Naringenin (& maybe quercetin) to beat the next pandemic and maybe heal from the last one - the natural way
What is Naringenin, and what does it have to do with quercetin and the next pandemic?
Warning - do not combine medicinal grapefruit derivatives with prescription medications. Drugs can be potentiated by up to ten times by grapefruit extract, meaning you can overdose on the drug.
The information provided on this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute medical advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available on this site are for general informational purposes only.
In a video by Brian Ardis, he claims that there is a significant treatment already known for the “next pandemic”. It is variously called Naringenin and Naringin. It is found at therapeutic levels in grapefruit, grapefruit juice, grapefruit peels and grapefruit seed extract.
Currently looking for the video in question
At the time I saw the Bryan Ardis reference to it as a treatment, I was studying a cancer treatment protocol that recommended grapefruit juice to wash down arteminisin (wormwood), an active anti-cancer product. I put 2 and 2 together and came up with the research listed in this article. My research confirmed Naringenin as a potent healing agent in many different aspects of health.
I am writing this article prematurely as it is very early days in the use of Naringenin to treat covid, long covid or cancer. I still have no accurate idea how to dose, for how long and how to render the Naringenin bio-available. I am collecting what I can find and will update this article as more information becomes available.
However, I intuit that this is important enough that I am personally running it alongside other treatment protocols but not replacing them. I have made up my own grapefruit peel extract that currently I am mixing into grapefruit juice to make the juice more potent. I use a small glass to wash down my protocol tablets.
Co-researchers to help me flesh this out would be most appreciated. Who else is looking in this direction?
So on to what Naringenin is and does and how we can use it.
What is Naringenin?
Naringenin is the bitter taste in grapefruit and citrus peels. When our grandmothers made marmalade, or put dried citrus peels into cakes, they were ensuring we took our medicine, in this case, Naringenin.
“Naringenin is a flavanone from the flavonoid group of polyphenols and is commonly found in a variety of citrus fruits and is the predominant flavanone in grapefruit. Naringenin has demonstrated numerous biological activities, including anti-inflammatory properties, antioxidant activity and skin healing.”
What is the difference between Naringenin and Naringin?
Naringenin and Naringin are very closely related with Naringin being a precursor to Naringenin. I think we can consume either or both, and our system will convert the Naringin into Naringenin to use it.
What are the healing benefits of Naringin and Naringenin?
The healing benefits are many and varied and all are really significant.
The article below covers the range of benefits. I have covered a few below.
Metabolic syndrome, high blood sugar, high blood pressure et al
One really significant benefit is in the treatment of metabolic syndrome, which involves the co-existence of high blood sugar, high blood pressure, high blood lipids, and fatty liver.
and
Preventive Effect of Naringin on Metabolic Syndrome and Its Mechanism of Action: A Systematic Review
Anticancer properties
There is also evidence that it has anticancer properties.
Naringin and Naringenin: Their Mechanisms of Action and the Potential Anticancer Activities
“Naringin and naringenin can suppress cancer development in various body parts, alleviating the conditions of cancer patients by acting as effective alternative supplementary remedies. Their anticancer activities are pleiotropic, and they can modulate different cellular signaling pathways, suppress cytokine and growth factor production and arrest the cell cycle. In this narrative review, we discuss the effects of naringin and naringenin on inflammation, apoptosis, proliferation, angiogenesis, metastasis and invasion processes and their potential to become innovative and safe anticancer drugs.”
And from this article:
Naringenin Impairs Two-Pore Channel 2 Activity And Inhibits VEGF-Induced Angiogenesis
“Pre-clinical studies have revealed the potential of Nar and of its precursor naringin in the treatment of metabolic and cardiovascular disorders, including hyperlipidemia, hypertension, cardiac toxicity, hyperglycemia and diabetes, hepatic steatosis and atherosclerosis2; its therapeutic use to combat various kinds of cancer has also been envisaged.”
and
“TPC2 inhibition is emerging as a key therapeutic step in a range of important pathological conditions including the progression and metastatic potential of melanoma, Parkinson’s disease, and Ebola virus infection. The identification of naringenin as an inhibitor of TPC2-mediated signaling provides a novel and potentially relevant tool for the advancement of this field of research.”
SARS-CoV-2 Infection
The research paper below claims that it might be a good treatement for covid-19.
“The goal of the present review is to illustrate the rationale that links TPC channels to the mechanism of coronavirus infection, and how their inhibition by Nar could be an efficient pharmacological strategy to fight the current pandemic plague COVID-19”
Anti-inflammatory
You can even spread your medicine on your toast or drink it with your morning orange or grapefruit juice. If you don’t want to eat sugar, ignore the recipes in the following article. I am including sugar free ways of extracting and using Naringenin later in this article.
Anti-parasitic
Like all the other elements being used to treat the covid related diseases, naringenin is an effective anti-parasitic. There is evidence that it is anti-viral and anti-bacterial.
How to use Naringenin in therapy
We can easily consume Naringin and Naringenin, but dose control and bio-availability are problems
A very significant aspect of this polyphenol is that we can buy the source in our local supermarket, in the form of principally grapefruit but most citrus fruits to varying degrees, and we can productively use the waste of what we eat, the skins. Even the juice has therapeutic levels of Naringenin, but I have no idea of the comparative doses between flesh and peel.
We can purchase Naringin powder and capsules
You can purchase Naringin (not Naringenin) in powder or capsule form. An online search led me to a few powder products and just one encapsulated form, all available through eBay. These capsule are 125 mg each and the recommended dosage is 2 per day, so 250 mg which is lower than the 600mg dose recommended for therapy.
