My 16-month theanine self-experiment • Hacker News Board

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#41

Post by genewitch » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:26 AM UTC

OutOfHere wrote: post #36

MichaelDickens wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is strange to discuss L-theanine with vitamin D as one has nothing much to do with the other. That's the idea, vitamin D was used as a placebo. They bought vitamin D supplements rather than cellulose because the supplier sold both L-theanine and vitamin D and the pills looked (nearly) identical.

Vitamin D3 is not a placebo at all. It 100% promotes energy quite quickly even though it takes much longer for the body to convert it to the active form. Also, its mental effect is distinctly different from that of L-theanine, like day and night. For these reasons, it's not a great candidate for comparison with L-theanine.

Unless it's the active D vitamin, it takes weeks to convert it into reserves.

Taking vitamin D once, right before bed will do nothing. Our bodies don't use it that way.

Cholecalciferol = weeks

calcidiol = hours

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#42

Post by genewitch » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #10

instagib wrote: post #5

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…

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.

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.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#43

Post by adrianN » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:35 AM UTC

vazma wrote: post #32

energy123 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#44

Post by dmix » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:35 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #16

> This hacker news thread is full of positive reports, Hacker news always has the most insane takes when it comes to medical/biological things.

Most of this stuff is just takes from random people, not medical research. For example, the article links to 5-month old HN thread where the first comment says:

> And you do not want to mess with the 5-HTP and alcohol at the same time

so I googled it

> Internet forums are full of horror stories of people vomiting, blacking out or having seizures after drinking while on 5-HTP. It’s impossible to know if the stories are reliable, but there is little other evidence of known interactions between 5-HTP and alcohol.

https://www.drugrehab.com/addiction/alcohol/risks-of-mixing-...

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#45

Post by energy123 » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:37 AM UTC

vazma wrote: post #32

energy123 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#46

Post by jaggederest » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:38 AM UTC

This is actually a thing I wish existed, but I don't have time and energy to make it right now. I'd pay $25 a month or more.

Basically it's an application that lets you do self-experiments like this, properly blinded and with good statistics. A challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge study is one of the ones I like, but if you want to do one you essentially have to design the study anew each time, and it would be convenient to run multiple at once if that's possible.

I'm not interested in generalizing, I just want to know if (for example) taking Vitamin D every day at 1000 iu is enough, or whether I should be taking more or less. I can get labs done on this, of course, but again I'm more interested in subjective wellbeing than blood levels beyond avoiding deficiency or hypervitaminosis.

Maybe such an app exists and I simply don't know about it.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#47

Post by dmix » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:48 AM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #46

This is actually a thing I wish existed, but I don't have time and energy to make it right now. I'd pay $25 a month or more. Basically it's an application that lets you do self-experiments like this, properly blinded and with good statistics. A challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge study is one of the ones I like, but if you want to do one you essentially have to design the study anew each time, and it would be convenien…

While not exactly the same https://examine.com/ is doing this sort business and seems to be popular. They aggregate and meta analyze research for pills like L-Theanine and people pay $30/month to access it

https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/?show_conditions=tr...

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#48

Post by pazimzadeh » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:51 AM UTC

> I’ve long found that tea makes me much less nervous than coffee, even with equal caffeine. Many people have suggested theanine as the explanation, but I’m skeptical. Most tea only has ~5 mg of theanine per cup, while when people supplement, they take 100-400 mg. Apparently grassy shade-grown Japanese teas are particularly high in theanine. And I do find those teas particularly calming. But they still only manage ~25 mg per cup

It's not uncommon for a substance to have different, even opposite effects at different doses. For example high dose melatonin can keep you up, and stress you out, whereas in most people you only need up to 1 mg to promote sleep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#49

Post by fragmede » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:51 AM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #46

This is actually a thing I wish existed, but I don't have time and energy to make it right now. I'd pay $25 a month or more. Basically it's an application that lets you do self-experiments like this, properly blinded and with good statistics. A challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge study is one of the ones I like, but if you want to do one you essentially have to design the study anew each time, and it would be convenien…

you want a service to: mail out a 30-pack of daily pills, there's an app where you record your mood/whatever, and then at the end of it, reveal which days were VitD and which was collagen?

how much would you pay for this?

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#50

Post by strken » Sun, Mar 09, 2025, 5:52 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #16

> This hacker news thread is full of positive reports, Hacker news always has the most insane takes when it comes to medical/biological things.

Most of social media and most of real life have absolutely insane takes on health-related stuff. Ask someone at random about, say, keto, and you're pretty much guaranteed to get an opinion without any data behind it.

I think that part of this is because the effect sizes are so small. Grabbing some arbitrary sources, if you look at the average disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost to colorectal cancer as a result of red meat consumption in France[0] and put them into per-person terms, it averages out to a grand total of...less than 2 hours per person (presumably other causes also contribute). Meanwhile, for alcohol consumption and everything it causes, the average Australian is losing a little under 20 hours (and I assume most of HN lives in a country where this is similar).

These are pretty small numbers! I'm honestly not sure whether it's even worth worrying about them. No wonder people have trouble telling what's true in a field where many of the papers and most of the personal experience is just noise in the data.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02786...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption