[pct-l] The Desert

[Tom Hudson]

I've never heard of ambrotose until 10 minutes ago, but one trivial bit of
the college biochemistry I remember is that compounds ending in "-ose" are
sugars.  Glucose, Dextrose, Sucrose, etc.  They aren't usually ionic in
nature, and therefore aren't salts.

As for whether Abrotose has any nutritional value at all... web searches
lead one through a gallery of articles that are very critical of its
manufacturer, Mannatech, or through a maze of gobbledygook, fluffy science
sites that all eventually point back to the manufactuere.  Not a single
source I'd consider credible is featured prominantly  One good blog post I
found on why this might be is here:

http://blog.glyconutrientsreference.com/?p=13

On every site that criticizes the legitimiacy of the suppliment or any
peer-reviewed journals to support it, there are a number of respondants who
make incredible claims as to how they've been helped (almost miraculously)
by the "glyconutrients" in the product.  But, unsubstatiated, unverifiable
claims posted by God-knows-who on the Internet are meaningless.

The one credible source I could find was cancer.org.  They basically say
that many claims regarding the beneiftsof glyconutrients have been widely
made, and that there is zero evidence to support those claims.

http://www.cancer.org/Treatment/TreatmentsandSideEffects/ComplementaryandAlternativeMedicine/HerbsVitaminsandMinerals/glyconutrients

Glyconutrients are eight sugars that are used to make glycoproteins, which
are very important to cellular communication.  But it is exceedingly rare
for humans to be deficient in those sugars, and so supplementing them has
absolutely reasonable means of providing benefit.

Anyways, from my cursory search... it's snake oil.

/Tom

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Brick Robbins <brick at brickrobbins.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Mike Chapman <altathunder76 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I would like to add that there are 3 types of salt your body really
> > needs,I advise a supplement called ambertose,its very costly,but
> > athletes and celebritys and even cancer patients use it.
>
> Ambertose is a very expensive, multi-level marketed (think Amway)
> blend of plant sugars.
>
> I don't see anything about mineral salts in the description
> http://chetday.com/glyconutrients.htm
>
> In water, salt breaks down into electrolytes
>
> The two that are lost in sweat the most are
>    * sodium (Na+)
>    * potassium (K+)
>
> They both typically come with chloride (Cl-)
>
> The others you need are
>    * calcium (Ca2+)
>    * magnesium (Mg2+)
>    * bicarbonate (HCO3-)
>    * phosphate (PO42-)
>    * sulfate (SO42-)
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