High-Dose Selenium Significantly Improves My Fatigue and Brain Fog

[physicsstudent13]

I bought solgar selenium and took 400mcg the other day and didn't have any improvement in fog, also 300 today with sam-E and b vitamin injections about 400mcg cb12.
I'm beginning to think maybe the klonopin+gabapentin I'm taking for slow wave sleep may be causing problems

 

[nektarios]

Hi to all,

I was reading most of the forum here and I would like to show you another side of things - because before I was thinking the same as you.

What you are experiencing with Selenium and Zinc may not be necessarily because of these minerals, but their interaction with heavy metals inside your body!

In particular selenium acts like a magnet for neutralising mercury. Zinc is a direct antagonist of the same heavy metal. However, selenium and zinc may end up mobilising mercury. Depending on your body’s immunity and detoxification ability you’ll have brain fog, or clarity, fatigue or motor improvement, brighter and sharper vision or the opposite. It depends on where mercury gets lifted from and where gets re-deposited.

I had 12 amalgams in my mouth and didn’t have a clue. I was taking selenium (selenomethionine form) daily with food and vitamin C and E (plus other supplements that help me). Once I decided to get 400mcg of selenium on an empty stomach. One of my tooth with a big filling started hurting so bad that I couldn’t sleep the whole night. Then gradually the pain went away. I took vitamin E with tocotrienols (the Swanson ones) and my gums went black as if rotten! I was petrified! Went back to plain vitamin E and I was OK after a couple of days. I took rutin and bioflavonoids and some of my veins would become visible and hurting and I would get a spot on the same gum above that filling that was giving me pain. I took 400mcg of selenium and again the pain was back!

So I googled to figure out why all these antioxidants gave me such reactions. They had one thing in common: they try to get rid of mercury!

Mercury, cadmium and other heavy metals are food for yeast and candida and other such organisms in the gut!

No matter if you have amalgams or not, please read about the connection of mercury and CFS. How mercury causes havoc in the mineral transport, endocrine system, you name it! And read about Andy Cutler heavy metal detox, alpha lipoic acid and DMSA! Please investigate!

I weight train so I sense the effect very quickly (within 10 to 20 minutes) when I either take zinc or selenium! Selenium of 400mcg takes soreness away and makes me much stronger and vascular to the point that I have to increase the weight. This effect is like a switch so it is not muscular growth (!) but nerve system related. If I stop taking zinc and selenium within 2 days my muscle tone and strength goes south. I never knew before why I had to take zinc supplements to have strength and control of my left side (shoulder, back and arm). Well now I know!

 

[presently_distant]

I just recently (today, actually) started using selenomethionine again. Many months ago, I used the Solaray brand yeast free selenomethionine with poor results (lots of anxiety and inner tension).
But, today, I used some random whole foods brand selenomethionine (yeast based and awful smelling) with good results! I had little to no anxiety, lots more focus, and a bit less fatigue.

I wonder if my combination of selenium with colostrum changed the way it reacts in my body? Or if yeast based is more along the lines of what my body desires?

Hard to say, but I'm certainly interested in experimenting with different forms of selenium supplementation to see if these benefits hold up.

 

[drob31]

I bet the reason selenium helped is because it can reverse hashimoto's and repair hypothyroidism.

 

[JaimeS]

Giving this a try at 400 - we'll see. Thanks, @Hip, for the info - as always!

 

[Hip]

Giving this a try at 400 - we'll see.

I was hoping this treatment would help more patients, but it seems a lot of people reported selenium caused a strong mental over-stimulation feeling, so they had to stop taking it. Only handful of people did not experience the over-stimulation, and benefited from selenium in the same way as I did.

Though the over-stimulation side effect is of interest just in itself, because it was quite frequently reported in this thread. Why should selenium cause this over-stimulation in lots of ME/CFS patients? I am sure we could learn something about the biochemistry of ME/CFS if we worked out the metabolic pathway by which selenium causes over-stimulation in ME/CFS.

