Photo by Robert Burroughs

Jim Bie

For more than 60 years, scientists have known that the lifespan of rats could be extended by feeding the animals extremely low-calorie diets. I don’t remember when I first heard this, but I have always known it wouldn’t do me any good. Not that the same effect might not be seen in calorie-restricted humans. There are people who believe that near-starvation diets could enable us to live to 120, routinely. Probably the most famous proponent of this hypothesis is Ray Walford, the UCLA longevity researcher who’s been eating an extreme low-calorie, low- fat diet for a number of years. I think Walford may be rewarded by living 30 or 40 or 50 years longer than the average person.

Pill

But I also know I could never follow his example. I enjoy eating too much. On the other hand, a Los Angeles Times report late in 1992 about Gary Evans’s rat study struck me as being science news that might be worth acting upon. A chemistry professor at the state university in Bemidji, Minnesota, Evans had been looking at what happens when rats are given different types of nutritional chromium supplements. For this particular experiment, he took 30 rats and divided them into three groups of ten each. Two of the groups got forms of dietary chromium that had been around for a long time, while the third group received daily doses of chromium picolinate, a newer form of the mineral that Evans had developed while working for the United States Department of Agriculture.

Of the 20 rats in the first two groups, half died by the age of 33 months. One of the 20 reached 41 months—just one month short of the maximum age achieved by rats allowed to eat as much as they want. The ten rats in the third group also were allowed to eat as much as they wanted; the only difference was their daily dose of chromium picolinate. But at 41 months, eight of them were still alive. Five lived longer than 45 months, and one rodent Methuselah made it to the four-year mark—about the equivalent of a 125-year-old human being.

Now this I could imagine: swallowing one pill a day in exchange for an extra 20 years. When I saw an ad for chromium picolinate a few months later, I bought some and began taking it. Last fall I also made my way to the offices of Nutrition 21, the San Diego company that holds a legal monopoly over the manufacture of this intriguing substance.

The offices are unpretentious, occupying part of the third floor of a massive glass-and-stucco office building on Turquoise Street in north Pacific Beach. Fewer than a dozen people work here, at what is arguably Chromium Central for the world. When Herb Boynton founded the business a little more than 20 years ago, he says no chromium was available in any form as a nutritional supplement. Today he estimates that at least four million people are consuming chromium picolinate; last year they spent somewhere between $75 million and $95 million to do so.

That money didn’t all flow directly to the San Diego company. In fact, Nutrition 21 doesn’t produce any of the end products that make it into the mouths of all those chromium picolinate consumers. Instead it sells bulk chromium picolinate to roughly 200 other companies that now produce at least 450 items containing the nutrient — everything from chromium picolinate tablets to multinutrient preparations to meal-replacement powders to chromium picolinate-fortified baked goods. There’s even a chewing gum spiked with it.

Nutrition 21 doesn’t even manufacture the raw chromium picolinate but instead contracts with pharmaceutical firms to do that. The manufacturers ship it to a Nutrition 21 warehouse here. “It’s required [nutritionally] in microgram amounts,” Herb Boynton said to me. (One microgram is a 28-millionth of an ounce.) He was holding a container about the size of a standard mayonnaise jar. “So a jar about this high and about this much in circumference sells for about $25,000. We get about four and a half thousand dollars a kilogram for it.” The San Diego firm merely assays the material (to make sure it has been manufactured properly) then ships it off to customers.

Boynton unscrewed the jar’s lid to show me the coarse grained powder within. When trivalent chromium (the nutritional sort found in the human body and certain foods, as opposed to the metal used on car bumpers or the toxic hexavalent form found in some mining operations) is processed with picolinic acid, it turns an astounding shade. “All of the picolinates turn out to be gorgeous,” Boynton commented. “Copper picolinate is a beautiful green. Iron is purple. Chromium is hot pink. ” In fact, it’s darker than hot pink, a lustrous, intense fuchsia, the sort of color you might see on a very young, very self-confident woman, dressed for a night on the town.

Boynton will be 70 this year, and he has the sort of vigor one might expect from a long-term nutrition fanatic, the head of thick ash-blonde hair, the face that’s hardly lined. The eyes are deep-set blue and watchful; the build powerful. He speaks with passion about nutritional matters, but there’s a formality to his style. He’s a man who favors suspenders and steel-rimmed glasses and crisply tailored shirts — immaculate white ones.

It is easy to imagine him in some middle-management position in a large technical organization like Convair or TRW Systems or Stromberg Datagraphics — all of which he worked for. It’s less easy to understand what made him leave that corporate world in 1970, when he was in his late 40s, to start a health food store in Point Loma. Boynton explains it this way. In 1956, when he was just 32, healthy and athletic, he came down with polio. The calamity (from which he ultimately recovered) baffled him, and he began reading about nutrition to try to understand why it happened. He eventually concluded that there was no nutritional explanation for his illness. “I appear to have gotten it the same way that Franklin Roosevelt did,” he says, that is, by getting overly chilled one day while swimming (skin diving, in Boynton’s case) and thus becoming vulnerable to the polio virus. But Boynton continued to read voraciously, and he became convinced that “almost any disease that is not caused by a microbe or a virus is largely nutritional.”

