Glucosamine Supplementation Reduces All-Cause Mortality: Study
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Also here is his video on Sulforaphane which Glucosamine activates. He goes into detail as to how this mechanism works. Because of his video/latest research presented I changed to taking Broccomax because you need Myrosinase to actvite the SGS for it's full effect, he goes into detail on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAb1eQbRAe0
Cochrane Review he uses as his primary source: https://www.cochrane.org/CD007176/LIVER_antioxidant-suppleme...
In the case linked, the analysis seems pretty unequivocally to not support supplementing:
"We found no evidence to support antioxidant supplements for primary or secondary prevention. Beta-carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A. Antioxidant supplements need to be considered as medicinal products and should undergo sufficient evaluation before marketing."
Did I miss something?
The research that has been done so far basically indicates alpha tocopherol-only supplementation aligns identically with unspecified-Vitamin-E-is-bad research.
And a study on vitamin a and e etc doesn't tell you much about other supplements. Just like how a study on does whether or not statins are associated with reduced mortality tells you little about whether or not ACE inhibitors are associated with reduced mortality.
Also I don't think op meant primary source as in primary vs secondary sources but meant in the sense of "this doctor primarily uses Cochrane as his source for information"
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=glucosamine
Still, I took a look at Dr Stanfield’s youtube channel (because nothing says “primary source” like a YT link):
As a side note, here's all the supplements I currently take (affiliate links):
WAKE UP:
• Sulforaphane 8mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Niacin 50-500mg ( https://amzn.to/… ) - start low to help with flushing
WORKOUT:
• Creatine 2.5g before & after ( https://amzn.to/… )
BREAKFAST:
• Vitamin K2 MK-7 90μg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Vitamin D3 3,000 IU ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Omega-3 (DHA/EPA) two capsules ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Trans-Resveratrol 500mg ( https://amzn.to/… or https://cntr.click/… )
• Pterostilbene 150mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Collagen 10g ( https://amzn.to/… )
LUNCH:
• Niacin 50-500mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Trimethylglycine (TMG) 750mg ( https://amzn.to/… or https://cntr.click/… )
NIGHT (one hour before sleeping):
• Metformin 1 gram (only on non-workout days)
• Melatonin 500mcg ( https://amzn.to/… )
• Magnesium Taurate 125mg ( https://amzn.to/… )
ONCE I can afford it (will take in the morning):
• Nicotinamide Mononucleotide (NMN) 1 gram ( https://amzn.to/… or https://cntr.click/… )
BTW, here’s what your own Cochrane link says, which suggests you didn’t even bother to read it yourself:
“The current evidence does not support the use of antioxidant supplements in the general population or in patients with various diseases.”
IANAD, but I advise you apply some skepticism to that burn ASAP.
> Third, regular glucosamine use may be a marker for a healthy lifestyle, but it is hard to distinguish the confounding effects of a healthy lifestyle from the impact of regular supplementations in an observational study. Although we had carefully adjusted for potential confounding lifestyle-related factors in our analyses, we could not exclude the possibility that the results were confounded by unmeasured lifestyle-related factors. In general, with the current observational study design the possibility of residual confounding due to imprecise measurements or unknown factors cannot be excluded for all findings in our study, despite our careful adjustment of all measured confounders.
If the sample is not representative of the broader population, then in no way will any amount of sampling correct that error.
Observational studies often involve quite large samples, but they remain unreliable because it is extremely difficult to address all possible confounding factors. Experimental intervention is the gold standard for a reason, and absent the ethical or practical impossibility of experimentation, should be used here.
My latest favorites that I'm a bit more hopeful for are glycine, spermadine, and rapamycin.
Do you make an effort to get large doses of these things from food first?
Since I tested all of my blood metrics beforehand, it's unlikely the market would have a 'perfect' vitamin for me. Especially since most of what I like to take isn't technically a vitamin.
My diet is currently pretty un-optimized, so although I would prefer to consume a lot of things via diet, it's not guaranteed at all. But the extra bio-availability and such is likely nice
Daily intake of, tomato juice, kefir, sardines, salmon, spinach, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, pistachio, eggs. You could probably get a whole days worth of food into a snack, a salad, and a soup.
