H Bomb H4CBD Gummy Mix 2000mg

The ingredient list calls it CBD. It is not CBD.

The declaration published for this tub opens with the words H4CBD Extract, followed by CBD in brackets, followed by 2000mg. Those three characters in brackets are the whole problem with this corner of the market.

H4CBD is hexahydrocannabidiol. It is made by taking CBD and adding four hydrogen atoms to it, which is a chemical modification carried out in a laboratory rather than something that grows in a plant in any meaningful quantity. That modification changes how the molecule behaves. It is a different substance with a different regulatory position, and describing it as CBD on an ingredient panel is not shorthand, it is wrong.

It matters practically as well as pedantically. CBD ingestibles in Britain sit inside the Novel Foods regime, and validated products appear on a public FSA list. H4CBD has no such route: there is no authorisation, and as far as we are aware there is not even an application. A product labelled as though it were CBD borrows a legitimacy it does not have.

One more thing about that ingredient list, which is worth noticing because it tells you how carefully any of this has been checked. It is visibly two lists stuck together. Flavourings appears twice. Colours appears twice. The second half adds pectin and propylene glycol after the first half has already ended with a full stop. That is a copy-paste artefact printed on a food label.

We stock this because the owner of this shop decided to, and we would rather sell it with the facts attached than either hide it or dress it up. If you want the longer explanation of what H4CBD is, we have written one.

Fifty milligrams a gummy, and a dosage figure that expired in 2023

Each gummy carries fifty milligrams of H4CBD. The two nearest competitor products on the same search results, both European, carry twenty five. This tub is double the per-piece figure of anything sitting beside it.

One of the UK retailers selling it prints an instruction not to exceed the FSA recommended daily amount of seventy milligrams. That sentence is wrong in two separate ways.

It is out of date. The Food Standards Agency revised its precautionary advice for healthy adults down from seventy milligrams to ten milligrams a day in October 2023, adopting the position of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Seventy has not been the figure for three years.

And it is the wrong substance. Ten milligrams a day is FSA advice about CBD taken as a food supplement. There is no FSA daily figure for H4CBD, because the agency does not issue consumer advice for a compound with no authorisation. Quoting a CBD number on an H4CBD product is the same conflation the ingredient list makes, in a different place.

Nothing on this page is dosage guidance and we are not going to give any. What we can tell you is that fifty milligrams is a large single unit, that the figure being quoted at you elsewhere is neither current nor applicable, and that if you have not taken H4CBD before, one gummy is not a cautious starting point.

About that hundredfold claim

Three UK retailers selling this product carry the same sentence, near enough word for word: that H4CBD is rumoured to be a hundred times more effective than CBD.

Read the hedging. Rumoured. Some sources boasting. Nobody cites anything, because the figure appears to come from a laboratory receptor-binding measurement rather than from anything observed in a person, and a binding affinity is not a strength multiplier you can put on a tub of sweets.

So we are not repeating it, and a shop that does has told you something about itself rather than about the product.

The two mixes

Both tubs carry the same fifty milligrams a gummy and the same declaration. The difference is the sweet.

Both are available at the moment.

What is in the tub, and what it is like

Beyond the extract, the declaration is a fairly ordinary gummy: sugar, glucose syrup, wheat starch, gelatine, water, modified maize and potato starch, a set of food acids, flavourings, fruit and vegetable concentrates for colour including spirulina, safflower, black carrot and grape, plus curcumin and paprika extract. The concatenated second half adds glycerol, pectin, the colour E133 and propylene glycol.

Wheat and gelatine are the allergens, and gelatine also rules these out for anyone eating vegetarian or vegan. Exactly one of the four UK pages selling this product publishes the ingredient list at all, which is how easy those two are to miss.

As a sweet it is a firm, chewy gummy rather than a soft one. At fifty milligrams there is a distinct bitter, slightly chemical edge underneath the flavour, which is why the Sour Mix exists and why most people find it the more comfortable of the two. Sour coatings are very good at covering things.

It is not a subtle product and it does not pretend to be.

Where H4CBD actually stands in UK law

Honestly: it is contested, and anyone telling you it is simply legal or simply banned is skipping the part that matters.

H4CBD is not a controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act. That is the part sellers lean on.

The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 prohibits producing, supplying or importing a psychoactive substance for human consumption. Whether H4CBD is caught depends on whether it is psychoactive, and the entire commercial case for it is that people feel something. Sellers who argue it falls outside the Act are arguing that their own product does not do what they are selling it to do.

On the food side there is no ambiguity at all. Ingestible cannabinoid products require Novel Foods authorisation in Britain. H4CBD has none, and there is no application we are aware of. So this tub is not an authorised novel food, and we make no claim that it is.

The recurring line about EU legality that appears across this category is not a British statement either. Britain left the EU in 2020 and its food additive and novel food positions have diverged since.

It is eighteen plus, and it is not for anyone pregnant or breastfeeding. One of the four UK pages selling it states no age restriction whatsoever.

How it compares with what else we stock

Two comparisons matter. Against other H4CBD gummies, this is about strength per piece. Against actual CBD gummies, it is about what you are buying at all.

If what you wanted was CBD, the last row of this table is the one to look at, and the difference is not a matter of degree.

Who should not buy this

Anyone who came looking for CBD. This is not that, the ingredient list saying otherwise does not make it so, and there are shelves of real CBD gummies a click away.

Anyone new to cannabinoids. Fifty milligrams of a semi-synthetic compound in one sweet is not a first step, and a gummy cannot be halved cleanly.

Anyone eating vegetarian or vegan, or avoiding gluten. Gelatine and wheat starch are both in it.

Anyone who is pregnant or breastfeeding, and anyone under eighteen.

And anyone who wants a product whose regulatory position is settled. This one's is not, we have set out why above, and if that uncertainty bothers you then it should, because it bothers us.