Comment · Sun, June 21, 2020 · ND Owner
Why do you not sell Suntheanine on ND?
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post in this thread.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Suntheanine is just propped up by marketing these days. Suntheanine is also NOT extracted from tea. It uses a specific strain of bacteria (Pseudomonas citronellosis GEA, FERM BP-8353) to ferment it. They try so hard to make people believe they are the only enantiopure L-theanine, but that's just lies. In fact, you can get much better yields using other methods now. I bought us a polarimeter for our lab years back to verify optical purity of compounds. Proving those liars wrong about Suntheanine was the thing that actually made me pull the trigger! LOL. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s their bacterial fermentation process might have meant something, but not today. There are a bunch of enantiopure routes for L-theanine now that are much cheaper than Taiyokagaku's one. You can actually see their promotion on their site.
Suntheanine was awarded the “Food Ingredient Research Award” at the 1998 Food Ingredients Europe and “Best New Product of 2000” at Nutracon.
Yes, truly revolutionary for 1998 and 2000. However, in 2020 there are many optically pure L-theanine routes.
I only add patented/trademarked ingredients to our offering if they make sense. So if there is something meaningfully different about them that makes them better, I consider them. If they are just fancy marketing names for the exact same thing I can have made cheaper, I don't. Suntheanine is the EXACT SAME as our L-theanine. There is nothing different about the final product at all. We have extensively tested it in our lab. We actually based our internal specs off Suntheanine's specs. If I sent a bag of Suntheanine labeled A to a lab, and a bag of our L-theanine labeled B, that lab would not be able to analytically tell the difference. They are the same.
Now if Suntheanine did something cool like Longvida does, which made it a more effective product, that's different. If this was an extract with a bunch of other things, and they were standardizing to novel stuff in it, then I would as well. This is why we offer regular curcumin and Longvida, or our own lemon balm alongside Cyracos. However, pure L-theanine is pure L-theanine, no matter what name you put on it.