82 mg of blend a day
What the money buys, measured in milligrams
A jar delivers 2,460 mg of blend in total. Divide a supplied price by that and a milligram costs between two and three and a bit cents.
One more division turns a price into a comparison with the rest of the shelf. The panel
prints one blend total, 82 mg per gummy, so a jar delivers
2,460 mg of blend — 2.46 grams.
Read the label’s footnote at face value — 82 mg
“equivalent to approximately 567mg of dry powders” — and a jar is
about 17 grams of dry-powder equivalent, or roughly $4.64, $4.06 and $2.88 a
gram. Also this desk’s arithmetic.
What a milligram of this blend contains
A cost per milligram is only useful if you know what the milligrams are, and this label
gives you more than most. The nine members are printed in descending order of weight, as
FDA’s labeling guide requires: “Indented underneath the name of the blend, you must list the ‘other dietary ingredients’ in the blend, either in a column or linear fashion, in descending order of predominance by weight.”
Caffeine is fifth, with 5 mg beside it — itemised, to
the label’s credit, and the figure that makes the rest derivable.
The working, in two lines
Everything listed after caffeine must weigh no more than caffeine does, so ashwagandha,
L-arginine, tribulus terrestris and horny goat weed extract can each be no more than
5 mg — and the four together no more than 20 mg, leaving at least 62
mg in the top five rows. Row one, muira puama extract, can be no more than 62
mg: 82, minus 5 for caffeine, minus at least 5 each for the three rows between.
Derivations from the printed panel, not estimates.
So the cost per milligram is low, against a quantity that is small to begin with. NIH ODS
discusses L-arginine at 2 to 20 grams a day and concludes that
“The research to support supplemental arginine as a performance enhancer is limited and conflicting. Overall, it suggests that doses of 2–20 g/day arginine have little to no effect on performance in either anaerobic or aerobic exercise.” That row is capped here at 5 milligrams.