Reports like this on the dangers of DEHP is exactly why I started work on NeutraOat (https://neutraoat.com/), a modified oat fiber supplement designed to trap plasticizers in your gut before they can get into your bloodstream. The idea is to give people an easy, safe way to avoid absorbing plasticizers that you've ingested.
I just use my microwave to boil and drink a couple tablespoons of ground barley with a sweetener, beta glucan is amazing and hulled barley is awesome, cheap and higher in beta glucan than oats.
Solved every gastro issue I've ever had, humans co-evolved with barley and it's awesome. No modifications needed.
Not a bad idea for your health, but it won't trap plasticizers. We're modifying the beta glucan to have many tiny, "sticky" pores to trap the chemicals in the gut, so they go out with the rest of the beta glucan. Pure beta glucan, whether from oats or barley, won't have much effect.
Based on everything I know about the mechanism of action and the impact of dietary fiber in general on microplastic adsorption I would need to see a study with protocols and raw data published to be convinced that barley is lacking and your solution is superior but I'm open to it.
Hulled Barley is a combination of both IDF and SDF's, that study is for DF across the board. Frankly a barley drink made with unfiltered french press coffee would probably be the single best/easiest validated drink for reducing absorption of microplastics and heavy metals.
But it is an under researched area for sure.
edit because I can't reply: the above paper I linked references coffee grounds and MP.
So you eat both, have ground barley with something to make it more palatable and cook with hulled barley in meals? Seems like it's a better solution than psyllium fiber.
I grind hulled barley to a powder and then boil it with RO water in the microwave. Total cook time in my microwave for the ~2tbl I consume is 2 minutes and 10 seconds.
I put in a little stevia/monk fruit for taste.
Because the end result is basically a thickened drink with a rather neutral flavor I'll often throw in my 3rd shot of espresso for the day or just drink it as is while still hot.
A lot of cultures that are long lived tend to have barley based drinks but of course isolating barley's effect is a fools errand, it's just correlation at best.
I started playing with barley for a "cream of wheat" esq experience, which was actually way better than cream of wheat or oats but I found that the water absorption of barley is so high that for gastro purposes it's more consistent to add enough water that it remains a drink.
The upside bonus is that due to the mechanism of action you can start with very low volumes of barley and it doesn't give you gastro distress the way other types of fiber supplementation can, basically the soluble fiber slows down the movement of food through the intestines giving your gut more digestive time to create a homogenous, gelled slurry making the defection process closer to ideal texture.
I now also spend far less time on the toilet and it only takes 2 minutes and a single hot beverage every morning.
One other positive side effect is I've found that my overall hydration stays more consistent as well.
Thanks for the info! I'm always using psyllium but reading more and hearing about barley it seems like combining the two for my morning and evening drink might be the way to go.
Sounds good! I used to worry about insoluble fiber more but barley's been very effective for me so I dropped psyllium, it's method of action is improves fermentation so it definitely takes a few weeks to normalize everything. I found that with supplementing with insoluble fiber (psyllium) food was moving through my digestion too fast.
We're still prototyping and testing, but you'll probably have to eat it twice a day to get complete coverage. It needs to be in the gut at the same time as the plasticizer to have any effect.
How likely (perhaps as a percentage) do you think it is that your product will work as described? I'd be interested in taking it, assuming that's all it does is remove plasticizers and not a bunch of good things, and otherwise is mostly inert.
Author here. Thanks! I'm pretty sure most of the negative effects of SSRIs were discovered in phase 2 trials, though. Pk trials aren't usually powered to find adverse effects in subpopulations like teenage patients. Same thing with GLP-1 agonists and their effects on addictions (which I think were actually discovered post approval).
That being said, we'd still have to do dose escalation studies for toxicology even if we had great pbpk models. Not denying that.
Author here. As someone who works in pharma, organ on a chip models are not even close to being relevant to providing accurate PK curves for oral absorption. The state of the art is trying to make it work for cutaneous absorption and that's still not great/commercially useful.
My whole point is that there needs to be way more open data on pharmacokinetics. That's the only way we're going to solve this.
> It would just require the raw data from a variety of pharmacokinetic trials, some in-depth experiments on human liver and gastric membranes, and some simulation of the physics of how different drugs diffuse into the bloodstream and across membranes. This would be difficult, but not impossible, and would not require any huge scientific advances.
Author here. Enzyme polymorphisms are tricky and would require a whole different blog post. Some drugs they matter a lot for, some drugs they do not. I actually have not found any drugs with 10-fold variability that could be ascribed solely (or even mainly) to polymorphisms, although it doesn't seem impossible.
Here’s an article I found in 30s of searching (granted, I already knew Warfarin was hugely affected by CYP2D6) stating that equivalent maintenance doses of Warfarin can vary by a factor of >10 (from 0.5mg to 7mg) based on the CYP2D6 phenotype of the patient.
Don't know about 10x, but having the MTHFR mutation genotype 667TT reduces folate activation [1] by 70-80%, which is a problem with drugs that require folate supplementation, like methotrexate.
The corporate attorney agreed not to require me to pay any of their invoices until I closed a seed round, while the patent attorney let me pay their invoices a full year after I received them. These sorts of arrangements are common with attorneys who work with startups.
