The Breath of the Sea

An Essay on the Sulfur Cycle and the Knowledge We Used to Have

Author’s Note

Two registers operate in this essay. When mainstream science is being examined, the establishment’s language and citations appear. When the terrain framework is being stated, terrain language takes over. The reader should always know which register is operating.

The biogeochemistry described here is not fringe science. It is one of the best-documented planetary systems in the mainstream literature. The paradigm-relevant question is not whether the sulfur cycle exists, but why its practical implications for human health have been quietly removed from public conversation, and what recovering them looks like.

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Marine phytoplankton produce roughly one billion tons of dimethylsulfoniopropionate every year.¹ The compound gives the ocean its characteristic smell, seeds the clouds that shape the earth’s radiation balance, and delivers sulfur to plants, animals, and humans on land through a chain that has been mapped in mainstream science for more than fifty years.

A reader mentioned this week that he remembered learning about this cycle from a New Scientist article around 1985. He added, without prompting, that the magazine at that time was “not so narrative driven and more focused on dispensing knowledge.” The article he remembered was almost certainly part of the coverage around James Lovelock’s work, which reached its most influential statement in the 1987 Nature paper by Charlson, Lovelock, Andreae, and Warren titled Oceanic phytoplankton, atmospheric sulphur, cloud albedo and climate.² Lovelock’s foundational observation appeared in Nature fifteen years earlier.³ Between 1972 and 1987, the science press treated this material as knowledge worth transmitting to a lay audience. A reader who kept it in his head for forty years is evidence that the transmission worked.

Today the same material is buried under advertising copy. The compound at the center of the cycle is now sold as a joint supplement in capsules, with no reference to the biosphere-wide chain that used to deliver it into the body without industry mediation.

This work stays free because paid subscribers make it possible. They get the full book library, the Deep Dive Audio Library, and the Questions for Your Doctor, Before You Consent, and Package Insert series. No grants, no gatekeepers — your subscription is what keeps it that way.

The Compound the Ocean Makes

Dimethylsulfoniopropionate, or DMSP, is synthesized by marine phytoplankton, several species of coral, some seagrasses, and certain marine bacteria.⁴ Inside the cell it works as an osmolyte, balancing internal salt against surrounding seawater. It also acts as an antioxidant⁵ and as a cryoprotectant. When phytoplankton are grazed by zooplankton, die, or are metabolized by marine bacteria, DMSP is cleaved into a gas: dimethyl sulfide, or DMS.

DMS is what your nose registers as the smell of the sea. At the low concentrations found in coastal air, it is faint and unmistakable. Behind that smell sits the chemistry of trillions of cells across the ocean surface, releasing a gas that has been part of ocean life for as far back as ocean life can be traced.

The gas does not stay dissolved. Roughly 300 million tons of DMS escape into the atmosphere each year, making it the largest natural source of sulfur gas over the global ocean.⁶ Once airborne, DMS reacts with hydroxyl radicals and other oxidants in a stepwise chain:

DMS → DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) → DMSO₂ (dimethyl sulfone, also called MSM) → methanesulfonic acid and sulfate.⁷

Each step adds an oxygen atom to the sulfur. The end products act as cloud condensation nuclei, the microscopic particles that let atmospheric water vapor form droplets. Higher DMS emissions produce more of these particles, which produce more clouds, which reflect more sunlight back into space and cool the surface below.

This feedback loop was named the CLAW hypothesis after its authors. The tightness of the climate coupling has been challenged in the mainstream literature; Quinn and Bates published a critical review in Nature in 2011 arguing that the tight feedback cannot be demonstrated.⁸ The underlying chain, however, is not disputed. Phytoplankton make DMSP. Bacteria cleave it to DMS. DMS enters the atmosphere. The oxidation products form cloud nuclei and return to earth in rain. A reader in 1985 could learn this. A reader in 2026 has to hunt for it.

