Posted by Thorp on May 23, 2005, at 13:40:54
In reply to Re: Original Limu » Thorp, posted by Larry Hoover on May 23, 2005, at 10:04:35
Hey, Lar, I am onto you. You are not just some casual observer with a degree in chemistry. You already have a bottle of Original Limu from which you are reading the label. You have tracked other supplements like Noni and Kava. You have some kind of axe to grind. I suspect your axe is just like mine of wanting to expose shams! Believe me, Original Limu ain’t no moonshine!
I will try to respond like you to your posting:
> Hi again, Lar, 2005 05 22
>
> I am very much enjoying the exchange, Lar, and I truly appreciate your helping me along in getting into the technology with definitions regarding the seaweeds.
I'm going to heavily edit, again, dude. Although I fully recognize your enthusiasm, and belief in the efficacy of this product, those are not matters for debate. Anecdotally, the stuff works. Scientifically, I can't find a single reference to that species used in Original Limu. That's a problem for me.Hey Lar. “The stuff works!” I am a scientist and I really don’t care about all the details any more, although I was just like you when I started – so how can I complain. I would love to hear your results with dried kelp. Don’t you find it strange that nobody is singing the praises of dried kelp already? Why are there no references in the National Library of Medicine to dried kelp? As cheap as it is, a person could easily shovel a half a pound into their spaghetti sauce like basel and oregano. Perhaps you are onto something there. We need to let the word out that since Original Limu is doing so well, others ought to now realize that they can get the same results with dried kelp. I truly would love for that to be the case as it would save us all a lot of money. But, I seriously doubt Original Limu is just superfluous next to dried kelp. Again, why waste 15 years of a man’s life developing the extract that goes into Original Limu if it has no greater value than dried kelp powder? Nevertheless, I am a scientist and I ran my own test of abstention from Original Limu and the throbbing pain returned to my arm. I really don’t want to go to the trouble of ordering dried kelp powder, but if it were to arrive on my doorstep by some interested party such as yourself, I guess I can go through the torment of ten more weeks of a throbbing pain in my right arm if dried kelp powder fails and give it a try. The problem is how to take it. I don’t eat spaghetti everyday. I guess I could make a soup and throw in a bunch there. What do you think would be a fair dosage of dried seaweed to support your contention that fucoidan is fucoidan? I made the same contention but guess I now am backing off until I see that dried kelp really does all that Original Limu does. How many bottles will I need to receive for a three month trial period?
> Finally, I ask, Lar, if simple dried up kelp were comparable to Original Limu, why haven’t people been put onto this product long ago instead of letting people suffer the horrors of our pathetic Western diet?
You raise a straw man argument. We simply don't know the answers.Lar, don’t you think in this world that somebody has already tried consuming dried kelp and should have seen some miraculous health effects already?
> Yes, the developer of the extract could also have come up in a much shorter period of time with a simple dehydration process for creating a product? That is what I read when NEI promotes its product as being 80% fucoidan in that the raw product having 2.5% to 4% by weight fucoidan is concentrated 40 fold. Actually, this seems fishy to me in that a 40-fold concentration would mean that all that is left after the concentration is fucoidan if only 2.5% only were present in the raw stock. They should be claiming with usual content being 2.5% to 4% accordingly between 100% and 140% fucoidan with the product being so concentrated and assuming as it appears through their report that all there is to concentrate is fucoidan.
I caught the inconsistency immediately. That's exactly what I meant by my quip about, "How can I get people to pay $80/lb. for kelp powder?" Just because you read a claim, does not mean it is valid. The math used to promote that product simply cannot be true.
It's like real estate advertising. "Easy access to commute" means "backs onto noisy interstate highway". Ya know?
E.g. all the claims about nutrients. They are *incidental* coextractives. If you process *any* fresh vegetable matter by means of *any* non-chemical extraction process, you'll get the nutrients in the product. Without further processing, it would be impossible for them *not* to be there. You could take weeds from the side of the road and extract those nutrients. Making a big deal of their presence is deceptive. It makes me skeptical.
