Editorial Policy

Essential Branch covers subjects where a wrong number can cause harm: supplement doses, essential-oil dilutions, and safety around children, pregnancy and pets. This page sets out the rules the editors follow so that you can judge our work and hold us to it.

Where our information comes from

We use sources in this order of preference, and we say on each page which ones we relied on.

1. Government health and regulatory agencies. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, MedlinePlus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization. Recommended intakes and upper limits always come from the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements tables, copied exactly and checked line by line against the fact sheet before a page goes live.
2. Peer-reviewed research, found through PubMed and PubMed Central. We give systematic reviews, meta-analyses and randomized, placebo-controlled trials more weight than small, uncontrolled or laboratory studies, and we say when the evidence is thin, mixed or funded by a company with an interest in the result.
3. University extension services and veterinary poison-control services, such as the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center and Pet Poison Helpline, for practical questions about plants, home use and pets.

We do not use product marketing, retailer copy, anonymous forums or social media posts as sources of fact. Where commonly published figures disagree, as comedogenic ratings for carrier oils often do, we give the most widely published value and note the disagreement rather than inventing precision.

Every page that makes a health or safety statement ends with a Sources section listing each source’s title, publisher and the date we accessed it. Our tools read from the same datasets as our reference pages, so a calculator and the page beside it give the same answer.

What the health notice means

Supplement, essential-oil and body-care pages carry a short notice that the page is general information, not medical advice. It means three things. The page describes what is generally true for healthy adults, not what is right for you. It cannot account for your medicines, health conditions, pregnancy, age or allergies. And it is not a reason to delay seeing a doctor, pharmacist or veterinarian. Where a particular group needs extra care, such as children, people who are pregnant or breastfeeding, people taking certain medicines, or cats and dogs, the page says so specifically.

We do not describe any supplement, oil or product as a cure or treatment for a disease.

Dates and updates

Each article shows the date it was first published and the date it was last updated. The updated date changes only when we revise the substance of a page: a number, a recommendation, a safety note or a source. We do not change it for typo fixes or design changes. When an agency revises a table or a significant new study appears, we update the pages that rely on it, and we review every reference page on a regular cycle.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, please email contact@e.essentialbranch.com with the page address and, if you can, a source. We check every report. When we fix a factual error, we update the page and its updated date; when the error could have affected a decision, such as a dose, a dilution or a safety caution, we also add a short dated correction note at the end of the page saying what changed.

Independence

Essential Branch does not sell any product and does not endorse brands. Our pages do not name products as recommendations. No company pays for coverage, reviews or placement, we do not publish sponsored content, and we do not accept free products in exchange for writing about them.

Affiliate links: there are none at launch. If we ever add affiliate links, which would earn us a commission when a reader buys through them, we will label every such link clearly on the page where it appears, update this policy before the first one goes live, and keep our editorial choices separate from any commercial arrangement.

Images

Photographs and illustrations are used under free licenses and credited, with links to the originals, on our image credits page. Images are chosen to illustrate, not to show any particular product.