Metaglucent Supplement Facts: Every Line on the Label

Seventeen dietary ingredients. Four are printed with a weight: vitamin C 90 mg, vitamin D 25 mcg, magnesium 20 mg and chromium 100 mcg. Thirteen sit inside the blend, in this printed order: turmeric, cocoa bean extract, berberine HCL, gymnema, cassia cinnamon, olive leaf extract, eleuthero root extract, juniper berry, maritime pine bark extract, bitter melon fruit extract, banaba leaf extract, butcher’s broom root extract and guggul resin extract. The other ingredients are a hypromellose capsule shell, microcrystalline cellulose, magnesium stearate, stearic acid and silicon dioxide.

Yes, all four. We recalculated every one against the FDA’s published Daily Values and they check out: vitamin C 90 mg against a 90 mg DV is 100 per cent; vitamin D 25 mcg against 20 mcg is 125 per cent; magnesium 20 mg against 420 mg is 4.8 per cent, printed as 5; chromium 100 mcg against 35 mcg is 285.7 per cent, printed as 286. That is the most careful arithmetic we have found on any label on this desk.

Because the label uses a proprietary blend. Under 21 CFR 101.36(c) a blend declares the total weight of all its dietary ingredients and lists them in descending order of predominance by weight, and individual amounts are not required. It is legal and it is common. It is also why no dose in that 528 mg can be checked against any study.

Ceilings and nothing more. Descending order of weight means the ingredient in position n cannot exceed the total divided by n. Turmeric could be anything up to 528 mg; cocoa up to 264 mg; berberine up to 176 mg; gymnema up to 132 mg; guggul, last of the thirteen, cannot exceed about 41 mg. Those are hard upper bounds, not amounts, and every one of them is consistent with the ingredient being present in a trace.

The four printed nutrients come to about 110 mg of dietary ingredient between them. The blend is 528 mg. So the blend is roughly five sixths of the 638 milligrams of dietary ingredient in this capsule, and it carries one number for all of it.

It is nearly three times the Daily Value, and chromium has no established Tolerable Upper Intake Level, which is a different thing from being proven safe at any dose. The number that matters here is not the percentage but the interaction: the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements states that chromium supplements might have an additive effect with metformin or other antidiabetes medications and thus might increase the risk of hypoglycemia.

Because 20 mg is a small amount against a 420 mg Daily Value. There is a second point worth making: the form here is magnesium oxide, and the NIH notes that magnesium in the aspartate, citrate, lactate and chloride forms is absorbed more completely and is more bioavailable than magnesium oxide. A small amount of the least absorbable common form is not a magnesium supplement in any meaningful sense.

25 mcg is 1,000 IU. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level for adults is 100 mcg, or 4,000 IU, so this capsule sits well under it on its own. If you already take a separate vitamin D supplement, add the two together before you decide, and tell whoever prescribes for you.

Not that we can see. Several ingredients are called an extract, which tells you a concentration step happened, but no percentage of any marker compound is printed for any of them. Without both an amount and a standardisation, even a published milligram figure could not be matched to a trial.

Yes, and this is one badge the panel genuinely supports. The shell is hypromellose, a plant-derived material, and nothing on the other-ingredients line is animal-derived. In a category full of gelatin shells, that is worth noticing.