The Hidden Cause of Aging? How Chronic Inflammation Affects Your Health with Joel Brind

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

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club, where we explore what it really means to live longer and better. I'm Dr. Joe Casciani, a geropsychologist. Focused on the mindset, habits, and science of aging well. Each episode brings you practical ideas and conversations to help you stay engaged, resilient, and purposeful at any age. And now to today's program. In this return visit to our podcast, I welcome back biochemist and researcher Dr. Joel Brind. For an updated conversation on the growing interest in glycine and its potential role in healthy aging. Building on our earlier discussion, Dr. Brind will explain in clear everyday language why chronic inflammation may be connected to many of today's most common health concerns, including insulin resistance, metabolic disorders, cognitive decline, and reduced vitality, with aging. Before I begin, let me give you a little background. Dr. Joel Brind is a biochemist with a PhD in biochemistry, physiology, and immunology, and 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 potential to address conditions like metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative disorders. In 2010, Dr. Brind founded Natural Food Science LLC, where he developed Sweet Amine, 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. Brint continues to provide actionable insights into the connections between diet, biochemistry, and long-term health. Dr. Brint, welcome back to our program.

Thank you very much. Good to be here again with you.

Yeah, you're welcome. Looking forward to our follow-up. So for many listeners who may have missed our earlier conversation, can you briefly explain what glycine is and why it's become such an important focus of your research?

Oh, it is the simplest of all the amino acids. There are approximately 20. There are actually a couple more odd ones, but they're basically 20 amino acids, which are the different Lego blocks, if you will, from which all the various proteins are made in our body. And glycine's probably the most abundant or the second most abundant in the body. And it's also considered non-essential because your body can make it. Basically, your liver and some other cells can make it from simpler compounds, which is in a way a kiss of death as far as research is concerned, because who Who's gonna research something that's non-essential? We all found out that the word non-essential is toxic, right? During COVID we all learned that. And so glycine is the very simplest one. And it also has other roles in the body, quite a few other roles in the body besides being one of the building blocks of protein. Because it's so simple, it's so fundamental, It's one of the molecular components, or it's used to make molecular components for DNA, for neurotransmitters, for hormones, for lots of different things in the body. And one particular function in the body, which is actually not a biochemical function, is it functions as a regulator of cellular physiology in the immune system. How? By being present in relatively high concentrations it is the gatekeeper of a molecular switch, which is called a chloride channel, a glycine-gated chloride channel. It literally opens or closes the channel, allowing chloride ions to flow in or out of the cell. Well, so what? Well, what does that mean? The cells which cause inflammation, which we now hear so much about because inflammation is the basis or the, the bedrock, if you will, of so many different conditions, so many chronic disease conditions that most of the things that make us sick and die these days actually are grounded in chronic inflammation. And everybody knows that in the research world, everybody has acknowledged that that's where all the research points to. And it works in that regard as a switch. The cells that cause inflammation are called macrophages. And the switch is like every switch that turns cells on and off, is just like the electrical switch on the wall that may turn the light on and off.

Sure.

