https://nw-adhd.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ADHD-Medication-Information-Sheet
i know vitamin c basically neutralizes adhd meds but lemonade good
Transcript
[three users express surprise]
Wait for real
Wait really???
vitamin c does WHAT?
Transcript:
Food restrictions: All of the first line medications for the treatment of ADHD are moderately strong bases (pH of 12-13). If they are present in the small bowel at the same time as a weak organic acid (citric acid or ascorbic acid/Vitamin C) the medication forms an insoluble salt and can not be absorbed into the body. You may have swallowed your medication but, [following is underlined in red]
if you washed it down with orange juice or a soda, none of the medication actually gets into your blood stream.Therefore, avoid the following foods for an hour before and after your dose. Once you feel the benefits of the medication, you may eat or drink anything you wish.
Transcript
[just the bold bits, there's a lot to type otherwise] FOODS TO AVOID WITHIN 1 HOUR BEFORE AND AFTER TAKING MEDICATIONS
1. Natural and artificial juices
2. Soft drinks
3. Poptarts, granola bars, Power Bars -- anything that comes in a foil packet, can sit on your shelf for months without going stale and be eaten without cooking must have high levels of preservatives such as citric acid.
5. Vitamin C
6. Oral suspension medications
yea lol
I have been struggling
For a long fucking time
with why my adderall was having such uneven effects and varying efficacy
and the weird pattern of what made it work and not work and if it was building up in my system or not
and fucking nobody told me I shouldn’t drink a glass of Kool-Aid to take the pills with
or eat fucking Pop-Tarts or Life cereal
this is the most useful information I have ever received from tubr and it seems to be confirmed by several other places upon searching
so this actually should be spread like wildfire like actually
tumblr user firebirdscratches:
Me reading this realizing tunglr dawt kom gave me more information about my medication than MYDOCTORRRRRSSSSSS MYYYYYYYY FUCKENNNNN DOCTORSSSSS PLURAL MULTIPLE DOCTORSSSSSSSS
https://firebirdscratches.tumblr.com/post/635053584689545216/brazenautomaton-mwg-7-mwg-7-i-know-vitamin-c
ProTip: if you drink the Panera Death Lemonade, the sheer amount of stimulants in it will make up the difference
They should lean in and make that the official name, then re-brand the entire store as Panthera, a metal theme'd bread shop.
Now I'm going to spend the next five minutes coming up with bread and metal themed names for restaurants
#1 3YEAST
Wait what? What? Vitamin C neutralizes meth?
WHY DON'T THEY TELL ME THESE THINGS?
[ACTIONABLE THREAT OF VIOLENCE TOWARDS US MEDICAL CARTELS]
I mean, its not really the vitamin c there bud. If you're drinking lemonade, its the citric acid where most of that acidity comes from (which is what the documents say). Same thing with soda really; carbonated water is acidic from carbonic acid (CO2 is acidic), but not really strong enough survive the stomach, which is why they only call out sodas with citric acid added.
They only really call out vitamin C as 'large doses', of 1000mg or more, a once-a-day pill only has 180mg vitamin C.
I have been on this drug for 30 years, how am I only learning this now
Good to know, vitamin C is part of my vitamin meth combo along with b12 and zinc
I mean like vitamin version of meth, not for doing meth
I phrased that really poorly
Wait, what are you saying? Isn't Vyvanse effectively the same drug?
Yes but that sheet OP linked says otherwise about the interaction (and at least tracks with my personal experience, given OJ is my favorite juice and I've literally swallowed vyvanse with it before) but I did do some research & found the Vyvanse monograph and it does mention
Acidifying and Alkalinizing Agents: Agents that alter urinary pH can alter blood levels of amphetamine. Acidifying agents decrease amphetamine blood levels, while alkalinizing agents increase amphetamine blood levels. Adjust VYVANSE dosage accordingly
I will eat a tablespoon of baking soda with my vyvanse tomorrow and report back with my findings.
Vyvanse instructions literally tell people to pour the capsule into orange juice if you have difficulties with swallowing pills (from memory).
Takeda is really not putting in any effort to help mitigate this lack of knowledge about Vyvanse here.
The best description I've heard is that with ADHD (and probably other neurodivergent conditions) you need to become your own pharmacist, psychiatrist and research specialist. There is so much information out there and the effects are so different for everyone. It's a constant balancing act of benefits, side effects, dosage, timing, food and choice of drug.
The pharma company "just" need to prove that there is a significant benefit above placebo for a certain fixed dosage under controlled conditions. We need to figure out how to use it in our normal daily ADHD riddled lives.
That is uncannily accurate.
My psychiatrist once remarked that he doesn't have any other patients who he can talk to on the level that he does with me after having a discussion about stuff (we were talking about my response to methylphenidate vs dexamphetamine and I compared the mechanisms of action of each and gave my best guess at what that indicated for my case). He treats me sorta like I'm a junior partner or I'm in residency - I come to him with my observations, symptoms, side effects, hypotheses and I provide the ideas for treatment while he brings the expertise, he deals with the more complicated stuff like interactions between meds, and he's the one to sign off on things or to veto them.
My case is kinda tricky because it's complex and I struggle with the side effects of stimulants so we've had to fumble around and do a lot of tweaking and balancing of side effects by using other meds and shit like that. I wish I could be the one to pop a Vyvanse and I'm golden but unfortunately that's just not how it is for me.
I basically got thrust into being my own psychiatrist and pharmacist and research specialist by circumstance and I drowned in the deep end until I started learning how to swim. I'm just grateful for being lucky enough to have the kind of brain that learns quickly and is good at heuristics and that kinda stuff.
