# New vitamin PQQ and beautiful skin ? **URL:** \ **Category:** Lounge\ **Created:** [July 22, 2007, 8:21pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/new-vitamin-pqq-and-beautiful-skin/4757 "2007-07-22T20:21:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![tacitus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@tacitus](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/tacitus)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2007, 8:21pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/new-vitamin-pqq-and-beautiful-skin/4757/1 "2007-07-22T20:21:40Z")
PQQ is interesting, skinwise, because it is active in the metabolism of lysine, an amino acid that is part of collagen, the skin structure protein. I have frequently noticed, when travelling in asia, that many traditional diet asiatic people had exceptionally fine, uniform, almost creamy skin texture. I wondered if this was genetic, environmental, dietary, or what ? Recently there have been stirrings in the nutritional industry about PQQ, **pyrroloquinoline quinone…** which is only now barely turning up in specialty supplements, around 5 mg… Looking into this, it also happens that PQQ is concentrated in popular fermented soybean… errrr… food items called Natto, in soybean, tofu, papaya… but particulary high in the fermented soybean… Also, PQQ seems to be generated by Bacillus Subtilis, a transient soil organism in some intestinal bacteria capsules… Hmmmmm… I thought to meself… so PQQ is intimately related to lysine metabolism… and lysine metabolism is intimately related to “cellular aging end products”… the stuff that makes you look older and uglier than you would otherwise… which is what happens when sugar polymers (Amadori Product… or proto-cellular crap) bind to… yup… you guessed it… Lysine ! to form… well… it ain’t pretty… CMO or carboxy-methyl-lysine… what the heck is that ? You know those nasty “liver spots” that heavy drining, heavy smoking, sun toasting people get ? That’s accumulated CMO… the Ugli Molecule… So why wasn’t I seeing much CMO accumulation in asia ? Especially in some regions of China back in the old days… even “elders” in their sixties were performing HARD manual labor, had lean musculature of a well exercised 25 year old gym rat… and in spite of great economic misery, had strikingly good skin… ? In retrospect, I attribute this to three things… one is they consumed (at the time) vastly less refined sugar than their wealthy conterparts… Two is they had a diet very high in bioactive fermentive things, esp. soybean… which would give them high PQQ family intake, and probably a ton of other undocumented micronutrients… Three is they lived in… well… not exactly sanitary conditions… and I would assume this was over eons pretty close to what humans were evolved to live like, once acclimated… and they were getting constant intakes of soil bacterias too… Possibly it was this that actually supplied them with some very hard to identify, unstable nutritions, and it is we who have some degrees of malnutrition by comparison ? **25/04/2003 - Japanese researchers have discovered a new vitamin that has an important role in immune response and fertility in mice. The chemical, pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ), may have a similar function in humans, they said.** **The team from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Tokyo report that they have found a new molecular function of PQQ, first discovered in 1979, leading them to propose its classification as a new B vitamin.** **_Researchers fed mice a PQQ-deficient diet and found that they grew slowly, had fragile skin and a reduced immune response_, and also had problems reproducing. It is thought that because vitamins that have an important effect on mice usually act in the same way in humans, this vitamin may be vital for humans too. Writing in this week’s issue of _Nature_, Takaoki Kasahara and Tadafumi Kato identify _PQQ’s role in degrading the amino acid lysine_ in mice. They found that PQQ generates an enzyme that is required for the reaction to occur. They explain that PQQ is acting as a redox cofactor in this reaction, just as nicotinamides and flavins act in other enzyme-catalysed redox reactions. They are classified as vitamins because they must be supplied in the diet. PQQ is believed to be the first new vitamin to be discovered since 1948, and will join niacin/nicotinic acid (vitamin B3) and riboflavin (vitamin B2), in the B vitamin series. There are 13 other known vitamins, organic compounds required in trace amounts for normal growth and metabolic processes. PQQ is not normally included in multi-vitamin tablets but can be found in vegetables such as parsley, green peppers and kiwi fruit and some meat. More research is needed to explain the low fertility in mice and find out if the vitamin has a similar role in humans.** --- _[View the full topic](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/new-vitamin-pqq-and-beautiful-skin/4757)._