By the Ancient Nutra Editorial Team

September starts tomorrow, and the plan for it is short enough to say in one sitting. There is no launch, no campaign, and no new range. There is one editorial change, and it is the kind of change that is easier to make quietly than to announce, which is exactly why it is worth writing down. Ancient Nutra is retiring a phrase it used for a long time and should not have. This letter is about what the phrase was, why it lasted, and what replaces it.

Retire the phrase, not the patience

The phrase is "give it 90 days."

It appeared, in one form or another, across a large share of the articles published on this blog. It was never a lie in the ordinary sense. It came from a real and defensible instinct: herbs are slow, people quit early, and a fortnight is not a fair test of anything. Told to be patient, most people are. That instinct is sound and it is not what is being retired.

What is being retired is the number. Ninety days was a house default. It went next to ashwagandha, next to triphala, next to a mushroom extract, next to a leaf powder, always with the same confident three digits, and almost never with a study behind it that had run for ninety days. The same phrase was doing duty for ingredients whose evidence bases have nothing in common. In at least one case it recommended roughly four times longer than any trial supporting the ingredient had run.

A number that appears next to everything is not really telling you anything. It reads as precision, which is worse than reading as a guess, because a guess invites a question and a specific number quietly closes it.

Bound a course to the study that supports it

The replacement rule is duller and much harder to write to: say how long the research ran, and stop there.

Maca is a clean example, so it is a fair one to work through. The plant is Lepidium meyenii, a root crop from the high plateaus of the Peruvian Andes, eaten there as a food long before anyone measured it. The best available human trial on mood and energy is a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled study of 175 adults who took 3 grams of spray dried red or black maca extract daily. It ran for 12 weeks. Over 80 percent of those taking red or black maca reported improved mood, and more than 90 percent of the red maca group reported increased energy by week 12. No serious adverse effects were reported in any group.

So the honest sentence about maca is that the evidence covers about twelve weeks. Not ninety days, which is nearly thirteen. The gap sounds trivial and the principle is not: twelve weeks is where somebody actually looked, and everything past it is an assumption wearing a number.

This also cuts the other way, and that matters. Where a trial ran four weeks, the article now says four weeks, even though a longer number would sell better. The rule is only worth having if it is allowed to shorten things.

Say plainly what is still unresolved

Here is the part that is genuinely unfinished, because a letter that only describes a fix it has already made is a press release.

Most of the herbs in the Sri Lankan tradition Ancient Nutra draws on have thin modern trial records. Some have none at all. Maca has a decent one. Many do not, and no amount of careful editing produces evidence that was never gathered. For those ingredients the choice is between saying "traditionally taken for" and being clear that this is traditional use rather than a demonstrated result, or saying nothing. The team is still working out where that line sits for each one, and it will get some of them wrong before it gets them right.

What can be committed to is narrower and checkable: no invented durations, no efficacy claim that outruns its source, and traditional use named as traditional use. That is a smaller promise than most supplement writing makes. It is the size of promise that can be kept.

Expect fewer numbers and better ones

What September holds, practically, is a slower and less quotable blog. Some articles will carry a shorter course length than they used to. Some will say that a course length cannot be given honestly for that ingredient, which is an awkward sentence to publish and the correct one. Older posts get corrected as they are revisited rather than in one sweep, so the back catalogue will be inconsistent for a while. That is worth naming rather than hiding.

The bottles do not change. A sixty capsule bottle taken once a day still runs sixty days, and Ancient Nutra wrote separately about how a bottle and a course line up, and when to reorder. Nothing in that arithmetic depended on the retired phrase, which is its own small piece of evidence that the phrase was never load bearing. It was decoration that looked like a fact.

The bottom line

One phrase is going, and with it a habit of writing numbers that sounded researched and were not. Durations now come from the studies or they do not get written. It makes for quieter copy, and it is the version of this blog worth keeping.

Maca Root Extract

A standardised Peruvian Lepidium meyenii extract, caffeine free, taken one capsule with breakfast.

Shop Maca Root Extract

Sources and further reading

• Gonzales-Arimborgo C, et al. Acceptability, Safety, and Efficacy of Oral Administration of Extracts of Black or Red Maca (Lepidium meyenii) in Adult Human Subjects: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study. Pharmaceuticals (Basel). 2016;9(3):49, PubMed Central.
• Maca, LiverTox: Clinical and Research Information on Drug-Induced Liver Injury (likelihood score E, unlikely cause of clinically apparent liver injury), National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Written by the Ancient Nutra Wellness Team. The team researches, sources, and tests every ingredient before it earns a place in an Ancient Nutra blend. Questions? Email info@ancientnutra.com or message Ancient Nutra on Instagram.

Medical disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Ancient Nutra products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Speak with a qualified healthcare provider before starting any new supplement, especially if you take prescription medication or have a medical condition.