American soldiers who have babies after a recent deployment are at increased risk of preterm birth, a new study suggests.
The finding comes from the analysis of data on nearly 12,900 births to U.S. soldiers from 2011 to 2014. Overall, just over 6 percent of the births were premature — three or more weeks early. That rate is lower than in the general population.
However, the preterm birth rate among those who had returned from military deployment within the previous six months was 11.7 percent. On average, these women were younger, made less money and had lower levels of education than other military moms.
The Stanford University study was published March 1 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
“What’s important is the timing of deployment,” said study author Dr. Jonathan Shaw, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. Women recently back from deployment were at higher risk for preterm birth, the study found.
“Pregnancies that overlapped with deployment or the period of returning home were much more likely to end in preterm birth, which has impacts not only on the health of the infant, but also on the mother and family,” Shaw said in a university news release.
However, among women who’d recently returned, the degree of risk for premature birth did vary with their number of previous deployments. Chances of an early delivery were 1.6 times greater with one previous deployment, 2.7 times higher with two earlier deployments and 3.8 times greater with three or more previous deployments, compared with women who’d never been deployed.
Among soldiers who had babies within six months after returning from deployment, 74 percent were deployed seven to 10 months before giving birth. This suggests that, in many cases, conception occurred during deployment.
Pregnancy during deployment is considered a medical emergency that requires immediate evacuation from conflict areas, the researchers noted.
“The concerns raised by these findings are heightened in the context of prior research documenting high rates of unintended pregnancy in the military and emerging evidence that the most reliable forms of contraception (long-acting reversible contraceptives) are underutilized in the Army, especially around the time of deployment,” the study authors wrote.
“This study shows that the time around deployment is a period during which we should empower our soldiers to prevent unintended pregnancies,” Shaw said.
“It’s reassuring that deployment itself is not a risk factor for having a premature baby,” but female soldiers need to understand the risks of becoming pregnant around the time of deployment, Shaw said.
“We could tell them, ‘It’s a pretty stressful time; consider returning home and settling in for a few months before you add to your family,’ ” he suggested.
You may spend a lot of time working out, but there’s a fitness reward you might not expect: better memory in your senior years.
New research finds that being physically fit around age 50 lowers a woman’s risk of developing memory-robbing dementia by almost 90 percent.
And for those physically fit women who do end up with dementia, they tend to get it much later in life — about 10 years later than others.
“Keeping yourself fit — by exercising and having a healthy diet — may decrease your risk of getting dementia in old age. It will also make you feel better and will reduce your risk of other disorders, [such as heart problems],” said senior study author Dr. Ingmar Skoog. He’s director of the Center for Ageing and Health at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
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How does exercise help keep the brain healthy?
“High-fitness is good for your [blood] vessels. Vascular factors have been found to be related to dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease,” Skoog explained. He also said that high levels of physical fitness may have a direct effect on nerve cells in the brain.
James Hendrix, director of global science initiatives for the Alzheimer’s Association, agreed that physical fitness is good for the blood vessels.
“We’ve talked for a while about the heart-head connection. If you’ve got good oxygenated blood, you’ll have healthier organs, and the brain is an organ,” Hendrix said.
The Swedish researchers looked at a group of nearly 200 women between the ages of 38 and 60 in 1968. Their average age was 50.
The women were asked to ride a bicycle until they were exhausted to measure their peak cardiovascular capacity. Forty women had a high-fitness level, while 92 were in the medium-fitness level. Fifty-nine women were in the low-fitness category. Some of the women were placed into the low-fitness category because they couldn’t finish the test due to high blood pressure, chest pain or other problems.
During the next 44 years, the researchers tested the women for memory and thinking problems linked to dementia.
Only 5 percent of the women who had high physical fitness in middle-age had developed dementia, the findings showed. Twenty-five percent of those in the medium-fitness group went on to have dementia, as did 32 percent of those who had low physical fitness. Nearly half — 45 percent — of those who couldn’t finish the fitness test developed dementia over the years.
But the study wasn’t designed to prove a cause-and-effect relationship. It can only show an association, according to Skoog.
What if someone comes late to exercise, beginning in their 50s or 60s? Could that still help their brain?
Skoog said he thinks it can, though he expects the effect would likely be smaller.
And, even if someone already has dementia, Hendrix said that exercise can be beneficial. “Alzheimer’s disease isn’t just a disease of memory. There’s some good evidence that other symptoms, like agitation, can be better managed if someone’s active. I know my own sleep is better when I’m exercising,” he added.
If you’re starting to exercise in middle or late life, Hendrix said it’s a good idea to check in with your doctor first.
“But, in general, it’s never too late or too early to start practicing good lifestyle approaches. And, when you try to pick an exercise to do, pick one you enjoy. Whatever exercise you’ll continue to do is the best one for you,” Hendrix said.
Findings from the study were published online March 14 in the journal Neurology.
Did you know that probiotic bacteria are capable of helping you detoxify the most noxious chemicals known to humankind?
You’ve probably heard the buzz already about the many health benefits of probiotics, a word which literally translates to: pro- “for” + biotics “life” — FOR LIFE. But did you know that these remarkable commensal microorganisms, which outnumber our bodily cells by some estimates up to 10 to 1, and contribute over 99% of our body’s total genetic information, also break down highly toxic manmade chemicals which your body is either incapable, or only partially capable, of defending itself from?
Learn about some of the amazing ways in which ‘good bacteria’ help to detoxify chemicals within our body:
Bisphenol A: This ubiquitous toxicant — linked to over 40 diseases — found in anything from thermal printer receipts, paper money, canned food liners, dental composites, and of course plastics, is a powerful endocrine disrupter now found in everyone’s bodies. Remarkably, two common probiotic strains, Bifidobacterium breve and Lactobacillus casei, have been found in animal research to help the body detoxify it by reducing the intestinal absorption of bisphenol A through facilitating increased excretion.[i] The animals receiving probiotic treatment were found to have 2.4 times higher excretion of Bisphenol A in their feces, suggesting probiotic supplementation could be of significant benefit to humans as well.
Pesticides: Probiotic strains from the traditional Korean fermented cabbage dish known as kimchi have been identified to degrade a variety of organophosphorous pesticides such as chlorpyrifos, coumaphos, diazinon, methylparathion, and parathion.[ii] These nifty organisms actually use these exceedingly hard to break down chemicals as sources of carbon and phosphorous – ‘food’! – and were found to break down the pesticide 83.3% after 3 days and degraded it completely by day 9.[iii] While this test tube study likely does not reflect exactly what happens in our gut when we ingest both chlorpyrifos and Kimchi, it is provocative, and may indicate there is some protective effects in the gut, and certainly cabbage tainted with organophosphorous pesticide which is subsequently fermented as an ingredient in Kimchi would certainly reduce the burden of this chemical in the diet.
Heavy Metals: Lactobacillus bacteria found in food have been looked at as a potential adjunct agent for reducing metal toxicity in humans. According to one study, “This is because they have resistance mechanisms which are effective in preventing damage to their cells and they can bind and sequester heavy metals to their cell surfaces, thus removing them through subsequent defecation.” [iv] The study differentiates between detoxification and detoxication, the former of which is described as “the ability to remove drugs, mutagens, and other harmful agents from the body,” and the latter of which is the mechanism through which ‘good bacteria’ prevent “of damaging compounds into the body.” Because there is a large body of research on probiotics preventing and/or healing up intestinal permeability, this may be another way in which toxic stomach contents are preventing from doing harm to the body as a whole.
Cancerous Food Preservatives: Another imchi study found it contained a strain of bacteria capable of breaking down sodium nitrate, a naturally and artificially occurring chemical (used from anything to rocket fuel and gunpowder) linked to a variety of chronic degenerative diseases, including cancer.[v] The study found a depletion of sodium nitrate by up to 90.0% after 5 days. Sodium nitrate becomes toxic when it is converted in food products, and even our intestines via microbiota, to N-nitrosodimethylamine. A recent study found that four lactobacillus strains where capable of breaking this toxic byproduct down by up to 50%.[vi]
Perchlorate – perchlorate is an ingredient in jet fuel and fireworks that widely contaminates the environment and our food. Sadly, even organic food has been found concentrate high levels of this toxicant, making it exceedingly difficult to avoid exposure. It is now found in disturbing concentrations in breast milk and urine, and is a well-known endocrine disrupter capable of blocking the iodine receptor in the thyroid, resulting in hypothyroidism and concomitant neurological dysfunction. A recent study found that the beneficial bacterial strain known as Bifidobacterium Bifidum is capable of degrading perchlorate, and that breast fed infants appear to have lower levels than infant formula fed babies due to the breast milk bacteria’s ability to degrade perchlorate through the perchlorate reductase pathway.[vii]
Heterocylic Amines: Heterocyclic aromatic amines (HCA) are compounds formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures of 150-300 degrees C, and are extremely mutagenic (damage the DNA). Lactobacillus strains have been identified that significantly reduce the genotoxicity of theses compounds.[viii]
Toxic Foods: While not normally considered a ‘toxin,’ wheat contains a series of proteins that we do not have the genomic capability to produce enzymes to degrade. When these undigested proteins – and there are over 23,000 that have been identified in the wheat proteome – enter into the blood, they can wreak havoc on our health. Recent research has found that our body has dozens of strains of bacteria that are capable of breaking down glutinous proteins and therefore reduce its antigenicity and toxicity.
While the role of probiotics in degrading gluten proteins sounds great, a word of caution is in order. Since modern wheat is not a biologically compatible food for our species – having been introduced only recently in biological time, and having been hybridized to contain far more protein that our ancient ancestors were ever exposed to – it would be best to remove it entirely from the diet. Also, the aforementioned research showing bacteria in the human gut are capable of breaking some of these wheat proteins revealed that some of the species that were capable of doing this for us are intrinsically pathogenic, e.g. Clostidium botulinum and Klebsiella. So, relying on the help of bacteria to do the job of digesting a ‘food’ we are not capable of utilizing on our own, is a double-edged sword. Again, the best move is to remove it entirely from the diet as a precuationary step.
What Probiotic Should I Take?
While plenty of probiotic pills and liquids exist on the market, and many of which have significant health benefits, it is important to choose one that is either shelf stable, or has been refrigerated from the place of manufacture all the way to the place you are purchasing it from. Moreover, many probiotics are centrifugally extracted or filtered, leaving the nourishing food medium within which it was cultured behind. This is a problem in two ways: 1) without sustenance, the probiotics are in ‘suspended animation’ and may either die or not properly ‘root’ into your gastrointestinal tract when you take them. 2) the ‘food matrix’ within probiotics are grown provides a protective medium of essential co-factors that help them survive the difficult journey down your gastointestinal tract.
