Re: This negative aricle about Antioxidants appeared in the Lancet

From: Steve Harris sbharris_at_ROMAN9.netcom.com (sbharris_at_ix.netcom.com)
Date: 10/24/04 

Date: 24 Oct 2004 13:47:31 -0700

peterb@mytrashmail.com (peterb) wrote in message news:<a25cdd6c.0410240617.25373727@posting.google.com>...
> Peter H Proctor <drp@drproctor.com> wrote in message news:<o4pfn0loq95veparijl7ls8jsskfjt4uea@4ax.com>...
> > On 20 Oct 2004 06:10:20 GMT, Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@omsdev.com> wrote:
> >
> > >Peter H Proctor
>
> > >> Paracelcus: " Everything is poison and there is poison in everything.
> > >> It is the dose that makes a thing a poison."
> > >
> > >Someone once said "the difference between a nutrient, a drug, and a poison
> > >is merely the dosage."
> >
> > "The dose makes the poison" is a fundamental concept underlyng toxicology...
>
> But ridiculously outdated. Paracelcus lived prior to the introduction
> of man-made chemicals, which are treated as poisons biochemically
> regardless of the dose; this is a fundamental difference between them
> and micronutrients to which humans have evolved a beneficial metabolic
> response; nor do they provide a health-positive benefit with long-term
> exposure (and a comparatively small overall benefit in crisis medical
> care with *short*-term exposure.) Everything is poison in *some*
> measure; but some things are poison in *ANY* measure.

COMMENT:

Don't tell the homeopaths.

I have no idea what you mean by "treated as poisons." Some things that
damage the body are metabolized, and others are outright ignored.
There is no single thing the body does with all "poisons"-- and indeed
one thing that is done, is nothing. The body doesn't do much with
aluminum, for example. But you eat it all the time, because it's a
major component of dirt and dust. Is it toxic? Not particularly in
that form, anyway.

The body has evolutinary mechanisms for specially recognizing
necessary nutrients (vitamins, minerals, essential fatty and amino
acids etc) to be sure, but necessary nutrients are only a tiny
fraction of what we eat. For most of the rest of the molecules it
deals with, the body has no particular program. If you eat a
kiwifruit, you're going to be dealing with a few chemicals your body
has no evolutionary experience with, unless you're an Australian
native, maybe. For that matter, the same goes for a potato, unless
your ancestors are from Southern south America. The Irish and Germans
haven't been eating potatos long enough to make any difference,
evolution-wise. Indeed, potato skins (especially eyes and sprouts)
contain the narcotic alkaloid solanine, which in large enough doses is
a toxin. The dose makes the difference.

Plants are full of nasty things. Bruce Ames makes the point that a
third of the chemicals known from cabbage are poisons or mutagens in
quantity. Indeed, that's the whole point of herbology-- you're eating
parts of the plants that the plant doesn't really want eaten (like the
root in potato), and so has probably filled with one sort of mild
toxin or another (think of garlic, onion, turmeric, etc). And in small
quantities, some of these are medicinal. That's the nature of plant
toxins. Nearly anything that is specifically toxic by binding to an
active receptor, is medically useful in smaller doses, as a modulator
for the physiologic function that receptor controls.

SBH

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