March 27, 2025

Metals are characterized as having outer-shell electrons that can separate from the atom and either travel linearly through wires or chemically react with something. If they chemically react, they tend to be catalysts. That means metals easily give up and re-absorb electrons.

There are other definitions of metals, particularly from ancient times; but the definition should be aligned upon the ability of outer shell electrons to be easily given up and re-absorbed. Other cationic types of elements such as sodium, potassium and calcium should not be called metals, but usually are. Cationic means one or more electrons is missing creating a plus charge for the atom.

When taking metals as nutritional supplements, they are always ionic, which makes them more soluble. They are then attached to chelating agents, such as gluconate. That means the plus charge of the metal is attracted to the minus charge of the chelating agent, which holds the metal in place making it less hazardous to surrounding molecules. Citric acid is the strongest chelating agent that is normally used.

If a person takes citric acid to make metals safer, it should be carefully evaluated in small amounts, because large amounts can cause artery attachments to come loose and plug arteries. When medical doctors use citric acid chelation to remove toxic metals, they are quite concerned about that. But small amounts of citric acid should be no problem, as it is added to some foods. A safe amount should be half a gram once in a while. Then take some citric acid a few minutes before taking metal supplements and again some time afterwards.

Metals tend to dismantle molecules which contain carbon such as biological molecules. So it is not good to have free metals in biological systems. The metals are normally attached to proteins or the porphyrin ring, which prevents them from reacting with surrounding molecules. The intestine has proteins designed for attaching to metals, so they can be carried around without damaging something.

Metals catalyze chemical reactions unlike anything else. The way that works, is an electron will be donated to or absorbed from a nearby molecule which contains bonding to more than one atom causing a bond to break. The broken bond will leave the wrong number of electrons causing the metal to do the opposite and absorb or donate an electron returning to the original condition of the metal.

So the key question is, how can the metal do both donate and absorb electrons. The reason why that is possible is because electrons have a wide variety energy states, particularly in the outer shell of metals. The energy state of all electrons is always rapidly changing due to vibrations and bumping into things.

That effect shows up at the bottom of oscilloscope traces as noise voltage. The voltage peaks are highly varied including some extreme spikes.

The extremes of electron energy means that a metal atom will have an electron of just the right energy to promote a chemical reaction in a nearby molecule. The molecule will then come apart. But there will then be too many or too few electrons in the result. The metal will then absorb or donate an electron to correct the number. Then the same thing will be repeated until the complex molecule is reduced to simplicity.

That means free metals are absorbing or donating electrons to nearby molecules reducing them to simple forms, which is how catalytic converters work.

In animal biology, zinc is used in that manner to degrade foreign matter in the blood. Zinc is the strongest oxidizing agent that can be handled in a routine manner by animals.

What would happen, circumstantially, when zinc is breaking down foreign matter, is, if it ends up in the plus one form, it can't attack another molecule; but if it ends up in the plus two form, it can be used again to attack another molecule of foreign substance.

There is probably a mechanism for restoring zinc when it has an electron that it can't get rid of; but such a mechanism hasn't been studied. It's probably cytochrome C that picks up the extra electron from zinc. Then cytochrome C can get rid of the electron a lot easier than zinc can.

That's because zinc must start in the plus two form to function as a catalyst. From the plus one form, it can't start the catalytic processes.

Organic molecules can be constructed with a wide range of redox potentials, but they aren't catalysts. Metals are needed for that.
 
Vitamin C Donates Electrons

Metals should not exist in free form in biological systems due to their reactivity which will damage anything near them. But occasionally some metals will be in free form. The most hazardous would be iron in the plus three form. Iron is used as a supplement in the plus two form combined with sulfate. To prevent it from taking the plus three form, vitamin C donates an electron to it.

When vitamin C donates an electron, it comes apart without requiring a replacement electron and it is not a catalyst. Therefore, when vitamin C donates an electron to an ionic metal, the metal has an extra electron which it cannot get rid of.

If vitamin C comes into contact with zinc, it adds an electron to zinc making the zinc nonfunctional and somewhat toxic. Zinc is vulnerable, because it needs to be exposed to its environment to dismantle foreign molecules. That means vitamin C must not react with zinc, even though vitamin C is needed to make iron less reactive. So people should not take large amounts of vitamin C.

Evolution deals with such contradictions (as needing Vitamin C for iron but damaging zinc) through probabilities without totally eliminating the contradictions. That means nutrients provide just the right amount of vitamin C and usually not much more than that amount should be taken. The right amount of vitamin C seems to be around the recommended daily dosage. But vitamin C pills are usually much larger in dosage, because many years ago, Linus Pauling said vitamin C might be good for curing diseases including cancer. He was a chemist, not a biologist and guessed wrong.

Assumptions are that vitamin C is needed to correct free radicals created by oxidative metabolism. However, vitamin C is too limited and hard to produce for that purpose. The balance of redox reactions is complex and would not be dependent upon such a metabolically expensive molecule. Superoxide dismutase is used for superoxide.

Oxidative phosphorylation doesn't produce an oxidized free molecule that would need vitamin C. Oxidative phosphorylation normally donates a low energy electron to oxygen. It does not create highly oxidized molecules such as plus three iron—that is, beyond the controlled transitions in cytochromes, which have no relationship to vitamin C. That means there is nothing for vitamin C to donate an electron to in the oxidative phosphorylation process.

Superoxide is accidentally created in respiration, when a high energy electron goes off course and combines with oxygen. Superoxide dismutase evolved to eliminate superoxide in very primitive organisms, before oxidative phosphorylation existed in modern respiration.

Strangely, descriptions say vitamin C "scavenges" superoxide type molecules. There is no such thing as scavenging in metabolism. It appears that someone wants to relate vitamin C to superoxide, when there is no relationship; so they say it scavenges instead of reacts with it.