Not only that, but the researchers believed that the picolinic acid was the "offending" compound, not the chromium. (Chromium picolinate supplements bind chromium to picolinic acid). But if that's true, how come in all these years of using zinc picolinate supplements, there has never been so much as a whisper about any problems with the picolinic acid when it's bound to zinc?

Interesting little sidebar, something to think about: The patent for chromium picolinate expires pretty soon, and there is a huge race on to find and patent an alternative chromium supplement that works just as well; if anyone does develop such a substance, and if the public is made sufficiently afraid of the chromium picolinate form, there is potential for a whole lot of cash to be made. So far, no one has developed anything that works as well as chromium picolinate.

I called Dr. C. Leigh Broadhurst, author of the brilliant must-read Diabetes: Prevention and Cure and one of the smartest researchers I know. Dr. Broadhurst is one of the people who puts this stuff under a microscope and figures out exactly how it works and what it does. She is a geochemist whose intellectual wattage could power "Star Wars."

I asked her whether chromium picolinate caused DNA damage in people.

The answer was simple. In a word: No.

Dr. Richard Anderson, probably the most internationally respected researcher on chromium, working at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has subjected rats to several thousand times the dosage of chromium picolinate likely to be taken by human beings. No problems. And in a well-known study by Mirsalis, reported in the austere and conservative textbook Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease, mice were given chromium at concentrations that ranged from reasonable human dosages all the way to "the upper limit of palatability in rodents." Even these ridiculously high doses could not produce a toxic effect.