I’ve just done this myself. MyProtein’s U.K. site is offering 40% off in a Black Friday deal already, although postage puts that back up a bit. There are some reviews that claim positive effects on skin, although they won’t be dealing with the same issues that we are.
Do they have the one you’re looking for? Is it this you’ve ordered, @Scotsman?
“That’s why we’ve changed Hydrolysed Collagen Peptide to Collagen Protein - but don’t worry, we’ve definitely not changed the taste or the nutritionals, so it’s still your favourite…”
Yeah, that’s the one.
peanuts are not nuts, are legumes. pea - nuts.
i have bad reactions with carbs that’s why i avoid rice and legumes and i’m on this raw-paleo.
Hi guys,
I am posting to make you aware that there have been some severe reactions to large supplemental doses of collagen/gelatin brought to my attention before now in PFS patients. I am not trying to tell anyone what to do or what not to here, but a lot of people have asked me to share when I have such information both publicly and privately so I just want to make everyone aware so they can make their own decisions as to what is worthwhile considering their own case. Particularly I believe @scotsman @devolution and @Greek will be interested to read the following.
The first is the user @pageidol who wrote the following on another forum:
Hiya guys look im in big trouble. I was doing really good. Ive now got massive problems! and im suicidal. I began taking magnesium everynight before bed and Great Lakes gelatin i think it is…for gut health. For 2 months. I just need to point out that this gelatine contains all kinds of amino acids that fuck with neurosteroids like glycine and l-glutamine. Alongside magnesium they affect nmda receptors along with gaba, serotonin and everything. Magnesium can upregulate gaba, glycine can increase serotonin. L-glutamine brain damage
Well over the last few weeks I began experiencing alot of problems climaxing which I have experienced in the past from ssris which got slowly worse(serotonin?) I then began slurring words, struggling to talk, dilated pupils, appetite gone, racing pulse…this then turned into massive panic attacks starting a week ago, massive parathesia in my legs, suicidal ideation 5 days with no sleep, heart rate was beating out my chest. Everytime i tried sleeping a lighting bolt would wake me up I spent 3 days in hospital.
These symptoms mirrored benzo withdrawal…identical! My dicks completely numb. Im fucking terrified. Im reading up on all these amino acids how they affect nmda receptors, neurotoxicity, excitory, gaba down regulation, up regulation, im reading benzo withdrawal, mdma damage, serotonin syndrome. I was doing great before supplementing magnesium oxide and this great lakes gelatin. Ive been reading about magnesium being a cns depressant.
Guys im fukin terrified. What the fuck have these supplements done to me?? I hope to god it’s transient but now I feel totally fucked and whatever issues I had from dht inhibition are completely blown out of the water with this.
Please help me. My dicks completely numb, ive never never had this before. If im truly fucked now, thats it, i was on the road out. Please tell me its transient or whatever. It mirrored identical to benzo withdrawal what happened to me.
The second is my late friend @lashes_to_lashes who told me and several others in detail that he experienced the onset of a lot of severe PFS symptoms (sexual, insomnia etc) in addition to his well documented skin symptoms following the use of collagen pills after seeing this suggested amongst alternative health ideas for PFS, usually talked about in regards to ideas about “the gut” or something. This for him was a permanent worsening.
As this has been reported to help some people (a lot talk of bone broth doing this or that for their symptoms) I would imagine this is somehow interacting with a pathway in regards to PFS that is not without risk. Both users I mention had only had exposure to a 5ari for a short period before the onset of issues, so as with all things in relation to PFS my personal feeling is that the risk would be more pronounced for users who experienced persistent symptoms after a short duration of use.
All the best guys.
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The fact that we don’t all have allergies and that those who have it do not have it to the same food makes me wonder. I would need to do a survey and ask all of us if they have allergies and to what.
It could be that specific enzyme are now giving us bad reactions (like soya or oat, which have phyto-estrogen), but it could also be that we are over reacting to conditions that used to cause us only mild reactions (maybe even without us realizing it).
I’m eating lots of cruciferous, like kale and cabbage. They contain DIM, which has anti-androgenic properties. It doesn’t seem to affect me adversely.
However, there are some commonalities in all our allergies. Nuts, soya, lactose, gluten are all types of food for which it is not uncommon for normal people to have allergies to. Looking at the growing incidences of obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and arthritis all around the planet, I would be inclined to say humanity is having a carbohydrate epidemic, or maybe more specifically a sugar one.
