Minerals

The Sacred Copper

5. Mai 2019 5 min read

Copper is an essential trace element often underestimated in nutrition. Adequate copper intake is crucial for immune function, metabolism, and cardiovascular health.

Newsletter from May 5, 2019

Unfortunately, over the years it has become clear that the information overload of the internet creates many misconceptions. Topics with little connection to reality get inflated in our minds as if they were life-or-death matters.

That's why we need statistics. You need statistics and above all a feel for the subject matter to form a proper picture—or you rely on someone who clearly understands it.

Many of us don't have much experience with statistics and "scientific intuition," but we understandably still want to form an opinion. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, this often leads to misunderstandings.

Topics like "nitrosative stress" get confused with "arginine excess," even though it's actually arginine deficiency that causes such nitrosative stress.
Just because a metabolically diseased body can no longer process carbohydrates (and excess carbs are certainly unhealthy in this state) doesn't mean carbohydrates in general make us sick.
And: Copper is an essentially important trace element that we often take in too little of—because some disease patterns seemingly show too much copper in cells, people claim that copper causes illness.

Specifically regarding copper, one could listen to a researcher who dedicated his entire research life to this trace element—Dr. Leslie M. Klevay. He postulated something unheard of:

The "recommended" 1 mg of copper per day is not enough; we probably need double or triple that amount.
Even the "recommended" 1 mg is often not achieved.

What do we often do: "Avoid copper" (Note: Most people already do this anyway based on their diet), because we read somewhere on the internet that it's totally harmful.

The fact is: Copper is incredibly important. The real problem is that our copper metabolism occasionally gets a bit dysregulated. But this isn't due to too much; rather, it's about too little and especially about missing important "cofactors." Copper requires vitamin A in the body, for example, because vitamin A regulates the formation of the most important copper transporter in the blood. Aha!

Basically, you should remember: Dysregulation occurs because we haven't provided our bodies with what they need for a long time. In rarer cases, genes play a role. This would be the case, for example, with hemochromatosis.

Back to copper. Interesting details about copper would include, for example:

Copper is a highly toxic element for pathogens (e.g., bacteria). That's why there's discussion about using copper-containing surfaces in hospitals again [source no longer available]. The body is clever and uses this fact to its advantage in many ways. For example: Macrophages—our first line of defense in the immune system—"shoot" at pathogens with the help of copper. If we have too little copper in our body, it limits our ability to destroy pathogens [source no longer available]. In other words: Little copper, worse immune system.
It turns out that copper influences the function of our adipose tissue. It regulates, for example, cAMP, which is important for fat breakdown [source no longer available]. Current studies show that copper regulates the metabolic program of fat cells. Low copper shifts the balance toward "fatty fat cells" [source no longer available].
Last but not least: A study from 2018 is titled: "Copper deficiency can be one of the main causes of ischemic heart disease [source no longer available]." Why? Because the aforementioned Dr. Klevay convincingly demonstrated that copper deficiency is the only intervention that produces cardiovascular disease in experimental animals like what we see in humans.

That's all for now. For more on this, where else, in our new Springer book [source no longer available].

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