From Ocean to Rain to Table

DMSO and MSM are both water-soluble. When they form in the atmosphere from DMS oxidation, they dissolve in atmospheric moisture and fall in rainfall. Plants take them up through their roots. MSM is retained in plant tissue and delivered into the food chain from there.⁹

Measurements find MSM in most fresh fruits and vegetables at concentrations of roughly 1 to 4 milligrams per kilogram.¹⁰ Raw milk from pastured cows carries 2 to 5 milligrams per kilogram.¹⁰ Breast milk contains it. Whole grains contain trace amounts. Coffee and beer show detectable levels because fermentation and roasting preserve some fraction of what the plant deposited.

The compound is heat-sensitive and volatile. Cooking destroys much of it. Pasteurization eliminates almost all of it from milk. Long storage reduces it. Industrial processing strips it. What survives is what arrives on the plate raw or minimally cooked, or in a glass of untreated milk from a cow that grazed on pasture watered by unpolluted rain.

Sulfur is the seventh most abundant element in the human body.¹¹ It sits in the structure of connective tissue. It powers the methylation cycle. It forms the backbone of the amino acids methionine and cysteine. It is central to glutathione synthesis, to the redox architecture that governs cellular energy, and to hundreds of enzyme systems that cannot operate without it. When sulfur supply falls short, connective tissue lacks material for its structural proteins. Detoxification pathways that depend on sulfur substrate slow down. Cellular energy production falters wherever sulfur-containing cofactors are needed to run the mitochondrial machinery.¹²

The chain runs from ocean surface, through gas emission and atmospheric oxidation, into rainfall, then through soil and plant and animal and food, into the body. Each step has been measured by mainstream biogeochemistry. What the mainstream literature does not do is add up what modern life does to each step of this cycle.

Six Interruptions

Glyphosate. The active ingredient in Roundup and its generics chelates manganese, cobalt, iron, and other minerals in the soil and in the plant.¹³ It also interferes with the shikimate pathway, which plants use to synthesize sulfur-containing amino acids. Sprayed plants have lower sulfur content than unsprayed plants grown in the same soil. This is standard agronomy, not disputed. The result: a food supply that carries less sulfur to the eater, meal by meal, decade after decade.

Industrial agriculture. Soil that has been continuously cropped with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, without return of organic matter, becomes depleted of the microbial life that mediates sulfur cycling in the root zone. Sulfur deficiency in agricultural soils is now widespread enough that agronomists have begun recommending elemental sulfur applications to restore yields. That recommendation is an admission, not framed as one, that the soil no longer contains what the plant needs, and therefore that the plant no longer contains what the eater needs.

Pasteurization. Raw pastured milk carries MSM at 2 to 5 milligrams per kilogram. Pasteurized milk contains almost none.¹⁰ The heat process regulators claim protects the public also destroys one of the compounds by which the sulfur cycle delivers into human nutrition. The regulatory framework was built as if MSM did not exist. Whether the regulators knew is a separate question. The compound is destroyed regardless.

Cooking and processing. The volatility that lets MSM enter the atmosphere lets it leave a saucepan. Long cooking, high heat, dehydration, and industrial processing all reduce it. A diet composed largely of processed food, restaurant meals, and long-cooked vegetables receives a fraction of what fresh, raw, and minimally cooked produce would deliver.

Organophosphates. Mark Purdey’s work is the clearest terrain reading of a disease the establishment declared infectious. Purdey was a Somerset organic dairy farmer, not an academic, when he refused to apply the government-mandated organophosphate warble-fly treatment to his herd in the 1980s. He took the Ministry of Agriculture to court over the mandate and won. His own cattle stayed BSE-free while herds around him did not. From that observation he began two decades of self-funded international investigation, tracing the same pattern through transmissible spongiform encephalopathy clusters in Colorado, Iceland, Slovakia, and Sardinia.¹⁴

The mechanism he identified: chronic organophosphate exposure combined with excess manganese in supplemental feed and depleted copper in the soil, resulting in the substitution of manganese for sulfur-bound copper at the active site of the prion protein.¹⁵ Organophosphates disrupt sulfur metabolism at the cellular level; manganese loading fills the gap the depleted copper leaves; the prion protein bends into the folded configuration that mainstream researchers then call infectious. Every geographical BSE cluster Purdey investigated showed the same signature of these three factors converging.

