SoylentNews

You can buy plenty of chromium supplements down at the vitamin store – chromium picolinate has been a big item for many years now. That’s because the element has been suspected as an essential trace constituent of the human diet, particularly for carbohydrate metabolism.

Doubts have surface over the years, though. It’s actually quite hard to show that something is essential to the human diet, not least because (1) the experiments to prove this definitively would not be ethical to run and (2) even if you wanted to run them, getting ahold of enough food that’s absolutely free of Trace Nutrient X is no small task. The existing trace elements and vitamins were discovered under conditions of natural insufficiency (areas of restricted diet or poor soil), not by locking people up and feeding them only two things to see what happens to them after a few years. (People are capable of doing that to themselves, though, or to their children, which I’m probably not alone in finding particularly infuriating).

These data support mounting evidence that Cr(III) is not essential and that Tf binding is likely to be a natural protective mechanism against the toxicity and potential genotoxicity of dietary Cr through blocking Cr(III) cellular accumulation.