@Jonathan Edwards
Hi Jonathan,
Theanine very definitely does work for most people. It used to work for me, before chemo drastically changed my biochemistry.
No-one in Europe or the US is ever allowed to make health claims in relation to any supplements.
And evidence needs to be checked for big pharma funding, skewed data, etc, because big pharma is continually producing fake "evidence" of either the "inefficacy" or outright "danger" of natural therapies, because they all threaten their bottom line and they play dirty to put naive people off using them.
Without ill-health, the pharmaceuticals woukdn't make any money. We don't have a health service in the UK or the States, we have an ill-health service. ALL the medical schools in the UK and the US are funded by pharmaceutical companies. The syllabus is therefore predominantly skewed towards finding the "correct" drug to treat a disease or condition, rather than finding out what has gone wrong in the body and putting it right naturally.
It wasn't as bad as this in the 60's and 70's, but I'm guessing Big Pharma got a lot more powerful in the 80's. I was told recently that pretty much every major company in the world is owned by just six companies. And they are all pharmaceuticals. The power the wield is unimaginably immense. They basically own the media, and that's why every few months, yet another piece of pseudoscience appears in the papers and on the news, warning us off whatever supplement is proving effective, and therefore popular, at that time.
A few years ago, they baldly stated that no-one could absorb more than 60mg a day of Vitamin C. The test was conducted in a test tube, with no human tissue involved. Given that there is a recognised protocol to determine an individual's requirement for Vit C at any one time, which involves taking gram after gram of Vit C until saturation point is reached and the body chucks the excess out the back door (hence the protocol's name, The Bowel Intoletance Point), the claim that 60mg is the most you can use is clearly rubbish. If you could only use 60mg, everyone would hit BIP at 65mg. Everyone's BIP is different, and each individual's BIP changes depending on how many stressors that individual is dealing with at that time. Mine varies from 6g to 20g plus.
It's Big Pharma that tell the government, who then tell the NHS, what the RDA's need to be, and what the reference ranges for every blood or other test should be. They keep reducing the "normal" cut off points for cholesterol, so they can get more patients on statins, and for HbA1C, so they can get more patients on metformin. Both drugs have been proven to be highly destructive to other aspects of health - but that works in BP's favour, because then those patients so affected will need, guess what, MORE drugs to cope with the side-effects.
The regulation about disallowing health benefit claims for supplements is down to BP protecting itself, and has no relation to any lack of evidence.
Ben Goldacre, a doctor, wrote an illuminating book called called Bad Pharma. More details about the stranglehold that BP has on the world's health can be found in that.
Did you know that even one of the big pharma companies is richer than the combined top ten individuals on the Forbes Rich List?
Sorry! I'll be jumping down off my soapbox now......
