Formulation Register · Observation IX
The question comes up at every event and in every conversation with someone discovering the product: why a powder to mix, rather than capsules like everyone else?
The capsule was patented to help patients swallow a remedy whose taste they could not stand.
That was its original brief, dated and signed. Like every object that solves one problem exceptionally well, it eventually reshaped the problem around itself.
IParis, 1834
Two men filed a patent in Paris: pharmacy student François Achille Barnabé Mothès and pharmacist Joseph Gérard Auguste Dublanc. The application was submitted in 1833 and granted in 1834. The process was almost absurdly artisanal: a small leather pouch filled with mercury was dipped into a gelatine solution; the film was left to dry, the mercury removed and the shell peeled away. The result was a gelatine bladder that could be filled with liquid and sealed with a drop.
What they wanted patients to swallow came down to two words: copaiba balsam. This South American resin was widely prescribed for gonorrhoea in the nineteenth century. Medical literature of the time dwells on it for one reason above all: its taste, and the smell it left on the patient's breath, recognisable from a distance. Practitioners promoting competing balsams even presented discretion as a clinical advantage.
The capsule solved the problem at once. Its first documented use was to mask the taste and smell of copaiba without any excipient. Two centuries later, the function remains while the status has changed. A solution to one specific problem became the default format, the one nobody feels obliged to justify.
A format designed to conceal became the standard for an industry that sells transparency.
IIThe ceiling
A capsule has a volume, and that volume is small. Size 00 is already large: 23.3 mm long and 8.18 mm wide, close to the upper limit an adult can swallow without thinking. Its usable volume is 0.95 ml.
What fits inside depends on density. A dense powder at around 1 g/ml yields roughly 950 mg. A light, aerated whole-plant powder is closer to 0.6 g/ml, or about 570 mg. A well-filled size 00 capsule of dried plant material holds just over half a gram.
Do the division. Our daily serving is ten grams.
Nobody swallows eighteen capsules a day. Faced with that wall, the industry made a rational choice that is rarely stated: instead of enlarging the container, it reduced the dose. Whole-plant powders gave way to concentrated extracts, grams became hundreds of milligrams, and formulas were rebuilt to fit the shell.
The format ended up deciding the formula.
That approach can be entirely legitimate. A properly dosed standardised extract is a serious pharmacological object and may outperform raw plant material for a given active. The problem is the silence around it: a 400 mg capsule of standardised extract and a 400 mg capsule of ground plant can carry the same number on the label while being worlds apart. That was the subject of Observation V.
A scale comparison between a size 00 capsule, its usable volume and a pile of powder representing 10 g. Make the number of capsules required immediately understandable without dramatising it.
Scale comparison · 3:2 · 1200 × 800 px · gelule-00-vs-10g.webpIIIWhat the machine needs
The second consequence is less visible. Powder does not flow by itself. In a machine filling thousands of capsules per hour, powder that clumps or sticks creates inconsistent fill weights and stoppages. It needs help.
That is the job of two excipients found in a large majority of capsules. Magnesium stearate is a lubricant: it coats particles, reduces friction between them and against the machinery, and enables ejection. Colloidal silica is the industry's most common glidant: it coats the grains and helps the mixture flow, typically at around 0.1 to 1% of the mass.
The subject has been thoroughly exploited by people who sell fear. At those levels, both excipients are considered safe; most alarmist claims about them are noise.
They are there for the machine. They are processing ingredients made necessary by the container. When a label runs to twelve lines but only three are actives, that may be the cost of the format rather than deception.
A simple cutaway of an encapsulation line: powder hopper, flow, dosing and capsule closure. Show where flow agents help the production process.
Process diagram · 3:2 · 1200 × 800 px · chaine-encapsulation.webpIVWhat a drink makes possible
Two hundred millilitres of water remove the ceiling. Ten grams fit comfortably, day after day, making two things possible that a capsule mechanically prevents.
First, whole-plant powders in meaningful amounts can sit alongside precisely dosed actives. Ingredients no longer have to be selected according to what fits inside 0.95 ml.
Second, nothing needs to flow through a capsule filler. Without that machine, glidants lose their purpose. There is no moral virtue in this: it is simply a consequence of one format, just as their presence follows from the other.
Colour remains harder to defend, and we accept it for what it is. Hibiscus turning water red in thirty seconds says nothing about efficacy. It says there is enough plant pigment in the glass to be visible. Nothing can be seen through half a gram sealed in gelatine.
VTaste as information
Observation VI dealt with the most common frustration in supplementation: you take something, feel nothing and begin to doubt. That is structural, and nothing to be ashamed of. Most actives work on timelines that create no immediate sensation.
The gesture, however, does create something. A drink has a taste, a colour and a temperature. None of this has pharmacological value, but it is a real signal of use: it tells you the ritual happened, and tells you now. By design, a capsule removes every one of those signals. That was its mission in 1834.
The dominant supplement format is therefore the one that erases all sensory feedback. The industry then wonders why people stop after three weeks because they cannot perceive anything.
The forty seconds of preparation work in the same direction. A gesture that occupies the hands, repeated in the same place and at the same time, can build a sustainable routine. That was the first Observation in the Habits Register. We never set out to make the ritual faster.
VIWhat the format does not solve
Drinks have their own mythology, every bit as questionable as the one on the other side.
On almost every website selling liquid supplements, you will find some version of “98% absorption versus 10 to 20% for tablets”. There is no robust evidence behind that figure. Non-caloric liquids leave the stomach faster; caloric liquids behave more like solids. But faster does not mean more: gastric emptying speed tells us nothing about the amount ultimately absorbed. Anyone selling a format on an absorption percentage borrows Observation V's favourite word without respecting its definition.
There are three further limits.
Some things belong in a capsule. A microdose of B12, vitamin K2 or trace minerals does not need two hundred millilitres of water. A molecule that is unstable in solution, or must cross the stomach intact, may require a capsule, possibly enteric-coated. The right format depends on what it carries.
A drink has a cost. It needs preparation, travels poorly and inevitably has a taste that will not suit everyone. A format that requires a gesture loses people who do not want that gesture. We accept that without pretending it is free.
Above all: a poor formula served in a glass remains a poor formula. The container never redeems the composition, and none of these arguments replaces reading the doses.
VIITo finish
Mothès and Dublanc had a clear problem and solved it: getting a patient to swallow something they refused to taste. A bitter molecule, a tiny dose, a train journey—if that is your problem, the capsule remains the best answer available 192 years later.
Our problem was different: how to put ten grams of plants into a daily serving without shrinking the formula until it fit the container.
We chose the dose first. The format followed.
The question extends beyond us. When looking at a supplement, ask which way the decision was made. A formula that fits its container exactly can be a happy coincidence. Quite often, the decision ran in the opposite direction.
Sources and references
Mothès & Dublanc patent, Paris, filed in 1833 and granted in 1834—the first gelatine capsules, designed to mask the taste and smell of copaiba balsam · To Cover Pills or Extract of Copaiba with Gelatine, nineteenth-century medical literature · Gurjun Balsam in Gonorrhœa, on the characteristic smell left by copaiba · Hard gelatine capsule specifications, size 00: 0.95 ml, 23.3 mm long, 8.18 mm wide · Jain S. et al., Influence of colloidal silicon dioxide–magnesium stearate interaction on flow and compaction behavior, Powder Technology, 2024 · Grimm M. et al., Gastric Water Emptying under Fed State Clinical Trial Conditions Is as Fast as under Fasted Conditions, Molecular Pharmaceutics, 2017.