The mainstream framing calls BSE an infectious prion disease transmitted through rendered animal feed. Purdey’s terrain reading called it a metabolic disorder driven by sulfur-cycle disruption in specific chemical zones. His analysis appeared in peer-reviewed journals, most consistently in Medical Hypotheses. It was never refuted in the literature. It was simply not funded to continue. Purdey died in 2006 at fifty-two, from a brain tumor, in circumstances his family found questionable. The prion story remains the official account. The industry that manufactures organophosphates has never had to answer for the evidence he assembled.

Air pollution. In heavily polluted urban environments, the ambient DMS signal from the ocean is overlaid with anthropogenic sulfur dioxide from combustion, and the atmospheric chemistry above the city runs on different pathways than the chemistry above a coastline. Sulfur-cycle exposure through the airway is not what it was.

Any one of these interruptions would matter. Six operate simultaneously on the same population, and they compound. A person eating processed, pasteurized, glyphosate-treated food, grown on depleted soil, in a polluted city, receives a fraction of what an intact cycle was configured to deliver. The mainstream health literature does not track this. It tracks isolated nutrients in isolated capsules and calls the resulting picture nutritional science.

The MSM Question

Both DMSO and MSM are now sold as commercial products. DMSO as a topical solvent and therapeutic. MSM as a joint-health supplement in capsules.

The compounds are not inert. Robert Herschler filed the original MSM patents beginning in 1981.¹⁶ Stanley Jacob and colleagues documented clinical use in thousands of patients through the 1980s and 1990s, spanning joint pain, connective tissue disorders, allergy symptoms, and inflammatory conditions.¹⁷ Engelke and colleagues confirmed MSM presence in human cerebrospinal fluid and blood plasma using NMR spectroscopy.¹⁸

The paradigm question is not whether the compound works. The paradigm question is what selling it in isolation, at concentrations no food provides, without reference to the cycle it belongs to, represents.

It represents the same structure this work has criticized elsewhere. A compound is isolated from its biological context, manufactured industrially, marketed as a deficiency correction, and sold in a bottle. What goes unmentioned is that the entire industrial food and water infrastructure has been engineered to remove this compound from the eater’s diet, and that reversing that engineering is the actual solution. The bottle becomes a permanent product because the interruption of the cycle is permanent.

MSM in a capsule and MSM in raw pastured milk are the same molecule. What differs is everything around the molecule: the cofactor matrix, the whole-food delivery, the enzymes that survived the pasteurization that did not happen, the calcium and magnesium and fat-soluble compounds that arrived with it, the microbiome that would have processed it, the entire biological context that arrives when the cycle is intact. The supplement industry sells one molecule. The terrain framework asks for the whole system.

DMSO is a different case. It is not a nutritional compound but a pharmacological and physical agent with specific therapeutic uses documented across the medical literature from the 1960s onward. Applications include pain relief, transport of other substances through the skin, tissue repair, and uses in ophthalmology, dermatology, and musculoskeletal medicine.¹⁹ Its utility does not depend on framing it as a nutrient. Used as what it is, it is a genuine terrain-compatible tool. My book on DMSO covers the clinical applications and the suppression history in full; what belongs in this essay is only its position on the sulfur oxidation chain and the distinction between it and MSM.

The distinction matters. Reject the vitamin-and-supplement paradigm where it applies. Recognize a real pharmacological agent where the evidence supports one.

Practical Restoration

Six items, ranked roughly by strength of effect.

Live near the sea, or visit often. Coastal air carries the ambient DMS signal and its oxidation products in dilute form. Nineteenth-century sanatoria placed tuberculosis and convalescent patients on cliffs and coastlines for reasons the physicians observed clinically even though they could not name the chemistry. Whatever the sea air was doing then, it is still doing now. Coastline is free. A morning walk on wet sand delivers what no capsule ever will.

Eat raw and minimally cooked produce in season. Alliums such as garlic, onion, and leek. Crucifers such as broccoli, cabbage, kale, and Brussels sprouts. Sulfur-rich herbs. These foods deliver the sulfur amino acid backbone the body uses to build every sulfur-dependent structure. Raw or lightly steamed preserves what long cooking destroys.