At this point, I fail to see why similar skepticism ought not to be levelled at Limu. We had noni juice a couple of years back. Before that, kava. Now it is Limu?Lar, we have people who have been on Noni, Sea Silver, and others and then get onto Original Limu and a blown away by how well it works. There is an 80 year old couple I see regularly as new-found friends that look to me to be in their early 60’s who grow their own foods organically even grinding their own corn meal and they have tried everything that has come down the pike for the last forty years as they have said and found none of them even comparing to Original Limu. There is no comparison to be made between Original Limu and hype products. Original Limu is the real thing!
Where is the evidence? The only claim to active ingredients I have seen is to fucoidan, and fucoidan is far, far, far from being a substance exclusive to Limu.
Lar, it is a proprietary extraction process that I could imagine would not rule out additional steps of transforming the fucoidan in it into a more active and bioavailable state. In fact, that is exactly why I am inclined to think that dried kelp won’t do anyone a lick of good in that the fucoidan in it is not readily absorbable into the blood stream. So, I strongly suspect that fucoidan is not fucoidan. There are various types of bioavailability for different sources of fucoidan.
> Another perspective rings true regarding NEI when one takes a quick look at the website you recommend.
I didn't recommend it in any way. I was using it for comparison purposes only.My apologies!
> It reveals a taletell sleight of hand that we are seeing with increasing frequency as others try to jump on the bandwagon with Original Limu.....Now, I see the same kind of deception with NEI where it has to contaminate its product with colostrom! That tells me that they cannot compete head to head with Original Limu regarding the real value of the limu moui in their formulation.
Hmmm. The Original Limu label says it contains spirulina and chlorophyll.Ah Ha! You already have a bottle of Original Limu, I see! Well, I was there at the prelaunch convention and saw what straight extract looked like and it just plain didn’t look like seaweed having a yellow-orange color at least for the batch that I saw. So human beings are funny. If they are told it is an extract of seaweed, they feel that it should look that way as well. I don’t blame the company for helping them feel it is still a seaweed by making the formulation greenish brown in color with the spirulina and chlorophyll if it gets them to drink this spectacular nutritional product.
> My question is whose colostrum is this? My mother’s? There is no definition at all given here.
I wasn't trying to make a point by point comparison of content. I was comparing fucoidan.
Colostrum is usually bovine, but others are available. I can't speak to this product, and I did not "recommend" it in any way.But you do now see my point of why I suspect NEI of being just another product in for the ride without most likely any exceptional value.
When I said:
"Compare that to: http://www.betterherbs.com/limu_nei.htm
This is a dried product, claiming 80% fucoidan by weight. Nobody is buying water with this product. I have no reason to believe its anything more than kelp powder, though."
....there were two distinct comparators I wished to consider.
You correctly deal with the first issue, and conclude that the dried product is cheaper, on a fucoidan content basis. I make no claims for efficacy. I was comparing fucoidan content and cost.
>For a 30-day period, NEI purports that it is providing 30 time 120 mg or 3.6 grams of fucoidan for a customer per month. The Original Limu provides two bottles of 2.8 grams of fucoidan per month or slightly less if strictly proceeding with only two ounces per day....So, NEI with its colostrums costs only $46 a month providing supposedly 3.6 grams of fucoidan and Original Limu costs $66.90 a month (actually a 30 day month would require only 60 ounces instead of the 67 ounces available in two bottles) providing a proven and publicly available for review by an independent laboratory of 2.8 grams
Okay, the "alternative" product is clearly cheaper.Who cares if it doesn’t do the job that Original Limu does? And, without 15 years of R&D behind it, I would highly doubt that it would compare to Original Limu in its truly making a difference in people’s health.
The second comparator was more hypothetical. How does this expensive powdered product, Limu Nei (based on Laminaria japonica), differ from a readily available generic product, called kelp powder (also Laminaria, probably japonica)? One obvious difference is unit price.
