Cell food and oxygenforlife

[DarthFishy]

Hi.

I did a search for cellfood and similar products but the only forum links were to really old threads that didn't really give me the info I wanted.

Essentially this product, especially the south african version (www.oxygenforlife.co.za) has my BS meter going off. I have a colleague at work who swears by the stuff.

Reading through the information and the pamphlets there are a lot of things that bother me. The problem is (a) I'm not that familiar with the chemistry or biology of the topics and (b) I would really like a good resource on it.

So does anybody have a good link to website/article/blog anything that debunks this stuff?

Thanks in advance.

Of course if it actually does work that would be nice to know as well :)

[HansMustermann]

Yep, looks like bunk to me.

For a start, any food or drink which makes a fuss about containing oxygen for your cells is, a priori, bullcrap. Even if you drank concentrated peroxide (not recommended!!), it would give you a negligible fraction of the daily oxygen you need and get from the air.

Plus, it's a zero sum game. If you actually got more oxygen into your blood from whatever other source, your normal self-regulation feedback loops would make you breathe less. The net gain is zero. You'd just have an expensive substitute for breathing, and, well... why?

The minerals... again, why? If you actually had a shortage of something, it would be of a certain mineral, not of every element in the periodic table. And for half that list, it reads like a major WTF...

E.g., argon? WTH biological role would that play, given that it's an inert element? Ditto for krypton. Gold? Really? What's the biological role of traces of gold?

Xenon? Other than as a general anesthetic (in much larger quantities than these guys probably include), what's that used for in human biology? Exactly what kind of cell food that is?

Etc.

But that's probably OK, because they only mention all that as _traces_. I.e., it probably just mean that it's non-distilled water.

Enzymes... well, as a general principle, you produce all the enzymes you need. Unless you have some genetic disease or poisoning, that is, but then you'd need exactly those you don't produce. Not a mixture of every enzyme that ever existed.

I also doubt that most of those would do anything unless you inject them in a vein. As a rule of thumb, enzymes are proteins, and your body doesn't just take foreign proteins as they are. Your digestive tract sees to it that they're broken into their individual components (aminoacids) and then absorbs those.

So I'm guessing you'd see less benefit from the _traces_ of those, than from eating a couple of peanuts or a steak.

What makes me curious though is that several of those enzymes aren't even human enzymes nor useful for humans. E.g., urease. It's something that exists in bacteria, yeast, and some plants. The only presence in humans is from such bacteria, and it's used to detect some infections. And it's something outright counter-productive in a human. Urease breaks down urea into CO2 and ammonia, whereas your methabolism works exactly the other way around: your body tries to get rid of ammonia produced by your metabolism, by converting it into urea which then you pee out. WTH the usefulness would be to take an enzyme which gets the ammonia back into your system, is beyond my comprehension.

But again, they only say "traces", so I'm guessing they included everything that exists in tap water :p

[Silly Green Monkey]

Our fingernails contain gold.

[HansMustermann]

Traces, yes. But as a by-product, not as something you actually need in any form or shape.

[Criticalist]

Completely agree with what Hans had to say.
I especially like the fact they proudly proclaim "does NOT contain any glucose!!" - the one molecule you could genuinely describe as "cell food"

[jasonpatterson]

Believe it or not, the guy who is hawking this stuff addresses homeostasis:

Oxygen Homeostasis

The Oxygen Model is about restoring oxygen homeostasis and not merely about dumping oxygen into the body, by mask, hydrogen peroxide foot soaks, intravenous infusion of ozone, hyperbaric oxygen, etc., though all of those therapies greatly help.


It's good to know that soaking my feet in hydrogen peroxide will help cure cancer (that's what he's referring to in this model.) It's a shame that people are allowed to sell this crap, and a bigger one still that people are foolish enough to buy it.

[DarthFishy]

Thanx a lot for the info guys. I actually saw it described as a homeopathic remedy at the pharmacy over the weekend.

I especially like the bits about the inert gases (argon, krypton etc.) I was too busy checking out some of the other elements for toxicity that I completely missed that.

Hopefully this will be a good place to start the conversation with my colleague.

[soylent]

The irony is that oxygen is a nasty poison.

There are on the order of 1000-1 million damages to DNA per cell, per day and the bulk of this is your metabolism of oxygen. Your cells have various antioxidants and other mechanisms to try to prevent this damage from occuring to DNA, if that fails it has intricate repair mechanisms to deal with various types of damage to DNA, if that fails it has a suicide mechanism, if the suicide mechanism fails it has an immune system which tries to find and kill cells that are misbehaving.

While the hyperbaric oxygen and soaking your feet in hydrogen peroxide sounds useless but relatively harmless, the intravenous ozone infusion sounds just insane.

[jasonpatterson]

While the hyperbaric oxygen and soaking your feet in hydrogen peroxide sounds useless but relatively harmless, the intravenous ozone infusion sounds just insane.

But if it were homeopathic ozone, that would be just fine! :D