Oregano oil? Interesting. How do you take it: with food or without food? And, what brand do you use?
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I use NOW brand Oregano Oil capsules, I take one it before I go sleep with my sleep supplements. It is a bit tough on your stomach the first few days, then you don’t feel anything.
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Can I ask, what is supposedly bad about zinc? I’ve been supplementing it forever, 15mg every night, on the basis that it’s one of the most common deficiencies.
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It is easy to overdo on zinc. 15mg should be OK. I think when you get to 50mg you are on the edge.
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Yes, it’s easy to become deficient in zinc, especially on a vegan diet. Which is why supplementing very modestly might be indicated. However, that does not mean every single day or above RDA. I do supplement 10mg 3 times a week, because my diet tends to be lowish in zinc.
However there are a few things to keep in mind. First, never mind all the mechanistic speculation. Look at outcome studies. Supplemental zinc, tends to fail in almost all studies. The exception were some zinc lozenges shortening the course of the common cold in some marginal study. Nothing long term. This ought to make us pause. Also remember - zinc from diet is not only bound to proteins within a food matrix, but we access it in physiological time. A bolus of near elemental zinc is an entirely different effect, even if the amount may be nominally the same.
Second, it’s very easy to accumulate excess zinc which leads to a laundry list of deleterious consequences. In view of that I would not supplement daily in RDA or close to RDA amounts, because you do get some in diet, and a bolus as in a pill is not handled by the body well. Btw. we have not evolved in conditions of abundant dietary zinc, so we have not developed physiological ways of dealing with excess, instead, as with any molecule that’s scarce, we tend to preferentially accumulate it. When there’s abundance, we can easily accumulate to excess.
So my approach is to get enough, but just enough, and not top off - and because a pill is a bolus, I would not exceed 10mg in a pill. When supplementing we often tend to go a bit extra, which is fine with many molecules (vit. C, just pi$$ it out), but zinc is not one of them - you want to get it right, not too much.
My personal caution also centers on zinc accumulation in the brain and neurotoxic effects, dementia pathologies etc. We have to be especially cautious with metals and the brain: iron, copper, zinc etc. Here’s a balanced review looking at both sides.
Zinc in the Brain: Friend or Foe?
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For independent labs (there is a cost), i belong to Consumerlab.com. The cost is low but they do a thorough job of checking supplements of all kinds and do cost comparisons also.
Just found out D3 vital for the preservation of our Telomeres, which we need for Rapamycin to be successful.
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Interesting, thanks. And I assume there’s no way to measure/assay that, since the circulating level might not reflect what’s stored in tissue?
This is true of many molecules, so often we don’t really bother to measure them in the serum. And even for the ones we do measure, it often says nothing much, because the body makes great efforts to keep - for example sodium - within a pretty narrow range in circulating blood.
That said, for most healthy people, zinc status can be reasonably assessed by serum, urine and hair. The problem is that excess accumulation does not show up reliably in hair as different tissues accumulate at different rates - how much accumulated in your brain is not reflected by hair. So serum, urine and hair can tell us if you are likely deficient or not, but tells us nothing about brain accumulation.
Methods of assessment of zinc status in humans: a systematic review
By the way even assessing zinc deficiency on a population level is surprisingly difficult:
Determination of Zinc Status in Humans: Which Indicator Should We Use?
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I supplement with a lot of sodium and it is interesting that I am just at the top of the normal range. If I stop supplementing I drop to the bottom end or possibly below