is a commercial link — this is enforced in code, not by habit. - Never in the tracker. The food logger and coach are product surfaces, not ad space. No affiliate links there, ever.
Commissions never touch the data
Rankings on Ration are computed from laboratory measurements and published research, as described in our editorial policy. Articles are written and conclusions are drawn first; products are matched to them afterward, never the reverse. If no product clears the bar for a page, that page simply has no product box.
Holding us to it
If you ever find a product link that breaks one of these rules, email hello@rationhealth.com and we will fix it and say what happened.