Sorry, can you clarify how this article connects to the post? I've read and re-read this abstract a few times and I can't figure out what you're getting at.
Yup. Except ND no longer sells any of what you listed here, as of a week ago or so. The amount of people who take supplements and are in favor of that bill just blows my mind. The FDA has repeatedly blocked so many benign things, including marketing of piracetam/Nootropyl (the og "nootropic"), but many nootropic users want to give them veto power over their regimens. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse...
"Fox guarding the henhouse" really seems like the wrong metaphor to use here. That implies the guard is going to steal for themself the thing they're supposed to be protecting. You seem to be concerned about the guard taking overzealous precautions that interfere with normal desirable usage, which seems to me like an entirely different problem.
This is an acceptable, or at least common, use of the phrase. From the examples portion of the second link on Google "For human rights, social justice, and secular education, a DeVos regime in the US Department of Education would be a proverbial case of the fox guarding the henhouse." Of course DeVos wouldn't be stealing any of these categories under purview for herself, but rather preventing their distribution to others, in the author's opinion.
I didn't even notice I got highlighted in this highlight and thus should read the post sooner rather than later, for reputational maintenance purposes...thanks for saving me the trouble, Scott. In the future I guess I ought to editorialize less when reporting opinions that irl acquaintances hold, to avoid the appearance that I myself might have thirdhand opinions about secondhand opinions. (Happy to own up to stupid idiocy, at least. Comparative advantage...)
haha, good point. Of course, LP was a biochemist, and I know several investigators who are pursuing Vit C like compounds for cancer research. It has the advantage of being well tolerated while bringing that volatile free radical to the game. I'm going to keep taking it for scurvy at least - har har
Besides the variance making finding the optimum hard--variance itself will be very detrimental to a medication (or supplement) working effectively. If you want to take 50 mg of Vyvanse, but instead you're swapping between 80 and 20 on alternating days, you're not going to have a good time.
On MYASD - I’ve read you for a long time and trust you. But for one thing, the stuff I trust you about is generally stuff for which you don’t have a direct financial interest in convincing me. For another, one of the reasons I trust you is that you generally do your best to “show your work” about why you’re convinced about something. And if you say you’ve done your homework on this guy for 10 years and trust him, great! But in the original piece this just really came across as you being significantly less skeptical than is typical of somebody’s claims without really showing why you believed that.
Anyway as I said I don’t really think MYASD is straight up lying about anything. He just is in a position where he’s more likely than average to engage in hyping his results , because his livelihood depends on it.
“ I said at the end that it’s probably not a problem if your supplement has +/- 25% of the active ingredient, so I don’t know where we’re disagreeing here.”
We’re not! Which is a big part of why I found your uncritical presentation of MYASD odd. This is one of the key results he uses to conclude that the industry sucks and is full of lazy hucksters and why his supplements are way better… but it’s probably actually irrelevant! That’s not a red flag?
On snake oil… selling fake oil was part of the problem, sure. But the other big part (and I think more relevant to the point I was trying to make) was that snake oil was pushed not merely as a nice fatty acid supplement to maybe have some modest health benefits, but as a miracle cure for whatever ails you.
I'm surprised - you doubled down on the attack on Labdoor with the same hearsay that stems from Illuminate's initial claim. Of course there'll be an echo chamber.
Why is the supplement industry full of major players (seemingly) openly and frequently accusing each other of libel, lies, secret business dealings, etc.? This industry seems so dramatic.
Not to mention that the whole US is periodically roiled by culture wars derived from humanities academia; an industry whose official job is to write papers no-one reads about books no-one reads.
I think the official job of humanities academia is to think about how people live, criticize popular problematic ways of doing it, and suggest new possibilities. In a sense, the culture war is the goal (though maybe it would be better if it were a culture churn more than a culture war).
Was it a Slate Star Codex post that predicted that in a post-scarcity society, people would compete with each other in elaborate signaling games instead of economically? I have a vague memory of reading that somewhere. Anyway, even though we are nowhere near post-scarcity, certain culture war stuff always reminds me of that idea.
Is it? I would have thought the official job of the humanities was to (depending on the department) decide on the best translation of "hwæt", figure out why Lee ordered Pickett's charge or Picasso started painting everything blue for a few years, or why Lucas couldn't leave well enough alone after the release of "Return Of The Jedi," and invent a better way to write down Apache. Even in the Department of Philosophy I would expect them to be more concerned with illuminating the differences between Epictetus and Seneca than between Trump and DeSantis.
