Smut Clyde has another crazy story for you. It starts with antivaxxery, but then swiftly enters the heavy waters to invariably arrive at anti-aging.

I did some editing, because I can’t just walk past russians selling anti-aging scams and say nothing.

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Come all without, come all within You’ll not see nothing like Mitochondrion

by Smut Clyde

Lutein is not a natural pigment and antioxidant from the carotene family, extracted from lutes. If it were, that would imply the existence of flutein, and fifein (the corollary of bagpipein does not bear contemplation). You eat plenty of lutein if your diet includes green vegetables (or eggs, or meat), i.e. if you’re not Scottish; it accumulates within our eyes in the macular pigment that shields the most sensitive zone of the retina from too much direct sunlight (not a problem in Scotland). But if Anthony Kyriakopoulos thinks you should supplement that dietary lutein with EVOO [Extra-Virgin Olive Oil] from his nutraceutical company ‘NascoAD‘, who am I to gainsay him? Especially when lutein will minimise the impact of Long COVID.

• Anthony M Kyriakopoulos , Peter A McCullough , Stephanie Seneff Dietary Natural Lutein and Its Impact on Hepatic Autoimmunity in Long COVID: A Clinical Case Study International Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Case Reports (2025) doi: 10.9734/ijmpcr/2025/v18i4455 
• Anthony M Kyriakopoulos , Greg Nigh , Peter A McCullough , Stephanie Seneff Clinical rationale for dietary lutein supplementation in long COVID and mRNA vaccine injury syndromes F1000Research (2024) doi: 10.12688/f1000research.143517.3 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man with a non-mainstream treatment for COVID-19 is also opposed to potential customers protecting themselves with masks and vaccines from contracting COVID in the first place; and Kyriakopoulos is no exception. In a heel turn that no-one expected except anyone who was paying attention, we find him aboard the antivax scamwagon as a member of Peter McCullough‘s merry band of scoundrels, promoting a wholly fictitious ‘vaccine injury syndrome’.

An important study, discussed at length above, was commissioned by the Editor-in-Chief Jose L Domingo and reviewed by rubber-stamps at breakneck speed:

Stephanie Seneff, Greg Nigh, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos, Peter A. McCullough Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs Food and Chemical Toxicology (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.fct.2022.113008 

The wilful distortion and outright mendacity in Seneff et al 2022 make for an entertaining PubPeer thread, but they was not excessive by the standards of Food & Chemical Toxicology so the paper remains unretracted; while the thorough rebuttal by Barrière et al. did not fall within the journal’s remit (although Domingo became ex-Editor and has portrayed himself ever since as a Martyr for an author’s right to make shit up Scientific Integrity). Instead Barrière et al reported the squalid saga in a different journal and at RetractionWatch. Meanwhile when vaccine recipients did NOT die by the billions, the prophets of gigadeath apologised profusely moved on to the new business opportunity of treatments for post-vaccination syndrome.

Now I call your attention away from Kyriakopoulos for a moment (and from McCullough, and from Greg the-end-is-Nigh, ‘naturopathic oncologist’ and second author on both those papers); for the author who isn’t any of those should be familiar. Stephanie Seneff was only a MIT computer scientist at CSAIL until her academic interest in Natural Language Programming led her to the VAERS database – a vaccine-side-effect reporting system that antivaxxers had flooded with bullshit – when she swallowed the metaphorical red pill and broke free from the Matrix of organised cognition. Since then her research program has centred on finding new Things that Cause Autism, mainly by letting the dictionary fall open on random words and combining each one with ‘oxidative stress’ and ‘mitochondrial dysfunction’.

But do not call Seneff a one-note crank, for she and Kyriakopoulos have branched out to find new Things that Cause Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease. These turn out to be gut dysbiosis, exacerbating the effects of [checks notes] water. Don’t worry, mitochondria are also involved.

