But what can we extrapolate from that dosing frequency? What do we know about typical adaptive compensation? Why was that schedule picked in the first place?
I'm not sure if we can take anything from it, to be honest, other than the fact that it worked pretty well for Wistar rats. This was a tox study, so essentially they were trying to induce some observable pathology in the rats. First they loaded them up with a huge dose for a week, to look for acute effects and serve as a loading dose. Then they reduced the frequency to simulate a chronic exposure.
As far as coming up with a human dose, in this case I would scale the mg/kg dose used in Baati by 1/6, the rat-to-human rule of thumb. I often question the rationale of allometric scaling, but in this case, the metabolic rate differences are particularly relevant. Such a scaling would result in a 0.3mg/kg target. I kind of like the idea of a loading dose followed by longer dosing intervals, but I'm not sure I'd want to go as radical as Baati did. The one thing that I would definitely change, compared to Baati, is I wouldn't stop after seven months and never take it again. I think that periodic re-dosing is going to be needed. It would be nice if we had a biomarker that could tell us exactly how often to re-dose. I speculate that glutathione ratio might work for that, but it remains to be shown. We might be able to figure something out by monitoring our aerobic and anaerobic endurance, and possibly our photosensitivity. If these things start falling off to pre-supplementation levels, that would be a pretty good indication that either we're being struck down by a hideous disease caused by our rash consumption of rare carbon allotropes, or we need to top up.