Twelve grams
When a regulator authorises a health claim it attaches a number to it. That number is the least glamorous part of the document and the only part a shopper can actually use.
Regulation (EU) 2015/2314 authorises one claim for chicory inulin — that it contributes to normal bowel function by increasing stool frequency — and permits it only for food providing a daily intake of 12 g of native chicory inulin. The regulation defines native chicory inulin as a non-fractionated mixture with a mean degree of polymerisation of 9 or more.
A dose threshold is the honest part of a health claim, because it is the part that can be checked against a label. Divide the threshold by the declared amount per serving and you have the number of servings the claim would require. On this product that division is 12,000 ÷ 211, which is 56.9 — 57 capsules a day, on a label that says do not exceed one.
Why a regulator puts a number on a claim at all
An authorised claim is two things, and the second one is the useful one.
A health claim, examined properly, is never just a sentence. It is a sentence plus the conditions under which it was found to hold. The evidence a regulator reads is made of trials, and a trial gives people a specific amount of a specific material. The amount is part of the finding, not a detail of it.
So an authorisation carries a condition of use. The claim may be made for a food providing a certain intake and not for a food that does not. Without that condition the claim would apply to a crumb, which would make it meaningless rather than generous.
That is why the number is worth more to a shopper than the claim is. The sentence tells you what somebody concluded. The number tells you what you would have to do to be inside the population they concluded it about, and unlike the sentence it can be compared with a Supplement Facts panel in about five seconds.
Conditions of use come in more than one shape. Some are a daily intake. Some are a proportion — an ingredient must make up a given share of something else. Some are a replacement: this instead of that, within a meal.
What Regulation (EU) 2015/2314 authorised
One claim, one ingredient, one number, and a definition doing quiet work underneath it.
Commission Regulation (EU) 2015/2314 of 7 December 2015 authorises a health claim made on foods: that chicory inulin contributes to normal bowel function by increasing stool frequency. It is a modest claim, carefully worded, and it is about bowel function rather than about weight.
The condition attached to it is the part that matters here. The claim may be used only for food that provides a daily intake of 12 g of native chicory inulin. Twelve grams a day, every day, is the intake at which the evidence the regulator read was obtained.
Two things follow. A food providing less than 12 g a day is not a food the claim was authorised for; and the figure is a floor for the claim rather than a recommended intake for a person.
The same framework is where this site’s other European figure comes from. Regulation (EU) No 432/2012 lists permitted health claims, including the resistant starch claim: replacing digestible starches with resistant starch in a meal contributes to a reduction in the blood glucose rise after that meal, on the condition that resistant starch is at least 14% of the total starch in that meal. That is a condition of the second shape — a proportion within a meal, not a daily intake.
What “native chicory inulin” means
The regulation does not say “inulin”, and the two extra words are not decoration.
Inulin is not a single molecule. It is a family of chains of fructose units of varying lengths, and the length distribution changes what the material does. A manufacturer can separate those chains — fractionate them — to produce a short-chain product or a long-chain one, and the results are different ingredients with the same common name.
So the regulation defines what it authorised. Native chicory inulin is a non-fractionated mixture of mono-, di- and polysaccharides extracted from chicory, with a mean degree of polymerisation of 9 or more. Two constraints: nothing was separated out, and the average chain is at least nine units long.
- Degree of polymerisation
- How many units long a chain is. A mean degree of polymerisation of 9 or more describes the average chain length across the whole mixture, not a minimum for every chain in it.
- Non-fractionated
- Nothing was separated out after extraction. The short chains and the long chains are all still present, in the proportions the root produced them in.
- Why the definition is in the regulation at all
- Because the trials were done on that material. A fractionated product is a different ingredient, and the authorisation does not reach it.
- What it means for a label
- “Chicory root inulin” on a panel does not state a degree of polymerisation or whether the material was fractionated. Those are usually not printed, on any product.
A reader who checks only the milligrams is assuming the material matches the one in the authorisation, and on most labels nothing is printed that would confirm it.
Why a dose threshold is the honest part of a claim
Everything else in an authorisation is language. This is the one sentence with a number in it.
Read an authorised claim and almost all of it is careful prose: what may be said, how it may be worded, what must not be implied. Prose is hard to check against a bottle. A threshold is trivial to check against a bottle, which is why it does more work for a shopper than the rest of the document combined.