Look at primitive human societies, he exhorts. “For example, in Uganda and Tanzania and Kenya, in the early part of this century, heart attacks were unknown.” So were high blood pressure, varicose veins, diverticulosis, constipation. “Obesity was enormously rare,” Boynton continues. “These people didn’t necessarily eat an extremely good diet, but it was sufficiently good to prevent virtually all the diseases that afflict us.” Furthermore, whenever they moved to cities and traded their traditional diets for modern ones, they quickly developed the modern constellation of ills, Boynton adds.

Herb Boynton

He says the same pattern can be found closer to home. “Do you know that a heart attack was a rare occurrence in the U.S. in the 19th Century? It was.” That’s not merely because people didn’t live long enough to have them, Boynton asserts. “The reason the [average] life span now is in the high 70s is that hardly anybody dies in early childhood. The difference between age at death for people who attain the age of 40 isn’t much different now than it was 2000 years ago.”

What has changed dramatically, Boynton argues, are the proportions of the macronutrients that constitute our diets. “Macronutrients are carbohydrates, fats, and protein. The micronutrients are vitamins, minerals, and trace elements.” In the paleolithic diet (“the diet that humans ate for two million years, as opposed to the very, very short period of time they’ve eaten the modern diet”) there was very little sugar — only about two to three percent of total calories, Boynton says, citing an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. This sugar “was in ripe fruits and berries and some occasional honey from beehives. But there was no refined sugar,” he elaborates. “There were a lot of complex carbohydrates and a lot of fiber.” Fats constituted only about 20 percent of the paleolithic diet.

By 1860, according to United States Department of Agriculture studies, fats and carbohydrates made up about 35 percent of what people ate. By 1910 the combination had risen to 45 percent. “By 1925,51 percent. By 1975, 64 percent. That’s almost double what it was in 1860. Now since there are virtually no vitamins or minerals or trace elements or fiber in fat and sugar, you would expect that the amount of vitamins and minerals and trace elements in the diet to have diminished. And they have diminished. They have diminished a whole lot” — with drastic health consequences, Boynton believes.

At Point Loma Health Foods, he sold nutrition books and periodicals, vitamins and minerals, yogurt, organic produce — “the whole bit,” he says. He also continued his own study of nutrition science. At the same time, however, he quickly learned that “you couldn’t make any money in a health food store.” As Boynton’s enterprise foundered, he began to have a far more radical vision of a company that would use the fruits of nutritional research to develop products that would dramatically improve health levels by the year 2000.

Boynton figured he could raise the money to launch such an enterprise by offering stock to the public. But when he consulted with Jim Bie, a stockbroker friend who was vice president of San Diego Securities, Bie suggested a different approach: find some private investors, run the company for a few years, develop a moneymaking track record, and then go public. “Initially I thought it was inappropriate and presumptuous to hustle [money from] any of my friends,” Boynton recalls. But “eventually I hustled a couple of my affluent friends, who readily anted up the money. And it created a bandwagon effect, where we could probably have raised twice as much money as we actually did!” Bie was so impressed with Boynton’s determination that he even offered to set up a partnership and help the other man start the business. He says they started with $50,000 contributed by a total of 10 investors (not including the two principals).

Boynton began working full-time at the business in the fall of 1973, the only employee. One of the first things he did was to seek help from some graduate and premed students at UCSD. “I paid them $4.00 an hour or something to research the literature. We started out with vitamin A and went right through zinc. It was extremely illuminating.”

Bie says when Boynton saw some of the things that had been published, he was appalled by the lack of public awareness of the findings. “Herb wasn’t accustomed to the way the scientific community worked. You know, one of these researchers goes out, he does a study, he finds out some tremendously important thing and writes a paper about it. He gets it published in a technical journal, and he’s got one more notch on his gun. And then the thing sits on the shelf and nobody pays any attention to it.”

Boynton concurs. “I was shocked, stunned, horrified! In 1973 it was very well known, for example, that vitamin A and beta carotene were immensely cancer-protective.” Yet the general public barely knew anything about these nutrients. “It’s only in fairly recent years that anybody has made any to-do about beta carotene. We introduced beta carotene in 1977 or ’78, and it bombed! It was called Amplified A. As far as I know, we were the first company ever to introduce beta carotene, by several years.”