(To be clear though, I don't fancy myself as some sort of expert. A first year psychiatry student would absolutely wipe the floor with me. I just happen to have a lot of problems and a lot of time on my hands lol.)
Happy to hear that it mirrors your experience. It's a weird ass condition for sure.
A first year psychiatry student would absolutely wipe the floor with me.
Doubt that. I've met plenty of them and knowledge about ADHD is not really as prominent as one might think for something that affects possibly 5% of people. All the science dealing with the psyche is still extremely young and underdeveloped. In most cases we have no idea what a drug does to a brain. Just look up Lithium. Stops people from killing themselves better than anything else and nobody knows why. Until recently we thought that people would just "grow out" of ADHD. The naming schemes and definitions change frequently and adoption varies wildly throught the world. It's a mess and they don't always know better.
I would trust a fellow affected person with 327 browser bookmarks about ADHD medication, diagnosis and therapy more than any neurotypical student at pretty much any point. And even some doctors.
Lithium is kinda wild.
There's at least two population studies that have been done which I know of that looked at places that had elevated levels of lithium in their local water supply. Obviously this is nowhere near the dosage of lithium that, say, a bipolar person might be on because lithium has a really narrow therapeutic window (i.e. to get lithium to a level where it's considered effective as established in psychiatry [at least according to the orthodoxy] is just slightly below the doses that become toxic.)
So anyway, two studies on populations who are essentially microdosing lithium. The results? Lower rates of suicide that which are statistically significant.
Makes you wonder if they should be adding a little bit of lithium in with the fluoride, doesn't it? Lol
Lithium is one of those drugs that has some really neat effects and I think it's overlooked for treatment-resistant depression because it's well known as a mood stabilizer and the first-line treatment for bipolar so it gets a bit pidgeonholed because of that fact. Sometimes I wish that prescribing doctors would try going off the beaten path a little bit with the meds they try on their trickier cases instead of just playing SSRI roulette over and over again.
The more you know. I have a cold so took a bunch of vitamin C but also vyvanse.
Don't wanna be annoying, but vitamin C literally does nothing for a cold. It's a myth long disproven. It just makes your pee slightly more expensive.
It's metabolized into dextroamphetamine after absorption in the lower GI tract, hence no interaction potential there. In theory it's susceptible to the vitamin c megadose issue thru altering urine pH.
Edit 3: that said idk how much vit c youd have to take to significantly affect blood amphetamine levels via the urinary mechanism
I know chugging orange juice can help getting speed out of your system from experience as a speed freak. This was street knowledge for a while now.
that's cool when medical literature and street knowledge agree, IMO
If you're gonna do hard drugs you're gonna pick up medical knowledge cause otherwise you die.
Vyvanse/Elvanse (why the fuck they have different names in EU and US is just beyond me) are a so called prodrug called Lisdexamphetamine, a derivative of Dexamphetamine that has the aminoacid L-Lysine bound to it. This compound is inactive and has to be absorbed through the gastrointestinal system and then converted in your bloodstream into Dexamphetamine. This delays the peak level by about an hour and makes it more resistant to ph-levels and the influence of food.
Like the others wrote, it's probably not entirely inert to acidic environments but apparently much better than Adderall (raw Dexamphetamine) and Ritalin/Concerta (Methylphenidate).
Learned this the hard way because the doctor didn't bother to teach me anything about the medicine.
The inverse also applies here: be cautious with alkalinizing things that you might consume (You're a westerner? That means you're likely only going to need to watch out for OTC heartburn remedies.)
Also it's a handy tip for if you accidentally took double your dose or if you took a dose too late at night and now you can't sleep - consume a decent amount of something acidic like some OJ or take some vitamin C and it should crash your amphetamine levels out of your bloodstream.
Edit: But don't do this often as it may increase the risk of kidney damage, as per Poisoning and Drug Overdose by Olson
Edit 2: I remember trying to dig up conclusive info on the pharmacokinetics of AMP vs MPH and not getting much on MPH, upon another look it still seems pretty sparse but it appears as though MPH is not affected by urinary pH in a significant way as per this article (see: 3.5 Elimination):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17425255.2019.1675636
This isn't the picture that I've gotten from literature but I'm not a doctor nor am I good with chemistry so take this for whatever it's worth:
Show
(Sakai 2010)Show
(Olson, Poisoning and Drug Overdose 6e)Show
(Matsuzaki 2018, Towards Further Verification of Physiologically-Based Kidney Models: Predictability of the Effects of Urine-Flow and Urine-pH on Renal Clearance)it's about making your urine more acidic, not your blood. this is oversimplifying but think of it like, acidic urine traps the molecules there and removes them from circulation to be pissed out. your kidneys are always filtering them out to some degree but acidic urine effectively amplifies that process.
I used to consume alkaline stuff for funsies back when I was first introduced to adderall.
Also it’s less funny to me knowing now that I really just needed to be actually medicated rather than randomly taking it
Oh thank god. Coke is still ok (Though I'm not sure how phosphoric acid is much better here)
Yeah, if you're doing coke instead of amphetamine you can drink lemonade with it.
The opposite also works. You can use tums before taking your Adderall to make it stronger
How does that explanation make any sense? Stomach acid has a pH between 1 and 3, similar to lemon juice, so if the acid-base reaction was the issue then medications wouldn't work in the first place.
True, but the explanation still doesn't make sense. Either pH is relevant or it isn't.
the text specifically notes that "weak organic acids" form the insoluble salts so it probably can't do that with stronger ones (like stomach acids)
That's a fair point, I missed that.
I'm still skeptical, given the lack of sources and the lack of reliable information elsewhere. But you're absolutely right that the the weak/organic qualifiers may be important.
Vyvanse users stay winning yet again