Drink raw milk from pastured animals where legally accessible. The MSM is there. The living enzymes are there. The fat-soluble compounds are there. The intact matrix is there. Pasteurization removes all of it. This is not a supplement; it is a whole food that was, until very recently, the default form of dairy for most of human history.

Eat sulfur-rich whole foods for the amino acid backbone. Pastured eggs. Organ meats, particularly liver and kidney. Bone-in cuts and bone broth. Wild-caught fish. Grass-fed red meat. These supply methionine and cysteine, the sulfur amino acids that form the structural pool the body draws on. MSM is a delivery vehicle; the amino acids are the building material.

Use DMSO topically for the applications it is documented to serve. Pain, inflammation, tissue repair, transport of other therapeutic compounds through the skin. It is a real therapeutic with a real evidence base going back sixty years. Use it as what it is.

Sulfur springs, mineral baths, and hot springs where geography permits. Traditional healing practice worldwide, ignored by modern medicine, structurally consistent with what the sulfur cycle does. Not a substitute for food-chain delivery, but not nothing either.

None of these requires a bottle, and every one predates the supplement industry by centuries.

What the Reader Noticed

The reader’s aside about the magazine carried more weight than he may have known. He remembered New Scientist treating the sulfur cycle as knowledge to be transmitted, and noticed that the same magazine no longer does that. The chemistry has not changed since 1985. What has changed is what the science press does with knowledge like this. A person searching for information about MSM today finds advertising copy for capsules. A person searching for DMS finds either climate policy debates or industrial safety data sheets. The connective tissue is missing. The story of how the ocean feeds the land through the atmosphere, and how modern life has interrupted every step of that delivery, has been removed from public view.

The information is not classified. Every claim above sits in the mainstream literature and can be checked. What has been removed is the frame that lets a reader see the whole system at once. In its place: fragments of a story sold as isolated products, framed as isolated deficiencies.

The terrain paradigm is, in part, an insistence on putting the connective tissue back. Claude Bernard called it the milieu intérieur when he was working out the biology of internal regulation in the nineteenth century. Lovelock extended the same principle to planetary scale with his Gaia framework a hundred years later. And Purdey worked at the smallest scale of all, tracing the sulfur-manganese chemistry that broke down in his neighbors’ cattle when it did not break down in his. The principle operates the same way at every scale. Living systems are integrated systems, and health is what happens when the integration is intact.

Phytoplankton produce this molecule for their own cellular purposes. It escapes as gas, condenses in clouds, falls as rain onto pasture, and reaches the child through raw milk, where the sulfur takes up residence in connective tissue for a lifetime. This is what an intact biosphere does, and what a curious reader in 1985 could still be told.

How To Explain It To A 6 Year Old

Tiny plants in the ocean, so small you can’t see them, make a special kind of smell. That smell is what makes the beach smell like the beach. The smell rises up into the sky, gets turned into invisible bits of dust, and those bits help make the clouds. When the clouds rain, the rain carries something the plants on land need to grow strong. When you eat those plants, or when you drink milk from a cow that ate the grass, you get some of that same something too. It helps hold your body together, from your skin to your joints to everything in between.

Grown-ups have made the rain dirtier, they cook the food too long, they clean the milk in a way that takes the good part out, and they spray the plants with chemicals that stop the plants making the good part in the first place. So people don’t get as much as they used to. Then someone puts it in a little bottle and sells it back to them.

The best answer is to go to the beach, eat food that isn’t cooked to death, drink milk the way it comes out of the cow if you can, and remember that the ocean is helping you every time you take a breath of sea air.

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Disclaimer: This essay discusses biochemistry, agricultural practice, and general nutrition. It is not medical advice. Anyone considering changes to diet, use of DMSO or other therapeutic agents, or consumption of raw dairy should educate themselves independently and consider their own circumstances. Nothing here is a treatment recommendation for any specific condition.

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In Print

Seven of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.

Two more take up what the first five leave out — the remedies the first five explain why you need. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence.

A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

References

¹ Curson, A. R. J., et al. (2018). DSYB catalyses the key step of dimethylsulfoniopropionate biosynthesis in many phytoplankton. Nature Microbiology, 3(4), 430–439.

