CBDA Dosage: A guide on the proper CBDA Dose

Hey there! Are you considering using CBDA or CBD for anxiety relief or mental wellbeing?

I know the dosage can be confusing, but don’t worry! Natural Dos has got you covered with our daily CBDA guide. Let’s find the right dosage together!

You are interested in using CBDA or CBD to for anxiety relief or improve your mental well being, but what is the dosage you should take? A typical product recommendation for CBDA or CBD dosage ranges from 10mg to 100mg per day, but these are dependent on the individual.

Should the dosage for CBDA be different than CBD? Yes!

CBDA is absorbed by the body over 450% to over 1000% more than CBD.

Below is the Natural Dos guide to your daily dose of CBDA.

Article Highlights

• CBD is not not water soluble, and thus has low absorption. Most clinical studies end up using high doses between 200mg up to 2000mg
• Acidic cannabinoid, like CBDA, are water soluble and have much greater absorption, leading to superior benefits over their neutral form
• New studies have now found that CBDA can have between 450% to 1000% better absorption than CBD
• The ability for a compound to have an effect is largely determine by how well it is absorbed.

 

What are CBDA oils?

CBDA (cannabidiolic acid) is the most abundant cannabinoid in the hemp plant, and is the precursor to CBD oil production. After extraction of the cannabis plants (the hemp species), the resulting crude extract is purified using a heating process called distillation.

Distillation is the conventional purification method, and it converts all the natural acidic cannabinoids, like CBDA, CBCA, CBGA (cannabigerolic acid) and others, into their neutral form. These include CBD, CBC, and CBG among others.

With the proprietary purification method developed by Natural Dos, hemp extract is purified into CBDA oils that contain all the minor acidic cannabinoids. This new type of CBDA oil is termed Natural Spectrum CBDA oil, and is somewhat similar to the more common full spectrum CBD oils.

Unique CBDA benefits

With the enhanced absorption of acidic cannabinoids, the CBDA dose that the human body needs will be different than the CBD dose.

In addition to superior absorption, CBDA also has some unique properties found in many preliminary studies:

• Anti inflammatory properties: CBDA was found to be a direct inhibitor of COX2 (cyclooxyrgenase 2), which is a critical enzyme that enhances inflammation. Not only can CBDA inhibit the enzyme activity, it has also been shown to decrease its production.
• Anxiety disorders: Anxiety and stress are closely related, and like CBD oil, CBDA can also interact with the serotonin and endocannabinoid system receptors. Multiple pre clinical studies show substantial benefits using CBDA oils, which appear to work through these critical systems.
• Inflammatory pain: A common cause of pain, especially in joints, is excessive inflammation that can lead to activation of the pain receptors. In addition to impacting inflammation directly, CBDA has been found to inhibit pain signaling by blocking the TRPV1 channel which propagates pain signaling in the peripheral nerves.

Overall, the potential treatment options of CBDA oils are wide depending on the animal studies you look at. We think this new evolution in the CBD space has the potential to unlock the maximum support that the hemp flower offers.

 

What is the right CBDA dose for me?

The amount of CBDA or CBD that works for you will vary depending on a number of factors:

• The state of your endocannabinoid system
• What condition you need help with
• Concentration of the CBDA oil or CBD oil in the tincture, breath mint, gummy, or capsule
• Body weight
• Personal biochemistry

These are a lot of variables, and shows why finding the right CBDA dosage for you will rely on varying the dosage for your personal needs.

Tracking your dosage and noting the benefits on those days to see how you respond is recommended.

Where do you start when testing out if CBDA oil dose is right for you? Natural Dos offers a couple different CBDA Tincture doses depending on the product. We recommend that you start out with a single dose depending on what product you prefer.

• If you bought a CBDA tinctures, start with 50mg.
• If you bought the CBDA breath mints, start with 20mg, 1 mint.
• If you bought the CBDA gummies, start with 30mg, 1 gummy.

CBDA is the parent cannabinoid to CBD, and is natural form found in the hemp plant. However, since it was hard to isolate for commercial purposes, there has not been as many studies on it as CBD oil. Most of the dosage studies assessing beneficial amounts are using CBD, so we have to use those for starting purposes.

Clinical studies testing the beneficial effects of CBD have used a wide variety of doses from 20mg per day up to 2000mg per day!

Examples of some clinical trials below with references at the bottom of the page:

• Social Anxiety: Ingestion of 600mg CBD dose¹
• Nicotine addiction: Ingestion of 800mg CBD dose²
• Opioid Addiction: Ingestion of 800mg CBD dose³
• Seizure control: Ingestion of 25mg/kg to 50mg/kg of CBD. This converts to 1750mg – 3500mg CBD for a 150lb person.⁴

As you can see, sometimes it takes a significant amount of CBD to get a benefit. This would mean you would go through multiple bottles a week at these doses. At these doses, you should consult your physician since some medications may have interactions with CBD and can affect liver function.

This is what makes CBDA so powerful, it absorbs over 450% more than CBD, and also yields greater CBD blood levels than taking CBD by itself. You need much less of it to get a benefit.

 

Correlating CBD and CBDA dosage

Because CBDA has greater absorption than CBD, we need to calculate how much CBDA to take to reach a similar bioavailability as CBD.

