The Problem the Phrase Is Trying to Solve
When researchers test a compound in animals, they pick a dose based on the animal's metabolism, surface area, and the goal of the experiment. The dose is reported as milligrams per kilogram of body weight (mg/kg). When that finding gets used to inform a human supplement dose, three conversions have to happen: animal to human (which is not 1:1), kg to milligrams (which depends on body weight), and route to bioavailability (which depends on whether the published research used oral, IV, or other delivery, and what fraction of an oral dose reaches circulation in humans).
Acts by promoting aldehyde and alcohol metabolism of foods.†
† These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
A "clinical dose" is meant to be the dose that, after all those conversions, lands at the level where the published mechanism operates in a human body. Each conversion adds uncertainty, so the result is an estimate, not a measurement. (this is the part of supplement formulation that took me longest to internalize, because the math is unintuitive.)
Animal-to-Human Conversion
The standard correction for rat-to-human dose translation is based on body surface area, not body weight, and the typical adjustment factor is roughly 6.2x lower in human dose for a given mg/kg rat dose. For mice, the factor is closer to 12x. So a 10 mg/kg rat dose corresponds to roughly 1.6 mg/kg in a human, which lands at about 110 mg for a 70 kg adult. The same 10 mg/kg dose in mice would correspond to roughly 0.8 mg/kg in a human, which is half that.
The conversion factors are imperfect approximations, in the published animal-to-human extrapolation literature at least. They get you to the right order of magnitude, not to a precise dose, which is part of why supplement formulation involves a margin built into the input dose.
Bioavailability Adjustment
Triggers the liver to produce more of the aldehyde- and alcohol-metabolizing enzymes (ADH and ALDH) and boosts their efficiency in breaking down aldehydes and alcohols in foods as well as their by-products.†
† These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
The bioavailability adjustment is the second step. For DHM, the oral bioavailability figure usually quoted, about 4 percent, comes from rats 2; I have found no published human figure. Formulation changes such as lipid nanocarriers can raise the fraction absorbed in the studies that have tested them 3. Without a human figure, this step can only be a rough estimate for any DHM product.
The best-known DHM study shows where this math stops. The 2012 paper by Shen and colleagues gave rats injected DHM, mostly at 1 mg/kg, and measured intoxication rather than any liver effect 1. Run through these conversions, an injected rat dose still does not give a tested human dose, and it is not where our DHM dose came from. 1,500mg is where my testing settled: my own tests, and what I saw directly in the people I tested with. No study was used to set it.
How Newer Animal Studies Give DHM
Helps you feel fresh.†
† These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
A 2023 study of DHM and ethanol-induced lipid accumulation gave mice DHM mixed into their liquid diet for three weeks 4. Feeding studies like that one are a further step away from a capsule taken before a night out.
What This Page Is Not Claiming
The clinical-dose math is not exact. There is real biological variability between individuals, between species, and between formulation routes. The math gets you to the right order of magnitude with appropriate margin, not to a precise per-individual dose. For DHM, with no published human absorption data, it cannot produce a dose that is known to work in people.
For where our 1,500mg DHM dose actually came from, see DHM Dose-Response. For what is known about how DHM is absorbed, see DHM Bioavailability.