Reagent In Excess Contaminating Synthetic Vitamins?

Okay, Blogger isn't that bad, really. It doesn't suck. I wouldn't normally say blogger sucks - that's not the kind of thing I say.

"So vitamin A may be synthesized from acetone, and vitamin C from keto acid. " (http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/Vitamin.html)

have you ever heard of a 'limiting reagent' in chemistry class?

when you mix chemicals together, ONE of the chemicals will get completely used up. that is the limiting reagent.

in the chemical reaction, the chemicals bond with each other in a certain ratio, like two hydrogen molecules for every one oxygen molecule.

but since you can't count out the EXACT number of molecules you need, there will always be a few unreacted molecules of something left over. you won't ever start with exactly 200 hydrogen molecules for every 100 oxygen molecules. you'd more likely have 250 hydrogens and 103 oxygens, or something. in that case, all the oxygens would get used up, and there would be hydrogen left over.

i've been reading about the hazards of synthetic vitamins. a lot of the arguments talk about things that i think are IRRELEVANT. they argue about whether or not the digestive system is able to absorb artificial vitamins as well as it can absorb natural ones. i don't care if you can absorb them or not. i want to know what they do to you AFTER THEY GET ABSORBED. i also want to know if they're identical to natural ones, and also, i want to know if synthetic vitamins DON'T HAVE anything new and different that shouldn't be there. such as... unused chemical reagents.

if you have a complex chemical reaction with a whole bunch of different reagents, not just two (like hydrogen and oxygen), then you might use up the limiting reagent, and then have six or seven things left, which might partially combine with each other to form new compounds which then contaminate the final result. or you might have some original reagents that haven't reacted at all. (okay, i found it: it's called the 'reagent in excess.')

so if artificial vitamin A is synthesized from acetone, you could be eating leftover acetone when you eat synthetic vitamin A. vitamin A is said to be one of the more dangerous synthetic vitamins. now, i don't know if acetone would evaporate - i seem to recall that it's volatile and it becomes a gas or vapor - i don't know enough about it to be sure if it could remain in the final product. but even if it wasn't acetone, there could still be SOMETHING left, and you won't know what it is.

the MOST DANGEROUS reagent ought to be the limiting reagent. the safest reagents ought to become the remaining contaminants. you also have to check that they're not reacting with each other to form something you don't want.

but i wouldn't bother with that - i would just argue that you should avoid synthetic vitamins.

i wish i could find the article that i read which said that nasal allergies - sneezing, runny nose - were triggered by using synthetic vitamins. i used to eat breakfast cereal, and i don't anymore. the cereals are all full of synthetic vitamins. i recently (within the past two years or so) bought a box of breakfast cereal and ate it over a couple of weeks, and immediately i started having a runny nose and sneezing and allergies. they went away right after i finished the box of breakfast cereal.

i've also been reading that synthetic vitamins are associated with autism. i don't know the details: for instance, a healthy adult isn't going to suddenly become autistic by using them, but maybe a pregnant mother increases the chance of having an autistic child if she is using synthetic vitamins.

this is part of the 'placebo effect is a myth' blog that i haven't written yet, but... superstitious beliefs are necessary and helpful. it's okay to have some superstitious beliefs. why do i say that? because superstitions are a 'work in progress' as people struggle to understand a phenomenon they observe. you see something, you don't know HOW it happens, and you try to do something about it.

if you notice that you vaccinated your child, the child developed a high fever afterwards and was screaming for three days, and never spoke another word to you again, and developed lifelong autism, you can't explain HOW the vaccine caused the autism. and a thousand articles proving that 'thimerosal has nothing to do with autism' are useless to you, because you still saw that SOMETHING HAPPENED when you vaccinated your child. maybe it wasn't the thimerosal, maybe it was something else.

if you see something happen, and it seems to be caused by one thing, you don't always know the exact details of what caused it. maybe you cured a wart on your hand by going out in the woods, and saying a prayer while the moon was full. so you do that again, and it cures another wart, and you start telling everybody this is a good wart cure.

