SlimTide Ingredients: The Three Declared Rows
Three declared rows, three real per-serving amounts, and three very different kinds of thing. Two of them are fibres. The third is alive, and it is declared in a unit that cannot describe it.
SlimTide has three active rows: chicory root inulin, potato resistant starch and a probiotic blend.
The panel prints 211 mg of inulin, 100 mg of resistant starch and a 36 mg blend of Bifidobacterium infantis, Clostridium butyricum and Akkermansia muciniphila. The capsule shell is hypromellose.
See the whole panel on the label page.
The three declared rows
Each card leads with a number, which is a thing this series of sites has rarely been able to do.
A supplement ingredient list answers two questions: what is in it, and how much. This label answers both, for all three actives.
The three sit in descending order of weight, as FDA’s labeling guide asks. Two are plant fibres, extracted and dried. The third is a cultured blend of three microorganisms, and the unit it is declared in is the reason it gets its own page on this site.
Nothing below describes a benefit. Benefits are on the claims page.
What a fermentable fibre is
Two of the three actives belong to one category, and the category explains most of what follows.
Most of what you eat is broken down by your own enzymes in the small intestine and absorbed there. A dietary fibre is a carbohydrate those enzymes cannot take apart. It travels the length of the small intestine more or less intact and arrives in the large intestine still recognisable.
What lives in the large intestine can take it apart. Fermentable is the word for a fibre those resident organisms will use as food, and fermentation is what they do to it. Both of the fibres in this capsule are fermentable; that property is the whole basis of the argument the product makes about itself.
- Digested
- Broken down by your own enzymes and absorbed as sugar in the small intestine. This is what ordinary starch does and what neither of these two ingredients does.
- Fermented
- Broken down by the organisms in the large intestine, which use it to grow. Gas is one product of that process, which is why wind is the best-known effect of a large dose.
- Prebiotic
- The word for a fibre supplied specifically as food for those organisms. It is a description of intent as much as of chemistry, and it is the half of this product that is not alive.
- Butyrate
- One of the substances fermentation can produce. The label names Clostridium butyricum, an organism whose name says it makes it.
That a fermentable fibre does something recognisable in a gut is established. Whether 211 mg and 100 mg of it do anything measurable is a separate question.
Chicory root inulin — 211 mg
Chicory is Cichorium intybus, and the panel prints both the Latin name and the plant part — root. Inulin is the storage carbohydrate that root holds, a chain of fructose units with a glucose on the end, extracted from the root in hot water and dried to a powder.
It is the best-documented ingredient in this bottle. The European Commission examined the evidence for it and authorised a health claim in Regulation (EU) 2015/2314: “Chicory inulin contributes to normal bowel function by increasing stool frequency.”
That regulation also defines what counts as native chicory inulin, down to a mean degree of polymerisation of nine or more. The panel says “Chicory Root Inulin” and does not say which it is.
The claim came with a condition of use, and the condition is a number: it may be used only for food providing a daily intake of 12 g of native chicory inulin. This capsule declares 211 mg — 0.75% of FDA’s 28 g Daily Value for fibre, and about one 57th of the authorised intake. That makes the amount small, not the ingredient bad.
Potato resistant starch — 100 mg
The name is the description: a starch that resists the thing starch is normally for.
Starch is a chain of glucose units, and the point of eating it is that your own enzymes cut those chains apart and your small intestine absorbs the glucose.
Resistant starch is starch that the same enzymes do not get through. It resists because of how the granule is built and how tightly the chains are packed, so it passes the small intestine without being absorbed and reaches the large intestine as food for the organisms there. In other words, it behaves like a fermentable fibre rather than like a starch.
- What it resists
- Your own digestive enzymes. Not heat, not stomach acid, not storage — digestion, specifically, in the small intestine.
- Where it ends up
- The large intestine, largely intact, where it is fermented — the same destination as the inulin beside it.
- What is declared
- 100 mg per capsule, from potato tuber — a real per-serving figure. What proportion of it is resistant rather than digestible is not declared, and the law does not ask for it.
There is an authorised European claim for resistant starch, in Regulation (EU) No 432/2012, about replacing digestible starch in a meal so that resistant starch is at least 14% of the total. A capsule swallowed with water replaces no starch, so the claim is unavailable at any dose — a different problem from falling short of one, set out on the capsule-count page.
