#benzoate — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #benzoate, aggregated by home.social.
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Thanks! Cinnamon is a great functional food.
I have problems with it, though - I get 'the shakes' if I have more than a sprinkle. 'The shakes' are similar to a hypoglycemic attack. Since cinnamon can lower blood glucose, my reaction to cinnamon seemed to confirm that these were hypos. But after wearing a glucose monitor, I found out that my symptoms aren't due to hypoglycemia. I don't know why this happens; it could be a reaction to benzoate, which is a metabolite of cinnamaldehyde. I'm a carrier for a fatty acid oxidation disorder gene (MCAD deficiency). One step up from the MCAD enzyme in
the oxidation of medium chain fatty acids is an enzyme that does double duty - it's also involved in the detoxification of benzoic acid / benzoate*. So maybe that has something to do with it.I don't want to give the impression that benzoate is bad - there's some evidence that it could be preventative of Parkinson's:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11481-020-09955-2Ceylon cinnamon is preferrable to Cassia (lower coumarin). Heavy metals might be a problem; Consumer Reports did a study of spices in 2021, but cinnamon wasn't one of them (I checked my public library's PDF of the article):
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herbs-and-spices-might-contain-arsenic-cadmium-and-lead-a6246621494/~
* Xenobiotic/medium chain fatty acid: CoA ligase – a critical review... https://doi.org/10.1080/17425255.2016.1206888