Now to the point that we were more or less healthy before we crashed (some of us may have been a little fat or were bloated), I believe psf may have exacerbated some underlying condition we already had.
At this point it’s just a theory and that’s why I want to test it out with collagen. If the cause of some of my allergies was leaky guts and collagen fixes it, I should be able to eat peanuts and gluten without anxiety. I think I’m pushing my luck by trying sugar.
To be honest, there’s more to it. I think eating carbs increases the production of glucocorticoids, the main one being cortisol (the so called stress hormone). The 5αri we took also blocked persistently the chain of transformation leading to allopregnanolone and tetrahydrodeoxycorticosterone (which actually has cortisol as a precursor many steps before), two important anti-stress neurosteroids. To top it all, it is the allopregnanolone that acts as the main regulator of the GABA (A) receptors so the lack of it means those receptors are not regulated (allopregnanolone is the hormone the most affected by pfs according to this study: http://anabolicapex.com/2017/01/30/allopregnanolone/). Gaba (A) receptors has a certain inhibiting action on the nervous system, so if it’s malfunctioning, we get overstimulated.
So it looks like for many of us, the cortisol “stress button” is always on.
Here’s an article on what happens when the stress button is always on: https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-cortisol#1
The list of symptoms for having too much cortisol is as follow:
Anxiety and depression
Headaches
Heart disease
Memory and concentration problems
Problems with digestion
insomnia
Weight gain
The effects of Cortisol are balanced out by dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) which I bought as a supplement. However, DHEA creates more testosterone and more estrogen so I’ll have to be very careful with testing this one. I wouldn’t want to take too much.
The effects of too little cortisol are
Changes in your skin, like darkening on scars and in skin folds
Being tired all the time
Muscle weakness that grows worse
Diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting
Loss of appetite and weight
Low blood pressure
The GABA (A) receptors are also regulated by Taurine to a lesser degree. So I bought some Taurine to test it as well.
Altogether, it appears to me that the 5αri has blocked more than a few links in the chain of normal transformations that takes place in the body and if a few links are broken, then wholes section of chains of transformations are affected; more than just those few links.
But I’ll go by elimination and first investigate the leaky guts and auto immune lead. Once I had take collagen in large enough quantities and for sufficient time, I will first try peanuts, see if I react to it, and on another day try some bread (or pizza). Gluten is a huge molecule that doesn’t pass through the guts unless they have holes in it (which collagen should fix). On another day I will try a can of Sprite to see what happens to me when I have a sudden spike of blood sugar level. (I expect this one will not go well but we’ll see.) I may end up running 5km just to burn off the sugar and the anxiety… (ha ha ha ! Here comes the stressed, sugar pumped anxious dude running down the street !)
People have been trying different things for 20 years. I’m not re-inventing the wheel here. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that collagen could help with skin problems and could at least reduce some of the food allergies. Let’s see.
Again, I’m not a doctor and all of this are just my opinions and best educated guesses (with my limited education).
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Thanks a lot @axolotl for this. I don’t think that we can be reminded enough that what could on the surface be considered innocuous, for us can have a further devastating effect. I was guilty of that mindset when ordering them but I take on board how severely impacted lashes_to_lashes and pageidol were in the pursuit of therapeutic gains.
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Definitely, what @Scotsman said.
You might have just saved some more lives @axolotl.
Just gonna tag @Go_Faster_Sonic on this too.
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Thanks axolotl. This is really appreciated.
The last thing I want to do is influence someone into doing something that would make his situation worst.
Reading what @pageidol has to say about this is really something. It mirrors in a negative way my previous post on Collagen (the one I did a few minutes ago). He’s also talking about all the neurotransmitters and neurosteroids. I think it’s precisely where the problem lies and I think it’s the regulation systems of those brain juices that are off track. Someone can go from too little to too much in a short time.
I took fin for 16 year, 1.25mg a day before getting any ill effects. To this day, my symptoms are not as bad as many of you guys. I take it on me to do some testing on myself but from this point on, I will be very, very careful before advising someone else about anything. Mea culpa. As a general rule, I’ll consider that we’re all different and what works for one can be detrimental to another.
