Jazz1, In the interest of possibly sidestepping the need to use Nature's Sunshine and filter out all of the fillers, not to mention opening up thousands of capsules to do so, can you ask Susan to see if she can get a ballpark price on bulk equol to get a sense of how many people we need and what the price might be? I had approached 2 other companies about formulating a topical and they declined saying equol was too expensive......but that was only in a quantity enough for 1 person. The price of equol seems to vary based on the type. For example, Caymen sells 25 mg of S-Equol and R-Equol for $280 but +/- Equol (I assume this has both types) at $117 for 25 mg. And Enzo sells 25 mg (presumably +/- equol) for $138. When I asked Enzo for bulk pricing, they said they didn't sell to individuals. A topical would obviously never work at any of those price points. But I have to assume that at some quantity equol is inexpensive enough to formulate in a reasonably priced topical otherwise Nature's Sunshine couldn't put 6 mg in 1 capsule. It might also be beneficial to have Susan ask about the solubility of equol. On the Caymen s-equol datasheet it says s-equol is soluble at 15mg/ml (
https://www.caymanchem.com/pdfs/10010173.pdf) while the +/- equol and the r-equol has a solubility of 10mg/ml (
https://www.caymanchem.com/pdfs/13184.pdf &
https://www.caymanchem.com/pdfs/10010172.pdf ) I don't see from the research article whether they used S,R or +/- equol in their trials. But my understanding is that S-Equol is preferable on the theory that while they both have a similar affinity for DHT, S-Equol has a much stronger affinity for the Estrogen B receptor as well a stronger anti-inflammatory benefit. I'll see if I can dig up some research on that.
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