Gallant Gallium: Secret Sidekick to Iron?
by Jon Sasmor RCPC (Mineral Guide, MinBalance LLC)
Updated
February 27, 2022
Sidekick Minerals assist the main nutritional minerals by stabilizing and calibrating them.
Gallium in its +3 state can substitute for ferric iron (+3), in some but not all of iron's roles.
In particular, Ga+3:
- can't displace iron from transferrin, so iron transport by transferrin continues uninterrupted.
- does displace iron from several enzyme binding sites that are upregulated in cancer cells.
- does displace iron in some bacterial siderophores designed to steal iron; leaves bacteria with a useless substitute instead of iron.
- lacks redox activity, so shuts down iron's redox roles when gallium substitutes.
Our bodies expect gallium in natural proportions with iron. Signalling for iron may depend on the usual presence of a proportion of its usual sidekick, gallium.
What happens when we eat iron supplements, iron-fortified grains, iron multivitamins, and so on — without the usual proportion of gallium?
We are enriching the body with iron, which is also fuel for bacteria and cancer cells. But, we are adding iron without its usual sidekick, gallium, which protects from bacteria and cancer cells that thrive on iron.
Gallium and the other Sidekick Minerals provide a great reason to get your minerals mainly from organic ancestral wholefoods, grown on rich soils, in Nature's balance; not from a bottle or from chemicals added to processed foods.
There are more minerals with great importance than those within our present state of knowledge. Our bodies (and livestock and plants) expect the minerals in Nature's proportions — even the minerals we don't know much about yet.
Reference
Kircheva, N., & Dudev, T. (2021). Competition between abiogenic and biogenic metal cations in biological systems: Mechanisms of gallium‘s anticancer and antibacterial effect. Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, 214, 111309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinorgbio.2020.111309