These all contribute, in the same way that figuring out the fourth decimal in the molar mass of technetium contributes to understanding how the universe works.
Oh. So the Departments of French Literature and History are just handmaidens to the sociologists? One might not want to say so in the next faculty meeting.
BTW there are no decimal places in the molar mass of Tc, because it does not naturally occur.
The three meanings the phrase "official job" appears to have in the three mentions of it in this comments thread here is fascinating in and of itself, from a humanities perspective.
Depending on the meaning of "official" (as has been said, a humanities question), aren't they still formally meant to be studying how people live, rather than correct it? In other words, only interpreting the world as opposed to changing it?
There are disagreements about this, but the famous Marx quote saying that the point is to change it is apparently written across the front of the Freire Universität in Berlin.
But if you don't change the world, how are you supposed to keep your job? (this is only half sarcastic, I graduated as a humanities major in Spring 2022 and this was one of the buried threads in the curriculum)
The writing was good enough that I kept reading even long after realizing that nobody was going to bring up how mattresses themselves are a scam -- not so much the wrong kind of snakes in the oil as maybe they're putting the snake venom in there too.
> That’s 2 mg. For context, a medium dose of the antipsychotic risperidone is 2 mg/day. So these supplements contained as much arsenic as a risperidone pill does of risperidone.
I don't get it. Paracetamol comes doses of about 1g. L-Thyroxine comes in dosages of about 125ug.
Was Scott's point here simply "if a pill contains 2mg of something, it is probably meant as the active ingredient instead of a random contamination"?
If the contamination was 2mg of the well-known toxin NaCl, that would be a safe level. If it was botulinum toxin A, it would be enough to kill a horse. For lead, poisoning starts at 40ug/dL. Arbitrarily assuming that the bioavailability of lead is 100% (in reality, it probably depends on the compound or oxidation state), that is spreads evenly over 500dL worth of blood and soft tissue and has a biological half-life of 40 days and the natural logarithm of two is one, 2mg a day would result in about 160ug/dL, which sounds pretty bad.
I have been the MYASD in another industry (which shall remain unnamed, and which I haven't been connected with for about fifteen years now) -- basically the guy who get into a business because he believes in the product, discovers that there is a ton of shady stuff being done by competitors, and is up front and outspoken about the issues in the industry even though it might be more financially remunerative to just shut up and be shady. The situation wasn't exactly parallel -- I never criticized competitors directly. This was both out of legal concerns but also more generally because getting in a food fight with a specific competitor seemed less productive than advocating for best practices and standards.
Anyway, I'm mentioning this just to say that this type of person exists and I think their perspective should be valued. They generally have a great deal of insider knowledge and -- perhaps more importantly -- they thread a useful line between blanket cynicism and mindless boosterism.
Was I ever cross-pressured by my own financial interests? Undoubtedly, although it's hard to think of any specific instances. Obviously, some skepticism is warranted. But if Scott has been reading this guy for 10 years, that is way more than enough time to come to an informed opinion of his credibility.
I'm with Helen: medicine and especially nutrition is still so variable and strange that informed random self-experimenting can have good results.
Case in point, I recently decided to go on a limb and trust a nutrition blogger with unorthodox ideas who has a decent chance of being a crank (because there's hundreds of cranks with blogs and unorthodox ideas). He was recommending a high dose of calcium-pyruvate (12-15 grams per day) combined with l-carnitine (2 grams per day) because he has a theory about the Krebs Cycle and metabolism and seed oils, etc. He claimed that since he started taking the combo his body temperature has gone up (which he touts is a sign of improved metabolism, which seems plausible to me) and that he's been able to break through a weight loss plateau.
The subreddit dedicated to his particular variety of nutritional crankery (r/saturatedfat) had a post on this theory, and it was the typical thing: a lot of posters saying they tried it and didn't feel any affects, one or two saying it caused digestive distress, and one or two claiming it was working. Just like any other supplement I've looked at. Yet, I decided to try it anyway (I've been trying to lose weight for a long time, and the supplements were cheap, and I was reasonably sure they were very unlikely to kill me).
The first day I started taking it within a half hour I felt more energetic than I have in years. My mood improved, I took care of a few chores that have been sitting undone for weeks (because I couldn't bother to do them), my memory seemed to improve, and overall I felt great. Also my temperature spiked up to 100.4 degrees (after taking it for a week it seems to have stabilized around 99.1 degrees on average).
