One Unifying Chemical Reaction To Explain Why We Shouldn’t Feed Ourselves With All The Wrong Foods.

It’s just one aldehyde, come on. What can it really do?

It’s quite interesting to note these days what we can eat and what we shouldn’t be eating. Even if the food product is actually edible, the metabolites may not be regarded as safe.

We know a few things about what not to consume in overly large quantities. Sugar, we know, isn’t that great. Alcohol, we know that we shouldn’t be drinking too much of. Polyunsaturated fats (or even partially hydrogenated fats) aren’t that great either.

But wouldn’t it be interesting to know that why they’re not good for health can be distilled down to the exact same chemical reaction?

Now, sugary foods are rich in sugars such as glucose and fructose.

Glucose, on its own, can exist as an aldehyde, or it can be converted into glyceraldehyde in the body by first converting it into glucose (it therefore goes without saying that fructose can also be converted into glyceraldehyde).

Aldehydes can react with amines, and that’s what we see in the Maillard reaction when we see the browning of potato chips, for instance.

Of course, the proteins in our body and our cellular DNA all do contain amines, and all these aldehydes derived from excessive sugar consumption can react with them. That’s the thing that isn’t great for our health, because we’d see the proteins in our body and the cellular DNA components becoming damaged — in some cases, the damage can be irreversible, too.

We call this reaction a “glycation” reaction, though it’s just about an amine reacting with an aldehyde — such is the nature of haemoglobin proteins reacting with glucose to form HbA1c. And of course, the glycated proteins tend to lose their biological functions:

So there we have the aldehyde-amine reaction in full force.

But of course, we can see that happening in alcohol consumption too.

The ethanol in alcoholic beverages can ge oxidised by our liver into acetaldehyde. In drunk people, elevated blood acetaldehyde levels will manifest itself in the form of red faces, impaired thinking and also contribute to the splitting headaches that accompany hangovers the next day:

Acetaldehyde, being an aldehyde, also solemnly swears to be up to no good with amines.

So now, if consuming too much sugar can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and consuming too much alcohol can lead to alcoholic liver disease, can we not pinpoint the aldehydes as the issue?

But wait, there’s more!

See, even unsaturated fats in our diet can get into the act.

They can undergo lipid peroxidation to form 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), which is another aldehyde.

So when we want to look at the broad ideas of sugar, fats or alcohol “causing” cancer, here’s why. They react with the amines in proteins and in DNA to force mutations, and the mutated cells are going to behave differently because of those mutations. These mutated cells have to be killed off, or they’ll end up aggregating into tumours.

When we want to look at the broad ideas of sugar, fats or alcohol, “causing” Alzheimer’s, it’s all about those aldehydes causing damage to the proteins at the blood-brain barrier and allowing other noxious chemicals to enter the brain, which then create a whole new round of brain inflammation and trigger the neurons to commit suicide prematurely.

All from the humble aldehyde.

Which, by the way, is also responsible for causing wrinkles and our skin structure to collapse as we age, you know:

That darned aldehyde!

To add insult to injury, our dead bodies will be smothered with aldehydes if we do get embalmed — formaldehyde being the aldehyde of choice.

But it’s all about the reactions that aldehydes can partake in. That’s the scary part right there!

No prizes for guessing that formaldehyde has been declared as a carcinogen, though!

Joel Yong, Ph.D., is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 5 ebooks (available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on crafting strategies to support optimal biochemical functions in the human body at https://thethinkingscientist.substack.com.