With that said, another option is to consume a traditionally fermented, living probiotic food like sauerkraut, kimchi, or yogurt (focusing on non-cow’s milk varieties, unless you are lucky enough to find a source that has the beta-casein A2 producing cows). There is always goat’s milk which is relatively hypoallergenic.
Finally, the reality is that the probiotics in our bodies and in cultured foods ultimately derive from the soil, where an unimaginably vast reservoir of ‘good bacteria’ reside – assuming your soil is natural and not saturated with petrochemical inputs and other environmental toxicants. And really fresh, organically produced – preferably biodynamically grown – raw food is an excellent way to continually replenish your probiotic stores. Food is always going to be the best way to support your health, probiotic health included.
[vii] C Phillip Shelor, Andrea B Kirk, Purnendu K Dasgupta, Martina Kroll, Catrina A Campbell, Pankaj K Choudhary. Breastfed infants metabolize perchlorate. Environ Sci Technol. 2012 May 1 ;46(9):5151-9. Epub 2012 Apr 20. PMID: 22497505
An amazing study published in the Journal of Cell Science reveals an entirely new reason why it is essential that you ‘eat your greens,’ as mother always said, namely: it enables your body’s mitochondria to produce more ATP energy when exposed to sunlight.
The researchers, working out of Columbia University Medical Center, conducted a number of experiments in order to ascertain whether animals as well as plants can use light-absorbing chlorophyll molecules to capture light energy for ATP synthesis.
While it has been prevailing wisdom that only plants can use sunlight directly for producing energy (photosynthesis), it can not be denied that not only do many animals consume chlorophyll through their diet but that research has been performed showing chlorophyll metabolites “retain the ability to absorb light in the visible spectrum at wavelengths that can penetrate into animal tissues.” (Ferruzzi and Blakeslee, 2007; Ma and Dolphin, 1999). Given these facts, the authors of the new study “sought to elucidate the consequences of light absorption by these potential dietary metabolites.” What they discovered was simply remarkable:
We show that dietary metabolites of chlorophyll can enter the circulation, are present in tissues, and can be enriched in the mitochondria. When incubated with a light-capturing metabolite of chlorophyll, isolated mammalian mitochondria and animal-derived tissues, have higher concentrations of ATP when exposed to light, compared with animal tissues not mixed with the metabolite. We demonstrate that the same metabolite increases ATP concentrations, and extends the median life span of Caenorhabditis elegans [worm], upon light exposure; supporting the hypothesis that photonic energy capture through dietary-derived metabolites may be an important means of energy regulation in animals. The presented data are consistent with the hypothesis that metabolites of dietary chlorophyll modulate mitochondrial ATP stores by catalyzing the reduction of coenzyme Q. These findings have implications for our understanding of aging, normal cell function and life on earth.
The implications of this study are truly profound. ATP production is essential for the health of our body, from the level of the cell all the way up. When ATP production is compromised through suboptimal nutrition, environmental exposures, or non-adaptive stress, disease and accelerated aging are inevitable. Even when these adverse variables are not a factor, ATP production will naturally fall off as we age, leaving a role for nutritional interventions that can help to increase ATP synthesis without, for instance, increasing oxidative stress or causing exhaustion or imbalances elsewhere. Clearly, a plant-based diet rich in chlorophyll will have certain advantages over one without this compound (and its metabolites). Also, chlorophyll and/or it’s metabolites may be an ideal nutritional and/or functional medical intervention for the growing number in the post-industrial world whose cellular machinery is already deeply compromised and functioning far below optimal levels.
If this cell and animal research holds true for humans, a chlorophyll-deficient diet, along with a deficiency of sunlight exposure, would lead to significantly lower ATP production. Given this possibility, wouldn’t it be amazing to begin looking at the green wavelengths of color in the produce case as a source of energy for the powerhouses of the cell (mitochondria), as potential age-decelerating agents, or as a means to increase one’s sense of energy and health by allowing you to capture the sun’s energies directly within your body? I believe this is exactly what this research indicates and makes it all the more compelling to got out of your way to include deep green veggies and living, chlorophyll-rich foods in your diet on a daily basis, does it not?
Is A Radically New Understanding of Cell Bioenergetics On the Horizon?
It’s really not that hard to believe that the human body can capture and utilize sunlight when you consider the extensive body of research that already proves we emit low levels of light (below the threshold of visibility) known as biophotons. And this study is actually only the tip of the iceberg! Two new studies just published and well worth reading, argue that our bodies evolved the capability to capture the energy of the Sun directly through melanin, as well as other components within our cells, in a process known as “extrasynthesis of ATP.”
The first study, titled, “Did human hairlessness allow natural photobiomodulation 2 million years ago and enable photobiomodulationtherapy today? This can explain the rapid expansion of our genus’s brain“, argues that human hairlessness evolved approximately 2 million years ago because it made possible the conversion of sunlight wavelengths into chemical energy within our cells. By making possible the exposure of our skin to a consistent and significant source of ultraviolet radiation, the genetic mutation leading to hairlessness was positively selected for, leading to a number of downstream effects, including the accelerated growth of the energy-hungry neocortex portion of our brains. Here is the extraordinary abstract:
Present hypotheses to explain human hairlessness appear to be inadequate because hairlessness is not accompanied by any immediate benefit. A new, testable, hypothesis is advanced to explain our hairlessness based on photobiomodulation research, also known as low-level light therapy. This shows that red and near infrared radiation has a very beneficial effect on superficial tissues, including the brain. Random mutation/s resulting in complete hairlessness allowed early humans to receive daily doses of red and near infrared radiation at sunset. Photobiomodulation research shows this has a twofold effect: it results in increased mitochondrial respiratory chain activity with consequent ATP ‘extrasynthesis’ in all superficial tissues, including the brain. It also advantageously affects the expression of over 100 genes through the activation of transcription factor NFkB which results in cerebral metabolic and haemodynamic enhancement. It is also possible that melanin can supply electrons to the respiratory chain resulting in ATP extrasynthesis. These effects would start automatically as soon as hairlessness occurred resulting in a selective sweep of the mutation/s involved. This was followed by the very rapid brain evolution of the last 2my which, it is suggested, was due to intelligence-led evolution based initially on the increased energy and adeptness of the newly hairless individuals.
The second study, even more extraordinary in its hypothesis and implications, and titled “Beyond Mitochondria, What would be the Energy Source of the Cell?“, argues that melanin (the archetypal pigment molecule) is capable of providing up to 90% of the cell’s energy needs through capturing and converting sunlight into chemical energy (specifically, disassociating and reforming H20). If proven true, this view would profoundly decenter the glucose-centric view of cellular energetic which presently dominates cell biology, with many deep-reaching implications to the field of nutrition and medicine. Here is the amazing abstract:
Currently, cell biology is based on glucose as the main source of energy. Cellular bioenergetic pathways have become unnecessarily complex in their eagerness to explain that how the cell is able to generate and use energy from the oxidation of glucose, where mitochondria play an important role through oxidative phosphorylation. During a descriptive study about the three leading causes of blindness in the world, the ability of melanin to transform light energy into chemical energy through the dissociation of water molecule was unraveled. Initially, during 2 or 3 years; we tried to link together our findings with the widely accepted metabolic pathways already described in metabolic pathway databases, which have been developed to collect and organize the current knowledge on metabolism scattered across a multitude of scientific articles. However, firstly, the literature on metabolism is extensive but rarely conclusive evidence is available, and secondly, one would expect these databases to contain largely the same information, but the contrary is true. For the apparently well studied metabolic process Krebs cycle, which was described as early as 1937 and is found in nearly every biology and chemistry curriculum, there is a considerable disagreement between at least five databases. Of the nearly 7000 reactions contained jointly by these five databases, only 199 are described in the same way in all the five databases. Thus to try to integrate chemical energy from melanin with the supposedly well-known bioenergetic pathways is easier said than done; and the lack of consensus about metabolic network constitutes an insurmountable barrier. After years of unsuccessful results, we finally realized that the chemical energy released through the dissociation of water molecule by melanin represents over 90% of cell energy requirements. These findings reveal a new aspect of cell biology, as glucose and ATP have biological functions related mainly to biomass and not so much with energy. Our finding about the unexpected intrinsic property of melanin to transform photon energy into chemical energy through the dissociation of water molecule, a role performed supposedly only by chlorophyll in plants, seriously questions the sacrosanct role of glucose and thereby mitochondria as the primary source of energy and power for the cells.
What if conventional wisdom regarding our most fundamental energy requirements has been wrong all along and we can directly harness the energy of the Sun when we consume ‘plant blood’?
Plants are amazing, aren’t they? They have no need to roam about hunting other creatures for food, because they figured out a way to capture the energy of the Sun directly through these little light-harvesting molecules known as chlorophyll; a molecule, incidentally, which bears uncanny resemblance to human blood because it is structurally identical to hemoglobin, other than it has a magnesium atom at its core and not iron as in red blooded animals.
The energy autonomy of plants makes them, of course, relatively peaceful and low maintenance when compared to animal life, the latter of which is always busying itself with acquiring its next meal, sometimes through violent and sometimes through more passive means. In fact, so different are these two classes of creatures that the first, plants, are known as autotrophs, i.e. they produce their own food, and the animals are heterotrophs, i.e. they depend on other creatures for food.
While generally these two zoological classifications are considered non-overlapping, important exceptions have been acknowledged. For instance, photoheterotrophs — a sort of hybrid between the autotroph and heterotroph — can use light for energy, but cannot use carbon dioxide like plants do as their sole carbon source, i.e. they have to ‘eat’ other things. Some classical examples of photoheterotrophs include green and purple non-sulfur bacteria, heliobacteria, and here’s where it gets interesting, a special kind of aphid that borrowed genes from fungi[1] to produce it’s own plant-like carotenoids which it uses to harness light energy to supplement its energy needs!
A green carotenoid tinted aphid that is capable of capturing sunlight to produce energy. Interesting right? But we need not look for exotic bacteria or insects for examples of photoheterotrophy. It turns out that animals, including worms, rodents and pigs (one of the closest animals to humans physiologically), have recently been found to be capable of taking up chlorophyll metabolites into their mitochondria, enabling them to use sunlight energy to ‘super-charge’ the rate (up to 35% faster) and quantity (up to 16-fold increases) of ATP produced within their mitochondria. In other words, a good portion of the animal kingdom is capable of ‘feeding off of light,’ and should be reclassified as photoheterotrophic!
