RON: The principal ingredient in MemorEase is phosphatidylserine, and all phosphatidylserine (PS) is derived from soy lecithin.  Originally, PS was extracted from bovine sources, but because of the BSE (mad cow) epidemic a number of years ago, all manufacturers switched over to the best vegetable source, soy.  I can tell you that the PS is manufactured in Israel and is kosher, and all other ingredients, including the capsule, are kosher.

RON:Thank you for your detailed feedback!

I would like to discuss your diet a bit. Even though you do not eat foods
with added sugar, grains are predominantly carbohydrate, mostly starch,
and starch breaks down into glucose very rapidly, especially when cooked.
Starch is just a long chain of glucose molecules, and it breaks down into
glucose easily. For this reason, starchy vegetables and grains have an
even higher glycemic index than table sugar. Table sugar (sucrose) is
composed of 50% glucose and 50% fructose, and the fructose converts to
glucose more slowly than starch does. For this reason, cooked yams are
practically pure sugar (glucose), and this glucose goes into your blood
very rapidly. Hence, the bread crumbs, the Kashi, and the yams are all
heavy sources of sugar (glucose) in your diet.

Chicken breast is said to contain a higher level of muscle glycogen
than dark meat, so this choice of protein may also contributes to your
consumption of sugar.

Dieticians and doctors advise most people with diabetes or pre-diabetes to
switch over to a higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate diet. This can help
significantly, though part of the protein also converts to sugar.  Your diet

is fairly light in protein and heavy in carbohydrates, so this may be why

you are not seeing as much benefit from your supplements.

It sounds to me like you have made a good first step by avoiding table
sugar. Cutting down on the starchy carbohydrates probably would be a good
next step.

I hope this helps. Let us know!

RON: Thanks for your question regarding bottles.  We spent months trying to locate a good supplier of corn-based bottles and never found one.  In the meantime, we have come to the conclusion that amber-glass bottles are an even better solution, and we now have converted all of our products to amber-glass bottles, though you may continue to find a few of our products in plastic bottles on health-food-store shelves until they sell out.  All our new production has changed over to glass bottles, except for bottles over 400cc.  Glass bottles this size seem a little too fragile.

Strangely, we have run into at least one distributor outside the United States who prefers our former white plastic bottles, so we will continue to look for alternatives that are not petroleum-based.  We also have looked for white-glass bottles, but white-glass bottles would have to be custom manufactured in Asia because no one in the USA seems to manufacture or carry such bottles for nutritional products.

I hope you are as pleased with the amber-glass bottles as we are, and if
you have any further suggestions, know that we love to hear them, even if
it does take time in the manufacturing world to make changes.

RON: I believe I’ve found the article that you may have been wondering about.  It appeared in the April 28, 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).  The study lumped together vitamin B6, folic acid, and vitamin B12.  Unfortunately, the lumping together of ingredients confounds the results.  Also, the doses used were much higher than you would find in a normal diet, and certainly higher than in GlycoTrol.  The question of whether vitamin B12 is important for diabetics has been well-established for many year.  There is plenty of research showing vitamin B12′s benefits to diabetics.

As you know, there are two common forms of folate:  folic acid and methylfolate.  Aside from its well-known benefits, folic acid has raised some health questions in recent research, and, given the high dose that was used in the JAMA study, the folic acid content may have been responsible for the adverse results.

A study years ago concluded that stone-age man consumed 5mg of folate per day, on average.  Merck claims that methylfolate is the natural form, so the 5mg probably was consumed as methylfolate.

Unfortunately, in the recent JAMA study, no effort was made to distinguish between the cheap, chemical-analogs of vitamins – often used in supplements – and the enzymatic-forms more commonly found in nature, which are much more expensive, but unlikely to produce side effects.

To give you an example, pyridoxine HCl (a non-enzymatic form of vitamin B6) costs $25/kg, but pyridoxal 5-phosphate (the enzymatic form) costs $350/kg.  And there is good reason why Lidtke chooses the latter for our supplements.  As mentioned above, there is evidence that the cheap form interferes with cell-B6 receptors and produces deficiency symptoms by blocking the enzymatic-form from attaching to the cell.

Likewise, in regard to vitamin B12. our methylcobalamin is twice as expensive as the cyanocobalamin that was used in the research:  $4200/kg versus $2100/kg.

Methyfolate, too, probably is 50-times as expensive as folic acid, and we have been able to find a good source.  For the time being, then, we have removed folic acid from all our supplements, and we are reviewing the research on methylfolate.  We hope methylfolate is as good as Merck and the physical anthropologists claim, but there still is much to review from a safety perspective.

