What is inside HoneyFil
Eight entries appear on the label and nothing more. They sort into three groups — two, then two, then four — and they add up to eight because the panel sets each one on its own line instead of gathering them under a heading.
No proprietary blend appears anywhere on the bottle. A blend line is the usual device for naming several ingredients without revealing how they split; this label does without it. Each of the eight is printed under its own name, and the Supplement Facts panel on the bottle you receive states the amount of every one.
What follows restates the panel and explains what each entry is. These are descriptions of ingredients, not claims about what a serving of HoneyFil will do.
Vitamin B3 (Niacin)
Essential nutrient · Carries a recognised daily value
One of the panel's two daily-value entries. What the body puts to work is not niacin itself but the two coenzymes it becomes.
Vitamin B3 reaches the body in one form and is spent in another. Conversion produces NAD and NADP, and from that point almost every reaction pulling energy out of a meal runs through one of the two. Being water soluble, it banks very little, so a panel value is a daily refill rather than a running total.
Zinc (as Zinc Oxide)
Essential mineral · Carries a recognised daily value
Built into the machinery of several hundred enzymes, and held in no real reserve, which is why a men's panel keeps coming back to it.
Very few single minerals appear in as many places. Several hundred enzymes are built around zinc, while the body holds almost nothing of it in reserve, so each day replaces what the day before spent. Wide use with no store behind it is what puts zinc on practically every men's panel in print.
L-Citrulline
Amino acid · Amino acid, on its own line
Named for what follows it. Citrulline passes the liver intact and becomes arginine further along, and arginine relaxes a vessel wall.
Arginine relaxes the wall of a blood vessel, and arginine swallowed on its own is largely dismantled on its first pass through the liver. L-citrulline is not: it comes through intact and converts further downstream. Going the long way round is precisely what makes it the dependable route.
L-Carnitine
Amino acid compound · Amino acid compound, on its own line
A shuttle. Fat already inside a cell still has one membrane left to cross before it can be burned, and this is what carries it over.
Fatty acids can sit inside a cell and remain entirely unavailable to it, because the inner mitochondrial membrane stands in the way. L-carnitine is the carrier that takes them across. It contributes no energy itself; what it settles is whether stored fat ever reaches the part of the cell able to burn it.
Pine Bark Extract
Botanical extract · Botanical extract, standardised
Bark from plantation maritime pine on the French Atlantic coast, extracted and standardised so one batch can be measured against the last.
Maritime pine grown in coastal plantations in south-west France yields a bark extract standardised on its proanthocyanidin content. Standardisation is the whole reason the entry reads the way it does: it lets a supplier show that today's batch carries the same marker level as the one before it.
Maca Root Extract
Botanical extract · Botanical extract, standardised
A root farmed high on the Peruvian plateau, where the season is short and frost is ordinary. Eaten there as food long before it was ever extracted.
Maca grows high on the Peruvian altiplano, where frost is a normal part of the calendar and the window for growing anything is counted in weeks. People there ate it as a staple food for a very long time before anyone thought to extract it, and that is the accurate version of its history.
Grape Skin Extract
Botanical extract · Botanical extract, standardised
The skin rather than the juice. Nearly all of a grape's polyphenols sit in the part a winery presses off and sets aside.
Pressing a grape sends the juice one way and the skin the other, and the polyphenols very largely follow the skin. Concentrating that fraction is what the extract does, so the material reaching the panel is the portion a winery has no further use for.
Saffron Stigmas Extract
Botanical extract · Botanical extract, standardised
Three threads to a flower, lifted by hand on the morning it opens. By weight, the dearest line anywhere on this label.
Each crocus flower offers three crimson stigmas, and every one is taken out by hand on the morning the flower opens. That labour is the entire explanation for what saffron costs, and by weight it outprices everything else named on this label.
Further reading on the HoneyFil ingredients
- Niacin — NIH Office of Dietary Supplements
- Zinc — NIH Office of Dietary Supplements
- Maca — NIH NCCIH herb summary
Public reference pages covering three of the ingredients themselves. None discusses HoneyFil, and none is an endorsement of it.