Animals are Not Just Glucose-Burning Biomachines, But Are Light-Harvesting Hybrids
For at least half a century it has been widely believed among the scientific community that humans are simply glucose-dependent biomachines that can not utilize the virtually limitless source of energy available through sunlight to supplement our energy needs. And yet, wouldn’t it make sense that within the extremely intelligent and infinitely complex design of life, a way to utilize such an obviously abundant energy source as sunlight would have been evolved, even if only for the clear survival advantage it confers and not some ethical imperative (which is a possibility worth considering … vegans/Jainists, are you listening?).
As the philosopher of science Karl Popper stated, a theory can only be called scientific if it is falsifiable. And indeed, the scientific theory that humans are solely heterotrophic has just been overturned in light of empirical evidence demonstrating that mammals can extract energy directly from sunlight.
Deeper Implications of the New Study
First, let’s start by reading the study abstract, as it succinctly summarizes what may be of the most amazing discoveries of our time:
Sunlight is the most abundant energy source on this planet. However, the ability to convert sunlight into biological energy in the form of adenosine-59-triphosphate (ATP) is thought to be limited to chlorophyll-containing chloroplasts in photosynthetic organisms. Here we show that mammalian mitochondria can also capture light and synthesize ATP when mixed with a light-capturing metabolite of chlorophyll. The same metabolite fed to the worm Caenorhabditis elegans [roundworm] leads to increase in ATP synthesis upon light exposure, along with an increase in life span. We further demonstrate the same potential to convert light into energy exists in mammals, as chlorophyll metabolites accumulate in mice, rats and swine when fed a chlorophyll-rich diet. Results suggest chlorophyll type molecules modulate mitochondrial ATP by catalyzing the reduction of coenzyme Q, a slow step in mitochondrial ATP synthesis. We propose that through consumption of plant chlorophyll pigments, animals, too, are able to derive energy directly from sunlight.”
And so, to review, the new study found that animal life (including us, mammals) are capable of borrowing the light-harvesting capabilities of ‘plant blood,’ i.e. chlorophyll and its metabolites, and utilize it to photo-energize mitochondrial ATP production. This not only helps to improve energy output, but the research found several other important things:
Despite the increased output, the expected increase in Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) that normally attends increased mitochondrial function was not observed; in fact, a slight decrease was observed. This is a highly significant finding, because simply increasing mitochondrial activity and ATP output, while good from the perspective of energy, may accelerate aging and other oxidative stress (ROS) related adverse cellular and physiological effects. Chlorophyll, therefore, appeared to make animal mitochondria function in a healthier way.
In support of the above finding, worms administered an optimal range of chlorophyll were found to have significant extended life span. This is in accordance with well-known mechanisms linked to improved mitochondria function (in the absence of increased ROS) that increases cell longevity.
The last point in the abstract above is especially interesting to me. As a fan of coenzyme q10 supplementation for sometime, I have noticed profound differences qualitatively between ubiquinone (the oxidized form) and ubiquinol (the reduced, electron rich form), the latter of which has lead me to experience far greater states of energy and well-being than the former, even at far lower quantities (the molecular weight of a USP isolate does not reveal its bioavailability nor biological activity). The study, however, indicates that one may not need to take supplemental coenzyme Q10, even in its reduced form as ubiquinol, because chlorophyll-mediated sunlight capture and subsequent photo-energization of the electron transport chain will naturally ‘reduce’ (i.e. donate electrons) ubiquinone converting it into ubiquinol, which will result in increased ATP production and efficiency. This may also explain how they observed no increase in ROS (reactive oxygen species) while increasing ATP production: coenzyme q10 in reduced form as ubiquinol is a potent antioxidant, capable of donating an electron to quench/neutralize free radicals. This would be a biological win-win: increased oxidative phosphyloration-mediated energy output without increased oxidative damage.
Finally, in order to grasp the full significance of the study, one must read the authors’ conclusion:
Both increased sun exposure (Dhar and Lambert, 2013; John et al., 2004; Kent et al., 2013a; Kent et al., 2013b; Levandovski et al., 2013) and the consumption of green vegetables (Block et al., 1992; Ferruzzi and Blakeslee, 2007; van’t Veer et al., 2000) are correlated with better overall health outcomes in a variety of diseases of aging. These benefits are commonly attributed to an increase in vitamin D from sunlight exposure and consumption of antioxidants from green vegetables. Our work suggests these explanations might be incomplete. Sunlight is the most abundant energy source on this planet. Throughout mammalian evolution, the internal organs of most animals, including humans, have been bathed in photonic energy from the sun. Do animals have metabolic pathways that enable them to take greater advantage of this abundant energy source? The demonstration that: (1) light-sensitive chlorophyll-type molecules are sequestered into animal tissues; (2) in the presence of the chlorophyll metabolite P-a, there is an increase in ATP in isolated animal mitochondria, tissue homogenates and in C. elegans, upon exposure to light of wavelengths absorbed by P-a; and (3) in the presence of P-a, light alters fundamental biology resulting in up to a 17% extension of life span in C. elegans suggests that, similarly to plants and photosynthetic organisms, animals also possess metabolic pathways to derive energy directly from sunlight. Additional studies should confirm these conclusions.
I think it is obvious that there are a wide range of implications this discovery holds for the fields of nutrition, medicine, and cell and evolutionary biology, to name but a few disciplines that will inevitably be profoundly affected, if not entirely transformed.
For example, as far as implications to the hotly debated field of ascertaining the ideal, ancestrally-based human diet, if animal cells evolved to be able to harness the energy of sunlight through the help of the ‘blood’ of our plant allies, then isn’t it reasonable to believe that in order to optimize our biological potential nutritionally we require a certain amount of chlorophyll to take advantage of sunlight for our energy needs and perhaps evade sole reliance on the glucose-dependent energy pathways of the body whose overexpression and carbohydrate-rich dietary correlate are linked to conditions like cancer, obesity and cardiovascular disease? When one considers the potential of sunlight (a regular, daily, guaranteed source of energy) to contribute to our daily metabolic energy needs (and therefore the survival advantage conferred by regular consumption of chlorophyll-rich plant material), shouldn’t the Paleo community, which is highly fixated on animal tissue consumption, now be compelled towards putting chlorophyll on a higher level of importance versus conventional ‘Paleo’/heterotrophic sources of sustenance, e.g. forged/hunted food?
Also, what are the implications for the increasing ambivalence within public awareness concerning sunlight exposure, where on the one hand it is viewed as a vital, if not life-saving source of vitamin D, while on the other hand a vector of lethality in skin cancer causation, against which especially pigment deficient races slather on various petrochemical preparations to defend themselves against? What if sunlight (as was evidenced in the roundworm model) is toxic when no chlorophyll is present in our diet and tissues, but promotes both increased ATP and longevity when found there in optimal doses? These are just a few of the questions that are now on the table, following these recent discoveries.
Of course, there are many other implications of the study, and likely far more questions than answers now that should be investigated further. I hope you the reader will help provide additional insight and share it below or in follow up articles that you are welcome to submit for publication by emailing us here.
How to Put The Research Into Practical Application?
How do we translate this study into real life application? This has been a common question for those loyal followers of Greenmedinfo.com: “I love the research, but what do I do with it?”
First, green vegetables and their juices should no longer viewed simply as sources of antioxidants, alphabetic vitamins, nutrients, minerals etc., but carriers of essential mitochondrial cofactors without which our body can not optimally and efficiently produce ATP, and without which our body can not realize its biological potential for maximal longevity. Of course, if you have been long time followers , you know we also look at ancestral foods (i.e. those which have been in the human diet for over 10,000 years) as highly dense and vitally important sources of biologically useful information which have become indispensable regulators of gene expression. This means that when you are consuming a glass of green vegetable juice, for instance, it is likely the most precious health promoting elixir on the planet and should be considered something of a nutritional ‘bridge’ we, heterotrophs, can cross to become photoheterophic or light-capturing organisms, if we choose to be. (Interested further in the human relationship to light? Read: Biophotons: The Human Body Emits, Communicates with, and is Made from Light).
Here is my suggestion. On top of increasing the consumption of green foods and/or vegetable juices, add in a liquid or encapsulated supplement that provides at least 200mg of additional chlorophyll daily. In combination, make sure to get additional sunlight and engage in energy intensive, outdoor activities simultaneously. If you like, visualize sunlight entering into the tissues of your body reaching deep down into your chlorophyll-metabolite saturated mitochondria. Then observe and assess how you feel energetically following this exercise. Do you feel more energy? Less exhausted afterwards? Please report back your experiences in the comments below so we can compare notes and continue to explore how to apply this finding to our daily lives in a useful way.
This study, along with several others more recent papers, represent a Copernican-type revolution in cellular bioenergetics. What if chlorophyll, water, and our body’s own melanin produced were capable of producing most of our body’s energy needs? Stay tuned for further reporting on this topic, including guest posts by noted scientists and clinicians who are also aware of the importance of this research and wish to help flesh out the theoretical implications and real world applications to human health.
Could the melanin found in our bodies and in foods like mushrooms help to mitigate the increasingly dire quantities of radiation we are exposed to daily?
Research is now emerging indicating that melanin may function in a manner analogous to energy harvesting pigments such as chlorophyll, and may have even have driven our evolution into the uniquely hairless, brain-dominant hominins we are today. While melanin’s proposed ability to convert sunlight into metabolic energy has amazing implications (one of which is the taxonomical reclassification of our species from heterotrophic to photoheterotrophic), what may have even more spectacular implications is the prospect that melanin may actually both protect us against ionizing radiation and transform some of it into metabolically useful energy.
In a day and age where radioisotopes from nuclear weapons testing, routine releases from the nuclear, fracking, and coal-fired power industries, and more recently, global fallout from the Chernobyl and Fukushima meltdowns, are increasingly accumulating in the environment, food chain, and our bodies, reducing radiotoxicity and/or enhancing detoxification mechanisms should be a universal concern. Add in the unavoidable onslaught of medical, cell phone communications and WiFi technology, and air travel associated radiation exposures, and you can virtually guarantee your body burden of radiation exposure is significant and represents a serious health risk.
While GreenMedInfo.com now contains an extensive database of radiation toxicity mitigating substances which can be viewed both on the Radiation Disaster Toxicity page, and the radioprotective actions page, we have not until now reported specifically on melanin’s potential to offset radiation exposure.
