The Glycine Solution: Unlocking Health Secrets with Dr. Joel Brind

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Well, hello to everyone joining us today. You're listening to the Living to 100 Club Podcast, and I am your host, Joe Casciani. I'm passionate about helping people embrace the principles of psychologically healthy aging, staying positive, finding purpose, and making the most of all the years we're given. No matter what challenges come along. Each episode, we bring you conversations that educate and inspire, guiding you to age with resilience, optimism, and a positive mindset. I also invite you to explore our Club Insider membership by visiting my website, livingto100.club, and signing up. You'll gain access to exclusive content, resources, and a supportive community. And if you're a professional working with older adults, be sure to check out my Better, Longer, and Happier card deck series at livingto100.solutions. These 12 modules offer valuable insights and activities designed to promote positive aging and personal growth. Thanks for being part of this journey. Now let's dive into today's conversation. In this episode of the Living to 100 Club Podcast, I welcome Dr. Joel Brind, a distinguished biochemist, researcher, and author of "The Glycine Miracle." Together, we discuss the remarkable potential of glycine in medical science and its far-reaching implications for chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and disease prevention. Drawing from diverse backgrounds in psychology and biochemistry, Dr. Brinton shares the science behind glycine and explores the differences between meat eaters and vegans and considers the broader health implications of chronic inflammation and metabolic syndromes. First, a little background. Dr. Gerald Brind is a biochemist with a PhD in biochemistry, physiology, and immunology. He's a recognized expert in amino acid metabolism and its impact on health. Over his distinguished career, he has focused on the critical role of glycine in regulating inflammation and preventing chronic diseases. His groundbreaking research highlights glycine's potential to address conditions like metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative disorders. In 2010, Dr. Brind founded Natural Food Science LLC, where he developed Sweetamine, a unique supplement leveraging glycine's anti-inflammatory properties to promote better health and wellness. Through his innovative work and dedication to scientific discovery, Dr. Bryn continues to provide actionable insights into the connections between diet, biochemistry, and long-term health. Dr. Bryn, thank you for joining us today.

Well, thanks for having me on.

Good to be with you. Yeah, you're very welcome. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I think it's an important conversation for our listeners and, I always like to begin by asking our guests to describe maybe the highlights. You have a long distinguished career, but what are the highlights, maybe the pivotal points that brought you to where you are today?

Well, pivotal point— points in this area of research had to do with some work that I was doing with a foundation that was looking into something called methionine restriction. That's how I got into the amino acid and aging field. Hmm. This group called the Orentrich Foundation, they had actually established a, a particular phenomenon that has been verified over and over again called methionine restriction, which is to say, if you feed or eat a diet that is— they found, of course, with experimental animals, rats and mice— if you have a diet that is very severely restricted almost completely deficient in the essential amino acid methionine, the, the animals actually live 30 to 40% longer.

Hmm.

They don't grow to normal size, but they live 30 to 40% longer. And methionine restriction has been verified many times by other groups in both rats and mice. And it's, it's, so it's a thing as they say, but it's not very easy to do. Why? Because some of our favorite high protein foods meat, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese are loaded with methionine.

Oh.

So how do you get a diet that's restricted in methionine? Well, so, what I found other researchers, you know, in the literature had discovered is that methionine, although it is essential, and we learn in biochemistry school, if you will, we, we, everybody learns about the methionine cycle, the, the classic way in which your liver recycles methionine to make sure you have enough. Because it's essential. If you don't eat any methionine, you die. Well, because it's so essential, the, the body's got lots of different ways of recycling it, regenerating it, and reusing it so that in fact you only need half a gram at most of methionine in your diet every day. 300 to 500 milligrams is all the essential requirement is. That's more like a vitamin, right? Even though you think of an amino acid as a bulk nutrient. Well, so, uh, what other researchers had found is that the amino acid glycine constitutes the body's only way really of getting rid of excess methionine. And these days, with all the hypernutrition that we have, meat, fish, poultry, sugar, everything, we tend to get a lot of methionine. And so after you eaten that cheeseburger, for the next hour or two, your liver is actually busy getting rid of the excess methionine rather than recycling it. And then, uh, so if— so the simple, uh, hypothesis that I tried was let's supplement with glycine, see if that can accelerate the clearance of methionine, and maybe the animals then will live longer without the extreme dietary restrictions that a methionine-restricted diet would entail. Well, guess what? We tried that.. And the animals did live longer.

Wow.

