Astral Codex Ten

Bacopa

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Bacopa

Article

Bacopa is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 05, 2022 and October 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Bacopa and ashwagandha are Ayurvedic (Indian traditional medicine) herbs used for stress”; “Consider for example their bacopa rankings”. It most often appears alongside Ashwagandha, Ayurvedic, Chicago.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 05, 2022
  • Last seen: October 26, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 05, 2022 · Original source
Hard Mode: Bacopa and Ashwagandha
Bacopa and ashwagandha are Ayurvedic (Indian traditional medicine) herbs used for stress. I’m listing them as hard mode because turning it into a supplement usually involves extracting active chemicals (called withanolides) from the plant. If there were problems with herbal medicines, this would be where we would expect to find them. Labdoor has bacopa but not ashwagandha, and ConsumerLab has vice versa, so I’m combining them for this investigation.
Labdoor investigates three brands of bacopa, giving two Bs and one C. These grades are only lower than As because they find the brands have slightly more bacopa than promised on the label. As mentioned above, this shouldn’t be considered an error and a more reasonable version of LabDoor would probably have given As to all of these.
Inline links: investigates three brands of bacopa
Highlights From The Comments On Supplement Labeling
October 26, 2022 · Original source
Regarding the overages, I agree that it’s better to penalize something more for an underage than an overage, but I am still not sure this is good communication. Consider for example their bacopa rankings. Just looking at this, I would come away with the conclusion “no bacopa is entirely trustworthy, but at least ND and PE are better than Swanson”. But if I’m understanding right, the whole ranking is entirely driven by overages, and nobody (including the brand getting a C-) has any other problem. I suppose it’s fair to, if everything is exactly the same, rank based on a minor issue, but I think if I didn’t understand what was going on here I would be much more concerned about Swanson than justified.
Inline links: their bacopa rankings