What is Nanotechnology?
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Nanotechnology is going to change the world and the way we live, creating new scientific applications that are smaller, faster, stronger, safer and more reliable. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick; a single gold atom is about a third of a nanometer in diameter.
Nanotechnology as we now know it began about twenty years ago, when science and engineering extended into the nanoscale from both above and below. Many important functions of living organisms take place at the nanoscale. The human body uses natural nanoscale materials, such as proteins and other molecules, to control the body's many systems and processes. A typical protein such as hemoglobin, which carries oxygen through the bloodstream, is 5 nanometers in diameter.
In the food and supplements industries nanotechnology is being used to create nanomaterials, which allow nutrients to be delivered to the body more effectively or be absorbed more rapidly.
Nutritional experts agree that a critical aspect of any vitamin or nutritional supplement is the body's ability to absorb the composition into the body. Our body is very capable of disposing of excess vitamins or supplements resulting in a loss to the system of the vitamins or supplements taken. The most effective solution to maximum vitamin absorption is the science of nanotechnology.
For a supplement to work effectively, the right amount must be presented to the right place in the human body. To get there it must pass through cell membranes. The speed and extent of which it moves through those cell membranes is described as absorption rate. The amount of the supplement that reaches central circulation is described as the bioavailability of that supplement.
Reducing nutrient molecules to nanosize enhances the body's ability to absorb them by passing the molecules through the blood stream and directly into body tissues. The result, of course, is that you will receive the maximum benefit of the vitamin or supplement that you are taking.
Nano-GO develops molecular mechanism based formulations using highly concentrated delivery systems in order to allow for absorption throughout the complete digestive system and to reduce first pass liver metabolism. Our technology delivers natural molecules to the human digestive system in a form that most closely mimics the hydrated structure in a living source.
Nanotechnology: How It Works And Why It's Safe
The rising tide of controversy surrounding and overflowing into All Natural Nanotechnology is, in many ways, unwarranted. "Following on from genetic engineering, nanotechnology represents the latest high-technology attempt to infiltrate our food supply." This quote from Nanotechnology: The New Threat to Food appeared in the January-February issue of Nexus 2009. The article, which was written by Georgia Miller and Scott Kinnear in 2007, painstakingly underlines the potential dangers of Nanotechnology such as food fortification, modification and pesticide administration. In that context, the article is a valuable reference. The developing study, which has many applications in device physics and nutritional health, elicits fear because it operates on an extremely small scale -- one that is unfathomable and boggling to the human mind. In actuality, a nano-encapsulated nutritional supplement (a rapidly growing trend in commercial products) is only dangerous if its size reaches 50 nanometers or less. Otherwise, a supplement containing reliable ingredients such as Vitamin C, Folic Acid, Selenium, Zinc, etc., can be absorbed faster and deeper into the bloodstream through the help of nano-encapsulation . Products like this, such as Dailysource, only use nanoparticles. There is no tampering with unstable technologies like quantum dots or nanowires.
Granted, technology can be scary. The human imagination combined with the fantastical conditioning of dystopian novels and Hollywood blockbusters makes us weary of scientific advancement. That's understandable. But, the process of nano-encapsulation is really quite simple, and the consumption of related products is completely harmless. Here's how it works:
Take a nutritional compound with proven ingredients and blend it with an encapsulation material. This is sometimes referred to as a precursor. It basically consists of water, alcohol, and lecithin -- a natural phospholipid found in every cell of the human body.
The nutritional blend and precursor are spun together at different speeds. This step not only encapsulates the product or compound, but allows for the control of particle size. In addition, every nutrient blend requires a feasibility study before encapsulation. Also, the process is GRAS certified meaning that the FDA generally considers all of the involved ingredients to be safe.
Perhaps it is an intelligent defense mechanism to apply cynicism to issues and technologies we don't understand, but Natural Nanotechnology isn't just gadgetry and gimmickry for the savvy 21st century. When applied to nutrition and medicine, this new phenomenon is a precise and efficient means of disease treatment and prevention.
As James R. Heath, Mark E. Davis and Leroy Hood explain in Nanomedicine Targets Cancer from the February 2009 issue of Scientific American, "That combination of cost and performance opens up new avenues for studying and treating disease by permitting the human body to be viewed as a dynamic system of molecular interactions. Such systems-level measurements are then integrated into computational models, which, in turn, can reveal early indicators of a problem. When these insights are combined with new nanotechnology-based therapies, the treatment can be targeted to the problem and only the problem, thereby avoiding serious side effects."
We've all watched plenty of television. We've all seen the cheesy commercials for pharmaceuticals and commercial polymers, but ask yourself this: When was the last time a pharmaceutical commercial promised no side effects?
Nanotechnology Demystified
These days, some terms like green or indie or even Nanotechnology are starting to become like white noise. We hear them constantly in conversations where people join the bandwagon--so to speak--and begin freely waxing intellectual. Why exactly is an organic product automatically more green than inorganic product? How can an indie film or album still be distributed by a major studio or label? You get the idea.
Nanotechnology is a bit like one of those terms now in the health industry and science community. Insiders talk a lot of about nano-encapsulation of medicines and vitamins. There is much controversy over how Nanotechnology can apply to electronics or energy production. And, there are no doubt a host of other lofty ideas involving device physics developing out there. But, what exactly does it mean? Most people can ascertain that it entails working on a very small scale, but can it become as generalized as the aforementioned terms in society?
In the Indian Gujarati language, the word nano does indeed mean little. The SI prefix nano means 10-9. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, a nanosecond is one billionth of a second and so on and so forth. A better way of understanding this incredibly tiny scale, as Jennifer Kahn said in the National Geographic of June 2006, is that "a nanometer is the amount a man's beard grows in the time it takes him to raise the razor to his face." Anyway, Nanotechnology is basically the study of controlling matter on a molecular and/or atomic scale. The term was popularized by a man named Eric Drexler who referred to building technologies based on molecular machine systems.
In the context of science and medicine, Nanotechnology certainly has a bright future. However, it only seems appropriate for controversy over this kind of use to arise out of pharmaceutical application. More and more products are simply employing Nanotechnology to efficiently administer natural vitamins and minerals--ingredients that have already been proven time and again to work gradually without side effects. A nano-encapsulated vitamin only employs the technology in order to increase and accelerate absorption. In other words, you'll get out what you put in, or something like that.
Hopefully, you learned something here about an exciting and aspiring technology. In any event, Nanotechnology is certainly a topic to revisit sometime soon. At least, you can break out a fact or two if it happens to mysteriously come up in conversation. The ways things are going, it just might.