Not 30 or 40%, but 10 or 20%. And, but the levels of methionine in their blood didn't change at all. So it did not accelerate the clearance of methionine, but something else was going on. So what was going on? What's going on is mainly when you eat a lot of glycine, when you have enough glycine, that has another function, which is not even a biochemical function. It serves as like a trigger lock on the immune system cells, the macrophages, as they're called, that actually cause inflammation. And inflammation is the body's first response against infection before the immune system can, can make specific antibodies against a pathogen, some microbe that's invaded, uh, it takes several weeks before it can actually mount a specific immune response. That's why vaccinations take time, and an antibody response once you've had the illness takes time before you're actually immune from getting it again. So what is interesting about it is that now all— almost all the diseases that make people sick and die these days seem to be rooted in chronic inflammation. That's a big problem. Why is everybody getting chronic inflammation? And it, it comes from a couple of misunderstandings, mistakes that medical science is still making by and large. Number one, that glycine is not an essential amino acid. It's considered by most people, not all anymore, as a non-essential amino acid. Why? Because your liver can make it from scratch. I mean, and when I say from scratch, I mean it can make glycine from carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, and ammonia. You know, you can even find glycine as a natural amino acid is even found in the environment outside of living bodies. You can find it on meteors and comets, asteroids. It's actually been detected reliably. So it's a very, very, very simple compound. But just because you're— yeah.

No, there hasn't been the emphasis on making sure we have enough glycine.

Because it's not believed to be essential in the diet at all.

Okay.

But the reason for that, outside of the fact that the body can make it itself, is that, you know, that the effects are subtle. This chronic inflammation is long-term chronic kind of stuff for the most part. But it really is important in the short term too, as I'll explain. In any case, so that's one mistake. You, you actually need, just in terms of numbers, the average overall intake of methionine in the— of glycine in the typical diet is 2 to 3 grams a day, 2 or 3,000 milligrams. It's a bulk nutrient, and the actual needs of the body are to take— you need to take in about 10. So we're short about 8 grams, 8,000 milligrams a day of glycine in the typical diet to provide the— not the glycine you need to make proteins, which everybody has enough of, but the glycine that is needed to be kind of in the soup that the cells live in, acting as a trigger lock against the cells that cause inflammation so that they don't overreact and cause inflammation when it's inappropriate. The other big misunderstanding outside of the, uh, essentiality or non-essentiality— essentiality, really— of glycine in the diet is, uh, what the function of inflammation is in the immune system. And this I actually found out through self-experimentation, aha moments back in 2010. And, uh, you see, if you look up either Wikipedia or any medical textbook you like, They will all tell you that inflammation is the immune system's first response against infection or injury.

Mm-hmm.

That's a half truth. That's what I discovered. When you sprain your ankle and you get some, some sort of blunt injury right now, it becomes stiff and red and stiff and swollen and painful and immobilized. You've got inflammation. What's the point of that happening? After all, if you have not been somehow infected by something, it's a sterile blunt injury. Why is now your immune system, why are these macrophages now secreting all kinds of non-specific poisons for the purpose of killing microbes before they kill you when nothing's gotten in? It's just injury. It's just your own cells that have died, that have been injured and that died, and you need to initiate the the process of cleaning up the mess and repairing the tissue. Well, the cleaning up the mess role of these macrophages is not the same thing as inflammation, which is another level of activation. And it's, it's really directly comparable to first responders out there in the world, right? So let's say there's a pileup on the highway. Who shows up? Who's the first responders? The state troopers come along, right? They're cops. They come along, they radio for backup, they, they call for ambulances and tow trucks, they take accident reports, they get out and they redirect traffic, and then they go back to their base when it's all moving again and they're on their way. Well, interestingly, they are armed, right? We know they're cops, they've got loaded guns in their holsters, and if there's trouble, they'll use them. But if it's just a pileup, just an accident, they're not going to show up at the scene come around screeching with the brakes and then, you know, come out of their patrol cars shooting the place up.

The guns draw.

But in your body, most people's body, when you're glycine deficient, that's exactly what happens. Whenever there is injury, whenever there is cell death from any reason, because there's not enough glycine around, the glycine is like a trigger lock. So it actually, inflammation is not an appropriate response to injury. And even when it's a response to infection, it's often overdone.

The immune system goes into overdrive, even that part of it.

Yes, those not needed. Yes, that's right. The first responders start responding as if there is a bad infection when there's maybe probably no infection at all.

No infection at all.

