“Activated Charcoal?”Here!
Hasn’t appeared in a scanned product yet.
As a supplement
Talk to your doctor or pharmacist.
Roll Call does not check drug interactions or assess personal safety.
A fine black powder made from carbon-rich material, such as coconut shells or wood, treated at high heat to create a highly porous surface.
Why it’s used
Used in emergency medicine to adsorb certain ingested substances, and sold as a supplement for occasional use with intestinal gas or general "detox" purposes.
What the evidence says
We haven’t found a source for this one that you can open and check, so we’re not summarizing the evidence.
Look it up yourself
We would rather point you at the shelf than summarize something you can’t check. These are the same places we search:
- PubChem — what the substance is, chemically — names, synonyms and structure
- PubMed — every paper indexed by the US National Library of Medicine that names it
- NIH Office of Dietary Supplements — the plain-language fact sheets, if this one has been written up
These are starting points, not our findings — we haven’t run them for you. A substance whose name is also an ordinary word (“Heart”, “Alanine”, “Water”) will return papers that are not about the ingredient at all.
Context
Clinical adsorption studies use carefully timed, supervised dosing after ingestion of a specific substance, a context that does not translate to routine supplement use.
Rumors
Relief of intestinal gas (flatulence).
We haven’t checked the evidence on this one yet.
What was measured is not yet noted.