Basic Knowledge of Lipopolysaccharide (LPS)

(2)The Safety of LPS, “Immuno Vitamin”

LPS is a safe substance that does not show toxicity when taken orally or upon skin contact. In animal experiments, when LPS is given about 10 μg/kg body weight per day, effects such as prevention or improvement of disease are seen, but no toxicity can be seen even if animals eat LPS at a dose of tens of thousands of times higher than that. LPS exist in the soil and is also attached to vegetables. It is also in the intestines. For intestinal and skin cells, the presence of LPS is normal, and if it is insufficient, immunity will rather decline..

However, when LPS is injected into the blood, strong inflammation occurs. This is because, when immune cells in the blood encounter LPS, the blood cells think that the pathogen has invaded the body and cause inflammation for removal. In the history of LPS research, this inflammatory action in the blood was first known, so LPS has an alias called endotoxin.

If you search on the net and there is a description that LPS is poisonous there, it is an experiment that injected LPS, or it was brought into the body by infection. Either taken orally or percutaneously, the natural intake of LPS is not toxic. Even in common food eaten daily, there are many substances that can be dangerous when injected into the body. Similarly, LPS is also not a substance to inject.

Recently, with regard to the fact that allergic diseases are increasing in industrialized countries in particular, it has become apparent that it is caused by the reduction of natural intake of bacterial components, especially LPS, due to the sanitary environment being prepared (*1). As you can see, due to changes in living environment and eating habits, intake of some ingredients decreases unknowingly, and "diseases of unknown reasons" may be newly born. For example, Europeans in the Age of Exploration first saw a disease called scurvy develop during a long voyage due to the lack of vegetable- or fruit-derived vitamin C intake. The Japanese first saw a disease called beriberi develop in the late Edo period, when brown rice was taken over by white rice, leading a lack of vitamin B1.

Because the existence of vitamins was unknown in those days, it took a long time before the cause was identified. Although LPS has been discovered in 1892, its usefulness was not known; therefore, it was unthinkable that its deficiency caused allergies in those days. In this aspect, the recognition of LPS’s usefulness has a history similar to that of the discovery of vitamins.

Vitamins are defined as:

1. Nutrients essential to the survival and growth of an organism, deficiency of which results in diseases or growth disorders
2. Consumable compounds that cannot be produced in the body, requiring intake from the outside the body
3. Organic compounds other than carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids.

Actually, LPS applies to definitions of these vitamins. From this point as well, LPS is a substance that can be said as a “Immuno Vitamin”.