First off, I'm on a mobile and the Android Medium app shows this article as posted twice. Not sure if that's an artifact of the app or a (potentially correctable?) oops.
That said, I find it interesting that sodium benzoate is converted into glycine N-acyltransferase in liver cell mitochondria before being eliminated. N-acyltransferase is a key part of bactera's lipid envelope and might be part of the proton-pump 'machinery'. Figures that it'd interact with mitochondria, given their origin. I'm very much not a biochemist, but this is somewhat sugestive, given the emerging evidence that many issues with the CNS center around 'energetic crises' (which I take to mean mitochondrial disfunction).
Speaking of biochemistry, I recently lucked across (and read) Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", which I very much recommend. He explores two deep mysteries of biology. How metabolism might have started, and once that became bacterial/archaeal life, how an archaeon teaming up with a bacteria released a lot of constraints and enabled multicellular life.
I've started his "Transformer", which is a beautiful introduction to the Krebbs Cycle. He's taken something that would have caused a younger me to completely glaze over and made it fascinating. If you've been struggling with this cycle (something I pretty much never have as I was never exposed in school) this might be the exact book to read.