Comment · Fri, October 17, 2025 · ND Owner
What is the difference between GABA and PharmaGABA?
Original post in this thread
nexusoflife · 15 points
I was looking to experiment with supplementing GABA but I am unsure if I should buy regular GABA or PharmaGABA. I have read that GABA is typically chemically synthesized whereas PharmaGABA is fermented from lactobacillus bacteria making it more bioavailable than regular GABA. But I have also read that some people still get benefits from regular GABA despite it reportedly not being able to cross the blood brain barrier. I wanted to get the perspectives of people with more experience in this area.
What they were answering
nexusoflife · 3 points
Thank you! You have cleared up all of the confusion and questions I had around GABA with your comments on it. It's so shady that some companies will literally bank on people's lack of experience and exploit them just to charge extra for a product that is not really any different. I had no idea that all GABA is fermented nowadays. I will be buying GABA from you guys instead of PharmaGABA for sure.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
That's this entire industry, unfortunately. Everyone is just trying to make as much money as possible off consumers, and using all the shady marketing tactics to do it. We talked about it for saffron on this other thread.
https://old.reddit.com/r/NootropicsDepot/comments/1o70vx7/best_affron_saffron/
Some brands are making up names for standardizations, then convincing customers that's what their product is standardized to. One of them is lepticrosalides. That's just a made up word they came up with. Then another one is saffromotivines. That one is the dumber sounding of the two, but both are just made up terms meant to trick consumers. We even get customers asking us what the lepticrosalide level of our saffron is... Uhh, the same as the bullshitasine levels. The bioactives in saffron already have names: crocins and safranals.
Here is a crocins assay chromatogram.
That shows crocin and its 3 derivatives.
Here is a safranals assay chromatogram.
That shows safranal and its 11 derivatives. Sure, we could make up some dumb name to call all these, but why? It would be like instead of us testing for hericenes and hericenones in lion's mane fruiting body, we grouped them all together and called them memoboostivines. Then we would trademark that name, so nobody else could use it. Then we would convince everyone that the only lion's mane that is good are ones standardized to memoboostivines. However, nobody else could, because we would own the trademark. It's lunacy!