Comment · Thu, February 5, 2015 · Ceretropic
Fake herbal supplements. How to know?
Original post in this thread
NellucEcon · 34 points
A news article about the prevalence of fake herbal supplements recently made it to the front page of reddit. I couldn't find the original, so here is a similar article:
http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20150203/retailers-fake-supplements
My question is, how do we verify the quality of products? Single drug compounds are probably easier to verify for a number of reasons. For example, adrafinil is a yellowish-white powder, tastes like death, produces an unmistakable urine odor, and has substantial subjective effects in responders. Of course this does not rule out cutting agents that might make dosing hard or impurities that could be unhealthy. In addition, this method works only for those drugs so obviously characterized. Compounds without a distinctive flavor or appearance would be difficult to identify. And compounds whose effects are subtle would be difficult to gauge by subjective experience.
All these problems are more severe for herbal supplements because they typically lack distinctive characteristics, particularly when crushed up and placed in a capsule. And most of their effects are subtle. And lab tests for authenticity require DNA testing.…
What they were answering
desexmachina · 1 points
GI tract pH gradient as you go down the GI tract is pretty consistent. It is acidic at the stomach, less so in the duodenum, and near 7.5 by the time you get to the lower intestine. Looking at the pKa of Adrafinil, depending on the ionized version, it gets nearly 100% ionized in the stomach acid, which means nearly 0% absorption. But nearly 100% absorption at the lower intestine. The best bet with Adrafinil is to get it to the lower intestine. Drink milk with it, or take with meals, and hopefully, the stomach doesn't get to too much of it. Ionization also needs to be understood. Even if it is 97% ionized, it will still get absorbed eventually, in 3% chunks at a time. Which means that you're getting slowly dosed over a long period of time, which is probably why no one feels the effects because the blood serum levels are never quite high enough at any given point in time.
For reference, I took light pink today from Powder City 125 mg potentiated w/ caffeine and tried to follow protocol based on pKa, and the effect was significant at that low dose.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Ceretropic
So where are you seeing that Adrafinil can have differing pKa levels? Are you just gleaning that from the structure itself, or is this documented somewhere?