WHY 1,500MG DHM: THE DOSE LOGIC

The Three Numbers That Set the Dose

The 1,500mg DHM dose is the product of three calculations stacked on top of each other. The first is the effective dose in the animal studies the human dose extrapolates from. The second is the surface-area conversion from rat or mouse to human. The third is the bioavailability haircut from DHM's poor native gut absorption. Each one is documented in the published literature, and stacking them is what produces the input dose number that lands at the top of the bottle ^{1 2 4}.

(this is the math the rest of the supplement industry skips, and it is the largest reason most retail DHM products do not actually work at the dose they claim.)

Number One: The Animal-Effective Dose

The Shen 2012 paper from UCLA used effective doses of 1 to 10 mg/kg in rats to demonstrate DHM's ADH/ALDH induction effect, NAD+ restoration, and acetaldehyde clearance acceleration ¹. That mg/kg range is the foundation for every subsequent dose calculation in the formula.

Number Two: Surface-Area Conversion

Animal-to-human dose translation is not a 1:1 multiplication. The standard correction uses body surface area rather than body weight, and the rat-to-human adjustment factor is roughly 6.2x lower in human dose. So a 10 mg/kg rat dose corresponds to about 1.6 mg/kg in a human, which lands at roughly 110 to 160 mg of in-circulation DHM for a 70 kg adult. The conversion factors are imperfect approximations, in the published animal-to-human extrapolation literature at least, but they get you to the right order of magnitude with appropriate margin.

Number Three: The Bioavailability Haircut

This is the multiplier that does most of the work. A pharmacokinetic review of DHM put absolute oral bioavailability at approximately 4 percent in standard formulations ². To deliver 110-160 mg of DHM into circulation, you would need to load roughly 25x that as input dose -- so 2,750 to 4,000 mg of raw DHM in the worst case, or roughly 1,000-1,500 mg in better-formulated cases ⁴. The fulvic acid in the H180 formula functions as a delivery-format improvement, which is why we can land at the lower end of that range.

Why 1,500mg Specifically

The math points to 1,000-1,500mg of input DHM as the minimum functional dose. We chose to land at the top of that range to keep margin for individual variation in absorption, food-intake effects, gut microbiome differences, and the other factors that shift bioavailability between people. Going higher (2,000mg or more) flattens the dose-response curve in the data we have, where additional dose does not add measurably more effect on hepatic outcomes ³. Going lower drops you into the range where most retail products live, which is where measurable effect becomes inconsistent.

Why This Is Hard to Communicate

The 1,500mg number can look like a marketing flourish to a consumer who has not seen the underlying math. Most retail DHM products use 100-300mg per serving, which sets the consumer expectation for what a "DHM dose" looks like. Explaining that 1,500mg is the actual functional dose and 200mg is below the floor of the floor takes more text than a label can hold, which is why this kind of dose explanation lives on the science section of the site instead. 1,500mg of DHM per serving is what survives the math, adn it is the dose we landed on after testing converged.

For the cluster-level treatment of DHM dose-response, see DHM Dose-Response. For the bioavailability problem the dose addresses, see DHM Bioavailability. For why the rest of the industry under-doses anyway, see Why Most DHM Supplements Are Under-Dosed.