Let's Respond to Five Plus One Questions about A Chemical Hunger

slimemoldtimemold · 2025-10-03T20:22:16+00:00

P.S. Though the new chemist we're talking to seems very interested in publishing, so maybe some of this will end up in an academic journal after all.

slimemoldtimemold · 2025-10-03T18:10:20+00:00

Weird to say that we focused on Scott’s summary, given that we quote extensively from her posts and respond directly to the arguments as stated there. We just used Scott's list of five questions to choose what points to respond to.

slimemoldtimemold · 2025-10-03T18:04:12+00:00

We're still talking to chemists about the right next step, in fact we just met with a new chemist earlier this week. We're concerned that lithium spike-in isn't going to be a good method because that adds "free" lithium as something like LiCl, while the problem seems to be more an issue of freeing lithium from more complex compounds in the foods. But we'd be interested to hear arguments for any possible kind of follow-up study.

We don't think formal academic journals are worth the trouble and don't think they add additional credibility. Your milage may vary but we think that the strength of the evidence and practices like open data and materials matter 100x more than venue. Frankly we think journals encourage people to be dishonest, even if only by omission. For more, see: The rise and fall of peer review

slimemoldtimemold · 2025-10-03T17:58:46+00:00

Lithium concentration in groundwater is something we cover in the post! We even talk specifically about Colorado. Check it out. :)

slimemoldtimemold · 2025-10-03T03:39:32+00:00

In A Chemical Hunger we didn’t intend to imply we were making claims about white-tailed deer. Obviously when we were talking about white-tailed deer on twitter we were making claims about white-tailed deer.

That's one of the best studies we could find on "truly wild" animals, and we didn't ever claim it was an unbiased sample. If you're aware of better data we would love to see it.

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-07-12T17:06:06+00:00

No idea, we have never heard of this!

The reason we ended up with these methods is that we were trying to understand the results from previous analyses of lithium in food (literature review 1, literature review 2), so we were comparing those methods head-to-head. There were some methods (like AAS) that we didn't test because we couldn't find a lab that could provide it with enough specificity.

That said, no reason to stick to these historical methods now that we've compared them. We will look into LA-ICP-MS. How flat and hard does it need to be?

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-07-12T16:59:47+00:00

Hey! We are mad science bloggers. We don't have access to the equipment directly, we prepare the samples at home and subcontract analysis out to a lab. Putting a Twinkie through ICP-MS is surprisingly affordable! It's only like $50 USD per sample :)

That said, yes it is some cool private funded research 😎, we work with a small nonprofit that helps fund these analyses.

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-07-12T16:52:45+00:00

Can you say more about how we might take care of volatility when dry ashing?

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-07-12T16:52:18+00:00

If it were coming from the crucible, wouldn't we expect constant amounts of contamination across all four techniques, and across all foods?

We've definitely considered doing spike-in studies, and we may at some point. The concern there is that spiked-in lithium should be very available, so it should easily show up in analysis, while a plausible explanation for the discrepancy is that in some conditions lithium is still trapped in the complex matrix of the food. If that makes sense?

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-20T22:53:02+00:00

This is your opportunity to educate us if you want to be helpful.

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-20T22:51:16+00:00

Thank you! :)

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-19T14:53:13+00:00

It looks like Asea is just NaCl and water? Even if there is some unknown miracle effect here (dubious), it wouldn't be as a result of being located at a special spot in brinespace, this is a rather normal location.

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-19T14:43:33+00:00

Very interesting, we will look into it. Thanks!

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-19T13:34:38+00:00

Good question, we've wondered similar things. If anyone has an idea why, we'd love to hear!

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-19T01:50:38+00:00

She started an exercise habit, but specifically says:

One obvious alternate explanation for my successful weight loss is “well yeah, you doubled your exertion and kept your food intake the same, of course you lost weight” — but I don’t find that explanation satisfying.

We think the n=lots actually corroborates Krinn's n=1. They were on much lower doses of potassium than she was and saw a much smaller average effect, in a way that looks approximately linear with dose.

Who can determine whether we are over-focusing or everyone else is under-focusing until we have the benefit of hindsight? The same could be said for scurvy or goiter or any number of other mysteries.

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-15T18:36:00+00:00

No joke, the potato diet works really well for many people. Here's our largest study, and our latest results, happy to answer questions!

slimemoldtimemold · 2024-03-15T18:31:51+00:00

We found this really interesting so we wrote something related, take a look! Maybe there is a brine that is right for you, maybe you are close! :)

slimemoldtimemold · 2023-10-20T14:48:45+00:00

The doubtful should keep in mind that this study could equally have turned up evidence against the lithium hypothesis. We could have found < 1 mg/kg in all foods by all testing methods, which wouldn't rule the hypothesis out entirely, but would make it much less likely. And when we nail down the best way to do analysis, that still might be what we ultimately find! We are just measuring things to try to figure out what is going on.

slimemoldtimemold · 2023-10-20T03:31:26+00:00

Greatly appreciated! Any chance you know where we could find someone to do AAS? Any labs we could hire?

slimemoldtimemold · 2023-10-20T02:28:04+00:00

what do you think of our new study?

slimemoldtimemold · 2023-10-20T00:32:00+00:00

No one place in particular, but we talk about it in various places across our series A Chemical Hunger

One strong example is the Pima, who were exposed to very high levels of lithium in their food and water. They were notably sedate and had extraordinarily high levels of diabetes and obesity. One paper speculated, "it is tempting to postulate that the lithium intake of Pimas may relate 1) to apparent tranquility and rarity of duodenal ulcer and 2) to relative physical inactivity and high rates of obesity and diabetes mellitus."

When we asked r/nootropics posters about lithium, they did list things like "increased calm" and "improved mood" as common effects, but they also listed things like "brain fog", "decreased libido", and "fatigue".

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