Amplified A wasn’t the first product fielded by Nutrition 21. Boynton’s initial creation was inspired by his love of skin diving (undimmed after his recovery from polio). “I thought, skin diving is really taking off. And if there’s any sport that requires superb nutrition, that’s it. So I’ll put into the marketplace a really good vitamin-mineral supplement for skin divers.” Boynton had a pharmaceutical manufacturer produce the Dive Power tablets for him, and he convinced “hundreds and hundreds” of dive shops to carry the product. “It was an abysmal failure,” Boynton recounts. “And the reason is that, at least then, most skin divers were in their late teens and early 20s, hard as a rock. The last thing they were interested in was nutrition.”

But Boynton had backup ideas. Some of them he developed by talking to Klaus Schwarz, a nutrition scientist who had worked at the National Institutes of Health and then moved to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Long Beach. Schwarz’s groundbreaking research was just the sort of thing that fired the San Diego businessman’s imagination. Schwarz had concentrated on studying the so-called “trace elements” — the category of minerals found in the human body in minuscule quantities. Thirty-nine of them have been identified, according to UCSD biologist and nutrition authority Paul Saltman, and all together they amount to about a teaspoonful. Iron is the most abundant of the lot, and its importance has long been recognized. (Writes Saltman, “One of the oldest bits of pharmacological lore tells how Melampus, ship’s surgeon to Jason and the Argonauts, laced wine with filings from their iron swords to help them sustain blood loss and boost their sexual potency.”)

But well into the 20th Century, little was known about most of the other trace elements — molybdenum and cobalt and zinc and tin and the rest. Did we really need to have them in our bodies? What would happen if we didn’t consume any? How could you even answer that question when the very dust in the air, when inhaled, might contain enough of some of the minerals to sustain life?

Chromium picolinate molecule

Schwarz had tackled the problem by building “trace-element isolators” — completely sterile enclosures designed to eliminate all stray contaminants. Animals in the enclosures (which looked a bit like giant plastic bottles) breathed air from which all the dust had been filtered out; they ate chemically pure amino acids from which all metal contaminants had been removed. And within weeks they developed into very strange creatures indeed — stunted in size, their muscles shriveled, their fur oddly spiky. Eventually Schwarz and his colleagues traced the abnormalities to the absence of fluorine, silicon, tin, and vanadium. Adding just one-tenth of a part per million of vanadium to the rats’ diet was enough to restore normal growth, for example. And almost as small amounts of the other minerals proved to have similar consequences.

Well before he built the trace-element isolators that caught Boynton’s eye on the pages of Scientific American, Schwarz had already proven that without enough of two other trace elements — selenium and chromium — animals get sick. As early as 1957, Schwarz had shown that selenium helped prevent liver disease in rats and muscular dystrophy in cattle. Two years later, he and a colleague found that chromium deficiencies (again in animals) impaired growth, reduced life span, caused corneal lesions, and sabotaged sugar metabolism. “Chromium is an essential cofactor for the hormone insulin,” Boynton says today. “And when there isn’t any chromium, insulin doesn’t work, blood sugar goes up to sky-high levels, and (the chromium-deficient individuals) have all of the classical symptoms of Type 2 diabetes.” However, when Schwarz had put chromium back in the animals’ diet, “they recovered,” Boynton snaps his fingers, “almost instantly!”

It was selenium and chromium that Boynton and Schwarz discussed most avidly when the two men met. Both suspected that chromium deficiencies were causing widespread health problems among adult Americans — most notably adult-onset diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Boynton says there was certainly reason to believe that many people weren’t getting enough of either nutrient. “There are three trace elements, and only three, that are required by mammals but not by plants. And since they are not required by plants, there is no incentive to put them in fertilizer.” If soil happens to contain those three minerals, plants grown in that soil will take them up, and people who eat those plants will receive some. “Those three,” lectures Boynton, “are iodine, selenium, and chromium.” He says more than 100 years ago, people figured out that insufficient iodine could lead to health problems, and in the early part of this century they began adding it to table salt. “Before that, we had a ‘goiter belt’ in the Midwest,” Boynton states. He says selenium and chromium likewise are missing from the soil in many parts of this country, and even where they are present and enter the food, “they’re often processed out.”

Boynton returned to San Diego convinced that his fledgling company should develop and sell some kind of selenium and chromium supplements. He knew that conventional brewer’s yeast was considered a good source of both minerals; it contained one to four parts per million of chromium, for example. But Boynton envisioned increasing that concentration a thousandfold. “That way you could get it into a tablet or a capsule.” He negotiated a deal with a Milwaukee company called Universal Foods, commissioning its researchers to concoct a culture medium rich in selenium and chromium (so that the yeast grown in it would be brimming with the elusive nutrients). “Within a relatively short time they did develop a selenium yeast,” Boynton says. “We checked it out very thoroughly to get its toxicity and its biological characteristics.”

Convinced that the supplement would be safe if taken in the proper dosage (too much selenium is toxic), Boynton traveled back to New York and New Jersey, where most of the vitamin and supplement manufacturers were then located. “I might as well have tried to sell einsteinium or fermium! But I finally found one very astute gentleman who saw the potential for it.” Boynton says this man packaged the yeast in tablet form and the product went on the market around late 1974.

