What makes a kava tincture dangerous?

[verticity]

I think the real question is: How do you study hepatoxicity? What would I need to do in order to find out if something is harmful to a liver? Is it only through clinical trials? Is there a way we can simulate a liver, and inject bajillions of FKBs to see if it really does have adverse reactions from it?

We don't know if FKBs cause hepatoxicity. Doing all of this work to stop FKBs from being extracted might be for no good reason.

In the paper above they actually used some liver cells and measured the toxicity to the cells--so they actually did simulate a liver, sort of. Of course that doesn't really say how harmful it may be to a whole functioning human liver. Whole, functioning organs have ways of repairing themselves that individual cells may not.

 

[verticity]

"...we next tested all 9 compounds against [a]... human liver cell line, L-02. Again, FKB and FKC induced cell death in L-02 cells, with LD50 values of 32 and 70 μM, respectively (data not shown)"

That means a 32 micromolar concentration of FKB will kill 50% of the liver cells after 48 hours, if I am reading it correctly. So another question is, when you drink kava, or ingest a tincture, what is the effective concentration of FKB in your liver? How much time does it remain at that concentration? I don't know if either of those are known, because those experiments would require rather unethical human studies. (You would have to dose people with large amounts of kava and then dissect their livers). It might be a lot less than 32 micromolar; I have no idea.

 

[HeadHodge]

....(You would have to dose people with large amounts of kava and then dissect their livers)

If that happened, I would pretty much agree that kava is indeed harmful to your health.

 

[verticity]

If that happened, I would pretty much agree that kava is indeed harmful to your health.

We would need some Titans like Prometheus to do these experiments on. Their immortality could be a confounding factor, though.