Now, okay. So this happens not only when there's frank injury, just if you sprain your ankle or you get a severe sunburn. This happened to me in answer to your question about how this all came about. In 2010, I had, my brother-in-law had scored tickets to a baseball game at the new Yankee Stadium, which I had not been to. It opened in 2009. This was 2010. I was very excited as a lifelong Yankee fan. And I had, I didn't wear a hat. I don't usually wear a hat, but I had my short sleeve shirt on, Yankee shirt, and, you know, shorts on. And because I wasn't going to the beach, it never occurred to me to put on sunscreen. But there it was. It was around the 10th of June, very close to the solstice, in New York, but with a cloudless sky and a new stadium with no obstructions to the sun. So on about the 5th inning, I started to feel a little warmth in my thighs, and I looked down, and to my horror, every place where my skin was exposed, it looked like I had been to the beach for a couple of hours without sunscreen. Yeah, I had done this to myself in my youth. A few times. So I knew what, what I was in for. I mean, I was certain I'm going to have excruciating pain just getting dressed, undressed, bathed for the next couple of days. And after all that, it's just going to blister and peel and come off. Well, so the first thing I did was I got into the shade, and then the next thing I knew— uh, not the next thing I knew, but in looking down and considering, you know, my sun exposure— the next thing I knew was that it was starting to fade.. And then it continued to fade and it was pretty much gone the next day. No reaction, no typical reaction. This is a startling response because, I mean, I was certain that this response was going to happen, but why didn't it happen? Well, since 2008, I was experimenting on myself with glycine. I knew that it was a simple and harmless amino acid. Mm-hmm. And that if I took 10 grams a day, which I then did religiously every day since about 2008, that nothing bad was going to happen and maybe something good was going to happen. Well, so I completely didn't expect it, but I realized at the time that that's what it was. And then I had another experience the same year where I actually fell 4 feet onto a concrete floor, onto my tailbone directly. Get— I got up after the pain subsided after about half a minute, managed to finish what I was doing. And then went out with my wife actually dancing that night.

Hmm.

You know, which we didn't think we could do. And the next day I felt perfectly normal. I just had a big bruise. So sunburn, blunt injury, light bulb, right? In that order. It doesn't keep firing.

It doesn't, the immune system doesn't keep firing after it, after it's no longer needed.

But it doesn't even start firing in terms of inflammation doesn't even start unless there is some microbe for it to kill. So inflammation is really the secretion of poisons. It's like a bunch of stages of a military response, you know. It's a military attack, so there's, so there's, uh, rifles and pistols and artillery and missiles and aircraft and all kinds of armaments that your immune system has— T cells and B cells. You know, inflammation is the first response. That your immune system has against infectious microbes. But if there are no infectious microbes to kill, you're just destroying normal tissue. So that's, that's really, uh, the basis of it. It's the, the function of glycine. It's not even in that sense a biochemical effect of glycine. It's what you might call a cellular physiological effect. It's just part of the environment that these cells need to be in. It keeps them from getting activated inappropriately. They get activated to clean up the mess, to go around and, you know, gobble up the cells and cell debris, but not to make the place inflamed, not to generate, you know, some kind of a, of a toxic reaction.

And it, it becomes chronic because of the shortage of glycine. Is that—

Yes. Well, it, it, it's chronic if the glycine is consistently short. Consistently, you know, lower than it should be, if you are, you know, not euglycemic but hypoglycemic, not glycemic but glycemic, glycine in the blood, if that's chronically low, then yes, these will be chronic problems. Now, the other reasons why they're chronic problems that lead to familiar situations like heart disease and cancer and diabetes is that there are many physiological functions in the body that actually produce injury routinely on a minor level. So blood circulation, you know, your, your blood pressure, even if you don't have high blood pressure, it's still pretty high. So especially when you're doing a lot of exercise, that blood, when it is flowing through high-pressure arteries, and especially where they branch off, where the coronary arteries branch off is the highest, and where the carotid arteries branch off to go to the head, and where the renal arteries branch off to go to the kidneys, those are high-pressure points. Of a high-pressure fluid system, and so it naturally generates some turbulence. And with turbulence, you get these minor little micro injuries. And if that keeps happening over time, as the body tries to repair it while also engaging in an inflammatory response, you just end up building up a plaque, chronic inflammation, which makes the blood hypercoagulable, more likely to clot, and narrows the opening through which the blood can go, and eventually you get, you get heart disease, you get stroke, you get things like that. Also other diseases, uh, like cancer, for example, that I mentioned. If you look at, for example, uh, let's take breast, breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer, which is less common, it has been known for decades to be directly proportional to how many times in her lifetime a woman has ovulated.

Why?

