re: 12 Food Additives to Remove From Your Diet

gmcft — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:55:03 GMT

BHT: Still working after all these years

by Ed Sharpe

A little over 25 years ago a paper got published in the journal Science showing that BHT, a common food preservative, could inactivate herpes simplex and other lipid-coated viruses in lab dishes 1. Two years later another paper in the same journal reported similar results, but this time in live animals-dietary BHT could prevent chickens from dying of Newcastle disease 2. Like herpes simplex, NDV (the virus that causes Newcastle disease) is lipid-enveloped, i.e., its nucleic acid core is sheathed in a fatty membrane. Viruses of this type require an intact membrane to be infective. BHT seems to work against such viruses by disrupting (“fluidizing”) their viral membranes.

In the chicken study cited above, the amount of BHT needed to inhibit NDV turned out to be equal to the amount already present in chicken feed as an additive, i.e., 100 to 200 parts per million of total diet 2. Assuming a comparable result for humans and a total food intake of about 2 kilograms per day, this would mean that 200 to 400 milligrams of BHT ingested daily should be adequate to protect many people from infection by herpes and other lipid-coated viruses. See Table below for a listing of common viruses which have a lipid envelope and are therefore amenable to inhibition by BHT.

If our diet consisted exclusively of foods containing BHT as a preservative (such as some breakfast cereals, potato flakes, chewing gum, and certain baked goods made with shortening), we’d probably get enough BHT to ward off herpes-or mumps and measles for that matter. But we don’t. Most of our diets tend to be more varied than that and, besides, in recent years we’ve all been conditioned to avoid food additives.

The other option for getting enough dietary BHT is to consume it as a food supplement, a controversial proposition at best because it isn’t a nutrient—it’s a synthetic antioxidant. Nevertheless, this is precisely what some pioneering life-ex

re: 12 Food Additives to Remove From Your Diet

HopeFilledLife — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:50:06 GMT

Excellent to have this information in a condensed spot to drive others to. Thanks