An Interview with Dr. Rudi Moerck Astaxanthin

Transcription

1 DM: Dr. Joseph Mercola RM: Rudi Moerck An Interview with Dr. Rudi Moerck Astaxanthin By Dr. Mercola Introduction: DM: Hi, this is Dr. Mercola. Today, I m here with Rudi Moerck who is an expert and has specific advanced training in biological sciences. He is really passionate about antioxidants specifically astaxanthin which we both recognize as one of the most potent and exciting antioxidants that s emerging now because of all the powerful compelling evidence. It s been relatively recent. It s extracted from marine algae. It is what makes pink flamingos pink because they re born white and it s in salmon so it s naturally occurring in our environment but it s unusual to get it because most of us aren t eating marine algae or salmon. If you are, you re getting the benefits. We just like to highlight some of the important distinctions of astaxanthin and why you may want to consider it. Welcome Rudi. RM: Thank you very much. Astaxanthin is a member of the carotenoid family. There are a number of carotenoids including beta-carotene, lutein, lycopene, zeaxanthin. Probably in a normal diet there is enough beta-carotene. We don t recommend excessive supplementation of beta carotene. There is some literature about that. It really should not be overdone. DM: Especially synthetic versions. RM: Especially synthetic versions. You re better off getting your beta-carotene from organic carrots for instance. DM: Many supplements actually use in their beta carotene like multivitamins will use a synthetic version. People are confused thinking they re getting the real thing but it s not the same as (indiscernible 1:46). RM: It s not the same thing. Besides, if you re taking your carotenoids in a natural matrix, it s generally more bioavailable and you re not getting just a big slug of it. You re getting it more distributed over a period of time while your body is digesting your food. So that s why I like carrots. I happen to like almost raw carrots, in other words just grilled carrots. That s a good source of that.

2 The other ones I just mentioned; lutein, zeaxanthin and astaxanthin especially astaxanthin does not have any pro beta-carotene activity. That means its effect is not additive with beta-carotene. There has been some negative health effects associated in smokers that use excessive amounts of beta-carotene. I also don t recommend suntan pills that have very large amounts of beta-carotene. That s generally not a good idea. DM: So beta-carotene normally consumed will be converted by your body to vitamin A. Not in large amounts but vitamin A. But astaxanthin won t do that. RM: No. It will not. You still need your vitamin A source. You still need to eat carrots. You still need to eat other foods that are rich in beta-carotene but I don t generally recommend going out and buying beta-carotene supplements. Because there is a lot of beta-carotene in almost all the vitamin A (indiscernible 3:11). DM: It s typically unnecessary if you re on a healthy diet. RM: It s typically unnecessary especially if you eat a good amount of vegetables. The same thing goes for zeaxanthin. Zeaxanthin is found in various things like broccoli, green leafy vegetables and that sort of thing. So there is generally a good amount of zeaxanthin though supplementation with zeaxanthin is not an issue at all, even larger amounts is not an issue. Vitamins are good for you generally. They re called vitamins because a deficiency in those things would lead to a problem but overdoing vitamins is also not a good idea. You yourself you believe very strongly in a balanced diet basically food and supplementation only as an adjunct to that food. Supplements are not food in themselves. Astaxanthin, the topic that we re talking about is very interesting because it definitely shows much stronger oxygen scavenging effects, much stronger free radical scavenging effects compared to lutein, zeaxanthin or even beta-carotene. It s much more active. For a minute, let s just talk about the two worlds of antioxidants. One world are the fat soluble antioxidants like the carotenoids that we just talked about including astaxanthin, lutein, etc. And the other world are the water soluble antioxidants like vitamin C which is very important. It s also very important in the water world if you will to replenish those on a daily basis because literally when you go to the bathroom you re getting rid of the water soluble vitamins that are antioxidants. Now in the fat soluble world we have vitamin E and we have the carotenoids.

