Functional Yeast Extract vs Epicor

Specifically I found that the recommended dose of Palmitoylethanolamide was somewhere between 1200mg and 1800mg per day according to some studies that I only glanced through because I'm not a chemist.

That's VERY high for a PEA dose. Those studies are looking at chronic pain and Alzheimer's, not as an immune booster. After testing, we found 200mg to be perfect in combination with oleamide and black seed extract.

Functional Yeast Extract - So glad you cracked this. I ordered some cheap-ish EpiCor to increase my daily intake during the weather change, which is when I usually get sick, but once I'm done with it I will probably just rely on this, assuming you can allay my worries about the other ingredients.

I stopped using EpiCor month ago, and have only been using our yeast extract. I'm happy to report my immune system is as strong as ever, and my stomach seems to like our yeast extract better than EpiCor.

Turkey Tail 8:1 - The only literature I found was related to its effects on cancer patients, but the standalone extract you sell is 1:1 at 500mg 2x per day. Assuming that 8:1 is a weaker ratio, 300mg doesn't seem like a lot. If it's the other way and 8:1 is more concentrated, this makes more sense.

The 8:1 is a concentrated extract of turkey tail, and extremely expensive. 300mg is a good healthy dose of it by itself, much less paired with all the other things.

Palmitoylethanolamide - Your own PEA supplement is 400mg daily, so either that is overkill or the 200mg in ID is included for its synergistic effects with the other compounds.

Again, this is a daily immune stack. Our standalone PEA is more for pain. Plus, we can only fit so much in two 00 capsules. We are up against a hard limit there. It takes a lot of formulating, R&D, and balancing to get the amounts/ratios right. This is literally almost 3 years of work for Immune Defense.

Black Seed Extract - Examine.com recommends at least 250mg daily, and ID has less than half of this.

That's for regular black seed oil. Our extract has 5% thymoquinone, which is much higher than regular black seed extract. Also, Examine is not the end all and be all of dosing protocols. We do our own research and testing to find what works best. Sometimes Examine is pretty spot on. Other times they are wildly off.

Red Reishi - Again, assuming that 16:1 is a weaker ratio than the 8:1 (500mg 2x) that you usually sell, 100mg seems incredibly low. If it is stronger, it still seems kind of low since even if it is twice as powerful you would think the dosage would be somewhere around half of the 8:1 compound.

The 16:1 is a VERY concentrated extract of reishi, and even more expensive than the turkey tail. Also, some people get testosterone lowering effects from too high of a reishi dose. So we kept it low for that reason. Again, we only have so much room, and we only can make the price work up to a certain point. Nobody would pay for a $100 per month stack that you needed to take 4 capsule a dose for. This is a delicate balance that we need to maintain, and I think we did a damn good job of it.

Tyrosol - Not much I could find, but this study I skimmed over seemed to suggest that in vitro Hydroxytyrosol was more effective, and you might be better off just drinking 25-50ml/day of olive oil since you'd be getting both TYR and HTYR, but I don't think its inclusion hurts anything or raises the cost much.

You are certainly going to be getting a more rounded effect by drinking olive oil than taking 10mg tyrosol, but this is only a small part of the stack. It's also the dose we have in our Salirosol solution, and we have found good effects with that solution by itself. Hydroxytyrosol might be better, but we decided to go with what we knew and had long experience with. Also, this is our most expensive product yet with the least amount of margin. These ingredients cost a lot. It was going to cost even more before we replaced the EpiCor. So we at least saved some money there, but we are up against a limit on what people will pay. So it is a delicate balance of not only all the ingredients working together synergistically with no side effects, but at a price point people might actually pay. I am damn proud of our Immune Defense, and our testing shows it works better than I could have ever hoped. Seriously, our internal testing had it taking people from dead sick to feeling almost better in less than a day... My wife got sick after we went out drinking with my sister, who conveniently forgot she had laryngitis. She came down hard with it, and I gave her Immune Defense. Within a hour of taking it she started to turn around, and she felt pretty much back to normal the next day. We've had multiple employees take it when they were sick, and all of them recovered lightning quick. This was one I was worried about, since the immune system is such a complex beast. However, all the testing we have done so far has allayed my fears and showed that we did a really good job on this one.