Why Results Vary From Person To Person

Where you started from

This is the big one and it explains most of the variation on its own. Almost everything in nutrition works better on somebody who had a shortfall than on somebody who did not. Correcting a deficiency produces a change. Adding more on top of enough usually does not.

Two people can be identical in every other respect and land in completely different places for this reason alone.

What else is on the plate

Someone eating a lot of fast carbohydrate has more room for an effect to show than someone already eating carefully. The same is true of activity. If your afternoons were already steady, there was nothing for a capsule to steady.

Your gut bacteria

Several plant compounds are transformed by gut bacteria before they do anything, and people carry quite different populations. For some compounds, whether you respond at all depends on whether you happen to host the bacteria that process them. This is well documented for certain plant compounds and suspected for others.

How you metabolise things

Liver enzymes vary between people, sometimes substantially, and they determine how fast a compound is cleared. A fast clearer and a slow clearer taking the same capsule do not end up with the same amount in circulation.

Medication in the background

Anything else you take regularly can compete for the same clearance pathways. That can raise or lower the effective amount of a supplement, and it is one of the reasons the pharmacist conversation is worth having rather than skipping.

How carefully you actually took it

Unglamorous and probably second only to baseline. Someone who took nineteen of thirty capsules has not run the same experiment as someone who took thirty, however similar their memory of it feels.

What to take from this

Treat other people’s reviews as information about what is possible, not as a forecast for you. The only relevant data point is your own, and the only way to get it is a full bottle taken properly while writing down what else changed. That is also exactly why a guarantee that covers opened bottles is worth more than a longer ingredient list.