In order to develop a market for it, Boynton wrote articles for health magazines describing the benefits of selenium, a nutrient that he still believes to be “the most potent anti-carcinogenic agent ever discovered by man.... It’s essential for the manufacture of four different important enzymes, and probably the most important of these is glutathione peroxidase, which is an antioxidant, just like vitamin E. And there have been dozens and scores of epidemiological studies and other studies that show that animals that get selenium have a far lower instance of most types of cancer. In the case of skin cancer, it's about one-fourth. And it also plays an important role in cardiovascular disease.”

Despite Boynton’s impassioned arguments, sales were slow the first year. Then in 1976, the tabloid National Enquirer published an article summarizing some of the research on selenium. Overnight, “our sales quintupled,” Boynton says; by 1977 Boynton began distributing profits to his investors. In 1978 the company acquired another source of revenue when the development team at Universal Foods finally succeeded at producing a form of yeast that contained about 100 parts per million of chromium — far less than Boynton had originally hoped for, but still a significant improvement over traditional brewer’s yeasts. Nutrition 21 continues to sell some of this yeast today, and Boynton says it’s a good product. But he says he always felt there ought to be a still better way of getting chromium into people’s bodies.

Human cells, it seems, are extraordinarily impermeable to trivalent chromium. When researchers have measured what percentage of dietary chromium actually makes its way into our bloodstreams, they’ve come up with estimates of little more than half of one percent; the rest is excreted. One explanation for why the chromium is so hard for human cells to absorb looks to the chemical structure of the chromium ions, which are “missing” three electrons and thus have a slight electrical charge. “A positive charge is an impediment to the transport of compounds across biological membranes,” says Mark McCarty, Nutrition 21’s research director. In some cases (such as zinc) specific “transport proteins” somehow help the charged compound penetrate the cell walls. But chromium apparently comes unaccompanied by such a biological key — and thus only rarely gets in the door.

By the early ’70s, one of the United States Department of Agriculture’s staff biochemists had begun looking at how trace metals get out of the diet and into the blood. This was Gary Evans, then working in the USDA’s human nutrition lab in Grand Forks, North Dakota. After a few years, Evans found himself concentrating on a substance called picolinic acid that’s produced naturally by the kidneys and liver. This substance has the ability to “chelate” with the metal ions, that is, to wrap around them and neutralize the electrical charge. Evans realized that metal picolinates might more easily slip through the cell wall and thus might have great nutritional significance. He had the USDA patent the process for creating metal picolinates, among them zinc, iron, copper, manganese, and chromium, for use as nutritional supplements. And then everyone ignored the patent.

Boynton still sounds dumbfounded when he thinks back on this. “All these big companies like Meade-Johnson and Squibb and Lederle were all aware of it, but not a single one evinced any interest in it at all!” Boynton, in contrast, knew nothing about Evans’s achievement until about 1986, when a consultant alerted him to it. Boynton tracked down Evans in Minnesota, where he was teaching chemistry and nutrition classes and doing a bit of research on zinc picolinate. “I certainly wasn’t interested in zinc,” Boynton says today. “I mean, it’s a nifty nutrient. But it doesn’t have anywhere near the potential that chromium does.”

Since Boynton had first talked to Klaus Schwarz in the early 1970s, more evidence about chromium in humans had emerged. One piece involved a young Canadian woman whose small intestine had been destroyed by a gangrenous infection. To save her life, doctors had placed her on “total parenteral nutrition” — a system in which sterilized nutrients were pumped directly into her bloodstream every night. She fared well on this regime for seven years but around 1977 suddenly developed a variety of symptoms, including high glucose levels in her bloodstream, a sign of diabetes. But insulin injections, the normal treatment for diabetes, weren’t helping her. At this point, aware that experimental animals raised on low-chromium diets had also developed diabetic-like symptoms, her doctor added chromium to the woman’s bag of daily nutrients. Within two weeks, all the abnormal symptoms disappeared. (Two similar cases involving patients on total parenteral nutrition have since been reported.)

Gary Evans

Still, this woman’s circumstances were bizarre. Couldn’t the average person, eating normal food, feel confident that his or her food contained enough of the mineral? In 1985 the United States Department of Agriculture’s chief expert on chromium set out to see. “We took 22 females and 10 males and collected duplicate samples of their diets for seven days,” Richard Anderson said in a recent phone interview from his office at the Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsviile, Maryland. The subjects all worked at the nutrition center, “so they were certainly not at the low end and may have been at the higher end (of the population],” Anderson said.

When Anderson analyzed the food that had been eaten, he found that on some days, some of the individuals took in more than 50 micrograms of chromium, but every person got less than that amount on average, over the course of the week. (The U.S. government currently recommends an average daily intake of 130 micrograms.) “The mean intake for women (in the study] was 28 micrograms, and it was 33 micrograms for men,” says Anderson.

