Comment · Mon, November 5, 2018
Question about Terpene/Polyphenols testing
Original post in this thread
obliviron · 3 points
Hi, I have bought Lion's Mane in the past and I was wondering why the Terpene content isn't tested. Beta-Glucans are important, but they are likely secondary to the alkaloids in terms of importance for the effect profile of Lion's Mane. Can this be tested for? I understand other companies wanting to sell a lesser or shady product and not even test for B-Glucans, but now that Nammex is providing standardized B-Glucans every vendor that sources from Nammex is advertising B-Glucan content. Knowing the Terpene and the content of alkaloids unique to Lion's Mane would be more indicative of the quality of the extract.
What they were answering
Kostya93 · 3 points
A healthy level of skepticism is good to protect yourself, but you also need to be sure to not venture into cynicism. Not everyone out there is a scammer, and there are people trying to change things for the better.
That I do agree with wholeheartedly.
But I will value a CoA of a certified third party lab higher no matter what, because a vendors direct financial interest is and will always be much higher than a lab's, and, of course, the confirmation bias is usually very prominent in a vendors approach. Just keep in mind Paul Stamets and his supplement business. He keeps ignoring peer reviewed research and objective test results and calls everything that doesn't agree with his own theories 'flawed'.
Host Defense [...] are going to have a big lawsuit on their hands soon
That would be interesting to witness! They are doing it for over a decade already, not to mention their claims about using 'mushrooms' while actually using 'biomass'. And many others just like them.
UV-VIS vs HPLC testing
This is still going on. Vendors benefit from the ignorance of the average consumer. I remember reading a thread somewhere about L-Theanine; Synapsa vs Bacognize. The first is UV-VIS and the second one HPLC tested IIRC.
Both products are probably quite equal if the HPLC test would have been used for both but Synapsa is much more expensive because it appears to be more potent thank…
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
Just keep in mind Paul Stamets and his supplement business. He keeps ignoring peer reviewed research and objective test results and calls everything that doesn't agree with his own theories 'flawed'.
You and I have no disagreement on Paul Stamets. Literally everything about his business is bullshit. It's the cheapest product to produce, sold for insane markups, with no clinical scientific research backing it, and constantly-changing nonsensical explanations for the inconsistencies. Some might go so far as to say it is an outright fraud.
That would be interesting to witness! They are doing it for over a decade already, not to mention their claims about using 'mushrooms' while actually using 'biomass'. And many others just like them.
The music always comes to a stop at some point.
This is still going on. Vendors benefit from the ignorance of the average consumer. I remember reading a thread somewhere about L-Theanine; Synapsa vs Bacognize. The first is UV-VIS and the second one HPLC tested IIRC. Both products are probably quite equal if the HPLC test would have been used for both but Synapsa is much more expensive because it appears to be more potent thanks to the UV-VIS test results.
Yes, that was our blog. We discussed it because we went back and forth with Verdure on the situation when they decided to be the first ones to bite the bullet, and switch over to HPLC for their bacopa. We had to explain to everyone why we were suddenly listing much lower values for Bacognize, and explain to them that nothing changed in the extract. It was just the testing methodology that changed. We deal with this constantly. We have begun forcing all our suppliers to list their standardizations via HPLC instead of UV-VIS because of it.