3 There is also a group that s kind of in between and that is things like vitamin E, because it has a water soluble end to it, can go into the membrane interfaces between water and fat and has some functionality as far antioxidant activity there. The important thing also is that if you forget to take your oil soluble antioxidant like astaxanthin or lutein or zeaxanthin you really don t have to take it everyday. You should take it everyday at a modest dose but it goes into the fat tissue of your body. And you know very well from a medicine point of view, fat tissue just doesn t turnover that much. There isn t a depletion going on all the time; whereas in water, there is an important thing. Let s talk specifically about vitamin E. First of all, the most important vitamin E derivative is alpha-tocopherol, natural, not dl but alpha-tocopherol. It s more important than the other tocopherols which I will talk about. DM: When you say dl that s a racemic version, the stereoisomers. But you re going to have dl or both so does it really matter what stereoisomer you have? RM: Yes it does. It s been shown clearly in the scientific literature that natural vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) which is in I believe RRR form there is I think three optical centers is the one that first of all works the best. These other ones that don t work as well, I mean, they re not dangerous but why should you be eating an oil that gets burned up as energy. Remember folks that any oil has nine calories per gram of energy. If you eat a lot of oil you re just going to DM: And these non-active isomers are typically produced synthetically. Is that correct? RM: That s correct. A lot of foods also have gamma and delta vitamin E in them. That s fine. They re healthy. They re not as active as alpha-tocopherol itself. However, the ones that are the dl form, the typical things you get at the drugstores that are very generic supplements, they are synthetically made. They are hydrogenated if you will. It s very similar to the story in trans-fats, you hydrogenate them and you get something that doesn t really look like nature and only maybe a third of it is the actual component of nature and the rest is just fat that you burn. It doesn t really work. When I take a supplement I always try to get something that is fairly concentrated that works, that doesn t have a lot of baggage associated with it and I consider these chemically produced materials, I hate to say this, I m not a chemist by training but these chemically produced materials are not the way to go. DM: The more natural we say the better. There are some experts who believe that although the alpha-tocopherol is probably the most potent, that a combination, a synergy between all of the different types are probably useful because they have other functions and the alpha-tocopherol may not provide all the benefits that is in the gammas or the deltas might.

4 RM: I think that is generally okay. Let s put it this way, if you re eating foods that have natural vitamin E in them DM: What foods would those be? RM: Well, there are things like fresh whole nuts, not necessarily roasted nuts but raw. Roasting does cause oxidation to take place and makes the vitamin E not as potent. Certain cereal grains I m not talking about Cheerios here. I m talking about cereal like barley DM: All unrefined grains. RM: Oats and that sort of thing have natural vitamin E because plants make vitamin E to protect themselves from oxidation. Chia seed will have some vitamin E in it. That would be the approach and then the supplement would be a natural source of vitamin E. Let me address the thing about alpha, gamma, and delta vitamin E. Most foods that you eat will have all of them in there. The most important one is alpha. If you had a diet of just alpha that would be excellent. The other ones also work but it s on the basis of what I call a catch fence strategy. They re not quite as reactive with singlet oxygen or free radicals compared to alphatocopherol. They re slower reacting but that s not necessarily bad. [ : ] Because the first thing that s going to react with the oxygen or the free radicals is the alpha- tocopherol and when it s all consumed, when it s gone, then the gamma and delta are there as a catch fence. Sort of like downhill skiing where you have that fence that keeps you from going down into the valley. Well, the gamma and delta work like that. They don t really have any other biological function. DM: This is assuming you re having the natural occurring forms. If you have a synthetic form, specifically one that s commonly used is the acetate version of vitamin E. This is synthetically altered and it s done to provide more stability but it actually devastates and it just obliterates the ability of the vitamin E to function. Why don t you comment on that? RM: What I m about to say is a very bold approach to this. Vitamin E acetate I think is just falsely labeled because vitamin E acetate is not really a bioavailable form of vitamin E. It s a very stable form and it s used on a lot of processed food to get that vitamin E on the label but it really doesn t work like vitamin E because that acetate group would first have to be hydrolyzed away to give you free alpha-tocopherol if you will. I believe that you think you re getting something that you re not getting.

