If you visit the Metamucil web site, you will read how taking three doses (7 grams) per day of Metamucil, a dietary fiber, will help to lower your serum cholesterol. John Glenn brought Metamucil wafers on his history-setting voyage in October 1998, as a septuagenarian on the space shuttle, to prevent constipation. Another web site explains how this material, actually seed husks (seed coats) from psyllium, Plantago afra, can be made into nonsticky "flubber" by mixing with water and nuking in the microwave. Here's a news flash! You can also use this tan, powdery substance as a stabilizing organic binder in paths and roads.
At the recommendation of Gail Materials in Corona, our staff has been adding psyllium powder to decomposed granite and sand mixtures to "harden" handicap-access paths. Our paths made since 1996 were being stabilized by adding small quantities of cement powder, watered in, but heavy runoff has in patches caused paths to erode. Using psyllium powder at a rate of 10 pounds per ton of path materials acts-like flubber-to bind the materials and make a suitably hard and natural-looking surface. So far, the stabilizer seems to be working. Anyway, that is what garden path manicurists John Cluff and Mike Thompson say.
A special mucilage comprises about 30% of psyllium seed coat. For a seed, this chemical swells with water to keep the embryo adequately wetted during germination; it consists mostly of the sugars xylose, arabinose, and galacturonic acid and is termed a colloidal polysaccharide. The successful use of this material to relieve human constipation is because the seed mucilage acts as a soothing lubricant, but also it absorbs toxins in the digestive tract.
Of course, using any material now has accompanying warnings, with do's and don'ts, but the organic adhesive, which forms such copious mucilage, is classified by OSHA as nonhazardous and nontoxic, provided that persons with respiratory problems do not inhale the dust during processing. What OSHA doesn't tell you, of course, is that walking on paths hardened with psyllium powder not only is a wonderful use of a renewable natural resource, but also good for your heart, even for septuagenarians like John Glenn-to be walking around MEMBG admiring the plants.