Quite frankly, I love this stuff. I can't say it's helped me lose weight (I'm losing weight, but I'm also on a calorie restricted diet and I'm only losing about a pound a week) but its improved my life significantly overall.
And I'm sure for most people, like those on the subreddit, it would do little, nothing, or just have bad effects. Because they're body chemistry isn't screwed up the way mine is, I guess.
I really don't know what else to say about it other than I was really, really, really surprised that a supplement I took actually had the advertised effect. I don't think that has ever happened to me prior to this.
>The first day I started taking it within a half hour I felt more energetic than I have in years.
Have you considered the possibility that the pills contained some kind of stimulant, maybe something as mild as caffeine? Snake oil salesmen can put something like that in their pills specifically to get the reaction you describe, and even honest manufacturers can stumble on some supplement that contains a stimulant in addition to the main ingredient.
The supplier seems legit, and more importantly I've taken caffeine. I've taken amphetamines. This felt different than both of those. Heck. for what its worth, I usually take this supplement while I'm on amphetamines (Adderall) and its still an very noticeable energy boost. I don't quite know how to describe the difference: amphetamine (and caffeine) I feel more in my head and emotions, it's a motivational and focusing boost. I fidget less, focus more, don't mind doing my chores. This stuff, I feel it much more in my body. I want to run, or lift something heavy, or otherwise move. Moving my body feels much easier.
But yeah, it's always possible they doped it up with something else. Just doesn't seem likely to me absent other evidence: how often do US supplement companies lace their supplements with stimulants?
I mean, it's not a *random* supplement. It came with plausible method of action to improve metabolism, and was billed as such. It's not unreasonable that such a supplement, if it worked, would have that result. Certainly a supplier might be cheating by including a known chemical that causes the same effect in the supplement without disclosing that, but we would need some evidence for that. I don't think it's the obvious explanation, just a possible one.
I mean, if someone says that taking St. John's Wort really helped their depression is the obvious explanation that the supplier was sneaking SSRIs in there?
L-Carnitine is actively meant to make one more energetic, and I've noticed that effect myself. Doesn't seem that surprising to me, loads of foods can give short term energy boosts.
Interesting. I'm moderately confident that I got over debilitating fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue syndrome by taking OTC supplements targeted at mitochondria (CoQ10, acetly-l-carnitine...). I had exercise intolerance and that seemed consistent with a mitochondrial issue. The improvement was quick and dramatic with the supplements. The prescription meds didn't work as well as expected so I don't find it very likely that my success was due to placebo.
What about Ashwagandha makes it interesting, rather than unsatisfactory? In my feeble attempt at due diligence, I tried to identify (read: google) relevant papers/studies. Most I come up with are published in things like the "Journal of Herbal Medicine" and its ilk, which triggers my obvious 'pseudo-science mag says pseudo-science works!" bias. Without an academic background to score a papers scientific rigour, how can I judge the enthusiasm for Ashwagandha as opposed to a myriad of other supplements?
Re: Vit C for common cold: there's a newer high-powered study that showed significantly decreased incidence of the common cold with high doses (6g per day): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32139409/
6 grams is quite a lot even when taken as 2g after every meal 3 times a day. Personally I can hardly tolerate even 1g in the regular (readily soluble) form due to gastrointestinal side effects. However, when using a time-release formula, I can easily do 3-4 grams at a time, up to 12 grams per day, without any negative side-effects whatsoever. And at least in my experience, when you take such a time-released megadose at the very onset of cold symptoms (that is, even before the sore throat/runny nose, when you get that "aura" that frequent common cold sufferers are probably familiar with), you may very well skip getting sick altogether. Unfortunately, even though vit C's rapid excretion rates and strong GI side effects at high doses strongly suggest using time-released formulas, as far as I can tell, no one has conducted a proper study with time-release vit C megadoses yet. But that Korean one is pretty close.
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Sorry, can you clarify how this article connects to the post? I've read and re-read this abstract a few times and I can't figure out what you're getting at.
Yup. Except ND no longer sells any of what you listed here, as of a week ago or so. The amount of people who take supplements and are in favor of that bill just blows my mind. The FDA has repeatedly blocked so many benign things, including marketing of piracetam/Nootropyl (the og "nootropic"), but many nootropic users want to give them veto power over their regimens. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse...
"Fox guarding the henhouse" really seems like the wrong metaphor to use here. That implies the guard is going to steal for themself the thing they're supposed to be protecting. You seem to be concerned about the guard taking overzealous precautions that interfere with normal desirable usage, which seems to me like an entirely different problem.
