An Exercise in Bureaucracy

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Slugs secrete slime, bureaucrats secrete bureaucracy. They polish the seats of their office chairs and do the bidding of their masters, which is generally directed towards money. They are highly motivated to protect their polishing rags, and thus naturally costive. In my experience they too grow towards money, as office plants grow towards the window.

Good bureaucracy provides the order and stability that any complex organization or society requires to thrive. But bureaucracy can go bad (as it generally has done in the West), and le trahison des petits clercs turns away, with potentially fatal results, from the interests of the public to those of its paymasters.

Consider, for example, the regulatory situation of Gynostemma pentaphyllum. An adaptogenic herb, it has for centuries been made into a tea (jiaogulan) used in China to increase longevity and endurance, and to treat cardiovascular disease.

This herb is a cornucopia of actives, with over 230 compounds identified (1) and multiple therapeutic applications which extend well beyond traditional use. It has an array of anti-cancer properties (1), and appears to be an effective prophylactic and treatment for two more plagues of our times; metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (2-8) and the closely related Type 2 diabetes (9-11).

Gynestemma p. is also, irrefutably, an exercise mimetic, via up-regulation of the energy sensor AMP-kinase (12-18) and the closely related metabolic sensor Sirtuin-1 (19). The standardized extract ActivAMP reduces abdominal fat (20) and improves mitochondrial and muscle function in humans (15); cyclists significantly improved their performance in a 20km time trial (15). The herb is thus competing in a market that Big Pharma wants for its own, and the next goldmine to be strip-mined after the rich seams of Wegovy and Mounjaro have been ceded to generics.

Big Pharma needs to open up that next goldmine ASAP. A generation of GLP1-junkies (as soon as you stop, the weight creeps back) have lost not just fat but also muscle. A couple of spins around the track and you are well on the way to sarcopenia, already a very major problem (21) and inexorably linked to metabolic disease and early death (22). Class action lawsuits incoming ..

The industry’s short-term answer to the sarcopenia caused by satiety mimetics includes androgen receptor modulators and antimyostatins (which will be problematic and extremely expensive), but the pharma folk’s ultimate goal is to create exercise mimetic drugs.

Who needs exercise mimetic drugs, when you can just exercise?

Nobody disputes that exercise is good for you, but as the wonderful Gillian Welch sings (channeling the young libertine Augustine of Hippo), ‘I want to do right but not right now’ (23). What people think they ought to do, and what they do, in our seductively labour-saving environments, are two different things.

This is why scientists have been working to develop new synthetic exercise mimetics since the early ‘90’s. (The old one, Metformin, is an excellent drug (24), and derived from a natural source, but it is out of patent and therefore not worth investing in).

Some of the experimental new molecules are clearly effective (ie 25) but due to safety issues, including aggressively metastatic cancers (26), none has yet passed the filter of Phase III clinical trials. We are unlikely to see them on the market much before 2030. The drug cartels have spent billions on this and will not let natural, time-tested and safe competitors get to the finish line first. If at all.

Their main weapon in this fight is regulatory bureaucracy, which they have largely coopted (27). They use it to curtail the developing market for natural products, including Jiaogulan.

In 2012 the EU declared Jiaogulan to be a Novel Food (28), and therefore illegal for food or supplement use. The EFSA ruling, however, is almost meaningless; member states have their own positive and negative lists and they do whatever they like. Mutual recognition rules are tossed and there is no consistency, just multiple layers of bureaucracy and deliberate confusion.

Gynostemma Pentaphylum leaves are in the Belgian Register and Belfrit list (Belgium, France & Italy, 29) as an accepted herb for commerce in EU. Despite this, the herb is NOT on the formal EU list of herbals considered as food (30).

The leaves are available for consumption in the UK, the Czech Republic and Romania. In Germany and Denmark, however, they are illegal unless sold for decoration, potpourri and ‘improving indoor air quality’ (31).

Why would the Germans and Danes ban Gynestemma teas and supplements, when they have access to the same data as the Brits, Belgians, French, Italians, Czechs and Romanians, who allow them? The most likely answer is that Big Pharma paid off key Danish and German regulators, and in this way disrupted the EU market. (The Danes also banned curcumin and ashwagandha, with little scientific justification).

