@Sunniva interesting quotes at that link. Peat seems to suggest that organisms like oranges and cows serve as filters for heavy elements and therefore water that has passed through them and become juice or milk is safer than straight water, at least from tropical or coastal sources. With the bulk of oranges coming from semitropical and coastal places like Florida I wonder how deuterium content in commercial oj stacks up to the local water here, as I am fairly far north, decently inland, and near some mountains though still on a side of them that does not block weather exposure from the coast.

Milk from inland dairy farms would seem to perhaps be the lowest deuterium beverage commonly available to people.

It's all very interesting, but I think focusing on compounds like this where your options for avoiding it pretty severely limit you would ultimately be a restrictive and stressful mindset that may not make it worth the potential upsides. Managing your health really is a cost benefit game theory type thing were you have to carefully manage priorities to leverage maximum benefit from the least intrusive/demanding interventions.

@pannacottas Interesting, the interaction with T is one of the things I was very curious about since some of the studies I looked at showed a dramatic decrease in T when using DHT. It seems that the nuances of SHBG are a little bit of a blind spot that I should remedy. As far as I can tell currently, there's disagreement over whether a high or low level is preferable. The traditional bodybuilding crowd believes you want shbg low because you want androgens to be in the free form, while there seems to be a strain of thought in the bioenergetic sphere that low SHBG may indicate a poorly functioning liver, and more radically, the binding of SHBG to a hormone doesn't deactivate but regulates/potentiates it. I'm not sure which is closer to the truth.

I strongly believe the scalp issues that appeared/worsened with DHT were results of liver stress since that is what has usually caused me scalp problems in the past. If DHT hogged all my SHBG, would that mean a greater amount of test, estrogen, and other hormones would be passing through liver for deactivation or excretion? The studies I read showed a dramatic decline in T after a while on DHT, so the T first becoming free T and then being basically dumped out would make sense.

It seems like every second post I see on health Twitter lately comes from this new crew of people who are really fixated on not eating carbs in winter because supposedly it dramatically increases deuterium which is toxic to mitochondria. The thesis is something like eat a lot of fruit when you get a lot of sun, eat a lot of fat in winter because ketosis in lower light/heat circumstances yields more "metabolic water" which is relatively deuterium free and promotes mitochondrial decoupling.

I mean, afaict it's not a terrible thesis and I do agree that light is more important than many give credit for. However the fixation on a single substance (deuterium) sets off my diet cult/fad radar. I'm also skeptical of favoring fat oxidation even if cyclically.

What also throws me is that despite the basis of their ideas being about promoting mitochondrial health and they really are pretty "bioenergetic" on the face of it, they are constantly loudly countersignalling and ridiculing the general peat crowd. Have you all encountered this too? Did it all start with some influencer or crowd of influencers? What do you think of the thesis itself, internet pettiness dynamics not considered?

@basebolt I just measured 30 drops per 1 ml when squeezing the nipple enough to make the drop fully descend. You may be right that my napkin math underestimated the mg per drop, however I wasn't really taking a full ML and then measuring drops from it, instead I was filling the dropper to 0.1 ml and then dropping out either half or all of that depending on the day. 0.1 ml should still be 10 mg if the conversion calculator I used was right so eyeballing half that amount on days when I took <10mg doses should yield about the doses I recorded.

@Kilgore Is it permitted to say on the forum? It was the Australian lab thats been recommended a few times on reddit and the old forum

@pannacottas I'm fully aware that there are lots of lifestyle factors remaining to optimize. My current biggest focuses are optimizing light intake, movement/mobility, and amino profile of protein intake. In fact protein intake and balance and possibly vitamin E are probably the only things on that checklist from Peat that are not where I'd like it to be. I get plenty of D, Mag, and Calcium.

I knew that DHT wasn't gonna be the silver bullet for the health goals I outlined, in fact I mostly outlined them in order to explain that this experiment is very much a tangent driven by curiosity and illustrate what my "exit condition" would be if DHT had an actively detrimental effect on those goals. I understood from reading others experiences and the literature that the primary benefits of DHT are a neurological calming effect and an antagonistic effect to estrogen and aromatization.

