Hi Elizabeth,

the meta-study you cited emphasises the bad and causative effects of
homocysteine on some mass-killer-diseases.

I wondered why on earth the body makes homocyteine then.
Better to look why, than to find agencies to drop it down by some way.

On how the good Cysteine is made out of Methionine I found:
"By first converting it to homocysteine. Then the body converts the
homocysteine into regular cysteine, but only when there is enough of
certain other nutrients (mostly B Vitamins) available. .. If you
eat your ordinary food and don't get enough B vitamins, your ordinary food
can, some of it, convert into homocysteine and never get converted into
cysteine."

In this way a functional B-vitamin deficiency would cause homocysteine in
the bodies attemt to make cysteine (annother, non-essential amino acid)
out of methionine. Betrays the vitamins folate, B6 , for one pathway B12.

IHD etc a followup of B-vitamin deficiency?
Plausible, since supplementation was reported (in your study) to cause
drastic improvenemts in strokes/attacks etc.

Here's another idea.
How would it be to eat food items high enough in *cysteine*?
I'll run a report to see food items high in cysteine, relative to
methionine. Maybe these would work anti-homocysteine.
And be as good against CHD etc. as sources of folate.

>Writer makes an interesting association between milk carbohydrates (and
>sugar) and CVD.
I had difficulties to find this (commentary) text you cited.
Alas the citation works out unfortunate in the web interface of the list
(all one big link).
Maybe including only the url could help, like:
http://bmj.com/cgi/eletter-submit/325/7374/1202?title=Re%3A+Diet-
induced+Folate+Deficiency

To milk. Milk has carbs which are not ment to be digested by the baby.
The lactose is metabolized by gut bacteria (or should be).
I found this out by comparing the relative amounts of thiamine (vitamin-B1)
to the carb contents of food items. Milk carb has less thiamine than how
much would be necessary to fuel them in a human. (Thiamine is used up as a
coenzyme in the process).
This is consistant with the claim above that milk doesn't contain enough of
the other B-Vitamins (folate, b6, b12).
My thiamine/carb comparisons can be found in the paleofood archives (e.g.
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?A2=ind9907&L=paleofood&P=R125 ).

regards

Amadeus S.
(Cit.Source: http://www.nutriteam.com/cysteine.htm )