We don't know. We didn't know. Um, but it is directly proportional to that number of times. So for example, if you have a lot of kids and you breastfeed them all, you don't ovulate that much, risk of ovarian cancer is low. If you, if you don't have a lot of kids, but you don't take a, a, you know, a hormonal birth control, right? Uh, it's not really hormonal because they're synthetic drugs, but if you take birth control pills, what do they do? They inhibit ovulation. So guess what? The risk of breast— of the risk of ovarian cancer is lower when you take birth control pills. Why is that? You're ovulating less. So still, what happens in ovulation? Well, ovulation is not a very passive, easy process. The, the egg, the ripe egg, you know, toward the, uh, you know, middle of a menstrual cycle is actually ejected from the ovary like it's shot out of a cannon or a volcano. It's interesting to see the photomicrographs, very classic in, in, in endocrine textbooks showing the, the expulsion of, of a, of a ripe egg from a rabbit's ovary, for example. It's an explosive process. It always damages the surface of the ovary month after month after month. If it just heals, no problem, that's natural. But if inflammation happens, it becomes chronic.

Hmm.

In the case of the breasts, it's a little different. It's the number of cycles, not ovulations. So, for example, in that case, birth control pills actually increase the risk of breast cancer. Why? Well, every month during a non-conceptive cycle, when a woman's breasts undergo a little growth spurt, from the estrogen and progesterone that are produced in the third week of the cycle. That's needed in order to prepare the breast for their 9-month journey toward becoming real potent milk factories to feed a big baby or two, right? When the, you know, when birth happens. Well, if that doesn't happen, if conception doesn't happen, what happens? That little growth spurt has to end. Those cells that were created, those excess cells, what do they do? They die. And so, uh, no problem again if you have enough glycine. If you're glycine deficient, you get chronic low-level inflammation during that third week of the cycle, or, or after the third week of the cycle. Now, what happens with birth control pills is they actually suppress ovulation by giving you the equivalent of secreting estrogen and progesterone through like 3 weeks of the cycle, not just one.

Mm.

So the exposure to those hormones is greater, or to those drugs is greater, and the growth is greater. The breasts grow a little more every month, but still that growth regresses at the end of the month before menstruation. And it's so you get a little more inflammation month after month. And that's why the risk of breast cancer is, uh, proportional to the number of menstrual cycles that a woman has, ovulating or not. So all of these things, those things show up statistically and epidemiologically over the years. But these can now be understood in the context of chronic inflammation, which is now generally appreciated, but that that is based on a situation of chronic glycine deficiency. This is still not generally appreciated, but it's getting there. There's some good research from the Mayo Clinic in the last couple years. Science is beginning to catch up, catch up and catch on. And, uh, the whole purpose of my making a product available and then writing a book about it is basically to make as many people as possible aware of it so that they can actually take advantage of it. Because glycine is as simple as possible, uh, you can get as a nutrient. It's the basis of all of the benefits of bone broth and collagen supplementation because most of the glycine is in the bones and the connective tissue. Whereas most of the methionine is in the muscle.

So you're, you're making your argument for the importance of glycine and how does it relate to the development of, you know, other chronic conditions of metabolic syndrome and other— Right.

Metabolic syndrome, which, which is typically referred to as pre-diabetes, right? This happens for a couple of reasons. One of them is The, they know now that if you, if you're, let's say you become a type 2 diabetic, like, you know, you're, you gain extra weight.

Yeah. Lay down.

So you're 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight. And, and the doctor says, well, you know, it's from all that visceral fat, which, you know, is, is why your overweightness is causing diabetes. And if you lose the weight, the diabetes will go away. That's true. Well, but why is that? And well, it turns out, and it's a very good clinical trial done in Mexico City in 2008, I believe, that if you supplement with glycine, the diabetes can be reversed without losing any weight. Why? Because it's not the fat cells themselves, it is the immune cells, the macrophages that are embedded in the fat. That become more sensitive as you gain weight. Fat cells are very interesting. You know, when, when most organs and tissues grow, how do they grow? Cellular multiplication. When you gain weight, when your fat content, you know, the fat in your belly goes from 20 pounds to 30 pounds to 40 pounds, you actually don't get cellular multiplication. The cells get fatter individually. And that's for the most part what happens. And when they do, they get more fragile. When they get more fragile, they, you know, they are more vulnerable to die, to be injured, damaged. And so the macrophages, of which there are more, the more visceral fat you have, the more macrophages you have embedded in them to, uh, take care of the, uh, dead and dying cells that occur. And so you end up with more and more chronic inflammation, which is also there in the islets of the pancreas. But these, the addition of glycine fixes that. And one of the reasons that it fixes that is that, and this was discovered pretty recently, I think in the last few years, very exciting research, is that obesity leads to diabetes. But one of the things that obesity directly and predictably leads to is a decrease increase in glycine synthesis. Very interesting. So a couple of things are going on. You're becoming more vulnerable to cellular injury, which is prone to cause damage and start the process, the road toward diabetes, if you're glycine deficient. But it also makes you more glycine deficient. So you get this, you know, this sort of push-pull, uh, descent into a disease state can happen fairly quickly, but it can also be the good news. It can be reversed very quickly.

