Context
Unakitsteig is an editorial compilation on a single trace element. It works with two materials: the text the European Commission carries in the Union list of authorized health claims, and published measurements from food tables. Anything beyond that would be interpretation, and interpretation does not take place on these pages.
An adult organism carries on the order of 50 to 120 milligrams of copper, the greatest part of it in the liver, brain, skeletal musculature, and bone. Measured against the roughly one kilogram of calcium in the skeleton that is nothing. But the element does not work as a building material; it sits in the active center of a manageable number of enzymes. Where one of these enzymes sits, there the metal has an address — and only there.
Three such addresses have been given a formulation of their own by the European Union: the pigment in growing hair, connective tissue, and the balance of reactive oxygen compounds inside the cell. The following sections take each of these statements individually, name the tissue in question, and quote the wording unchanged.
Each of the three claims was assessed individually and authorized individually. They can be neither combined nor offset against one another; anyone using one of them uses it in full and in the original.
Color arises in the hair follicle, several millimeters below the scalp. There pigment cells release small containers filled with finished melanin to the cells that build the hair shaft. What later grows out of the skin consists of keratinized, no longer living material: the dye is already fixed within it.
At the start of this chain stands a copper-containing enzyme. It converts the amino acid tyrosine in two successive reactions into a precursor of the dye; all further steps then proceed without an enzyme. It is precisely to this connection that the first authorized claim refers.
Pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 432/2012
Collagen and elastin are present in the body not as individual threads but as a network. Such a network becomes load-bearing only through the cross-connections between neighboring chains. These connections are made enzymatically, and the enzyme responsible carries copper in its active center. If the cross-linking is missing, the material stays soft and yields under tension.
Pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 432/2012
In the mitochondria, electrons travel across a chain of proteins at whose end oxygen becomes water. A small share leaves the chain prematurely and generates superoxide, a molecule with an unpaired electron. The organism does not leave it lying about: an enzyme with copper and zinc at its center converts it onward within fractions of a second.
Pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 432/2012
Unakitsteig
Unakitsteig takes the three authorized statements on copper apart individually: which tissue is meant in each case, which figures have been published on it, and what the wording expressly does not assert.
To the status reportThe three formulations sound similarly constructed but refer to processes that have scarcely anything in common biochemically. What connects them is solely the metal, which in all three cases sits in an enzyme. It is therefore worth reading each of the three connections on its own.
Melanin arises not freely in the cellular water but in an enclosed container within the pigment cell. In its membrane sits an enzyme whose active center holds two copper atoms side by side. This arrangement allows molecular oxygen to be bound and transferred to the reaction partner — a step that would not proceed at this pace without the metal.
The enzyme works in two stages: it first attaches a hydroxyl group to the aromatic ring of tyrosine and then oxidizes the intermediate product further. From there the building blocks largely arrange themselves into long, insoluble dye chains. The same enzyme family is, incidentally, responsible for a cut potato turning brown.
„Copper contributes to normal hair pigmentation“ — Pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 432/2012. The statement speaks of pigmentation as a process. It contains no claim about a particular shade, about its retention over the course of life, or about the density of the hair.
A freshly formed collagen chain is at first a single strand. Only when neighboring strands are chemically joined to one another does a fiber arise that withstands tension. The first step of this connection is carried out by an enzyme in the space between the cells: it converts certain side chains so that they can react with the side chains of the neighboring strand. In its active center sits copper.
With elastin the same process runs with a different result. There, ring-shaped connections arise from four converted side chains, which give the tissue its restoring capacity. Skin, vessel walls, tendons, and cartilage contain both fiber types in differing proportions — and all four tissues fall under the collective term connective tissue.
„Copper contributes to the maintenance of normal connective tissue“ — Pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 432/2012. The word „maintenance“ marks the scope: it is about holding a normal state, not about building it up and not about a change.
Reactive oxygen compounds arise continuously in cellular metabolism without any external occasion being needed. They can be neither stored nor excreted; the cell can only convert them into more stable substances. For this it keeps an enzyme ready whose active center carries a copper and a zinc atom side by side.
The process happens in two half-steps: the copper atom takes an electron from one superoxide molecule and passes it to a second. From two molecules, hydrogen peroxide and ordinary oxygen arise in the process. Downstream enzymes carry the hydrogen peroxide on to water. The conversion speed is among the highest measured in biochemistry.
„Copper contributes to the protection of cells from oxidative stress“ — Pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 432/2012. The statement names neither an organ nor an age group nor an occasion. It describes a function that occurs in every cell with mitochondria.
The status report goes beyond this page: measurement series for the copper content of around fifty foods, the figures of the professional societies, EFSA, and EU labeling set side by side, and an appendix naming the associated opinion for each of the three statements.
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