but it turns out that actually, the place where you sat in the woods is full of some herb that cures warts, and you didn't know that you were sitting in a field of this medicinal plant and it's the reason. you can effectively cure warts by going there, but it has nothing to do with the moon or the prayer, and yet, you can still cure the wart by doing those (harmless but irrelevant) actions over and over again, as long as you do it exactly the same way you did it the first time, in the same location. if a superstition is harmless, don't worry about it. sometimes it's connected with a real cure, but just misinterpreted somehow.

vaccines, and synthetic vitamins, might be like that. i don't know the exact details of HOW they harm the body, but a lot of people are observing that they do. if you can't explain how it works, then people accuse you of falling for the placebo effect.

but what else was the cause of this problem... you vaccinated your child, and he/she never functioned normally again afterwards? starting right in that moment? functioning perfectly well up until that day, and then afterwards, obviously sick and autistic?

(sorry, i'm in a bad mood: i've been sick all night and couldn't eat anything. this is why i'm obsessed with nutrition and sickness right now.)

anyway, ALL 'SCIENTIFIC' OBSERVATIONS begin with one person using their eyes and their senses to observe and experience something - even if it's the 'scientist' reading the numbers on an electronic screen after testing something. he still has to trust his eyes to read the numbers correctly, and still has to trust his brain to interpret them.

so why are the scientist's eyes better than my own? if i see something, why is MY observation 'the placebo effect?' i see that something makes me sick - that's a 'scientific test.' i do the 'test' (eat the particular food in question, such as fruit juice) and i notice that after a day of drinking a bunch of fruit juice, i can't sleep well, i can't sit still, i can't relax. (that happened when i drank a whole bunch of serving-size boxes of lemonade that all had 100% vitamin C in them. i had insomnia for several days, and i also got a rash all over my whole body. i think it was a vitamin C overdose that one time.)

couldn't i say that the scientist experienced 'the placebo effect' whenever his eyes read the numbers on the scientific instrument that he was using? he only BELIEVED he was reading those numbers. in fact, it could have been a 'group delusion,' where a whole room full of scientists mistakenly believed they were reading a particular number on their scientific instruments being used to do some test.

the placebo effect is a myth. i still want to write about it sometime.

i have to get ready for work today and this is supposed to be my day off, and i haven't eaten anything, and i am in a very bad mood.

Medical Marijuana: Might let the states decide on it - keep your fingers crossed.

Every time I see Patrick Swayze with his face sunken and gaunt, it hurts me to know that he is probably going to die soon. I didn't grow up having a 'crush' on Patrick Swayze as an actor, or anything like that. But I watched the movie 'Ghost' about a million times, because it was one of the few good movies we had on tape at my parents' house. Watching the movie over and over again made me become familiar with Patrick Swayze, where you feel like an actor is just somebody you know.

I imagine he is probably using medical marijuana, privately, to make it easier for him to eat while suffering from pancreatic cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. He might be, he might not be, I don't know.

I haven't used marijuana deliberately, but I can recall two or three incidents over the years where I inhaled a small amount secondhand from other people who were smoking it. To me, it seems similar to tobacco and to many other herbal drugs (like St. John's Wort) that are legal. And as far as I know it doesn't trigger homicides and suicides (although I don't know enough firsthand to be sure) the way prescription antidepressants do. If you smoke a lot of it, and maybe use other drugs at the same time, it can raise your blood pressure enough to cause a stroke, just like tobacco does. There are dangers to using it, but it shouldn't be illegal.

(It turns out that the woman who owned the rampaging chimp had given it Xanax just before it went out and attacked a bunch of people. That's a really good 'placebo controlled' test. The chimp couldn't have had a 'placebo effect' of 'expecting himself' to go crazy after taking Xanax. But don't get me started: I believe there is no such thing as the placebo effect, and the entire concept of it is wrong.)

Today's good news says that there is serious talk about letting the states decide individually (instead of the federal government universally forbidding everyone) whether or not to allow medical marijuana. And they say they will stop raiding the shops that sell it. I feel skeptical and distrusting: "I'll believe it when I see it." It seems like it might really be true. This is an exciting thing to read in the news.

If the federal government gives a more tolerant attitude, the states themselves might also develop a more tolerant attitude. It could be a 'de facto' legalization, when they all relax about it and stop enforcing it so severely. The states will tend to copycat the federal government's attitudes in a 'voluntary' way.