Toxic Aluminum: The Trouble with this Abundant Element
Jason Hartman:
So, can’t we just take a silicon supplement of some sort rather than worrying about the hard to find water?
Prof. Christopher Exley: Everybody asks this question. And it’s the obvious thing to do because you can go to your health foods shop and there’s loads of these silicon supplements. And unfortunately, silicon supplements are generally something called silica. Silica is of course what happens to silicic acid when aggregated it comes out as solution. Silica is sand essentially. Now, unfortunately, if you took some sand and you dropped it in some water, theoretically it will dissolve to give you soluble silicon, but you need to wait about several hundred thousand years or something like that. In other words, it’s a very slow process going one way and not the other.
These silicon supplements, many people take them and some people actually tell you that they get some positive results from them. That’s quite possible because silica is a surface upon which, for example, metals, including aluminum can absorb and it might help the metals to be excreted in that way. It doesn’t give you silicic acid. It doesn’t give you soluble silicon. Or if it does, it gives you a relatively small amount in comparison to what you can get simply from a mineral water and sometimes from your own tap water. But it’s very rare that tap water is so high in silicon as these specific mineral waters are.
So, the silicon supplements do not supply you with soluble silicon. It’s unfortunate. And we have for many years been involved with trying to develop something which does. And there are companies out there that claim to have developed things that do and we have tested them all and none of them live up to the claims. So, one has to be very careful about that. I don’t want to put people off from using silicon supplements. If people find them to be helpful, go ahead and use them, but they are not working in the way in which we understand this particular chemistry to work.