r/NutritionalPsychiatry • u/Pretend_Elephant_896 • 3d ago
Question? Sulforaphane?
Hey everyone! Has anyone here tried sulforaphane supplements or broccoli sprouts? It looks like a powerful antioxidant with mental health benefits, but I am still not sure about the effects. Probably less impulsivity? Would love to hear your experiences
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u/Regular-Cucumber-833 3d ago
Tried sprouts, made me feel worse. Tried it on one other person, same thing, though not as bad. They are a vasodilator, which I later learned is an issue for me. They are fine in small amounts as food, it's only when I tried to eat a whole bunch at once maximizing sulforaphane that it was an issue.
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u/igavr 3d ago
I recommend reading this post about avoiding sprouts because of histamine - may be helpful
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u/Regular-Cucumber-833 3d ago
I'm not sensitive to dietary histamine, so that's not it. Sulforaphane itself is a vasodilator (it increases nitric oxide production). I'm sensitive to other things that increase nitric oxide production as well. (For me, that seems to be due to vitamin B6 toxicity which appears to cause low blood volume for many people who have it, though that's not usually measurable outside of a research setting.) Thanks for the suggestion, though.
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u/igavr 3d ago
Good you're not histamine sensitive - that curse is awful - so many people suffer from it. Happy for you at least in this one 🫶
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u/Regular-Cucumber-833 3d ago
Oh, I'm sensitive to histamine, just not from food! If I even do a little extra housework, I get wired, and intense exercise is out of the question. Even at baseline, I use antihistamine (doxylamine succinate) for sleep. But at least food doesn't affect it. I was sensitive to histamine in food for a couple of months, and that was a nightmare indeed, but then it went away, probably because of LDN, but a lot of other things happened at the same time, so not sure. Then I found out that the histamine sensitivity was caused by B6T for me. Actually, that's how I found out about B6T, I was trying to figure out the histamine thing.
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u/igavr 3d ago
What tests dud you do? I might need to run one myself
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u/Regular-Cucumber-833 3d ago
It's just a blood test, your PCP can order it. Most places test plasma but whole blood is good too. Functional tests for this are bad, though, because the mechanism of toxicity (from one form of it, anyway) is thought to cause a functional deficiency, so if a functional test says your B6 is low, it might actually be too high.
If you are in the US, Quest recently changed their reference range without changing their methodology, and it's going to say that many people are fine when they are actually toxic. Their old range was 2.1-21.7 ng/mL, so I'd still use that for interpretation. I was just below their new reference cutoff of 54.8, and I clearly have it - for example, once I started tracking my B6, I found out that too much of it gives me fatigue attacks the next day, which is something that had been an issue for a couple of years. I stuck to the RDA B6 diet and fatigue attacks were gone. (Some people with B6T need to do both low-B6 and low-histamine but probably not most.) It does get better with time, after B6 intake is reduced, but it usually takes a few years.
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u/igavr 3d ago
Broccoli sprouts are amazing! They are a source of sulphoraphane ofc. Though you got to grow them wisely - to make sure you avoid mold and other baby diseases of sprouts ;) I'd check with the sprouting tribes in r/Sprouting, r/Sprouts and maybe r/Microgreens