Formulate Your Own Supplements

A supplement company does the same thing, only on a larger scale.  It acquires pure, powdered supplements from one of the few supplement manufacturers and packages them into dosage units (e.g. capsules or tablets).  Then, it bottles those dosage units into containers that bear the name of its company, before selling them, at a premium, to wholesalers and retailers.

Not only is doing it on your own cheaper, but it also allows you, the user, to decide on the type of dilutant[*]to use, as well as to avoid certain excipients that may be necessary on a large production scale, but unnecessary (and possibly allergenic) for making supplements at home for your own use.  You also get to create your own unique mixtures of supplements, and to vary the proportions of the supplements in those mixtures – handy for self-experimentation purposes.[†]And, lest the requirement for comprehensiveness be disregarded, some powdered supplements taste awful, so encapsulating them automatically gets around this taste factor.

Here I’ll show you how to make your own supplement capsules, without a capsule-making machine.  You’ll need a digital scale that is sensitive enough to weigh in 100 mg increments;[‡]empty gelatin capsules; and, of course, the powdered supplement (and possibly a dilutant) you wish to encapsulate.

As an example, I will formulate 30 capsules, each containing 10 mg of vitamin B6.  Therefore, in total, I will need 300 mg of (pure) vitamin B6 powder (30 x 10).

There are eight sizes of gelatin capsules available for human use, from 5 (the smallest) to 000 (the largest), with each capsule size providing a range of volume capacity that is dependent on the characteristics (e.g. density) of the powdered supplement.  The smallest possible capsule size should be selected because larger capsules are harder to swallow and require more dilutant.

There are two methods available in the literature to determine the appropriate capsule.  I’ll only describe one of them here: the rule of 6.  The rule of 6 is simple.  It entails subtracting the capsule size (column 2) from 6 (column 1), which yields the fill weight of the capsule in grains (column 3).  Column 4 represents column 3 in milligrams (1 grain = 65 mg).

Since each of my vitamin B6 capsules contains 10 mg, the smallest possible capsule size is 5, whose total fill weight is 65 milligrams.  Thus, each capsule requires 55 mg of dilutant to fill out the rest of the capsule’s volume.  In total, 1,650 mg of dilutantis needed (55 x 30) for the entire ‘recipe.’

For my vitamin B6 capsules, I will weigh out 300 mg of (pure) vitamin B6 powder and 1,650 mg of dilutant.  The dilutant I typically use is powdered sugar.  However, you could use any other dilutant, as long as it is extremely fine in texture. (You’ll see why in the last step.) 

First, place the thoroughly mixed powder in a heap onto a clean flat surface.  Then, after separating the body of the capsule from the cap, take the body and tap it, open side down, on the deepest part of the heap until the body of the capsule is packed as much as possible with the powdered mixture. (If the supplement and dilutant are not powdered finely into nearly dust, they won’t pack into the body of the capsule.)  Finally, place the cap back onto the body and repeat the process with the remaining empty capsules.[§]