Comment · Wed, July 15, 2015 · Ceretropic
"You do not need to take fat with fat soluble vitamins"
Original post in this thread
theskepticalidealist · 25 points
I wanted to have people comment on this thread but it's been archived and now you can't.
So, fact or fiction? Some people said fiction so wanted a discussion to make it clearer to people.
What they were answering
DrunkBTC · 3 points
Can you explain why thc needs to be extracted from weed into fat to be bioavailable? Or is that a myth too. I was under the impression that if I just ate some weed it would be significantly less effective than if the thc had been dissolved into a fat first.
This was also true of synthetic cannabinoids. Back before they were banned I tried taking just the powder with no or little effect but if dissolved in oil first they were very active orally.
Or am I just way off base?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Ceretropic
That's because THC in the plant is in a carboxylic acid form. Cooking the THC in heat decarboxylates it. Since THC is fat soluble, fat is used in that process to make the extraction more efficient. The fat is not altering the absorption of the THC. It is facilitating the extraction during cooking, which decarboxylates it, which then allows the THC to absorb and work properly.
Tetrahydrocannabinolic Acid, which is what is found naturally in the cannabis plant, is not psychoactive. You need heat to turn that THCA into the psychoactive THC form. THC itself is very non-polar. So you need a non-polar solvent, like alcohol or fat, to get it to absorb in a solution. Also, eating THC products is actually more potent than smoking, because when passing through the liver during first pass metabolism, THC gets converted into 11-hydroxy-THC. That has been shown to be more psychoactive than regular THC, and has much higher plasma levels after oral administration of THC compared to smoking.
I have not really researched THC that much, though. There might be some interactions with stomach acid that I am not aware or, or bile salts. I would have to do some more reading on it.