How much serine one should take is a decision for you and/or your health care provider. There will be no information here about the amount you should take. We will, however, help you understand the numbers and the meaning behind the recommendation.
Items such as serine are often prescribed in the units of “mg/kg/day” which is pronounced “milligrams per kilograms per day.” This says how many milligrams of serine you should take in an entire day based on your weight in kilograms.
Doses of serine often range from one capsule a day, 500 mg (half a gram), to at least 600 mg/kg/day, which is over 48 grams a day for an average adult (96 capsules per day!) This is why we sell serine powder by the kilogram, 1000 grams (equal to 2000 capsules or more). There is a safety study of L-Serine and ALS where the doses in the study range from 2.5 grams twice a day to 15 grams twice a day (see the trial here).
First, discuss with your health care provider and find out either how many grams of serine per day s/he wants you to take, or decide what your dose per weight should be. If you know the total grams per day, you are done! If not, continue …
Second, determine your weight in kilograms. There are 2.2 pounds in a kilogram, you can use this calculator:
Third, now that you have your weight in kilograms, we can calculate how to achieve the dose you and your health care provider have agreed upon.
Multiply your weight in kilograms by the number of mg/kg/day you are trying to take. That will give you the number of mg (milligrams) to take a day.
For instance, if you weigh 150 pounds, that would equal 68.2 kilograms. If your health care provider wants you to take 300 mg/kg/day, you would multiply 68.2 * 300 and get 20,460 mg. NOTE, this is how many milligrams to take a day. Divide the number by 1000 to get how many grams to take (this is easiest done by moving the decimal point three places to the left). In this example, you would take 20.46 grams of serine per day. It is generally safe to round this to 20.5 grams.
Now you know how much serine to ultimately dissolve for your drink.
Fourth, determine if you are going to mix up each dose individually or all at once? If you want to take it three times a day, you can mix the day’s worth of serine in any amount of water, as long as you drink one-third of it three times per day. Or you can mix it as you need to. You can divide the number we just calculated (in the example here, 20.5 grams per day) by three, for instance, and three times during the day you can dissolve 6.8 grams of serine each time.
