Guest Post by Mr. JM

For those interested in health, here’s a couple of interesting bits that came from the science world. Both of these came to my attention because they worked on everything they could try them on.

The CSIRO is an Australian research Centre, Government run. Although more recently it seems to have become politicised, for decades it did independent science in a variety of fields. I was listening to a radio program interviewing the retired head of CSIRO and they asked something like ‘what is the thing you thought might change the world that didn’t’ and he said zinc sulphate.

They’d been looking, back in the 50’s or early 60’s, for a way to deal with virus problems. What they found after extensive testing was that zinc sulphate, (chelated) at around 50mcg per day, would prevent a virus from co-opting the cell factories to reproduce itself. They weren’t sure why it worked, but it stopped the virus cold. It would invade, sit around for a bit, then die out.

Take 75 – 100 mcg per day for 3 weeks, then back to 25mcg once a day or 3 – 4 times per week.
Colds and flu were never major problems for me but I used to get 2-4 per year; now I get none. Or rather, the only time I get them is when I stop taking the zinc regularly.

It isn’t a matter of luck or anything – when there’s a flu going around I will get that raw patch feeling in my throat – for maybe a few hours – but it goes no further than that.

A couple of years back, one of the pharmaceuticals came out with a cold and flu remedy that claims to do exactly what the old guy claimed for zinc – they want something like $12 each for it. $12 will buy two containers of 100 zinc sulphate pills, each 25mcg of zinc, enough for at least six months protection.

Guest Post by Mr. JM

JM’s not well at present and although she wants to try to keep up with everything I figured I might contribute a little and see if I can get her to ‘BACK THE HELL AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER, WOMAN!’ *grins*

Every so often as I read through the science stuff I’m interested in, I have come across something that seems a little different. Science usually explores very constricted alleyways so they can control the parameters and get definitive results from their experiments, but on occasion, the experiments lead into unexpected results.

One such had to do with diet. There is a strange effect observed, originally in mice, but later in every creature they could try it on. If you take the normal healthy diet for a lab mouse and cut it by up to one third, you get a weird result. The mouse lives longer and healthier.

In other words, if the mouse normally lives (say) three years and starts to fade with age at two years, on the calorie restricted (CR) diet it will not only live to maybe 4 years, but the age effect doesn’t kick in till maybe three and a half years. Note the figures are indicative only – for a human it would be normal 75, age effects at 60, under CR, live till 120 with age effects from maybe 115.

Note this was not fad diet stuff. It was still eating a balanced fresh healthy diet, working out what is correct for a given individual then cutting it by between 20% and 30% across the board. So no, you can’t just stop eating brussel sprouts.