It also gives you a scale. A supplement providing a twentieth of a threshold and one providing nine tenths of it are both outside the claim, they are not in the same situation, and only the arithmetic tells you which is which.
The honest reading of a threshold
A product below a published threshold is not thereby useless, and nothing here says it is. It is outside the range where a regulator found an effect, which is a statement about evidence rather than about the product.
What the threshold removes is the assumption. With a number you can see the distance between the bottle in your hand and the evidence that made the ingredient interesting, and decide what that distance is worth.
Using a published threshold on any fibre supplement
Four steps, one division, and it works on a shelf without an internet connection.
Find the declared amount per serving
It is on the Supplement Facts panel, in milligrams or grams, beside the ingredient name. If the ingredient is inside a proprietary blend, you have a ceiling rather than an amount, and the ceiling is the blend total divided by the ingredient’s position in the list.
Find a published threshold for that ingredient
An authorised claim with a condition of use is the cleanest kind, because a regulator examined the evidence before writing the number down. For chicory inulin that number is 12 g a day.
Divide the threshold by the declared amount
The answer is the number of servings a day the threshold would take. It is division, not a judgement, and every figure in it belongs to somebody else.
Compare the answer with the directions
If the number of servings is larger than the number the label permits, the threshold is not reachable from that bottle. That is the finding, and it is the end of the exercise.
Then check the national yardstick too
In the United States, FDA’s Daily Value for dietary fibre is 28 g a day, and FDA’s own rule of thumb calls 5% or less of a Daily Value low and 20% or more high. That converts a milligram figure into a share of a day.
The method has one requirement, and it is the one most supplement labels fail: a declared per-serving amount. Without it there is no numerator and the exercise stops before it starts. A panel that prints real amounts is what makes a product checkable — including when the check goes badly for it.
The arithmetic on this bottle
One declared amount, one published target, one division.
The SlimTide panel declares Chicory Root Inulin (Cichorium intybus)(root) — 211 mg per capsule. That is a real per-serving figure, printed on the bottle, and it is the thing that makes everything below possible.
| The target | Who published it | Capsules a day it would take |
|---|---|---|
| 12 g of native chicory inulin | Regulation (EU) 2015/2314, the authorised bowel-function claim | 57 — 12,000 ÷ 211 = 56.9 |
| 28 g of dietary fibre | FDA’s Daily Value, adults and children 4 and over | One capsule is 0.75% of a day, which is inside what FDA itself calls low |
Scroll this table sideways →
Twelve thousand milligrams divided by 211 is 56.9, which rounds to 57 capsules a day. The label’s directions say to take one capsule daily, and its caution says do not exceed the recommended dose. So the threshold is not reachable from this bottle, and the label itself is the document that says so.
Read that the right way round. It is not an accusation. The panel is honest; it printed a real number, and a real number is the one thing you can check. The finding is about what 211 mg buys, and it took one division to find.
It is also not a statement about legality. European regulations do not govern a product sold in the United States, and the 12 g figure is cited here because it is the most specific published statement anyone has made about a daily intake of chicory inulin — not as a rule this product is being measured against.
The transferable part is the method. Any fibre supplement with a declared amount runs through the same steps, and the answer is a number of servings rather than an impression.
See the SlimTide packs
One, three or six bottles. The price is on the seller’s checkout page, because it is one of the few figures this site was never given — and a figure we were not given is not a figure we will print.
Shipping cost and delivery time were not supplied either, which matters more than usual on a product whose label asks for refrigeration. The guarantee is 60 days from purchase unless the sales page prints longer.
References
The sources behind the numbers on this page.
- European UnionCommission Regulation (EU) 2015/2314 of 7 December 2015 authorising a health claim made on foods · source“Chicory inulin contributes to normal bowel function by increasing stool frequency”, authorised only for food providing a daily intake of 12 g of native chicory inulin. The source of the 12 g figure used throughout this site.
- European UnionCommission Regulation (EU) No 432/2012 of 16 May 2012 establishing a list of permitted health claims made on foods · sourceThe authorised resistant starch claim — “replacing digestible starches with resistant starch in a meal contributes to a reduction in the blood glucose rise after that meal” — and its condition that resistant starch be at least 14% of total starch.
- U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationDaily Value on the Nutrition and Supplement Facts Labels · sourceThe Daily Value for dietary fibre is 28 g, and FDA's own rule of thumb that 5% DV or less of a nutrient per serving is low and 20% or more is high.