I love a mystery.

Don't you?

It brings out my inner Nancy Drew. I feel way more skilled than her though with my statistical knowledge (I teach statistics). So I'm more like a well designed character in a classic Agatha Christie novel....a curious statistician if you like ;)

Cooking brings out my inner Laura Ingalls Wilder (or perhaps Rose Wilder if you've read their history). Sometimes I wonder if part of each of them reincarnated with me. That is the power of books (and especially autobiographical books like the Little House in the Prairie series). Of course Nancy Drew is a purely fictional character but what young girl didn't envision herself as a detective after reading her books!

So, the mystery that unfolded to me in the last year was one that erupted when I discovered the possible death of nervonic acid from a) our food chain and b) our food information chain.

At this point you might be wondering what the heck I'm talking about...I'm keeping my cards pretty close to my chest eh?

Well, just like Agatha Christie, I'm setting it up for you. That's all this will be since any answers are not clear enough to draw firm conclusions (alas, that is the nature of the allopathic world we live in). But I will tell you where you might find some sources of nervonic acid without heading to the drugstore or compounding pharmacy.

So who is our suspected cadaver then? Not much is known about our victim. For starters, nervonic acid is also known by the two other names I've attached as labels to this post - selacholeic acid and tetracosenoic acid. But a search on those terms leads to even less information.

So nervonic acid isn't quite a "Jon Doe" but there is not exactly a lot of background information on the topic. The information on wiki's stub for Nervonic Acid indicates clearly that there is interest emerging in this monounsaturated long chain (Omega 9) fatty acid - i.e. food. Note the reference list is only 3 items long and all of them are patents.

Patents on food? Easy to do if the item has almost disappeared from our food chain and consumers look to pills and supplements for answers to health issues - and vaccines, but that's a tree I won't bark up in this mystery.

MS consumers are mentioned in one patent specifically.

In fact, MS and nervonic acid research is also currently underway by the Canadian government - research into seed breeding to create higher nervonic acid concentrations for 'treatment' purposes for MS and other diseases (scroll about 1/2 way down the page for the research headed by David Taylor). The research summary is partly as follows (bold emphasis is mine):

Nervonic acid has also been investigated as a raw material in the pharmaceutical industry for production of medication used for symptomatic treatment of MS. Therefore, the focus of this project is to produce new elite prototypes of Brassicaceae producing seed oils highly enriched in nervonic acid for human and animal health-related targets.

Interesting plot twist eh? Especially coupled with this professor's research - another Canadian - he is conducting more nutraceutical research on nervonic acid. There must be a bit of money in this I'd say.

So we've got 3 patents and one government so far directly linked with our suspected cadaver, nervonic acid. And one source for nervonic acid - brassicaceae seeds which include many well known and not so well known items including mustard and cabbage. According to wiki (bold emphasis is mine):

The (brassicacaeae) family is cosmopolitan, but is concentrated in the northern temperate regions and reaches maximal diversity around the Mediterranean area.

Do we now have yet another hypothesis for why MS rates are exceedingly higher the further you go from the equator? Hmmm...too simple? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. Actually I would say most times.

Could nervonic acid consumption (or lack thereof) be a cornerstone in the mystery known as multiple sclerosis?

And why is the Canadian government supporting research into pharmaceutical applications to produce nervonic acid while not reporting it in any of our food (the Canadian nutrient database does not list nervonic acid in it's output and neither does any international nutrient data base that I've explored)?

What's up with that? To be fair, the entire class known as monounsaturated fats have been discovered to provide health benefits only very recently (the link is to an example 2007 publication on the health of children and consumption of monounsaturated fats).

But to be blunt....why fund commercial applications while not providing consumers with raw data on a nutrient that is AVAILABLE IN OUR FOOD CHAIN? (yes, this makes me a tad angry). It is like barking up a tree that nobody else sees in the forest - or only corporations are seeing.

So we now know that most governments have avoided connecting themselves with our suspected victim. ...so we have 'evidence' linking nervonic acid with 3 patents, many governments worldwide (linked by omission or commission) and one food source.

But onto another tree that I will bark up - an actual tree - for trees hold a special spotlight in my nervonic acid mystery story. A spotlight that perhaps should be floodlit but without a chemical lab at my disposal then the only actual tree I can connect with nervonic acid is the one a curious publication in Forest Products Journal identified in November 2006. The following is from that page - bold emphasis is mine:

Purpleblow maple (Acer truncatum) is a plant belonging to the genus Acer. In ancient China, its Chinese name was Yuanbao. The tree is widely distributed in China from north of the Jilin Province to south of the Gansu Province and from south of the Anhui Province to the Kerchin Desert of Inner Mongolia. It is one of the main species of the red-leaf trees on Mount Xiangshan and in big cities such as Beijing. In the early 1970s, seeds of purpleblow maple were exploited for their edible oil; the oil content is high reaching 45 to 48 percent (Wang 2003). The cultivation technology, constituents, and medical value of purpleblow maple have been systematically studied through intensive research projects, The results showed that purpleblow maple has been developed and exploited as food and for use in medicine and chemistry. The fatty acids of purpleblow maple seed oil contain 5 to 6 percent nervonic acid (NA).

Updated evidence list: 3 patents, many governments and 2 food sources.

And China? Well, now there's a country that's been just a hopping with nervonic acid production (stimulated/funded by the above publication?......the dots connect for me.....). China taking over our food chain...what a novel concept eh?

Evidence update: 3 patents, many governments including a large Chinese supplier and 2 food sources.

One more key piece of evidence in our nervonic acid story is in this pdf publication from the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry in 2001. This is an article entitled "Lexicon of lipid nutrition". Basically it reports the lipid content of many oils and foods (download this if you wish a very detailed resource on all fat contents in many foods...you will have to know the chemical composition to identify the fat that you are interested in but wiki contains that information).

Lipids are basically any fat soluble naturally occurring molecule and nervonic acid is one of the identified fatty acids in this study. The only food items that contain ANY nervonic acid in this published study are: Rapeseed (canola) oil (<3%) and Rapeseed oil (low erucic acid - this is probably what is on the market if you know that canola is heavily gmo'd) < 0.4%. Soybean and peanut oil also contain small amounts but they are not part of my diet.

Hemp oil was not reported in the previous study but a number of sites suggest that it has a nervonic acid composition of < 0.2% as does borage oil.

So as evidence in our nervonic acid mystery we have: 3 patents (at least); many countries; and a few food sources.

There are other sources of nervonic acid that have been identified in published research but all of them seem to be published by pharmaceutical interests and contain food from far away continents such as China. I included the Chinese purplebrow maple tree because just maybe the maples littering my own province contain this same molecule. And the fact that China seems to have cornered the nutraceutical market on this so far. And oh yeah...nervonic acid is present in breastmilk. Surprise surprise. I'm so glad I breastfed my daughter for 14 months.

So do we have a cadaver?

Perhaps, but, like my tag line reads, "Each morsel is an opportunity for change".

So I've grabbed some organic mustard seed powder and use it liberally in my cooking and salad dressings. I'm eating mustard greens, cabbage, turnips and hemp products like I've never before.

Nervonic acid is not dead to me. Not anymore. And that's the crux of the matter isn't it?