A few days into my trial of Sodium Benzoate… Having had good results from Glycine, although I couldn’t hack the queezy stomach, I thought I’d see if NaBen was as effective and more easily tolerated. Sarcosine didn’t work for me…
Unless something goes funny, I’m going to do a full six weeks before drawing any conclusions. I don’t experience positive symptoms anymore but negative symptoms are another story, they really are the bain of my life. So if I can get a 20% improvement, I’ll take it - all day long!
Has anyone done a full six weeks of 2 x 500 mg daily? So far I don’t notice any immediate effects but I’m going to give it time and hope that at 6 weeks - the results will be evident.
Will try and make weekly updates here of any pitfalls or positive results.
The taste is not so great and I don’t get the queezy stomach like I did with glycine, so far so good…
I tried Sodium Benzoate for a month last summer. It really feels to boost cognition. Too bad it seemed to make my anxiety from bad to worse, so i kinda had to stop.
Update day 11 - no huge difference as yet, perhaps less of the drained feeling and less of a desire to lie down all the time. No noticeable side effects.
I tried .5 grams of Sodium Benzoate. It really works. I like it better than sarcosine. I think 1 gram is too much for me right now. I notice my cognition is better but I don’t know how to describe it.
You need to be careful with Sodium Benzoate, it converts into Benzene in the presence of Vitamin C, a powerful carcinogen. A good dose of that will give you cancer for sure! Its a shame it works on schizophrenia, I am tempted to try it but I know better.
I tried Sodium Benzoate last summer, quit because of the cancer scare and it made me hurt badly in the liver area. In addition to that it messed up my gums, even though I diluted it a lot.
I have drinks with vitamin C in it but I don’t mix it or anything. I wait a few hours. But it’s probably in my stomach. I’ve been pretty motivated with sodium Benzoate. I think SZA is worse than cancer.
Not sure benzoate reacts with vitamin c in the body to create benzene… It’s a very particular reaction involving heat, so unless you have an impossibly high body temperature - logic tells me that benzoate will not react with vitamin c in the body. Besides, there are plenty of everyday foods that contain sodium benzoate that occurs naturally. I seriously doubt that scientists would carry out trials on benzoate if it was turning into benzene in the body.
If you Google “sodium benzoate”, prepare yourself for a firehose of stupidity. There’s a long list of sites that are convinced that while benzoic acid is a fresh, healthy, natural ingredient, that sodium benzoate is a devilish industrial chemical that will rot your soul. No, really, that’s pretty much how it goes, and since I know that the great majority of the readers here have a good understanding of acid/base chemistry, you all must be furrowing their brows in puzzlement about that one. I’m with you. I think that my favorite, in a way, is the assertion that when sodium benzoate is exposed to ascorbic acid, that it immediately converts to benzene, which cues up a look at benzene’s (most definitely alarming) toxicity. The source for this would have to be this paper from 2008, which analyzed a long list of beverages for benzene contamination, and found that the only detectable levels were in carrot juice intended for infants. Benzene levels correlated with copper and/or iron levels, and the authors believe that the benzoic acid in carrots is catalytically decarboxylated to a small extent during the heat treatment of the juice. But even the sites that don’t bring that up generally work in something about how sodium benzoate causes Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, cancers of all types, you name it. And you thought only aspartame could do it all. Somehow, turning fresh, pure benzoic acid into its sodium salt puts the Curse of the Vat onto it, and this evil stain can never be removed, as we all know.
Well it’s roughly 5 weeks… All going well, I seem to be sleeping better, less tired during the day and a bit more motivation. Unlike glycine which made me verge on hypomania, this is much more subtle, which appeals to me. I definitely notice a change for the better and will continue to take it I think.
Whilst physically I feel well, I find myself with nothing to do, where I was content to lie down all day before starting sodium benzoate - I now feel alert and want to do more. I need to change my behaviour to fit my new physical state, old habits die hard… I expect that will take some time to achieve though, perhaps CBT would be the answer. At least I feel able to make changes now and hopefully I can follow through and turn things around.
The main thing is that I feel more able to get on with my life, less drained and not so down in the dumps contemplating the point of existance.