² Charlson, R. J., Lovelock, J. E., Andreae, M. O., & Warren, S. G. (1987). Oceanic phytoplankton, atmospheric sulphur, cloud albedo and climate. Nature, 326(6114), 655–661.

³ Lovelock, J. E., Maggs, R. J., & Rasmussen, R. A. (1972). Atmospheric dimethyl sulphide and the natural sulphur cycle. Nature, 237, 452–453.

⁴ Curson, A. R. J., Todd, J. D., Sullivan, M. J., & Johnston, A. W. B. (2011). Catabolism of dimethylsulphoniopropionate: microorganisms, enzymes and genes. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 9(12), 849–859.

⁵ Sunda, W., Kieber, D. J., Kiene, R. P., & Huntsman, S. (2002). An antioxidant function for DMSP and DMS in marine algae. Nature, 418(6895), 317–320.

⁶ Kettle, A. J., & Andreae, M. O. (2000). Flux of dimethylsulfide from the oceans: A comparison of updated data sets and flux models. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 105(D22), 26793–26808.

⁷ Barnes, I., Hjorth, J., & Mihalopoulos, N. (2006). Dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl sulfoxide and their oxidation in the atmosphere. Chemical Reviews, 106(3), 940–975.

⁸ Quinn, P. K., & Bates, T. S. (2011). The case against climate regulation via oceanic phytoplankton sulphur emissions. Nature, 480(7375), 51–56.

⁹ Herschler, R. J. (1990). Use of methylsulfonylmethane to enhance diet of an animal. United States Patent 5,071,878.

¹⁰ Herschler, R. J. (1986). Methylsulfonylmethane in dietary products. United States Patent 4,616,039.

¹¹ Nimni, M. E., Han, B., & Cordoba, F. (2007). Are we getting enough sulfur in our diet? Nutrition & Metabolism, 4, 24.

¹² Parcell, S. (2002). Sulfur in human nutrition and applications in medicine. Alternative Medicine Review, 7(1), 22–44.

¹³ Samsel, A., & Seneff, S. (2013). Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance. Interdisciplinary Toxicology, 6(4), 159–184.

¹⁴ Purdey, M. (1998). High-dose exposure to systemic phosmet insecticide modifies the phosphatidylinositol anchor on the prion protein: the origins of new variant transmissible spongiform encephalopathies? Medical Hypotheses, 50(2), 91–111.

¹⁵ Purdey, M. (2000). Ecosystems supporting clusters of sporadic TSEs demonstrate excesses of the radical-generating divalent cation manganese and deficiencies of antioxidant cofactors Cu, Se, Fe, Zn. Medical Hypotheses, 54(2), 278–306.

¹⁶ Herschler, R. J. (1981). Methylsulfonylmethane and methods of use. United States Patent 4,296,130.

¹⁷ Jacob, S. W., Lawrence, R. M., & Zucker, M. (1999). The Miracle of MSM: The Natural Solution for Pain. Berkley Publishing.

¹⁸ Engelke, U. F. H., Tangerman, A., Willemsen, M. A. A. P., et al. (2005). Dimethyl sulfone in human cerebrospinal fluid and blood plasma confirmed by one-dimensional ¹H and two-dimensional ¹H-¹³C NMR. NMR in Biomedicine, 18(5), 331–336.

¹⁹ Jacob, S. W., & de la Torre, J. C. (2015). Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO) in Trauma and Disease. CRC Press.

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Additional Sources

Cowan, T. S. Human Heart, Cosmic Heart. Chelsea Green, 2016.

Cowan, T. S. Cancer and the New Biology of Water. Chelsea Green, 2019.

Lester, D., & Parker, D. What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong. Independently published, 2019.

Purdey, M. Animal Pharm: One Man’s Struggle to Discover the Truth about Mad Cow Disease and Variant CJD. Clairview Books, 2007.

Lovelock, J. E. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Lovelock, J. E. The Revenge of Gaia. Penguin, 2006.

Price, W. A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1939.

Unbekoming. DMSO: The Persecuted Molecule. (Author’s book on DMSO.)

The Microbiologist. “The smell of the sea: how microbes shape Earth’s sulfur story.” Feature article, 2025.

Chemistry World. “The secrets of the sulfur cycle.” Feature article.