The laundry powder your feed calls an arthritis cure

Sodium tetraborate: laundry booster, ant killer, banned from American food.

A pinch stirred into a glass of water, once a day, for stiff and sore joints. That is the instruction in the clips circulating again this month. I would not follow it. The element behind the claim, boron, is one you can eat instead.

The claim traces back to Rex Newnham, a soil scientist who noticed in the 1960s that plants need boron to take up calcium, and who then took 6 mg of boron a day for his own arthritis. In 1990 he co-authored a double-blind pilot at the Royal Melbourne Hospital: 20 people with osteoarthritis, 6 mg of boron a day or a placebo, eight weeks. Fifteen finished. Five of the seven on boron reported less pain on movement, against one of the eight on placebo.

That is a pilot with 15 completers. The firmer signal came later: a 2014 double-blind trial gave 60 adults, average age 50, a sugar-borate form called calcium fructoborate carrying 6 mg of boron a day, and knee discomfort scores fell over two weeks. Small, short, one product. Boron may do something for a sore joint, and the dose that keeps appearing is a measured one.

Borax runs about 11% boron by weight, and a quarter teaspoon is roughly a gram of powder, which is where that third number comes from. A capsule and a scoop off the laundry shelf are not the same intervention. Poison control records show the far end: a published series of 784 boric acid ingestions lists vomiting, diarrhea, skin flushing and, at the top of the range, seizures. 20 Mule Team has posted its own notice asking people not to drink the product.

Which one lands on your plate today?

She probably felt what she says she felt, Denise. Two weeks is too short to credit it to the powder: hand osteoarthritis flares and settles on its own, and in that 1990 pilot one person on the placebo improved as well. The part I would raise with her is the amount. A daily quarter teaspoon puts her many times over the adult ceiling, month after month, and her kidneys carry that load. Send her the fruit list above, and her doctor can weigh in on a measured supplement.

Got an ache question? I read every one.

Keep moving,

The Ache Report

P.S. Your body takes up 85% to 90% of the boron you swallow and passes most of it out in urine within a day, so the habit matters more than the size of any one serving. Split the fruit between two meals rather than stacking it at breakfast.

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