The probiotic blend — 36 mg
A probiotic, in the definition NIH’s Office of Dietary Supplements uses, is live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host. Three words in that sentence are doing work: live, adequate, and amounts.
A blend is a labelling structure rather than an ingredient. FDA’s labeling guide lets a manufacturer print one total weight for a group of ingredients and list the members underneath in descending order of weight, without saying how the total is divided. That is what the 36 mg line is: a total, with three names indented under it.
- Bifidobacterium infantis
- A bifidobacterium of the infant gut, reclassified in 2008 as a subspecies of Bifidobacterium longum. Widely used commercially, and always as a named strain in the literature. Here: no strain designation is printed.
- Clostridium butyricum
- A butyrate-producing organism used as a probiotic in Japan, where the MIYAIRI 588 strain has been in use for decades. The genus also contains species that are not benign, which is exactly why the strain matters. Here: no strain designation is printed.
- Akkermansia muciniphila
- A mucin-degrading organism of the gut lining and the newest of the three to reach the supplement market. In the EU only the pasteurised — that is, non-viable — form has been authorised, for adults, excluding pregnant and lactating women. Here: no strain designation is printed.
Milligrams are not organisms
The unit that describes a live culture is colony-forming units, and no CFU figure appears on this label — not at manufacture and not at the end of shelf life, which is the one ODS tells buyers to look for. US rules require only total weight, so the label does what the law asks and nothing beyond it.
ODS is also explicit that probiotic effects are strain-specific. Three species are named and no strain designation appears, so there is nothing to look up. The blend has its own page.
The Other Ingredients line
Four names, one of which is the capsule you swallow and three of which are there to make the powder behave.
The label prints it in full: “Other Ingredients: Hypromellose (vegetarian capsule), microcrystalline cellulose, magnesium stearate, silica.” A complete inactive list is not a given on a supplement bottle, and this one is complete.
| As printed | What it is | What it is doing in a capsule |
|---|---|---|
| Hypromellose (vegetarian capsule) | A cellulose derived from plant material and formed into a shell. | It is the capsule. The label says so in brackets, and it is the reason the vegetarian mark on this bottle is true rather than decorative. |
| Microcrystalline cellulose | Purified plant cellulose, ground fine. | Bulk. Three actives weighing 347 mg between them do not fill a capsule on their own. |
| Magnesium stearate | The magnesium salt of a fatty acid. | Flow. It keeps powder from sticking to the machinery that meters and fills capsules. |
| Silica | Silicon dioxide, as a fine powder. | Dryness and flow. It keeps a powder free-running rather than caked. |
Scroll this table sideways →
Nothing animal-derived appears in the list, which is what makes the vegetarian claim the one quality mark of eleven the label itself supports; the rest are audited on the quality marks page. What the line does not carry is an allergen statement beyond the names themselves, or anything at all about how three living species were stabilised for a shelf. For a fibre that does not matter. For a culture it is the whole question.
What the ingredient list does not tell you
A short list, which is unusual, and the first three items are the ones that matter.
- No colony-forming unit count appears anywhere — not per capsule, not at manufacture, and not at the end of shelf life.
- No strain designation for any of the three organisms. Species only.
- No split of the 36 mg blend between the three organisms.
- No statement of how the live organisms were stabilised, or whether they are live at all when the bottle reaches you.
- No expiry or best-before date is visible in any supplied image.
Every one of those could be printed on the next run of labels without a new study, because the manufacturer already knows them. A count at the end of shelf life and three strain designations would turn the most interesting ingredient in this bottle from the least checkable one into something a reader could look up in an evening.
What is on the label is good, and a list of absences reads harsher than it is meant to. The gaps above are what is left after all of it has been credited.
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.
- U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationDietary Supplement Labeling Guide, Chapter IV: Nutrition Labeling · sourceWhat a Supplement Facts panel must carry, and the proprietary-blend rule: the blend's total weight on its own line with the ingredients listed underneath in descending order of predominance by weight.
- 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.
- Office of Dietary Supplements, National Institutes of HealthProbiotics — Health Professional Fact Sheet · sourceThe definition of a probiotic, what colony-forming units are, the fact that US regulations require total microorganism weight rather than viable CFU, the advice to prefer products stating CFU at end of shelf life, strain specificity, and the safety record in immunocompromised people.