So the glycine will kind of reverse that predisposition to diabetes, right?

Doesn't mean you can't— all, see, all these diseases, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, you can still get all these diseases, but the likelihood is lower, the onset is later, the, you know, the reversal is easier.

Mm-hmm.

Um, all, all of these things. There have been other diseases too. Like, for example, in, in 2015, I, I got a case of shingles.

Yeah.

Friend of mine is a neurologist. I went to see him, took one look at me. I said, I think I had shingles. He took one look, he says, yep, classic. I had that, uh, unilateral rash.

I'll never go back.

Yeah, classic shingles. And I had it for most of the summer of 2015. So at the time, I was How old was I? I was, you know, 64. So, um, you know, typical age for getting shingles. And it was classic, except for one thing. That rash, which is often described as your skin being on fire, very, very painful, persistent for several weeks or a month or two— no pain. No, I didn't even know it was there because I was soaping up in the shower one morning and felt the bumps with my fingers. What's that? Feels like some kind of a rash or reaction. I look in the mirror, hold another mirror back there. Wow, that looks like shingles.

It was visible.

So I had shingles. Yeah, I also had— I had COVID. Yeah, I had, you know, Delta strain of COVID in 2021, and I know where I got it, and, you know, through a family member and all of that. That's another story, but, um, The important part of the story is I got a case of COVID I felt awful. It was like having a really nasty intestinal flu, and I was sick. I felt very sick for about 2 weeks and then another, another week later. So I would say the total time of having this was, was 3 weeks. You couldn't consider it a severe illness because I wasn't bedridden. I needed about 12 hours a day of sleep, 12 hours a night, and I felt really like not doing anything or eating anything. My sense of smell disappeared, and then eventually it came back. I fever for about a day, diarrhea for about a day, and that was it. But guess what?

Smaller scale symptoms.

But also not just smaller in scale.

Yeah.

Not one cough, not one sneeze, not one wheeze, not one episode of shortness of breath. Nothing respiratory at all. As far as I could tell, this is not a respiratory virus.

And if you were glycine deficient, all those symptoms would multiply.

Yes. Because, because the, the macrophages in the, in the lungs, right? What are called alveolar macrophages. Mm-hmm. Are provoked to causing inflammation by the spike protein if there's not enough glycine around to prevent it.

How, how does it, how does the deficiency of glycine affect brain health and maybe risk for dementia?

Well, dementia is now most often referred to as type 3 diabetes. So it's really the same kind of disease process. However, there's also another another component of it that, uh, so it's not only that, but it's also the fact that, uh, dementia, Parkinsonism, or, or, and different, uh, let's see, chronic, chronic encephalopathy will often happen from like head injuries, right? And we never, never used to have that before. You know, there were boxing and football and everything like that. You know, sure, you could always get serious head injuries, but this business of chronic encephalopathy is really something new, concussion protocols and all of that. Well, I also got a severe concussion. I had, I had just driven a couple of hours and was not hydrated, didn't drink any water, had a nice glass of wine after I got to my, my kid's house in Philadelphia when I lived in Upstate New York. And then I got up quickly and momentarily I fainted and my head went wham against the sharp wooden wooden corner of a desk, of the table in the kitchen. And next thing I knew, I was on my back, you know, which was close to a minute later, I guess, maybe half a minute later, on my back talking to my kids and forgetting some things, you know, being in a state of confusion for about half a minute or a minute. So they called the, you know, they called 911, and the ambulance came and took me away. And I was feeling okay after that. I could remember everything and recognize everybody. And there wasn't any blood. It just hurt, you know, where my head hit it very hard. So they're doing— they're examining me in the ER, and I remember about what time it was. It was just about 2 hours after I had fallen, just sitting in the ER being examined, waiting, resting, all of that, that my head no longer hurt. It was still tender if you pressed it there, but no, nope, not even a headache anymore.. And by the time they let me out, they said, yeah, because I had a loss of memory momentarily and had some confusion, it was classified as a substantial concussion. But after that, I never had any problems after that. And I never had recurrent headaches, memory loss, nausea, nothing. It just healed. Why? Because there are macrophages in the brain. They're called microglia. And they're just like macrophages everywhere else in the body. They're the first responders whose job it is to clean up the mess in terms of infection. And if there's not enough glycine, they will also cause inflammation. And by the way, it is, I am convinced, I wrote a, I wrote a, uh, an article about this about 5 years ago in, uh, no, more than that now, about 7 years ago in the British Medical Journal Online, because I believe enough, uh, evidence has accumulated in the published peer-reviewed medical literature that autism, which is now greater than 1% incidence, is also due to glycine deficiency. So why are we more glycine deficient than ever before? Well, or unlike our forebears, when we consume meats, fish, and poultry, we usually consume the muscle meats. We cut the muscle off the bone and we throw the bones in the trash instead of the soup, right? Grandma always put it in the soup. Right? In addition, the meat that we eat, you know, not being, you know, grass-fed beef or wild game or something like that, the beef and the, and the pork and everything, they're just basically fed soybean meal and fattened up on feedlots so that the meat is really nicely well-marbled and tender. Very, very, very little collagen in the, in the muscle meat. So that the difference between muscle meat and connective tissue and bone is even more exacerbated. And the more— and we eat more of it now than we did, right? Being affluent as we are. So you have your bacon and eggs for breakfast, and you have your tuna fish sandwich for lunch, and you have your beef or chicken dinner 3 times a day, 7 days a week. We're eating a lot of muscle meat without eating the corresponding bones. And remember that glycine is the way that the body, that the liver gets rid of excess methionine.

