You look at your bottle of vitamin C, or vitamin D or fish oil. The dosage tells you how much of it you should take, so you take it. But you’re not really sure if it’s doing you any good. Well, after reading this article, this will happen no more. In here, I will teach you how to determine the right supplement dosages for any given vitamin, mineral, amino acid or herb.
Original source: here.
When it comes to determining the dosage for a nutritional supplement, there are certain things that need to be taken into account: your weight, whether you are using it for a therapeutic reason or a maintenance reason, and your personal reactivity to it. Let’s break these down one-by-one.
Supplement Dosage Factor #1: Your Weight
Does it make sense for a petite 110-pound woman to take the same supplement dosage as a 250-pound man? No. And yet, if the dosing information on the label included all possible variations, it would be well…. the length of this article.
So manufacturers naturally adjust the dosage for the average person. The “average” person, they assume is 70 kg, or 154 lbs. (that’s in Canada. In the States, they assume that the average person is 400 lbs. Just kidding.) So if you’re larger than 70 kg, you’ll need a higher dose than what it says on the label. If you’re smaller than 70 kg, you’ll need a smaller dose than what it says on the label.
Therapeutic vs. Maintenance Dose
Are you using a certain supplement to treat a specific condition? Or are you using it for general good health? Using a supplement for the short-term treatment of a specific condition will require higher (sometimes MUCH higher) dosages than for just maintenance of good health.
For example, to maintain good health, you probably need just about 500-2000 mg of vitamin C per day. But if you have cancer, you may need as much as 100,000 mg of vitamin C per day. This isn’t for cancer prevention. This is for cancer treatment. And certain doctors, who practice IV therapy (there aren’t very many of them) will actually inject that much vitamin C into your blood. One of the few doctors I know of who practice IV therapy is Dr. John Dempster, ND, and that’s who I refer my clients to when they need his services.
Another example is glucosamine sulfate: a very popular supplement for arthritis. A maintenance dosage might be about 1500 mg per day. A therapeutic dosage might be as high as 8000 mg per day for a span of 1-3 months.
In a similar vein, in my article on the tendonitis supplements I used for myself when I had tendonitis, I used relatively high amounts of curcumin (compared to what you’d find in food).
Your Personal Reactivity to It
Some people are highly responsive to supplements, while other people, not so much. If you’ve taken supplements in the past, you likely already know if that’s you. You might take just the dosage recommended on the label, and have a very pronounced effect. For instance, in my article on sleep supplements, you’ll notice that the recommended amount was between 0.5 mg, up to 5 mg. That’s a difference of 1000%.
If, however, you’re not very reactive to supplements, what we would do with our clients is have them start at the dosage that it says on the label, and stick with that dosage for a period of 2 days-2 weeks (depending on the supplement). If they get the desired result, stay at that dosage. If they don’t, increase it by the smallest possible increment, and maintain that new dosage for a period of 2 days-2 weeks again. We keep going up like that (it’s called “titrating”) until we find the dosage that works for them. That’s the method I used with George to find the right magnesium dose to lower his blood pressure.
Toxicity
So I know that some of you may be wondering “can I overdose” on ___________ (fill in the name of the supplement)?
Fortunately, compared to medications, the safety profile of supplements is much more favorable. Every medication has a certain upper limit, which if you go above it, you will experience some pretty bad side effects, and even death.
Most supplements have a HUGE safety margin, and almost none of them will cause death.
For instance, you can’t overdose on B vitamins, because if you take too much, they just leave in the urine. Most B vitamins in supplements come in either 50 mg or 100 mg capsules. But if you were to take the whole bottle at one time (that can be anywhere from 60-180 capsules), you still wouldn’t overdose (although it’s not recommended, either).
With vitamin C, an overdose will just result in diarrhea, and that’s it.
So to overdose on supplements, you really have to work hard at it.
But if you’re really concerned about overdosing, and want to be on the safe side, just Google “[NAME OF SUPPLEMENT] toxicity.” This will tell you at what dosage do symptoms of toxicity develop for any given supplement.”
