What 'Standardised Extract' Actually Means On A Label

The Word Doing The Most Work On A Panel

Two products can both say "green tea extract, 200 mg" and deliver wildly different amounts of the compound you actually want. The difference sits in one word: standardised.

What Standardisation Means

A plant contains hundreds of compounds in proportions that vary by harvest, region and season. Standardising means processing the extract so a stated percentage is a specific compound — catechins in green tea, hydroxycitric acid in Garcinia, punicalagins in pomegranate.

"Green tea extract standardised to 50% catechins, 200 mg" tells you something concrete: roughly 100 mg of the compound with the research behind it. "Green tea extract, 200 mg" tells you almost nothing, because the catechin content could be anything.

Where a label names the standardisation, somebody had to test for it. That costs money, which is why cheaper products tend to omit it.

The Serving Size Trap

Check this before anything else. Impressive figures on a panel, and a serving size of two chews or three capsules. Take one and every number you just read halves or thirds itself.

Get this wrong and every subsequent calculation is wrong too.

Proprietary Blends

A blend lists several ingredients against one combined weight instead of individual amounts. "Metabolic Complex, 450 mg" conveys nothing whatsoever. The first item could account for 430 mg and the remaining five for a pinch each, and in practice that is usually exactly the arrangement.

Blends are legal and extremely common. They are also the clearest signal available that a manufacturer would prefer you did not do arithmetic.

Compare Against The Research

Find the amount of the active you care about and set it beside what the studies used. A trial at 500 mg against a label offering 50 mg means you are holding a flavour rather than a dose.

This single check eliminates a great many products in under a minute.

The Badge That Is Always False

No dietary supplement is FDA approved. A facility can be FDA-registered, which is a different and much lower bar concerning premises rather than product. Any label carrying an FDA approval badge either misunderstands the rules or is relying on you to.

Two More Worth Noticing

A guarantee graphic that contradicts the terms. If the badge says 180 days and the policy says 60, the policy wins and the badge is a future argument you will lose.

No warnings anywhere. Every genuinely active ingredient interacts with something. A label with no cautions is not a safer product, it is a less forthcoming one. Ours are on the safety page, including the ones that cost us sales.

The Sixty-Second Version

Serving size, then standardisation, then named amounts rather than a blend, then a comparison against the research, then the warnings. A label surviving all five is probably worth your money — which is the standard we set for the six actives documented here.

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