Ashwagandha Root Capsules

Details

A water extract of Withania somnifera root, 500 mg a capsule, standardised on total withanolides and assayed by HPLC on every lot. There are three cheats here, and the second one is the interesting one. Leaf substitution is the first. Leaf is far cheaper than root, it grows back, and once it is dried and powdered nobody can see the difference. The tradition used root. So this is root only, and it is proved two ways: DNA barcoding on the incoming material, and a withaferin A ceiling. Ashwagandha leaf is rich in withaferin A and the root carries very little, so a high withaferin A fraction is leaf, whatever the label says. Ours is under 0.1 percent of the extract, and that number is the proof, not the sentence above it. The assay method is the second, and almost nobody names it. A 5 percent withanolide claim measured by ultraviolet absorbance or by gravimetric extraction routinely reads two to three times higher than the same material measured by HPLC against individual withanolide reference standards, because the UV method counts anything in the sample that absorbs at that wavelength. Two packs can both say 5 percent and differ by a factor of two. So the method is named on the label here, not just the percentage. Heavy metals are the third. Contamination of Indian herbal products with lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium is documented in published market surveys, so all four are measured by ICP-MS on every lot and the figures are printed.

• Total withanolides 5.4 percent by HPLC against individual reference standards, release floor 5.0 percent. That is 27 mg of withanolides in a 500 mg capsule
• Withaferin A below 0.1 percent of the extract, which is the analytical proof that no leaf went in
• Root only, confirmed by DNA barcoding of the incoming raw material and by HPTLC fingerprint
• Extract ratio 10:1. 500 mg of extract is made from about 5 g of dried root, and root at about 0.5 percent withanolides concentrated tenfold gives the 5 percent on the label. The arithmetic is printed because a standardisation figure with no ratio behind it can be reached by adding a purified marker instead
• Water extraction. No ethanol, no acetone, no hexane, and a residual solvent test is therefore not needed rather than merely passed
• Lead 0.31 mg per kg against a 10.0 limit, arsenic 0.09 against 3.0, cadmium 0.04 against 0.3, mercury below 0.02 against 1.0. By ICP-MS, every lot
• Capsule shell is hydroxypropyl methylcellulose and water. No gelatin, no titanium dioxide, no colourant. The fill is extract only, with no rice flour, maltodextrin or magnesium stearate
• Open the bottle and it smells strongly of horse. The name says so, and an ashwagandha root extract that smells of nothing is worth a question
• A traditional herbal food supplement. Not a medicine, and no claim is made here about what it does