If all brown algae contain fucoidan (and it's looking like they all do.....you can't prove that, unless you test them all, of course), and brown algae products are readily available and quite inexpensive, and drying does not alter fucoidan (trust me on that, but I believe this to be a very stable molecular structure), then why pay such a price to obtain it?Perhaps your very point that drying does not alter the fucoidan is the key. Without altering it in some way as possibly could be the case in the proprietary extraction process, the fucoidan in dried kelp is unchanged and thus not readily bioavailable. Just my guess!
It boils down to your saying this stuff (Original Limu) is special (without a side-by-side comparison to show that other products *are* less efficaceous), and my not seeing the evidence to conclude the same thing via a priori analysis.
> Now, Lar, this is not the impression you gave in your posting that there was any comparison between the two:
> Original Limu has 0.14% fucoidan. The bulk of your product is water.
> Your remarks suggested a wide discrepancy in fucoidan content of NEI vs Original Limu with your implication that Original Limu is simply selling water.
I'm an environmental toxicologist. It makes no sense to ship water from place to place (energy and pollution costs), unless there is no reasonable alternative. "Live enzymes" is one argument against dehydration, but the sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate denature the enzymes. That's what they're for. To stabilize the product against auto-degradation.Lar, I find it hard to make arguments when I do not know the facts behind the proprietary issues of Original Limu but I suspect that the components in Original Limu are more bioavailable in a liquid formulation. I could envision colloidally dispersed ingredients that may thereby be more bioavailable and not left clumped up somewhere and simply wind up passing through the alimentary canal without absorption.
> My point is that, although the medium for Original Limu may be water (actually mango and papaya juice puree along with a small amount of a natural preservative, grapefruit extract),
I see the mention of the fruit puree in the literature, but I do not see it on the label. That concerns me.Read the fine print in the white portions of the label apart from the part that says “Other Ingredients:” You’ll see the genus there as well.
The actual preservatives are sodium benzoate (incorrectly described as a polyunsaturated fatty acid in the company literature) and potassium sorbate. The grapefruit extract is antioxidant.An antioxidant would certainly suggest it to be a fine preservative in my way of thinking to protect from free radical chain reactions upon exposure of the formulation to air.
> I take it that my last posting satisfied your other questions regarding the following:
>
> 1. Selecting limu moui, actually sphaerotrichia divaricata according to the label on Original Limu, over other fucoidan-containing seaweeds for Original Limu
Quite contrary to your supposition, I can see no reason whatsoever to support the selection of this specific form of brown algae over all others (many thousands of species).
Okay, this came as a surprise, the species identified. There is a substantial issue of translation between different languages. Just as kelp is better thought of as a generic common name, so it seems we must consider "limu". In fact, rather than limu, mozuku seems to be the more appropriate descriptor. Whatever.
I used google to track the meaning of limu, and it leads to the genus Laminaria, and more specifically, three species in that genus, especially japonica.
There is not a single mention of Sphaerotrichia divaricata on all of google, with respect to the identifier limu, save for two references to the Original Limu product. There are only 135 mentions of Sphaerotrichia divaricata in any sense, and many of those are duplicate pages. Just a bunch of botanists babbling on, generally.Lar, you missed my point of taking whatever is the most economical source of fucoidan and work with it. If Original Limu can process sphaerotrichia divaricata more economically than other seaweed and wind up with just as potent a nutritional supplement, why would it matter which seaweed they chose? I would prefer that they go with what will keep the price down as long as the quality of the product is unaffected.
> 2. Testing fucoidan in over 600 studies in the National Library of Medicine database at www.pubmed.gov not requiring that the fucoidan come only from the plant source limu moui or sphaerotrichia divaricata or any other brown seaweed to reflect the value of the fucoidan in any brown seaweed in the health of people and animals
I disagreed with that specifically. If you make claims to the specific source of fucoidan, as you seem to recurrently do (paraphrased as "only Original Limu has these special properties"), then I would expect to find something in the literature to back that up.
I said, "And how many of those 600 articles are specific to Laminaria japonica? Eleven. Not a single one mentions Limu."
The evidence is not there for Sphaerotrichia divaricata, either. It is not found in Pubmed, period. The genus does not appear, either.
