Why You Probably Should Not Take SAMe

And what you can do instead…

SAMe is found in virtually every single cell in your body.

(Note: SAME is short for S-adenosylmethionine, also known as SAM.)

It’s involved in producing neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, detoxifying the liver from toxins and alcohol, supporting the gut-brain connection, and even regulating the expression of your own genetic code.

It’s sold as a supplement in the USA, but it’s so powerful that some countries (like Germany, for example) designate SAMe as a prescription medication for depression and joint health. It’s even being studied for Alzheimer Disease and other forms of dementia.

And SAMe does all that by powering one central process in the human body:

Methylation.

So when you hear people speak about “methylating” properly and taking “methylated” supplements, all of that comes down to one final goal in the equation:

Increasing your levels of SAMe.

That raises the question: If all this methylation effort is going towards increasing this one molecule in the body, why not just take that molecule directly? The answer is somewhat nuanced but extremely important, as taking SAMe inappropriately (which I argue is the case for most people) can be harmful.

But firstly:

Who should take SAMe:

Biochemically speaking, SAMe is useful in cases where there’s some hidden, unidentifiable genetic deficit that blocks your ability to effectively make SAMe on your own. In other words, if you’ve tried everything to fix your methylation deficit (and I mean everything—most people who claim to have tried everything absolutely have not) and you’re still not increasing your SAMe levels sufficiently (and you’ve determined that you actually need to do so), then SAMe supplementation might be useful in this scenario.

It might be that your methionine is sky high but your SAMe levels won’t budge.

Or that your methionine is actually very low despite carefully adjusting your methylation factors (and cofactors).

Note, the only way to really know for sure whether either of the above two scenarios are happening is to actually test your SAMe and methionine levels.

A second scenario is treatment-resistant psychological disorders, like depression. There are studies to verify this use case—but it’s still not for everyone.

The problem is: SAMe can actually worsen some psychological disorders as well (more on that later).

Another use case for SAMe would be severe liver disease or osteoarthritis that simply does not respond effectively to anything else. These would both be potentially responsive to SAMe (supplemented correctly).

But the fact remains that:

The vast majority of people will not benefit from SAMe supplementation.

And the central underlying reason for this is SAMe’s half-life.

The half-life of SAMe in the bloodstream is very short, typically only around 100 minutes. That means that, after you take a SAMe supplement and it’s absorbed into the bloodstream from the digestive tract, it’s rapidly filtered out, so SAMe supplements remain at significant levels in your body for only a matter of hours.

This can create rapid, wide fluctuations in your blood’s SAMe levels, which you don’t want.

The body tightly regulates SAMe levels because of its effect on vital processes like gene regulation and neurotransmitters levels. If your SAMe is swinging wildly due to supplementation, this can wreak havoc on your body’s internal self-regulation and balance.

The other problem is overmethylation.

You may have heard of this term—it’s frankly widely misused and misunderstood (I intend to write on this sometime in the future)—but in this context:

SAMe is the most likely supplement to cause overmethylation symptoms—which can be highly unpleasant and range from resistant anxiety and a racing heart to joint pains and body-wide inflammation.

Whereas the goal of idiosyncratically fixing your methylation based on your individual genetics is (partly) to allow your body to optimally produce its own SAMe at the levels that it wants, supplementing with straight SAMe forces your SAMe levels to a place your body may not want. This can put huge stress on other methylation cofactors and biochemical pathways in the body, ultimately putting you in a place that’s hard to get out from.

What to Take Instead of SAMe

Keep in mind that none of this is an actual recommendation to you specifically, but educationally speaking:

You need to start by at least testing your methylation genetics and, if you’re able, methylation biomarkers. This will give you a baseline foundation of where your weaknesses lie so that you can determine exactly what methylation cofactors (and how much) you should be taking to increase your SAMe levels optimally and stably (If you already have genetic results, I can do that for you).

This is vastly better than just taking SAMe (or other methylation supplements) because it saves time (sometime years), self-experimentation, and potential complications.

But if you don’t want to get testing, you know your SAMe levels are low, and you want to go the brute force self-experimentation route, then creatine is a highly effective way of increasing SAMe levels much more stably and effectively than just taking straight SAMe. Around 2.5-5 grams per day is the general benchmark for most people, but—as with everything in the supplemental world—it must be taken with the right cofactors and complementary dietary measures.

A note from Dr. Malek:

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~Dr. Malek

Keep in mind that this is not official medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is established through this article or through any other information provided on this website.