So it must be time for another episode of ‘Meet the Mitochondriacs’! Previous episodes:

• mitochondrial biophotons (“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to diet“)
• mitochondrial transplants (“Little Creatures“)
• the Mitochondriac Redox papermill (“Hymie Dearness – Confessions of a Mitochondriac“)
• The post on mitochondrial supplements like Mito-Q remains to be written

By “water toxicity” I do not mean the infamous overdose potential of Dihydrogen Oxide, H₂O (a.k.a. hydrogen hydroxide), but rather the molecules of deuterium hydroxide, DHO – about 5% heavier because one of the H components is the deuterium isotope ²H with an extra neutron. These contaminate ordinary mass-produced water at about 1 molecule in every 3200, and three billion years of eukaryote evolution were evidently not enough to evolve mitochondrial proteins that cope with them.

The mitochondrial membranes are studded with ATP Synthase complexes resembling Philippe Stark-designed espresso pots… powered by the trans-membrane H+ ion gradient, they spin like nano-querns as they mint the molecules of ATP that form the energy currency of the cellular economy… and it goes without saying that D+ ions gum them up. Empirical evidence for this is unrequired; it’s just math! The Litewater company (and its many competitors) has considered the corollary – that to Mitomaxx our metabolisms we must drink only small-batch, artisanal, pot-still-distilled DDW (Deuterium-depleted water), and eat plants that were watered with DDW, until our bodies can eliminate every molecule of DHO.

Alternative title: Litewater, we’re sailing at the edges of time. Litewater, we’re drifting at the waterline

Litewater is a US subsidiary of the Russian deuterium-depleter company ViViDi, so the Origin Story spelled out at the Litewater website is Russocentric. It features Russian Yakutian and Altaic peoples living to great ages because their drinking water came from naturally-depleted mountain snows (and totally not because they had every incentive to exaggerate their ages to gain governmental benefits, unencumbered by record-keeping and formal birth-date documentation). Also heroic Russian discoverers of “miracle melt-water” using it to save the lives of radiation victims of the Kyshtym catastrophe. And the Soviet government classifying those miracle cures beneath the veil of National Security, which is why they could never be published. Another ethnic group whose lives are untouched by modern birth certificates are the Hanza of Pakistan, and again their consequent longevity is ascribed to their mountainous environs and the deuterium-depleted melt-water quality of their water.

Sadly, once the constraints of commerce are factored in, the (small) depletion from snow distillation is no longer enough; any therapeutic benefit requires greater dilution, i.e. Litewater. ViViDi do not claim that they source their product at a discount because it’s a waste byproduct of heavy-water refining for the Russian nuclear program; readers are left to draw that conclusion themselves. I choose to believe that they reverse-engineered de Selby’s Water-box.

But all this takes us away from Kyriakopoulos and Seneff, whom I must credit for coining the neologism ‘Deupletion’. Their version of the DDW Mythos is more elaborate, adorned with Rococo encrustations and Ptolemaic epicycles… we learn that humans and (I surmise) other vertebrates have adapted to environmental DHO, but it is a round-about adaptation that out-sources the protective work to one’s gut symbionts. These somehow fractionate and sequester deuterium (through metabolic pathways that are as mysterious as they are miraculous), thus supplying us with deupleted lipids like butyric acid – a minor nutrient supplement, yet still enough for mitochondrial well-being. Words like “almost surely” and “most likely” prove that they also de-deuterate our dietary intake of choline. UNLESS acetaminophen or glyphosate or vaccines cause gut dysbiosis: everything goes kattywampus; Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s ensue. Also cancers, though those have (a) their own deuterium-sequestering abilities and (b) a protective role.

Stephanie Seneff, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos. Cancer, deuterium, and gut microbes: A novel perspective. Endocrine and Metabolic Science, (2025), doi: 10.1016/j.endmts.2025.100215.

