Caffeine

The world's most familiar stimulant — declared, so you can count it in

All articles checked for accuracy against the GB NHC Register and all sources have citations with verified links to their relevant studies.

Caffeine is the compound most people in Britain consume daily, often without thinking of it as a supplement. This article explains what caffeine is, how WellsparQ labels it, and why the brand chooses to declare milligrams rather than make claims.

This piece covers caffeine’s basic chemistry and common sources, how WellsparQ lists caffeine amounts on its product cards, and the regulatory position on health claims. It summarises safety guidance from European authorities so you can understand the numbers and add them into your daily tally.

Ingredient Snapshot

What it is

A naturally occurring stimulant alkaloid found in many plants.

Where from

Coffee bean, tea leaf, cacao, kola nut and guaraná (caffeine anhydrous in supplements).

Known for

Commonly consumed daily; amounts are declared so you can tally intake from all sources.

In WellsparQ

• BacoPanax Complex100 mg (anhydrous)
• Glucomannan Complex50 mg (per 2-capsule serving)
• ActiveNO Blend40 mg (anhydrous powder)
• WellsparQ BacoPanax Complex100 mg
• WellsparQ Glucomannan Complex (serving)50 mg

For reference

• Mug of instant coffee~100 mg ^¹
• Mug of filter coffee~140 mg ^¹
• Mug of tea~75 mg ^¹
• Can of cola~40 mg ^¹

Caffeine is the one active compound almost everyone in Britain takes every day, usually without thinking of it as a supplement at all. It is in the morning coffee, the afternoon tea, the square of dark chocolate, the can of cola. When it also appears in a capsule, the sensible thing is not to treat it as something new and exotic, but to add it to the running total you already carry. That is the whole of the WellsparQ approach here: caffeine is present and printed, so you can tally it with your coffee before you scoop.

What caffeine is

Caffeine (1,3,7-trimethylxanthine) is a small, naturally occurring alkaloid of the methylxanthine family. Plants make it as, among other things, a natural pesticide; we know it best from the coffee bean, the tea leaf, cacao, and the kola nut and guaraná. In supplements it is usually added as caffeine anhydrous — simply caffeine with the water removed, giving a dry, concentrated, precisely weighable powder. Chemically it is the same molecule whether it arrives from a roasted bean or a measured powder; the only thing that changes is how exactly you can count it.

How WellsparQ declares it

Caffeine turns up in three WellsparQ formulas, each stating the amount on the label rather than hiding it inside a proprietary blend. The card voice is deliberately plain — this is arithmetic, not advertising.

Source: WellsparQ Supplements Database. These formulas sit in plant-cellulose capsules and are suitable for vegetarians and vegans, and kosher and halal approved.

To make sense of those milligrams, it helps to see them beside the everyday sources. The NHS gives rough working figures for common drinks ^¹.

The point of the table is not to flatter the capsule but to place it. A 100 mg dose is, quite literally, a modest cup of coffee — so it belongs in the same daily sum, not in a separate mental column.

What the safety guidance says

Caffeine has been studied more thoroughly than almost any dietary compound, and the most authoritative European assessment is the European Food Safety Authority's 2015 Scientific Opinion on the safety of caffeine ^². Its headline conclusions are worth stating plainly, because they are guidance about safe amounts, not promises of benefit:

• For healthy adults, single doses of up to 200 mg (about two-and-a-half espressos) give rise to no safety concerns ^².
• Habitual intakes of up to 400 mg per day, from all sources combined, are not of safety concern for healthy adults ^².
• In pregnancy, EFSA advises that intakes up to 200 mg per day (again from all sources) do not raise safety concerns for the foetus — the same 200 mg figure the NHS uses in its pregnancy advice ^¹².

Great Britain's Food Standards Agency echoes this framing in its guidance for businesses selling caffeine-containing supplements, and treats the 400 mg adult figure as the practical reference point ^³. Because caffeine reaches you from so many directions, the only way to stay inside these numbers is to add them up — which is exactly why WellsparQ prints the milligrams. Caffeine can also disturb sleep and, in higher amounts, cause jitteriness or a faster heartbeat; people who are pregnant or breastfeeding, or who have a heart condition, should be especially mindful of their total ^¹².

A word on claims — and why you will not find one here

This is the careful part. Caffeine's effects on alertness and on physical performance have genuinely been examined by EFSA. In 2011 its panel gave favourable scientific opinions on caffeine and increased alertness and attention ^⁴, and on caffeine and endurance performance, endurance capacity and reduced perceived exertion during exercise ^⁵; a further favourable opinion on alertness followed in 2014 ^⁶. On the science, in other words, the assessments were positive.

But a favourable EFSA opinion is only half of the process. The European Commission never adopted these caffeine claims into law — they were not authorised — and so caffeine carries no approved health claim on either the Great Britain nutrition and health claims register or the EU register ^⁷. That is a regulatory fact, and it is the reason this article reports the EFSA opinions as evidence and regulatory history and stops there. WellsparQ makes no alertness or performance claim in its own voice. What we do is simpler and, we think, more useful: tell you the number, and let you count it in.