Comment · Wed, June 22, 2022 · ND Owner
Tongkat Ali 2% different bottle/color - any difference in effectiveness?
What they were answering
Spirited_Gap7644 · 1 points
Curious as to whether hygroscopic substances lose potency after being saturated with moisture any amount? Even if small?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Short answer: no. Long answer: sometimes. LOL
Most things are not susceptible to hydrolysis from moisture in the air, so water is just going to add weight. You can usually just desiccate the water out, or use a vacuum oven to evaporate it out, and everything is fine. In fact, some molecules just naturally have higher water content, and they are stable like that. Berberine is one. Then you have different forms of things, like hydrate, dihydrate, or even trihydrate forms. This is how much water is bound in the crystal structure of the compound. People are probably familiar with creatine monohydrate. Then you have anhydrous forms, or forms of a molecule where the water has been completely removed. We do loss on drying analysis on all our raw materials to ensure it is in spec, which is also how you report "dry basis" assay results. You can actually see water in FTIR spectra, and even in our mass spec data. You can see the water molecules being fragmented after being hit with ionized particles. It's pretty sweet!
So what do I mean by sometimes? Well some things are sensitive to degradation by hydrolysis. Peptides are especially so, because they are not bound together by covalent bonds like other molecules. They are weaker peptide bonds, so if your material has a bunch of active peptides in it, then perhaps getting too much water in it will affect potency. It really depends on the specific peptide, though. Certain amino acids are more susceptible to hydrolysis. This is also very much pH dependent. Higher pH generally catalyzes it more than low pH. Water absorbed from the air will be neutral, so generally not super bad. Also, just because it can happen doesn't mean it will happen fast. Maybe it breaks down half of the peptide in a year. We are not talking days or weeks. Even so, this would be a rare thing, and it would not affect 99% of the small molecule organic compounds that are the main actives.