I will continue to take it..I mean after all it is used in Europe (IV) for a toxic liver....my ND still recommends it..but I don''t know if this scientific memo crossed his desk yet!

I think that it works, and I don't think I would trust that source.

It has made little difference to my liver enzymes so far. I take it because it's the only thing i can do besides my diet - my specialist isn't exactly enthusiastic to get me on current treatment so despite my excitement i seem to be getting a virtual pat on the head and a 'calm down'. He seems to be snobbing me :(

( i got a boxful of Microgenics Milk Thistle here under my pc desk. My footrest :) i ordered big so i won't be running out for sometime

Both my ND highly recomend it for it's liver healing, detoxing, and so many other things my liver enzymes went way way down from 6 months on it. 1 point over normal and the rest normal. I was also told to take double doses of tumeric and selinium. My Md and gastro say it dosen't do anything but then why it is always the first course of action if eating tne wrong kind of mushroom. One of my ND's wanted my to get the milk thistle in iv form, but she couldn't find where to get it. Have you tried googleing it?

Did anybody read over at the main board Lev's post about absorption and cooking? Mak...can you go visit over there and figure out the recipe? (pretty please) I suck at math and I can't quite figure out his equations! But his post #42 in the Milk Thistle thread is very interesting....

I would love to try that formula. I get it sometimes at wise womans herbals in an 8 oz bottle. Very spendy so i also do thorne or someother brand with standardized silybum or silybin. I wouldn't dare go without it. Be nice to save money and make my own. Thanks for the recipe

Well, I'm going to order a pound of seeds again. :-)

ME too...THANKS MAK for going over to the main and breaking it down for me...I boggled my mind and got a brain ache trying to figure it out!

I found on another website 'MEDSCAPE' where they talked about milk thistle not being effective. Written by doctors who admittingly dont know anything herbs or vitamins. It the article they claimed that their tests proved it did nothing for the enzymes or liver. Such narrow minds they have. Maybe they would loose one of their vacations to the bahamas if they admitted anything except tx helps.

Not all milk thistle is created equally. It depends on the soil, the methods of growing, the way it is harvested and cared for in the drying process. I bought milk thistle seeds once, but realizing that without being extracted, the silymarin content could be minute, and with extraction, the supporting factors in milk thistle are missing, I used it up and didn't buy more. Perhaps I should get a pound of milk thistle again. I would either get it from Frontier Herbs or from Mountain Rose Herbs. Organic.

By the way, not all 80% extracts actually have 80% silymarin in them. The supplement industry is not regulated and there is an awful lot of crap out there posing as good stuff. I once bought some goldenseal root and received golden seal herb or something else that was green, not gold. The roots are gold. That was a long long time ago, 10-15 years ago. Live and learn.

Consumer Labs tests independently, but membership is required to get results. I joined several years back and found that most of what they tested wasn't what I was interested in, so I got a refund.

It would be nice to have a bunch of us go in on a membership and then report the results to the group. But their reports are copyrighted and sharing them is a breech of contract or something.

So the dried seeds from the milk thistle extract contain approximately 60 percent silymarin, according to salamresearch.com. so basically to get 500 to 800 milligarms of silymarin, one would need to eat GROUND UP SEED (whole seed will pass right through you) in the quantity of 800-1300 mg daily. That's not a lot. 1000 mg is one gram. That would give you 600 mg daily. 28.35 grams in an ounce and 453.6 grams in a pound.

So if you get a pound of seeds, and want to take 1.3 grams daily, in order to get 800 mg daily of silymarin, that pound will last you 348 days, almost a year. So what I would do is divide it into 12 equal portions and put them into little ziploc bags and freeze them. Take one bag and put it in the coffee grinder and turn it to powder. Then measure it, divide by 30, and you have your daily amount.

I just weighed a tablespoon of ground cumin seed, and it weighed 6 grams. so that's 2 grams per tsp. So 1.3 grams would be 2/3 tsp. I don't think I've ever seen a 2/3 tsp measure, but if you used a rounded 1/2 tsp, you'll be good. Put it in a smoothie with lecithin and you'll be fine. I think I'd probably just use a tsp and not worry about exact measurements.

I was grinding it and adding it to my energy bars recipe. About 1/2 tsp in each bar. I would think that if you roast it lightly in the oven before grinding it you would get a better result. Once ground, keep in the fridge or freezer.

Whoa, I should have kept reading, I wasn't awake! It said the extract is about 60% silymarin. Silymarin content often varies between 1–3 percent (seed with 3–6% silymarin is considered of high quality). Milk thistle seed also contains 20–30 percent oils/lipids (60% linoleic acid, 30% oleic acid), flavonoids (taxifolin and quercetin) and 20–30 percent protein. These ingredients also contribute to milk thistle’s therapeutic actions.

That is why I didn't get any more seed! 1-3%. Up to 6% with high quality. So basically you'd need at least 10 times the amount that I was talking about. 10-60 times the amount, depending on the quality.

So daily, you would need 2 tablespoons of the best 6% silymarin seeds and 12 tablespoons of the 1% silymarin seeds.

http://www.iherb.com/Thorne-Research-Siliphos-90-Veggie-Caps/18571

according to the following article, this is one of the best, but it costs $1 a day.

http://salamresearch.com./html/milk_thistle_product.html

The article also recommends mixing milk thistle with lecithin to aid in absorption.

if this is the same study i think it was set up to fail, scroll down to the blue box that says the researchers have relationships with all the large pharma, this makes me wonder a little. http://hepatitiscnewdrugs.blogspot.ca/2012/07/milk-thistle-no-help-in-tough-hepatitis.html

How much Milk Thistle do you recommend taking in a day?

I found on the other group where a couple people's vl dropped a bunch while taking milk thistle. It was on a questionair done, I take 2 caps of siliphos 3 times a day standardized to 180mg, and milk thistle with dandelion tincture a couple times a day. sure got my liver enzines good. way way down in 6 months, my alt just 1 point above normal.