Mm-hmm.

So if you add more glycine, it doesn't get rid of, uh, excess methionine any quicker. But if you need to get rid of more of it, you use up more of the glycine that you have available from endogenous production or from the diet. So what happens is that eating the typical omnivorous diet, meat, fish, and poultry diet, they always say, well, you know, being a, a vegan, is better. You have lower incidence and later onset of things like heart disease and cancer, and you live longer and all of that because it's better to eat animal pro— better to eat vegetable protein than animal protein. Well, it's all about the amino acids because protein only gets absorbed when it's digested, broken down into its component amino acids, all protein. So it's a matter of what amino acids are there.. And it turns out that it's glycine. If you have a meat, fish, and poultry diet largely, or even a full-on keto diet, which is where those things are really exaggerated, you're getting more methionine.

Mm-hmm.

But if you also have the equivalent of the rest of the animal, the bones and the connective tissue, then you will offset that. You'll balance that and have enough glycine to go around and keep you from being glycine deficient. And the amount of that is about, As I say, it's about an extra 8 grams a day, which is about a quart or a liter, however you like to measure it. A quart or a liter of bone broth every day will have the same effect as my product Sweet Amine, which has 8 grams of glycine in it.

A quart of bone broth?

About a quart of bone broth a day will give you about what you need.

Are there other, are there other ways to bring this into our diet besides bone broth?

Sure, sure. You can do, you can get the same protein, which is very glycine rich.

Rich.

The other way is that, you know, the, a glycine supplement like Sweet Amin, right? Right. Or you can have gelatin, which is essentially collagen peptides. You know, it's denatured collagen, which is readily absorbable. And so if you take, for example, you may know, if you go into the grocery store and you get a, a box of unsweetened gelatin, right? It comes, it comes in these little boxes. Maybe, you know, half an inch thick.

And the plain white box.

Yeah, yeah, those little, little boxes of, uh, like Knox unflavored gelatin. You open the box, it has 4 packets, and each packet you can mix with water and make, uh, or you can mix it with fruit juice and make basically 4 servings of Jell-O. So it's like the equivalent of 16 servings of Jell-O worth of gelatin in each of those little boxes. Well, each packet of uh, glycine, and, uh, there's a little, little taurine and erythritol to adjust the sweetness and make it more like sugar. Yeah, should have it somewhere.

There it is.

Okay, there it is, showing away. Turn it around so that the—

and that's how many—

yeah, there it is, Sweet Amine. That's each one of those stick packs, which gives you the sweetness of about maybe 2 teaspoons of sugar, uh, but has no sugar in it. It's basically just mainly glycine. Yeah. 8 grams of glycine. That's equivalent to the gelatin that you would find in a whole box of Knox Gelatin.

Wow. That's 4 packets. Okay.

So, so it's, it's hard to get. You need to eat a lot of it.

Yeah.

If you're not going to take a glycine supplement, you need to have a lot of bone broth or a lot of gelatin. But this is very easy, you know, just 8 grams, just put it in your, use it to sweeten your coffee or tea instead of any other sweetener that you would use, whether it's sugar or, you know, So that tube you just held up was 8 grams. That's it. Got 8— it's got— it's 9.6 grams, but 8 grams of it is glycine. There's also some taurine and a little bit of erythritol.