My DHEA doses are also usually low, about 1mg a day and never above 5, and I increased them over the duration of this experiment because subjectively it felt better to take a ratio of dhea:dht that favored dhea. The 20s may be when DHEA peaks, but an individual's peak of production doesn't necessarily mean that's the maximum amount that would benefit them or the maximal amount they can use for androgenic pathways. When taking those small amounts of dhea I did not have any of the mental hypersexuality or any other negative symptoms that emerged with the DHT experiment.

You say DHEA supplemented in one's 20s would go almost exclusively to estrogen - wouldn't this be less the case when it's accompanied with a significant amount of progesterone both from direct supplementation and from conversion from pregnenolone? IIRC the logic for pairing DHEA with Preg is that preg and its metabolites should inhibit conversion into estrogen.

You say a higher DHT dose would be better - perhaps I will resume the experiment with a higher dose and no other hormones to see, but currently it seems to me that I was getting good results on the prior youth hormone-only stack and that some unfavorable side effects emerged only with the addition of DHT, so is part of your thesis that the DHT is interacting with the youth hormones in a way that increases estrogenic effects? Nothing I have read gave indication that this is a possibility. Or are you saying that my DHT dose was low enough that matching it in a 1:1 ratio with DHEA allowed the DHEA to aromatize without sufficient opposition from the DHT? Again that would be strange considering the reported and touted very strong anti-estrogenic effect of DHT.

I understand the viewpoint that all the no-risk things should be ticked off first and then escalate from there. But my personal opportunity cost and risk profile calculations at this point favor experimentation, even if pretty fringe. I know that solid sustainable results take time, and even just setting up the habits/environments that produce those changes takes a lot of time and energy. My general trajectory is solidly positive for a significant amount of time now. I'm just a very curious person and I wanted to dip my toe into, frankly, recreational steroid usage and see if I could do so without compromising my progress from other sources. At this point I'm over a week out from my last post and last dose and I feel totally normal and good, so I consider the experiment a success on that front

@milo7 So that would be about 24 mg a day for you? Do you plan to continue? If you keep going a while, you should update us as I'm curious how effects would look with long term dosage yet I'm not personally willing to try a long term cycle due to the reasons outlined in this thread.

@babou Day 11 June 2
Did not at all result in shorter sleep: woke up at 1130 after solid 10 hours of dreamless sleep.
Ejaculated around 12. Partially retained. Sperm quality normal/high. Sensation of orgasm slightly lower than usual. No mood or energy crash afterwards.

3 pm: energy steady but not high. Body comp improved compared to yesterday.

I believe I am going to suspend the experiment now and take a few days or possibly weeks off all hormones except thyroid and possibly some pregnenolone "to taste." I believe I have a decent idea now of what dht does and doesn't do for me. On the whole I'd say I'm not in love with it and the negatives slightly outweigh the positives. I'm curious to see if there will be lingering positive or negative effects after stopping and if those would be strong enough to change my opinion to sharply positive or negative, but I don't see much evidence currently why that would be the case. I also note that the positive effects felt at first diminished over the course of these 10 days while the negative effects remained about the same or became slightly worse. I suspect that this small cycle even if not enough to make the raw amount in circulation unphysiological was still enough to create an unphysiological ratio.

The return of dandruff is also a powerful negative sign to me and I do believe if dosage was higher and the cycle longer, I would start to shed hair

@babou

Day 10 June 1

No dht during day today. 3-6 mg of pansterone spread over day, 2 or 3 drops tyromix spread. Mood, libido high, energy fairly high, erection quality still down compared to pre dht, body comp diminished from highs during supplementation.

Midnight before bed: 24 drops pansterone, 8 drops preg, 14 drops progest, 15-20 mg DHT. Trying to see if I can recreate effect from first night where I got a full restful night of sleep in only 6 hours. Smell of both hormone and dmso carrier strong and less subjectively pleasant than previously.

@babou
Day 9 may 31

1140 am 1 drop tyromix 3 drops pansterone 2 drops preg. 1 drop DHT; experiment with tiny doses spread out instead of concentrated?

Poor sleep and not an easy wake up, slept in late because went to bed late. Congested and runny nose today, seasonal allergies likely.

4 pm, 3 drop pansterone, 2 preg, 2 prog, 1 mg dht.

Breathing reaction persists even at this tiny dose? Hard to tell.

9 pm 3 drops pan 2 drops preg 2 drops prog 1 drop tyromix 1 1/2-2 drops dht.

No noticeable changes until bed a few hours later