This Gummy on Amazon Says It Has 200,000,000 mg of Hemp Extract, But Is That Even Possible?

If you’re shopping for hemp on a store like Amazon, eBay, or Walmart, you might come across some truly bizarre claims about the amount of “hemp” you’re buying.

Sellers behave as if “bigger is better” when it comes to the dosages of hemp in a gummy, and there is apparently no limit to what they’re willing to claim their products contain. But what does it mean for a pack of gummies to contain 3,500,000 mg of hemp extract? What if the number is 200,000,000? Does it even make sense?

We’re going to take a look at the facts behind these claims, whether it’s even possible to have that much hemp in a gummy, and how you can spot deceptive claims before you make a purchase.

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TL;DR

• Metric measurements follow a simple pattern. 1,000 mg is 1 g, and 1,000 g is 1 kg.
• This means 1,000,000 mg is 1 kg.
• A gummy can’t contain more than 2% hemp extract, and most have much less than this for optimum flavor and gelling.
• It’s unlikely that you’ll find any regular-sized gummy bear with more than 100 mg of any hemp or cannabis extract.

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A Crash Course in the Metric System

First off, what does it even mean if something contains 3,500,000 mg of something? To answer that we’ll need to learn a little bit about the metric system. 

The good news is that the metric system is completely uniform and once you know the basics, it’s very easy to decode basically any metric measurement.

Most hemp consumers know about milligrams (mg): a gram is a unit of mass and a milligram is 1/1000 of a gram. In fact, any metric unit of mass can be found by making similar conversions:

• 1,000 milligrams (mg) = 1 gram (g)
• 1,000 micrograms (mcg) = 1 milligram (mg)
• 1,000 nanograms (ng) = 1 microgram (mcg)

These are pretty easy to combine, too: 1,000,000 ng = 1,000 mcg = 1 g.

The same pattern continues in the other direction, but the only one that’s likely to come up in most cases is the kilogram, which is 1,000 grams. This also means that just like the above example, we can spot that 1,000,000 mg = 1,000 g = 1 kg.

200,000,000 mg of Hemp – Really?!

Now let’s go back to the supposed 3,500,000 mg hemp product, using the general rule that 1 million milligrams is simply 1 kilogram (equal to 2.2 pounds). We can see straight away that 3,500,000 mg means 3.5 kg, or 7.7 pounds.

This makes it incredibly easy to see the issue with the product, noting that the “item weight” for the whole product is listed at 0.8 pounds (363 g). It claims to have 7.7 pounds of hemp but its total weight is closer to 1/10 of that amount.

Hopefully you can already spot the downright insanity of claiming there’s 200,000,000 mg of hemp in a jar of gummies. “Millions of milligrams” is just a confusing way to say “kilograms,” and you better believe that no jar of hemp gummies will ever weigh 200 kg or 441 pounds. If the entire gummy was (somehow) made of hemp, and we assume a quite hefty 5 g gummy, it would take forty thousand gummies to hold that much hemp.

As Erik Paulson, lab manager at InfiniteCAL commented about CBD Oracle’s study of Amazon hemp products, “I think some people do recognize this issue, as you can read in some of the reviews for these products, but surely they are taking advantage of people who just aren’t thinking about it enough, or are unfamiliar with the metric system.”

How Much Hemp Can a Gummy Actually Contain?

As you might imagine, you can’t really have a gummy that’s entirely hemp extract. For one it wouldn’t really be “gummy” so much as “hemp in the shape of a bear,” but technical limitations would make it impossible, way before reaching that point.

We spoke to Mike Sill, CEO of Sunday Scaries, who explained:

“A gummy with any gelling base, whether it be gelatin or pectin, has a threshold for how many additives it can support before it loses its ability to gel and loses its structure. […] Even if you could get a 20+ gram gummy to fit 5 grams of extract and still gel properly, it would taste like battery acid and be the size of a golf ball.”

Concluding:

“In short, 1-2% of the gummy can be hemp extract without interfering with the gelling matrix (which is on the high end). 0.2% – 0.8% seems to be the norm. Anything higher than that is going to be really bitter and a typical 2-3 gram gummy bear cannot possibly fit 5 grams of extract.”

With this, we can make some upper limit estimates for dosage. A single gummy is unlikely to weigh much more than 5 g, and at the very most, 2% of this can be hemp. This means that the absolute maximum you can expect from any reasonably sized gummy is 100 mg. If we take more ordinary estimates of a 3 g gummy and 1% of this being hemp extract, we get down to about 30 mg. 

Now let’s take a look back at the pack of 50 gummies we spoke about earlier. The calculation above says that the maximum we should realistically expect from this whole pack is 5,000 mg of hemp. The label, on the other hand, claims that they got 3,500,000 mg in there… somehow.

So the next time you see a gummy claim to have thousands of mg of any cannabis extract, all you need to do is think about a gummy the size of a watermelon and whether they could even fit a single one of those in the jar.

Related:

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• Amazon Could Get Fined Up to $1.3 Million Over INFORM Consumers Act Violations
• Amazon’s Hemp Market Costs the CBD Industry Over $60 Million Per Year
• Study Reveals Amazon’s Hidden Market for THC Gummies