I just read a review and then read this article:

www.t-mag.com/nation_articles/295naked.jsp

Does anyone know anything about this. Moderators do you have info..since you guys seem very knowledgeable. I don't want to take it if it does what the article says.

If it was as bad as the article says then no one would experience results from it. I have read that article a while back and it was for the most part dismissed on another board. The betaine will help with the effects of Glycocyamine. The GPA I do not know that much about - so I can not help in that area.

In my opinion, there is no good reason to take GPA or glycocyamine, and there are plenty of reasons not to take them. I doubt toxicity is a huge concern but a lot of thinks can be bad for your health without you being able to tell easily.

I can understand where you are coming from with GPA, but why do you think glycocyamine is so bad? Other than the fact it competes for creatine transport - which some say can actually lower the level in your body - yet v12 worked for me and satur8. Plus I thought betaine helps with the effects glycocyamine. Not arguing just curious where you are coming from.

Not really bad. More that it is useless. The two possibilities are

A. Glycoyamine supplementation elevates blood levels of glycocyamine, where it inhibits creatine transport to important tissues such as muscle and brain. Moreover, the enzymes necessary to convert glycocyamine to create are not present in muscle tissue, and it cannot function as a phosphate donor, so basically you are depleting yourself of creatine.

B. Second possiblity - much more likely. Glycoyamine is converted to creatine in the liver. So glycocyamine increases blood levels of creatine. Which does not accomplish anything that you can't accomplish with creatine mono supplementation. Elevating blood levels is not rate limiting, creatine transport to muscle tissue is. In other words glycocyamine poses no advantage whatsoever. However it does raise HCy. You can include betaine to combat this, sure. But you are combatting a problem you don't even need to be creating in the first place because glycocyamine doesn't do anything more than creatine anyway.

It's like if you put lead and mercury in a supplement and then put some heavy metal chelators in it as well to combat their toxic effects. It's great that you put the protectants in there. But this doesn't answer the question, why consume lead and mercury in the first place?

Another thing - a theory as to why people report better results than Swole (other than the placebo effect) is that glycocyamine may be in effect "delayed release creatine." In other words it has a longer half-life because for some reason or another. This would not be surprising because creatine has a very short half-life. This may also explain why people insist that loading phases work even though it is functionally impossible to absorb more than a certain amount of creatine into muscle tissue each day. When you are loading you are taking creatine 4-5x per day instead of 1-2x. So it may be a matter of keeping blood levels of creatine elevated. It may be a good idea to take creatine more often than most people do.