Any advantage to ArginoCarn (ALCAR Arginate) over ALCAR taken with or without Arginine alpha-ketoglutarate

I wasn't flipping out at you... That rant was not directed at you at all. Sorry if it came across that way. It was directed at the unscientific claims being made by the people selling this "stabilized" version of BPC-157. That is, unless you are the person selling it and making the claims?

Also, sometimes things are bullshit, and those BS claims need to be called out. I do that in a very direct way most of the time. I am sorry if that comes across as crass, but I am sick of people making bullshit claims and misleading consumers all over the place. So when I see it, I get heated. That's who I am, and that's how I react. If I see a bullshit claim, I am going to directly call it out. I have done it for almost a decade here on /r/Nootropics, and I will likely be doing it for a long time to come. I do take people's ideas in first, though. My responses are always after I read and analyze the data. Sometimes things are just unscientific, and need to be called out for it. When something is so clearly based in false data, I get upset. If the people making the claims on this version didn't make so many insane mistakes, perhaps I would not been so direct in my responses. I read everything I could find on the "stabilized" BPC-157 with arginine, and that was my assessment. I even got the opinion of other scientists on my team, and they all concurred. I am sorry if I was direct, and if the conclusion we came to was not what you expected. If I felt I could honestly say "oh I kinda understand your ideas" I totally would have. I can't and don't, though. It doesn't make any scientific sense, and none of the evidence proposed as explanation does, either.

So I apologize if you felt attacked by my response. However, my rant was directed at the people making these unscientific claims. If you are not the person trying to sell this "stabilized" version of BPC-157, or the one making the claims, you should not feel attacked at all.

Here is the patent for it: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2014142764A1/en

They just mix 1 mole of BPC-157 with 2 moles of L-arginine, then lyophilize to a powder. So we are talking an ionic bond here. Ionic bonds dissociate in solution. So once it hits your gastric juices, it will dissociate into free BPC-157 and L-arginine again. So how is this improving stability or bioavailability? How is the arginine protecting it from UV light or from stomach acid? None of it makes any sense. They reference tables of data they made themselves as evidence. Where is the peer reviewed study that we can read the study methods on? They post a UV-VIS spectrum showing absorbance, and say that proves it is stable in UV light. It is literally nonsensical! They say that they dissolved 1g BPC-Arg in 100ml water at 20*C. Okay, so the ionic bond between the arginine and BPC is broken, because it is now in aqueous solution, and they are now dissociated. It's free BPC-157 in solution. So how is that protecting it from UV light again? It's literally just free BPC-157 in water at that point mixed with L-arginine. They make no scientific attempt to explain how that is protecting it from UV light or gastric juices. It wouldn't. It's all nonsensical.

If you look at the data in their patent, that doesn't even make sense. So at a pH of 2, this is the concentration of BCP-Arg at 0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 hours.

* 0hr- 100%
* 0.5hr- 30.2%
* 1.0hr- 13.5%
* 1.5hr- 8.2%
* 2.0hr- 6.0%
* 2.5hr- 4.9%

Then you look at it at pH of 3

* 0hr- 100%
* 0.5hr- 98.1%
* 1.0hr- 96.5%
* 2.0hr- 93.6%
* 3.0hr- 90.0%
* 4.0hr- 87.2%
* 5.0hr- 84.2%

Then look when they raise it to a pH of 4

* 0hr- 100%
* 1.0hr- 99.0%
* 2.0hr- 98.9%
* 3.0hr- 94.6%
* 4.0hr- 89.7%
* 5.0hr- 78.3%
* 6.0hr- 76.3%
* 7.0hr- 68.2%
* 8.0hr- 60.9%

So first off, your stomach is at a pH of 1 to 2. When using a gastric buffer to simulate stomach conditions, you use a pH of 1.2. So their data is useless, as who cares what it is a pH 3 and 4, when the stomach is in the 1.2 range? Look at their pH of 2 run. It is NOT that much more stable. They are advertising the stability numbers from the pH of 3 run, which is not pertinent to stomach acid. Also, I don't believe any of their numbers anyway. I think they are all false, fake, or inaccurate. So even if they were properly measuring at a pH of 1.2 for a gastric buffer, the numbers are not backed up by any verifiable data I can confirm. The idea that adding L-arginine to BPC-157 in solution, then lyophilizing it, and having that completely change its stability just doesn't make any sense. Unless I can see some really compelling data I can confirm in our lab, I am saying it is total bullshit. Their data is just false.

I mean, just look at the lysine sidechain and all the nitrogens in the arginine. Your stomach acid will protonate all the amino acids. The arginine would ionically bond to the lysine and aspartic acid in the BPC-157, but that won't stop the protonation. Also, once they are in solution, those bonds dissociate. So BPC-157 acetate and BPC-157-Arg will act exactly the same once in solution. That's how ionic bonds work. These guys are claiming that in neutral water at 100*C for 1hr the BPC-157-Arg was unchanged?!? Bullshit. Total bullshit. The science just doesn't add up.

I'll have some of this arginine BPC-157 made, and run it through our lab. Hell, I will buy some of theirs and see if it is even legit. We have access to extremely advanced 2D NMR techniques now, which will literally tell us anything about a peptide. So again, sorry for being direct. I am just reading a ton of nonsensical shit trying to justify this "stable" version, and none of it makes sense to me or any of the scientists on my team.