So I normally really like this nutrition site and the Dr. does a pretty good job of going through the science and explaining it to lay people... however this video caught me by surprise a little.




That quote comes from a 2004 paper in the Journal of Chromotagrphy...discussed in the video..

Any thoughts from the community here?
Anyone shed light on norharman and harman toxicity or lack of toxicity?
I know all compounds are toxic in high doses...

The video is here: http://nutritionfacts.or...sential-tremor-and-diet/

If there is any truth to this my day's of using syrian rue are done...

I can investigate this a bit more this weekend but, some questions:

At what dosages do they mention it`s toxic, and at what dosages is it present in rue? Also, what is their solubility in water, etc?

I know I haven´t detected any of those compounds in rue extracts.

Also, when they say these compounds are implicated in those diseases, as you very well know it might not be a causal relationship, so that´s something else to have in mind. I´m pretty sure there have been some papers mentioning the relative safety of rue pharmacology, plus there´s quite some ethnobotanical use history which does not seem to show such things but I cannot affirm for sure if they looked at those specific things you are worried about.

Endless. I'm not positive about Harman or norharman in rue either. I was deriving that from this erowid link.

Your other points are very valid. The basic argument was that these compounds build up over time.

The reason this alarmed me is that I was using a fair amount of rue and developed a strange twitch in my upper left arm... it lasted close to a month and a half and then vanished. I never tied it to rue usage or anything, but after watching the above video I mentally reconstructed the time line and it does seem like it has been about a month and a half since I last used rue.. obviously correlation doesn't imply causation and the good Dr in the video even mentioned that... but they were able to induce tremors in people with large doses (I don't have the paper so I don't know the dose) of harman which then subsided after discontinuation of the drug...

I'll be curious what yours and others thoughts/questions are after watching the video.. it's only 5 minutes or so.
I don't have the same access to inter library loan that I used to so I can't get the papers without going through friends... But I'm guessing others here will be able to post the entire papers he covers in the video.

Is it possible they mean harmaline instead of harman? Harmaline administration has been used as a pharmacologican model of essential tremor in animans.

Also, the phrase "has been implicated' means absolutely nothing. It only implies lazy literature survey." Implicated" in what kind of sense?

I don´t think there is harman in peganum harmala.

I´ve been looking at the different refferences and it seems to have been bad source checking from the different publications. For example:
Asgarpanah & Ramezanloo 2002 cite it has harman, and use as a reference Mahmoudian et al 2002 and Fathizad et al., 2007. But both these papers only mention harman being used as a standard in the analysis, but NOT found in the plant. The Mahmoudian paper even specifically says: ¨Harmane content of the extract, if present, was below the detection limit of the HPTLC analysis that was used¨

The other one doesn´t even mention harman appart from saying it was used as an analytical standard.

Maybe erowid just quoted one of those and never bothered to check the sources.

I´ve just skimmed over 5 other different phytochemical analysis for p harmala and none show any harmane.

Also, at the end of the video you`ve posted, the narrator says himself that some products with high harmane content like tobacco do not induce ET so something else might be at play.

Interesting about your arm twitch thing, no idea if it´s related or not. Do what you feel is safe, but at least in the sense of harmane presence, seems it´s not an issue.

Thanks for the response guy's.

Endless I suspect you are right and it's unrelated.... and twitching can have several other causes.

Your analysis of rue, and not finding harman hold a good bit of weight for me.
Honestly I suspected there wasn't much to this, but what community knows more about harmals than this community? lol

Thanks again guy's for your responses.

I brought these issues up (after talking with mydriasis) back when people were first starting to explore plants in the Eleagnaceae, but it kind of fell by the wayside as there wasn't that much engagement with it and I found myself without the time to play around with Russian Olive.

The two mentions I made were in this post and this post.

Rivea said he noticed that harmalas really magnify his essential tremor, iirc.

..i think Infundibulum is right here..

from "Plasma harman and norharman in Parkinson's disease." Kuhn et al. J Neural Transm Suppl. 1995;46:291-5.
..this paper is cited by a few references..there is no conclusive evidence here..it just as easily could be speculated from this that harman is 'implicated' in countering parkinson's disease effects..