5 DM: The hydrolysis doesn t occur spontaneously or we don t have an enzyme to do it readily. RM: It will slowly undergo acid hydrolysis in your stomach but it won t be bioavailable like vitamin E is. I think that that s really kind of a fake thing that s going on in processed food. DM: So we ve established that vitamin E is useful. People recognize this to begin with but I think it s important to review that and thank you for that review. One of the reasons that we re bringing that up is that astaxanthin is frequently compared to vitamin E as being hundreds of times more potent. The question that has come is do I still need to take vitamin E if I m taking astaxanthin as they are both fat soluble antioxidants. Why don t you discuss those? RM: Great question, Joe. First of all Vitamin E in large excess amounts is not a good idea. The reason for that is that vitamin E when it gets oxidized or when there is a photochemical production of a free radical, it has for us chemists it s called a benzenoid ring, a phenolic ring if you will. That forms a very stable free radical. It can just sit around and that free radical can wait until it sees something that it can react with. That could be your tissue. It could be another vitamin E free radical. So large amounts of vitamin E in your diet you probably can t do it in your diet but as a supplement, actually becomes prooxidative. It becomes prooxidant. That is not good because you ll form these stable free radicals. They don t have a way to get down to the ground state the chemists call it quenching. They ll just sit around and wait for something to react with like a fat molecule and form a moiety of reaction or it will react with itself and form a polymer etc. That is not a good idea. Vitamin E ultra supplementation in large amount is in my opinion not healthy. DM: What type of levels what you consider mega-dosing? Because a typical RDA would be 400 units. RM: I would say mega-dosing would be anything more than 2000 units. DM: So five times above the RDA. RM: Remember you are getting it in some of the food you eat and you don t even know it. Not unless it s vitamin E acetate which we know is not vitamin E. DM: Which is irrelevant. RM: Having said that, if you now mix something with vitamin E that allows that free radical to quench, to get down to what we chemists call the ground state then you have a vitamin E that s very functional and does not become a prooxidant and that one moiety, that one ingredient is astaxanthin.

6 If you mix astaxanthin with vitamin E it prevents the vitamin E from being a stable free radical and the astaxanthin quenches it to the ground state. So that s very important. Any formula that has vitamin E in it, I think you should have a few parts per million of astaxanthin or more. It could be up to 4 mg. The other thing that you have to mention is that astaxanthin and vitamin E are totally unrelated in structure. Astaxanthin works by a completely different mechanism of antioxidant. Astaxanthin can quench free radicals. It can quench peroxygens and singlet oxygen. It can go to the ground state without sitting around as a free stable radical and reacting with brick on the wall. Free radicals are very potent. If they are stable, they ll wait around until something comes along that it can react with or damage reaction with something, it could be damaged. So it could react with DNA, it could react with fats etc. Astaxanthin mixed with vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) will allow those radicals that are formed when vitamin E reacts with singlet oxygen to go to the ground state, whereas vitamin E alone will not do that. DM: This doesn t have to be in the same supplement especially if someone is taking astaxanthin. So if you re taking 4 mg or so a day as a separate supplement of astaxanthin or eating fish or salmon specifically then you wouldn t need to have it with the vitamin E. RM: That s correct. DM: Most antioxidants including vitamin E are electron donors. They donate electrons and that s how they perform their antioxidant function. But astaxanthin doesn t do that. It works in completely different ways. So if you can elaborate on that difference in electron donation versus the way that it actually provides its antioxidant RM: Astaxanthin is really an electron acceptor. It also has the ability to you won t see this, you won t glow in the dark but it has the ability to actually emit light in order to get down to the ground state. It s something that you can t see. It s there on a molecular level. Astaxanthin can react with oxygen itself where oxygen is donating a free radical because in the ground state, oxygen itself is a triplet. It s very unusual and it can react directly with astaxanthin. It can also be singlet oxygen. That s triplet oxygen that s been excited by say, UV light and that can react directly chemically react with astaxanthin taking it completely out of the picture. It s not just an electron transfer; it s actually a chemical reaction. Astaxanthin can react with things like a free radical associated with vitamin E and take it to the ground state. Astaxanthin can both react as an electron acceptor but also can directly react with an excited state in order to get it to the ground state.

