Getting Silicon Wrong

March 10, 2023

Over the past few years, some persons have been saying silicon is a nutrient for humans. Now silicon is in most vitamin and mineral pills. There isn't a biological function for silicon in the large-animal world. Silicates normally attach to cations and metals hardening rocks due to covalent bonds.

So it's not a good thing for humans to ingest silicon. Most of it would not be soluble; and no one knows how much enters the circulatory system. One of the rationalizations for putting silicon in pills is probably to slow absorption creating an element of "time-release." But that type of time-release would also be fallacy, because highly delayed absorption would tend to result in non-absorption, while a lot of persons complain of vitamin and mineral pills not being absorbed well. Removing the silicon would improve that problem.

Even though silicon is largely not soluble in vitamin and mineral pills, a small amount would be, just as rocks weather on the hills. Acids would solubilize a small amount. And that is entirely why there should not be silicon ingested by humans. The solubilized silicon could form covalent bonds with cations and metals.

No one is saying there is silicon in gall stones, kidney stones, calcium deposits or hardening of arteries. But if some silicon were found there, it wouldn't be mentioned, because positivism is the prevailing rule in tailoring information for the public, while negativism is assumed to be the ruination of man. In fact, no looking for silicon would occur for that reason. No need to find out what the negative elements of modern existence consist of.

Medical scientists got urea wrong in assuming urea is a method of getting rid of excess nitrogen. Its actual function is to kill bacteria in the urinary tract.

Microbes love urea, but only in a small quantity. Above 0.2% in growth media is toxic.

Urea is a combination of carbon dioxide and ammonia. When bacteria absorb urea, it splits apart into carbon dioxide and ammonia. The resulting carbon dioxide is emitted through cell walls, as usual, leaving ammonia in the cells as alkali. Cells cannot adjust pH to reduce alkali, so the accumulation kills the cells.

Cells normally adjust pH when overly acidic by pumping hydrogen ions out of the cell. Almost all cell membranes in biology have hydrogen ion pumps for removing excess hydrogen ions from cells. An ATP is needed for each hydrogen ion.

But there is no way to correct for alkalinity, because hydrogen ions cannot be pumped into cells. That's because the outside of cells does not have excess hydrogen ions to pump into cells. So alkalinity cannot be corrected. But alkalinity is extremely unusual, because breakdown of carbohydrates produces excess acidity, not alkalinity.

Creating urea to kill bacteria is an involved and energy intensive process. So why not simply exhale the ammonia instead of converting it into urea? Medical scientists see ammonia being produced in converting one amino acid into another and assume the result is accidental production of ammonia. Not so. The whole process has the function of producing ammonia, so it can be used to kill bacteria.

Very little ammonia is accidentally produce in metabolism; so it is easily exhaled without an elaborate process. That's because ammonia is high in energy; and energy is not wasted in metabolism. In fact, ammonia is the gold of the soil, because it is easily metabolized being high in energy. But only a small amount of ammonia exists in the soil; and it is rapidly absorbed as a valuable nutrient.

The claim is that sugar creates a problem in fat production. If so, the amount is the problem and some sugar might not be a problem depending upon how energy is metabolized.

But another problem is that sugars damage cells. That problem is not noticeable with youngsters, since they seem quite resilient to nutritional problems. But nutritional problems become more noticeable for the elderly, as their metabolism slows down and gets stressed; and a problem with sugars damaging cells becomes noticeable. Physiology explains why.

Glucose enters most cells uninhibitedly through the GLUT1 transport protein, while insulin regulates glucose entry into muscle cells through the GLUT4 transport protein. The manner in which glucose enters cells is different than the manner in which other substances enter cells. Usually, proteins identify which substance should enter cells and assists the transfer. But sugars are not identified for GLUT1 entry. The result is that a wide variety of molecules enter cells through the glut1 transport protein including vitamin C and the lymphocyte virus.

The problem is that most sugars are approximately the same diameter and will go through the GLUT1 opening into cells which is designed for glucose. But only glucose is readily metabolized as sugar. That means the other sugars get in the way of cell metabolism.

The inside of cells is like thousands of assembly lines packed together. Enzymes must be attached to membranes to keep reactants moving directly from one to another without diffusing around and disrupting other processes. Sugars diffuse around and disrupt various processes. If it's glucose, it gets metabolized rapidly, but not other sugars.

So the elderly notice aches and pains from eating sugars. Eliminating all sugars improves those problems. That means cells are being damaged from the sugars.

The promotion of plant oils in food in place of animal fats is a lot of rationalizing, where the biology indicates otherwise. Animals evolved metabolizing animal fats, not plant oils. Evolution will therefore be aligned upon animal fats rather than plant oils for animals.

Energy storage fats are different from the structural fats in cell membranes. Energy storage fats are tri-glycerides; and cell membrane fats are phospholipids.

The energy storage fats of animals are mostly straight chains, which are saturated, the obvious reason being that enzymes function a lot better with straight chains. Different enzymes would be needed for the cis double-bond variants called unsaturated.

The promoters of the cause of campaigning for plant oils as nutrients harp against saturated fats. There is no biological logic. The cis double bonds of plant oils, called unsaturated, would require different enzymes. That means the logic of evolution would have no reason to use double bonds for energy storage fats by animals.

The structural fats in cell membranes are cis double bond unsaturated. The evolution of membranes goes back as far as cellular biology. The logic indicates that the reason for cis double bonds in cell membranes is to resist attack by insects, since the cis bonds are strange and difficult to metabolize and have no other apparent logic.

Energy storage fats didn't exist until the dinosaurs died out and all biology was modernized. It would have been yeasts that evolved energy storage fats; and then horizontal gene transfer would have spread storage fats to other types of organisms. That would have occurred about fifty million years ago—long after membrane fats evolved.

Then there was no reason for energy storage fats to be complex requiring more cumbersome enzymatic processes; so the storage fats would have initially been straight-chain, saturated fats. Beef and pork energy storage fats are mostly straight chain, saturated. But a few cis double bonds have been entering those fats, probably because of eating plant oils in livestock feed consisting of corn and soybeans. Picking up some of the fats unaltered with cis bonds would have been a convenience.

What that situation adds up to is that animal fats are metabolized by animals and humans more easily that plant fats. The animal fats are simpler, easier to metabolize and less demanding upon enzymes.

Fats which are not attached to carriers are removed from the blood by white blood cells. Sometimes, the white blood cells become attached to artery walls. Those white blood cells continue to absorb fats in the blood which are not attached to carriers in addition to calcium to create hardening of the arteries.

It is therefore more logical that it is the plant fats that contribute to hardening of the arteries than animal fats.

The propagandists on such subject are the same sort of know-nothings that insist fake renewable energy is carbon free and must be used to remove fake greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. That means the know-nothings will say anything and make up science that doesn't exist. Incompetent power mongers in science will depend upon the know-nothings to make claims which are not scientifically credible to promote their schemes. So the scientific logic needs to be explained and accounted for, which is nothing resembling the propaganda on scientific subjects.