OH⁻ is the simplest, most primordial form of negative charge in biology. But if you look at the human body, and actually all animals, the elemental proportions are something like H₅₆O₂₂C₁₁N₁P₀.₂S₀.₀₄ so the most obvious thing we are missing is a lot of carbon. That's the primary life formation step! HCOO⁻ is the main character when you look at how both carbohydrates and fatty acids are formed.
The upside of OH⁻ is that it is very small and mobile, if you are trying to neutralize positive charges then that's far superior. I am not sure that HCOO⁻ could enter the inside of a cell, for instance. We already know (as it is visually apparent) that OH⁻ enters the inside of cells, even taking more neutral water with it, greatly improving hydration.
The "downside" (relatively speaking) of OH⁻ is that it requires you to supply all the other elements on your own, by way of food and drink. If we run out of the other building blocks (which tbf doesn't seem to be a huge problem as the right foods become more appetizing and enjoyable) then OH⁻ will not make your skin oily anymore, because you need more than just OH⁻ to make oil.
However, with HCOO⁻ you'll always get oily skin upon application! Which also means that you'll make new cells faster, too. Super fast regeneration has been seen already. However, I have used it quite little relatively speaking, since I wanted to focus on OH⁻ initially, and did not want to conflate the two.
Further context, here's my earlier post about this:
I can also tell you (for the first time, haven't posted about this elsewhere) how to supercharge that process. You see, the body recycles carbon molecules when they get broken down, and the most simple molecules in that is HCOO- which is called a "formate ion". This is basically the next step, after OH- in the creation of life. HCOO- will very rapidly (minutes, by my estimate) attach itself to damaged nerves. Since they are so quickly utilized, it's probably easier to overdo it. Having too much (neutral) formate in the body is well known - it's what happens when you drink methanol and get poisoned by having many hours of continuous very high formate levels as the methanol is broken down, you probably know what happens.. yeah, blindness. This is because the visual nerve gets over-stimulated so it gets fried. This may or may not be a risk with charged formate. Certainly, my vision is far better now thanks to negative charge, but I have had brief periods of blurrier vision that usual, so I think the visual nerve concern might be real. When you consume negatively charged formate, you instantly get tingling at the weakest or most damaged nerves, and then it's seemingly insta-healed. I've had a part of my face which I had lost almost all sensation in, since like ten years ago, very minor healing during that time. Was fixed in minutes. You're probably wondering how to make formate. That's easy. Boron doped diamond electrode ($80-100) and then use that on sodastreamed distilled water. You'll get almost pure HCOO- that way. The effects are noticeably different than regular OH- charge. You may or may not get this to work with sodastreamed water and regular electrodes, if you let the water sit for a while, the OH- might react with CO2 and make HCOO-.. not sure that should occur in regular chemistry but the body seems to do it somehow, since much of the charge we consume is in OH- form yet our body is built from HCOO-
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