It makes EFSA look foolish, and racist too. Jiaogulan cannot be a novel food because the tonic was used by Chinese diaspora in Europe for a century or more before the regulatory cut-off date of May 15th, 1997.

The Chinese history of this herb goes even further back.

In 1406 the Ming Dynasty prince Zhu Su wrote took the first illustrated textbook of famine foods (32), plants which might be used as a source of calories in hard times. In his Jiuhuang Bencao (‘Herbs for Famine’) there is specific reference to Gynestemma pentaphyllum as such a food. (It is a member of the family Cucurbitaceae, which includes cucumbers, gourds and melons).

The first mention of medicinal use comes a century later, when the famous herbalist Li Shi-Zhen (1518 – 1593) described the plant as a treatment for hematuria, pharyngeal edema, cancers, and trauma in his Bencao Gangmu, or Compendium of Materia Media. Shi-Zhen’s book is still in print to this day, and can be purchased on Ebay.

But let us consider the Danish / German roadblock in a modern context.

Widespread lack of exercise (33) is a significant contributor to poor global health. It degrades metabolic and cardiovascular health (34, 35), and increases the risk of psychiatric illness (36-39) and a number of cancers (40).

From this perspective, EU bureaucracy is being misused to prevent people accessing a herbal tonic which provides at least a partial antidote for our low-energy lifestyle, which has a history of centuries of use, and which modern toxicology studies deem safe (41, 42). (Full disclosure: in susceptible individuals, it can cause diarrhoea).

By designating Jiaogulan as a Novel Food, the drug lords and their regulators are harming us and even killing us. Slamming the regulatory door on Jiaogulan is good for business but it is bad – very bad – for public health.

Fortunately, there are other doors. Various polyphenols have the ability to up-regulate AMP-kinase, including resveratrol, apigenin and the curcuminoids (43-45), and are therefore also considered to be exercise mimetics. There is also a back door.

Energy metabolism in the round includes both calorie use and calorie intake, and as well as exercise mimetics there are also calorie restriction mimetics. They activate many of the same genes and metabolic pathways, and offer broadly similar health benefits up to and including, at least in lower life forms, life extension.

One calorie restriction mimetic is the sweet-tasting rare sugar mannoheptulose, which occurs in unripe avocados at 1- 5% by weight (46), and at lower levels in figs, primroses and alfalfa (47).

Mannoheptulose inhibits glycolysis (46), a biochemical process used by all cells to oxidize glucose and generate energy as ATP. It protects against the adverse metabolic effects of a high-fat diet in mice (48), and when given to humans, as 10 g freeze-dried unripe avocado powder, it had analogous effects ie it improves insulin sensitivity (49).

Levels of mannoheptulose fall drastically as the fruit ripens, which is why consuming much larger amounts of ripe avocado has little effect (50). The rare sugar is not yet commercialized, and as unripe avocados are hard, chalky and sometimes very bitter, here are some preparation tips.

Peel unripe avocados, cut into small pieces, sprinkle with lemon juice and place in freeze drier. When dry, use a burr mill or similar to grind the pieces into powder. Store the powder in the fridge or freezer, and mix it into foods such as soups and stews. Dose at 10 to 20 g powder / day for a few months, and monitor your HbA1c.

Finally, many of the polyphenols are not only exercise mimetics but also appear to be calorie restriction mimetics as well (51, 52 and 53, see Table 1). They must now therefore be classified as enviromimetics and gerosuppressants.

The ultra-processed diet is notoriously low in polyphenols (54), and is therefore gero-accelerant. It also causes dysbiosis, glycemic overload and Type B malnutrition, as repeated ad nauseam in previous posts. No wonder we are growing sick and feeble in the West, and in all those other parts of the world where ultra-processed foods are gaining market share.

It is time to pull back from the precipice.

Thumb your nose at the Eureaucrats by growing your own Gynestemma pentaphyllum and making your own jiaogulan tea (55, video). Alternatively, buy a standardized extract on-line (56). If you’re unlucky enough to be Danish or German, have a foreign friend send it to you in a plain wrapper. The Health Protocol will provide further support.

Next week: At the going down of the sun…

References

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  55. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5DwcnZ8XYk
  56. https://www.swansonvitamins.com/p/swanson-ultra-activamp-amp-k-stimulator-225-mg-60-veg-caps

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