RON: I am familiar with the controversy regarding magnesium stearate, and some of the arguments I have seen are beyond silly.  Nevertheless, regardless of whether there is any substance to the claims, we have changed over to stearic acid from palm oil.  This is a natural, vegetable source of stearic acid.  Furthermore, we typically use less than 1% in a formulation as a FLOW agent and only in L-Tryptophan-containing products when there is no alternative.  L-Tryptophan, by itself, will jam-up encapsulation machines.  Thus, encapsulators have hours of downtime – disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling machines - EACH TIME the machine jams up during production.

For those who claim that stearic acid is a deadly poison, I would remind them that stearic acid (according to what I have read) is the most abundant fatty acid in the human body, and consumers get thousands of times more stearic acid from eating meat.  What else can I say?  Vegetable stearic acid from palm oil is the most natural, most benign flow agent available to us.  It is not made from hydrogenated vegetable oils, as claimed by the company that is the source of this controversy.  Furthermore, it is NOT a filler.  Fillers are added to fill up space.  The only supplements where we use filler are 5-HTP and True-B6, simply because our encapsulators cannot reliably measure such small amounts of ingredient into a capsule that is 90% empty.  Also, customers would complain if their capsules of 5-HTP (50mg per capsule) or True-B6(25mg per capsule) were 90% empty.  We are exploring the possibility of changing to tapioca flour.  Tapioca flour is the most non-allergenic filler we know of.  If we do make this change, our labels will indicate tapioca as the filler ingredient.

To give a little more insight into the controversy, let me quote from what another manufacturer has posted to the internet.

“It has come to our attention that a supplement marketer, Ultra Laboratories, has been enclosing in their shipments a notice entitled “INGREDIENT WARNING, Stearic Acid/Magnesium Stearate.”  The statement contains false and misleading statements regarding the compounds stearic acid and magnesium stearate.  These statements create confusion among retailers and consumers and also result in damage to the reputation and business operations of many nutraceutical and pharmaceutical companies…

As colleagues in the nutrition industry, we are disappointed by this type of unprofessional conduct.  The statements in question are without scientific merit.

The publications Ultra Laboratories cite do not support their claim of potential toxicity of stearic acid and magnesium stearate.  In fact, stearic acid is a normal part of the human diet.

Stearic acid is a naturally occurring fatty acid that is found in both animal and plant fats.  In the body, stearic acid is converted into oleic acid, an important fatty acid that is also commonly found in olive oil and other naturally occurring fats.”

RON: The interaction between Pyridoxal 5-Phosphate (P5P) and Pyridoxine HCl that may occur (explained to us by a Ph.D. who taught at the Baylor College of Medicine) is that Pyridoxine HCl may block P5P cell receptors and possibly lead to vitamin B6 deficiency symptoms.  I am told that this interference becomes a problem when Pyridoxine HCl is consumed in fairly-large amounts.  5mg does not sound like a large amount. On the other hand, I would not go over the amounts you mention unless there is a medical condition that your doctor is treating.  There seems to be a balance among the water-soluble vitamins (and probably among fat-soluble vitamins as well) such that too much of one might deplete another.  For example, I would be sure that I am getting sufficient vitamin B2 when I am taking extra Vitamin B6.

RON: Although we still are studying the interactions between the serotonin and dopamine pathways, the two pathways do seem to compete for at least one enzyme – meaning there could be a teeter-totter effect that might need balancing.  This probably is true whether you are taking either 5HTP or L-Tryptophan.  On the other hand, the enzyme L-Tryptophan hydroxylase seems to act as a faucet that meters the amount of L-Tryptophan that flows down the serotonin pathway.  For this reason, we believe that L-Tryptophan may be less likely to produce serotonin spikes than 5HTP and may cause less interference with the dopamine pathway.  However, we have not yet seen research to corroborate this.  I briefly perused the internet and found a number of articles asserting that an interaction does exist between the two pathways.  Below is the link to just one of them, which you may already be familiar with.

http://www.neuroassist.com/serotonin-dopamine.htm

According to Medicinenet.com, Trazodone is chemically unrelated to the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) or the monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAO inhibitors). Yet Medicinenet.com still reports that Trazodone acts to elevate serotonin levels. If this is true, then there is the potential for an adverse reaction if Trazodone is mixed carelessly with L-Tryptophan or L-Tryptophan-containing products.

If the pharmacist at the natural pharmacy is familiar with the biochemical effects of Trazadone, then he may be a good person to ask if there is a safe way to adjust dosages. He is licensed to dispense drug information, and he has access to a wide range of current information if he wishes to use it. The two products you mention, Slumber-EZ and GlycoTrol, both contain moderate amounts of L-Tryptophan, and if the pharmacist needs further details, he should feel free to give us a call. He may also have access to safe protocols for changing from one medication to another that he can share with your doctor. If not, we may be able to point you to a doctor in your area who can help.