Another Covid Opportunist
Dietary bromelain won’t have any more effect on spike proteins than a bowl of sugar frosted insulin would have on diabetes
More nutritional flimflammery about bromelain.
Either those promoting this have no understanding of human nutrition and nutritional biology and they’re ignorantly promoting something that is completely useless or they do understand human nutrition and nutritional biology and they’re knowingly promoting something that is completely useless.
Here’s the simplest and most basic way we know this:
If they were selling a product that could actually do what they claim, it would have to be applied by means of injection and would be regulated as a drug. But it’s being sold as a dietary supplement, which means that it is NOT going to be able to get inside the body where it’s claimed to have its effects.
To understand why this is so, you have to understand the processes by which proteins in the diet are digested and the results internalized:
Bromelain is a protein.
Proteins have a primary, a secondary, and maybe a tertiary or even higher structure if protein subunits are involved.
When a ribosome translates an mRNA molecule into a protejn, that initial string of amino acids is the primary structure.
After that, either spontaneously or with the help of chaperone proteins, the primary structure of the protein folds into its secondary or higher structures. They may undergo post-translation modification in the Golgi apparatus which may include specific types of glycosylation.
Once all that is done, you have a protein that is able to behave a certain way under basic physiological conditions.
The behavior of a protein in vivo depends entirely on those higher level structures and modifications.
If you mix that mature protein with stuff in a test tube or apply it to cells in cell culture, it may have certain effects.
But if you believe that, after eating that protein, it can exert those same effects inside your body that were observed in vitro or in cell culture, then you’re mistaken.
Why?
Because that protein never makes it inside your body.
“But I ate it, so it’s inside my body!”
Nope, the volume of space between your mouth and your anus is surrounded by your body, but topologically it’s external to your body in exactly the same way that the surface of the donut hole is continuous with the rest of donut’s surface. The inside of the donut is found below that surface.
The volume of space between your mouth and your anus, a space that is literally external to the interior of your body, is dedicated to extreme chemical processing of foodstuffs followed by the absorption of the products of that chemical processing.
When you eat a protein, regardless of the behavior that protein could have had under the physiological conditions in which it was translated or elsewhere in the body to which it was exported, that protein, between the time it enters your mouth and whatever is left when makes it out the other end, is subjected to extremely harsh chemical conditions unlike almost any it would encounter in the interior of the cell in which it was made (except for lysosomes in which damaged proteins are disassembled into their constituent amino acids) or elsewhere in the interior of the body it was exported to, or outside the body to which some are secreted.
So, when you eat proteins, some are initially acted on by amylases in the mouth, then they are mixed with hydrochloric acid in the stomach. The action of the hydrochloric acid denatures the protein, that is, the higher order protein structures are destroyed, leaving the primary protein structure, the simple string of amino acids.
With the denaturation of the protein to its primary structure, all functions that protein had under the physiological conditions inside the organism in which it was formed are irretrievably lost.
The denatured protein in its primary structure and the hydrochloric acid is dumped into the beginning of the small intestine. Base, secreted by the pancreas, neutralizes the hydrochloric acid. Peptidases, also secreted by the pancreas, chop up the primary structure of that protein into single and double peptides, which are single or double amino acids.
Those amino acids are actively transported into the body through the cells of the gut lumen. Any incompletely denatured protein eventually makes it out into the toilet, or, if Joe Biden, into his pants or explosively onto those poor fools who have to care for him.
This means that the fate of proteins going into your mouth is either
A. to be completely broken down through chemical digestion into single and double amino acids, which are then imported into your body either to be used to make other completely unrelated proteins or to be catabolized either in the glycolytic or lipolytic cycle as fuel, or
B. to be expelled as waste.
Which is a real problem for folks claiming that whatever functions such proteins could have under physiological conditions INSIDE the body are going to make it through the digestive process.
It may be perfectly true that proteins in their mature functional form, when added to a mixture of stuff in a test tube under physiological conditions found inside the body, could exert those effects on the appropriate substrates in the test tubes.
And it may be perfectly true that proteins in their mature functional form, when added to a cell culture, could exert some of the effects it would have produced in vivo.
For instance, think of insulin.
As produced inside your own body, the finished form of the protein is capable of mediating specific effects. And as produced by recombinant methods, that human insulin protein is capable of mediating exactly the same effects as home-grown insulin IF it can get into your body.
The way that happens is either by injection or via an insulin pump. You cannot get it by eating of a bowl full of sugar frosted insulin.
Your stomach acid will destroy it.
And if you found a way to protect it from stomach acid, there are no insulin transporters on the gut lumen side of intestinal cells to get it into the body.
So even if bromelain is observed in vitro or cell culture to have certain effects, that’s only because it’s being added directly to something under physiological conditions. Eating that in a pill won’t have those same effects because either A. it will be denatured in the stomach and digested to single and double amino acids in the small intestine or B. it will come out the other end and be flushed down the toilet.
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Walter M Chesnut did say last year that bromelain had potential to be used as an inhibitor against SARS-CoV-2, but that more in vitro and in vivo testing is needed before reaching any firm conclusions. I don't think he was necessarily saying that it would be of much use if just taken orally as a supplement. I wonder if perhaps the entrails of a goat combined with eyes of a frog collected at dawn while a cock is crowing and then soaked in wormwood after being blessed by a priest might be more effective.
Great. I now disagree with the 4 articles I have read from you. One on Russell Brand, one on Malone and now serrapeptase and bromelain. Yes, both of these are dissolved by stomach acid. But they are protected by an enteric coating, a polymer. Acid won’t dissolve this polymer but the alkaline environment of the intestines will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_coating