A ruling published on 2 September is the third time in seven months the Advertising Standards Authority has upheld against the same Berkhamsted company. The interesting part is the paragraph listing which rules were broken.

What was claimed, and what was conceded

The ad, a paid Instagram post seen on 29 April 2026, promoted a “NEW Dopamine Patch” said to increase dopamine and serotonin levels for better mood, focus and motivation. The ASA upheld both issues. Kind Patches Ltd told the authority that they did not hold evidence to substantiate the claims regarding mood, focus, motivation, emotional balance, dopamine- and serotonin-levels, and that the name could be taken at face value; they had renamed the product. The second issue was the ad itself — a woman applying a patch to a man’s arm over a line saying he did not know — held to condone anti-social behaviour.

The rules cited, and the one absent

The first issue breached CAP Code rules 3.1 on misleading advertising and 3.7 on substantiation. The second breached 1.3 on social responsibility and 4.4 on harm and offence. Section 15 — food, food supplements and associated health or nutrition claims, which covers supplement advertising, not packs — appears nowhere. Nor in the ruling of 4 February, over four Facebook ads for NAD+, Dopamine and Energy patches, which cited 3.1, 3.7 and 12.1 on health-related products; nor in a third, on 15 July, over a GLP-1 patch, citing 1.3, 4.9, 12.1 and 12.11. Three rulings are not a practice, and we claim nothing about the category.

There is nonetheless a reason a patch sits awkwardly under food law. MHRA Guidance Note 8, published in September 2025, quotes the definition in assimilated Regulation (EC) 178/2002: a food is any substance “intended to be, or reasonably expected to be ingested by humans”. Something worn on an arm is not. That is a reading of the definitions. What the ASA decided is narrower: the ad must not appear again in the form complained of.

What the register would have allowed for that claim

Nothing that mentions dopamine or serotonin. The Great Britain nutrition and health claims register, kept by the Department of Health and Social Care and last updated on 19 May 2026, holds 2,349 health-claim applications, authorised and non-authorised. Only 267 are authorised for use here. Every entry mentioning dopamine or serotonin — seven, covering L-tyrosine, L-tryptophan and 5-HTP — is recorded as non-authorised. A capsule promising the same would have no permitted wording to retreat to, a gap we have written about before.

Sitting outside food law is no escape into a laxer regime: it forfeits the public list of approved wordings and keeps the duty to hold evidence, which this advertiser accepted it could not meet. Food supplements are regulated as food in Great Britain, not as medicines, and are not there to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent anything. Whatever a patch is, it is not a food.