I have written many times about how important supplementing with this element can sometimes be. It’s time to collect it all in one place, supplemented with some important information.
At the beginning – who should use it? The ideal would of course be to conduct tests, unfortunately – standard blood tests are very unreliable, they mainly reflect the level in the diet in recent days, and also how recently the body has regulated the level in the blood – for example, with infections it can change rapidly, which is not related to the reserves inside the cells.
Most at risk, of course, are people on a low-value diet or with gastrointestinal diseases. In general, the levels of minerals and vitamins in our food have declined since we started using refined flour and sugar. For example, comparing wholemeal flour with white flour, you can see that the former has more than three times the amount of this element:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/5744/2
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/5747/2
A person whose diet contains a lot of cocacola, for example, must have a deficiency, as a large proportion of calories will be supplied in the form of worthless sugar.
Quite often there is information that women using hormonal contraception lose a lot of zinc, but perhaps it depends on what preparation they use – you can confront this with your gynecologist. Supplementing a deficiency can change hormone levels, so the pills may stop working, so you should inform your doctor about this – he will probably know how to adjust the dose of birth control pills.
Small amounts are lost during ejaculation – less than a milligram, but a man addicted to masturbation can lose 1-2 milligrams a day. Not much until you multiply it by several years.
There are no clear symptoms of deficiency – different diseases and other deficiencies can look very similar, as I wrote, and there are no cheap, accurate tests (the popular taste test is unreliable). A very good test is a trial supplementation – if within a dozen days you suddenly feel that your hair is much stronger, you feel better, problems with the digestive system disappear, your libido improves, skin problems disappear, and wounds heal several times faster – you know that you have a serious deficiency.
The body of a man weighing about 70 kg should contain about 2300 mg of zinc. In case of a serious deficiency, it can be assumed that about 1000 mg should be supplemented.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15585770
The above study shows that we will absorb no more than 12 mg at a time – regardless of whether we take a tablet containing 15 mg or 150 mg.
You also have to take into account the fact that if someone has a poor diet, part of the supplement will simply be used for current needs, so, for example, instead of 12 mg, only 9 will be put aside and stored.
It is also important to remember that much of the zinc absorbed in the intestines will be simply pissed away – the human body can not use large doses of minerals at once, it needs to be saturated gradually.
It is safe to assume that for every large dose of a supplement (20 milligrams or more of zinc) taken, only 5 mg will be stored. In practice, this means that we need to take 200 doses for the deficiency to be replenished.
As you can see, this is quite time consuming – you can speed up the whole process by taking the tablets several times a day. Long breaks should be taken and zinc should not be taken with food or together with magnesium or calcium.
It is very important to take copper in parallel – these two elements are in balance, high doses will eventually lead to severe copper deficiency, there have been cases described where people ended up in hospital. Admittedly, this requires many months or even years of very high doses, but the danger is real – on top of that, even small copper deficiencies can have health consequences. I would suggest taking just zinc for maybe 10 days and then copper for 2-3 days, in doses of 2 to 4 mg per day.
Finally – a clinical trial showing the power of supplementation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11952542
A group of patients had recurrent warts, caused by viruses. None of the therapies used had any effect. They decided to see if supplementing their zinc deficiency would help anything. They were given very high doses, on the order of 50 mg of zinc per day, the other group was given a placebo.
After 2 months, almost all the patients (87%) in the active drug group were completely cured, and the only people who were not helped by the therapy were those who continued to have deficiencies detected by tests after those 2 months. No patient in the placebo group was cured.
Question – what other chronic viral diseases can be cured with zinc? In the example above, the patients had an infection for many years that would not go away, the virus had nested and could not be removed in any way. By supplementing with just one nutritional deficiency, in virtually every case the body simply removed the virus on its own, if it did not it was only because the supplement dose was too low and the patients continued to have the deficiency.
Billions are now being made from chronic viral diseases – HIV, hepatitis, it is even strongly suspected that Alzheimer’s disease has a viral infection as its primary cause. Even the vaccine against cervical cancer, which costs a fortune, is supposed to… protect against chronic viral infection. How many of these diseases could be cured with zinc?
I have in front of me right now the results of a clinical trial in which zinc supplementation at 2 x 20 mg for 4 months versus placebo, in chronic hepatitis C virus infection. The effect? A decrease in the concentration of viral copies in the blood from 28.3 to 6.2.
Here, a study involving patients with HIV/AIDS:
https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/the-effect-of-zinc-sulphate-on-the-increase-of-cd4-t-lymphocytes-in-hivaids-patients-2168-9652-S5- 003.php? Aid = 58827
I had been complaining for years that no one wanted to test this, finally a study was done somewhere in Indonesia. Patients were given 32 mg of zinc daily for 3 months, under placebo control.
In the placebo group, the level of CD4 cells, which is a marker of disease progression, dropped by 23, from 526 to 503. The disease progressed.
In contrast, in those patients who received zinc, levels rose from 342 to 414 – the disease gently regressed! Hurraaaaaaaaaay, we have a cheap drug that may not cure patients completely, but will certainly postpone the need to take very expensive antiviral drugs that have very serious side effects. A cheap, safe drug. Which no patient has ever received.
To make things funnier, there are quite a few such “miracle drugs” with proven effects against HIV/AIDS – selenium or cysteine, for example. At the very least, they significantly slow down the progression of the disease, making it possible to postpone the need for anti-viral drug therapy, which has terrible side effects, for years.
Of course, the fact that the disease regressed slightly with zinc or cysteine does not mean that it would continue to regress with further supplementation – it may simply be that the patient’s condition temporarily improved. We won’t know what’s going to happen until we test it – and it doesn’t look like it will pay for anyone to test such correlations.
Alzheimer’s disease. Admittedly, zinc is thought to have played a different role here, including blocking copper toxicity, but preliminary research suggests that it can at least slow down the disease – who knows, maybe scientists who see its cause in a viral infection are right, and in fact zinc simply allowed the body to fight off the virus?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/biof.1005/abstract
Finally, who should watch out – blood levels of this element are significantly elevated in people with multiple sclerosis. There is a suspicion that it may affect the course of the disease. Supplementation would be quite risky.