This is an interesting line of reasoning, which is not easily refuted. It seems quite plausible biochemically, and my strongest attack on it would probably be through the conjunction fallacy—while each of these steps seems reasonable, perhaps the entire chain is faulty.
However, there is one thing that seems blatantly out of place—and that’s the scale of the process. The citric acid cycle as a whole operates at a catalytic concentration of 1-5 millimolar, in just about every cell of the body. Multiplied by 70 kg of weight per person, that would equal 70-350 millimoles, or roughly 10-50g of CAC intermediates in the body. If this pill is really hoping to dump enough oxaloacetate into the system in order to temporarily force the cycle to run backwards, a 100mg daily dose seems small. I would think you’d need at least 1g daily before it actually affects the citric acid cycle.
Do they teach science in school nowadays? I feel like the analysis that I’m doing should be doable by most scientifically literate people.
Resurrecting a long dead topic here. I have a BS in Chemistry and only learned about the citric acid cycle in my last semester as an undergrad. I doubt many physics, math or comp. sci. people are ever exposed to it so it may be that the analysis can be done fairly easily, but that most people don’t have the prior information to flag this as improbable.
This is an interesting line of reasoning, which is not easily refuted. It seems quite plausible biochemically, and my strongest attack on it would probably be through the conjunction fallacy—while each of these steps seems reasonable, perhaps the entire chain is faulty.
However, there is one thing that seems blatantly out of place—and that’s the scale of the process. The citric acid cycle as a whole operates at a catalytic concentration of 1-5 millimolar, in just about every cell of the body. Multiplied by 70 kg of weight per person, that would equal 70-350 millimoles, or roughly 10-50g of CAC intermediates in the body. If this pill is really hoping to dump enough oxaloacetate into the system in order to temporarily force the cycle to run backwards, a 100mg daily dose seems small. I would think you’d need at least 1g daily before it actually affects the citric acid cycle.
Do they teach science in school nowadays? I feel like the analysis that I’m doing should be doable by most scientifically literate people.
Resurrecting a long dead topic here. I have a BS in Chemistry and only learned about the citric acid cycle in my last semester as an undergrad. I doubt many physics, math or comp. sci. people are ever exposed to it so it may be that the analysis can be done fairly easily, but that most people don’t have the prior information to flag this as improbable.
It’s been 25 years since I took chemistry.