Posted by bleauberry on December 29, 2007, at 19:26:08
In reply to Split doses? Or once at night? (nm), posted by qbsbrown on December 29, 2007, at 12:33:04
Dosing tryptophan is an individual customized thing. Most do it in the evening. Some do it in the morning. Some do it in a single dose and some in multiple doses. You have to experiment what is best for you.
Keep in mind tryptophan converts to a lot of different things besides serotonin. For example if you do not have enough niacin in you the tryptophan will be converted to niacin and not leave much left for serotonin. Basically to get good tryptophan conversion you need an adequate pool of B vitamins, C, and some minerals, with I believe zinc being the most important one, not sure on that. Even in a best case scenario I believe about 10% of tryptophan gets converted to serotonin. The rest goes to other stuff. So roughly speaking a 500mg dose of tryptophan is about 50mg 5htp.
Tryptophan has to compete with other amino acids to gain entry in the brain. Other amino acids bully it out of the way. To get maximum entry you want to take it before a meal, or a couple hours after a meal, and take it with some type of natural sugar such as orange juice to enhance its entry. Otherwise a lot of it just gets wasted and never gets where you want it.
Generally I found tryptophan very calming. Too calming for me. I think with me too much of it went into melatonin conversion, and melatonin depresses me. The time it sparked nasty mania was when I took it in the daytime without vitamins. It only lasted a day and maybe wasn't even mania but maybe just a bad reaction.
poster:bleauberry
thread:803041
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20071225/msgs/803187.html