“…the unusual metabolic policies of cancer cells can be explained as a strategy of their cancer pathogenesis to hoard deuterium and supply deupleted nutrients, mainly lactate, to the resident immune cells as well as to distant organs”

“Microbiome” is one of those Worship Words that deactivates the critical faculties of editors and reviewers – convincing them that the paper it adorns is merely an affirmation of something they already know [the entire “microbiome / autism” literature of wibble is a case in point]. So no concern arose that the entire edifice of speculation rests upon a brief, unreplicated, cherry-picked report from 65 years ago (Krichevsky et al 1961). Indeed the same loose foundation supports further speculative architecture as the mythos grew into a Theory of All Disease, evolving from paper to paper by accreting new threads in the manner of a Trichobezoar, unchecked by need for empirical support. I don’t know if Sabine Hazan is aware of all this. But, Frontiers! And a journal by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology!

• Stephanie Seneff, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos Deuterium trafficking, mitochondrial dysfunction, copper homeostasis, and neurodegenerative disease. Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences (2025), doi: 10.3389/fmolb.2025.1639327
• Stephanie Seneff, Greg Nigh, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos. Is Deuterium Sequestering by Reactive Carbon Atoms an Important Mechanism to Reduce Deuterium Content in Biological Water? FASEB Bioadvances (2025) doi: 10.1096/fba.2025-00032

Now, this is not the place for a lengthy exegesis on the curious “exclusion zone” phenomenon observed by a Gerald Pollack; nor the somewhat fictitious “structured water” state he dreamed up to explain it.¹ I mention them only because Seneff had already assimilated Structured Water into her active fantasy life, so of course it features in the Deupletion narrative:

Stephanie Seneff, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos Taurine Prevents Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Protects Mitochondria from Reactive Oxygen Species and Deuterium Toxicity. Amino Acids, (2025) doi: 10.1007/s00726-024-03440-3

“… highly sulfonated polymers have remarkable effects on the structure of the surrounding water, creating gelled water that excludes solutes, known as “Exclusion Zone” (EZ) water … Pollack and others have maintained that EZ water mobilizes protons and becomes negatively charged, releasing protons into the surrounding fluid water (Seneff & Nigh 2019).”

Yes indeed, taurine turns out to be another sovereign remedy for the toxicity of water!

“We describe how taurine could potentially alleviate deuterium stress, primarily through metabolic collaboration among various gut microflora to produce deuterium depleted nutrients and deuterium depleted water, and in this way protect against leaky gut barrier, inflammatory bowel disease, and colon cancer.”

Much as Parames Sil and his students decided that taurine must be an antioxidant – making it the ideal treatment for cadmium- or arsenic-poisoning. It’s not just an amino acid, or energy-drink ingredient, or the cure for dilated cardiomyopathy in diet-deficient cats! A food that is richest in natural taurine is spiders, but you explain away your unusual choice of snacks as Mitomaxxing and people still give you side-eye, or so I hear from Renfield a friend.

Taurine became an essential nutrient for cats when evolution robbed them of the metabolic means to synthesise their own. It follows that feline deficiency might be the cause of dilated cardiomyopathy in taurines though no-one has researched this possibility.

One prominent prophet of depletion is a Professor László G. Boros (he has his own website!), and Seneff first ascended to the firmament of Deupletism as second author on one of Boros’s papers. I don’t know what it is with Hungarians and DDW, but one of Litewater’s rivals is the Hungarian derichment company HYD (owned by Boros’s associate Gábor Somlyai), with its ‘Preventa’ water and its sporadic International Congresses on Deuterium Depletion. Anyway: PNAS! Because PNAS.

László G. Boros , Stephanie Seneff , Marianna Túri , László Palcsu , Roman A. Zubarev Active involvement of compartmental, inter-and intramolecular deuterium disequilibrium in adaptive biology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024) doI: 10.1073/pnas.2412390121

It somehow involves another russian deupletist: Roman Zubarev, professor at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, who in 2024 proudly declared two active additional affiliations in Moscow to assure his Swedish colleagues that he is never an FSB agent.

Alternative Title #2: The Heavy Water War

It would be wrong to lock the proponents of ‘Longevity and Rejuvenation through DDW!’ in a room with their ‘Longevity and Rejuvenation through Heavy Water!’ counterparts, for a cage fight. But how wrong would it be? For such contrarians do of course exist… if you can’t trust Fiona MacRae, Science Correspondent for the Daily Heil, who can you trust?

