Spoopy Season Safety
Had to address this because I hate, hate, hate, when people online with zero medical or biological credentials write things like this
I spent the last half an hour trying to find any scientific studies that show activated charcoal effects HRT. There are none. There are a few conflicting studies, one study from 1986 claims charcoal interferes with estogen and progesterone in birth control for up to three hours, and another study from 2001, found no changes after taking 5000 mg of charcoal three hours after they took birth control. I found nothing about it affecting T. The amount of charcoal added to food items are extremely low also. It’s not going to “flush” your hormones from your body. That’s not how hormones work and it’s not how activated charcoal works.
If someone has any scientific medial papers that actually show it affecting HRT I’d love to see them. But right now this is just scaring trans people on HRT with information that is just straight up based on no solid medical evidence?
Human isn’t my thing, but activated charcoal is widely used to absorb organic toxins and medication from the gut, but it will not ‘flush things from your system’. It is used to reduce absorption into the system. Once you’ve absorbed a medication, it’s all yours.
We use it a lot for toxicology cases in veterinary medicine as a kind of cover-all, and this is a general guide.
- Most use when given within an hour of the toxin/medication having been eaten.
- If the toxin has entero-hepatic circulation you keep giving it for a day or so to continue to ‘mop up’ the compound, because in this case it’s being excreted by the liver into bile, then reabsorbed a second, third, etc time from the gut.
- Activated charcoal can only bind these compounds in the gut.
- Activated charcoal only binds organic molecules (those with carbon atoms in them)
So for a non-organic (contains no carbon) molecule, eg lithium, potassium bromide, activated charcoal will do nothing.
For a very rapidly absorbed molecule,e g alcohol, activated charcoal is unlikely to get a chance to do much.
The biggest risks would potentially be taking activated charcoal at the same time as fast acting medications, as they should be absorbed quickly but don’t hang around in the body very long, so you might see an effect from the reduced absorption. Things like anti-seizure meds, heart meds, and some anxiety meds spring to mind.
Hormones are different because they’re not an instant or short term effect, they produce their effects over a long period of averaging doses. Miss one dose of testosterone and you probably wont see a difference. Miss one dose of a heart medication, anxiety medication or anti-seizure medication and you might see a huge difference.
The two studies above are probably not conflicting. There’s this rule of thumb that there’s a window of opportunity of about 1-2 hours to administer the charcoal, and otherwise you’re probably wasting your time. So three hours after contraceptive pills I would expect to do bugger all. I suspect nobody has bothered to study it’s effects on HRT.
So I wouldn’t take charcoal at the same time as any oral medication, but a three+ hour gap is probably fine. And I’d avoid it if you’re on something ‘sustained release’, and check with your friendly neighborhood pharmacist if you take anything life-saving.
But it doesn’t magically ‘flush’ medications or toxins from your system - otherwise it would flush all the natural compounds as well! It simply binds to organic compounds in the gut.
For this reason, you can also use it to reduce flatulence.