This is an acceptable, or at least common, use of the phrase. From the examples portion of the second link on Google "For human rights, social justice, and secular education, a DeVos regime in the US Department of Education would be a proverbial case of the fox guarding the henhouse." Of course DeVos wouldn't be stealing any of these categories under purview for herself, but rather preventing their distribution to others, in the author's opinion.
Commenter banned for this comment.
I didn't even notice I got highlighted in this highlight and thus should read the post sooner rather than later, for reputational maintenance purposes...thanks for saving me the trouble, Scott. In the future I guess I ought to editorialize less when reporting opinions that irl acquaintances hold, to avoid the appearance that I myself might have thirdhand opinions about secondhand opinions. (Happy to own up to stupid idiocy, at least. Comparative advantage...)
I talked to a guy managing Linus Pauling's estate and he said he takes copious quantities of Vitamin C, as recommended by LP
Kurt Goedel told me that all food not prepared by his wife is poisoned so I’m starving myself to death.
Bertrand Russell told me that if I take vitamin C, it will protect me from getting sick with “the set of all sets that do not contain themselves”
A hermit in a dream told me to eat powdered mica, so I did, and now I'm immortal! Thank you, strange dream hermit.
I'm glad I listened to you and not the "drink mercury, it's delicious" guy.
The ghost of Howard Hughes…
Hey, he only said it would be delicious, not make you immortal.
And given lead is the sweetest of all metals, there might be sometime to it.
haha, good point. Of course, LP was a biochemist, and I know several investigators who are pursuing Vit C like compounds for cancer research. It has the advantage of being well tolerated while bringing that volatile free radical to the game. I'm going to keep taking it for scurvy at least - har har
Besides the variance making finding the optimum hard--variance itself will be very detrimental to a medication (or supplement) working effectively. If you want to take 50 mg of Vyvanse, but instead you're swapping between 80 and 20 on alternating days, you're not going to have a good time.
On MYASD - I’ve read you for a long time and trust you. But for one thing, the stuff I trust you about is generally stuff for which you don’t have a direct financial interest in convincing me. For another, one of the reasons I trust you is that you generally do your best to “show your work” about why you’re convinced about something. And if you say you’ve done your homework on this guy for 10 years and trust him, great! But in the original piece this just really came across as you being significantly less skeptical than is typical of somebody’s claims without really showing why you believed that.
Anyway as I said I don’t really think MYASD is straight up lying about anything. He just is in a position where he’s more likely than average to engage in hyping his results , because his livelihood depends on it.
“ I said at the end that it’s probably not a problem if your supplement has +/- 25% of the active ingredient, so I don’t know where we’re disagreeing here.”
We’re not! Which is a big part of why I found your uncritical presentation of MYASD odd. This is one of the key results he uses to conclude that the industry sucks and is full of lazy hucksters and why his supplements are way better… but it’s probably actually irrelevant! That’s not a red flag?
On snake oil… selling fake oil was part of the problem, sure. But the other big part (and I think more relevant to the point I was trying to make) was that snake oil was pushed not merely as a nice fatty acid supplement to maybe have some modest health benefits, but as a miracle cure for whatever ails you.
For a small N+1 I also have years of interactions with MYASD and consider him one of the top two sources on supplements.
IMHO, anyone who is more concerned about variability in supplements than variability in generic meds from India is misallocating their time.
I'm surprised - you doubled down on the attack on Labdoor with the same hearsay that stems from Illuminate's initial claim. Of course there'll be an echo chamber.
Why is the supplement industry full of major players (seemingly) openly and frequently accusing each other of libel, lies, secret business dealings, etc.? This industry seems so dramatic.
They've got nothing on the mattress industry though: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars
Not to mention that the whole US is periodically roiled by culture wars derived from humanities academia; an industry whose official job is to write papers no-one reads about books no-one reads.
That was an interesting article, thanks
Agreed.
I think the official job of humanities academia is to think about how people live, criticize popular problematic ways of doing it, and suggest new possibilities. In a sense, the culture war is the goal (though maybe it would be better if it were a culture churn more than a culture war).
Was it a Slate Star Codex post that predicted that in a post-scarcity society, people would compete with each other in elaborate signaling games instead of economically? I have a vague memory of reading that somewhere. Anyway, even though we are nowhere near post-scarcity, certain culture war stuff always reminds me of that idea.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
Is it? I would have thought the official job of the humanities was to (depending on the department) decide on the best translation of "hwæt", figure out why Lee ordered Pickett's charge or Picasso started painting everything blue for a few years, or why Lucas couldn't leave well enough alone after the release of "Return Of The Jedi," and invent a better way to write down Apache. Even in the Department of Philosophy I would expect them to be more concerned with illuminating the differences between Epictetus and Seneca than between Trump and DeSantis.
