Lymphatic Support Blend: A Guide

Fourteen plant extracts in a two-capsule serving. That is a lot of botanicals in one place, and it means a lot of cautions — this product has the longest "do not take" list of anything we sell apart from St John's Wort. This guide covers what is actually in it, in what amounts, how to take it, and at length who should not. No health claims: none are permitted for these plants, and the name is a name rather than a promise.

What it is

A blend of 14 botanical extracts

Largest extract

Horse chestnut seed, 200 mg per serving

Per daily serving

2 capsules

Format

Vegetarian capsules, 60 per bottle

Bottle duration

30 days

Cautions

See the product label and leaflet

01 What this product is

A food supplement containing fourteen botanical extracts, presented in vegetarian capsules. Two capsules make a serving. Sixty capsules make thirty servings, so a bottle is a month.

It is a blend rather than a single botanical, which changes how you should read it. With a single-plant capsule you can ask one question: how much of that plant, in what concentration. With fourteen, you have to ask that question fourteen times, and the answers vary from 200 mg down to 5 mg. The full list is in section 02, and it is worth reading rather than skimming.

"Lymphatic Support" is the product's name. It is not a claim about what the product does, and we are not permitted to make one.

About the name. Health claims on food supplements have to be authorised before they can be used, and none of the plants in this blend carry an authorised claim in Great Britain or the EU. Claims on botanicals have sat "on hold" in the regulatory system for years without resolution. So the name describes the traditional category the blend sits in, and nothing more. We cannot tell you it supports your lymphatic system, and we won't. What we can do is tell you exactly what is in the capsule, which is the rest of this page.

Several of these plants are ordinary British hedgerow and garden species — cleavers is the sticky weed that clings to your sleeve, dandelion and burdock is a soft drink, and horse chestnut is the conker tree. Others are staples of Chinese and South Asian herbal practice. Being familiar is not the same as being inert, and a concentrated extract is not the same as the plant.

What has actually been studied, and what has not. No trial of this blend, or of any comparable multi-herb formula of this type, has been published — we looked. The research that does exist covers some of these plants individually, and the better-quality work among it measures chronic venous insufficiency, a condition of the leg veins. The veins and the lymphatic system are not the same thing, and none of those trials measured lymphatic transport. We are not going to hand you vein research dressed as lymphatic research. Every study we could find is summarised, with its limitations and its dose, on the research page.

02 What's in our product

Every extract is named with its Latin binomial and the plant part used, and every amount is stated. Nothing is hidden inside a "proprietary blend" figure.

Horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum L.), seed

200 mg

Japanese pagoda tree (Sophora japonica L.), flower bud

100 mg

Astragalus (Astragalus membranaceus (Fisch.) Bunge), root

100 mg

Red clover (Trifolium pratense L.), flower head

100 mg

Grapefruit seed (Citrus paradisi Macfad.), seed

100 mg

Olive leaf (Olea europaea L.), leaf

100 mg

Gotu kola (Centella asiatica (L.) Urb.), aerial parts

50 mg

Burdock (Arctium lappa L.), root

25 mg

Yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis A.St.-Hil.), aerial parts

25 mg

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale F.H.Wigg.), whole plant

25 mg

Cleavers (Galium aparine L.), aerial parts

25 mg

Ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe), rhizome

25 mg

Kelp (Laminaria japonica Aresch.), thallus

25 mg

Black pepper (Piper nigrum L.), fruit

5 mg

Capsule shell

Cellulose

Bulking agent

Maltodextrin

Anti-caking agents

Silica, magnesium stearate

Serving

2 capsules

Servings per bottle

30

Suitable for

Vegetarians

Manufacture

Made under GMP standards; every batch tested by an independent laboratory for identity and purity

Four excipients, named. Unlike our single-botanical capsules, this one is not just extract and shell. Maltodextrin is a bulking agent — it fills the capsule so the small extracts can be dosed consistently. Silica and magnesium stearate are anti-caking agents that stop the powder clumping and sticking to the machinery. They are ordinary, widely used, and we would rather name them than describe the product as "clean" and leave you guessing.

On the amounts. Read the milligram figures carefully. Horse chestnut seed at 200 mg is the largest single extract, twice the next. At the other end, black pepper is 5 mg. A 25 mg extract of a plant is a small amount of that plant, and you should calibrate your expectations to the number on the label rather than to the length of the ingredient list. Fourteen names look impressive. Fourteen names is also how you end up with 25 mg of most of them.

A long ingredient list is a design decision, not a measure of strength. The amounts are what matter, and they are all printed above.

No standardisation figures. None of these extracts carries a stated standardisation on our label — no percentage of a marker compound, and no extract ratio. That matters most for horse chestnut. The published clinical work on horse chestnut uses seed extract standardised to a declared aescin content, typically 600 mg of extract a day delivering 100 mg of aescin. Ours provides 200 mg of extract and states no aescin figure, so what it actually delivers is not knowable from the label and should not be assumed comparable to trial material. We would rather tell you that than let the ingredient name do work the specification does not support.

The same applies down the list. Ginger has been studied at 1,000–3,000 mg a day; there is 25 mg here. Olive leaf trials use 500–1,000 mg standardised to oleuropein, and the best-designed trial at 500 mg found nothing; there is 100 mg here. Red clover work uses 40–85 mg of standardised isoflavones; there is 100 mg of flower-head extract here with the isoflavone content undeclared. We set all of this out study by study on the research page, because the honest version of "fourteen botanicals" is that most of them are present in small amounts relative to anything that has been tested.

03 How to take it

Daily amount

2 capsules

With food?

Preferably with a meal, and with water

Timing

No particular time of day is specified. Pick a meal you eat reliably and keep to it

Maximum

Do not exceed the recommended daily amount

Format note

Swallow the capsules whole with water

Storage

Keep the lid closed. Store in a cool, dry place, out of direct sunlight. Keep out of the sight and reach of children

Also

Not a substitute for a varied and balanced diet or a healthy lifestyle

Take both capsules together, or split them across two meals. The daily total is what the label specifies.

Miss a day and take the next day's serving as normal. Doubling up achieves nothing and would exceed the recommended amount.

Do not take it alongside another supplement containing the same plants without adding up the totals first. Red clover, kelp and horse chestnut in particular turn up in other blends, and stacking two products is the easiest way to take considerably more than either label intends.

04 Taste and format

Capsules only, so mostly you do not taste it. The shell is swallowed whole and the powder stays inside.

Open one and it smells like what it is: a mixed, dry, faintly bitter herbal powder, with the ginger and the pepper the most recognisable notes. We would not recommend opening the capsules and stirring the contents into food or drink. The blend is not formulated for that, several constituents are unpleasant loose, and it makes the serving harder to measure.

The trade-off with a fixed capsule is that you cannot take a partial serving. If two capsules do not suit you, the answer is to stop rather than to improvise.

05 In short

Fourteen botanical extracts in a vegetarian capsule, two capsules a day, thirty servings a bottle. Horse chestnut seed at 200 mg is the largest component and most of the rest sit at 25 to 100 mg. Every amount is printed on the label and repeated above. No standardisation figures are stated, so do not assume equivalence with the preparations used in published research. The cautions list is long and several items are absolute — the grapefruit seed extract, the kelp and the red clover each rule out groups of people on their own.

Shop the product: Lymphatic Support Capsules · Read the research: published studies on these botanicals

This is a food supplement, not a medicine. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any medical condition. Food supplements are not a substitute for a varied and balanced diet or a healthy lifestyle. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking any medication or under medical care, speak to your doctor or pharmacist before use. ProBotanics Ltd, company number 13685177, 86-90 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NE.