Melanin’s Mysterious Properties
Melanin is, indeed, one of the most interesting biomolecules yet identified. The first known organic semiconductor, it is capable of absorbing a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum (which is why it appears black), most notably, converting and dissipating potentially harmful ultraviolet radiation into heat. It serves a wide range of physiological roles, including free radical scavenging, toxicant chelation, DNA protection, to name but a few. It is also believed to have been one of the original ingredients essential for life on this planet. I’ve reported previously on its potential in converting sunlight into metabolic energy, but converting ionizing gamma radiation into useful energy? Beyond the realm of comic book heroes, who would have ever thought such a thing possible?
The first time (I am aware of) that this possibility surfaced in the literature was a 2001 Russian report on the discovery of a melanin-rich species of fungi colonizing and apparently thriving within the walls of the still hot Chernobyl meltdown reactor site.1 In 2004, the same observation was made for the surrounding soils of the Chernobyl site.2 We also know that, based on a 2008 report, pyomelanin-producing bacteria have been found in thriving colonies within uranium-contaminated soils.3 There is also a 1961 study that found, amazingly, melanin-rich fungi from soils of a Nevada nuclear test site survived radiation exposure doses of up to 6400 Grays (about 2,000 times a human lethal dose!).4 Clearly, something about melanin in these species not only enables them to survive radiation exposures that are normally lethal to most forms of life, but actually attracts them to it. Could the fungi actually be using melanin to ‘feast’ on the free lunch of anthropogenic radioactivity ?
Remarkably, back in 2007, a study published in PLoS titled, ‘Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi,” revealed that fungal cells manifested increased growth relative to non-melanized cells after exposure to ionizing radiation. The irradiated melanin from these fungi also changed its electronic properties, which the authors noted, raised “intriguing questions about a potential role for melanin in energy capture and utilization.”
Can Melanin Lend Those Who Consume It “Super Powers”?
The question arises, could the consumption of melanin from fungi protect those higher on the food chain (like mammals; humans) from radiation exposure?
This question appears to have been answered affirmatively by a 2012 study published in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, titled, “Melanin, a promising radioprotector: mechanisms of actions in a mice model,” which found that when melanin isolated from the fungus Gliocephalotrichum simplex was administered at a dose of 50 mg/kg body weight in BALB/c mice before exposure to 6-7 Grays of gamma radiation, it increased their 30-day survival by 100%. The study also noted that melanin up to a dosage of 100 mg/kg (i.p.) did not cause adverse effects on the health of the mice.
In the study conclusion, the authors stated:
“The observed mitigative effects of melanin in the present study gain a lot of significance especially in nuclear emergencies but need to be validated in humans by more detailed experiments. Prior to these confirmations and based on current investigations, it can be concluded that during such emergencies, diets rich in melanin may be beneficial to overcome radiation toxicity in humans.” [emphasis added]
The authors fed mice a mushroom used in East Asian cuisine, called Judas’ ear, tree, or jelly ear (Auricularia auricula-judae) an hour before giving them a powerful 9 Gy dose with the beta emitter Cesium137. For perspective, anything over ~0.1 Gy is considered a dangerously high dose for humans. All the control mice died in 13 days while ~90% of the mushroom-fed ones survived. Mice fed a white mushroom (porcini) died almost as fast as the controls, but those fed white mushrooms supplemented with melanin also survived.”
So, how does melanin perform this trick?
One clue was provided by a study published in 2011 in Bioelectrochemistry titled, “Gamma radiation interacts with melanin to alter its oxidation–reduction potential and results in electric current production,” where ionizing radiation was found to alter melanin’s oxidation-reduction potential. Instead of most other biomolecules which experience a destructive form of oxidative damage as a result of radiation exposure, melanin remained structurally and functionally intact, appearing capable of producing a continuous electric current. This current, theoretically, could be used to produce chemical/metabolic energy in living systems. This would explain the increased growth rate, even under low nutrient conditions, in certain kinds of gamma irradiated fungi.
So, you may be wondering, what is a good source of supplemental melanin for those interested in its radioprotective and radiotrophic (“radiation eating”) properties? I believe Chaga is one of the most promising candidates. Not only is it one of the nutritionally dense mushrooms, containing an immense amount of melanin, but it was known by the Siberians as the “Gift from God” and the “Mushroom of Immortality,” the Japanese as “The Diamond of the Forest,” and Chinese as the “King of Plants.” There is also an increasingly compelling body of scientific information demonstrating its health benefits for conditions as serious as cancer. Chaga health benefits here.
It should be noted that there is a profound toxicological difference between the type of radiation exposures that come from the outside in, e.g. being irradiated at a distance by radioactive material outside of us, and from the inside out, e.g. low-dose radioisotope uptake. The latter can be orders of magnitude more dangerous, as radioisotopes like uranium-238, cesium-137, and plutonium-239, can be taken into the tissues and remain there for a lifetime wreaking havoc on a moment to moment basis. Please read our report on the topic, “Why There Is No Safe Dose of Radiation,” to learn more about this critical distinction.
Due to a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect, low-dose radionuclides like uranium-238, which are technically weak emitters of alpha radiation, can be ten’s of thousands times more damaging to our DNA than present day radiological risk assessment models account for. We bring this up in order to properly qualify the aforementioned information, as it could be highly misleading to those who interpret it to mean that one can simply supplement with an edible melanin product to reduce and even benefit from radiation exposure. Nothing can effectively reduce the radiotoxicity of incorporated radionuclides beyond removing them from the body. We have indexed research on this topic, and would encourage the reader to view the research on apple pectin, in particular, as it was successfully used post-Chernobyl to dramatically reduce the bodily burden of absorbed radionuclides in thousands of Russian children. Moreover, once we grasp the genocidal implications of the widespread contamination of the biosphere with the routine and accidental releases of radio-toxicants that maintain their toxicity for thousands, and in some cases, millions of years (e.g plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.4 BILLION years), we realize the solution (if there is one) is to phase out and try to mitigate the planet wide fallout from the nuclear industry’s activities over the course of the 75 years.
For further research on this topic, watch Dr. Karl Maret’s fascinating youtube presentation on “The Science of Melanin” below:
1 Wember VV, Zhdanova NN (2001) Peculiarities of linear growth of the melanin-containing fungi Cladosporium sphaerospermum Penz. and Alternaria alternata (Fr.) Keissler. Mikrobiol. Z. 63: 3–12. 2 Zhdanova NN, Tugay T, Dighton J, Zheltonozhsky V, McDermott P (2004) Ionizing radiation attracts soil fungi. Mycol Res. 108: 1089–1096.
3 C.E. Turick, A.S. Knox, C.L. Leverette, Y.G. Kritzas In-situ uranium stabilization by microbial metabolites J. Environ. Radioact., 99 (2008), pp. 890–899 4 L.M. Shields, L.W. Durrell Preliminary observations on radiosensitivity of algae and fungi from soils of the Nevada test site. Ecology, 42 (1961), pp. 440–441
Much like photosynthesis in plants, can human beings utilize light and water for their energy needs? New evidence suggests that it may be happening right now in each cell of your body.
In response to the title question, my answer is a definite “maybe.”
On the positive side, a recently published paper by Herrera et al. (1) argues that the answer is yes. The authors pinpoint melanin as the central player in the drama of photosynthesis, arguing that melanin, a black substance prominent in certain tissues, absorbs all visible wavelengths. Those concentrated photons could then drive the photosynthetic process in the same way as photons do in green plants and many single celled organisms.
The authors focus on the eye, which absorbs abundant light. They address a mystery of ocular function that remains unsolved: the retina stands as one of the most avid of the body’s consumers of energy; yet nearby capillaries are remarkably sparse, and therefore seemingly unable to meet those energy needs. Herrera et al. argue that the missing link could be melanin, which exists in unexpectedly high concentration in the eye. If melanin were a light antenna, collecting numerous photons, then that concentrated energy could drive metabolic processes just as they do in green plants. Melanin could resolve the energy problem.
Melanin exists not only in the eye, but also in many tissues. In a comprehensive review, Barr et al., (2) discuss many relevant features of melanin that support the authors’ hypothesis. First, melanin is an ancient protein, which may have been present at the inception of life. Second, its distribution is ubiquitous not only within, but also among, living organisms. Third, melanin in brain tissue increases with ascent up the phylogenetic ladder, reaching a peak concentration in man; it is invariably found in the brain’s strategic, highly functional loci. And, melanin responds to light, with semi-conductive properties. Hence, the provocative idea that melanin may be centrally involved in transduction of light energy into chemical energy gains traction from this evidence.
Our own work lends strong support to the idea that humans exploit light energy. Although we have not studied melanin, we have studied in considerable detail another light-absorbing substance that exists in higher concentration in the human body: water. Given water’s simplicity and pervasiveness through nature, many presume that water must be completely understood, but in fact little has been known about how water molecules organize themselves, and especially how they respond to light — until recently.
Students learn that water has three phases: solid, liquid and vapor. But there is something more: in our laboratory we have uncovered a fourth phase. This phase occurs next to water loving (hydrophilic) surfaces. It is surprisingly extensive, projecting out from those surfaces by up to millions of molecular layers. And it exists almost everywhere throughout nature, including our bodies.
This newly identified phase of water has been described in a recent book (3). The book documents the evidence underlying the existence of this phase, and goes on to show how that phase explains many familiar phenomena in straightforward terms. A central feature is that the phase builds from light, i.e., from absorbed electromagnetic energy. The more light that’s absorbed, the more extensive is the phase.
The existence of a fourth phase may seem unexpected. However, it should not be entirely so. A century ago, the physical chemist Sir William Hardy argued for the existence of a fourth phase; and many authors over the years have found evidence for some kind of “ordered” or “structured” phase of water. The fresh experimental evidence cited in the book and many papers not only confirms the existence of such an ordered, liquid-crystalline phase, but also details its properties. It is more viscous, dense and alkaline than H2O and has more oxygen since its formula is H3O2. As a result, it has a negative charge. And like a battery, it can hold energy and deliver that energy as needed.
The presence of the fourth phase carries many implications. Here, I outline some basic features of this phase, and then deal with several of those implications including the role of light and energy. I then focus on some biological and health applications. [Note: the video below will explain the fourth phase of water if you want a comprehensive, easy to learn overview.]
Does Water Transduce Energy?
The energy for building water structure comes ultimately from the sun. Radiant energy converts ordinary bulk water into ordered water, building this structured zone. We found that all wavelengths ranging from UV through visible to infrared can build this ordered water. Near-infrared energy is the most capable. Water absorbs infrared energy freely from the environment; it uses that energy to convert bulk water into liquid crystalline water (fourth phase water) — which we also call “exclusion zone” or “EZ” water because it profoundly excludes solutes. Hence, buildup of EZ water occurs naturally and spontaneously from environmental energy. Additional energy input creates additional EZ buildup.