In 1992 Anderson reported on another study that should have made those original subjects feel better about their chromium-poor diets. He had professional nutritionists design 22 well-balanced daily diets. When he analyzed what they came up with, he found a nutritional content of only 8.4 to 23.7 micrograms of chromium per 1000 calories — meaning that one would have to eat almost 5500 calories pfer day of the most chromium-rich diets to get even the government’s recommended dose. And other research by Anderson suggests that many people might do well to get more than a minimum amount, since “any kind of stress on the body” (including a high-sugar diet, strenuous exercise, pregnancy, lactation, and physical injury) “causes you to lose more chromium,” Anderson said.

Anderson’s analysis of the dietary chromium levels tidily confirmed Boynton’s suspicions that most Americans were getting very little indeed. “There is no question that people survive on relatively small amounts of chromium,” the San Diego businessman exclaims. “But let me point out that just ten milligrams of vitamin C will prevent scurvy. Ten milligrams! The (government’s] recommended daily allowance for vitamin C is 60 milligrams. The amount that most nutritionists recommend is 250 to 500 milligrams. The amount that Linus Pauling takes is 18,000 milligrams. And he may be right! The point is that relatively small amounts of a nutrient can prevent the emergence of overt deficiency symptoms.” Yet the diabetes and heart disease that plague so many Americans beginning in middle age might well be the symptoms of a more subtle chromium deficiency, Boynton believed.

Talking to Evans convinced him that chromium picolinate ought to be the most potent form of the nutrient available. “Here was this patent that was worth $100 million in my view.... And we rescued it from oblivion!” Boynton crows. In the fall of 1986, Bie flew off to Washington to negotiate with the government for the right to use its patent, and on January 1, 1987, the San Diego firm was granted an exclusive license to research and market chromium picolinate in exchange for paying the government royalties.

With the license in hand, Boynton immediately had Evans begin testing chromium picolinate on rats to make sure it wasn’t toxic. “We had a saturated solution and we force-fed it to the animals,” says Evans, who still works for the university in Bemidji. “Basically, we just could not get enough chromium picolinate in solution to cause the animals to die. What we gave them was equivalent to a human eating a boxcar load.”

But even armed with evidence that chromium picolinate was safe, Boynton says it was “immensely difficult” to find any scientist willing to investigate whether the mineral also might counteract some disease conditions. Boynton says he “tried dozens, scores, maybe even a hundred times to get somebody to do a study. You’d lay the money in their lap, and they wouldn’t do it!”

“They probably just assumed that it was worthless,” Mark McCarty, Nutrition 21 ’s research director, ventures today. “There wasn’t any data in the literature suggesting that chromium was going to do wonderful things. Chromic chloride [an inorganic form of trivalent chromium] hadn’t done much. It was a goofy idea — but sometimes goofy ideas have results.”

McCarty is a fellow who seems to take some pleasure in challenging the orthodox view of things. One of Boynton’s original crew of student researchers, he had gotten a biology degree at UCSD, “which is equivalent to a degree in biochemistry or molecular biology,” he says. “And it was just obvious to me that nutrition was the chief determinant of your internal environment. You can’t change your genes, so therefore the only other way you can change your disease risk was to change your environment, and nutrition defines about 70 percent of that. The chemicals in your food constitute the bulk of the chemicals to which your body is exposed, and the vitamins and minerals are highly active because of their catalytic activity. There are just tons and tons of researchers showing...that modulating nutrient intakes up or down has a raft of physiological effects. So it’s simple common sense that if you can define optimal intakes of macronutrients and/or micronutrients, you could have a significant impact on health.”

Within the UCSD medical school, which McCarty entered after getting his undergraduate degree, such views were “extremely avant-garde and inappropriate” in the mid-’70s, he says. After three years of study, he decided to abandon medicine in favor of a career doing nutritional research. At the time, Nutrition 21’s research director had just resigned to take a higher-paying job with Abbott Laboratories, and Boynton offered the position to McCarty, who began working for the company in 1978.

Years later, when Nutrition 21 acquired the right to market chromium picolinate, McCarty shared Boynton’s hope that it might prove to be the most effective form of nutritional chromium ever developed, and eventually a research team led by two medical doctors at Mercy Hospital did agree to put the mineral to a test. The two physicians, Raymond Press and Jack Geller, assembled a group of 28 men and women who had moderate to high cholesterol levels. For 42 days, half were given a placebo while the other half received 200 micrograms of chromium picolinate (neither the doctors nor the subjects knew who got what). Both groups took a break for two weeks, then they switched roles; those who had gotten the chromium picolinate began getting the placebo, and vice versa.

