Are CBD Softgels As Effective As CBD Tinctures?

There are a lot of different CBD products on the market, which is good for helping the largest number of people possible find something that works perfectly for them, but it’s not ideal if you’re trying to make a choice for yourself about what you want to use. So, which is generally more effective, CBD Softgels or CBD tinctures?

There are a lot of comparisons and contrasts that you can make between the two products, and we’ve gone ahead and done the research that was needed to illuminate this topic. There is a lot of information available all over the internet

There are plenty of resources available, which is good news if you want to make sure that you’re being as thorough as you possibly can be. Today, we aim to provide a crash course comparison all in one place both for people that want to check a lot of sources and for people that just want to read a single article and be done.

So, let’s take a look at what these two products have in common and what differences they have in order to figure out once and for all which one is the most effective option for your CBD consumption enjoyment.

Why Do People Enjoy CBD?

Over the last ten years or so, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about CBD. You can even get CBD products made specifically for your pets! What a truly interesting thing to pop up in our societal consciousness.

CBD is believed to provide a lot of various therapeutic effects, with some people going so far as claiming that it provides medicinal effects. The FDA has only approved CBD for treating seizures and only as a specific medication and there hasn’t been enough research done to say whether or not CBD actually has all of these miraculous effects that people claim it does.

That being said, CBD does have a lot of therapeutic effects that people enjoy. For example. People regularly say that CBD helps them with:

• Relaxation
• Soreness
• Discomfort
• Restfulness
• Minor mood regulation that doesn’t require medication

Many people who regularly use CBD swear by it because of these effects, and there’s a good chance that you were recommended CBD by someone who uses it on a daily basis. It can be very helpful for a lot of people.

Softgels: What are They?

There are a lot of ways that you could go about ingesting your CBD, and using softgels is one of the more popular ways to go about this. There are a lot of reasons why people might prefer softgels, but we can break them down into a few simple, base reasons.

Firstly, softgels contain nothing but CBD and gelatin or a gelatin-like substance because gelatin isn’t vegetarian-friendly. If you get a full-spectrum softgel, it would also contain other cannabinoids and potentially terpenes, as well.

Softgels are, well, softgels. You’ve probably seen softgels at some point in your life or another. They’re small tablets that are jelly that you take orally. You take softgels just like you’d take any pill.

Just get the gels in your hand, toss them in your mouth, and wash them down with water or another beverage that you enjoy drinking. Then, poof, you’ve just taken some softgels. You’ve probably taken things like this for a good chunk of your life.

Once you’ve swallowed the softgels, they make their way down your esophagus and travel to your stomach. Your stomach is full of stomach acid, and once the gels fall into the acid they start dissolving through the process of digestion.

It can take 1-3 hours to feel any effects this way because your body needs time to digest things. Once the compounds in your softgels are digested, your stomach takes them and adds them to your blood just like it would with food or water.

This process is exactly the same for anything that you need to take orally, if you didn’t know. Extended-release pills are a little different by design, but they just release the chemicals in the pill more quickly than other kinds of orally ingested pills.

Fun fact before we move on, digestion is actually an incredibly painful process but our brains just kind of ignore it because our brains are smart and know what the pain is being caused by.

Tinctures, Anyone?

Here’s another incredibly popular method of ingesting CBD. CBD tinctures are probably one of the most commonly used types of CBD because they have a kind of ven diagram of people who enjoy tinctures and people who use CBD.

Tinctures are actually pretty cool. They’re, in short, compounds from either plants or animals that are extracted generally by using ethanol. You can also use any alcohol that’s over 100 proof as well as glycerin if you don’t want there to be any alcohol in your tincture.

You can make a tincture out of a lot of different things. The process is pretty simple:

1. Take the item that you want to make a tincture out of.
2. Put it in a container with your dissolving agent.
3. Let this mixture soak for x amount of time, it varies depending on the type of tincture you’re making.
4. Filter the mixture through a cheesecloth into another container.
5. At this point, people will add their finished tincture into a small vial with an eyedropper or a dropper bottle. Those amber-ish glass bottles are usually the best because they keep out the light and keep the tincture good for as long as possible.

Industrial tincture manufacturers do this on a much larger scale than you’d be able to even hope to do at home, and they typically have machines that take care of each step of the process. Taking tinctures is a pretty easy process, but it might take a bit of practice because tinctures aren’t known for their taste.

Or, in a less polite turn of phrase, tinctures typically taste bad. This might be a bit of a problem because of the way that you ingest tinctures. In order to properly ingest a tincture, you have to take it sublingually. If you don’t know, that means you put it under your tongue.

With tinctures, what you’re going to want to do is put the recommended amount under your tongue and hold it there for at least a minute. The longer you keep it under your tongue, the stronger the effects will be.

The area under your tongue will absorb the mixture and immediately put it into your bloodstream without it having to get through the digestion process. That means that it works a lot faster than gel tabs because of the ease it enters your system.

Which is More Effective?

Both of these types of CBD are incredibly popular, but one of them is a lot more effective than the other. Can you guess which before we move on? If you understand how our bodies work, odds are you’ll be able to.

The short answer is that tinctures are a lot more effective than softgels. The longer answers involves a bit of explanation of how the human body works so you can fully understand exactly why tinctures are so much more effective than softgels.

When you take softgels, as we mentioned, they have to go through the entire digestive process. As we also mentioned, your stomach is full of acid. That acid does a great job at breaking down things that fall into it, almost too good of a job, actually.

As a consequence, when you swallow CBD in any form, it loses a lot of its potency. That’s because it simply gets melted by your stomach acid. This is true for any type of medication that you have to take, your stomach is really good at digesting things unless you have a medical condition that makes it not as good.

When you take things under your tongue it goes straight into your bloodstream. It doesn’t have to get filtered out by your organs, and there wouldn’t be any time for it to be. Most things that are taken under the tongue are absorbed in a matter of minutes, which is incredibly fast.

When you take something orally and it has to pass through the digestive system, which can take hours to finish. Your stomach has to absorb it and then put the compounds into your bloodstream afterward, which adds an extra stop.

Choose What’s Best For You

While tinctures might be more effective than softgels, that doesn’t mean that softgels are bad to use. If you prefer softgels to tinctures, just use the tinctures. You have no obligation to switch just because you read some article on the internet telling you that they’re not as effective.

Your CBD experience is highly personal, so you should always go with the choice that suits you best. Who really cares if it’s a little less effective so long as you’re happy with using them? There is no wrong answer here, so choose whatever makes you happiest.