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Member
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 261
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Member
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 261
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Interesting article about Zinc and Copper
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/?p=305
A snippet
Quote:
The patient was a 47 year old man who had undergone gastric bypass surgery four years earlier and had then lost about 100 pounds. Two years after the gastric bypass the patient had developed a hernia, a fairly common occurrence after abdominal surgery. He underwent another operation to repair his hernia after which he developed a serious infection.
He needed weeks of intravenous antibiotics, and he was still living with the consequences: the incision that the doctors made to repair the hernia never healed. It remained an open wound, and no one could figure out why. That wasn’t the only mystery: six months ago, routine blood work showed that he had developed anemia (too few red blood cells) and neutropenia (too few infection-fighting white blood cells). He had a slew of tests, but no one could explain this newest complication either.
His blood work showed that he had fewer than 2,000 white cells per microliter of blood — less than half the number he should have had, even without an infection. The neutrophils — the type of white blood cells that serve as the front line of the immune system, our body’s version of the Marine Corps — were below 500 cells per microliter, an inadequate force to fight off even the most insignificant infection.
This patient’s doctor racked her brain and her medical books to come up with some reason for his immune problem. She rightly figured that people don’t just develop a disorder like this for no reason: something had to be causing it. As it turned out, there was a cause, and it came from an unlikely source: the patient’s own physicians.
The patient’s wife brought all his nutritional supplements to the hospital so he could continue taking them. His surgeons had started him on a regimen of vitamins and minerals to help the healing process after his surgery, and the patient had continued to take these supplements since, even during his subsequent hospitalizations for his recurrent infections.
In going over the patient’s list of supplements his doctor noted that along with his multivitamin that patient was taking extra vitamin A and zinc. In fact, he had been taking 10 times the recommended amount of vitamin A and 15 times the recommended amount of zinc. His doctor read up on these supplements and learned that excess zinc could cause all the problems that her patient was suffering, not because of the excess zinc itself, but because of the copper deficiency the excess zinc causes.
Zinc and copper are absorbed through the same ionic channel, and when there is an overabundance of zinc it gets absorbed instead of the copper. Think of a turnstile leading into a stadium. If there are an equal number of people with green shirts and yellow shirts outside the stadium pushing toward the turnstile, both will get in at about the same rate. If suddenly a bus dumps of a crowd of people with green shirts who then outnumber the yellow shirts by a factor of 20 to 1, there will be way fewer yellow-shirted people who make it through the turnstile.
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