My 16-month theanine self-experiment

I finished one bottle of Theanine for occasional use and went to order a different combo as it was unavailable. It is Theanine Serene with Relora which also includes Magnesium, GABA, Taurine, and Holy basil in two large tablets. Helps relax and ease falling asleep.

Another option may be a pain/stomach relief/sleep aid concoction we found :

1tsp ginger

1tsp turmeric

1tsp cinnamon

1tsp fine black pepper

500ml milk

Boil for 10 minutes. Drink one cup warm and save the other for another day.

If you're not careful and diligent, this is a recipe for liver damage from coumarin and heavy metal toxicity. You can take all those things safely but it requires knowledge and care.

And that’s making the huge assumption that what you had what it claims to.

Hey, ok I get it for coumarin but just out of curiosity, what can introduce heavy metals in this mix?

Turmeric, but I think it's only some suppliers?

Yeah, be careful, curry will poison you, that's why there's billions of people that eat curry on the planet regularly and they all died from liver poisoning.

Some people add yellow lead salts to turmeric to increase profit margins.

Turmeric and cinnamon are both notorious for lead contamination.

In many locations it's legal to sell consumables that have disgustingly high ppm of heavy metals as long as the recommended daily dose is small so that the absolute amount of heavy metals stays below a fixed threshold. Also many companies just flagrantly violate the regulatory levels.

Getting clean turmeric extract is possible by knowing which brand to trust. Natural Factors is trustworthy, they are transparent with heavy metal testing and have third-party validation in academic studies and by consumerlab.com. But even if it's clean, you would still need to manage this risk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK548561

For cinnamon, avoiding coumarin is possible by making sure it's ceylon cinnamon. But I don't know of any brand selling ceylon cinnamon that I would also trust to have low heavy metal levels. The intersection of reliable brands and ceylon cinnamon sellers is a very sparse set.

Weren't the "beneficial effects" of turmeric (or to curcumin, to be more exact) found to be based on fake research? The researcher who started the whole thing about turmeric, Bharat Aggarwal, had to retract 30 (!) of his papers, in which he falsified the images.

Appreciate the response. I took the turmeric combo a couple of times and had to stop due to stomach irritation from the pepper. Can’t edit my comment.

Were any of the downvotes and responses related to the Theanine with relora pill for stress relief?

> The acute hepatotoxicity caused by turmeric appears to be due to an idiosyncratic injury, perhaps immunologically mediated.

idiosyncratic means they don't know why (because they're idios?), but it happens to some people for unknown reasons. The chances are very slim that you'll have whatever pre-condition to be affected by this.

I don't downvote, so i don't know.

but regarding theanine, i can't tell if it is useful for me, i bought it because of this thread's commentary. Sometimes it makes me jittery, and some times it doesn't, n=1, five trials so far ;-)

I bought the bottle so i'll take it. i really ought start writing down vibe/mood journals with a list of supplements i took that day, if any.

oh and i avoid taurine. I don't recall why, offhand; but i do, so i'll have to look into those other chemicals, i see "GABA" often - and you didn't specify what type of magnesium!