From my research, not a lot of companies list the iodine content and they don’t have to because the FDA doesn’t regulate fucoxanthin. I also came across FucoPrime when I was first doing research. They say that every capsule is 50mg of pure fucoxanthin, but it seems that a lot of people in the industry say “pure focoxanthin” when they mean “pure powdered seaweed with nothing added.”

Let’s pretend carrots aren’t very popular or well known but they contain beta carotene, and let’s pretend beta carotene is the latest must-have thing. So instead of people talking about carrots, they talk about beta carotene. You can say “our competitor’s pill only contains 5mg of beta carotene! They mix it with fillers! Our pill is 50mg of beta carotene.” Now, this could mean the competitor mixes powdered carrots with flour or whatever “fillers,” but that the “real deal” is 50mg of the pure stuff, which is just powdered carrots. This is NOT the same thing as 50mg of beta carotene because carrots contain other stuff like vitamin C, fiber, vitamin A, etc.

This is the problem with fucoxanthin pills that claim it is 50mg of pure fucoxanthin when I think it’s actually 50mg of the seaweed which happens to contain fucoxanthin in it.

Why do I think this?

Well, I requested a sample from another site that said 100% pure fucoxanthin (I even emailed to verify) but what I got was a green, very salty powder: seaweed! I’m sure it contains fucoxanthin, but it’s not the pure extract. It’s all the other stuff also that make up seaweed, including iodine!

Fucoxanthin is a chemical compound that makes up the seaweed. I would think the pure extract would be very hard and expensive to isolate. A 100 gram carrot contains about 8285 ug of beta carotene. The question here is how many mg or (even smaller) micrograms (ug) of fucoxanthin are in 50mg of powdered seaweed? This is important to know because the dosage of fucoxanthin, IF fucoxanthin works in humans, is imporrtant.

Now, I could be totally wrong and perhaps this FucoPrime website is selling the isolated, extracted fucoxanthin, but I doubt it. My best suggestion is to email them and ask for more details, but it seems that even the people who work for the company may not understand the distinction between a pure fucoxanthin pill and a pure seaweed pill.