Maca Root Dosage in Jelly Blue: 100 mg Against the Trials

Turn a JellyBlue bottle round and the Supplement Facts panel lists seven actives, each with its own milligram figure. Maca root extract sits third, after L-arginine and tongkat ali, printed as 100 mg with its Latin name, Lepidium meyenii. It shares that figure with ashwagandha and horny goat weed, and the three rows together make up 300 of the 650 mg of actives in every gummy.

Maca is an Andean plant of the brassica, or mustard, family, grown for its root. The systematic review of maca describes it that way before it turns to the trials. It is sold as a powder, as a heat-processed flour and as extracts, and those forms are not interchangeable milligram for milligram.

The row also tells you something by what it names. The federal panel rule, 21 CFR 101.36, asks that a botanical on a supplement label say which part of the plant it comes from, and this row does: root. The same rule says that for an extract with its solvent removed, the weight printed is the weight of the dried extract. So 100 mg means 100 mg of maca root extract, not 100 mg of fresh or dried root.

The study most often behind maca’s reputation is a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial from Lima, published in 2002. It randomised men aged 21 to 56 to one of three arms for twelve weeks: 1,500 mg of gelatinised maca a day, 3,000 mg a day, or a placebo. At weeks four, eight and twelve the researchers recorded each man’s own rating of his sexual desire, the Hamilton scales for depression and anxiety, and blood levels of testosterone and oestradiol.

Desire improved with maca from week eight. Testosterone and oestradiol did not differ from placebo at any point, and the mood scores did not explain the change either. That separation was the authors’ point: whatever maca was doing in this trial, it was not doing it by raising hormone levels.

Set the row beside the trial and the arithmetic is short. The smaller trial dose, 1,500 mg, is fifteen times the 100 mg in a JellyBlue gummy; the larger, 3,000 mg, is thirty times. A buyer would need fifteen gummies a day to reach the lower arm, which the label rules out in its first words: do not exceed recommended dose.

There is one honest complication. The trial used gelatinised maca, a processed flour of the whole root, while the panel lists an extract, and an extract can be concentrated so that one milligram stands for several milligrams of root. No ratio is printed for this row, so no conversion can be made in either direction. The fair reading is the plain one: 100 mg of extract against 1,500 mg of processed root.

Why carry maca at a fraction of its trial dose? Because a gummy is small. Each JellyBlue gummy holds 650 mg of actives alongside cane sugar, glucose syrup, pectin and water, and the formula spreads that across seven ingredients rather than spending it on one. Maca here is one of seven named amounts, not a single-ingredient maca supplement, and that is the frame in which to judge it.

One trial is one trial. In 2010 a team including Edzard Ernst searched seventeen databases for every randomised trial comparing maca with a placebo for sexual function, and found four that met its criteria. The resulting systematic review is still the clearest summary of the human evidence.

Two of the four suggested a positive effect: one on sexual dysfunction in healthy menopausal women, and one on sexual desire in healthy adult men. A third, in men with erectile difficulty, reported significant effects on the five-item IIEF-5 questionnaire. The fourth, in healthy cyclists, found no effect.

The review’s verdict is the phrase to remember: limited evidence. The number of trials, their combined size and their average quality were all too small for firm conclusions, and the authors asked for more rigorous studies.

The widest view comes from a 2018 meta-analysis of herbal supplements tested in men with erectile difficulty. It gathered 24 randomised trials and 2,080 men. Twelve of the trials tested a single herb: five on ginseng, three on saffron, two on tribulus, one on pine bark and one on maca, with 50 men.

Ginseng was the only single herb with a significant pooled effect on erectile function scores. Maca and pine bark showed what the authors called very preliminary positive results, a fair description of one trial of fifty men. Adverse events were recorded in 19 of the 24 trials, with no significant difference between the herbs and placebo.

None of this makes maca a treatment, and the label does not present it as one. It places maca where the evidence places it: an ingredient with a small, encouraging and unconfirmed human record, studied mostly at doses many times larger than a gummy carries.

Week eight is the number from the trial worth carrying home. It was the first point at which desire changed on 1,500 or 3,000 mg a day, and it says something about the pace of maca even at a much smaller amount. Anyone judging a daily supplement in its first fortnight is judging it early.

It also lines up with the refund window in a way worth planning for. The JellyBlue window runs 60 days from the purchase date, not from the first gummy. Allow a few days for delivery and week eight of taking it falls close to the day the window closes. On a six-bottle order, about four bottles are still sealed at that point.

The fair expectation is modest and specific: a steady routine for eight weeks, a decision made with the window still open, and a judgment based on how you feel rather than on a promise the label never makes. The results timeline and pricing page set the packs against those dates.