And in fact, interestingly enough, I actually learnt something new about selenium just yesterday that might possibly help explain these ill effects: I read in this post by @mariovitali that either selenium deficiency or selenium over-supplementation increases endoplasmic reticulum stress in the cells, which can impact upon glutamate / excitotoxicity. 1 Whether this might have something to do with the selenium-induced over-stimulation, I don't know.

Though it does suggest that there might be an optimum level of supplementation. For me I find 400 mcg of selenium daily better than 200 mcg.


Anyway, let's hope you don't get this side effect, and that selenium provides some nice benefits for you.

 

[JaimeS]

Hmm, @Hip - here is another source that says that selenium deficiency contributes to glutamate-induced excitotoxicity.

And... ooooh, a study that says that higher doses of selenium improves mitochondrial function.

Finally, this article, a review of its toxicological and beneficial effects, but I admit I am too tired now to analyze in depth. Still, someone else might like to pick it apart, or I will when I have more time.

-Jaime

 

[Deltrus]

Well I've been doing this protocol for a week, and I just got a sore throat when I had one of my sudden onsets of fatigue. I never got that before. Good to know that a virus is part of the cause for these fatigue flare ups of mine.

I'm more fatigued when I get tired, but in the morning my sleep is a bit more refreshing.

EDIT: I just had a pretty good immune response. It was pretty weird. It was normal fatigue, except I got a sore throat at the same time and the fatigue felt good and not... insanely bleh. Felt good after I had a nap. Hope I keep getting good immune reactions from this.

 

[Deltrus]

Well I went on high dose selenium for 1 month.

Pros: gave me a really high lebido for some reason, females looked really good when normally I'm not that interested at all. Also for the first week sometimes I felt that "good" immune response described earlier but that went away.

Negatives: After 3 weeks I started getting worse baseline fatigue levels.

 

[Battery Muncher]

@Deltrus thank you for posting your experience. Has the fatigue levels returned back to normal after stopping selenium?

 

[Biarritz13]

It's odd, 2 Brazilian nut gives me headache the entire day but nothing when I eat one...

 

[Deltrus]

@Deltrus thank you for posting your experience. Has the fatigue levels returned back to normal after stopping selenium?

Yes, fatigue went back down over the course of a week.

 

[Hip]

Well I went on high dose selenium for 1 month.

Pros: gave me a really high lebido for some reason, females looked really good when normally I'm not that interested at all. Also for the first week sometimes I felt that "good" immune response described earlier but that went away.

Negatives: After 3 weeks I started getting worse baseline fatigue levels.

What dose of selenium were you taking each day, and what particular form of selenium were you taking, @Deltrus?

 

[Deltrus]

What dose of selenium were you taking each day, and what particular form of selenium were you taking, @Deltrus?

"Seleno L-methionine" 400 mcg / day.

 

[ebethc]

@Hip - do u recommend yeast-free selenium? any co-factors taken concurrently? thx

 

[Hip]

@Hip - do u recommend yeast-free selenium? any co-factors taken concurrently? thx

Yes, for these reasons:

• Selenomethionine comes in both a yeast-free form, and a yeast-derived form. I would avoid the yeast-derived form of selenomethionine, because I found this yeast form caused significant depression symptoms when I took it, whereas the yeast-free selenomethionine had no such side effects.

I don't take any specific cofactors.

 

[Aerowallah]

Hip, I'm going to trial selenium on the recommendation of someone who has good experiences with it also.

Many here seem to jump in at the maintenance dose of 200 mcg or UL dose of 400. Along the lines of Nektarios' thought above that symptoms are due to metal dumping, my friend recommends a liquid suspension of selenium nitrate 50 ppm, which works out to 250 mcg per teaspoon. That allows you to start out low with an 1/8th a tsp and titrate up, backing off any side effects, which in his experience starts with irritability and leads in severer reactions to nausea and diarrhoea. I wouldn't be at 200 mcg for three weeks or so. He attributes these reactions to mobilization of metals, especially iron. I can't find studies on this iron connection but see mercury is a factor here. He believes selenium deficiency and "anemia" or high unavailable iron go hand in hand.

