Comment by cluckindan
3 days ago
Why not? Ethanol kills competing bacteria and is only produced in microscopic quantities.
Methanol is produced by a lot of bacteria, almost every human produces it within their body.
3 days ago
Why not? Ethanol kills competing bacteria and is only produced in microscopic quantities.
Methanol is produced by a lot of bacteria, almost every human produces it within their body.
Isn't methanol a strong poison? I do not believe that any probiotic or native strains produce it.
Chemically the problem with ethanol is that it's too close to methanol.
From Wikipedia:
”Small amounts of methanol are present in normal, healthy human individuals. One study found a mean of 4.5 ppm in the exhaled breath of test subjects.[19] The mean endogenous methanol in humans of 0.45 g/d may be metabolized from pectin found in fruit; one kilogram of apple produces up to 1.4 g of pectin (0.6 g of methanol.)[20]”
”Ingestion of as little as 3.16 grams of methanol can cause irreversible optic nerve damage, and the oral LD50 for humans is estimated to be 56.2 grams.[66]”
19: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0967-3334/27/7/00...
20: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.1997...
66: https://aoemj.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.1186/s40557-017-01...
It doesn't mean it's safe to risk adding to the burden. The danger is that low-grade non-acute toxicity over the natural level could still be harmful over time. All it could take is one mutation.