Beware, lots of calculations below, you can skip to the results picture

In this study they found that average blood concentration of CBDA was 96.05 ng/mL with a dose of 8.82mg. CBD had a blood concentration of 4.39 ng/mL with a dose of 1.93. The ratio of dose to absorption for CBDA is 10.9 and 2.3 for CBD, which means that CBDA absorbs over 450% (4.78 ratio) more than CBD. Using this ratio we can roughly calculate how much CBDA you would need to take to get the same blood concentrations as CBD:

As you can see from the calculations above, significantly less CBDA oil is needed to reach similar blood concentrations as CBD oil. While everyone will absorb different amounts, the data was the average for the study population.

This is important because the typical doses studied in many clinical trials are very high, and thus cost prohibitive to consumers.

How much is in a dropper?

NaturalDos tinctures come in 2 amounts, 500mg and 1000mg. Because our tinctures are more concentrated than most other tincture products, they come in two volumes, 5mL and 10mL. The concentration of both amounts is 100mg/mL and each have a graduated dropper. For a 50mg dose, use 0.5 mL and for a 100mg dose, use 1 mL. See below for reference:

How many doses will I get out of my tincture?

This will depend on the dose that is right for you. We have made an easy guide below to determine the tincture dosing for CBDA:

How to calculate CBDA dosage

Calculating dosage for tinctures can be complicated since many products are sold with different amounts of CBDA. Most manufacturers use a 30 mL bottle, but they may have different amounts of CBDA in their product, meaning 1 mL from one company does not have the same amount of CBDA as 1 mL from another.

How to calculate out the amount of CBDA per dose:

Amount of CBDA (500mg) / total volume of bottle (30mL) = amount of CBDA in 1 mL (17 mg)

A brief reference guide for how to dosage CBD and CBDA:

 

CBDA dose and absorption formulations

There is a lot of information online about the many health benefits of CBDA and CBD. We wont cover all of them but people have reported benefits for some of the symptoms below.

The hemp plant contains many different cannabinoids, and in their natural state CBDA is the most abundant. While CBDA is not psychoactive, in other words it wont get you “high”, there are many benefits to cannabinoids that people have reported.

• Anxiety and depression
• Help with sleep and insomnia
• Joint discomfort
• Provides benefits for pain and inflammation

New research has found that the CBDA oil formulation can affect the absorption which directly correlates with CBDA benefits. 

So what appears to be the best formulation for maximum support?

It is a mixture of CBDA with other cannabinoids! CBDA was found to absorb 14-times better when combined with other cannabinoids than on its own. While this was performed in a mouse model, the cellular mechanisms and proteins involved are the same we find in the human body.

Can I take too much CBDA or CBD?

As we found out earlier in the post, clinical studies typically use high doses of CBD to reach therapeutic outcomes with few side effects to participants.

While minimal side effects have been reported at lower concentrations, such as below 100 mg, it is important to consult your physician if you are on medications or have liver complications.

 

Choosing the right type of CBD or CBDA oils

Hemp cannabinoids like CBDA and CBD come in different types based on the manufacturing process. The 3 main types of product are:

• Isolate: only 1 cannabinoid, typically CBD
• Full Spectrum: contains CBD, THC, and other cannabinoids
• Broad-Spectrum: contains CBD, no THC, and other cannabinoids
• Natural Spectrum CBDA: contains all the natural cannabinoids found in the hemp flower such as CBDA, CBCA, CBDVA and other acidic cannabinoids.

We typically recommend a product that contains all the cannabinoids from the hemp plant for maximum benefits. When all the acidic cannabinoids are present, you get improved CBDA affects on the endocannabinoid and other systems that it targets.

 

How to take CBDA or CBD

CBDA products can come in other forms as well. Try some of these if you do not like taking tinctures:

1. CBDA Edibles 
2. Capsules
3. Breathe mints
4. Flower
5. Drinks
6. Vape

While CBD vaping and flower are popular, we don’t usually recommend because the heated compounds in those products may have adverse health effects.

Take CBDA before you eat, or when you have not eaten in a couple hours. Recent research found that when you take CBDA or CBD before eating, then it is better absorbed by the body. It appears that ingesting CBDA on an empty stomach can double the concentration in the blood!

Consult your physician

If you are on medication or have liver complications, talk to your healthcare provider, and see if they can recommend a CBDA dosage or CBD dosage. There may be drug-drug interactions with CBDA, even though only CBD has been studied specifically to address this question.

 

References

1. Mateus M. Bergamaschi et al, “Cannabidiol reduces the anxiety induced by simulated public speaking in treatment-naïve social phobia patients”, Neuropsychopharmacology, 2011, May;36(6):1219-26. PMID: 21307846
2. Chandni Hindocha et al, “Cannabidiol reverses attentional bias to cigarette cues in a human experimental model of tobacco withdrawal”, Addiction, 2018, May 1;113(9):1696-1705. PMID: 29714034
3. Yasmin L. Hurd et al, “Cannabidiol for the reduction of cue-induced craving and anxiety in drug-abstinent individuals with heroin use disorder: A double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial”, American Journal of Psychiatry, 2019, Nov 1;176(11):911-922. PMID: 31109198
4. Elizabeth A. Thiele et al, “Long-term cannabidiol treatment for seizures in patients with tuberous sclerosis complex: An open-label extension trial”, Epilepsia, 2022, Feb;63(2):426-439. PMID: 34957550