Of particular significance is the fourth phase’s charge: commonly negative (Figure 1). Absorbed radiant energy splits water molecules; the negative moiety constitutes the building block of the EZ, while the positive moiety binds with water molecules to form free hydronium ions, which may diffuse throughout the water. Adding additional light creates more charge separation.
Figure 1. Diagrammatic representation of EZ water, negatively charged, and the positively charged bulk water beyond. Hydrophilic surface at left.
This process resembles the first step of photosynthesis. In that step, energy from the sun splits water molecules. Hydrophilic chromophores catalyze the splitting. The process considered here is similar, but more generic: any hydrophilic surface may catalyze the splitting. Some surfaces work more effectively than others. Melanin might be one of those.
The separated charges resemble a battery. That battery can deliver energy in a manner similar to the way the separated charges in plants deliver energy. Plants, of course, comprise mostly water, and it is therefore no surprise that water itself could exhibit similar energy conversion.
The stored electrical energy in water can drive various kinds of work, including flow. An example is the axial flow through tubes. Immersing tubes made of hydrophilic materials into water produces flow through those tubes (3), similar to blood flow through blood vessels (Figure 2). The driving energy comes from the radiant energy absorbed and stored in the water. Nothing more. Flow may persist undiminished for many hours, even days. Additional incident light brings faster flow (4). This is not a perpetual motion machine: incident radiant energy drives the flow — in much the same way that it drives vascular flow in plants and powers water from the roots to nourish trees taller than the length of a football field.
Implications of Light Energy
This energy conversion framework is rich with implication for many systems involving water. All that’s needed is water, radiant energy, and a hydrophilic surface. The latter can be as large as a slab of polymer or as small as a dissolved molecule. The liquid crystalline phase inevitably builds — and its presence must therefore play some role in the system’s behavior.
Let me provide a few representative examples.
One example is…yourself. By volume, two thirds of your cells’ content is water. However the water molecule is so small that making up that two-thirds volume involves numerous water molecules. If you count molecules, 99% of the molecules in your body are water molecules. Modern cell biology considers that huge fraction of molecules as mere background carriers of the “important” molecules of life such as proteins and nucleic acids. It asserts that 99% of your molecules don’t do very much.
However, EZ water envelops every macromolecule in the cell. So tightly packed are those macromolecules that little room exists for any but liquid-crystalline EZ water. Most of your cell water is EZ water. As elaborated in my earlier book (5), the ordered phase water plays a central role in everything the cell does.
What’s new is the profound role of radiant energy, which can power many of those cellular functions. An example is the blood flowing through your capillaries. That blood eventually encounters high resistance: capillaries are often narrower than the red blood cells that must pass through them; in order to make their way through, red cells need to bend and contort. Resistance is high. You’d anticipate the need for lots of driving pressure; yet, the pressure gradient across the capillary bed is modest. The paradox resolves if radiant energy helps propel flow through capillaries in the same way that it propels flow through hydrophilic tubes. Radiant energy may constitute an unsuspected source of vascular drive, supplementing cardiac pressure.
Why you feel good after a sauna now seems understandable. If radiant energy drives capillary flow and ample capillary flow is important for optimal functioning, then sitting in the sauna will inevitably be a feel-good experience. The infrared energy associated with heat should help drive that flow. The same if you walk out into sunlight: we presume that the feel-good experience derives purely from the psychological realm; but the evidence above implies that sunlight may build your body’s EZs. Fully built EZs around each protein seems necessary for protein folding and hence for optimal cellular functioning.
A second example of the EZ’s functional role is weather, which, as I will show, is not unrelated to health. Common understanding of weather derives from two principal variables: temperature and pressure. Those two variables are said to explain virtually everything we experience in terms of weather. However, the atmosphere also contains water: it is full of micrometer-scale droplets commonly known as aerosol droplets or aerosol particles. Those droplets make up atmospheric humidity. When the atmosphere is humid, the many water droplets scatter considerable light, reducing clarity; you can’t see distant objects as clearly as in drier conditions.
The Fourth Phase book presents evidence for the structure of those droplets (3). It shows that EZ water envelops each droplet, while hydronium ions occupy the droplets’ interior. Those internal hydronium ions repel one another, creating pressure, which pushes against the robust shell of EZ water. That pressure explains why droplets tend toward roundness.
How do those aerosol droplets condense to form clouds? The droplets’ EZ shells bear negative charge. Those shells should repel one another, precluding any condensation into clouds. Droplets should remain widely dispersed throughout the atmosphere. However, droplets do often condense into clouds, and the question is how that can happen.
The agent of condensation is the unlike charges that lie in between the droplets. Richard Feynman, the legendary Nobel Prize physicist of the late 20th century understood the principle, opining that: “like-likes-like because of an intermediate of unlikes.” The like-charged droplets “like” one another, so they come together; the unlike charges lying in between those droplets constitute the attractors (Figure 3).
The like-likes-like principle has been widely appreciated, but also widely ignored: after all, how could like charges conceivably attract? A reason why this powerfully simple concept has been ignored is that the source of the unlike charges has been difficult to identify. We now know that the unlike charges can come from the splitting of water — the negative components building EZ shells, while the corresponding positive components, the hydronium ions, provide the unlike attractors in between. With enough of those attractors, the negatively charged aerosol droplets may condense into clouds.
The like-likes-like principle operates not only in clouds but also in our bodies. Wherever two like-charged substances exist, a good possibility is that they hold together because of the opposite charges lying in between. Since those separated charges build from the energy of light, one might say that the self-organization of biological materials comes ultimately from light, just as the blood flow in capillaries might also comes from light.
We may be reluctant to call these light-driven processes photosynthesis, because they do not— as far as we know — produce sugars as end products. Nevertheless, the role of light in driving biological processes is clear.
Implications for Body Function
I present two implications of these light-driven processes: why your joints don’t squeak; and why dislocated or sprained joints will swell within seconds.
Joints are sites at which bones tend to press upon one another (Figure 4). The bones may also rotate, as during deep-knee bends and push-ups. You’d think that rotation under pressure might elicit frictional resistance, with some squeakiness, but joint friction remains remarkably modest. Why so?
Cartilage lines the ends of bones. Those cartilaginous materials do the actual pressing. Hence, the issue of joint friction reduces to the issue of the cartilaginous surfaces and the synovial fluid lying in between them. How does this system behave under pressure?
Cartilage is made of classic gel materials: highly charged polymers and water; therefore, cartilage is a gel. Gel surfaces grow EZs, so cartilage surfaces should likewise line themselves with EZs. EZ buildup — driven by light — creates many hydronium ions in the synovial fluid between those EZs. Additional hydronium ions come from the molecules within that fluid, creating their own EZs and protons. Thus, many hydronium ions will lie in the area in which two cartilaginous surfaces lie across from one another. The repulsive force coming from those hydronium ions should keep the cartilage surfaces apart — some investigators maintain that the cartilage surfaces never touch, despite heavy loads. That separation means that any rough spots, or asperities, will never come into contact as the respective surfaces shear past one another; and that in turn means low friction.
For such a mechanism to actually work, some kind of built-in restraint should be present to keep the repelling hydronium ions in place. Otherwise, they may be forced out of the local region, compromising lubrication. Nature provides that safety net: a structure known as the joint capsule envelops the joint. By constraining the dispersal of hydronium ions, that encapsulation ensures low friction. That’s why your joints don’t ordinarily squeak.
Regarding swelling, the second issue under consideration here, osmosis evidently plays a role. Since the cell is packed with negatively charged proteins, the cytoplasm should generate an osmotic draw similar to the osmotic draw generated by diapers or gels. Physiologists know that it does.
A peculiar feature of cells, however, is their relatively modest water content. Compared to 20:1 or higher for many common gels, the cell’s water-to-solids ratio is only about 2:1. That limited water content may come as a consequence of the macromolecular network’s stiffness: cellular networks typically comprise tubular or multi-stranded biopolymers tightly cross-linked to one another. The resultant stiffness prevents the network from expanding to its full osmotic potential.
If those cross-links were to disrupt, however, then the full power of osmotic draw would take effect; the tissue could then build many EZ layers and therefore hydrate massively, bringing huge expansion (Figure 5). That’s what happens when body tissues are injured, especially with dislocations. The injury disrupts fibrous macromolecules and cross-links, eliminating the restraining forces that keep osmosis at bay; EZ buildup can then proceed virtually unimpeded.
The reason why swelling can be so impressive is that the cross-link disruption occurs progressively. Breaking one cross-link results in higher stress on neighboring cross-link; so disruption progresses in a zipper-like fashion. When that happens, the osmotic rush of water into the tissue can continue practically without restraint, resulting in the enormous immediate swelling that is often seen. The tissue will return to normal only when cross-links repair and the matrix returns to its normally restraining configuration.
Water and Healing
During childhood illness, grandmothers and doctors will often advise: “drink more water.” In his now-classical book, sub-titled Your Body’s Many Cries for Water: You Are Not Sick, You Are Thirsty (6), the Iranian physician Fereydoon Batmanghelidj confirms the wisdom of this quaint advice. The author documents years of clinical practice showing reversal of diverse pathologies simply by drinking more water. Hydration is critical.
Batmanghelidj’s experience meshes with evidence of healing from special waters such as those from the Ganges and Lourdes. Those waters most often come from deep underground springs or from glacial melt. Spring waters experience pressure from above; pressure converts liquid water into EZ water because of EZ water’s higher density. Unlike bulk water, EZ water absorbs light in the UV-wavelength region of 270 nanometers. The more light absorbed, the higher the EZ concentration. Certain spring waters and glacial melt (7) show a spectrometer peak in this 270-nanometer region, suggesting that their therapeutic benefits could come from the relatively high EZ content.
EZ water should rehydrate tissues better than ordinary water because of its higher dipole moment. To appreciate this argument, picture a bean with positive charge localized at one end, negative at the other. The positive end of that dipole orients toward the negatively charged cell, which then strongly draws in that dipole. The larger the dipole moment, the stronger will be the draw. Since EZs contain masses of separated charges, or large dipoles, that water should hydrate cells better than ordinary water. Now under study, that feature may be particularly important for promoting good health.
Negative Charge and Anti-Oxidants
Humans are considered neutral, but I suggest that we bear net negative charge. Most physical chemists would disagree. They reasonably presume that all systems tend toward neutrality because positive charge attracts negative charge. The human body being one of those “systems,” we assume that the body must be neutral.
