YM, as a friendly admonition, chemistry is a hazardous field for anyone to engage in, especially in terms of logical conclusions inferred from perceived truisms, given a background roughly commensurate with yours. Similarly, your talents and qualifications in etymology are an insecure basis for your semantic arguments. To deal with the latter point first, note that in this very forum we already have discussed the meanings of “essential” in response to a perfectly reasonable question from a participant whose mother-tongue happens not to be English. He at least, did not make the error of confusing the semantics and the etymology. In case of any reasonable impression on your part, that we might be at a loss in default of your philological competence in these matters, you might reassure yourself by inspecting the associated thread at:
http://www.last-word.com/content_handling/show_tree/tree_id/3902.html
Note that in your cheerful assertion that ‘...its meaning has been broadened relatively recently to mean “greatly necessary” or “indispensable”...’, you came rather a nasty cropper: in English that was one of its first meanings, early sixteenth century at least. My curiosity piqued by this fact, I did a bit of looking up and have not been able to find earlier use of either the word “essence” or of meanings of “essential” related to essence rather than to the sense of “indispensably requisite”.
Oh well... Please don’t feel any compulsion to explain how your digression in that direction amounted to an exercise in semantics rather than “spin”... I regret to disappoint you by declining at this time to respond to the rest of your remarks on that point, but if you really feel the need for a deeper analysis, ask me later when I have more time.
You say: ”Your reflexes getting off the mark to disparage diet supplementers show no signs of decay.”
You understate my reactions if your supplementers are the likes of the quacks and fringe practitioners who would represent i.a. aluminum, barium, beryllium, cadmium, caesium, cerium, gallium, gold, indium, iridium, lead, osmium, platinum, radium, rubidium, tellurium, thallium, thorium, and zirconium as all nutritionally vital or of course, “essential” (Ahem! All from your little list with its magnesium! Would you insist on “indispensably requisite”, or have you by now caught up with sixteenth-century English?) Nutritional physiology is a valid discipline with valid practitioners, but fruitloopery on that scale is a bit over the top, to borrow a term from Feedback. If you had had the faintest conception of the nature of research in such fields, you could have saved us both a lot of time and embarrassment. If I had had the faintest idea of your actual understanding of the field, I could have saved myself some for certain.
As for your chemical insights, mine eye glazeth over when I try to imagine what you think the relevance is of “the average masses of various elements in the body of a 100 Kg human.” Let’s ignore the term “average, and observe that if the only relevant variable were the masses of the elements, then by using your figures, the buoyancy of just the O, H, and N of such a human body could float not only all our (have mercy...!) aluminium, radium and gold, not to mention astatine, promethium, osmium, iridium, and technetium, in even the freshest of hot water, but float a hundred thousand tonne freighter as well!
Am I getting through, YM?
Please stick to something less drastically intellectually challenging! Reflect! How many compounds that share the same empirical formulae can you think of, that also share the same density in spite of comprising the same types and numbers of atoms?
You ask in part: “If we were all nought but oxygen, water, hydrocarbon and nitrogen how could this be ?”
YM, plenty of plain, common organic compounds, even pure hydrocarbons such as polythene, or alcohols such as glycerol, are denser than water, and sink merrily. And some don’t. Ask Georg to help you comparing those two with say, polypropylenes and diethyl ether. None of the floaters needs extra hydrogen to float, and none of the sinkers needs extra iridium!
“Swim bladders” for the love of mike!
You say: “The suggestion that these and the other rarer metals are contaminants is preposterous.”
Really? Really really? Including all those in your list, even those few that I have quoted from your list? Preposterous in such terms as those that you have been arguing? Would you care to explain in clear and direct logical, chemical and physical principles why it is preposterous? YM, you started out of your depth, and you are sinking fast.
“It is true there is plenty of research yet to be done...”
Yes. The eternal weasel words that accompany argument by demanding proof of a negative!
>Certainly diet supplement manufacturers make vast fortunes convincing people that our diets do not contain enough of them, much to the chagrin of one prolific answerer of “Last Word” correspondence.<
YM, your use of the word “chagrin” is no better informed than your disapproval of “essential”. “Revulsion” and “anger” would be more appropriate at so blatant a demonstration of the fact that the assertion: “Where there’s brass there’s muck” is about as valid as its more conventional converse. I will avoid the discourtesy of answering for you, but I for one find such blatant and unethical parasitism of the uninformed public disgusting to see. No matter how it enriches crooks, I refuse to accept their profits as evidence of the nutritional or medicinal merits of the products.
Do you, YM?
>Some domesticated animals receive supplements but that tends to be more to encourage weight gain than for subsistence.<
YM, you are far out of your depth!
As for your familial experience of Al, I sympathise with the situation (genuinely!) but does it not strike you as just a bit like special pleading to assume that Al is a nutrient because it occurs in food, but also that it promotes conditions related to Alzheimer’s, neither on any better grounds than that it once was proposed to be associated with Alzheimer’s, in studies that subsequently failed to demonstrate any causal connection? Personally I am not worried about Al, but I prefer to use alternatives for reflux on the grounds that I know of effective and uncontroversial measures for my own purposes, both for gastro-oesophageal and urinary acidity, whether for discomfort or osteoporotic indications. As a matter of principle I mildly, though not obsessively, try to avoid gross consumption of non-nutritive substances. A prejudice of course sir, but mine own!
I am afraid though that your remarks about the insolubility or otherwise, of Al salts, are irrelevant, incorrect, or meaningless, in context.
As is, I fear, the whole discussion.
What you have said has nothing, nothing whatever, to do with the density of essential oils (this time in the sense of essence YM!) If you had the slightest idea of what you were discussing, you would have begun by noting what I had told you in the first place: that no essential oil that you or I know includes any metallic atoms, heavy or otherwise, and so they cannot affect its density. (You missed that one didn’t you YM?) And your list of essential oils didn’t include any oils, irrespective of density, did it?
So, never mind your facts, DO please try to get your logic together before you invoke more of my participation, will you please?
Please?
