verticity
I'm interested in things
Welcome to the Forum. This is a great write up!
Regarding this question:
"Method I: 10 mL of room temperature water was added to 5 grams of powdered kava, shaken for 2 hrs, centrifuged to remove insoluble material and the supernatant evaporated to dryness and re-dissolved in water at a concentration of 1.5 mg of residue per mL."
But when you prepare kava the traditional way, there is a lot of sediment that gets through, and that sediment seems to be an important part of the beverage. If you centrifuge kava beverage, the result is a translucent brownish liquid with no psychoactive properties, because it contains very low levels of KLs. Basically it would just be a glutathione supplement at that point. So I'm really not sure if that kind of study is an accurate way to gauge the amount of FKs that you are drinking. The kava in the beverage is basically equivalent to rehydrated instant kava.
But having said all that, I do agree that traditional prep with water does have the best safety record, and also there is both in vitro and animal evidence that it really is safer.
Regarding this question:
As a practical matter, I always use a filter bag rated at 80 microns or smaller. If I use a larger pore size I am likely to get stomach upset. But on the other hand, if you do use a good filter, the sediment is generally the "good" stuff, i.e. the most potent part. But this point also relates to your comments about water extraction of FKs:Good thinking. This actually gets to a question I had about drinking that sediment. I've had some issues with stomach aches when drinking grog (I always mix before sipping to resuspend fine particles) and I was wondering if it had to do with root particles. Do you avoid drinking those on purpose, or do you just not bother to mix before drinking sometimes?
This is something I have wondered about out loud before: in that paper, the method they use for water extraction is the following:I personally don’t want to mess with flavokavains, and they’re greatly enriched in organic extracts relative to water. Here’s a nice graph showing differences between water and ethanol extraction, from Martin et al, 2014. Note that organic extraction of flavokavain B is much higher than aqueous (bottom subfigure). Similarly, Zhou et al (2010) estimate that 95% ethanol and 100% acetone are ~160-times better at extracting flavokavain B than water. One thing that makes me somewhat reassured that flavokavain B isn’t very scary at typical rates of intake is the fact that that acute liver toxicity is a very rare issue, even with organic kava extracts. If typical organic extracts of kava had enough flavokavain B to cause acute liver injury, we’d expect to see it more often with those taking organic extracts....
"Method I: 10 mL of room temperature water was added to 5 grams of powdered kava, shaken for 2 hrs, centrifuged to remove insoluble material and the supernatant evaporated to dryness and re-dissolved in water at a concentration of 1.5 mg of residue per mL."
But when you prepare kava the traditional way, there is a lot of sediment that gets through, and that sediment seems to be an important part of the beverage. If you centrifuge kava beverage, the result is a translucent brownish liquid with no psychoactive properties, because it contains very low levels of KLs. Basically it would just be a glutathione supplement at that point. So I'm really not sure if that kind of study is an accurate way to gauge the amount of FKs that you are drinking. The kava in the beverage is basically equivalent to rehydrated instant kava.
But having said all that, I do agree that traditional prep with water does have the best safety record, and also there is both in vitro and animal evidence that it really is safer.
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