It's an electrochemical switch, if you will. And when you have a switch, you have two poles in the switch, right? And when the switch is open, when the light is turned off, the poles are separated from each other, and one of them has a voltage on it like 120 volts, and the voltage of the other one is zero. So there's— the switch is polarized, right? 120 volts is the potential, electrical potential between them. When you turn the switch on, right, you close the switch, now there is no polarization. The voltage between them is not 120, it's zero, and that activates the switch to go on. Well, activities in cells work pretty much the same way. And ordinarily, the polarization of the cell is there is a negative voltage inside relative to outside. It's not 120 volts, unless you're an electric eel, you have voltages like that. But in our ordinary physiological experience, we have about 0.07 volts, about 70 millivolts is what the voltage is. And in the ordinary activities of the cell, especially macrophages, which whenever there is cellular injury, cell death, damage, they have to come around and clean up the mess. And they're all like little amoebas, phagocytosing, engulfing, engulfing the particles of cells and cell debris. And as they do that, you know, things leak out and things leak in, and so that voltage may deteriorate. And if the voltage deteriorates too much, guess what? The cell gets activated to what's called an M1 level, Macrophage 1, as opposed to Macrophage 2, which is basically cleaning up the mess. Macrophage 1 is now causing inflammation. It starts a whole cascade of secreting poisons, which will also damage normal tissue in addition to killing whatever microbe got in before it kills you. But it's not supposed to do that. And glycine in very high concentrations, not as a biochemical in a sense, because It is not being transformed into something else. Glycine is not being used to make something else. It's, it's basically at a certain concentration keeping those gates open, allowing chloride channel, chloride ions, which are negatively charged ions, to enter the cell. And that keeps the voltage up so that the cell does not be polarized, doesn't get depolarized. And start the chain of events of inflammation. Now, what, what the key discovery, the key scientific breakthrough here, and there is one that is more key than anything else, is that the commonly accepted definition of inflammation is actually wrong because it's a half-truth. If you look at any source of, any source of medical information, you can go to Wikipedia or WebMD or any physiology textbook that you like. Or any immunology textbook that you like, or medical textbook, it will say that, that inflammation is the, uh, the body's or the immune system's first response to infection or injury. That is a half-truth. It is not the first natural first response to injury, only to infection. Why do we say that it's a first response to injury? Because that's what always happens. That's everybody's experience. But it actually is inappropriate, and all it does is damage normal tissue and create chronic damage, chronic dysfunction, which leads to all kinds of problems down the road, including ordinary aches and pains.

So it contributes to infection. I mean, to it.

So, but infection, you need You need that because you got to kill that bug before it kills you. If that's what's happened, that's why your immune system needs to be able to do that. But because of the general situation in the population around the world, most people are deficient in glycine. So it's actually not non-essential. That's the corollary really to that initial discovery, to that principal discovery of it not being appropriate. To deploy inflammation in, in the case of injury. The corollary really is that we tend to be deficient, that we don't ordinarily get enough to keep, to maintain that integrity of the immune system so that it doesn't cause inflammation. So an ordinary diet will give you enough glycine because your body can make it. What your body can make and what you ordinarily eat, you ordinarily eat 2 to 3 grams a day of glycine in the various proteins that you eat, but you need about 10 grams a day to maintain that function in the immune system to prevent inappropriate inflammation. So in that sense, most— well, many, let's say many researchers are now currently coming to view glycine as conditionally essential. And so that's, that's really the corollary, is that it's not non-essential after all because it has this other important function. That's been overlooked and for which it's needed in much higher concentrations.

So that's the reason it's on, the spotlight is on glycine. The shortage contributes to chronic inflammation, more or less.

Well, the shortage, if it stays that way, you know, 'cause glycine, what's not chronic is the concentration of glycine. It's a small molecule, a water-soluble molecule. It cycles through you very quickly. Its biological half-life is measured in hours, not days. And so, you know, you take, let's say, like the glycine supplement that I sell, the Sweet Amine. If you take Sweet Amine, you start taking it, and by the third day, by the second or third or fourth day, you feel usually, if you're feeling chronic inflammation 'cause you have aches and pains and so on, you will feel them go away. In 2 or 3 days. And you say, wow, this is great, but I don't know, is that really what's doing it? I'm not so sure. And then you go off it, 2, 3 days later, sure enough, the pain comes back. And so, you know, I encourage people to experiment on themselves because glycine is very, very safe. It's probably safer to ingest than water. I think it's virtually impossible to drink enough glycine solution at any strength to actually do yourself any harm. The closest that they've come to an LD50 for a, you know, a lethal concentration of glycine, it's something like 5 grams per kilogram. So for an ordinary 70-kilogram man like me— I weigh 75 kilograms, right? So, you know, what's 5 milligrams per kilogram? It's about 35 grams. 35 grams a day. That's about an ounce and a half of dry powder. I mean, you'd have to take a, you know, a tremendous amount.

Absolutely.

Um, uh, let's see. No, I'm sorry, 350. 350 grams. You know, it's sort of like you'd have, you'd have to take 12 ounces of dry powder, you know, to kill yourself. It couldn't— you couldn't do it.

So for the, for the non-medical, um, members of the audience here, including myself, why is, um Generally, why is chronic inflammation the root of so many health problems? So many.

