We’ve gone back to the era of “tonics for balancing the humors”.
Generally speaking when it comes to any supplement (drinks included) you can look at two things:
- The concentration of the ingredient
- Which way they get the ingredient in
The first one is easier if you’re anywhere that’s not the US, since brands need to detail the ingredients list. Basically there’s doses wehre these ingredients start to work. You can look them up online generally. Many of these brands, especially in the energy drinks boom, underdose the active ingredients just so they can put the name front and center.
The second thing can be trickier but you can also generally look it up. Notice it says lion’s mane extract for the Trip can, but only Ashwagandha. This is a particularly easy example to look at. The extract is good, it’s what you want. It’s essentially the concentrated active component without the not-interesting bulk - that is, every other molecule that forms fungi, such as the cells.
But they don’t say that for the Ashwagandha, which implies they use the whole root, including the cellulose or whatever
This logically lowers the concentration of the chemical that you want from Ashwagandha for this purpose. Whether the chemical actually works is another question, but this should be sufficient to say that it’s not going to be present in high enough concentrations if they don’t specify extract or the particular molecule.
On the flip side you also have different binding agents. Magnesium is a big one. you can get magnesium oxide which is the cheapest form, but is also almost entirely rejected by the body. This means out of say 100mg of magnesium oxide, you will only process and absorb 10mg. Magnesium glycinate, bound to the glycine amino acid, is much more readily bioavailable to our body and the one you should take as a supplement because we digest glycine, but not oxide.
Energy drink companies love the oxide form though because it’s cheap af since you can barely do anything with it, but they can still say there’s magnesium in their formulation, and sell you that can at a premium. They make huge margins on sales that’s why there’s an energy drink boom right now.
i’m convinced that if a package says that the product is good for you, it’s usually the opposite.
