One off great reaction to methylfolate

[lift]

This happened in 2013, after trying it a couple of times previously and thinking it made me feel worse, I decided to give it another shot. The first day I was surprised that I tolerated 2x400mcg. The next day I took 4x400mcg in the space of a couple of hours and suprisingly I had a the biggest lift in mood I have had in during CFS, it was the happiest I have ever been in 10 years.

I ended up walking twice as long as I normally would, I was enjoying the music on my mp3 player a lot more, I felt really happy. It felt like my feel good chemicals were firing. After that though I never experienced anything like that again, despite trying many times by itself and with every co factor you could think of. I find it hard to believe it could just be placebo, considering my mindset was negative(thought that it made me feel worse in the past)

I also find other B vitamins work randomly for me, some times good sometimes bad, but never to the degree of above.

 

[ahmo]

It's not uncommon to experience euphoria when increasing folate. I had it happen a number of times, though it wasn't the norm. Fred might have explained the reason for this somewhere, I don't know, but he did describe it. It seems that the other B vitamins can be quite significant as co-factors. There are a few threads that have gotten into this, in particular one entitled B2 I love you, and another, No love for B2! I've just begun a new-to-me form of B2, FMN, a low dose sublingual. I'm curious to see how it affects things.

 

[PeterPositive]

I know the feeling. I have had similar experiences.
I have learnt over the years that it's very hard to correlate what one does with what happens.

E.g. I take a pill, then I feel better, ergo the pill did something.

More often than not it turns out that it wasn't the case.

Personally I seem to be more sensitive to the weather and seasons than anything I take. So during late spring and summer I have a surge of energy that is usually quite stable. If I take new supplements during those months I am usually tempted to correlate them with the improvements of symptoms and energy. But those changes are likely to set back when the good season is over

Bottom line, it's a fudgin' tricky business.

This is not to say that some supps are not working. Some really are, but so far I have been mostly wrong at evaluating how much it was the supplements and how much it was the rest, i.e. the 1000 other variables I don't even know about.

ETA: Placebo is not much about being deceived by some mind-trick, it's all of the other stuff that we can't take into account, that have a significant effect, be it the natural course of the illness, the weather, sleep, food, interactions, and all the complex physiological / biological variables...

 

[forbius]

I've found b12 & folate to be better tolerated with a higher niacinamide/riboflavin ratio in my home-made b-complex. Too much riboflavin can create some unpleasant effects, where I feel on edge and like I want to leap out of my skin (some people think this is hypermethylation--they may be right). Niacinamide and biotin helped counter this, riboflavin made it worse (tested and confirmed multiple times). It is a fact that b2 is a structural component of the folate processing enzymes and niacinamide is a cofactor, so the reason lies somewhere in there (and NADH/NADPH are almost ubiquitous, so it's no wonder a lot of formulations have niacin(amide) as the dominant b vitamin, although none so much as mine).

Jarrow's b-complex has a b3:b2 ratio of 5:1, and so does Freddd's recommendation. This is what I ran with at first. Now mine has a ratio of 40:1, and a 100mg serving provides 1.2mg riboflavin and 47mg niacinamide. This works much better for me.

I'm guessing this is one case where it's possible to 'unlock' a process that is normally passively rate-limited by what can be typically found in nature.

Ironically on another occasion I had a really positive experience with riboflavin, but that was because I'd been taking literally none for months. Never befriend just one supplement, or it will stab you in the back.

 

[PeterPositive]

My B complex has almost a 1:1 B2 to B3 ratio: 100mg B2, 130mg B3, although I take 1/4 of that:
25mg FMN (active B2)
32mg inositol hexanicotinate

Plus I take extra 25mg NAD. I have never been able to figure out the conversion rate between B3 and NAD. The Source Natural's NAD bottle says 25mg of NAD is 125% the RDA, which sounds like the B3 RDA (~20mg).

Is all niacin/niacinamide turned into NAD (and relatives), at least in theory?