Hacker News Reader

Comment by Circuits | Hacker News Reader

So there are products on the market already or no one has a product on the market yet?

Quite possibly pomegranate... It's unclear how much it has though.

From the Wikipedia link someone else posted it looks like 100g of pomegranate is approximately 250mg, so 200g pomegranates a day to get to the point where they saw any (non clinical still) effects.

Your statement reads as though the research tested lower doses and 500mg was the lowest which "saw any effects". Is this accurate?

Yes, specifically 250mg saw none (or at least no statistically significant ones).

Thanks, I hadn't time to check.

There are raspberries and pomegranates on the market, yes.

Phase 1 study. Years from market.

...or we could just start eating Pomegranates?

who doesn't?

We can "just" start eating Pomegranates, absolutely. Personally, I find them pretty tasty, and they remind me of the Greek myth of Persephone's abduction by Hades. So I'm all for them.

But how much you'd need to eat for a clinically noteworthy benefit is the question. That's what the follow-on studies are for.

If they’ve raised capital for a series of clinical trials, you can reasonably assume the doses at which they expect to see clinical effects are much higher than you’re likely to get just from food ingestion - otherwise their competition would just be pomegranate juice pills or something, sold as a food supplement and requiring no trials of safety or efficacy. They’d never have been able to raise a cent.

In other words, no one would fund a penicillin trial if they thought people could get by eating moldy bread from GNC.

I don’t know. The dose of broccoli you need to see clinical effects from the sulforaphane it contains is extremely high, but concentrated sulforaphane capsules are sold as a food supplement without needing to go through any FDA process.

What criterion does the FDA use to distinguish a food-derived chemical that needs to be treated as a drug, from one that’s still just seen as an extract/essence of the food itself, and therefore can be treated as a supplement? It seems very opaque to me.

The article states that Urolithin-A is not produced by everybody. That acid in these fruits needs to be converted to UA in our gut. So no, it’s not always as simple as eating these fruits.

However at the same time, the gut is so confoundingly complicated that substances in concentrated tablet form are often less readily absorbed than less concentrated amounts occurring in food.

First we should see if this study was funded by that one giant pomegranate farm in California.

If Wikipedia is correct, we should start eating yellow raspberries instead; they offer about seven times as much of the compound this study is investigating the effects of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urolithin_A#Dietary_sources

Reply on news.ycombinator.com