lessthanhalf said:
I haven't looked into the research on black seed oil, but I'll point out that this is precisely the kind of supplement that is very likely to be sketchy when purchased from amazon, or when it's newish, trendy, or pricey.
PEA, or palmitoylethanolamine, is the one compound that's fairly easy to get and has genuinely strong evidence—by any measure, and remarkable for a supplement, since research in this area is usually very thin, to put it mildly. Several hundred studies show it lowers chronic pain, and unusually, it acts gradually and its effects build over 4 to 8 weeks. It isn't especially cheap, and I believe 90% of the versions sold on Amazon US are sketchy; one product's pills weighed 300mg even though the label claimed 1450mg per capsule. Maybe iherb, micronised is better. Liposomal would be ideal, but from what I can find, every brand selling that form is sketchy. Plain PEA requires 2-4 times the dose of the micronised version's 600mg x 2. It didn't relieve my chronic gut pain from ulcerative colitis/ IBS-d as much as I'd hoped, but it did help with chronic pain from a sensory peripheral neuropathy.
The scientific evidence backing its use for chronic pain is on a completely different level from any of the peptides, and strangely, it has no known side effects.