Well, because, because as I mentioned, the— when inflammation is— it's a secretion of poisons. The immune system is now secreting poisons to try and poison something. It's like chemotherapy, you know, it's, it's, it's throwing a lot of heavy poison at something, some bug that got into you, to kill it before it kills you, because bacteria and viruses and, you know, mold and so forth, they can multiply very rapidly, even from very small doses. Like whenever there's a, you know, when there's some sort of a crisis in food contamination, right, where there's like salmonella poisoning, you know, when you have salmonella getting into the food supply and they recall batches of some kind of food or other, and hundreds of people or thousands of people can get sick. And very often, you know, and some number of people will die from it because if they're, you know, just a few bugs, like a dozen or two dozen Salmonella bacteria, which are tiny, tiny, tiny fractions of the size of a single human cell, if they get in, they can actually, they can actually cause a lethal infection. So it's very, very important for your body to be able to get these things right at the source and really throw some very heavy chemical poison at it. But when you're doing that from activation that's inappropriate, just from ordinary injury— and when I say injury, I mean even micro injuries, like from things like blood circulation. Blood circulation in your arteries, it's a very high-pressure fluid situation. So especially at branch points like where your coronary arteries branch off from your systemic aorta right outside the heart. The carotid arteries, the renal arteries, these high-pressure arterial branch points always generate turbulence, especially with things like exercise, you know. So turbulence, well, turbulence is going to cause micro damage, you know, it'll cause damage or death to a few cells around the branch point. It'll damage slightly the, the lining of the blood vessels. Well, so what? Your body's very Resilient, a little bit of damage, heals it right up, no problem, unless you're deficient in glycine. And then you get cells that come around and cause inflammation. And then when your body tries to repair itself through the inflammation, think about it, you have a blood vessel that's gotta be an opening on the inside. And then you, when you get a little hole in it, a little tear in it, what happens? The body tries to repair it putting a patch on it and another patch over the patch, and you get sort of scar tissue. Or the equivalent inside an artery would be an arterial plaque. It's basically like scar tissue inside the artery, and eventually it builds up and it clogs the, you know, it narrows the diameter of the artery. So you get atherosclerosis. And when— so atherosclerosis will happen basically A little popup came on my computer. I have no idea whether you saw it. But anyway, atherosclerosis then is what happens mostly in those arteries where they are at high-pressure branch points. And so when you get a blood clot, an inappropriate clot, or when the blockage just gets so much that it clogs up and compromises the blood supply enough to the heart itself, you can get a heart attack. To the brain, you can get a stroke. To the kidneys, you can get malignant hypertension from these arteries getting clogged up. So that's one way it can happen. Other ways is that when you have inflammation, the— all these poisons around, they tend to stimulate the development of cancer cells. So for example, one of the earliest epidemiological cancer associations observed was, oh, maybe 50 years ago, that in the case of ovarian cancer, women who get ovarian cancer are more likely to have ovulated more times in their fertile years. And every— because every time a woman ovulates from alternately one, one ovary and then the other ovary, alternating month to month, you get an ovulation. What's an ovulation? That's where the ovary releases an egg so that it's then possible to become fertilized. However, uh, that sounds very benign. The ovary releases an egg. Yeah, it releases an egg like a shotgun releases a bunch of buckshot. The volcano releases some, some, uh, you know, some, um, magma, you know, in the form of lava, you know.

Sure.

