Glad to hear it's working! My understanding is that it is a protein enzyme that your body can use to clean up waste proteins and eliminate them. Like giving your body a tool to clean up more adhesions or scar tissue.
@Still alive and kicking @jason30
That's my understandning of it, too., and is the reason I bought it,
@jason30 Re: supplements being too low-dose, or otherwise ineffective - often it's the
form of of the substance concerned. If we lack the necessary conversion enzymes to convert the
inactive forms into the
active forms used by the body, there will be no benefit, and there could even be nasty side-effects, because unless a substance is converted, it can be toxic. For example (not strictly speaking a "supplement", but it's still replacing a "deficiency") I don't convert enough T4 into T3 (inactive and active thyroid hormones respectively).
So if I take even a small amount of T4, I go toxic within 20 minutes - headache, nausea, temperature, etc. Even taking T4's pre-cursor, tyrosine, has the same effect (obviously, that suggests I am at least converting tyrosine to T4, so there's one pathway working, at least!)
Same thing with B2 in standard riboflavin form. I'm doing quite well with the active Flavin Mononucleotide co-enzymated form instead, and whilst I didn't see much benefit (other than not feeling nauseous from B2) at the recommended
dose, increasing it x3 - 4 is evidently getting some rusty pathways working again and improving parts of my methylation cycles.
I started a thread about some (to me) very interesting information on B2 and FMN, FAD earlier today, with this link:
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/riboflavin#nutrient-interactions.
There's also the issue of bioavailabilty. Some forms of minerals in particular, are almost worse than nothing, like the oxide forms, which are cheap and therefore widely available, but are almost impossible for even a healthy body to use and gain any benefit from.
Conversely, taking the wrong supplements at any dose, or the right supplements at too high a dose can be actively damaging.
Back to no response - there's also the matter of
absorption to take into account. A lot of us have gut issues, digestive difficulties (lack of digestive enzymes and/or hydrochloric stomach acid), poor gut bacteria, slow transit time, too rapid transit time, constipation, diarrhoea, IBS, etc, etc), and receptor resistance to a variety of biochemicals. So from that point of view, the dose listed on the label is never going to be the dose your cells actually receive.
Connected with that is the
format/ delivery system for whichever biochemical/ nutrient/ hormone/ whatever else you want to call the different substances available for supplementation.
Tablets can be a nightmare for me, because of
additives - colours, fillers, preservatives etc, as can
injectable solutions with
preservatives and/ or other additives.
Capsules can be OK, depending on what the capsule is made of, with a better absorption rate for me based on observing my personal responses to the same substances, and
pure powders with
no additives can be the best of all. (Powders are also cheaper, and are widely available on the body-building sites like My Protein, Bulk Powders, and others.) Some products are available as
transdermal patches,
oils, or
creams, which bypass any digestive difficulties, and also imvolvement from the liver. Some people respond much better in terms of fewer side-effects and efficacy using these. Magnesium absorbed transdermally by using
Epsom Salts in the
bath,
or mixed with cream and applied to the skin, work better than other delivery systems for some.
Sublinguals can be useful to maximise absorption, too, and further improved by placing these tablets not under the tongue as recommended, where they can dissolve too fast to provide the prolonged contact that facilitates absorption, but
under the top lip, on your gum.
Nasal and
oral sprays are also an option. So are
drops, although many contain
ethanol, or
citric acid and
other preservatives, which can often be
problematic.
So, form, format and dose all play a very important part in safely and effectively supplementing a beleagured or fragile system.
Slightly off-topic but still connected to your experience of supplementation efficacy, I agree with another post I saw this morning about the effectiveness and safety of using supplementation as a tool to help improve our otherwise crappy quality of life due to ME/CFS and the myriad of co-morbidities that accompany our condition - I'm not going to wait until some double-blind, placebo-controlled, peer-reviewed study gives me the OK about nutrients etc that I've gathered enough information about to warrant testing out for myself or have already gained benefits from.
I investigate studies anyway, and find that negative studies have often used either a less-than therapeutic dose, and/ or the inactive form, and often other bias, to "prove" lack of efficacy.
Anything that elevates my quality of life even slightly from the status of bed-ridden, pain and anxiety-riddled, brain-dead zombie is good with me!
I hope at least some of this info helps in understanding why some supplements seem ineffective and / or cause unpleasant reactions.