Not all systems are neutral, however. The earth bears net negative charge, while the atmosphere bears net positive charge. Water itself can bear charge: Anyone watching MIT professor Walter Lewin’s stunning demonstration of the Kelvin water dropper (8), where separated bodies of water eventually discharge visibly onto one another, will immediately see that bodies of water can bear net charge. If doubt remains, then the experience of getting an electric shock from touching certain kinds of drinking water (which my colleagues and I have personally experienced) should eradicate that doubt.
Charges can remain separated if input energy keeps them separated — something like recharging your cell phone battery and creating separated negative and positive charges at the battery’s terminals. Since we constantly absorb electromagnetic energy (light) from the environment, the theoretical possibility exists that we may bear net charge.
Consider the arithmetic. Cells make up some 60% of your body’s mass, and they are negatively charged. Extracellular tissues such as collagen and elastin are next in line, and those proteins bear negative charge and adsorb EZ water, which is negatively charged. Only some of the smaller compartments remain positively charged with protons (low pH), and they commonly expel water: urine, gastrointestinal system; sweat, and expired air (containing hydrated CO2 or carbonic acid). They rid the body of positive charge. The net charge should be negative, and an ordinary voltmeter connected between your clasped fingers and ground will confirm that negativity.
So, the body makes every effort to maintain that negativity by ridding itself of protons. It is as though maintaining negativity is a “goal” of life. Plants do it easily: they connect directly to the negatively charged earth. Animals need to struggle a bit more to maintain their body’s negative charge, but greater mobility compensates for that struggle.
How does our body’s negative charge relate to the benefits of anti-oxidants?
Answering this question returns us to elementary chemistry. Recall that “reduction” is the gain of electrons, while “oxidation” means electron loss. Oxidation strips molecules of their negative charge, acting against the body’s attempt to maintain that high negativity. To guard against such loss we employ anti-oxidants. Simply by maintaining proper negativity, anti-oxidants may keep us healthy.
The Future
Water’s centrality for health is nothing new, but it has been progressively forgotten. With the various sciences laying emphasis molecular, atomic, and even sub-atomic approaches, we have lost sight of what happens when the pieces come together to form the larger entity. The whole may indeed exceed the sum of its parts. 99% of those parts are water molecules. To think that 99% of our molecules merely bathe the “more important” molecules of life ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary. Water plays a central role in all features of life.
Until recently, the understanding of water’s properties has been constrained by the common misconception that water has three phases. We now understand that it has four. Taking into account this fourth phase allows many of water’s “anomalies” to vanish: those anomalies turn into predictable features. Water becomes more understandable, and so do entities made largely of water, such as oceans, clouds, and human beings.
Central to the existence of that fourth phase is light, for light energy builds that phase. Ambient infrared light — literally free energy, is sufficient to maintain that phase. Additional light expands the phase. The examples above imply that through the vehicle of water, humans exploit that light to drive many processes. This energy source may help explain why some people can get by with little or no food intake (9). And, it may explain the basis of the various light therapies (10).
As Herrera et al. suggest (1), light may be critical for humans, just as it is for plants and bacteria. Nature has not deprived humans of the advantages of exploiting light. The role of melanin in the process described above has not yet been fully explored, although the melanin could conceivably absorb visible light and then emit the absorbed energy in the infrared band. That could power appreciable EZ buildup, charge separation, and therefore energy to run the cell.
Do humans photosynthesize?
Clearly, humans exploit light. I’ve described a water-mediated mechanism by which light energy gets transformed to other kinds of energy. The process bears some resemblance to photosynthesis, or at least the initial step of photosynthesis, in which light splits water into positive and negative components. Subsequent steps are less clear, and that’s why, on the question of human photosynthesis, I suggested a definite “maybe.” Herrera and colleagues might be on a productive course.
—
Various presentations describe these fresh understandings on light and water (11-13). A fuller, detailed synthesis appears in the above-mentioned book (3).
Barr, F. E., Saloma, J. S. and Buchele, M. J. Melanin: The organizing molecule. Medical Hypotheses 11; 1-140, 1983.
Pollack G. H. The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. Seattle: Ebner and Sons, 2013.
Rohani M and Pollack GH: Flow through horizontal tubes submerged in water in the absence of a pressure gradient: Mechanistic considerations. Langmuir 2013 29(22):6556-61. doi: 10.1021/la4001945
Pollack G. H. Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life: A New Unifying Approach to Cell Function. Seattle: Ebner and Sons, 2001.
Batmanghelidj F. Your Body’s Many Cries for Water: You Are Not Sick, You Are Thirsty. Don’t Treat Thirst with Medications. Falls Church: Global Health Solutions, 1997.
So E, Stahlberg R, and Pollack GH: Exclusion zone as an intermediate between ice and water. in: Water and Society, ed. DW Pepper and CA Brebbia, WIT Press, pp 3-11, 2012.
When artificial sperm and eggs become a reality, the sex of your baby-making partner won’t matter.
Renata Moreira’s 1-year-old daughter is just beginning to talk. She calls Renata “Mommy,” her other mother, Lori, Renata’s ex-wife and co-parent, “Mama,” and the man who donated the sperm that gave her life, “Duncle,” short for donor uncle. The couple’s sperm donor is Renata’s younger brother.
“I frankly never contemplated having kids because I didn’t have any role models,” Moreira begins as she tells her daughter’s origin story. But when she met Lori at a bar in New York in 2013, the gay marriage movement was in full swing. When the couple decided to marry, they saw many of their friends starting families because of the new legal protections that marriage offered LGBTQ families, and they too began thinking about their options.
The cluster on the right is a colony of iPS cells.Each one of them could become a sperm or egg cell under the right conditions, which scientists are trying to uncover.
After months of research and thinking about the values that were most important to their family, they decided that a genetic connection to their kid was a high priority. “It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in adoption,” says Moreira, who is executive director of Our Family Coalition, a nonprofit that works to advance equity for LGBTQ families. “But the idea was that we wanted a child that was related to our ancestors and the genetic code that carries.”
Moreira is Brazilian, of indigenous and Portuguese ancestry, and Lori is Italian. Given that they both wanted to carry on their genetic heritage, they asked Renata’s brother to donate his sperm, to be matched with Lori’s eggs. The family’s fertility doctor used in-vitro fertilization to conceive an embryo in a dish and implanted it into Moreira’s uterus, making her into her daughter’s “gestational carrier.”
Even as the social stigma around gay parenting lessens — the Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that as many as six million Americans have a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender parent — LGBTQ families that want a biological connection to their children have a lot to think about. A same-sex couple who make a baby must work through an arduous puzzle of personal values, technologies, and intermediary fertility doctors, egg and sperm donors, or surrogates.
But that could change dramatically before long. A developing technology known as IVG, short for in-vitro gametogenesis, could make it possible for same-sex couples to conceive a baby out of their own genetic material and no one else’s. They’d do this by having cells in their own bodies turned into sperm or egg cells.
The science of IVG has been underway for the last 20 years. But it really took off with research that would later win a Nobel Prize for a Japanese scientist named Shinya Yamanaka. In 2006, he found a way to turn any cell in the human body, even easy-to-harvest ones like skin and blood cells, into cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), which can be reprogrammed to become any cell in the body. Until that breakthrough, scientists working in regenerative medicine had to use more limited — and controversial — stem cells derived from frozen human embryos.
There is a small international group of scientists racing to reprogram human iPS cells into sperm and egg cells.
In 2016, researchers at Kyoto University in Japan announced that they had turned cells from a mouse’s tail into iPS cells and then made those into eggs that went on to gestate into pups. There are a lot of steps that still need to be perfected before this process of creating sex cells, also known as gametes, could work in humans.
If it does work, the first application likely would be in reversing infertility: men would have new sperm made and women would have new eggs made from other cells in their bodies. But a more mind-bending trick is also possible: that cells from a man could be turned into egg cells and cells from a woman could be turned into sperm cells. And that would be an even bigger leap in reproductive medicine than in-vitro fertilization. It would alter our concept of family in ways we are only beginning to imagine.
Today same-sex couples have to involve other people’s genetic material in making a baby. Artificial gametes could let them procreate with their own. (Illustration by Aart-Jan Venema)
Sex cells!
There is now a small international group of scientists racing to recreate the mouse formula and reprogram human iPS cells into sperm and egg cells.
One of the key players is Amander Clark, a stem cell biologist at UCLA. On a Friday afternoon, she walks me through her open lab area and introduces Di Chen, a postdoctoral fellow from China who’s working on creating artificial gametes. We enter a small room with a microscope, a refrigerator incubator, and a biosafety cabinet where students work with iPS cells. Chen invites me to peer down the microscope and shows off a colony of fresh iPS cells. They look like a large amoeba.
Getting cells like these to become viable eggs or sperm requires six major steps, Clark says. All of them have been accomplished in a mouse, but doing it in a human will be no easy feat. (In 2016, scientists reported that they had turned human skin cells into sperm cells, a development that Clark calls “interesting — but no one has repeated it yet.”) And no one has yet made an artificial human egg.
Clark’s group and other labs are essentially stuck on step three. After the steps in which a cell from the body is turned into an iPS cell, the third step is to coax it into an early precursor of a germ cell. For the work in mice, one Japanese researcher, Katsuhiko Hayashi, combined a precursor cell with cells from embryonic ovaries — ovaries at the very beginning of development — which were taken from a different mouse at day 12 in its gestation. This eventually formed an artificial ovary that produced a cell that underwent sex-specific differentiation (step four) and meiosis (step five), and became a gamete (step six).
Di Chen and Amander Clark in the lab. (Photo by Reed Hutchinson/UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center)
Other researchers, Azim Surani at Cambridge and Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, have gotten to step three with both human embryonic stem cells and iPS cells, turning them into precursors that can give rise to either eggs or sperm. Surani’s former student Mitinori Saitou, now at Kyoto University, also accomplished this feat.
It’s an impressive achievement: they’ve made something that normally begins to develop around day 17 of gestation in a human embryo. But the next step, growing these precursor cells into mature eggs and sperm, is “a very, very huge challenge,” Surani says. It will require scientists to recreate a process that takes almost a year in natural human development. And in humans they can’t take the shortcut used in mice, taking embryonic ovary cells from a different mouse.
At UCLA, Clark refers to the next three steps needed to get to a human artificial gamete as “the maturation bottleneck.”