TRUE FACT: deuterium was seriously considered as a chemotherapy agent, by the reasoning that its sabotage of cell replication (stronger hydrogen bonds & slower chemical dynamics stabilising the self-assembly of microtubules yadda yadda mitotic spindles blah blah blah) would selectively put the kibosh on fast-dividing cells – i.e. cancer. The idea has been around for as long as heavy water itself was available in any quantity (Barbour et al 1938), with a new burst of enthusiasm every decade or two. The low but non-zero exposure to deuterium in a normal environment is evidently the worst possible level; a kind of anti-hormesis.

Viz. Katz’ report from a July 1960 Scientific American (back when it was still worth reading). Katz concluded that for full clinical benefit, most of the water in an animal’s body must be replaced with D₂O. Unfortunately this concentration has inconvenient and undesirable side-effects (in the form of death when the percentage reaches 20-30%), hindering the uptake of heavy-water therapy, chiz². Unless you are composed of choanoflagellate algae.

I choose to believe that the scriptwriters of Hogan’s Heroes were aware of (and influenced by) Katz’ work. In Episode 9 (1965), a barrel of heavy water is stored for safe-keeping at Stalag XIII, until the prisoners are appraised of the fact that it is a component in the German A-bomb program, so they persuade Werner Klemperer’s character to drink it in the belief that it is invigorating (and hair-restoring) spa water.

ANYWAY… the most recent re-inventor of the heavy-water-for-health wheel is yet another russian: Mikhail Shchepinov, whose philosophy is, in his own words: “We don’t have to be consuming isotopes as white powder. If you take a pig and feed these things to a pig, all you need to do is consume the pig in normal fashion.“. For this purpose, he founded the anti-aging biotech Retrotope in California. The business plan was to feed isotopes to both pets and their owners.

Retrotope’s scientific adviser used to be the anti-aging guru and drug-addicted pimp Aubrey de Grey. The company teamed up with institutes in Russia and Belarus to create isotope peptides for anti-aging, and:

“Retrotope has signed up some heavyweight gerontologists to join de Grey as scientific advisors, including Jan Vijg of the Albert Einstein College Of Medicine in New York and Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California, San Francisco. Kenyon recently started work on Retrotope’s second round of experiments, giving a deuterium-enriched diet to nematode worms.
“It’s a beautiful idea,” says Vijg. “It gives us a serious chance of retarding ageing.””

New Scientist (2008)

Among Retrotope’s scientific collaborators are countless russians like the aforementioned Zubarev, but also westerners like Vijg and the late Judith Campisi, who was “intrigued” by Shcheptinov’s anti-aging approach as “very original and novel“.

Shchepinov’s twist is to live on iFood: deuterated nutrients – heavy fat, heavy proteins, carbodeuterates – synthesised by algae of various persuasions, which can survive 100% heavy-water enrichment. Without flooding cell fluids with those bad D+ ions, the more stable molecular bonds (in specific nutrients, in specific stages of metabolism) will create fewer free radicals. Everything is better without free radicals, therefore IMMORTALITY.

Shchepinov has a book out. titled “Breaking the Chains of Aging“, which is about the dangers of lipid peroxidation; this in turn can be prevented with polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) – once these are ‘stabilized’ with deuterium-atom substitution so that metabolism cannot touch them. Which is what Shchepinov’s company sells now. Sadly they are not cheap.

Also, the FDA is accepting some of his PUFA experiments for “compassionate use” on dying patients; the lead candidate RT001 is stabilized linoleic acid. But restoring his credibility is an uphill battle, after his work became grist to the Enstupidising Mill of Daily Fail churnalism [see above] as part of their “ongoing ontological program to divide all inanimate objects into ones that will either cause or cure cancer” (Ben Goldacre, 2006).