I do know there are a few people in the area that log literally every substance they eat in terms of grams, and then correlate it with all of their blood metrics, and use that to try to optimize each blood metric for what correlates with the lowest mortality rate. It's interesting, but this stuff is unfortunately a lot of work for average people to attempt. Here's a great example: https://twitter.com/Nearcyan/status/1282042301980835842
I'm interested in it's benefits for autoimmune diseases but it seems quite expensive (in the US).
It's a hard area to give advice in since everyone is different, so I can't really offer much besides that I think for the best return, someone has to spend a lot of time doing their own research and testing and so on to find out what works for them
Sounds more than a little dangerous, unless you have an illnes like Lupus that activates mTOR, and even then I'd be nervous taking this drug without expert medical supervision!
On the upside, my partner has a Lupus-like autoimmune disease, so this drug will be an interesting one to track.
Personally, I do think it can likely be taken pretty safely if monitored reasonably, and I am pretty hopeful for it as well. But it's true it's a serious drug so it shouldn't be messed around with as if it's a game.
Serious questions: have you experimented with calorie restriction? Clearly thats THE method that works in every species. Second question: do you battle with depression? My current hypothesis is that any life extending drug will also inevitably lead to depression given the links shown between the sirt1 pathway and depression (also potentially as an evolutionary check but that's just me throwing ideas out).
I have before, but I would say it's not too bad right now.
It’s also funny that chondroitin supplementation does the job too, because it actually contains no glucosamine, but contains monosaccharides that are derived from glucosamine (N-acetyl Galactosamine).
I think there’s probably a very interesting answer to these metabolic questions that could shed a lot of light onto the phenotypes of aging. That said, I don’t know what evidence is out there for systemic lack of e.g. glycosaminoglycans in aged populations, or even in arthritic cohorts.
And profitable too, I have no doubt. Thanks to Orrin Hatch, US supplement peddlers don’t even have to prove their products are safe, never mind effective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_...
I bet the oft-reviled Big Pharma (who, amusingly enough, are some of the biggest manufactures of supplements too) just wish all their products could enjoy such lax standards of regulation. Meanwhile, to everyone else, I wholeheartedly recommend The Poison Squad:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squ...
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312067/the-poison-s...
I also give give them fish oil pills, but I've never been able to notice a difference.
1. The amount and frequency of glucosamine you give to your dog
2. The size of your dog (kg/pound)
I couldn't run 15 miles though! Walking 1km is risky even on a good day, even with glucosamine.
FWIW, I've noticed iHerb has started selling shellfish-free glucosamine.
I’ll definitely checkout that brand though!
"Associations of regular glucosamine use with all-cause and cause-specific mortality: a large prospective cohort study"
This does not mean it reduces all cause mortality. This is correlation, not causation.
To take this further, there might be no limit to what you could correlate to some degree with all-cause mortality, especially since it might be heavily correlated to financial status, which would correlate to an enormous amount of other behaviors (eating avocados, owning a swimming pool, having a high ceiling, having your own bathroom, having a gym membership, organic food, name brand laundry soap, not taking public transportation, better healthy insurance, smoking habits, coffee quality, living in a low crime area, etc etc). Determining cause and effect takes a lot of control variables.
"Third, regular glucosamine use may be a marker for a healthy lifestyle, but it is hard to distinguish the confounding effects of a healthy lifestyle from the impact of regular supplementations in an observational study. Although we had carefully adjusted for potential confounding lifestyle-related factors in our analyses, we could not exclude the possibility that the results were confounded by unmeasured lifestyle-related factors. In general, with the current observational study design the possibility of residual confounding due to imprecise measurements or unknown factors cannot be excluded for all findings in our study, despite our careful adjustment of all measured confounders."
> Regular glucosamine supplementation was associated with lower mortality due to all causes, cancer, CVD, respiratory and digestive diseases.
Edit: Yea, reading the study, I don't see anything about controlling for fitness level. Running and caring about one's diet alone would account for this effect without glucosamine.
Doesn't table 2 and 3 show that they examined a bunch of relevant covariates including physical activity, smoking, alcohol use, diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, statin and aspirin use? It's at least "something" at the very least and I'm not sure how you missed it if you were actually reading the study because it's very hard to miss.
