Hello all, I was given Sprulina tablets as a health supplement to take. The recommendation is 3-9 per day and they’re 100% spriulina, 1 tablet is 1000mg. I’d say they’re on the relatively larger size of pill. So I was wondering can these be made smaller or is there a limitation?
E.G. Can it be produced that I’d only take 1 tablet vs 9 tablets per day? Like a super concentrated tablet.
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I don’t know anything about spirulina specifically, but one reason to split the pills up is how much you can absorb. Bioavailability. Example, Spinach has a decent amount of iron in it but we cant absorb it all from the spinach.
I would make the assumption it is split up because if you put a full days amount of spirulina in one pill, you’d probably pee most of it out.
Some pills need to be absorbed slower, so they tack on a lot of inactive parts to the active ingredient to allow for that.
Pills with a few milligrams of active ingredient are often pretty small. Practically, you still want a pill to be big enough that it’s fairly easy to pick up between thumb and finger, as well as big enough to have a visible shape/color/markings. If a person with subpar vision has shuffled up medicines and is looking at two tiny round white pills, that’s an accident waiting to happen. Otherwise, though, small pills are easy to swallow, which is nice.
For some pills, though, there’s enough active ingredient that you simply can’t go small. A gram isn’t a lot in terms of weight, but it can make for a decent-sized tablet. For reference, a sugar cube is about 4 grams, and is much too big to easily swallow whole. Also, most pills aren’t just the pure substance, but also have a large volume of other binders and inactive stuff that lets it be a pill (most medicines wouldn’t just compress into a perfect hard tablet.)
In this case, a tablespoon of pure spirulina is only 7 grams. A tablespoon-sized lump of anything is already much too big to swallow whole. Your concentrated tablet would be what we affectionately call a “horse pill.”
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