That's a daily recommendation?

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a daily serving. Uh, that's usually— some people say they need more of it, but usually, yeah, you know, if you take that much, it works.

Aside from testing our immune system, how do we know if we're deficient in glycine? I mean, how are there tests that we, blood lab?

Well, sure. You can test, you can test your blood for glycine. Yeah. Although I would say the easiest way is just to try it. We sell it risk-free, by the way.

So you're okay. Good. Good. No, that's good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can try it. If you don't like it for any reason, just say, hey, I don't like it. Okay. We'll give you your money back. You don't have to return any empty boxes or packets or anything. Okay.

And how is it sold?

So it's sold online at sweetamine.com.

Uh-huh.

Uh, S-W-E-T-A-M-I-N-E.

There's the box.

Okay.

Anti-inflammatory sweetener. Okay.

And, uh, that, uh, as I say, we say if you could buy a 12-day challenge, which is 12 sticks, or you can buy a full box of 30, that's a month's supply. Uh, and if you do either one of those, as I say, it's sold risk-free. And you usually, most people who have chronic inflammation can feel it cuz you know, if you get injured, you know, it's going to be sore. You know, I mean, it's gonna hurt. And the way you can tell if you have pain, let's say joint pain, if you know it's inflammation or not, if it's inflammation, it's gonna hurt. If it's not inflammation, it may only hurt when you're actually stressing the injured joint. So for example, sometimes, you know, I play softball. So sometimes I'll, you know, I'll pull a muscle. Really did a number on a hamstring last year. Wow. So I was out for 6 weeks. But usually a simple muscle pull that used to have me out for about 3 weeks now, it heals in a week.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't have inflammation. So let's say you pull a muscle and then I'm sitting down, interviewing with you, right? Just sitting here for a half hour. Well, a few minutes into the interview, I forgot I was injured. Nothing hurts. And then when I try to get up, oh, oh yes, I remember, I, uh, you know, I pulled my hamstring or another muscle, you know. So it doesn't— inflammation will hurt all the time because those cells are secreting poisons and causing swelling and pain, and, uh, it's irritating the nerves on a constant basis. If you just have an injury where the wounded member the wounded joint is irritating a nerve, it'll hurt while you're stressing it. But when you're not stressing it and there's no inflammation, there's nothing to cause the pain, you know.

So, uh, two people, um, one is very responsive to colds and flus and, um, maybe black and blue if they bump them, you know, arm or elbow, and the other person doesn't. Um, we can largely explain that by glycine levels.

Bruising is something else though. I mean, that's, you know, oh, it is something else. Yeah. Well, sure. Bruising is basically just the fragility of the red blood cells, right?

Okay.

They break up and they reduce, release hemoglobin, which then breaks down, you know, into the tissues, which then breaks down and causes all these wonderful colors that take a week or two to fix.

Well, that's different from the inflammation.

That's different.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, you get injured, you're gonna get a, get a bruise. Okay. And you should. You know, it's, you know, but aside from that, then aside from the bruising, aside from that, usually it's, you know, whether it's working out soreness from that. But typically, you know, people who try it will have some, some kind of pain. I mean, I had, for example, my daughter was susceptible to that. It turned out she's like a low methylator, you know, and it's interesting what happens with low methylation. 'Cause with low methylation, the best thing to do is to supplement with methionine. Remember, glycine is to get rid of methionine.

Mm-hmm.

That's kind of a temporal thing because right after you eat, the low methylators basically have a mutation which, which interferes with the recycling of methionine.

Mm-hmm.

But it doesn't interfere with the clearance of it. So when a low methylator has that cheeseburger, his or her liver is gonna get rid of that methionine just as fast as it will in somebody who doesn't have the mutation. But then in between, they're low in methionine. They can't recycle it. So they could have a, a nice snack that's methionine rich. The best thing I've come up with that is Brazil nuts. But a lot of times those people will be more prone to respiratory infections and that sort of thing. So sometimes there are genetic predispositions which really don't have anything to do with glycine.

I see.

It's hard to generalize.

It's good to know. Yeah. Well, in a, in a minute left, tell us about your book, The Glycine Miracle.

Oh, the book, The Glycine Miracle. Yeah. This will— it's available on Amazon. You can find the link on sweetamine.com.

Okay.

It's called The Glycine Miracle: The Science of Living Long and Free from Inflammation.

Yes.

I decided to put the words miracle and science in the same title because a contradiction is a way to sort of pique interest.

Yeah.

And make you wonder what's going on with this book. Is it a— is it a miracle or is it science? Well, it's It's the science behind what, what many, many customers have experienced as, as like a miracle for getting rid of chronic pain, migraines.