So this is, this is a very, very violent process. Well, it only happens once every other month. In each ovary, and it repairs itself. No big deal unless you have chronic inflammation, unless it gets inflamed because you're chronically deficient in glycine. So there are many processes like this which cause— naturally, part of the natural cycle of things, there is injury, there is cell death. The natural cycle of the rise and fall, for example, of tissue in the breasts When, you know, when every reproductive cycle, it's not only ovulation, but when that happens, there's also breast tissue that is multiplying to be able to produce enough milk to feed a baby when it's born. That happens during the menstrual cycle, right? About the third week of the menstrual cycle. But if conception does not happen, all those extra cells, they have to die off. No big deal. They die off, it's natural. What's the big deal? Well, the big deal is that if you're glycine deficient, you get inflammation month after month after month. So breast cancer is related very directly epidemiologically, statistically, to how many menstrual cycles you have had during your fertile years, if you're a woman, obviously. So all of these things can be, you know, the epidemiology is the statistical footprint, you know, the, the way you can track these events that happen. And, uh, and the— these all correlate very well with, with inflammation. And the other kind of epidemiology that you can see, uh, reflected so well in, in this particular area is, uh, where you look at a bunch of people with heart disease, a bunch of people with cancer, a bunch of people with diabetes, and you look at glycine levels. And you see, aha, glycine levels are lower in people with diabetes, lower in people with heart disease, lower in people who are obese, lower in diabetics, right? With the, all of these conditions which are related to chronic inflammation, all related to glycine deficiency. And we know very directly, as I explained before, the molecular events by which glycine prevents inflammation from happening. Appropriately. Yeah, it's a pretty simple story, uh, and in fact, you know, I love it because it's, it's one of the most simple stories. So many things get, you know, are very confusing because, you know, they seem to be very complicated. But of course, you know, the light really goes on, you know, when, uh, you know, when everything becomes simple. Like if you're doing a jigsaw puzzle, you finally find that, that one piece that seems to fit the picture, and then all of a sudden every other piece of the puzzle I mean, when I first discovered these things in like 20— uh, oh, 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, around there, you know, a new research would come out, or I would discover some older research, and some of my own research that I was doing with rats and mice, you know, would, would again, uh, you know, rats and mice live longer when you supplement their diet with glycine, uh, you know, among other things.

The puzzle pieces started fitting together.

Yeah, all the pieces started coming together. And when you know it's right, because no matter what happens, what kind of research is thrown at it, it's not— you don't get the apple cart upended, you know. Because if that's what, you know, you may think you're on to something in research. Research is a very frustrating business. It's not for everybody. Because I would say most, as I told the technician once who was having great difficulty, working in the lab. I don't think he stayed on in medical research because he was too easily frustrated. I said, you know, trying to console him after some experiment had failed, I said, you know, in medical research, I said, most experiments fail. They really do. They don't necessarily show you what you want. Sometimes you get in a groove where they do. Once you're into— you have a finding that's real,, and then you can do a whole bunch of confirmatory studies. Well, let's see if it does it when you do this. Let's see if it does it when you do that. What if we change the conditions this way, or we use something else that's similar? Or, you know, this— so then systematically, then you can do a series of experiments, one after another, that work because you're really confirming something that you found that's real. But if it's not real, if your hypothesis has some holes in it, you're going to run into experiments that don't work. They don't, they don't show you what you think they do. And this is another problem with research, is that many people run experiments and the experiment will work, it will give you the kind of result that you expected, but it won't be what you think it was. So we ran into a little bit of this also. I mean, we were, we were working on, um, a phenomenon called methionine restriction, which is if you take rats or mice and you feed them an amount of the, or a diet containing an amount of the essential amino acid methionine that's almost inadequate, almost deficient in methionine. You still allow them to eat as much as you want, but the diet is almost deficient in its methionine content. Then the rats won't grow normally, but they're still sort of happy and active. And they'll live 30 or 40% longer. So this is now known, it's been reproduced many times as a, the aging phenomenon called methionine restriction. Well, dietary methionine restriction. And so because it had just been established that glycine is the substrate or the, the material that is used by the liver to get rid of excess methionine, um, then, uh, we thought, well, if we supplement with methionine, maybe that'll make them live longer. And guess what?

It did.

Oh yes, glycine mimics, you know, methionine by, by helping to clear methionine out of the system. So it mimics methionine restriction. Well, it turned out that wasn't true. It didn't do that because when you looked at the data, guess what? It didn't change the amount of methionine in these animals' blood or in their liver. The amount of methionine was the same. So adding more glycine didn't help them get rid of methionine, was doing something else. What we found out was, of course, that it was the methionine all along that was stripping the glycine. And the glycine was not that sort of, oh well, you know, that sort of unimportant non-essential amino acid that the liver uses to dump excess methionine on. It was very important itself in health and disease and longevity in these animals. You can do longevity studies when animals live only 3 or 4 years anyway, right?