These all contribute, in the same way that figuring out the fourth decimal in the molar mass of technetium contributes to understanding how the universe works.
Oh. So the Departments of French Literature and History are just handmaidens to the sociologists? One might not want to say so in the next faculty meeting.
BTW there are no decimal places in the molar mass of Tc, because it does not naturally occur.
The three meanings the phrase "official job" appears to have in the three mentions of it in this comments thread here is fascinating in and of itself, from a humanities perspective.
Depending on the meaning of "official" (as has been said, a humanities question), aren't they still formally meant to be studying how people live, rather than correct it? In other words, only interpreting the world as opposed to changing it?
There are disagreements about this, but the famous Marx quote saying that the point is to change it is apparently written across the front of the Freire Universität in Berlin.
But if you don't change the world, how are you supposed to keep your job? (this is only half sarcastic, I graduated as a humanities major in Spring 2022 and this was one of the buried threads in the curriculum)
The writing was good enough that I kept reading even long after realizing that nobody was going to bring up how mattresses themselves are a scam -- not so much the wrong kind of snakes in the oil as maybe they're putting the snake venom in there too.
> That’s 2 mg. For context, a medium dose of the antipsychotic risperidone is 2 mg/day. So these supplements contained as much arsenic as a risperidone pill does of risperidone.
I don't get it. Paracetamol comes doses of about 1g. L-Thyroxine comes in dosages of about 125ug.
Was Scott's point here simply "if a pill contains 2mg of something, it is probably meant as the active ingredient instead of a random contamination"?
If the contamination was 2mg of the well-known toxin NaCl, that would be a safe level. If it was botulinum toxin A, it would be enough to kill a horse. For lead, poisoning starts at 40ug/dL. Arbitrarily assuming that the bioavailability of lead is 100% (in reality, it probably depends on the compound or oxidation state), that is spreads evenly over 500dL worth of blood and soft tissue and has a biological half-life of 40 days and the natural logarithm of two is one, 2mg a day would result in about 160ug/dL, which sounds pretty bad.
http://scienceandink.com/screen_res/nz015.jpg
I have been the MYASD in another industry (which shall remain unnamed, and which I haven't been connected with for about fifteen years now) -- basically the guy who get into a business because he believes in the product, discovers that there is a ton of shady stuff being done by competitors, and is up front and outspoken about the issues in the industry even though it might be more financially remunerative to just shut up and be shady. The situation wasn't exactly parallel -- I never criticized competitors directly. This was both out of legal concerns but also more generally because getting in a food fight with a specific competitor seemed less productive than advocating for best practices and standards.
Anyway, I'm mentioning this just to say that this type of person exists and I think their perspective should be valued. They generally have a great deal of insider knowledge and -- perhaps more importantly -- they thread a useful line between blanket cynicism and mindless boosterism.
Was I ever cross-pressured by my own financial interests? Undoubtedly, although it's hard to think of any specific instances. Obviously, some skepticism is warranted. But if Scott has been reading this guy for 10 years, that is way more than enough time to come to an informed opinion of his credibility.
I'm with Helen: medicine and especially nutrition is still so variable and strange that informed random self-experimenting can have good results.
Case in point, I recently decided to go on a limb and trust a nutrition blogger with unorthodox ideas who has a decent chance of being a crank (because there's hundreds of cranks with blogs and unorthodox ideas). He was recommending a high dose of calcium-pyruvate (12-15 grams per day) combined with l-carnitine (2 grams per day) because he has a theory about the Krebs Cycle and metabolism and seed oils, etc. He claimed that since he started taking the combo his body temperature has gone up (which he touts is a sign of improved metabolism, which seems plausible to me) and that he's been able to break through a weight loss plateau.
The subreddit dedicated to his particular variety of nutritional crankery (r/saturatedfat) had a post on this theory, and it was the typical thing: a lot of posters saying they tried it and didn't feel any affects, one or two saying it caused digestive distress, and one or two claiming it was working. Just like any other supplement I've looked at. Yet, I decided to try it anyway (I've been trying to lose weight for a long time, and the supplements were cheap, and I was reasonably sure they were very unlikely to kill me).
