El agua de mar es fuente de vida y de salud
Seawater as an epigenetic agent and
cellular nutrient in prenatal treatment
Interview with Francisco Javier Coll, CEO of Laboratoires Quinton
When a woman is pregnant, external agents such as diet, stress or pollution, may modify the colour of the eyes, the character or the future resilience in terms of health of her baby. Furthermore, if the fetus is feminin, the influence of those external agents may be passed down to future generations, through genetic information. That is the essence of epigenetics. It is up to us to modify our genes by studying and being more aware of those external agents. According to Francisco Javier Coll, whom we interviewed, seawater -with 78 elements of the Periodic Table in a perfect balance- is the best model of an epigenetic agent.
In order to read the DNA strand of a gene our body needs zinc. That reading will trigger basic processes such as creating hair or skin. Zinc needs copper to be able to work correctly, but not too much, it needs just the right amount. Copper needs phosphorus and that one needs calcium. Calcium needs magnesium, etc. All the elements are dependent to some extend on another, but seawater is unique in that it give us all of them and in the right quantities, Coll claimed.
Doctor Antonio Hernández, a specialist in nutrition and anti-aging, encourages people to turn away from victimhood : "we are not only what we eat, think and feel, but we are also what our grandparents ate, the air they breathed and how they thought. Those impacts -generated throughout the lives of our ancestors- modified their genes and were transmitted from one generation to generation". Epigenetics, a term coined by Conrad Waddington in 1942 means therefore "genetic control", he said.
For men the period when epigenetics becomes more relevant is just before puberty. For women, it is during the formation of the ovaries, when they are inside their mothers womb. Coll recommends however to start drinking seawater before conception since the objective is to correctly nourrish cells and as such, modify this expression of genes.
The cells of our bodies are floating in extracellular fluid and when they need something, their membranes vibrate. Rodrig Makinon, Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry in 2003, showed that those membranes have proteins called ionic channels that works as a filter. In order to get through these channels to the cell nucleus and activate the genes, the elements of the Periodic Table must be in ionic form. The director of Laboratoires Quinton explains that those bioavailable elements founds in seawater are only found in vortex, which means with that specific electromagnetical camp to pass through the ionic channels. Bioavailability is the proportion of a nutrient that a body can digest, absorb and use in its physiological functions.
From the French physiologist René Quinton to
the Spanish pharmaceutical firm Laboratoires Quinton
By Nieves Pellicer Sotomayor
In 1897 René Quinton began to investigate using his marine method in the Department of Pathological Physiology of the Collège de France.
In 1904, he published his masterpiece L'eau de mer, milieu organique, which shows that seawater contains the same amount of elements from the Periodic Table and in the same proportion as the substance that surrounds the human cell matrix.
From there, Quinton begins to open marine clinics where he inyected marine plasma to human beings, with excellent results in overcoming diseases from the early twenties, such as tuberculosis.
In 1925 René Quinton dies and marine plasma was almost forgotten in the period between the two world wars, even if the laboratory with his name was still operating. In 1937 marine plasma is included in the list of injectable medicines in France. In 1982, the product loses the AMM (autorisation de mise sur le marché), which means the authorisation to be sold as medicine and injectable, by the time when the rules of the european pharmacopaea were changed.
The laboratory should have submitted a report on his product to the French health autorities to benefit from their status as "historic medicine", but this was never done. Losing the autorisation as an injectable medicine, the laboratory manager decided to stop the activity. Its Spanish distributor, Joan Miquel Coll, father of the current director of the laboratory, bought the firm and re-located the facilities to Alicante, Spain. They focused then on the potential of seawater as drinkable product.
A Laboratoires Quinton 10ml vial of seawater contains 78 elements of the Periodic Table
Laboratoires Quinton is currently a phamaceutical company that produces a dietary supplement in blister packaging (drinkable seawater) and cosmetics and hygiene produts (nasal, ocular and cutaneous sprays), from seawater.
The long-term aim of the laboratory is for this product to be reconsidered as a medication and in injectable form. Therefore, and due to a company philosophy which is focused on quality, they submit to high standards of medicine manufacturing, claims communication manager Sebastián Tuts. "We follow René Quinton's method, but improved and adapted to modern technologies", he said. To be considered as medicine, following the current standards of pharmacopaea, the product should always have the same chemical formula. However, Tuts recognizes that seawater has small variations because it is a living product. There are variations on the concentration of each mineral. But the quantity, he explained, is always the same: 78 minerals. To comply with the regulation of medicines, it is necessary to conduct expensive clinical studies -which, as an SME, they are unable to afford-. Nevertheless, they are working, he said, to become a subcutaneus injectable serum, by way of historical medicine.
Currently, Laboratoires Quinton sells its products mainly in Spain and France, but is also present in other countries like the USA, Malaysia, Holland, Japan, in South America, and is opening in new markets, such as China.
There are many other companies in the seawater market. Therefore Tuts declares that the firm he represents aims to be "the choice of quality and security". He claims that it is uniquely with the process that they apply all the properties of seawater remain as strong as they are in its natural form. "We distinguish by the area where we collect the seawater (in the vortex and far away from the coasts), multiple tests of the product and the use of white rooms", he explained.