Their cholesterol levels were measured at various points, and by the end of the study, a striking difference in the two groups’ blood values had emerged. When the members of the first group got the supplement, their total cholesterol levels declined by 7 percent, and their low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol — the bad kind — decreased by 10.5 percent. In comparison, the placebo recipients’ cholesterol levels actually increased slightly. Even after the first group went off the chromium picolinate and onto the placebo, cholesterol levels in the first group stayed down — while the second group, now receiving the chromium, experienced a similar drop in their cholesterol readings.

Press and Geller also concurrently did a double-blind crossover study of 11 diabetics in which they found that chromium picolinate appeared to lower the subjects’ blood sugar levels significantly.

McCarty says he expected to see both these results, just as he expected that chromium picolinate might have a musclebuilding effect. “It’s known that insulin tends to promote protein synthesis and reduce the rate of protein breakdown in the skeletal muscle,” he explains.

McCarty, moreover, had had a strange experience with Nutrition 21’s high-chromium yeast; a month or so after he started taking it, he says he noticed more muscle on his chest. “The reason it was demonstrable on me is, when I was a student I was so thin that when I went to see the school doctor one time, he took a look at my chest wall and said, ‘You’re missing a muscle!’ ” McCarty confides. “I was, like, six feet tall and 135 pounds. And this doctor didn’t think my chest was underdeveloped. He thought I was a genetic freak and that the muscle was never formed! So with me, the most minimal effect was detectable.”

Chromium picolinate prescription

When McCarty mentioned his observation to Boynton, however, the other man disclosed that he too had noticed some muscle increase. “People laugh at anecdotal evidence, but that’s where most of the good ideas come from,” McCarty says. Their experiences later prompted them to suggest to Gary Evans that he devise an experiment to see if chromium picolinate had any anabolic properties. So Evans came up with two controlled studies. In the first, he took ten male college students in a weight-training program, giving half chromium picolinate while the other half got a placebo. After 40 days, he found that the chromium-supplemented group had gained an average of 2.2 kilograms — 1.6 kilograms of which was lean body mass. In the placebo group, the men gained only 1.25 kilograms on average — and only four-hundredths of a kilogram of that was muscle. In other words, the weight gain in the placebo group was almost entirely body fat.

Encouraged by these findings, Evans then devised a larger trial — a double-blind study of 31 football players who were also lifting weights. After six weeks, the chromium recipients had gained an average of 2.6 kilograms of lean mass, compared to a 1.8-kilogram increase in the control group. But this time there was an additional surprise. The chromium group also lost 3.4 kilograms of body fat — compared to a one-kilogram fat loss in the other group. “We thought there would be muscle building,” Boynton says today. “But the fat reduction took us by surprise. There didn’t appear to be any theoretical biochemical basis for it — and we still haven’t explained it.”

Explicable or not, Evans’s study quickly attracted widespread interest. Two independent research groups — one in Louisiana and one in Texas — devised follow-up experiments and came up with somewhat mixed results. At Louisiana State University, researchers found that both female and male weightlifters getting chromium picolinate increased their muscle bulk measurements by significantly more than a group receiving a placebo — but the supplemental chromium didn’t seem to have a significant impact on body fat.

In Texas, on the other hand, where the subjects were not college athletes but obese people, the fat-reduction properties were far more dramatic. When Dr. Gilbert Kaats, the director of a San Antonio weight-loss clinic, gave chromium picolinate to more than 100 volunteers who didn’t change their diet or exercise routines, they lost an average of 4.2 pounds of fat and gained an average of 1.4 pounds of muscle, whereas they neither lost weight nor gained muscle when they weren’t taking the supplement.

Kaats later tried the nutrient again, this time with a group of 40 overweight men and women who were also on low-fat diets. Over the course of the eight weeks of supplementation, these subjects lost almost a pound and a half per week, a total of 15 pounds per person on average (and almost 12 pounds of that, on average, was fat). This same group had lost neither weight nor body fat during a previous eight-week period in which they tried the low-fat diet without the supplement.

“Remember, our chief motivation for developing chromium all along was its likely connection with cardiovascular disease,” says McCarty. “All this stuff about physique was just serendipitous. It was sort of a joke that was thrown in along the way!”

If so, it was a joke that delighted the crew at Nutrition 21 as articles about the “fat-busting” properties of chromium picolinate made the pages of both women’s magazines and popular fitness periodicals. In scientific journals, at least four articles about the impact of chromium picolinate on pigs’ body fat also appeared between 1991 and 1993.

“If you take two identical groups of pigs, with food the same and exercise the same, genetics the same, and feed one group chromium picolinate, they will have 21 percent less fat and a pork chop that’s 18 percent bigger, with seven percent more meat overall,” Boynton says today. He says his company in fact obtained a “follow-on” patent for the use of chromium picolinate in animal feed. “Of course the pork producers are extremely interested in this,” Boynton says. To date, however, the Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved the use of the supplement for American animals.