Yeah.

You know, all the kinds of diseases like, you know, psoriatic arthritis and things like that that you see commercials for really are due to glycine deficiency. Now, by, but I have to say, stay under the radar of the FDA, of course, is that this is not It's not designed to treat or cure or diagnose any disease. It's really just to fill in a nutritional gap, which renders us prone to not only more diseases, chronic diseases, but also more severe, you know, outbreaks of diseases that doesn't protect you from getting. But for example, when I got shingles, if I had shingles and the rash on my back, were as bad as the rash usually is described, then I'd probably consider getting a vaccine.

Hmm.

But it was really no big deal. Nothing I would need a vaccine for.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah. That's quite a difference. Well, that's an important supplement then as you're doing. I mean, the science behind this is so, so, so compelling.

And it's the whole, it is, I think. I mean, I was, I was convinced, you know, with some self-experimentation from your own literature, your own assaults. And, you know, you find, you find, you know, once you find a certain piece of puzzle, you know, if you do a jigsaw puzzle, right, you find that one piece after struggling for hours, and all of a sudden that one piece of the picture, all the other pieces of the puzzle start fitting together. It starts explaining all kinds of things you find in the literature.

Oh, that's good.

And so that's, that's the way it is. But the whole, that whole process and a lot of, uh, my view on science and what's really a problem with medical science just in general, how we've fallen away from real science in the pursuit of science. Because everybody says science, science, science, show me the data. The data is the last step. The first step is asking the right questions.

Great question.

And coming up with a hypothesis to test the answer to that question. And then that's how science, real science, proceeds. But unfortunately, now we have what we call data-based science. We have these so-called omics disciplines, metabolomics and genomics and proteomics.

Evidence-based. Yes.

Yeah. Which means, oh, let's just take a— let's see what makes diabetics diabetic. We'll take 100 diabetics and 100 people without diabetes, take a drop of blood from each of them and stick it in the analyzer, which can now analyze 300 or 400 different metabolites at the same time, and let the computer figure out which is significantly different from the normal population than the disease population. And then let's try and figure out why that is. So that's starting with the data, and more and more you see science is that way because we can, because we have the technology to collect so much data, we do it. And in the old days, that would have been called a fishing expedition because it is a fishing expedition. Now we can just trawl with those big nets and collect all the data and then try to analyze it from there, and that's what we used to call hypothesis-based science. Well, what is now called hypothesis-based science is what we used to just call science. So, so, you know, it's, it's unfortunate, you know, you can— it's a trade-off. More technology, less good theory. But, um, it's still possible to do good science, and it really does come down to asking the right questions and following— just follow where the trail leads.. And, uh, you know, if you have preconceived ideas, you have to be willing to be confronted, shocked by no reaction to a sunburn, no reaction to a fall onto your tailbone. You know, all of these things. Yes, it gets your attention because, wait a minute, something's not happening the way it always has happened. It always happens to everybody else. And that's how you, you know, we learn that way.

So, well, thanks so much for being a guest on our program today. This is valuable information for Just, I hope so.

Just trying to share it with everybody. Yeah.

Just before we end though, I just wanna remind my listeners to visit my website at livingto100.club and sign up as a club insider. As a longevity insider, you'll enjoy many benefits, including a free copy of my 9 Tips to Make Living Longer Enjoyable, 100 inspirational quotes, invitations to live discussions, and participation in our private group forum. And if you're affiliated with a senior living community, be sure to explore my Better, Longer, and Happier card deck series at livingto100.solutions, a powerful resource designed to promote positive aging and engagement. Today's episode is also brought to you by Quantum Squares energy bars, packed with 100 milligrams of organic caffeine, 10 grams of plant-based protein, and healthy fats. Perfect for workouts, busy days, or travel, and they provide long-lasting energy. As a listener, you get an exclusive 25% discount by visiting QuantumSquares.com and using promo code AGINGWELL. That's one word, AGINGWELL, at checkout.. I earn a commission when you use my code. So thank you for supporting the podcast while enjoying this amazing project. Dr. Brand, thanks so much for being a guest on our show today. You're, you have a website. Tell our listeners what your website is.

That is sweetamine.com to order Sweetamine, the glycine supplement, and, and learn how to live without chronic inflammation and to learn all the science behind it, just, uh, check out the book The Glycine Miracle: The Science of Living, uh, Long and Free from Inflammation. And, uh, that, uh, the link to get that book from Amazon is also on the website. On the website, on thesweetamine.com, right?

Great. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in today. Until next time, stay positive, stay inspired, and keep thriving.