So it's really the, really the, the magic pill, so to speak.

It, it's magic in, in some ways, yes.

Deficiency seems to be, um, affecting so many areas of functioning in our body. And let's talk about brain health a little bit and how brain health, the connection there, memory and, you know, cognitive functioning, even mood. How, how does that, how does that come into the picture?

Well, in a couple of different ways. I think neurodegeneration with age is also ascribed to inflammation, you know, Parkinson's disease. I mean, I guess famous case, you know, Muhammad Ali, right? Like many other boxers, had his brains bashed in many times. Fewer than most because he was such a good boxer, but, you know, he ended up with Parkinson's disease. And, you know, I don't think anybody would argue that that's why he got Parkinson's Parkinson's disease because he was a boxer. And, you know, when you get knocked out by guys like Sonny Liston, you know, it's going to do some damage.

We used to call it dementia pugilistica, if you remember that, right? So there's getting the head blown around so many times with punches, right?

And so dementia is also associated with Parkinson's disease, really different parts of the brain that, you know, will affect different whether it's cognition or, you know, motor skills, that's that kind of thing. Well, so a lot of my, a lot of my research life had to do with self-experimentation, some of it unintentional. So once I, once I was on to this and I started taking glycine, 10 grams a day— now I take about 8 grams a day, that's the way I packaged the formulation, is to take 8 grams of supplemental glycine every day as sweetamine— but What, now that I was doing it, I have not been glycine deficient now for 15 years or 18 years about, you know.

Yeah.

So, uh, one time about 8 years ago, I, uh, I had just had a long drive and, uh, and I hadn't— didn't have any water on the trip, you know. It was like a 3 or 4 hour drive. And I, you know, when I, when I got to my— this is my kid's house— and when I got there, I, you know, I sat down, relaxed with a nice glass of wine, but I didn't have a glass of water. So I was dehydrated, and then when I got up a few minutes later, I was a little lightheaded, enough so that I blacked out just for a second. It was enough to go wham, right down on the sharp edge of a hardwood table. And the next thing I knew, I was on the kitchen floor looking up, and I see there are my kids there, and, uh, and I'm confused, you know. They say, you know, who are we? Oh yeah, I know you, and I know you, and 'And you know, what about Sweet Amine?' And I'd say, 'Sweet Amine, that's a nice name. What's that?' And it was like, 'Oh, because that's my product, right?' Of course, if I'm confused about that, I'm in bad shape. So the confusion lasted some number of seconds, you know, till I kind of came to. It was like, like the old Western movies where the bank robber comes in and clocks the guard on the head with the butt of his pistol, you know. And, uh, and so I was out momentarily. And then so they wisely called the, you know, the 911, and they came over and they took me to the ER, the ambulance and all of that. And I, you know, got to the hospital, they did their evaluation, and of course my head hurt. Well, after about 2 hours or so, because you have to wait for all kinds of things to happen, of course, and, um, after about 2 hours my head didn't hurt anymore. Confusion had long since dissipated. And they said, well, uh, you know, you had, you had a concussion, you know, you were confused unconscious briefly, you know, you had a, you know, a serious concussion and you really ought to follow it up. I said, you know, I said, I, I said, that's fine, I'll be fine, I'm okay now, I don't worry about it. And I didn't worry about it, and I don't worry about it. That was, as I said, that was 8 years ago, and I never had any kind of, uh, sequelae to that. Nothing ever bothered me again as far as, you know, you know, in my head or my brain or anything like that. So I'm convinced also that, you know, chronic traumatic— what is it, CTE they call it?

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Yeah, you know, that, that really is, again, it's a function of glycine deficiency. And, you know, I've seen a couple of other cases. I mean, I had another head injury a few years after that. And then I know I had a, I had a niece who used to play hockey, and she, she was about all of 4 foot 10. I think, you know, the uniform, the equipment made more than— she weighed more than she did. But she loved to play hockey. Yeah, she was skating around.

And she got knocked down a bit after she graduated college.

She was in an adult hockey league, amateur league, you know. She really got clocked on the head with a, with a puck, and, and that was the end of that, you know. But then she was, you know, she had a concussion, and, you know, she would get headaches and dizzy spells, a little double vision or something like that after that. And I said, hey, you really ought to try and take this, this glutamine glycine every day.