Yesterday, I had 5gr of glycine and 10gr of glutamine (in the collagen and in the protein shake) as well as 150% rdi of magnesium. Those are high doses, but within normally tolerable range (for someone not sick anyway)
I slept deep for 5 hours, had an extra 3 hours of wake up and dream time which is normal for me, and the whole day I’ve been feeling unusually calm and rather happy. I even had a fight with my wife and didn’t stress or lost control of myself but stayed calm throughout the fight. It may just be that I tilted my brain chemistry closer to what it should be and maybe if I go on taking those same supplement I will overshoot the target and get off balance the other way.
So I will not take a larger dose of collagen, and I think I will stop after two weeks, or at the first sign of side effects.
I will go through the experiment thought, as well as test the other aminos that “fucks with the brain” like Taurine, Theanine, GABA, DHEA, L-DOPA etc… I will do it in small measures and for short periods of time with periods of time taking nothing in between.
I believe the solution lies where the problem is. I want to shake up my system and try and reboot it
But again, I don’t want to bring anyone down a dangerous path. I will post my results and can only advise you guys to be extra cautious with all of those products.
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I wish you all the luck and I understand your note of caution, but I guess part of the problem lies in not knowing where cautious ends and reckless begins.
That reminds me when I was drinking alcohol. I would get to a point where I was euphoric and was having fun, so then I would drink more, thinking what I was doing was making me feel better until it didn’t anymore and I would end up sick.
What if the mistake is to go on talking a supplement past the point where it have been beneficial ?
If I felt good today, maybe it means I should now stop so that I don’t overreach it and get off the other side.
@ axolotl
I’ve been reading a lot about how neurotransmitters and neurosteroids normally works in a healthy person but I lack the knowledge on, well, what’s wrong with us. Why isn’t it working normally for us as it is for healthy people.
I only have this article: http://anabolicapex.com/2017/01/30/allopregnanolone/ I cited above.
Could you please, when you have time, send me links to some relevant research that would help me understand the nature of this disease ?
It’s a nice analogy. Again, difficult to know where the lines are.
Hi @Go_Faster_Sonic. He posted elsewhere: “I didn’t get major PFS symptoms until I started taking collagen pills”. This was several months before he took resveratrol. His systemic and profound reversal of symptoms by resveratrol (mental, sexual, physical) was rapid and in the immediate days before he took his life. I was profoundly worried when he told us of his intensely positive response to resveratrol - @gents93 will likely remember the conversation - and the tragic outcome is another example of why I regularly give my opinion suggesting the avoidance of antiandrogenic substances.
@Ozeph, I don’t want to derail a thread but I will send you a quick message with some thoughts.
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Hey axolotl,
Thank you for you input, I was about to order a load of collagen for Black Friday and make a cocktail of peptides but after reading what you said I’ll pass on that, I don’t think I couldn’t risk this being any worse than it already is. Considering me and Matt both had skin issues it’s definitely not worth the risk, as you said he reacted badly and knowing how my luck seems to go, it probably would end up causing exacerbated symthoms. Kind of scary to think these things can have such bad reactions with people, like milk thisle with awor, I never even heard of milk thistle before he mentioned it so I definitely wouldn’t of been aware of that either.
This disease is very eerie, danger is pretty much lurking plain sight.
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Did he take fin for a long time before he started having symptoms or did he get sick after just a few pills ?
Day 4, morning.
Yesterday, I took another 15 gr of collagen, which contains roughly 5gr of glycine. I went a little easier on the glutamine, taking only 5gr instead of 10.
Sleep has improved. Best night since I crashed. I did wake up after 5 hours of sound sleep, but during the dream and wake up hours, I only woke up 3-4 times and went straight back to sleep.
I woke up without feeling sticky or drowsy and I’m in a good mood this morning.
Glycine works in pair with Methionine. Too much Glycine can deplete Methionine while too much Methionine can deplete Glycine. According to this article: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/balancing-methionine-and-glycine-in-foods-the-database/ for every 10 gr of meat (muscle) a normal person should eat 1 gr of collagen.
Sorry maybe Im misunderstanding the snippet of that thread that @axolotl posted but was the user talking in regard to callogen only, or the use of Aminos as well? I really apologize if Im repeating information already stated above, some days I just can’t find time to sit down and read through as much as I’d like so I have to skim through. Can someone clarify - are we talking about Aminos? Gelatin callogen that contains aminos? Or the gelatin itself?