Comment by timr
8 hours ago
> It also had more arginine, an amino acid that children need to grow.
My kingdom for even a tiny bit of scientific literacy amongst people who are reporting on science.
Not only is this absurd ("children" need all amino acids to grow...as does anyone else), arginine isn’t even one of the essential amino acids. Your body makes it unless something is seriously wrong.
Hopefully it's just my lazy reading/thinking, but this part of the article feels like scientism to me. Picking out some random micronutrients this strain has more of, praising that it has less gluten. It's just using "science" to justify whatever they already wanted to do.
I was waiting for them to explain what any of the real benefits were.
Arginine is a "conditionally essential" amino-acid, i.e. there are circumstances when the internal production is insufficient, so it must exist in food.
The need for arginine may exist during some illnesses and not for children in general, but for very young babies, especially for those born prematurely.
The times when internal production is insufficient are basically neonatal and diseases. Humans, in general, do not need to supplement arginine.
i don't have a PhD like you, but aren't some amino acids essential in young mammals and conditionally essential in adult mammals?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07533...
Not my area of expertise, but my understanding is that this is an extremely limited claim (i.e. unborn babies / neonatal supplementation, or children with genetic defects), and not something you can even remotely generalize to "children" as a whole. The way we teach this in biochem 101 is "arginine is conditionally essential", with the "conditional" being "periods of stress or sickness".
In any case, I seriously doubt the author is talking about this, given the imprecision of the language. Also, eating this wheat specifically for arginine supplementation is goofy gym-science. Arginine is trivial to supplement.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
So what you are saying is they forgot the word "small" in "arginine is an amino acid small children need to grow".
2 replies →
https://www.biochemical-pathways.org/metabolic-pathways.pdf
Your body is one hell of a lab.
Thanks for explaining this, reading this in the article made me concerned as a parent.
Don't worry too much. If you follow basic food recommendations, even those given out 60 years ago, your child can grow up fine. Even if you only follow it just half the time. Basically, all those articles have to be taken with a grain of salt. What kills you is: smoking, drinking, tanning, long periods of only junk food. And those seem to affect you mainly after age 25. Children are remarkably sturdy.