7 DM: Thank you for that detailed chemical explanation. I like to know if you could expand on that in a simpler fashion for those who find metaphors with the natural world useful. So if you can comment on the reason why astaxanthin is even created in nature. Why do the marine algae create it? I think once we understand that we can have a deeper appreciation for how it functions in our own body. RM: All marine animals have developed certain defenses due to the evolutionary process. In other words, the algae that didn t resist photochemical degradation or intense UV light as you find near the surface of the ocean are no longer with us because they died. They reacted with sunlight very quickly or oxygen DM: Because ultraviolet light is a very potent oxidative stress. RM: The crazy thing about oxygen and ultraviolet light is that they re both absolutely necessary for our lives but at the same time they will also eventually kill you. The same thing goes for algae. Over millions of years of evolution certain algae have developed a sunscreening method if you will by producing astaxanthin in their membranes so that they would be protected from UV light. The best example is an algae called Haematococcus. That s a fresh water algae that we today use to make astaxanthin. We extract the astaxanthin out of fresh water algae using supercritical CO2. That algae produces very little astaxanthin when it s just floating around in a pod. It s really happy. It just makes beta-carotene. Then if you deprive it of its food, stress, if you deprive it of certain nutrients, and you start bombarding it intensively with ultraviolet radiation light if you will. [ : ] DM: Sunlight. RM: Yeah, but intense. You raise it in a greenhouse and then you open the window. What that Haematococcus will do is it will produce a cyst. A cyst is the algae s defensive mechanism getting into a little ball that is super resistant to desert, oxygen, water, intense UV light. These cysts can be found that are hundreds of thousands of years old covered by rocks and stuff like that. You throw them in water and they ll grow back into an algae. Those cysts inside the biochemistry of that Haematococcus converts all the betacarotene to astaxanthin and it turns red. You ll see some pictures on the internet of various astaxanthin producers. They ll show you their ponds are green on one side then a few days later the ponds are intensive red. The reason why they are intensive red is they have deprived it of food and they have bombarded it with excess amount of light and then the organism reacts when making astaxanthin.

8 Those organisms in the evolutionary process that did not do that fast enough died. Only the ones that produce huge amounts of astaxanthin were protected. Now, in the top layer of the ocean or in streams that is where the UV light is very intense and therefore those organisms have developed this kind of protection. In normal food like tomatoes and things like that, you don t find astaxanthin because they have developed other evolutionary traits to protect them from UV light. DM: Thank you for explaining that. It would be reasonable to speculate that if we were to have the astaxanthin and get levels in our own skin that it would serve somewhat as a protective barrier just like it does in these algae and that we would be more resistant, not completely immune to but more resistant to sun damage, sunburn and overexposure to ultraviolet radiation. RM: Yeah. We both agree that if you go in the sun you should use a safe suntan lotion. You should minimize exposing your face, in the back, the back of your hands with sunlight. Get it on your legs, arms, chest. But if you are a regular user of astaxanthin, you will get more protection than just using suntan lotion alone. It s been shown many times that carotenoids, not just astaxanthin but other carotenoids do accumulate somewhat in your skin, gives you a little bit more of a pinkish look. It s hard to observe but people do look healthier especially in women and especially fair skinned people. It does give you more UV protection. It also gives you DNA repair like if there is damage to your DNA in your skin. There is a published paper and scientific journals on this that there is DNA repair. I recommend it. It s not suntan lotion in a pill but it is an adjunct to suntan lotion if you will. DM: We certainly always want to recommend prudent sun exposure. There doesn t seem to be ever any reason to overexpose your face for any reason because the skin there is so thin and it s predisposed to premature photoaging and wrinkling. And the back of the hands as you mentioned too is the liver spots that tend to appear if you overexpose. But you ve got lots of other areas of your body you can expose and still remain legal. Typically, the more skin your expose the better. I tend not to use suntan lotion unless circumstances prevent it. Certainly, if you re fair skinned or if you re a child and playing and you re unable to observe prudent exposures and you wear a hat or wear clothing and limit your time to the point where you never get burned and it may make sense. RM: The other thing is the fact that ultraviolet goes through most clothing. So if you walk on the beach and you re wearing a cotton t-shirt, like a cotton t-shirt will give you the sun protection factor of about 40 which means some sunlight is coming through. And then the movement of that cloth on your body moves it around so that the sunlight is not just hitting one particular spot.

9 I usually go out in the sun with a hat on about 15 to 20 minutes a day. I live in Florida. It s good for your vitamin D levels to do that. DM: Sure. I m convinced that vitamin D of course is probably the most important supplement if you re going to take it but I don t really believe that people ideally should get it from swallowing it. Ideally, it should be from the sun. For those of us who don t live in Florida in the winter it becomes a real challenge because your only real other option is a safe tanning bed. And if you don t have access to that then you really don t have any other choice except for swallowing it. It really is something that we should optimize. I think that really the astaxanthin and the vitamin D are kind of a like a perfect marriage. They re both fat soluble. If I could only take one antioxidant certainly it would be astaxanthin because I think it s just so superior to everything else. But it doesn t mean it s the only one you need. Ideally you could get most of them from food even astaxanthin but most of us aren t going to be eating marine algae or 4 or 6 ounces of salmon a day. RM: Right. I just had some last night. It s a pleasure getting your astaxanthin in that dosage form. Remember folks, it has to be wild caught salmon. It can t be farm raised because there you get synthetic astaxanthin or some other dye. We don t want that. DM: There are different types of astaxanthin. What we re talking about is natural astaxanthin and there is other ones from fungus or synthetic. If you can just comment briefly about those. RM: The one from fungus, it s (indiscernible 26:30) is the species. That makes the totally wrong astaxanthin. It makes the exact opposite optical isomers. There are four optical centers in astaxanthin. So it makes the total opposite optical isomers. That product has never really taken off in the marketplace. Regulators have also been very cautious about something that is just completely different. It s got the same chemical formula DM: Is it approved? RM: It is not approved as colorant. DM: As approved as a supplement? RM: No, I believe it is not approved. DM: I don t think so. RM: I would avoid it. There are some places you go that it might be around. I would definitely avoid that.