There is not one scientific link to the source species of this product. That doesn't confer some special property, or confirm the potency of Original Limu. It makes for unsubstantiation of conclusions.Again, my bet is that you are missing the point of Original Limu. It is not in the source of the plant, it is in the proprietary extraction process that took 15 years to develop!
> 3. Trying to help people in desperate need even if it means telling them about something they can buy that in some small way could eventually profit me and letting them make up their own minds and not having a forum moderator exercise tyrannical control through censorship and rude commentary
Oh boy. What rude commentary? What tyranny?I’m sorry. Are you the moderator? I did not know. I was not referring to you but rather to the moderator of The Naked Scientists Science Discussion Forum at I won’t give a plug to a pathetic forum.
If the need truly is desperate, then I suggest they start with the more affordable options. I did not investigate dried brown seaweed products in any substantive way. Yet, with a simple google search, I turned up a product at $3.60/lbLar, Desperate people aren’t concerned about a few bucks here and there. They want what has been proven time and time again to work for people. Where is the data on dried kelp powder? I can connect you to thousands of satisfied consumers of Original Limu. If you had a short time yet to live, where would you place your bet?
> 4. Selling Original Limu not taking place at an exorbitant price for all the value associated with it
The value vs. cost is a personal attribution. I try to do my best not to argue those issues. You exhibit great faith, and I do not mean to challenge that in any way. Your faith is not subject to debate, and nothing I have said was ever meant to challenge it.Lar, it is more than faith, although I appreciate your respect for my faith. We have doctors seeing results from the Original Limu that blow them away from many different patients and many different doctors. Results are seen in blood work, in radiological results, etc. Scientists are making similar results for fucoidan in the literature, apparently a very bioavailable form or at least already past the intestinal line barrier. Lar, we see pets and children and infants undergoing dramatic improvements without their having any idea that Original Limu is anything different from kool aid.
> I hope your doubts are receiving satisfactory responses. I strongly encourage you to take a break from endless pursuit of trying to find something wrong
???
I never said there was anything wrong. I am trying to contextualize your information. That is how my brain works.I again apologize.
> and just prove it to yourself by buying some and start getting relief from whatever is holding back your health and general well-being.
>
> Thorp
That is indeed the height of the bar.
There is something in this last clause that troubles me. It implies that "buying some[Original Limu] (would allow me to) start getting relief from whatever is holding back your health and general well-being".
That claim is rather broad. And I am a skeptic. A skeptic with a tight budget.
What you have done for me is to introduce me to a new aspect of dietary management. What I will do with that is to obtain some dried brown seaweed of some sort, and give it a shot. I am too far from the sea to obtain anything fresh.
I do not suggest or imply that my trial will be equivalent to or representative of a trial of Original Noni....errrr....Limu.You flatter Noni!
As I have said before, I am no physician and make no claims but I have the common sense to know that if the body is given the right building blocks and right nutrients, it will take care of its own ailments as in healing a cut finger as it was designed to do by the Creator. Original Limu is not a medicine but only a powerful source of incredible nutrition that gets the body back doing its job after a long drought on the Western diet. I feel extremely confident that it will do the same for you. I don’t know whether you have any serious health issues or not, but if you do, I would truly and sincerely from my heart encourage you to try your experiment with dried kelp after you first give yourself a more likely chance at relief, according to the reports of so many, through Original Limu. I trust if you do try the dried kelp, that you will be asking me later still on how to order something that has a better chance of helping you, Original Limu.Lar
P.S. The last sentence included a typo (braino?) that I caught on edit, and I decided to show the correction explicitly. It reveals my own faith in this product, I suppose.So you do take Noni? You won’t believe how much better Original Limu is!
I’m sorry, I may have a lot of typos etc. here, but my time is just getting too short to be as exhaustive as I have been. I really like you, Lar, and see so much of myself in you. I suspect that as you see the wonders of Original Limu yourself that we will look back at these discussions with great reminiscence as a country is dramatically changed in its health and vigor and productivity and reduction of guff.
Thorp
poster:Thorp
thread:469333
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20050510/msgs/501748.html