I for one await an even better treatment for Long COVID in the form of Deuterated Lutein.

Feetnotes:

1. See Elton et al. (2020) for a balanced survey of Pollack’s work, and for the acute, inarguable observation that “There is a long history of pathological science regarding water”. It is fair to say that as well as opening new grifting niches for scammers, Structured Water encouraged a school of Water-bending fringe scientists. For an unbalanced view there is S. Clyde (2012). ↩︎
2. Another potential side-effect of 100% deuterium enrichment in a cytoplasmic environment is the non-zero possibility that combined with the quantum coherence tunnelling properties of microtubules (which are almost as magical as mitochondria), it would result in a runaway cold-fusion reaction. Which would be bad. ↩︎

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Out-take #1

To my shame, I had not come across DDW until broad-spectrum grifter Marco Ruggiero invoked it as part of the groundwork for his main scam at the time – a dairy-free yoghurt-based food supplement formulated to protect you from radio waves from 5G cellphone towers.

Very briefly: Praesidium was supposedly manufactured by culturing a blend of Bifidobacterium ‘probiotic’ strains (along with cyanobacterial spirulina) in a medium of “fermented horsetail (Equisetum); sugar; lemon juice; apple cider vinegar; cultured kefir grains” – all mixed in naturally-radioactive mineral water. The idea was that the cyanobacteria would pass their purported resistance to hard radiation on to the probiotics (by the power of quantum entanglement) which would then transfer it to the consumer. Microtubules were involved. A paper-shaped advertisement (Ruggiero 2021) appeared in a Ruggiero-edited journal-shaped garbage scow, describing a radiation-free ‘control experiment’ in which DDW replaced the mineral water in the witches’ brew… mere tap water is not adequate, because Ruggiero is evidently under the impression that deuterium is radioactive. He is currently working on the next scam: a dairy-free yoghurt-based formulation that will protect you from nanoplastics in the food chain.

Out-take #2

Space does not permit a digression about CellFood (from NuScience), and readers have long since lost interest, so I will write a few sentences anyway. CellFood being a blend of petroleum by-products “virgin earth fossilized plants” and Deuterium Sulphate. It seems to be the same as Open-All, which is a drain cleaner AND a soil restorative, made by Deutrel Industries (“the pioneer in the deuterium process of soil normalization”). Scammers repackaged it as a Food Supplement in 1997 when they realised that the rubes are more easily persuaded to put weird toxins into their bodies than into their gardens.

“Wait”, thinks the reader, paying some belated attention. “Deuterium Sulphate, D₂SO₄? Isn’t that just sulphuric acid with two extra neutrons?”

Yes indeed, that is the icing on top of the scamcake. It is as if the food-supplement industry were engaged in a not-entirely-ethical experiment to plumb the depths of human stupidity, and to determine if there is any way of insulting the intelligence of magical-thinking eedjits and barmpots so badly that they’ll stop paying money to pour noxious products down their throats.

Search the Great Gazoogle for “CellFood” and so much fabulation and stark staring crazypants fantasy bubbles up to the top of the cesspool, it is difficult to know where to start. It is as if every party involved in the grift, from manufacturer to distributors to local retailers, feel compelled to contribute additional layers of mendacity, and things quickly escalate to ALL-CAPS. Hence the Deuterium Freedom Act of 1985 [completely invented], and the two Nobel Prizes.

So someone in the NuFood distribution pyramid was inspired by KFC’s Colonel Sanders to ascribe the 11-secret-spices recipe to a fictional character, and came up with an ‘Everett Lafayette Storey’. I will spare you his entire biography, but it is uplifting.

Drama intensified when a challenger appeared. The competing Deutrosulfazyme Deuterium-Sulphate Food Supplement company, DeutroCell was a couple of brothers who claimed to possess the “ORIGINAL” KITCHEN FORMULA of the completely fictitious UNCLE EV. Clearly this infringed the NuScience copyright / trademark of the character, and hilarity ensued in the form of a bitter courtroom battle. I’m cheering for injuries.

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