SodaMelt Supplement Facts

Serving size: 1 capsule. Servings per container: 30. The dagger is the panel's own mark, and its footnote reads: Daily Value (DV) not established.

Two rows, and they are doing different jobs. The first is a nutrient with a reference figure behind it, so a percentage can be calculated and printed. The second is a blend, so the regulation asks for a total weight and an ordered list rather than a figure per entry.

That is why the panel looks short for a product with twelve named ingredients. The eleven names sit underneath the blend line, inside the parenthesis, in the order their weights run.

Six things this panel states outright

• Serving size is one capsule, and a container holds thirty of them.
• Calcium, as calcium carbonate, is 100 mg and 7.5 per cent of the Daily Value.
• The Proprietary Blend weighs 250 mg in total.
• Eleven entries sit inside that blend, each with its Latin binomial and plant part.
• The dagger footnote says the Daily Value for the blend is not established.
• Four other ingredients are listed beneath the panel, outside it.

Printed in the order the label prints them, which is descending predominance by weight. Nothing is reordered here for readability, because the order is itself a statement the manufacturer is making.

All eleven share one 250 mg figure. The rank column is the label's own ordering, restated, not an estimate of how much of each is present.

Two entries carry a plant part that changes their meaning entirely. Oat is straw rather than grain, so the beta-glucan literature people associate with oats belongs to a different part of the plant. Aloe vera is leaf rather than inner fillet, and the latex under the leaf rind is where the laxative anthraquinone sits.

Two more carry a species that decides the evidence. Buckthorn here is Rhamnus cathartica, the cathartic species, and gentian here is Gentiana scabra, which is not one of the four Siberian gentians in the gastric-stimulation work. All four of those distinctions are set out on the ingredients page.

One capsule is the serving, which makes the arithmetic on this bottle unusually simple. Whatever the panel prints per serving is also what a day carries and what a capsule carries; there is no doubling, halving or dividing to do.

Thirty servings a container and one a day means a bottle is a calendar month. That is worth holding onto when reading the pack ladder, because three bottles is a quarter and six is half a year, and the pricing page runs those numbers against the cost.

A percentage on a Supplement Facts panel is always measured against a published reference figure, and calcium's is 1,300 mg for adults and children of four and over. Seven and a half per cent of that is 100 mg, which is exactly the printed amount, so the two numbers agree with each other.

The form matters as much as the figure. Straub's review of calcium forms, doses and indications sets out why carbonate is the cheap dense form, around forty per cent elemental calcium by weight, and why it depends on gastric acid to dissolve, which in practice means taking it near food.

One number this site does not print is the tolerable upper intake for calcium. The government fact sheet that carries it answers automated requests with a 403, so it could not be read from a primary source in the session that built this page, and a figure nobody here opened is a figure nobody here should quote.

Four lines sit below the panel rather than inside it, which is the convention for materials that are there to make the capsule rather than to be in it.

• Rice Flour. The bulking agent that brings the fill weight up to a capsule's worth.
• Hypromellose. The shell itself, a plant cellulose derivative, which is what makes this a vegetable capsule rather than a gelatin one.
• Magnesium Stearate (vegetable). A flow agent, so powder moves through the encapsulating machine cleanly.
• Silicon Dioxide. An anti-caking agent, in the same job, against a blend that would otherwise clump.

The seller's own ingredient summary stops at the twelve panel entries, so these four come off the bottle artwork. They are the reason someone avoiding gelatin can take this capsule, and they are the reason the fill weight works, which is a more useful pair of facts than a list of chemical names on its own.

This is stated once, here, in the section whose job it is, and it is not repeated elsewhere on the site.

The seller's own product summary prints the twelve ingredients as a flat numbered list, in alphabetical order, with calcium's amount given. Read that way, it looks like twelve discrete actives of which one has a figure.

The bottle shows a different shape. Eleven of the twelve sit inside a single 250 mg blend, and their order is weight order rather than the alphabet. Where the two disagree, the bottle governs, because the bottle is what arrives in the box.

The other difference is the dose sentence. The seller's short version is one capsule daily. The label's own version adds the 8 oz glass of water and the twenty to thirty minutes before a meal, and this site uses the label's version throughout.

The right-hand column is read off the label artwork in this site's assets folder.

Two more lines sit beside it. Storage: “Store in a cool, dry place away from heat and light.” Origin: “Manufactured in the USA with globally sourced ingredients.”

Reproducing a caution exactly is the whole discipline of a page like this one. The bottle's wording is the wording the manufacturer stands behind, and paraphrasing it would put this desk's words in place of theirs.

What this site adds to it is specificity rather than repetition. The panel's four anthraquinone entries and the goldenseal row both have named consequences, and they are set out on the side effects page rather than restated here in general terms.

If a bottle you received does not match what is on this page, the useful thing to do is photograph the panel and send it to [email protected]. A correction goes onto the page itself and moves the review date forward.