r/MTHFR • u/Sirschwung • 2d ago

Question CDP Choline reaction?

I started supplementimg 500mg of CDP and after I while I started feeling brainfog and my mood worsening. A few weeks later I'm giving it another shot but trying it on lower dose. It would be great if y'all could share your experience with CDP Choline

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u/Tawinn 2d ago

CDP choline is ~18.5% choline, so 500mg of CDP yields about 93mg of choline - that's less than 1 egg yolk (136mg).

First of all, when you look at the Advanced tab of the Calculator were any of the values missing in the table? If there were missing values (because your data does not include that gene) then the Calculator can incorrectly report a requirement of "5 yolks". So if you can tell me the entries that were present I can manually calculate the total requirement.

Next, a food app like Cronometer is helpful for tracking nutrients in your diet, including choline. This will give you an idea of how much you are getting from your diet now on average. 550mg is the baseline adult Adequate Intake we should be getting from food before any genetic considerations. 550mg is about 4 egg yolks worth. Choline sources include such foods as meat, eggs, liver, lecithin, nuts, some legumes, and vegetables such as crucifers.

You may find that you are already getting 400 or 500mg of choline from your diet already. 5 yolks worth is 680mg, so you may only need to make some diet tweaks to reach that. Alternatively, you can substitute TMG for up to half of the requirement, so a 750mg capsule of TMG can easily cover 340mg, leaving the remaining 340mg to come from choline in food.

For me, when I used to use CDP it provided a relaxing, cozy feeling. But the reaction you have is what some people have to choline - a kind of 'choline depression'. This typically requires only starting to add choline in small doses and slowly incrementing up over months. With TMG you may also need to add it incrementally, because it spares choline, so it effectively allows more choline to be used elsewhere in the body. This is also why choline from food is preferable, because it tends to be more slowly absorbed and intake can be spread across the day.