Those amoeba-like iPS cells that Chen showed me are sitting in a dish that he lifts off the microscope and carries to the biosafety cabinet. There he separates the cells into a new dish, and adds a liquid with proteins and other ingredients to help the cells grow. He puts the cells into an incubator for one day; then he’ll collect the cells again and add more ingredients. After around four days, the cells ideally will have grown into a ball that is around the size of a grain of sand, visible to the naked eye. This ball contains the precursors to a gamete. Clark’s lab and other international teams are studying it to understand its properties, with the hope that it will offer clues to getting all the way to step six — an artificial human gamete.
“I do think we’re less than 10 years away from making research-grade gametes,” she says. Commercializing the technology would take longer, and no one can really predict how much so — or what it would possibly cost.
Some of these iPS cells have been coaxed to become early precursors to a gamete. The next steps will be much harder. (Courtesy of UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center)
Even then, same-sex reproduction will face one more biological hurdle: scientists would need to somehow make a cell derived from a woman, who has two X chromosomes, into a sperm cell with one X and one Y chromosome, and do the reverse, turning an XY male cell into an XX female egg cell. Whether both steps are feasible has been debated for at least a decade. Ten years ago, the Hinxton Group, an international consortium on stem cells, ethics, and law, predicted that making sperm from female cells would be “difficult, or even impossible.” But gene editing and various cellular-engineering technologies might be increasing the likelihood of a workaround. In 2015, two British researchers reported that women could “in theory have offspring together” by injecting genetic material from one partner into an egg from the other. With this method, the children would all be girls, “as there would be no Y chromosomes involved.”
Yet another possibility: a single woman might even be able to reproduce by herself in a human version of parthenogenesis, which means “virgin birth.” It could be the feminist version of the goddess Athena springing from Zeus’s head.
The genderqueer nuclear family
The question remains whether society will want this technology — and how often LGBTQ families will choose to use it. Current advanced reproductive technologies are already diversifying the ways we reproduce and opening reproduction to groups who previously may not have had access to it. This is expanding the concept of family beyond the traditional Ozzie and Harriet hetero-nuclear family. Many people who are single parents by choice now include their gamete donors as members. Many LGBTQ families are collaborations of friends and relatives who become egg and sperm donors and help raise the kids.
So it’s understandable that social and legal observers are already thinking about the potential consequences of artificial gametes for the shape of families. If the technology means that lesbian couples wouldn’t need a sperm donor, and gay male couples wouldn’t need a donor egg, it could, among other things, make it “easier for the intended parents to preserve the integrity and privacy of the family unit,” Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in the Journal of Law and Biosciences.
A single woman might be able to reproduce by herself, the feminist version of Athena springing from Zeus’s head.
Ironically, however, the technology also could create something rather conventional — a biological nuclear family, albeit one that looks more like Ozzie and Ozzie. “Collaborative reproduction has paved the way for radical new definitions of family, which really helped to lead the movement for marriage equality,” says Radhika Rao, a law professor at UC Hastings law school. “Instead of challenging hetero-normative values, IVG could end up perpetuating them.”
That’s why Renata Moreira isn’t sure she would have chosen it. “It might take away from this great opportunity to challenge and expand the notion of what family looks like,” she says.
But new reproductive technologies are invented to expand our choices more than to limit them, as egg freezing and IVF allow women to pause and even extend their biological clocks. In the coming decades, IVG could let us bend biology to bring together the genetic codes, as Moreira puts it, of people who otherwise can’t. This would increase the freedom to shape our families to meet our personal values and desires, and push human evolution in an altogether new direction.
While people are aware of the health risk caused by outdoor air pollution, few may consider that indoor air quality can also have a negative impact on their health. While many of these products are commonly used in the home there are healthier options available.
The average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. While people are aware of the health risk caused by outdoor air pollution, few may consider that indoor air quality can also have a negative impact on their health.
According to the EPA levels of indoor air pollutants can be 2 to 5 times higher than outdoor pollution levels. In fact indoor air pollutants are ranked among the top five environmental risks to public health. Since we spend so much time indoors it is important to create a healthy, toxin free environment that is safe for everyone.
1. Non Stick Cookware-It’s been 40 years since nonstick pans were introduced. Although the concept is appealing to most cooks, the hazards just aren’t worth it. Nonstick coating is made of polytetrafluoroethylene which release toxic gasses that are linked to cancer, organ failure, reproductive damage and other health risks.
Healthier Options: Consider using stainless steel, cast iron, or porcelain coated pans. 2. Conventional Cleaning Supplies-All purpose cleaners frequently contain toxic chemicals such as ammonia which is a very strong irritant that can cause liver and kidney damage, or bleach which can burn your skin and eyes, and irritate your lungs. Oven cleaners and drain cleaners can cause chemical burns and emit toxic fumes that harm your lungs. Even products labeled “green,” such as Simply Green, are not entirely natural.
Healthier Options: Consider nontoxic cleaning products, or make your own from ingredients around the house, such as baking soda and vinegar. Click here for recipes for homemade cleaners. 3. Air Fresheners-As time passes more negative effects are associated with these incredibly toxic products. Whether they are solids, aerosols, automatic sprayers, diffusers, or plug ins, it doesn’t matter. Petrochemically-based air fresheners aggravate and can trigger respiratory problems, reproductive problems, birth defects, and are now being linked to breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
Healthier Options: Consider open windows, air cleaners, search for the origin of the offending odor and remove it. Click here to learn more about air fresheners.
4. CFL Light Bulbs– People may appreciate the efficiency of these bulbs, as they use less electricity. However these bulbs contain mercury. If you are using these bulbs, the EPA recommends these bulbs be taken to special facilities when broken or recycled. They also offer detailed clean up instructions of broken bulbs. Learn more.
Healthier Options: Consider sticking with the “old fashion” light bulb or LEDs till something better comes along.
5. Chemical Insecticides and Herbicides-Pests and weeds may be problematic, however the health risk of using these products may cause you to reconsider their use. RoundUp is known to create a host of physical illness. Bug sprays commonly contain cypermethrin, a known eye, skin and respiratory irritant; it is also known to have negative effects on the central nervous system. Click here to learn more about glyphosates.
Healthier Options: Consider Diatomaceous Earth, or a peppermint castile soap for insects and straight vinegar as a weed killer. 6. Chemical Fertilizers– When it rains or you water your lawn, chemical runoff enters the storm drains. This chemical soup eventually ends up in streams, rivers and the ocean, killing wildlife and destroying water quality.
Healthier Options: Consider an organic fertilizer and compost, or to be more eco friendly consider a xeriscape yard or replacing your grass with a vegetable garden. 7. Flame Retardants-Flame retardants are used in cushions, mattresses, foam pillows, hair dryers, tvs, computers, carpets, appliances, fabrics, even your telephone. The flame retardant used in mattresses, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) accumulates in blood, breast milk, fatty tissue and is linked to liver, thyroid and neuro development issues. Since most people sleep on average 6-8 hours in their bed, you may consider purchasing an organic mattress.
Healthier Options: Consider replacing items when your finances allow. Click here to read more about toxins in the home. 8. Fabric Softener and Dryer Sheets– According to the EPA and MSDS there are numerous chemicals in fabric softeners and dryer sheets, including benzyl acetate, benzyl alcohol, ethanol, limonene, A-terpineol, ethyl acetate, camphor, chloroform, linalool and pentane. Many of these chemicals are linked to central nervous system disorders, upper respiratory tract infections, and various cancers, they also trigger asthmatic responses.
Healthier Options: Consider using wool dryer balls or spiked dryer balls which fluff your clothes. Another option is to add a ½ cup of vinegar to the fabric softener compartment in your washer. The acidity level of vinegar neutralizes the laundry soap, allowing more residue to wash out in the rinse cycle, clothes come out softer, and vinegar also removes any odor on clothes. Click here to learn more about the ingredients in Fabric Softeners and Dryer Sheets. 9. Antibacterial Products-Since their widespread use we are seeing new “super-bugs” that are resistant to antibiotics. The Center for Disease Control states concern that these anti-bacterial products may be interfering with the immune systems of young children. There is also concern about the buildup of triclosan in our bodies and our water supplies.
Healthier Options: Consider washing your hands more often in plain soap and water. 10. Plastic Shopping Bags-Plastic is forever. In the U.S. only 2% of plastic bags are recycled, the other 98% end up in landfills or the ocean.
Healthier Options: Consider reusable cloth or fabric bags. Storage crates that are easily packed up in the store and carried to your car are a great option as they are more stable than bags while driving, and have multiple uses. 11. Plastic Bottles- Most plastic bottles are made with BPA, a chemical that mimics hormones that are harmful to the endocrine system. When exposed to heat, bottles will leach these chemicals at a faster rate into your water.
Healthier Options: Consider stainless steel or glass bottles. 12. Scented Detergents-Almost all detergents contain fragrance, even those that are listed as unscented, usually have a masking ingredient to cover the scent. 95% of the chemicals used in fragrances are made from petroleum products. Many are known to cause cancer, birth defects, and damage to lungs, brain, and nerves. Fragrances are not regulated by any government or health agency. There is no law that requires fragrance ingredients to be put on product labels.
Healthier Options: Consider washing clothes in baking soda, or look for unscented laundry detergents without a masking fragrance. 13. Perfumes and Scented Soaps– As with scented detergents, 95% of the chemicals used in fragrances are made from petroleum products. Many are known to cause cancer, birth defects, and damage to lungs, brain, and nerves. Some chemicals commonly used in fragrances, such as toluene, are listed as hazardous waste worldwide. Fragrances are not regulated by any government or health agency. There is no law that requires fragrance ingredients to be put on product labels. To read more about perfumes click here.
Healthier Options: There are many organic, unscented soaps available in the marketplace.
Contrary to what most people believe, long term weight loss is not simply about cutting a few calories here and there. Sure, it sounds like it works, but the bottom line is that it does not. This has been proven in countless studies and also the countless tears of unsuccessful dieters desperately counting their calories like Ebenezer Scrooge counting his pennies. We pretend we live in a world where nutrition demands scientifically rigorous proof that prescribed treatments are effective. So, where are the studies that show that cutting calories causes long term weight loss? After 50 years of desperate, intense research, guess how many studies prove its effectiveness? How about zero? That’s right, Nada. Zilch. Zero. The only reason we think the ‘caloric reduction as primary’ strategy is effective is because it’s been repeated so often. It’s like Santa Claus. When I was a kid, I thought “So, some random guy is just going to give me presents for no reason?” But repeated often enough, these tales gain an undeserved sheen of truth.
