Intro To Oxidation

Introduction to Fire In a Bottle

David Rosenberg increased his metabolic rate by 1100 calories per day with alpha-lipoic acid, succinade, sterculia oil and stearic acid.

I was excited when David reached out to me because he is very regimented. He has literally weighed and recorded the macros of every piece of food he has eaten going back to July of 2021. He exercises the same amount each week, the same number of reps of the same exercises. When he jogs …

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FIAB Podcast, Episode 4: Reductive Stress

A Google Scholar search for the phrase “oxidative stress diabetes” currently yields over 500,000 papers, but the phrase “reductive stress diabetes” yields only 17,000, a discrepancy of 30 to 1. I believe the underlying issue at the heart of our metabolic woes is reductive stress, which looks to cells like too much cellular energy. In …

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NAD+, Reductive Stress and the Magic of Superoxide

This is the next in a series of posts I am writing about reductive stress as defined by the NAD+/NADH.  This post looks at the uniqueness of superoxide as a reduced electron carrier.  Superoxide is not like the other electron carriers.  Most electron carriers, such as NADH, need to give their electron to something else …

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Lactate and the Lipoic Acid Flu, An Hypothesis and n=1

In my last post I recommended a strategy of combining lipoic acid – a natural, mitochondrially produced substance which oxidizes NADH to NAD+ – and succinate, which drives mitochondrial ROS production and oxidation of NADH to NAD+ via the activity of the enzyme NNT. Both of these are designed to shift the redox pool of …

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Speed Your Metabolism With Oxidative Stress! Slow It With Antioxidants!

It’s rare to find a scientific paper whose RESULTS are hilarious. Sometimes the authors conclusions are hilarious. If you’ve lived through the last 30 years of articles about the best sources of antioxidants and how to avoid oxidative stress, though, the actual findings of this study​1​ will certainly seem ironic, if not hilarious. I’ve written …

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When Life Gives You Pig Heads, Use Them To Boost Your Antioxidant System

I help my friend Devon with catering. He has a pig farm and does pig roasts/weddings, etc. He asked me the other day, “Is there any thing I can do with these pig heads?” “YES!” “You can make jowl bacon from the jowls and the rest can be made into headcheese.” Headcheese, or souse, is …

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Oxidative Balance: A Simple Regulatory Loop

For the background material on understanding this post, start with Hydrogen Peroxide Flips The Switch. In most cells, most of the time, it is ideal to be in a state of oxidative balance. The simplest measure for this is the percentage of a small molecule called glutathione, sometimes referred to as the body’s “master antioxidant”, …

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Hydrogen Peroxide Flips the Switch

For background information on this post, start by reading the introduction to oixdation. Terms you should understand before reading this article are superoxide and ROS. Additionally, you should understand the basics of the human antioxidant system. Hydrogen Peroxide is the Signal Superoxide is a free radical which is produced during metabolism at the bottleneck in …

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The Illustrated Guide And Annotated Guide to The ROS Theory of Obesity

I gave a lecture on The ROS Theory Of Obesity at Interbrook Farm in Sept of 2019. I made hand drawn slides with a Sharpie. Unfortunately my sense of humor is on full display in these. Maybe they’ll be useful to someone. Also, u/leerylizard posted an annotated guide to the ROS Theory Of Obesity on …

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The Mitochondria

A mitochondria works like a battery. It maintains a voltage gradient across its inner-membrane. The outside of the membrane has a positive charge and the inside has a negative charge. Protons from the outside flow back through the membrane down the gradient, releasing energy, through a large cross-membrane protein complex called ATP synthase, which uses …

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Two Elegant Experiments Demonstrating that ROS is The Signal

If you’been reading through the Introduction to Fire in a Bottle series, I explained the concept of oxidation, discussed the oxygen catastrophe and its implications for evolution, I introduced our unlikely hero superoxide and then we met our bodies inbuilt antioxidant defense system. Along the way I introduced the key point that Reactive Oxygen Species …

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Summary of The Introduction to Life in a Bottle

Oxidation (in a biological context) is the flow of electrons from elements like Hydrogen and Carbon to Oxygen Oxygen is very reactive. Chlorophyll took its electrons away and it would very much like to get them back. In metabolism – the oxidation of starch and fat – free radicals, notably superoxide, are produced from Oxygen. …

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Superoxide: An Unlikely Hero

When I took oncology at Cornell in the mid-90’s, the root cause of cancer was explained in the following way. Certain things – such as ionizing radiation from a nuclear explosion – cause free radical formation. The free radicals can damage the DNA, causing genetic mutations. When enough mutations accumulated in key genes affecting the …

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The Great Oxygenation

The primordial atmosphere of the earth didn’t contain Oxygen (O2). The atmosphere was a “reducing atmosphere”, the exact opposite of today’s “oxidizing atmosphere”. Somewhere along the line life evolved. Single-celled organisms. Weirdos by today’s standards. Methanogens and sulfate-reducing microorganisms. That was just life for a couple billion years. And then chlorophyll evolved. Chlorophyll changes everything. …

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