A Practical Guide to Herbal Supplements

A good question came up at Terra Sylva last week: how do you translate the dose of an herb you get from an herbal supplement you'd buy at the store as a capsule or a tablet to the equivalent dose of a tea or tincture that you might make at home? The answer is not always straightforward.

To understand how to think about such questions, we need to understand how herbal products are made, including processes of extraction, concentration, and standardization. These are important concepts to understand, whether we're shopping for herbal products ourselves, recommending them, or working with someone who is taking an herbal supplement already.

This guide works through the major categories of commercial herbal supplements, explains how each is made, and offers some practical tools for translating between commercial products and the preparations herbalists most commonly use.

Raw herb capsules

The simplest commercial herbal product is ground plant material: dried herb milled into a powder and packed into a capsule or (sometimes) compressed into a tablet. The capsule contains the same material that you could make into tea, only it's finely ground and is designed to be swallowed without extracting the herb into hot water first.

Bypassing the water infusion has both benefits and drawbacks. Making tea is a process of extraction in its own right, so medicine taken as tea can be more absorbable and bioavailable compared to swallowing dry herb powder. However, this benefit is dependent on the herb's constituents being water-soluble. If they are not, as with Milk Thistle seeds, then you're better off swallowing the herb whole.

A typical raw herb capsule might contain about 500 milligrams of powdered herb. Because nothing has been concentrated or extracted, the dose translation is relatively straightforward. Their limitations are also straightforward: potency depends entirely on the quality of the starting material and how long the capsules have been sitting around, and there's no quality control beyond the attention paid to initially sourcing the herb.

Herbal extracts: what concentration really means

"Extract" is a broad term that covers a wide range of products. In supplement labeling, it generally means that some process has been applied to concentrate the herb's constituents beyond what raw herb powder would provide. Understanding what that process was — and how meaningful the resulting ratio is — is essential for interpretation.

The X:1 ratio. When a label says "10:1 extract" or "20:1 extract," it's making a claim about concentration relative to raw herb. A 10:1 extract asserts that each gram of the extract is equivalent to 10 grams of raw herb; a 20:1 extract claims a 20-fold concentration.

To understand where these numbers come from, it helps to walk through a typical production process.

You begin with raw herb, let's say 20 kilograms of dried Ashwagandha root. This gets extracted into a solvent (water, ethanol, or a combination, depending on the target constituents) to produce a liquid extract. That liquid — now containing a broad spectrum of the herb's soluble constituents — gets concentrated through evaporation, which removes the solvent while leaving the dissolved plant material behind. What you're left with is a thick, semi-solid or powdery mass.

At this point, manufacturers typically have a choice. They can dry that concentrated extract into a pure "dry extract" — this is the most concentrated form. Or, more commonly, they blend the concentrated extract into a carrier material. The carrier might be raw herb powder from the same plant (which is a kind of self-referential fortification — you're adding concentrated extract back to the non-extracted plant mass), or it might be an inert substrate like maltodextrin, rice bran, or silicon dioxide. This blending is how many 10:1 or 20:1 products are made: concentrate 20 kilograms of herb down to 1 kilogram of extract, then blend it with enough carrier to produce a consistent, free-flowing powder at the desired ratio.

The ratio tells you something real, but it doesn't tell you everything. A 20:1 extract made from low-quality starting material may not be equivalent to a 10:1 extract made from high-quality, properly harvested herb. And the ratio says nothing about which constituents were targeted, how the extraction was designed, or how much of the original phytochemical complexity survived the concentration process.

Standardized extracts

A standardized extract makes an additional claim: not just that the product is concentrated, but that it has been manufactured to contain a specified minimum percentage of one or more marker compounds. You'll see this on labels as "standardized to 5% withanolides" or "standardized to contain 80% silymarin" or "standardized to 0.3% hypericin."

This framing imports a pharmaceutical logic into the supplement world. The implied claim is: if we can guarantee that a consistent amount of the marker compound is present, you can expect consistent effects. For constituents that are well-characterized, reasonably bioavailable, and genuinely responsible for the therapeutic effects being claimed, this can be useful.

But standardization is frequently more about quality assurance theater than it is about clinical reliability. The marker compound will always only be part of the whole-herb story, and sometimes it's not even the most clinically relevant constituent. Furthermore, the phrase "standardized to contain" only guarantees a minimum, not a maximum, and says nothing about the ratio of the marker to everything else in the plant.

