Wine & Health - The Boron Prescription
By Dr. Harvey FinkelBoron? Is it a renegade planet in a sci-fi film? A person of low intelligence who deprives you of solitude without providing company? A command barked out to an oil-drilling team?
Not.
It is element number 5 in the periodic table, mostly mined in California, and of considerable industrial importance. It's a component of the cleaning agent 20 Mule Team Borax (and its stablemate, Boraxo), the sponsor during the radio days of "Death Valley Days," well before Ronald Reagan hosted the television version. My mother treated my childhood eye irritations with a weak solution of boric acid.
In contrast to this demonstration of gentleness, the toxicity of boric acid may be illustrated by the powdered form's storied lethality to cockroaches when sprinkled about - a cucarachacide.
Well, what's wine to boron or boron to wine, or to health?
It is boron's still incompletely defined role in human health that recently drew my attention.
A glass of wine contains about 0.5 mg of boron. A maximum dose of about 2 to 3 mg daily is advised by some to avoid the risk of toxicity. (Charlene Rainey, of Food Research, Inc., of Costa Mesa, California, says that some healthful diets contain 9 to 13 mg of boron per day, and that the safe upper limit is 20 mg daily.) A serving of grapes and other non-citrus fruit and a handful of peanuts each also contain about 0.5 mg.
It seems to me that wine offers the most attractive form. Common sense rules.
Boron is one of those trace minerals that gets little of the respect and attention paid to the better-known major nutrients. (We should wonder what other trace elements or compounds may turn out to be major health factors.) I'd wager that few people, physicians included, even consider boron a factor in health, nor deficiency a concern, but a nutritional study of six nations conducted by Rainey revealed that American adults, consuming on average just over one milligram daily, stood last on the list: 7 to 10 percent less than the British and Egyptians; 32 to 41 percent less than Germans, Kenyans and Mexicans.
It is likely that Americans' boron intake is so low because we eat so few fruits and nuts and drink so little wine. Even so, what harm might be done?
Zuo-Fen Zhang and associates at the UCLA School of Public Health may have found out. Using the huge data bank of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which tracks thousands of men and women, Zhang's group sought correlations between the amount of dietary boron and its beneficial or adverse health effects. They uncovered only one, but it appears dramatic. Boron protected against prostate cancer, a cancer that lies near the top of the list of deadly afflictions of older men.
According to the American Cancer Society, at 198,100 cases per year, prostate cancer is the most common of newly diagnosed cancers in the U.S. In causing 31,500 deaths annually, prostate cancer is exceeded in this country only by lung, colorectal, and breast cancers.
Among the 7,727 older men in the survey, the risk of prostate cancer fell as boron intake climbed. As reported at the Experimental Biology 2001 conference held in Orlando, Florida, in early April, the trend was strong: "Prostate cancer risk for men eating the most boron, at least 1.8 mg/day was less than a third that of men eating under 0.9 mg/day" (emphasis mine). Ample boron consumption does not protect against other cancers, nor other chronic diseases, in this study.
Zhang called the association "very specific to prostate cancer." This is the kind of exciting discovery that will stimulate plenty of further research.
It's odd how often something rare or obscure pops up in multiples. At the same conference, Curtis Hunt and Joseph Idso of Grand Forks, North Dakota, working at the Human Nutrition Research Center of the Agriculture Department, reported immune benefits in rats fed boron, estimated to be about equivalent to 2 mg daily in a human diet.
We all know that immune inflammatory reactions are essential to controlling infection. Sometimes, and mysteriously, these reactions become perverted and uncontrolled, attacking one's own tissues, a mortal sin. Such autoimmunity is operative in a number of nasty diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. The North Dakota aggies' research showed boron-deficient rats to be more susceptible to autoimmune disorders. Boron is protective, apparently by preventing inappropriate activation of cells (T-suppressor and T-helper) important in autoimmune chain reactions.
The group is studying the effect of supplemental boron on the pain of rheumatoid arthritis in humans.
I must warn against taking pure boron supplements. They may lead to toxicity, which is much less likely from natural sources. But boron poisoning is rare - its compounds are found in soaps, detergents, fertilizers, wood preservatives, fungicides, high-energy fuels and in the form of boric acid. Ingestions, absorption from local skin application and inhalation must provide intense exposure to cause dangerous toxicity in most circumstances. Accidental or suicidal ingestion may be difficult to prevent. Among the effects of excessive boron are gastrointestinal disturbances, anemia, convulsions and other brain dysfunction, skin and hair loss, blindness, metabolic imbalance (acidosis), lung impairment and cardiac arrest.
Both the deficiency and excess of boron are injurious to the health and productivity of vines. Either may be caused by injudicious viticultural practices. Deficiency may occur in sandy or highly acidic soils, especially when irrigated freely with water deficient in boron. Water varies in boron content, some places high, some low, some just right.
As the problem progresses, vine leaves are blotched with yellow, shoots swell and fruit set is impaired, leading to berry shatter and fruit drop.
Because the range between deficiency and excess is narrow, as appears to be the case in humans, boron toxicity may be brought about by uneven application of borax to prevent or counteract boron deficiency. Toxicity is first manifested by dark speckling of vine leaves. As severity increases, these become confluent, and leaves wrinkle, pucker and wither.
Bear in mind, then, the payoff in antioxidants and boron of consuming ample fruits, nuts and a moderate quantity of wine. ¶
Contributing Editor Dr. Harvey E. Finkel is a clinical professor of medicine at Boston University Medical Center and chairman of the Committee on Health of the Society of Wine Educators.
