Guide
What a complete ingredient entry carries
Before you can ask how much of an ingredient is in a capsule, you have to know exactly which ingredient it is. A complete entry prints five things, and each one exists because leaving it out makes the row unverifiable in a specific way.
Five columns: common name, Latin binomial, plant part, standardisation and amount. On this label the first three are largely filled and the last two are mostly blank: the turmeric is the only ingredient with a standardisation, and the magnesium is the only one with an amount. A standardisation percentage without a weight cannot be turned into a dose.
The five columns
A supplement ingredient row is a claim about identity. These are the five pieces of it, in the order they matter for a reader trying to look something up.
| Column | What it does | What goes wrong without it |
|---|---|---|
| Common name | Tells you what to search for. | Nothing can be looked up at all. |
| Latin binomial | Fixes the species. | Common names are shared between unrelated plants, so the research you find may be about something else. |
| Plant part | Says which tissue the extract came from. | Different parts of a plant differ in chemistry; a monograph about one is not evidence about another. |
| Standardisation | Says what fraction of the extract is the measured compound. | Two extracts with the same weight can carry very different quantities of the thing anyone studied. |
| Amount | Turns all the others into a dose. | Everything above becomes decoration. A perfectly identified ingredient at an unknown weight is still an unknown. |
Four of those five are about identity and one is about quantity. A label can do very well on the first four and still leave a reader with nothing usable, which is exactly what happens here.
Column one: the common name
This label prints all six. That is worth noting before anything else, because it is not universal: plenty of proprietary blends name three ingredients and close the list with a phrase, and there is nothing a reader can do with that.
Four of the six names on this panel are chemical rather than botanical — Magnesium Glycinate, Alpha Lipoic Acid, L-Carnitine and Coenzyme Q 10 (as Ubiquinone) — and a chemical name does most of the identification work on its own. Two of them go further and name a form: the magnesium is specified as the glycinate, and the coenzyme Q10 as ubiquinone rather than ubiquinol. Neither was required.
Form matters for exactly the reason the rest of this site turns on. A magnesium row that said only “Magnesium 80 mg” would be compliant and would tell you nothing about how much of the blend it occupies. “As Magnesium Glycinate from proprietary blend” names a compound with a molecular formula, and a molecular formula is a weight.
Column two: the Latin binomial
Both botanicals on this label carry one: Ruscus aculeatus for the butcher’s broom and Curcuma longa for the turmeric. That is good practice and most labels in this trade skip it.
The binomial exists because common names are unreliable. They travel between languages, they get attached to unrelated plants, and they are marketing property in a way a species name is not. A binomial is the key that opens a database; a common name is a phrase that might.
In this case the binomial does something slightly unusual. It confirms that there is genuinely nothing to find. Searching the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements and NCCIH for butcher’s broom and for Ruscus aculeatus returns no fact sheet, no monograph and no summary of evidence — so the absence is an absence of published research rather than a failure of the search. Without the binomial this site could not have said that with any confidence.
Column three: the plant part
Both botanicals print theirs: root for the butcher’s broom, rhizome for the turmeric. Again, better than most.
The reason this column exists is that a plant is not chemically uniform. Root, rhizome, leaf, seed, skin, bark and stigma are different tissues with different constituents, and research conducted on one does not transfer to another without an argument. A reader who finds a monograph about a leaf extract and applies it to a root extract has changed the subject without noticing.
Here the column does its job quietly and correctly. NCCIH’s turmeric page concerns the rhizome of Curcuma longa, which is what this label names, so the research it summarises is at least about the right material. That is the best thing that can be said for any of the six research files on this product, and it is worth saying: the identification is sound. The problem on this label is never that you are reading about the wrong plant.
Column four: the standardisation
One ingredient of six carries one: Turmeric (Curcuma longa) Rhizome Extract 95% Curcuminoids. It is the only standardisation anywhere on this bottle, and printing it is a real disclosure that most labels omit.
A standardisation says what fraction of the extract is the compound anybody actually measures. Turmeric rhizome as a raw powder carries a low single-digit percentage of curcuminoids; an extract standardised to 95% is a concentrate. Two rows both reading turmeric extract, one standardised and one not, can differ by a factor of twenty in the thing that matters.