Jim Bie explains, “They have not yet determined to their satisfaction that chromium is essential to the nutrition of pigs.” Ironically, the FDA doesn’t object to Nutrition 21 selling chromium picolinate to foreign animal-feed producers, leading Bie to speculate that there may come a time when pig producers in Mexico, Asia, and Europe export back to the U.S. leaner pigs that have been raised on the American-made supplement.

The frustration of not getting chromium picolinate approved for American animal feed was tempered, however, by the surprising result of Evans’s rat longevity study. Evans says he got the idea for that study when he heard in 1988 that a Texas laboratory studying calorie-restricted rats found that the animals’ blood sugar levels, averaged over a 24-hour period, were 11 percent lower than rats fed freely. This was being cited as a possible reason why the calorie-restricted rats live longer; there’s a theory of aging that asserts that aging occurs because glucose reacts spontaneously with tissue proteins, damaging them in a process known as glycation. Thus, the more glucose in the blood, the faster an animal should age, this theory suggests.

From the Mercy Hospital study, Evans knew that humans fed chromium picolinate tended to have lower levels of blood glucose. Around late 1988, he decided to see whether the supplement would have any effect upon rat life spans. For this experiment, Evans used a black-eyed, black-and-white-coated experimental animal known as the Long-Evans rat. Just after they were weaned from their mothers, 30 males of this breed began getting daily supplements of one of three types of chromium. When they were 200 days old, a small amount of blood was drawn from the tail of each. Sure enough, rats in the group getting chromium picolinate had less sugar in their blood (an average of 6.6 millimoles, compared to 7.7 in the rats given chromium nicotinate and 7.8 in the rats given chromium chloride). At 1000 days, the blood sugar of the chromium picolinate rats remained steady (6.5 mm), while that of the other two groups had climbed to 8.3 and 8.2 respectively.

Evans says all the animals looked pretty much the same. “But this is what goes on in humans. They look perfectly healthy; but if you say, ‘Can I test your blood?’ you find what I call insulin resistance.” That is, their bodies must produce larger than normal amounts of insulin to get the cells to take up the blood sugar.

The rats in Evans’s study that weren’t receiving chromium picolinate also started dying much earlier. In fact, half were gone before the first of the chromium picolinate recipients died. And Evans says autopsies on the animals revealed another interesting difference between them. The chromium picolinate recipients had very little internal fat, even around their stomachs, while “the fat just oozed out” of the comparison animals, according to the biochemist.

Before the last of the chromium picolinate recipients died, Evans presented an abstract of his experiment at a San Francisco meeting of the American Aging Association. More than a year later, he still hasn’t published a full report of the study in a scientific journal. “The bottom line is, he’s not a member of the club [of established gerontological researchers),” alleges Mark McCarty. McCarty, however, also discloses that Evans’s full paper has been criticized by at least one journal for not including a large enough number of rats.

Both Evans and McCarty do acknowledge that 30 rats — the number Evans used — is a small sample. Yet McCarty argues that it’s amazing nonetheless, because “the maximum life span of ad lib-fed rats is supposed to be 42 months. That would be the equivalent of a human living to about 105 years. So if you have half your rats living to 45 months, you know that something really wild and wacky has happened! It would be as if you wandered into an old-age community and you saw that about half the people sitting around the table were 115,120 years old. It doesn’t happen by chance. It’s not a random occurrence.”

Why should chromium picolinate increase a rat’s life span? Why, for that matter, should calorie restriction do so? To pose such questions is to venture into the swamp of longevity theories, a murky ground where McCarty seems as relaxed and intrepid as a frontiersman. “No one really understands how caloric restriction works,” he prefaces his theories. McCarty argues that the mere fact that there’s less sugar in the blood of the calorically restricted animals can’t be the whole explanation for their extra years. “Because, on average, calorie restriction only reduces blood glucose levels by about 10 percent,” he notes. “It’s not a huge effect.” If that small a reduction in blood sugar levels had that big an impact on life span, “then diabetics ought to croak in about five months” — and yet they don’t. McCarty poses the additional question: “Why should a vole live to be two years and a human to be 70? And yet their blood glucose levels don’t differ that strikingly.”

Boynton

Instead, McCarty believes “that the aging process is largely centrally directed by changes in the brain” — particularly by the hypothalamus region, “the crucial crossroads in regulating the production of hormones throughout the body.... Among other things, it’s known that the hypothalamus contains insulin-sensitive glucoreceptors which tend to become less sensitive with increasing age.” McCarty thus argues that “to the degree you can reverse or slow that particular change in hypothalamic metabolism, it may be slowing the whole aging process.”