One research article I read on using it to treat cancer made the following statement.
“The therapeutic concentration of naringenin has been shown to be ∼300 mg, taken twice daily, resulting in 8 μM of naringin in the blood, which demonstrates beneficial effects for human health”
Taken from Naringin and Naringenin: Their Mechanisms of Action and the Potential Anticancer Activities
[Edit 28/02/2024] More on dose - I could not find any definitive dosage or protocol
I found another research paper with research done on rats, that concluded that:
“In conclusion, we demonstrated that NAR attenuates NAFLD in short-term use of low doses by enhancing energy expenditure, which may be a candidate for NAFLD, even metabolic disorders such as obesity. “
“ NAFLD rats were orally administered with NAR at 10, 30, and 90 mg/kg for 2 weeks.”
If the product being administered (the NAD) is the same as the product available for human consumption (Naringin) - A BIG IF. Comparing doses between Naringin and Naringenin is inevitably faulty.
a low dose of 10 mg/kg of Naringenin for a 90kg adult would be 900 mg of Naringenin
The dose recommended by a human cancer study of Naringenin is 300 mg twice a day totalling 600mg of Naringenin
The dose recommended on one brand of Naringin for human consumption is one 125mg capsule twice a day totalling 250 mg of Naringin
The dose recommended on another brand of Naringin for human consumption is one 500 mg twice a day totalling 1000 mg of Naringin
When it comes to dose LET THE BUYER BEWARE. Let me know if you find anything more human body, human disease and human product specific that we can work with.
I have ordered this product through Amazon. These are 500 mg capsules and I will stick to the dose on the bottle: As a dietary supplement, take one capsule two times per day with water - which is potentially a relatively high dose.
Another research article for naringenin and metabolic syndrome recommends the following:
“It has been suggested that naringenin (25 mg/kg), similar to acarbose (antidiabetic medicine) exerts significant inhibition of intestinal α-glucosidase activity and caused delaying the absorption of carbohydrates in type 2 diabetes, thus resulting in significant lowering of postprandial blood glucose levels.”
Make you own from grapefruit peel
I suspect but am not sure that you can make your own by boiling up citrus peels, particularly grapefruit, similar to the recipes for making your own quercetin.
However,again dose control and establishing the bio-availability, is a problem. If any reader comes across a resource that helps us with this, I would be grateful if you shared it in the comments.
[Edit 28/02/2024] From the comments below, one reader tells us that he dehydrates the peels so they are dried at a relatively low heat, and then powders the dried peels and adds to food.
Grapefruit tea
Click the image to go to a good winter recipe for hot grapefruit tea.
Quercetin
And this brings us to quercetin. Back at the start of the covid era, a number of recipes emerged on the internet claiming to produce quinine at a time when it was getting hard to get hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine. It turns out that citrus peel alone will not produce quinine - you need cinchona bark for that. But does it produce the equally effective zinc ionophore, quercetin and maybe the amazing healing element, Naringenin?
Now those same videos are claiming that those same recipes are producing quercetin. And as they are using citrus peels I am speculating that if they really are producing quercetin, they must also be producing Naringin or Naringenin, providing that the latter is not destroyed by heat and can be extracted by boiling water - a few “ifs” there.
If these recipes are producing Naringenin, on top of the quercetin, then that is a bonus.
Bio-availability of quercetin and Naringenin
Short story, consume quercetin with fats.
But what about Naringenin? The research papers I have read all say that Naringenin is not very bio-available, and that there are some chemical things laboratories can do to it to render it more bio-available. However, those are not accessible for home use. I have not even found reference as to whether we should consume with food, fatty food or with water.
However, one research paper speculates that milk proteins and bulky dietary fibers might reduce the bioavailability of Naringin and Naringenin. Might.
Quote below from this article: Multi-Therapeutic Potential of Naringenin
“Naringenin is known to have poor water solubility, which affects its overall bioavailability”
Quotes below from this article: Bioavailability of Quercetin
“The authors suggested that, despite its fast absorption, the bioavailability of naringenin remained low due to extensive first-pass metabolism in the intestine. After oral intake of naringin or grapefruit juice, significant concentrations of naringenin have been found in peripheral blood and urine. Recently, researchers have utilized different techniques and complex inclusion methods to develop numerous viable naringenin formulations. These techniques include liposomes, nanoparticles, self-nano-emulsifying drug delivery systems (SNEDDS), and nanosuspensions to improve its bioavailability, which would enhance its clinical applications”
Recipes to produce quercetin (and maybe Naringenin)
Click the image to go to a recipe that purportedly extracts quercetin. I have used a similar recipe with grapefruit peels to hopefully also extract Naringenin or Naringin.
Videos
There are lots of videos telling you what to do with grapefruit to get at the Naringenin. click on the link to go to the search page and select your own depending on your medical interest.
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In my 1950's childhood, my mother (like her mother before her) made candied orange and grapefruit peel---part of the Christmas preparation, like the very rich and intricately shaped cookies. I treated myself to a dehydrator two summers ago, and now I dehydrate, then powder, orange peel--and add it here and there to cooking. Same stuff, without all the sugar, and no cooking. Of course, maybe we will discover that heat is required to bring out the nutritive potential.
I've a T2 diabetic friend. He's not allowed to eat grapefruit or pineapple. I'm wondering if this is because they do the same job as his pharma meds, and if he ate them he'd overdose his meds? Docs just told him to avoid them as they prevent meds working.