Comment · Fri, February 14, 2025 · ND Owner
Milk Thistle is beneficial to the liver! fact or fiction?
Original post in this thread
Suspicious_Effort161 · 32 points
Looking for somebody with a better understanding of the topic to weigh in here. i’ve seen a lot of conflicting information on whether or not milk thistle actually benefits liver function. please educate me.
What they were answering
isaarg · 17 points
Best thing for liver unless you have a fully biliary obstruction is quality TUDCA or UDCA, it is available as a supp but is also fully studied and proven medication for a variety of liver, biliary and GI conditions. Probably would be my top request for ND to stock if they could. If you have genuine concerns about your liver I would get your liver numbers checked during and major changes to your stack as liver damage is often asymptomatic until it has gone too far. What helps or hurts one person could be completely different for you.
Anecdotally I use milk thistle oil successfully for some skin issues and I like to use it after shaving.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
We are working on TUDCA as we speak. It was always a pricing issue. We could never make the pricing work with what other brands were charging, and what it actually cost us for high quality TUDCA. We assumed everyone was using lower quality sources, but people wouldn't pay 2-3X more. However, we have recently been able to lower production costs a lot, so we should be releasing a TUDCA soon!
Also, one thing about milk thistle that people don't talk about, and that we didn't even know till a few years ago, is that it contains silychristin. That inhibits people's thyroid.
https://academic.oup.com/endo/article-pdf/157/4/1694/8997536/endo1694.pdf
We worked for a couple years to make a low silychristin extract, and moved to only using that a few years back. I think we need to do a better job of alerting people to this issue.
https://nootropicsdepot.com/high-potency-milk-thistle-extract-capsules-silymarins/
Ours is standardized to less than 0.05% silychristin.