Proving him right — or wrong — is clearly going to take some time, and a more concrete and immediate need is for other researchers to try to replicate Evans’s rat study. As soon as Evans announced the results of it, McCarty got a call from a physician in the pathology department at the UCLA School of Medicine who began feeding chromium picolinate to a group of 18-month-old mice. This researcher, Dr. Steven Harris, has changed a few of Evans’s parameters; he’s using mice instead of rats, for one thing, and he’s slightly restricting the animals’ food intake (instead of letting them gorge themselves). He’s also feeding them massive amounts of chromium picolinate. After a year of feeding the supplements to the animals, he says, one conclusion he can draw already is that “it’s not poisonous.” Harris says that so far the chromium group also appears to be doing slightly better than two control groups— but it will be at least a year before he can say anything definite about the supplement’s effect on the rodents’ life span.

It will take even longer for results to issue from the prestigious Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor, Maine. The research team there in September began a lifelong study, this one of 40 hybrid mice who started getting chromium picolinate when they were about four weeks old. Given their normal life span, significant life extension effects wouldn’t begin to be seen until 1996.

No one is experimenting to see if humans fed chromium picolinate live longer; because of the cost and difficulty of controlling such a study, one may never be done. But the group at Nutrition 21 sounds thrilled with the more modest human trials of the supplement now underway. The Kaiser Foundation in Fontana, California, for example, is studying the effect of chromium picolinate on a large number of people with high cholesterol (trying to duplicate the results seen by the doctors at Mercy Hospital). An HMO in Albuquerque is doing another large study of both diabetics and hypertensives. Even more revealing should be the work just beginning at the Institute for Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at Harvard Medical School’s New England Deaconess Hospital. A double-blind crossover study enrolling people who are both moderately overweight and hypertensive, with documented insulin resistance, this study will assess the effect of two different doses of chromium picolinate on insulin resistance, blood pressure, body composition, and a wide range of other cardiovascular risk factors.

“By the end of 1994, we should have data from three of these big studies,” McCarty says happily. And there is another cause for good spirits at the Pacific Beach offices. While neither Boynton nor Bie will say how much money Nutrition 21 is making, they drop clues that things are going very well indeed. Already, the firm has paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in royalties to the U.S. government, according to Boynton, who also discloses that each of the original investors who contributed $10,000 back in 1973 has now earned back in excess of $270,000.

And Boynton has ambitious plans for the company’s future. For all his excitement over selenium and chromium, he says Nutrition 21 still hasn’t made a major contribution to nutrition. To do that, Boynton would like to see the company come up with nutritionally engineered products that could be consumed by a broad enough audience to begin to change the incidence of disease in this country. “We plan to introduce products that are analogous to basic products like potatoes and bread and pasta and pizza and rice — but are a whole lot more nutritious than those things. It’s a tall order,” Boynton declared.

“Take an example: pasta. Pasta isn’t terrible. It doesn’t have very many vitamins in it, but it is [composed of] complex carbohydrates and it doesn’t do anything bad to you, per se. It is perfectly feasible to make a pasta that tastes pretty much like conventional pasta but which has fiber in it, which has some of the vitamins and minerals that are in short supply added to it. Or you could make a pizza that has the right kind of fat; that has less sodium but still tastes good. You can have food that is engineered to taste pretty good but does not have the enormously pernicious aspects of the typical American diet — which is killing people.” Boynton himself won’t be overseeing this development on a daily basis. As of January 1, he has turned over his position as chairman of the board to Jim Bie. But as the majority owner, Boynton says he still will be watching the company closely, perhaps checking in two or three times per month. Bie in turn says he and his staff are now doing “paper planning” for the nutritionally engineered products, with the idea of licensing actual products to other manufacturers within two to four years.

In the meantime, I’m still taking chromium picolinate. I look upon it as a gamble, one that costs me about seven cents a day (for 400 micrograms). If the chromium has made me more muscular or less fat, I have to confess I can’t tell the difference. But I’m hoping that it’s enabling the insulin produced by my pancreas to work more efficiently; I’m hoping that's somehow lowering my “bad” cholesterol levels. Maybe, as McCarty suggests, it’s even doing something to my hypothalamus and somehow slowing down the fundamental rate at which my body is aging.

Of course, I have no proof for any of these things. I suppose the odds are against chromium picolinate turning out to be a life-extender. “The number of studies that have an increase without [restricting calorie intake), well, you can count them on one hand,” pointed out Harris, the UCLA researcher who’s now feeding chromium picolinate to mice. “The literature’s full of things that have one great study and never are repeated.” A shade dolefully, John Archer, Harris’s counterpart at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, echoes his words. “I’ve seen an awful lot of negative results in the 15 years that I’ve been working on [longevity].”

“We all want so much to make positive results in aging [research),” says Archer’s boss, David Harrison. “People studying aging want to succeed, perhaps more than people in other areas of bioscience. So even at the level of the scientist there’s a danger of overinterpreting the stuff.” Harrison, a cheerful man with an infectious sense of curiosity, says that based on what he knows about chromium picolinate, it just might turn out to have some interesting effects. That’s why he approved doing the mouse longevity study. But at this point, “You just don’t know.”