[Bruce]: I'm writing a theoretical paper why
there are lots of things out there that we
probably should be calling vitamins that are
more long-term things.
I'll give you just one example.
The two carotenoids are these orange pigments
in every plant.
The reason they turn orange in the fall in
New England is because the chlorophyll goes
away and you're left with this orange carotenoid.
Beta-carotene is a good example.
Now that also goes to vitamin A, but that's
a different thing.
So there's 600 carotenoids in nature, but
humans have about 15 or 20 of them in the
brain.
And in the macula of the eye, there's a yellow
spot that has two carotenoids in them, lutein
and zeaxanthin, which nobody called vitamins,
but nature's putting them in the macula of
your eye, and if you don't get them, you get
macular degeneration.
The eye people have shown that.
So what do carotenoids do?
Well, the reason they're orange is they have
all these conjugated double bonds.
And if you have light in the dye, the energy
of that light gets transmitted to oxygen,
and you can make something called the singlet
oxygen, which is a very energetic form of
oxygen that can oxidize things much better
than just plain oxygen.
So that's nasty in the cell because it starts
destroying all your structure.
And what plants use, and they're out in the
light all the time, in strong light, what
they do is they have these carotenoids which
dissipate that extra energy of singlet oxygen
as heat in this double bond chain, and detoxify
it.
And people have worked all that out.
And in the macula of the eye, that yellow
color absorbs blue light, which is the most
toxic form of light.
So it keeps your eyes from oxidizing in the
key part of your eye.
Well, some people sort of understand that.
But shouldn't that be a vitamin?
It's just a longevity vitamin.
It's something that's helping your long-term
health.
And I think it should be.
Anyway, I'm writing a paper arguing all of
that.