10 The other form is synthetic astaxanthin and that has about one quarter of the molecules in a bottle. It is the active form, is the correct form. But when you make these things synthetically, you get actually four optical isomers. Only one is the really active one. That s the one you should be taking. These others, we don t know about the biochemistry of those. It is allowed in salmon because their risk assessment many years ago and it was deemed that if you feed this to the salmon, it certainly doesn t hurt the salmon and then the human exposure is extremely low because it has a very low amount. But if your salmon has 4 mg of astaxanthin and there were typically 3 mg only 1 mg of that would be the actual natural one. I don t eat farm raised salmon. Farm raised salmon has other issues like omega-6 content is through the roof. It doesn t have a lot of omega-3s like ALA, or DHA and EPA. I avoid that. I only eat natural. At the restaurant I ate out last night, they even have EU certified organic salmon which tastes really great and then supplement with astaxanthin. There is something else I wanted to mention too about astaxanthin and carotenoids. If you look at the structure of astaxanthin, it s a very long molecule, the center of which is extremely fat soluble. That s why it goes into the membranes of your body and then the fatty tissue. When you look at a salmon you see that redness in a salmon. That color is really in the membranes and in the fat portion of the salmon associated with omega-3 DHA. They re right next to each other. That actually keeps the DHA from oxidizing. DHA is an unsaturated fatty acid. If you just leave it exposed to oxygen, it goes rancid. DM: Just like any fish oil would. RM: Yeah. And in krill, one of the reasons why krill is so incredibly stable is it has astaxanthin in it. That keeps it from oxidizing. If you take that astaxanthin out of krill oil or you purposely destroy it in the krill. That krill oil would go rancid very quickly. Having said that DM: If I can interrupt. You actually work in an environment where you re able to do these tests. So you can test fish oil which doesn t have astaxanthin typically and krill oil which has it. Can you just comment on the length of time it takes to artificially induce oxidation through a system which is called a (indiscernible 30:04) I believe. [ : ] RM: Right. DM: When I first heard that from you it was very enlightening and sort of reinforced the understanding I had of the importance of astaxanthin.

11 RM: There is a standard test that s called a (indiscernible 30:17). People don t have to understand exactly how it works but basically, you take an oil, you heat it up to a certain temperature say 90 degrees centigrade which is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit a lot over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It s about 150 or so. I can t do the math in my head. If you take a (indiscernible 30:36) and then you take oxygen and you bubble through the oil which is a forced oxidative process and you collect the gas. And by measuring the conductivity of that gas, you can determine if the oil has gone south, if it s gone bad, if it s gone rancid. If oil didn t smell bad when it was rancid, you would know it was rancid but humans have evolved to know that when something smells kind of rancid, don t eat it. We take all these oils. We take corn oil, chia oil, krill oil, fish oil and run it through a battery of tests on the same machine. We could do 16 different oils at one time and then you can measure on a curve how fast is goes rancid. Let s just start with chia oil. Chia oil at 90 degrees will go 35 hours before it goes rancid on a forced stress test if you will. Like they do with the banks but this is with oil (stress test). Fish oil, less than hour, it goes rancid. Even the best fish oils go rancid very quickly. A lot of people add a lot of extra vitamin E to fish oil to try to pass that test but adding that much vitamin E, if you eat a lot of vitamin E that way through your fish oil, you re getting too much vitamin E and it s a prooxidant in your body not unless you re taking astaxanthin. Krill oil, I have never seen anything like it. As long as that krill oil has astaxanthin, as long as it s still red, it has (indiscernible 31:15) performance that even surpasses things like olive oil. That to me is totally astounding. At first I thought our (indiscernible 32:28) machine was broken. But the fact is is that the only other oil that I know that s extremely stable and it s a monounsaturated oil is amaranth oil. It s very expensive and it does not as well as krill oil. As a chemist, you look at krill oil structure, the DHA, EPA, phospholipid and I would say this stuff is going to be like fish oil. It s not going to hang around. Well, it does hang around. It s extremely stable. But make sure you get a good quality krill oil that has the astaxanthin intact. It needs to have at least 0.2 mg per gram of oil as a minimum in order to get this protective effect. If it has less than that, it s not stable. DM: Thank you for that explanation. Where does astaxanthin actually deposit when one consumes it? Is it in the membranes? Is it in a specific organ? Does it concentrate more on one tissue more than with another? RM: Yeah, as I explained before, astaxanthin has that fat soluble part of it that s on the inside. In the outsides however are somewhat water soluble. What happens with astaxanthin is that it dissolves in the fatty tissue, your membranes, cell walls. It crosses

