Why Europe Says 2mg and Britain Says 10mg
EFSA has set a provisional safe intake for cannabidiol of roughly 2mg a day for a 70kg adult. The FSA's published figure for consumers in Britain is 10mg. Both numbers are real, and the gap between them is explainable.
By Staff, CBD Wire
Two food regulators, one compound, and a fivefold difference in the number each publishes. A shopper who reads the small print on a European-market supplement and then on a British one could reasonably conclude that somebody has made a mistake. Nobody has. The figures were arrived at separately, by separate processes, and both stand as of this writing.
The European figure
In a statement dated 9 February 2026, the European Food Safety Authority’s panel on nutrition, novel foods and food allergens set a provisional safe intake for cannabidiol of 0.0275mg per kilogram of body weight per day — around 2mg a day for a 70kg adult. The panel reached it through benchmark-dose modelling of GLP-compliant subchronic studies, then applied an uncertainty factor of 400.
Two qualifiers travel with that number and both matter more than the number does.
It is provisional. EFSA says the evidence base is still incomplete, and that the gaps it flagged back in 2022 — liver effects, interactions with medicines, long-term accumulation, and effects on the endocrine, nervous and reproductive systems — have not closed, because much of the newer literature uses non-standardised protocols and short durations.
It is also narrow. The level is written for food-supplement formulations of at least 98% purity, without nanoparticles, where genotoxicity has been ruled out. And the panel is explicit that for people under 25, for pregnancy or breastfeeding, and for anyone taking other medication, it cannot draw a safety conclusion at all. The full statement says so in those terms.
The British figure
The FSA’s published advice is that healthy adults should limit their consumption of CBD from food to 10mg a day. It is advice rather than a statutory ceiling, and it should not be confused with the rule that actually constrains what can be sold here — the one milligram of controlled cannabinoids per container, which is a legal limit and a different question entirely.
Britain assesses novel foods on its own account now, so the two systems can diverge without either being overruled. The same FSA advice tells children, anyone taking medication, and those pregnant, breastfeeding or trying to conceive not to consume CBD at all.
What a buyer does with two numbers
Not much, immediately. No product is being withdrawn and no label is invalidated; neither figure changes what is legal to sell here. But the two numbers are useful as a reading aid.
If a product’s serving size is quoted against the 10mg advice, that is the British figure and it is the applicable one here. If a European-market label quotes something far smaller, that is EFSA’s provisional level, not a printing error. And if a brand quotes neither, the useful question is why not.
These are food supplements sold to adults, and the intake advice above belongs to the regulators who published it, not to us.