Despite the fact that the statement about the need to include chromium III in a healthy diet has not been questioned for many years, a new study shows that this element does not do any good to health. The study was conducted at the University of Alabama (University of Alabama) and published in the Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry.

The work convincingly proves that chromium, which since 1980 is considered by the National Academies of Sciences (US National Academies of Sciences) as an essential (vital) nutrient, is not an essential element, says Professor John Vincent of the University of Alabama ), Co-author of the article.

"This means that the status of chromium in numerous textbooks on nutrition and dietary guidelines of the National Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Agriculture (U. Department of Agriculture) should be changed, "- says Vincent.

In a study funded by the US Department of Agriculture, scientists fed one group of rats with a purified diet containing as little chromium (III) as possible, for six months, carefully monitoring animal health through various measurements, including a blood test. In the ration of rats from other groups, they added varying amounts of chromium, also continuously monitoring their state.

"A diet containing as little chromium (III) as we could add, and a diet containing the amount of chromium that corresponds to a person taking a standard food supplement with chromium, did not affect the rats," says Vincent. "They kept the same body weight, ate the same amount of food and were able to absorb glucose. There were no differences in the health status of rats ".

"Together with the results of other recent studies, these results clearly show that chromium can no longer be regarded as an essential element," write the scientists in the annotation to the article.

Over the past decade, scientists have become skeptical about the alleged use of chromium as an essential nutrient, but researchers from the University of Alabama first studied this element "in carefully controlled, metal-free conditions with a series of refined diets with different contents".

Considering chromium as an essential nutrient in the 1950s was proposed by experts from the US Department of Agriculture, and in 1980 the US National Academy of Sciences approved the proposal, setting a "sufficient consumption" of chromium.

"If you look at the list of everything that our body needs - vitamins, proteins and carbohydrates - chrome will be there along with iron, zinc and vitamins A, B, C and others," says Vincent. "We must remove it from this list".

"For an element to be recognized as vital, it must be shown that removing it from the diet leads to adverse health effects, and its return to the diet leads to the disappearance of these adverse effects. Or it is necessary to show that it interacts in the body with a certain molecule that performs a certain function. The latter was not done, so the previously obtained results were based on research in nutrition ".

Although recent experiments have proven that chromium does not do any good as an element of nutrition, its potential therapeutic effect on diabetes has also been established on the assumption of high doses.

"When we switched to very high doses of chromium, rats showed an increase in sensitivity to insulin, and their body did not need to produce so much of it to metabolize excess sugar. Thus, we not only observed the absence of the effect of chromium as an element of nutrition, but also established an effect similar to that of drugs, "notes Vincent.

In this case, the scientist stresses that the evaluation of the potential impact of chromium on diabetes is ambiguous and this effect requires further study.

"If your ability to metabolize lipids and carbohydrates is already changed and you are taking extremely high doses of chromium, this can lead to an improvement - at least, so to speak, based on the results obtained in animal models".

Based on the results of recent experiments, Vincent responded about the trade in food additives with chromium, such as chromium picolinate, as "misinforming," although further studies of the effects of chromium on diabetes, in his opinion, could change the situation. Food additives containing chromium, rank second among all mineral supplements, second only to calcium, and have annual sales amounting to about half a billion dollars.

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