How To Choose A Circulation Supplement

A supplement label is a dense document read badly. Most people read it once, top to bottom, and come away with an impression rather than an answer.

Six short passes work better, because each one asks a single question and most labels fail one of the first three. A label that fails pass three does not need passes four to six, which is where the time saving comes from.

The method works on any bottle in this category and on most bottles outside it. It needs no expertise, no app and no comparison site, and it can be done standing in front of a shelf.

• Pass one — the front claim, and what kind of claim it is.
• Pass two — the ingredient list, and which part of each plant is in it.
• Pass three — the amounts, and whether any are printed at all.
• Pass four — standardisation, the number beside the number.
• Pass five — the serving, the form, and the arithmetic they imply.
• Pass six — the interactions the ingredient list implies.

Read the largest line on the front and decide which of three things it is.

A structure-and-function claim describes an effect on the body's ordinary workings: supports healthy circulation, supports heart health. It is the only kind a supplement may make and it has not been assessed by anyone.

A disease claim names a diagnosed condition. On a supplement label this is not allowed, and a product making one is either mislabelled or being sold as something it is not.

A brand name is neither. This is the one people miss, and it is worth being alert to: a name that sounds like a mechanism is a name, not a claim, and a product's own label is the place to check what it actually says it does.

Thirty seconds, and it tells you what the seller has committed to in writing.

Move to the ingredient list and read for two things: how many names there are, and whether each one says which part of the plant was used.

Plant part is not a detail. Root, leaf, seed and fruit of the same species carry different compounds and have different literatures behind them, and a trial run on one part establishes nothing about another. In this category the seed of the horse chestnut is the part with the trials; the leaf is a different subject.

The count matters in a different way. A long list on a small serving means very little of anything, which is arithmetic rather than opinion. A short list is not automatically better, but it is easier to check.

A list with no plant parts named is not disqualifying. It does mean you cannot line the product up against the research, and pass four will usually confirm why.

Look for a Supplement Facts panel and read down the amount column.

Three things can be true. Every active has a printed amount, which is the best case and less common than it should be. Some have amounts and the rest sit inside a proprietary blend, which tells you the total and not the split. Or no amount is printed for anything, which is where a surprising number of botanical liquids land.

A proprietary blend is a legal, ordinary and deeply unhelpful arrangement. It lets a manufacturer protect a formula and it lets a reader check nothing at all. Where a blend total is printed, the useful move is to compare that single number against the trial dose of the first ingredient alone; it is often smaller.

Where no amount is printed for anything, the comparison you would want to make cannot be made in principle. That is worth knowing before rather than after a purchase, and it is the point at which many labels can be put down.

If amounts are printed, ask what each one is a weight of.

The trials in this category all used standardised extracts: a stated constituent at a stated percentage. Horse chestnut standardised to aescin. Gotu kola to the total triterpenic fraction. Grape seed to proanthocyanidins. Hawthorn as one named preparation.

So a label reading “300 mg horse chestnut extract, standardised to 20% aescin” is comparable with the literature and a label reading “300 mg horse chestnut” is not. Same weight, very different documents.

On a liquid, look for an extraction ratio instead — a figure such as 1:4 telling you how much plant material a volume represents. Without it, a volume of tincture cannot be converted into anything, and a drop is a variable quantity in any case: its size depends on the dropper, the viscosity and the temperature.

Read the directions and work out what a day actually costs you in effort.

One serving a day is easier to keep up than three, and adherence is not a trivial consideration in a category where the trials ran for twelve weeks. Three-times-daily dosing is how several of the published trials were run, which is a genuine mismatch between what was tested and what most retail labels ask of a buyer.

Then multiply. Servings per container against servings per day gives the days a bottle lasts, and that number against the trial durations in the category guide tells you how many bottles an honest trial of the product would take. It is usually more than one.

Form matters here too. A capsule delivers a weighed fill. A liquid delivers a volume of a solution whose concentration is only knowable from an extraction ratio. Neither is better; they are different kinds of document.

Finally, read the ingredient list for names that interact with common medicines, whether or not the label mentions them.

In this category three come up repeatedly. Hawthorn has a measured interaction with digoxin. Grape seed extract has anticoagulant and antiplatelet activity in the laboratory, which matters to anyone on warfarin — the systematic review of warfarin and supplement interactions is where that question is properly handled. Motherwort's constituents act on uterine smooth muscle, which rules a product out in pregnancy.

A label that names these itself is doing its job. A label that does not is not necessarily hiding anything — cautions are often abbreviated for space — but it does mean the reading has to be done by you.

This is the pass to do before buying rather than after, and it is the one worth mentioning to whoever wrote your prescription.

Scored by the same six passes set out above, on the same evidence any reader can check from the label artwork.

Two clear failures, both on the same underlying point, and they are the reason this website prints a trial dose beside every botanical rather than a comparison it cannot make. The ingredients page carries the full seven-row version.

Two clear passes are worth recording as well. The claim line is restrained for this category, and the ingredient list is published in full with most plant parts named, which a good deal of competing packaging does not manage.