Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My husband has had mild depression his whole life. 5-htp really takes the depression away. If you open the capsules and pour out how much you want onto a small plate then lick it off and swish it around your mouth and under your tongue for a few minutes to take it sublingually you are much less likely to get gastrointestinal side effects such as cramping or diarrhea. (Serotonin controls gastrointestinal motility so you can get more motility than you want if the 5-htp gets transformed into serotonin in the gut.) We find that taking it sublingually seems to get more of it into the brain and less into the gut so you don't have to take as much. If you are taking the whole capsule you can just open and pour into your mouth. My husband only needs about 50 mg sublingually each morning. If he takes it at night his dreams are too vivid. Our son takes it, too, in larger amounts because he has bacteria in his gut that produce a lot of histamine and the histamine creates a situation where his 5-htp is used for another purpose in the body and he doesn't have enough for making serotonin. If he doesn't eat any meat so that the bacteria don't have histidine (the amino acid that histamine is made from) then he feels fine. We are working on getting rid of the bad bacteria so eventually he should not need the 5-htp, but my husband has a gene mutation that makes it harder for him to convert tryptophan into 5-htp so he doesn't seem to make enough of it and taking it as a supplement is the only way around the problem that we know of.