The dose on
the box,
delivered.
Every supplement is sold on what goes into it. The number that decides whether it works is how much of that ever reaches your blood. This page is the physiology of that gap, the route we take instead, and the limits of what either can tell you.
*Up to 90% is the ceiling of the sublingual route for actives suited to it, drawn from published pharmacology — not a claim about a specific outcome. We publish no figure for pills or gummies, because it changes with the compound.
Your liver gets first pick.
Anything you swallow takes the long route. It has to survive the stomach, cross the wall of the small intestine, and then pass through the liver — where enzymes metabolise a share of it — before a single molecule reaches general circulation. Pharmacologists call that last step first-pass metabolism.
It is why the figure printed on a panel and the figure in your blood are two different numbers. Not a defect in the formula. A property of the route.
Acid, then enzymes
Breakdown starts before absorption does. Botanicals and peptides are the least forgiving of this stage.
Only part crosses
What survives has to pass the gut wall. What it finds there — food, timing, your own gut — changes the answer nightly.
The first pass
Everything absorbed from the gut is routed to the liver first, where enzymes metabolise a share of the dose. What survives that is the only part that ever had a job to do — an hour or more after you swallowed it.
The tissue under your tongue was built for this.
The floor of your mouth is one of the most permeable surfaces on the body: a thin, non-keratinised membrane sitting directly over a dense bed of capillaries. Anything that crosses it enters the veins draining the head and neck — which feed general circulation without passing through the liver.
No stomach. No gut wall. No first pass. Delivered this way, compounds suited to the route reach far more of the bloodstream than the same compounds swallowed.
A membrane, then blood
The film holds itself against the mucosa while it dissolves, so the actives are released exactly where the tissue is thinnest and the capillaries are closest.
Nothing like the barrier lining your gut. It is built to let things through.
Blood sits millimetres from the surface, which is why absorption starts in minutes rather than an hour.
The veins draining your mouth do not route through the liver, so nothing is metabolised before it can work.
Medicine has used this route for decades: nitroglycerin placed under the tongue for angina, sublingual B12, prescription oral films. We did not discover the shortcut. We built a nightly supplement around it.
Same actives.
Different arrival.
A capsule, a gummy and a film can carry an identical ingredient panel. Two of them take the route through the gut and the liver, so what arrives is decided by physiology rather than by the label. The third does not take that route at all.
The two lower bars carry no percentage on purpose. Published bioavailability for swallowed compounds spans a wide range depending on the molecule, the meal and the person, so a single tidy percentage would be a design decision rather than a fact. Ours is stated as a ceiling, with an asterisk, for the same reason.
A plant signal, not a synthetic dose.
Melatonin is not a sedative. It is a timing cue — the molecule that tells your body which part of the day it is. Plants make the same compound, and pistachios are among the richest natural sources of it. That plant-derived form is phytomelatonin, and it arrives with the cofactors the nut carries rather than isolated in a lab.
The heaviness people associate with sleep aids is largely a dosing artefact: a cue delivered too strongly, or too late, is still in your system at seven in the morning. Research on low, well-timed doses finds circadian phase shifts without next-day grogginess.
It works with the rhythm
A cue, not a switch. Your body still runs the night; the strip tells it the night has started.
Delivered with its cofactors
100mg of pistachio extract per strip, carrying phytomelatonin in the form the plant made it.
Nothing to clear at breakfast
No synthetic melatonin in the formula, and no escalating dose to keep it working on night thirty.
Three ways a night fails.
A sleepless night is rarely one problem. There is the mind that will not stop, the body that will not drop off, and the morning that arrives heavier than it should. Each active in the strip is there for one of those three.
Can't switch off
Lights out, mind still running the day. This is excitation that has not been braked.
The brain's principal inhibitory neurotransmitter — the brake on cortical activity, supplied directly rather than coaxed.
Flavonoids that act on the same GABA-A receptor, traditionally used for the nights that end wired rather than tired.
Can't drop off
Calm enough, but the gap between lying down and being asleep keeps stretching.
The timing cue that opens the door. Absorbed sublingually, it reaches circulation while you are still putting your phone down.
Valerenic acid interacts with GABA-A signalling. Pooled trials associate valerian with improved subjective sleep quality — Bent et al., The American Journal of Medicine, 2006.
Wake up groggy
You slept. You just did not arrive in the morning with it. Usually a dose still in the system.
The flavone behind the cup, at a dose a cup cannot reach. It binds GABA-A benzodiazepine sites weakly — calming without the sedation profile of a drug.
Deliberately absent. The morning is part of the product, so nothing in the formula is designed to outlast the night.
Doses are per strip, as printed on the box. Other ingredients: Pullulan, Monk Fruit Extract, Cellulose, Lecithin, Mixed Berry Flavour, Sorbitol Syrup, Steviol Glycosides. Zero sugar.
Held to the dose on the box.
A delivery claim is only worth what the manufacturing behind it is worth. Every batch is made in a certified facility, cast and cut so each strip carries the same dose, and tested by a third party against the printed panel before it ships.
GMP, HACCP, ISO 22000
Manufactured to pharmaceutical process standards, not food-supplement minimums.
Third-party tested, every batch
Potency and purity, batch by batch — not once at launch and quoted forever.
Dose uniformity by design
The film is cast to a fixed thickness and cut to a fixed area, so strip thirty matches strip one.
Single-dose sachets
Each strip is sealed on its own. No open bottle slowly oxidising on a bedside table.
No proprietary blends
Every active is listed at its milligram figure. A blend name is a way to hide a small dose.
Certificate of analysis on request
Quote the batch number printed on your box and we send the report for that batch.
What we don't claim.
A science page that only argues one way is marketing. Here is the other half — the things the evidence does not let us say, stated plainly so you can weigh the rest.
It is not a sedative
The strip supports the body's own wind-down. It does not switch you off, and it is not a treatment for insomnia or any medical condition.
Up to 90% is a ceiling
It describes what the sublingual route can reach for compounds suited to it, from published pharmacology. It is not a measurement of one person on one night.
The route is studied; this formula is not a trial
The evidence we cite is on delivery and on individual actives. We have not run a clinical trial on the finished strip, and we will not imply that we have.
Nights differ, people differ
Caffeine, stress, screens and shift work all outweigh a supplement. The strip is the easy part of a night, not the whole of it.
Dr.Strips+ Sleep is a health supplement, not a medicine, and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Statements on this page have not been evaluated by the HSA. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, on medication or under medical care, speak to your doctor first.
Where the science comes from.
Each claim above, and the published work it rests on. Bioavailability figures are compound-dependent ranges from the literature, not outcomes measured on this product.
The science behind better supplementation.
Science isn't a badge. It's a process.
At Dr.Strips+, we use evidence to guide how we think about ingredients, formulations and product claims.
We look beyond headlines. We look at:
Because a scientific ingredient doesn't automatically make a scientific product. The details matter.
Read it once.
Then just sleep.
Thirty strips, thirty nights. Ten minutes before bed, one on your tongue, and none of this to think about again.