R-alpha Lipoic Acid and Urine Smell

A couple of days after I started using R-ALA, I started noticing a strange smell when I pee. It smelled like burnt plastic or rubber. After doing some google searches, I come to find out that it's normal for someone using ALA to experience such a phenomenon. But that's only if one is using a high dose of it; I'm only using 100mg R-ALA once a day.

Does this indicate a problem with me healthwise?

zerx wrote:A couple of days after I started using R-ALA, I started noticing a strange smell when I pee. It smelled like burnt plastic or rubber. After doing some google searches, I come to find out that it's normal for someone using ALA to experience such a phenomenon. But that's only if one is using a high dose of it; I'm only using 100mg R-ALA once a day.

Does this indicate a problem with me healthwise?

There's no problem health wise and what you report is common.

I suppose it's because I can't metabolize sulfur all that well. Is there something that might be causing that for me, if it's a possibility? Or did you mean that the reduced ability to metabolize sulfur isn't a big deal?

I never get a smell with RLA (I take it on a daily basis per CS's top six recommendations) but did with high-dose regular ALA, which I started taking before moving to R-ALA. When I first started taking regular ALA it made my pee smell like I'd eaten a lot of asparagus.

My opinion now is that the smell has something to do with chelation/detox. ALA (both forms) is supposed to mobilize mercury out of the brain, so maybe it mobilizes other stuff as well. Sulfur is supposed to bind to chelated substances, remove them from the bod. So I'm guessing there's a connection.

However, I seem to have gotten over the stinky pee phase. I recently finished 3 weeks of fairly heavy duty chelation using humifulvate, high-dose regular ALA, and DMSA (3 days DMSA at beginning of chelation and 3 days near the end only), and I didn't notice any odor except during the days I took the DMSA. ALA provokes no odor at all any more. I'm assuming that's because I'm "cleaner" now than when I first started taking ALA. Maybe it will be this way for you, as well, if you keep up with it.

Thanks for that whodathunkit. I didn't consider that possibility until you mentioned it.