12 the blood brain barrier so it does go into your brain and acts as an antioxidant in there. The jury is still out whether that will contribute to the long range reduction in dementia and stuff like that. That has to still be tested. But it is possible from when we look at the chemistry and the mechanisms. It also goes into the eye. But the important thing is that it intercalates, it folds into the membrane. Since both ends are water soluble, the membrane is a structure like this it falls in perpendicular to that membrane with this part of the membrane is water, this is oil with the head of the astaxanthin pointing towards the water on both ends. DHA and EPA kind of do the same thing so they all align in those membranes. The way membranes age is that those fatty acids DHA and EPA that are very prevalent in tissue for instance, 40% of your dry mass of your brain is DHA. Forty percent of your eye s dry mass is DHA. If that DHA oxidizes guess what happens. DM: It doesn t work. RM: It turns to leather. It turns to a non-flexible, non-functioning membrane that can t transport enough oxygen, that can t transport enough nutrients and that sort of thing. So the astaxanthin intercalating it s a word that I use but you know what it means it falls in and it s near those DHA and EPA that means that it s going to keep them from oxidizing because the astaxanthin becomes a sacrificial.you know, being oxidized, being reduced. We know we can eat EPA and DHA and it does go into your body. It s a fairly slow inefficient process. It takes about a 45 day turnover of DHA in the body. Astaxanthin has a t1/2. That means half of it is destroyed in about 16 hours. That s something that you have to replenish. If you forget to take your astaxanthin everyday, don t worry about it, you can take it one day or two days later and you re going to be fine. I generally recommend discipline in taking your stuff on time and working it that way. But it s really important to recognize if something is antioxidant and if it doesn t align properly in the membrane, it s not going to do a lot of good because it s not going to be where the radicals are, where the singlet oxygen is. DM: One of the closing comments I would like you to address would be the safety issue. We ve had a number of people express concern about some potential complications such as breast enlargement or anything else that it might be an issue. If you can certainly address that issue and maybe how it came to be, how this concern came to be and what side effects we have. As far as I m understand, the only side effect documented is really slightly pinkish skin which is really beneficial because when you look at the studies, people almost universally identify people with that tint they don t really know that it s there and appreciate it but they subconsciously believe that that person looks healthier. So it s a cosmetic benefit.

13 RM: Yeah, the pinkishness is a sign of well being and good health. It definitely is a positive and it is somewhat protective. I have heard these things too. There has been blogs about breast enlargement associated with astaxanthin and folks this is simply impossible and not true. It s that cut and dry. Let me explain why that is. First of all, the molecules themselves, the carotenoids, have no steroidal function. They also do not inhibit steroid formation and of course we know that testosterone and estrogen are very important for sexuality and for hair growth and breast size etc. However, carotenoids do not affect that at all. There is no steroidal activity. It does not enter in any mechanism pathway for the synthesis of steroids. These reports are just completely wrong. DM: How did they ever come to be? What generated or spurred it? If you just look at the chemistry, you wouldn t even begin to believe that s an issue but someone, somewhere came up with this concept. RM: I think one of the first places it showed up is on Dr. Weil s website. I think it was through a blogger thing. But remember a lot of these websites I don t want to just zero in on his website are no longer directly connected with the founders. A lot of these websites tend to play it safe. The other website that has strange stuff about astaxanthin is the Lance Armstrong website which also has some information about astaxanthin which we don t know where they got the research. DM: They don t cite any studies. RM: And somebody is not reading this stuff. The scientists are not reading it [Interview cut at 39:26]