They specifically control for the following lifestyle factors: "smoking status, alcohol consumption, physical activity, body mass index (BMI) and vegetable and fruit consumption."
(Ctrl+f for "covariates")
In the conclusion, they acknowledge: "Although we had carefully adjusted for potential confounding lifestyle-related factors in our analyses, we could not exclude the possibility that the results were confounded by unmeasured lifestyle-related factors."
But if someone "works out heavily and supplements," that should show up in self reported physical activity, and indirectly in BMI.
Well, not to nitpick, but people with high muscle mass can easily end up with an "obese" BMI even if they have very low body fat. And it also doesn't take very many hours of working out per week to get jacked if you're doing heavy weightlifting and supplementing.
No idea if such people are common enough to skew the results of this study significantly, but it still makes me wonder a bit.
It's more an issue if there is something they haven't accounted for, as they point out.
And no people like this aren’t common at all.
Glucosamine + Chondrotin + MSM - This supplement combination is ideal.
It's hard to say how long, it does take a day or 2 to kick in (when I said "immediately" I meant within a couple days when I start taking it. I probably shouldn't have used that term.)
I'm not very strict with medication so I tend to stop it when I don't have issues.
But especially in my elbows where I only have mild pain it seems to help a lot. In my wrists it doesn't as much, but I think the pain there is not totally joint-related.
Why not just eat natural sources like cartilage, bone broth, skin etc ?
Also the little “bones” from certain fish I expect do the same.
My 80 year old grandfather is the most fit person I know. Super healthy, but literally lifts rocks and gardens every day.
To contrast other family members are in their 50s with diabetes and heart conditions.
Keeping active is key. Remove peoples joint pain (which is what this supplement is used for) and of course they reduce mortal across the board.
We began as a species focused on making sick people healthy, and it's the way the entire system works. It's near impossible to get studies approved that tackle aging and proactive healthcare with drugs, as they will largely need to look at the effects on people who are healthy now, but will almost assuredly die from dementia, Alzheimer's and heart disease.
I understand why it is the way it is, but it's frustrating to see the system wait until you have heart disease in your 70s before doing something about it.
As for heart disease, that’s largely a product of lifestyle choices: smoking, obesity, inactivity. And doctors already tell their patients to eat healthily and exercise daily, but who wants to hear that when they’re young enough not to feel the consequences, or old enough not to want to change their ways now?
Hence the eternal market for easy, quick magical pills and their silver-tongued salesmen that promise to cure it all.
We began as a species programmed to spot the difference between a zebra and lion on the plains of the Serengeti, and we’ve barely evolved since—if anything, we’re even easier to hack now. Just ask the vampires.
Always used this site when trying to find unbiased information, and also not be to hyped about a single study. However now the effect matrix is hidden behind a paywall.
When talking about joint health: As a young and very active person my biggest problem is overtraining injuries. Wish I knew how to be able to train as much as I would like to, with just a simple supplement or so...
IANAS, but even I know Correlation does not mean Causation. The paper itself only says “associated with”, not “responsible for”. Being an observational study of self-selecting cohorts, even with the authors’ attempts to control the confounders will be massive.
Honestly, this is the standard of reporting I’d expect from yellow-bellied fish wrappers like the Daily Mail. Please do better.
No, you have to start off with daily injections of small arms fires (think .22 caliber) in order to begin building immunity. Over time you gain immunity and then can work your way up to larger calibers.
Still, I can't quite work out if a biology degree would cause somebody to understand it better..
This last is why we keep seeing muddled reports that "antidepressants don't work". Diagnosis of "depression" is a snakepit; the only known way to discern which among at least six conditions you might have, all labeled "depression", is to see what medications work, if any. Imagine trying to conduct a plausible RCT for that.
"Gold standard"? Ha.
I agree a randomized controlled trial would be nice now. But even that is potentially fraught. For example, someone else mentioned the possibility that glucosamine reduces joint pain, which increases mobility, which increases longevity. Randomizing wouldn't really control for that sort of scenario. And that's not even getting into preregistration, meta-analysis etc.