The first day I started taking it within a half hour I felt more energetic than I have in years. My mood improved, I took care of a few chores that have been sitting undone for weeks (because I couldn't bother to do them), my memory seemed to improve, and overall I felt great. Also my temperature spiked up to 100.4 degrees (after taking it for a week it seems to have stabilized around 99.1 degrees on average).
Quite frankly, I love this stuff. I can't say it's helped me lose weight (I'm losing weight, but I'm also on a calorie restricted diet and I'm only losing about a pound a week) but its improved my life significantly overall.
And I'm sure for most people, like those on the subreddit, it would do little, nothing, or just have bad effects. Because they're body chemistry isn't screwed up the way mine is, I guess.
I really don't know what else to say about it other than I was really, really, really surprised that a supplement I took actually had the advertised effect. I don't think that has ever happened to me prior to this.
>The first day I started taking it within a half hour I felt more energetic than I have in years.
Have you considered the possibility that the pills contained some kind of stimulant, maybe something as mild as caffeine? Snake oil salesmen can put something like that in their pills specifically to get the reaction you describe, and even honest manufacturers can stumble on some supplement that contains a stimulant in addition to the main ingredient.
The supplier seems legit, and more importantly I've taken caffeine. I've taken amphetamines. This felt different than both of those. Heck. for what its worth, I usually take this supplement while I'm on amphetamines (Adderall) and its still an very noticeable energy boost. I don't quite know how to describe the difference: amphetamine (and caffeine) I feel more in my head and emotions, it's a motivational and focusing boost. I fidget less, focus more, don't mind doing my chores. This stuff, I feel it much more in my body. I want to run, or lift something heavy, or otherwise move. Moving my body feels much easier.
But yeah, it's always possible they doped it up with something else. Just doesn't seem likely to me absent other evidence: how often do US supplement companies lace their supplements with stimulants?
Googling finds this: https://www.opss.org/article/stimulants-dietary-supplements and https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20181022/study-risky-stimulants-still-in-many-supplements . I don't know how often it happens. But the *obvious* explanation for a random supplement making you more energetic is that it contains a stimulant, not that it cures some kind of biological condition making you less energetic.
I mean, it's not a *random* supplement. It came with plausible method of action to improve metabolism, and was billed as such. It's not unreasonable that such a supplement, if it worked, would have that result. Certainly a supplier might be cheating by including a known chemical that causes the same effect in the supplement without disclosing that, but we would need some evidence for that. I don't think it's the obvious explanation, just a possible one.
I mean, if someone says that taking St. John's Wort really helped their depression is the obvious explanation that the supplier was sneaking SSRIs in there?
L-Carnitine is actively meant to make one more energetic, and I've noticed that effect myself. Doesn't seem that surprising to me, loads of foods can give short term energy boosts.
Interesting. I'm moderately confident that I got over debilitating fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue syndrome by taking OTC supplements targeted at mitochondria (CoQ10, acetly-l-carnitine...). I had exercise intolerance and that seemed consistent with a mitochondrial issue. The improvement was quick and dramatic with the supplements. The prescription meds didn't work as well as expected so I don't find it very likely that my success was due to placebo.
What about Ashwagandha makes it interesting, rather than unsatisfactory? In my feeble attempt at due diligence, I tried to identify (read: google) relevant papers/studies. Most I come up with are published in things like the "Journal of Herbal Medicine" and its ilk, which triggers my obvious 'pseudo-science mag says pseudo-science works!" bias. Without an academic background to score a papers scientific rigour, how can I judge the enthusiasm for Ashwagandha as opposed to a myriad of other supplements?
Re: Vit C for common cold: there's a newer high-powered study that showed significantly decreased incidence of the common cold with high doses (6g per day): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32139409/
6 grams is quite a lot even when taken as 2g after every meal 3 times a day. Personally I can hardly tolerate even 1g in the regular (readily soluble) form due to gastrointestinal side effects. However, when using a time-release formula, I can easily do 3-4 grams at a time, up to 12 grams per day, without any negative side-effects whatsoever. And at least in my experience, when you take such a time-released megadose at the very onset of cold symptoms (that is, even before the sore throat/runny nose, when you get that "aura" that frequent common cold sufferers are probably familiar with), you may very well skip getting sick altogether. Unfortunately, even though vit C's rapid excretion rates and strong GI side effects at high doses strongly suggest using time-released formulas, as far as I can tell, no one has conducted a proper study with time-release vit C megadoses yet. But that Korean one is pretty close.
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