Plato

A: The short answer is you that can’t patent a plant. Without a patent, drug companies have almost no incentive to spend the enormous amount necessary to even begin the process of making an approved drug out of an herbal ingredient, no matter how promising that ingredient is.

Beyond that, and broadly speaking, the exact mechanisms of action of these herbs aren’t well-enough understood to allow a synthesized or patented version of these herbs to exist as a drug product. In many cases, the whole plant, or in some, a handful of compounds, are as close as studies have come to pinpointing the actives in a given herb.

Now, that might be a chicken or the egg thing. The pharmaceutical industry have major upfront costs in bringing a drug to market and it’s possible these herbs don’t meet any number of criteria they have for deciding what avenues to investigate and what compounds to develop into prescription drugs. On top of that, these herbs aren’t to be used to treat a condition, which is what prescription medicine is all about.

To clarify that last point, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 is the law that stipulates that the FDA regulates food separately from drugs. Under this rule, drugs are defined as products used for medical purposes, whereas foods have nutritional purposes, and food is the category supplements fall under. Drugs are for treating, preventing, diagnosing, or curing diseases, and thus, by exclusion, supplements can’t be marketed with claims to do any of those things.

For more on this topic, check out Integration of botanicals in contemporary medicine: road blocks, checkpoints and go-ahead signals. (Chugh, et al 2018)

A: There are a number of reasons a manufacturer might choose to include an ingredient in their supplement.

First, it’s not illegal or very closely regulated – according David Kessler, commissioner of the FDA when the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) was approved:

“The 1994 Dietary Supplement Act does not require that dietary supplements (defined broadly to include many substances, such as herbs and amino acids, that have no nutritive value) be shown to be safe or effective before they are marketed. The FDA does not scrutinize a dietary supplement before it enters the marketplace. The agency is permitted to restrict a substance if it poses a ‘significant and unreasonable risk’ under the conditions of use on the label or as commonly consumed…Congress has shown little interest in protecting consumers from the hazards of dietary supplements, let alone from the fraudulent claims that are made, since its members apparently believe that few of these products place people in real danger. Nor does the public understand how potentially dangerous these products can be.”

Other common reasons for including risky or unproven ingredients:

They’re hot – like anything, supplements have fads of their own, and by including the latest ‘hot’ ingredient, supplement makers can ride the buzz (pun intended).

It’s cheap – some ingredients may have little to no proven effect but are cheap to source and include in a supplement. To some consumers, more ingredients is better. Often, they’ll just include a tiny amount of the ingredient — just enough to claim it’s in there as part of a ‘proprietary blend’. If you don’t see a quantity or potency on the label, you should be looking for more information.

They work for a short time – some ingredients do have an immediate and noticeable effect, but then you’ll quickly develop a tolerance, requiring the whole supplement to be cycled in order to remain effective, or to avoid developing a dependency(!)

They sound good on a label.

Lastly, to quote Upton Sinclair, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ It may be good intentions mixed with a little bit of willful ignorance, as it is with a lot of the world.

If you want to know more about the history of the issues surrounding the lack of regulation, safety standards, and oversights in the supplement and vitamin industry, we recommend the book Do You Believe In Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine by Paul A Offit, MD.

A: Plato is made from plants, and plants, like people, aren’t all alike.

Seasonal variation, changes due to weather, and even differences from plant to plant — all are common reasons for variations in the potency of herbs and roots.

For that reason (and a few thousand others), Plato is formulated with branded standardized extracts.

‘Standardized’ means every batch of each ingredient is identical in potency and purity, season to season, year over year.

‘Branded’ means we buy from suppliers who are proud to put their name on the product. Many supplements are made of generic ingredients, which is fine for, say, packaged food, but not so much for nootropics.

To find out more about why we use branded, standardized extracts, check out the article on formulation at our blog.

A: No GMOs.

A: We didn’t see that movie, but probably not.

A: There are four ingredients on our label that aren’t the active ingredients in Plato:

1) Rice flour – Plato’s is formulated to match the amount of active constituents used in the best research available for each ingredient. As it happens, with those quantities of Plato’s four ingredients, the actives don’t perfectly fill two capsules, and empty capsule space can lead to breakage. For that reason, we use rice flour, an effectively hypo-allergenic, inert filler, to fill up the caps so they don’t get damaged in transit.

2) Hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) – sounds crazy, right? This is the chemical name for plant fiber, and it’s what our veggie caps are made out of. Ours comes from birch and spruce trees.

3 + 4) Magnesium stearate and silicon dioxide – these two are present in tiny quantities in Plato as what are known as ‘excipients’.

Excipients are commonly used in the process of encapsulating herbal extracts to prevent them from clumping or becoming airborne as a fine herbal dust rather than sliding into the capsule like we want them to.

Magnesium stearate is a salt that adds negligible amounts of magnesium to the formula, and silicon dioxide is a naturally-occurring compound found in many foods (like beets and brown rice) and is frequently used to prevent foods like salt and protein powders from caking.

We cover this and some other formulation topics in more depth on our blog post titled, appropriately, Formulation.

A: Always talk to your doctor before beginning any new supplement, Plato included.

With that said, the mechanisms of action of multiple ingredients in Plato may work on the same pathways [PDF] as those of SSRIs, SNRIs, and MAOIs, which may cause complications.

For that reason, it is best to abstain from taking Plato if you’re taking any kind of anti-depressant.

A: Did you know that many supplement capsules, and even gelatin desserts, are made from animal parts? Specifically pig skin, cow hide, and bones?

It’s not … ideal. Even if you’re not veggie or vegan, the idea of your herbs coming wrapped in cow hide might not sound all that great.

That’s why Plato comes in veggie caps.

Specifically, Plato is encapsulated in CapsCanada’s K-CAPS. They’re made of hypromellose, a plant-based cellulose derived from birch and spruce trees.

They’re 100% plant-derived, Kosher, Halal, and the highest quality veggie cap on the market. ‘Spruce cap’ sounds better than ‘pig hoof cap’ right? Agreed.

A: Plato is produced in a facility that, while capable of making gluten-free products, isn’t usually in a gluten-free state.

Producing a product that will be certified gluten free requires a very thorough clean-down of the whole production area to ensure that no environmental gluten makes its way into the product. The testing to certify a product as gluten-free is quite expensive and so is the clean-down, and we’re not at the scale where we can make it work just yet. With that said, if you’re living the gluten-free life and you’re staying away from Plato for that reason, we’d love to hear your vote. It’s high on our wishlist.