If we are talking metals then side effects might be oxidative damage. He and a few others like myself with glutamate issues seem to sleep well almost immediately and do not complain of overstimulation going low and slow, just a little irritability as you mentioned. People's starting doses may be encouraged by the size of these pills--I don't see low-dose Se pills out there. But you can always cut what you have or open a capsule.

Cannot find anything on this form--selenium nitrate. I might opt for selenomethionine at some point as a maintenance dose as it seems to be received well. Vital Nutrients has a 50/50 organic and inorganic selenium, whether by therapeutic design or cost cutting I don't know.

Brazil nuts are right out for me at this time—or any nuts & seeds for that matter—because of high copper, histamines and glutamate. They kill my sleep.

Hip, he also doesn't take cofactors but reduces high vitamin A foods temporarily during a trial for reasons I'm embarrassed I couldn't follow! Will report back and also will ask what kind of maintenance dose he is on.

 

[Hip]

@Aerowallah
Your suggestion of starting at a low selenium dose and slowly titrating up seems a very good one. Some people on this thread stopped their selenium experiments because it caused over-stimulatory effects on the brain. However, if it is possible to avoid these effects by gradually increasing the dose over many weeks, then possibly people will be able to achieve the significant improvements in brain fog and fatigue that some have got from selenium, but without these negative effects.

 

[Aerowallah]

BTW since this thread is entitled "High Dose Selenium" and we've been batting around a lot of dosages I thought I'd post this quote from Dr. Gary Price Todd, who used minerals to reverse macro-degeneration and cataracts. I'm guessing he's had a lot of clinical experience with selenium. Apparently he used hair analysis to monitor levels:

The American diet supplies 50 to 75 mcg of selenium per day, a Japanese diet 400 to 700 mcg of selenium a day. The FDA recommends a supplement of 50 to 200 mcg a day as safe. I really think the idea would be 200 to 500 mcg a day ... Selenium, I use a selenium chelate. I will start them on a minimum of 60 mcg per day. Now the FDA recommends 50 mcg per day as the upper limit but all of the literature indicates that 2400 mcg per day is safe and I have used as much as 1400 mcg on patients for years consecutively without any toxicity. Now there are other forms of selenium that are available. My results are based on the selenium that we used, which is a chelated form of selenium not selenite or selinate. If you take around 1000 mcg of selenium a day for the average person in this room it will take at least a year to bring you up to normal. To maintain that will take somewhere between 200 and 600 mcg per day as that exact value as yet is unknown.

My takeaway is that he wound up at a very high dosage but started slowly!

 

[Rand56]

BTW since this thread is entitled "High Dose Selenium" and we've been batting around a lot of dosages I thought I'd post this quote from Dr. Gary Price Todd, who used minerals to reverse macro-degeneration and cataracts. I'm guessing he's had a lot of clinical experience with selenium. Apparently he used hair analysis to monitor levels:

The American diet supplies 50 to 75 mcg of selenium per day, a Japanese diet 400 to 700 mcg of selenium a day. The FDA recommends a supplement of 50 to 200 mcg a day as safe. I really think the idea would be 200 to 500 mcg a day ... Selenium, I use a selenium chelate. I will start them on a minimum of 60 mcg per day. Now the FDA recommends 50 mcg per day as the upper limit but all of the literature indicates that 2400 mcg per day is safe and I have used as much as 1400 mcg on patients for years consecutively without any toxicity. Now there are other forms of selenium that are available. My results are based on the selenium that we used, which is a chelated form of selenium not selenite or selinate. If you take around 1000 mcg of selenium a day for the average person in this room it will take at least a year to bring you up to normal. To maintain that will take somewhere between 200 and 600 mcg per day as that exact value as yet is unknown.

My takeaway is that he wound up at a very high dosage but started slowly!

Interesting post. Do you know which chelate form of selenium Dr. Todd uses? Reading your post has me interested again in revisiting higher doses, since I had a good reaction when I tried 1000 mcg's. I just was too chicken to continue at the higher doses due to toxicity concerns, but your post is lessening my concerns.