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Molecules of Retinol in a Microgram
I got onto this Labor Day query after reading someone’s Progress Report where Orion talked about Chickpeas causing symptoms. I looked them up and saw that a cup (cooked) was around 44 IU which equals 13.2 micrograms - and later on, I mentioned those symptomatic responses to a couple of people and they were like “no way – that’s too small to have any significant effect”. So, I crunched the following numbers to take a look under-the-hood so to speak. If I botched something, let me know.
Mole is defined as the amount of substance containing the same number of chemical units (atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, or other specified entities or groups of entities) as exactly 12 grams of carbon-12.
According to WIKI - 286.45 grams of Retinol has Avogadro’s number of molecules in it.
It’s called the Molar Mass of Retinol
Avogadro’s number is 6.022 x 10(23rd).
286.45 grams = 286,450,000 micrograms
6.022 x 10(23rd) molecules divided by 286,450,000 micrograms equals:
21.02286 x 10(14th) molecules per microgram
Over 2100 trillion molecules of Retinol per Microgram!!!
Almost broke my neck on the double-take.
Each of those Retinol molecules has some opportunity to become Retinoic Acid.
Suppose only one out of a hundred did.
That’s 21 trillion molecules of Retinoic Acid.
How about one out of a thousand.
That number is over 2 trillion.
One out of a million is over 2 billion.
PER MICROGRAM – HELLO!
One International Unit – IU – is .3 micrograms
A mere one IU has 6.3 x 10(14th) molecules of Retinol
A trillion is 1 x 10(12th)
That’s 630 Trillion molecules of Retinol PER IU
Just think, each of those molecules requires a protein-response and that process consumes cellular energy and resources.
And imagine the results from RDA-level, milligram-quantities; that multiply these calculations by a thousand, putting the numbers into the hundreds of QUADRILLIONS of toxic molecules with which we have to deal.
(13.2 micrograms) (times hundreds of trillions) worth of “Vitamin A” molecules in just one cup of garbanzo beans?? Yikes!! No wonder some people are having toxic reactions to them. Never even thought about quantifying this stuff on a number-of-molecules basis until reading that Progress Report. Thanks Orion and others for discussing it. Goodbye Hummus, good riddance! I’m going hard-core zero for my second year.