No, the key to successful weight loss is to control your body’s ‘thermostat’ — the body set weight (BSW). A room thermostat is set to your desired room temperature and in the summer, when the outside temperature is hot, it turns on the air conditioning. In the winter, it detects the temperature is too cold, and turns on the heat. Your house stays at the perfect temperature despite wildly varying outside conditions.
In our bodies, we have the BSW, also called an appestat or obesistat, essentially a thermostat for body fatness. Some people believe we are designed to eat everything in front of our face and now that food is so easily available, we have no choice but to gain weight. This is false and completely ignores normal human physiology.
Instead, we have multiple overlapping powerful satiety mechanisms to stop eating. We have stretch receptors in our stomach to signal when it is too full. We have powerful satiety hormones such as peptide YY and cholecystokinin that stop us from eating. Think about a time you’ve eaten too much at a Chinese buffet. Would you be able to eat two more pork chops, just because they are available and free? Think about those restaurants that will give you a free meal if you can eat 40 oz of steak in 1 hour. Are they going bankrupt anytime soon? No. Because it is really, really hard to keep eating once we’re full. Yet these are the very same pork chops or steak that we hungrily ate just a few minutes ago, prior to the meal.
From an evolutionary standpoint, these satiety mechanism makes a lot of sense. Our body is designed to stay within certain body fat parameters. If you are too skinny, you will die during the hard times (winter). If you are too fat, you will not be able to catch food, and you might just get eaten yourself. Wild animals almost never become obese to the point of being unable to function normally. Where are the morbidly obese antelope? Caribou? Lions? Tigers? Fish? When food is plentiful, numbers of animals increase. You don’t get a few morbidly obese rats. You get thousands of relatively normal sized rats.
The BSW sets an ideal body fatness that it defends just like our house thermostat. If we are too skinny, we try to gain weight. If we are too fat, we try to lose weight. The clearest experimental demonstration of this was done by Dr. Rudy Leibel in 1995. In this experiment he took volunteers, and overfed them to make them gain 10% more weight. Then he returned them to their regular weight, and then to 10% or 20% weight loss. At each point, he measured the basal metabolic rate (BMR), or how much energy (calories) the body is expending. After 10% weight gain, the body burns about 500 calories more per day compared to baseline. As the body returns to it’s original weight, so does the metabolic rate. After 10% weight loss, the body burns about 300 calories per day less.
The body tries very hard to maintain its BSW in the original position, acting just like our house thermostat. This directly contradicts the ridiculous Calories In/ Calories Out (CICO) viewpoint that hold that simply eating too many calories causes body fatness without regard to the BSW or satiety hormones or pretty much any other physiologic signalling. If you deliberately overeat, your body tries to burn it off.
‘Calories’ is not a physiologic notion, as we’ve previously discussed. Our body has no ‘calorie’ receptors and does not know how many calories we eat or don’t eat. Over the past several centuries, we’ve decoded many of the human metabolic pathways. Do you see ‘calories’ mentioned ANYWHERE in this complex diagram? A calorie of carbohydrate is metabolised entirely differentlyfrom fat or protein. So why pretend they are the same? It’s like saying that humans and a tree trunk share the same physiology because we both weigh the same and would produce the same heat if burned in a calorimeter. Believing this totally ridiculous notion is a big part of why we’re losing the war on obesity. This notion of ‘A calorie is a calorie’ is mostly pushed by processed food companies trying to convince you that it is fine to swap 100 calories of avocado for Coke in terms of weight gain. You’d have to be pretty dense to believe it. For food companies, the calories model is like Santa Claus. As long as they keep people believing, its a gift that keeps on giving. They can sell sugary beverages and tell people with a straight face that 100 calories of sugar is as fattening as 100 calories of kale.
Take artificial sweeteners. It has no calories, so we can fool our taste buds, but can we fool our appestat? Not at all. How many people do you know have lost weight by switching to sweeteners? If all we had to do to lose weight was eat fake sugar and fake fat and no calories, we’d all be eating Olestra and Stevia and lose weight. There would be no obesity crisis. There would be no type 2 diabetes crisis. But there is.
Why ‘Caloric Reduction as Primary’ does not work
Suppose our house thermostat is set to 72F degrees, but we now want to be at 70F. Ignoring the thermostat, we turn on the portable air conditioner in. At first, the temperature drops to 70F but then the thermostat turns up the heat to return the room to 72F. We don’t like that, so we put a second and third air conditioner in. In response, the thermostat turns the heat on full blast. We continually fighting against ourselves in an ultimately futile attempt. Well, that didn’t work. What is a simpler solution? Turn down the thermostat.
This is analogous to reducing calories to lose weight because it completely ignores the BSW. Suppose our BSW is set at 200 pounds, but we want to weight 170 pounds. Conventional advice tells us to cut 500 calories per day to lose 1 pound per week. Initially weight goes down to 185 pounds, but then our appestat kicks in to make us gain weight. We become more hungry and basal metabolism slows in order to regain the weight. So we try even harder by cutting more calories. But our body responds by further slowing our metabolism. We continually fight against ourselves in an ultimately futile attempt to lose weight. Well, that didn’t work. What is a simpler solution? Turn down the appestat or BSW. How to do that? Read on, my friend.
The Body Weight ‘Thermostat’
So how does our appestat work? Recall that obesity is a disease caused by excessive insulin, not excessive calories. It is a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one. If you are not familiar with these ideas, you can find details in The Obesity Code book or review my past blogs at www.IDMprogram.com. If you need further help, you can contact us for personalized coaching or join our membership program. Insulin signals our body to store food energy in the form of body fat. When we fast, and insulin goes down, we burn some of that stored energy and this is why we don’t die in our sleep every night. Yes, we are able to survive without stuffing muffins in our mouths every 2 hours.
A thermostat works on a negative feedback loop. If the temperature is too low, the thermostat turns on the heat until it gets to the proper temperature and then it stops. The body also uses a negative feedback loop in the BSW. Excessive insulin leads an increase in the size of fat cells. They produce more of the hormone leptin which travels to the brain and signals that ‘we’re too fat’. Appetite decreases, we stop eating, and this lowers insulin. This signals our body to start burning fat instead of eating and storing it and returns us to our original, desired BSW.
This feedback loop keeps our weight relatively stable despite wide fluctuations in calorie intake and calorie expenditures day after day, week after week and year after year. After all, most people become obese by gaining 1–2 pounds per year. Over 40 years, this can add up. Assume that 1 pound of body fat is roughly 3500 calories. In a year, we might eat 2000 cal/day times 365 days = 730,000 calories. To gain 1 pound a year (3500 calories), we would need to accurately match calorie intake and expenditure to a 99.5% accuracy rate. That’s impossible. I have maintained an even weight since grade school, but I have no idea how many calories I eat and how many I expend. How do I maintain a 100% accuracy rate? Clearly, I could not do this through conscious regulation of my food intake/ exercise. No, body fat is regulated by a feedback mechanism — the BSW ‘thermostat’.
Obesity is therefore not a caloric balance problem, but rather the gradual increase in the BSW thermostat (appestat) over time. Let see how that works.
Obesity
The BSW is created by the balance of insulin effect versus leptin effect, just as the thermostat is regulated by the balance of heat versus cooling. In those who are obese, we know that insulin effect has prevailed over leptin effect. For example, if we inject exogenous insulin, we gain fat because we have tilted the balance towards insulin. In normal human obesity, this could be due to a number of reasons, but eating foods high in refined grains, eating frequently, eating lots of sugar (causes hepatic insulin resistance directly) are all culprits in keeping insulin levels high despite leptin’s best efforts to curb appetite to lower insulin. If insulin is extremely low, as in type 1 diabetes, the body loses weight continuously no matter how many calories are eaten.
The battle royale for the BSW is Insulin vs. Leptin. One is trying to make us gain fat, the other is trying to lose fat. It’s Rocky vs. Apollo Creed. These two heavyweight hormones that control body fat percentage are trading body blows. If leptin wins, then we are able to reduce appetite and/ or increase basal metabolic rates sufficiently to burn off the excess calories being eaten. This is exactly what we saw in Rudy Leibel’s study of deliberate weight gain.
But obesity is by definition a disease caused by too much insulin — hyperinsulinemia. If you are obese, it’s because insulin prevailed over leptin. As the fat cells stay over-filled, they produce more and more leptin in an attempt to fight insulin. This should help in the Battle Royale. And it does, often for decades. However, the root problem of hyperinsulinemia has not been solved (eating too much sugar, too many refined carbohydrates, eating constantly), so insulin also continues to march higher. And persistent high levels of hormones result in resistance. Eventually, persistent, high levels of leptin cause leptin resistance. Persistent high levels of insulin cause insulin resistance. But just as true — persistent high leptin levels cause leptin resistance.
This leptin resistance is virtually universal in common obesity. With leptin down and out, insulin is now unopposed to cause weight gain. The insulin vs leptin battle has been lost, and the BSW thermostat is reset upwards.
So, what’s the answer? Suppose we use the standard dietary advice of cutting dietary fat, reducing calories but eating lots of carbohydrates and eating 6 or 7 times per day. Since dietary fat has little insulin effect, this caloric reduction strategy has not reduced insulin effect and makes no difference to this Insulin vs. Leptin battle. Yes, you can cut calories, but no, you didn’t reduce insulin’s effect. The BSW is unaffected and our bodies desperately try to regain the lost weight. This is precisely the dietary advice given over the last 40 years that has failed so spectacularly. Eating frequently means constant stimulation of insulin, which is also detrimental to weight loss efforts.
The key to combating obesity, then is to help in the Insulin vs Leptin fight by lowering insulin. Everything depends upon it. Leptin is already maxed out. The only thing left is to lower insulin. How to do that? Well
Eat less sugar
Eat less refined grains
Moderate protein and high natural fats
Don’t eat all the time (time restricted eating or intermittent fasting). Stop snacking
Eat real unprocessed foods (lower in insulin effects)
Funny. That’s precisely the sort of no-nonsense advice your grandmother would have given. Low Carb Healthy Fats + Intermittent Fasting. Boom. If you need further help with weight loss, consider joining the IDM membership program.
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9. Antibacterial Products-Since their widespread use we are seeing new “super-bugs” that are resistant to antibiotics. The Center for Disease Control states concern that these anti-bacterial products may be interfering with the immune systems of young children. There is also concern about the buildup of 
12. Scented Detergents-Almost all detergents contain fragrance, even those that are listed as unscented, usually have a masking ingredient to cover the scent. 95% of the chemicals used in 
ARYAN'S BLOG 