I don't believe this was a fair or accurate trial. What you would do if you really wanted to replicate Vimmortal is take 183mg with each of the major meals of the day. Small doses, spaced out, with food.
Indeed, I didn't realize that people thought it best to divide the dosage throughout the day. However, I'm still confident that it's representative. I've taken bitartrate a couple dozen times, both with piracetam and without, at doses from 100-500mg; because of my reactions, the majority of these trials were below 200mg. Both with and without piracetam, choline bitratrate or alpha GPC produce the feelings I describe with a somewhat dose-dependent intensity, but still unpleasant enough at ~100mg that it's an unacceptable tradeoff for the benefits.
My normal daily routine is 2x 800mg piracetam + 1.5g ALCAR. I settled on ALCAR because of synergy, but also because it's the only ACh-increasing supplement I could tolerate (besides AChEIs). Given my reaction to precursors but not acetyl donors or esterase inhibitors, I'd speculate that my problem lies somewhere in the choline transport/storage/release processes upstream of ACh synthesis, but from others' reactions to other cholinergics, I think this can be mediated downstream of synthesis as well.
A dose of 183mg would produce brain fog and emotional blunting at a much more "functional" level, but based on the long duration I've observed, would be reinforced at a second and third dose. Not to mention that I'd be taking choline with dinner, which could very well interfere with my sleep, as trials with similar doses earlier in the day have done so several times.
Though disappointed, my point isn't so much that
my reaction should be a deciding factor in the formulation. Rather, I was attempting to illustrate that this ingredient affects a neurotransmitter, with unpleasant cognitive and emotional consequences for some people. Ajna
appears to be another such case, at least a couple of years ago.
Aside from (but also relevant to) my problem, I'm curious about the logic behind including 100% of men's daily AI, which is 130% of women's. The dosage is 5.5x higher than either of AOR's products, and 3.6x higher than LEF mix.
Finding no discussion in the project forum, the only topic I could dig up about the essentiality of dietary choline was
Review: Choline: An Essential Nutrient for Public Health. A few papers [
1] [
2] suggest that up to 50% of the population have polymormphisms which increase this requirement an unquantified amount. So, I'm guessing someone decided that the full men's AI was desirable to cover all possible bases (which doesn't seem to be the thought process for many other ingredients), and that potentially increasing intake to 150-200% of AI in the "choline-replete" would have no downsides.
If this was the case, why was choline bitartrate used? All the epidemiological data I saw were dietary studies, which AFAIK is comprised primarily of lecithin. In fact, choline bitartrate doesn't seem to be very well-studied at all. Given the possible (indeed, likely) differences in physiological processing of different forms of choline and phospholipids, wouldn't it be more reasonable in this context to go with the dietary form? Based on anecdotal evidence, lecithin/PC also seems less likely to exert neurochemical effects, though I haven't confirmed my own reaction at these levels. Though if 550mg is the target dose, this would require several 00 caps in itself, so probably isn't warranted for something that the team doesn't feel is an issue.
Edited by chrono, 15 October 2010 - 07:04 AM.
This topic is locked
