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mostly, herbs are snake oil. mostly, supplements are snake oil.
this is because people aren't using them on a mechanistically targeted basis. or at the right time.
and because products
a) don't contain what they say, and
b) they aren't in a bioavailable form.
yes. weird herb time
Marc Andreessen: Revolutionary technologies were often viewed as “trivialities” or “jokes”
“If you read history, the great innovations of the past are now well understood as being very important. In almost every case, they were not widely understood as such at the time. In fact, I would assert that they were often actually viewed as trivialities or jokes.”
He gives three examples:
1. The telephone. “When Thomas Edison was first working on the telephone, the assumption of the use case motivating his early work was the idea that telegraph operators needed to be able to talk to each other. It was considered implausible that you would have a system that would let any ordinary person pick up the telephone and talk to another person - that was clearly impossible… Completely missing the larger opportunity.”
2. The Internet. “I have personal experience with this one. The Internet was laughed at. It was heaped with scorn from 1993 to 1997-98. In fact, those of you who were in the industry at the time will remember the New York Times had a reporter on staff named Peter Lewis… I’m convinced he was specifically hired by the editors to just write negative stories about the Internet. It was all he did, and it was always the Internet was never going to be a consumer medium. The Internet is not nearly as big as these people think. Nobody is ever going to trust the internet for e-commerce.”
3. The car. “The car was absolutely viewed as a triviality and a toy when it first emerged. In fact, J.P. Morgan himself refused to invest in Ford Motor Company with the response that it’s just a toy for rich people, which is in fact what it was at the time. If you had one of the first cars, you had to be a rich person. You had to have a driver. You often actually had to also have a stoker with your early cars to keep the engine going. And then you also had to travel with a full-time mechanic because the thing would break down every three miles.”
Marc concludes:
“The great innovations of the present, I believe, are virtually guaranteed to be viewed as trivial and to be viewed as jokes. I think history 50 to 100 years from now will enshroud them in legend. In our time, they won’t be recognized as such. Of course, in the future, when they become legends, our descendants will themselves have their own trivial innovations to laugh at.”
Video source: @MilkenInstitute (2013)
The reason why herbs/phytochemicals are so important in moving forward is that they are available 'off-the-shelf,' so to speak. Prescriptions are not required. And they aren't sketchy, hard-to-find and illegal to distribute research chemicals.
If you want to hit many molecular targets, you can only do so at scale with herbs.
Yeah, that's what type IIa muscle development looks like. (Can't reply in thread - that dingding blocked me)
important paper
Excessive vigorous exercise impairs cognitive function through a muscle-derived mitochondrial pretender: Cell Metabolism cell.com/cell-metabolism/ful…
Important paper
One of the ways that the cells destroy damaged mitochondria was just discovered in a very cool Nature paper
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
good news
This is the most forward looking approach the FDA has taken with the expansion of scientific knowledge today. Well done @VPrasadMDMPH @DrMakaryFDA. I love these statements:
"An appropriately designed study with a small sample size can support licensure of a product for which pharmacologic effect is aligned with biologic plausibility and congruent with observed clinical outcomes. That philosophy, in essence, embodies the plausible mechanism pathway...."
"...Meanwhile, for patients and families, there is no time to wait. Nearly 30 years after the sequencing of the human genome, bespoke therapies are close to reality. The FDA will work as a partner and guide in ushering these therapies to market, and our regulatory strategies will evolve to match the pace of scientific advances."
nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NE…
I've recently seen posts on here about how carnitine blocks the action of T3. This is only half true.
Carnitine blocks nuclear import of T3 and so (temporarily) blocks its longterm "genomic" effects.
If anything it increases the "non-genomic" immediate effects of t3.
That's because if it blocks nuclear import it definitionally increases cytoplasmic concentrations.
Accordingly, in studies on hypothyroid patients it blunts fatigue.
For athletic use, the best form is the L-tartrate variety with rapid uptake and clearance.
important paper
nature.com/articles/s41392-0…
Sleep, among other things, might be like anesthesia; an opportunity to do things not well-tolerated awake
PAINS (Pan-Assay Interference Compounds) or panacea?
Quercetin Directly Interacts with Vitamin D Receptor (VDR): Structural Implication of VDR Activation by Quercetin
biomolther.org/journal/view.…
"VDR activation by quercetin is exerted by direct interaction, triggering subsequent downstream signaling events."
a really fascinating paper, ties in with some weird herb research
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
this is the same team that published this equally fascinating paper on myelin as a proton capacitator:
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…