But a percentage is not a dose. It is a percentage of a weight, and it is only as useful as that weight. Ninety-five per cent of a gram is 950 mg of curcuminoids. Ninety-five per cent of the ceiling this label permits — 1.9 mg — is about 1.8 mg. The percentage is identical in both cases and the two products have nothing in common.
NCCIH’s position on the ingredient at any dose is that “we don’t know enough to definitively conclude if turmeric or curcumin is beneficial for any health purposes”, and it adds that “oral curcumin products vary in how much curcumin they actually contain”. A standardisation figure is a partial answer to that second sentence, which is why it deserves credit — and why it deserves to be multiplied out rather than admired.
Column five: the amount
One of six. Magnesium, 80 mg, printed at 19% of the Daily Value, which is arithmetically correct against the FDA’s figure of 420 mg.
The other five carry nothing, and the FDA does not require them to: inside a proprietary blend only the total weight and the descending order are compulsory, plus a separate declaration for any ingredient that has a Daily Value. So the label is following the rule rather than dodging it, and the missing column is a legal choice.
What is unusual here is that the one printed amount does most of the work of the five missing ones. Because it names the compound and says it comes from the blend, a reader can compute that the magnesium glycinate occupies about 567 of the blend’s 575 mg, leaving roughly 8 mg for everything else. The blend guide sets out that method in full.
The ceilings this produces are ceilings, not amounts
At most 7.5 mg of alpha lipoic acid, 3.7 mg of butcher’s broom, 2.5 mg of L-carnitine, 1.9 mg of turmeric extract and 1.5 mg of coenzyme Q10. Each is an upper limit forced by the label; the true figures are at or below them and could be lower still. This site never prints one as though it were a dose.
All six rows, scored
| Ingredient | Name | Species | Part | Standardisation | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magnesium Glycinate | Yes | n/a — a compound | n/a | n/a | Yes — 80 mg elemental |
| Alpha Lipoic Acid | Yes | n/a | n/a | n/a | No — ceiling 7.5 mg |
| Butcher’s Broom Root Extract | Yes | Yes | Yes — root | No | No — ceiling 3.7 mg |
| L-Carnitine | Yes | n/a | n/a | n/a | No — ceiling 2.5 mg |
| Turmeric Rhizome Extract | Yes | Yes | Yes — rhizome | Yes — 95% | No — ceiling 1.9 mg |
| Coenzyme Q 10 (as Ubiquinone) | Yes | n/a | n/a | n/a | No — ceiling 1.5 mg |
Read it column by column and the shape is clear. Identity: very good. Every ingredient is named, both botanicals carry a species and a plant part, one carries a standardisation, and two of the chemical entries name a specific form. Quantity: one row in six.
The single blank worth chasing is the butcher’s broom standardisation, and only because there is nothing else to go on for that ingredient. Without a monograph and without a standardisation, Ruscus aculeatus root extract at a ceiling of 3.7 mg is a name, a plant part and an upper bound, and nothing else can honestly be said about it in either direction.
What to ask when a column is blank
- No binomial? Ask which species. If the answer is a shrug, treat any research you find about the common name as unrelated until proved otherwise.
- No plant part? Ask which tissue the extract came from, and whether the published research used the same one.
- No standardisation? Ask what the extract is standardised to, if anything, and what the ratio is. “Extract” on its own is not a specification.
- No amount? Compute the ceiling yourself and then ask for the figure. A formulator can answer in a sentence; a call centre usually cannot.
- A nutrient declared from inside a blend? Ask which compound and what its elemental content is. On this label that single question moves the whole mass balance from derived to confirmed.
None of this requires expertise. It requires knowing what a complete row looks like, which is the whole content of this guide. The contact page sets out who to ask, and the batch page has the questions written out to read down the phone.
Read the magnesium row before you decide
Thirty capsules, one a day. One amount is printed on this label — 80 mg of magnesium — and it is the amount that tells you what is left of the 575 mg blend for the other five ingredients. The live price and the 60-day return terms are both on the seller’s checkout screen.
60-day window · Questions first? The FAQ page answers most of them.