Label literacy
What “Standardised Extract” Actually Means
Two bottles both say “horse chestnut 300 mg”. One may be five times stronger than the other. Standardisation is why. 🧪
Key takeaways
- Standardisation names the active compound and guarantees a percentage.
- A bare milligram figure without it is weight, not potency.
- Plant part matters: seed, leaf and root are different products.
- Extract ratios (4:1) are not the same as standardisation.
Why raw weight means little
Botanical potency is not stable. The concentration of active compounds in a plant varies with soil, climate, harvest timing, which part of the plant was used and how it was extracted. Two batches of the same herb can differ several-fold.
So “horse chestnut 300 mg” tells you the weight of material in the capsule. It does not tell you how much aescin — the compound the trials measured — came with it. Standardisation closes that gap by specifying the percentage.
How to read a standardised line 🧪
A properly written line has four parts:
Horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) seed extract, standardised to 20% aescin — 300 mg
- Common and Latin name — removes ambiguity between similar plants.
- Plant part — horse chestnut seed is the studied material; leaf is not. Gotu kola whole herb and gotu kola standardised triterpene fraction are different things.
- Standardisation — the named marker compound and its percentage.
- Amount — milligrams of the extract.
From that you can calculate the actual active dose: 20% of 300 mg is 60 mg of aescin, which you can compare directly to the roughly 50 mg per dose used in trials.
Extract ratios are a different thing
You will also see notations like 4:1 or 10:1. That is an extract ratio: four kilos of raw herb concentrated into one kilo of extract.
It sounds like potency information and mostly is not. A 10:1 extract is more concentrated than a 4:1 extract of the same herb by the same method — but it says nothing about the actual percentage of active compound, and ratios are not independently verified. Standardisation to a named marker is the stronger claim.
What to do when it is absent
Most multi-ingredient blends, including Lymph Savior, print no standardisation percentage for anything. That is not unusual and not illegal. It does mean a third unknown stacks on top of the first two: you do not know the amount, you do not know the potency, and you do not know the plant part.
Practical response: if you specifically want the effect an ingredient was studied for, buy that ingredient standardised and disclosed. If you want a general botanical blend and accept it as an experiment, use the refund window as your protection. We compare both routes in Lymph Savior vs buying horse chestnut alone. 🔁