"Detoxifying with Chlorella"
Depression is a debilitating mental disorder
with a severe impairment to quality of life.
The drugs don't work particularly well, have a bunch of side effects,
so searching for alternative antidepressant agents
with proper efficacy and safety is necessary.
Well, there is this green algae called chlorella that has been used
as a dietary supplement and alternative medicine in Asia for centuries.
Why not put it to the test?
A randomized controlled trial
of chlorella in patients with major depression.
Subjects were randomized to standard therapy,
or standard therapy plus 1800 mg of chlorella,
which is about three-quarters of a teaspoon a day.
And significant improvements in physical and cognitive symptoms
of depression as well as anxiety.
Wow! OK, but what word is missing here?
A "randomized controlled trial of chlorella."
What we want is a randomized placebo-controlled trial.
Here they compared chlorella to nothing.
Half got some special treatment, and the other half got nothing:
the perfect set-up for the placebo effect, especially when the measured outcomes
are mostly just about how they're subjectively feeling.
Now, you could argue, look, that much chlorella would only cost
about 10 cents a day, it's healthy for you anyway,
and depression is such a serious disease, why not just give it a try?
OK, but I'd still like to know if it actually works or not.
This other study on chlorella I highlighted
suffered from a similar problem,
but at least had an objective quantifiable outcome,
a significant decrease in liver inflammation.
But this study had no control group at all.
So maybe they would have just gotten better on their own for some reason.
But there's never been a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial
of chlorella for liver disease until now.
And not just any liver disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,
which, thanks to the obesity pandemic, now affects 1 in 4 people on Earth.
Let's see if 1200 mg of chlorella a day will help.
That's about a half teaspoon, closer to just a nickel a day,
and significant drops in liver inflammation, perhaps because
they lost significantly more weight, about a pound a week over the 8 weeks,
which would explain the significant improvement in fasting blood sugars.
They conclude that chlorella has significant weight-reducing effects
with meaningful improvements in liver function.
How about a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study
of chlorella for cholesterol?
Compared with the control group,
the chlorella group exhibited remarkable changes in total cholesterol.
Wow, how much?
Only 1.6%. What?!
And note they said total cholesterol.
If you look at what really matters, LDL cholesterol, no effect whatsoever.
Thankfully, that's not what other studies found.
A meta-analysis of 19 randomized controlled trials
of chlorella for cholesterol, involving hundreds of subjects,
found that those taking chlorella did drop their LDL,
8 points on average, and even dropped their blood pressure a few points.
Four grams or more a day for at least 8 weeks seems to be the magic formula;
that would be about 2 teaspoons a day.
That's a lot of chlorella,
but if you can find a palatable way to take it, it might help.
This is the latest: a dietary cholesterol challenge.
They had people eat three eggs a day
with or without a few spoonfuls of chlorella.
In this double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study,
34 participants ingested 510 mg of dietary cholesterol from three eggs,
concomitantly with a dose of chlorella or a matched placebo for 4 weeks.
Just eating the eggs alone, 14% rise in LDL cholesterol,
but with the chlorella, significantly less.
Therefore, chlorella can be playing a useful role
in maintaining healthy blood cholesterol levels.
Another way would be to not eat three eggs a day.
That reminds me of this other study to assess the ability of chlorella
to detoxify carcinogenic heterocyclic amines, the cancer-causing
chemicals created when you fry, bake, broil, or barbeque meat.
The chlorella did seem to lower the levels
of one of the cooked meat carcinogens flowing through their bodies
but didn't quite reach statistical significance.
Or what about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,
another class of cancer- causing compounds
found particularly in smoked meats, cigarettes,
includes numerous genotoxic DNA-damaging carcinogens.
And again, chlorella did seem to lower levels but not significantly so.
Still, if you're going to
sit down to like ham and eggs for breakfast
or something, make sure to add lots of chlorella
and make them green eggs and ham.