X -> Z <- Y
If you want to see it yourself, let's simulate this system in R:
# Simulate 1000 trials in which X and Y are random coin tosses (T or F)
# and Z is their sum.
> X <- rnorm(1000) < 0.5
> Y <- rnorm(1000) < 0.5
> Z <- X + Y
# As expected, X and Y are not correlated:
> summary(lm(Y ~ X))
Call:
lm(formula = Y ~ X)
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-0.6947 -0.6893 0.3053 0.3108 0.3108
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 0.694704 0.025816 26.910 <2e-16 ***
XTRUE -0.005455 0.031330 -0.174 0.862 <<< No correlation.
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 0.4625 on 998 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 3.038e-05, Adjusted R-squared: -0.0009716
F-statistic: 0.03032 on 1 and 998 DF, p-value: 0.8618
# However, if we include Z as a possible confounder, we create a
# spurious correlation between X and Y:
> summary(lm(Y ~ X + Z))
Call:
lm(formula = Y ~ X + Z)
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-2.45e-14 -8.40e-18 2.04e-17 2.04e-17 3.59e-15
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -3.370e-16 6.292e-17 -5.356e+00 1.05e-07 ***
XTRUE -1.000e+00 8.241e-17 -1.213e+16 < 2e-16 *** <<< Oops!
Z 1.000e+00 5.873e-17 1.703e+16 < 2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 8.582e-16 on 997 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 1, Adjusted R-squared: 1
F-statistic: 1.449e+32 on 2 and 997 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16Given random x, y, controlling for z = x + y trivially generates a perfect anticorrelation as x = z – y.
Like, I get that you want to make a point, just seems weird to have a numerical solution in 5 lines of code to a problem that was already theoretically solved when you wrote down the problem statement and therefore required exactly 0 equations...?
Also like the theoretical solution clarifies that this happens for arbitrary probability distributions equally, it is not specific to Bernoulli random variables.
Regular glucosamine supplementation was associated with lower mortality due to all causes, cancer, CVD, respiratory and digestive diseases.
I talked to Dr.Yang Jwing Ming (one of the few Kung Fu practioners with a Western phd and he said eating cartilage is one of the best ways to help reduce the risk of arthritis. Oh, and pig ears too, but I never tried that, being a Westerner and all.
It does raise some good thoughts on why it’s not a super food.
I don't think it's as common as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig%27s_ear_(food).
cartilage in particular is scaffolding and generally must be constructed by other cells from very basic molecules at anchor points. it's decidedly not like lego blocks of glucosamine and chondroitin that just get assembled together.
My joints have also been really cracky since I was a child. This seems a bit less but still present with the glucosamine.
But my elbow joints are often sore due to being on the computer way too much and every time I start taking it again it fades in a day or two. I don't think I'm imagining it :) Many other stuff I don't feel much benefit to.
“In the first study, glucosamine sulfate was given to healthy volunteers in doses of 750, 1500, or 3000 mg once daily. In the second study, oral glucosamine sulfate capsules (1500 mg) were given daily for two weeks to 12 people with osteoarthritis. Glucosamine concentrations in plasma and synovial fluid increased significantly from baseline levels […] but the levels are still ten- to a hundredfold lower than required to positively affect the cartilage (chondrocytes) to build new tissue”
⇒ the good news is that these molecules make it through the intestines intact, and arrive at the place where they are supposed to help. The bad news seems to be you would need to take huge doses.
> Specifically in humans, glucosamine-6-phosphate is synthesized from fructose 6-phosphate and glutamine by glutamine—fructose-6-phosphate transaminase as the first step of the hexosamine biosynthesis pathway -wikipedia
Don't get confused between mass-media popular "science" and things science can actually do - like measure whether a dozen eggs a day will raise your LDL and HDL (cholesterol) and cause heart disease - and drawing wild conclusions (especially right now) from pre-print articles that are used to sell magazine articles to use as justification to eat chocolate and drink wine under the guise of "it's good for you".
This study did not control for lifestyle.
In other news, people who own Peloton shoes likely to live longer...
> The UK Biobank used a baseline touch screen questionnaire to assess several potential confounders: ..., lifestyle behaviours (smoking status, alcohol consumption, physical activity, body mass index (BMI) and vegetable and fruit consumption),
You seem to not have read other comments, where the same complaint is made, and its answers.