Are all standardized extracts concentrated? No, and this is a genuinely common source of confusion. A product can be standardized without being concentrated above raw herb levels. If a particular batch of Echinacea root naturally contains 4% alkylamides, and the manufacturer certifies that their product meets or exceeds a 3.5% alkylamide specification, they've created a standardized product through testing and selective sourcing rather than through concentration. The ratio might be effectively 1:1 relative to raw herb, and the product carries an accurate standardization claim.

Conversely, a product can be highly concentrated (20:1) and entirely non-standardized — which means you know something about the quantity but nothing specific about the quality of the constituent profile.

The most clinically nuanced products tend to be those where concentration, standardization, and whole-herb thinking are held in some balance: a full-spectrum extract, perhaps moderately concentrated, with standardization to a marker that has genuine relevance to the herb's therapeutic action.

Isolated constituents

At the far end of the spectrum from raw herb capsules are products that aren't herbal preparations, as we understand them, at all. Instead, they're isolated phytochemicals. Curcumin supplements are the most prominent example. Curcumin is a polyphenol found in turmeric rhizome, and it's possible to extract and purify it to the point where you essentially have pure curcumin rather than turmeric. Many commercial products marketed as "turmeric" are actually curcumin isolates, sometimes with absorption enhancers like piperine (extracted from black pepper) to address curcumin's otherwise poor bioavailability.

From an herbalist's clinical perspective, isolated constituents represent a fundamental departure from the phytochemical complexity that characterizes whole-plant preparations. These are the products most analogous to pharmaceutical compounds, and they can be evaluated more like drugs, which also means they carry more of a drug's risk of constituent-specific adverse effects and interactions, divorced from the buffering context of the whole plant. These are best thought of separately from the other preparations we're considering here.

Translating dose equivalents across preparations

Even with all of the above context, translating dose equivalents can be a complicated and fundamentally uncertain process. That said, some basic rules of thumb apply.

The reference point is established by tracing any preparation back to the dry-herb equivalent. (For simplicity, we will leave fresh-plant tinctures out of the equation for now.) For example, let's say that a "00" capsule contains 500 mg (0.5 grams) of Ashwagandha powder. If we made a 1:5 tincture (using the most common dry-herb tincture ratio) from 500 mg of Ashwagandha, it would produce 2.5 mL (0.5 x 5 = 2.5) of tincture, which is roughly 2.5 dropperfuls or 75-90 drops.

So, if you have a client that is taking 2 "00" capsules of Ashwagandha powder every day, then that's equivalent to 5 mL of tincture (1 teaspoon) every day.

Herbs are frequently consumed at higher doses when we make tea. A medicinal strength infusion of Plantain leaf might have 1/4 ounce (about 7 grams) of leaf per 8-ounce cup. If a "00" capsule holds 0.5 grams of powdered leaf, then a cup of tea is the equivalent of taking 14 capsules.

And again, these equivalencies assume equivalent bioavailability between tea, tincture, and encapsulated powder. In reality, the bioavailability across preparations might be similar, but it will never be exactly equivalent.

Working with commercial extracts

For a commercial extract labeled as, say, a 10:1 extract with 500 mg per capsule, the label is claiming 5,000 mg (5 grams) of dry herb equivalent per capsule. At face value, two capsules per day would be equivalent to roughly 10 grams of dry herb: a substantial therapeutic dose, and higher than many traditional preparations. Whether that capsule can practically do the same work as 10 grams of the raw herb is a question that can only be answered through experience, though if the product is standardized to a relevant constituent, that information can at least confirm that the constituent quantity matches the concentration claim.

One take-away that you might have noticed is that typical tincture doses are usually well below the amount of herb that we get from capsules and from medicinal-strength teas. This tells us a couple of things. For one, it helps explain why some herbs, like Ashwagandha or Astragalus, are often disappointing when taken in tincture form, and are better used in capsules or as decoctions. Second, it indicates that many of our herbal medicines are quite powerful, only needing a small amount to cause a meaningful shift inside the body. Sometimes this power is not entirely a function of the "dose" at all, such as herbal bitters, which work when taste receptors merely detect the presence of bitterness at all. The mechanisms of herbal actions are quite diverse, and are not always dose-dependent in a simple, linear way.

Hope this helps!