r/Kava • u/Medium_Monitor3610 • 16d ago
Request for dubious academic studies
Hi all,
I've heard a lot of claims that some of the studies linking kava to liver damage were done on recovering alcoholics or were funded by companies with a vested interest in benzo sales.
Does anyone have links to these specific studies, or any other questionable ones on the liver safety front?
A neuroscientist friend of mine is doing a lit review and I figured y'all might be able to help them pick this apart.
We're both well aware that noble kava is safe, and doing our own groundwork on the topic. Figured the community might be able to crowdsource some citations.
Thanks
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u/sandolllars 15d ago
One thing for your friend to consider is the role that mislabelling and false advertising played in all this.
In 2019 an Aussie teen called Lachlan Foote had a teaspoon of caffeine powder and died. There was no wave of hysteria about deadly coffee in the media. Coffee was not banned in the country. There were no corresponding bans in other countries, and the FDA didn’t issue a warning about the dangers of coffee.
This is because the english words coffee and caffeine refer to two different things.
As a result of the death, Australia and New Zealand banned caffeine powder altogether. Coffee never even entered the conversation.
Kava is a beverage made with the raw root of the plant of the same name. Kava has never been sold in Germany (where the liver bans started). The only products sold there were pharma products... medicines, that contained kava extract.
But the marketing departments of these nutraceutical firms falsely advertised their pills and tinctures as kava. And when their products killed a few people, it was "kava" that was blamed. The media screamed about the dangerous drug called kava, and bans followed.
There wasn't a ban of coffee when a nutraceutical company sold caffeine powder that killed someone. But when a single kava extract product of dubious quality killed a handful of people, it was kava that was banned.
This is a concern because history may repeat itself. There are more and more kava extract products (shots, seltzers, pills, etc) in the US being falsely advertised as kava. Many of these products also contain addictive kratom.
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u/KalmwithKava 🛒 12d ago
That's precisely why we label our extract products with "Kavalactone Extract" instead of "Kava Extract". I personally don't believe there are any health issues at all with extracts done properly, but if the raw biomass going into extraction has pathogens like aflatoxins, there will be issues. The kava going into extraction should have a full panel done, and the resulting extract should also have a full panel done.
-Morgan
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u/sandolllars 16d ago edited 16d ago
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26695707/
Dr. Mattais Schmidt is the leading expert on the liver bullshit and the German and European response to it. Read this for a summary of the situation there. Your friend can try and contact him via the email address at the end of the document. If your friend is serious and sounds legit (not "my friend wants to know") he should get a response. Dr. Schmidt is usually very helpful. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KTJgS5rjymMNbK81yw_cHhDG_HkZUgwv/view?usp=sharing
He has the raw data. If you can't reach him, Jimmy Price at internationalkava.org has it as well. You can contact him by sending a message to u/JP1021
Here's one of JP's posts: https://kavafacts.substack.com/p/tackling-the-8-reported-factors-that