SodaMelt Ingredients

The one ingredient on this bottle with a number of its own, and the only row on the panel a buyer can check against anything. Calcium carbonate is the chalk in an antacid tablet and the grit in a cuttlefish bone, and it is roughly 40 per cent elemental calcium by weight, so 100 mg of the mineral comes from about 250 mg of the salt.

Two things follow from that figure. It is a small share of an adult daily intake, which the panel's own 7.5 per cent says out loud, and it needs stomach acid to dissolve, which is why the 2025 absorption work on short-term carbonate gave it with food. The label's instruction to take the capsule 20 to 30 minutes before a meal sits slightly across that grain, and the one capsule a day is not enough carbonate to work as an antacid in its own right.

The strongest ingredient on this label by weight of published evidence, and the one worth reading the arithmetic for. Psyllium husk is a gel-forming soluble fibre: it takes up water in the small bowel, holds it through the colon and comes out again still holding it, which is why McRorie's review of stool output separates it from wheat bran so firmly.

The trials behind its reputation ran in grams. The Bijkerk primary-care trial gave 10 g a day for twelve weeks, the 2022 fibre meta-analysis pooled studies at more than 10 g a day over four weeks or longer, and the lipid meta-analysis sat around 10.2 g. The whole blend on this bottle is 250 mg. Psyllium is somewhere inside it, and even if it were the entire 250 mg that is a fortieth of the trial amount.

Straw is the threshed stem left standing after the grain is taken off, and it is a different material from the oat most readers picture. The 2024 chemical study of oat straw maps it as a lipophilic profile of sterols, fatty acids and waxes that shifts with the season it was cut in.

That matters because the famous oat number belongs to the grain. The cholesterol meta-analysis used 3 g a day or more of beta-glucan, the soluble fibre concentrated in the bran layer of the kernel. Straw is not where beta-glucan lives, so the oat figure most people carry in their heads has no route onto this panel. Oat herb extract has its own small literature, mostly trials of attention and cognition, which is a separate subject from digestion.

A deep-rooted legume grown mainly as fodder, sold as a green food for its mineral and vitamin content. There is no dose-finding trial in people for the digestive use it is here for, so the honest description is a nutritive herb rather than an active with a target.

Two entries in the literature are worth a buyer's attention and neither is about efficacy. The LactMed monograph records its vitamin K content, which is the reason it is advised against alongside warfarin, and a 2025 scoping review of immunostimulatory herbs lists alfalfa among the plants associated with lupus flares through the amino acid L-canavanine. Both belong on the side effects page, where they are set out at length.

Bark from a Pacific Northwest buckthorn, dried and aged before use, and one of the four anthranoid cathartics in this blend. Its active compounds are hydroxyanthracene derivatives, which pass the small bowel largely untouched and are converted by colonic bacteria into forms that stimulate the bowel wall and reduce water reabsorption.

This is a working mechanism rather than a gentle one. EFSA's 2024 opinion assessed preparations of this bark alongside rhubarb and frangula and concluded that their safety could not be established at any intake, which is why there is no reference amount here to set a milligram figure against. Cascara is also the ingredient that most firmly settles what kind of product this is.

Not the garden stalk. The medicinal root of Rheum palmatum has been used as a purgative for centuries, and it carries the same family of anthraquinones as cascara, including emodin and rhein. The same EFSA opinion covers it by name and reaches the same conclusion.

Rhubarb root is the second of the four stimulants, and the pairing is what makes this blend a laxative formula rather than a fibre formula with botanicals for colour. The 2023 review of melanosis coli lists rhubarb among the herbs behind the harmless brown pigmentation of the colon lining that a long anthraquinone habit produces, which a colonoscopist can see and which fades when the herb stops.

The third stimulant, and the plainest-spoken of them: cathartica is in the botanical name. The LactMed entry describes buckthorn as containing anthraquinones with potent cathartic properties and advises against it during breastfeeding.

European herbal practice has long drawn a line between buckthorn bark that has been aged or heat-treated and bark used fresh, because fresh bark carries anthrones that cause cramping and vomiting. Which of the two arrived in this capsule is a manufacturing question the artwork settles no further than the plant part, and it is one of the reasons the batch record matters more on a blend like this than on a panel of single actives.

The fourth stimulant, and the one most often misread, because two completely different materials come out of the same plant. The clear inner GEL is the one in the drinks aisle and the one the trials used. The LEAF, taken whole, includes the yellow latex just under the rind, which is where the anthraquinone aloin sits.

This panel prints leaf. The irritable bowel meta-analysis and the ulcerative colitis trial, which ran 100 mL of oral gel twice a day for four weeks, both tested gel. NCCIH's own summary separates the two and notes that oral latex preparations were removed from over-the-counter laxatives in the United States in 2002 for want of safety data.

A bitter root from the same genus as the gentian in aperitifs, and the one member of this blend with a genuinely different theory behind it. Bitters are held to work through taste receptors rather than through the bowel: the tongue registers the bitter iridoids and digestive secretion follows.

A 2015 profile of four Siberian gentians mapped the iridoid and flavonoid content and measured a gastric stimulatory effect in laboratory work, and a review of bitters sets out the receptor argument in full. Neither establishes a human amount, and a bitter sealed inside a capsule bypasses the tongue entirely, which is the awkward part of putting one in a swallowed shell.

A woodland root from eastern North America, traded for its berberine content and listed on CITES Appendix II because wild stands were dug faster than they regrew. In a digestion formula it is usually there for the bitter alkaloids and a traditional reputation for the gut lining.

Its best-documented property in people has nothing to do with digestion. Gurley's crossover study gave a standardised goldenseal supplement for fourteen days and measured clear inhibition of CYP3A, the enzyme system that clears a large share of prescription medicines, and a 2025 three-arm crossover in adults with type 2 diabetes found the interaction with metformin depends on the metformin dose. That is the single most checkable fact on this label and it belongs to who should not take it.

A volcanic clay, mostly montmorillonite, that swells in water and carries a negative surface charge. In supplements it is sold as a binder that holds onto whatever passes it, and in industry the same property clarifies wine and lines ponds.

There is no established oral amount, and the clearest published caution involves quantities far beyond what a capsule can hold: a paediatric case of severe hypokalaemia followed oral and rectal clay administration. A binding clay in the same capsule as a mineral and a live culture is also the reason this desk does not describe the calcium row as a nutritional contribution.

The only living ingredient in the capsule, and the one where the missing figure is a different kind of missing. Probiotics are counted in colony-forming units rather than milligrams, and a CFU count is what tells a reader whether a culture is a working dose or a decoration.

The trials that built this species' reputation in irritable bowel ran at 1 x 10¹⁰ CFU a day for six to eight weeks: the LAPIBSS trial, its two-strain successor and the DDS-1 study all sit in that region. Strain identity matters as much as count, and a 2024 shotgun metagenomic audit of US probiotic labels found label and contents disagreeing often enough to make the question worth asking of any product.