Juan Francisco Seller, quality control technician, explains that the fact of collecting seawater in the vortex of the Gulf of Vizcaya, an area rich in phytoplankton and zooplankton that tranform inorganic minerals into organic, makes the product totally acceptable for the body. Furthermore, the ship leaves from the port of San Sebastián, then they collect the seawater about 50km away from the coast and already conduct a first 0.5 micron filter to discard algae. The micro-organisms pass through this filter, but not the bacteries and chemical compounds. René Quinton also used a 0.5 micron filter.
There may be no risk of catching the seawater at microbiological level, but there may be a risk at chemical level, Seller warned. "Maybe that would not cause you a problem today, but if you keep on drinking it for years, you may end up paying the consequences. Therefore our request is to avoid any wild bacteria, most of them are not even yet classified", he added.
Meanwhile, Tuts declares that they take the seawater from sources which are recognised as being very pure, but still they have no guaratee that a ship may have discharged in that spot the day before. That is why every time that they receive a party of ten 1000 liter containers in the laboratory in Cox (Alicante, Spain), a sample of each of them is sent to an external laboratory to make a physico-chemical analysis of toxins, heavy metals, bacteria and even radiactivity. Once the seawater is identifies as safe to drink, they make a 0.22 micron cold micro-filtering in a white room. This sterility is required by the European pharmacopoeia for those products that can not be stelized by heat, thus avoiding any change to the composition of the product.
Laboratoires Quinton has 4 types of products
Sebastian Tuts, communication manager, shows the containers in which seawater arrives to the laboratory from the Gulf of Vizcaya
Thanks to our double door system, the white rooms have a A type air, equal to the one required in operating rooms, to keep a sterile environment
After packing the product and closing the bilsters, a manual and visual analisys is conducted, as the use of laser could modify the composition
To make the product isotonic, they reduce the salinity of the seawater at 9x1000 -diluting it with Fondetal spring water, from Badajoz).
After sterilizing the 10ml vials they are filled with hypertonic or isotonic seawater. "We use glass vials because this is a material that does not interact with seawater, which is corrosive. If you used plactic, for example, the seawater would have that taste because ions interact and change the composition", claimed Tuts. René Quinton already at his time used 10ml glass vials, some of them are still kept in this laboratory.
Seller warns that other larger container (a 1liter bottle, for example) would possible modify the product by exposing it to the environment and losing its sterility. Laboratoires Quinton sell such bottles to the respiratory spa of doctor Pros, in Barcelona, where the bottles are plugged directly into the nebulizer. These devices are used by children with respiratory problems.
Laboratoires Quinton promptly collaborates with charitable projects in line with its corporate social responsability policy. They are not considering, however, the creation of marine dispensaries, like René Quinton's, for the moment.
Tuts explained: "We are the heirs of René Quinton and we have spent many years working on this, so we are experts in marine therapy but our priority is to make the laboratory grow and legalize our product as a medicine".
The Laboratory welcomed us to visit its headquarters in Alicante, Spain
Francisco Javier Coll, CEO of Laboratoires Quinton
By Nieves Pellicer Sotomayor
In 1921 Doctor Jean Jarricot published several of his studies on marine prenatal treatment in his book Le Dispensaire Marin.
He mentioned a woman who had 9 previous pregnancies from the same spous (3 abortions, 2 early deaths, 2 deaf, 1 tuberculosis and the last one with other disease). After subjecting both hudsband and wife to a 7 months-marine-treatment, they had two healthy children (last check at 11 and 8 years old respectively).
Vortex are large sea currents where there is a higher concentration of phytoplankton and zooplankton. These microorganisms transform inorganic minerals into organic minerals thanks to photosynthesis in biocenosis, a process which the president of the International University of the Sea, Maurice Aubert, studied for years. The liquid that phytoplankton excrete in the sea is full of bioavailable minerals. That is Quinton plasma, claims Coll, who asserted: "when we say that on the shore of a beach you can not find these minerals it is because there is no phytoplankton".
The internal environment in which our cells are floating, he adds, is an exact replica of seawater in a isotonic form, with the same amount of ions and the same physico-chemical properties (pH, temperature, oxygen, etc.). The same applies to the amniotic fluid that surrounds a fetus.
The human body, through homeostasis, tries to always keep the same conditions and environment that surround our cells (calcium concentration, pH, de glucose, etc.). Therefore, when we regulate our extracellular medium providing the 78 minerals in the seawater, we are using it as an epigenetic agent. We are able to produce changes in our body, such as stronger immunity, said Coll.
In general, he explains the cause of a disease is that a gene is malfunctioning. That means that the gene is not active and therefore it doesn't produce proteins which are essential, for example, for the immune system. He also claims that diseases from a hundred years ago are the same as today's, in a slightly modified form. We have inherited tuberculosis or syphilis from our ancestorss, for example, which can result in ashma or today's allergies. Now, however, science is becoming more aware of the importance of epigenetics. We are able to rectify processes that have transmitted diseases for years through genes.
The director of Laboratoires Quinton concludes: "we do not claim to cure everything with two vials of seawater, but to hightlight that our product gives the chance for cells to nourish correctly and to rectify the changing immunity of our genes. It is impossible to say whether this is possible with all samples of seawater, because all the information that we have comes from the analysis that we do to the seawater that we collect and from the studies of René Quinton."
André Mahé states in his book The plasma of Quinton "acting on the fetus through the mother, we should be able to free him from his ancestors defects".