So there's a protective—

that went away. So I think, so that's, so that's one kind of thing, you know, for chronic or even acute brain injury. It's again, just like the injury in the interior of your arteries or whatever, it just heals if you have enough glycine around. So, um, as now, as far as you say mood and so on, there's a lot of buzz about glycine because of its effect on sleep. So glycine is also known as an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. And more recent studies, maybe studies that are within the last 10 years, I think, or so, have shown that it works via, mainly via the so-called NMDA receptor rather than the glycine receptor. So what are those? The glycine receptor and the NMDA receptor. NMDA receptors. Those are brain receptors which are also gated channels. So the glycine receptor, which is there on the macrophages and is important in inflammation, is also the same glycine receptor that works in the central nervous system to help to slow down impulses, you know, to sort of calm things down. So we know sort of how it does. So I— in, in so many people will buy glycine, will take glycine supplements in order to help them sleep. And many of my own customers will take it in the evening. And it doesn't make you sleepy, but it can, if you, if it's time to go to sleep, it'll help let you go to sleep. And what it does is it can actually lower your core temperature and provide the, you know, the basis for like a deep sleep and whether you sleep.

Deep sleep rather than light sleep. So it does help with that.

And the mechanisms have been worked out pretty much in rodents as to how it does it. And that does it through these two, through the NMDA receptor, as opposed to the, quote, classical glycine receptor, which is the one that's important in inflammation. So even working on these receptors, glycine interacts with a couple of different ones in different ways. So that's important in the brain.. And people know about that for sleep. There's even one Ajinomoto, which is a big amino acid manufacturing company in, in Japan. They sell a product called Glysom, which is basically little stick packs of glycine, similar to what I sell for a similar price. Only they only give you 3 grams instead of 8 grams. So it's a lot more expensive. But, you know, yeah.

You, you mentioned, like, the average person would need maybe 8 to 10 grams of glycine a day, right? So are there any, Any conditions, maybe chronic conditions or lifestyle habits, that would cause a need for more than that?

Uh, some— sometimes, because I know I have had the experience with customers who say that, um, you know, I have a feeling— I'm looking at— I'm looking at the screen and I see my— my— the, the, the left side of my face is kind of beginning to fade away because we, we had a very overcast rainy day and I think the sun is trying to come out, so the sky is getting brighter. So my, my natural lighting is starting to go a little— yeah, yeah, it's just my halo, you know, that's what it is, you know, just, just starting to shine there. But, um, um, the need for more glycine— the, uh, cust— one customer I remember came up to me in, um, uh, oh, I don't know, about 10 years ago, and she said, she, would it be okay to take more? I said, yeah, it's very, very safe, you can take as much as you want. And she tried— she had, I think, plantar fasciitis that was bothering her. She said, yeah, one packet, 8 grams, seemed to help a little. But then she tried 2. She had 2, really did the trick. So some— so for some people, occasionally, yes. So one customer said to me, she said, oh, so, so if I have this problem, should I take 2 then? And I said, well, that'd be good for business if I tell you to take 2 and it works for you. You'll keep taking 2 and you'll buy twice as much. Most likely you'll probably only need 1, you know. Some people even take a half and they find it's enough, you know. It depends on your metabolism, how quickly it cycles through you. But 8 is a good one-size-fits-all because you need about 10 grams a day and you get about 2 or 3 from a typical diet.

Typical diet.

The other, the other thing is that the way the diet works is that it depends what the diet is. Because remember I talked about that other amino acid, methionine. Well, methionine is very high in muscle meats and very low in like, you know, gelatin from the bones and connective tissues, whereas glycine is very low in muscle meats but very high in the connective tissues and bones. That's one reason why most people are glycine deficient these days more than they used to be, because I don't care what culture you come from, your grandma never threw the bones in the trash. She threw them in the soup. Right? No, they didn't throw away any food, any part of the animal. It was nose-to-tail eating. Yeah, whenever you had meat, fish, poultry, whatever. And so, uh, that gave a balance. So it's actually been documented. There was a study that was done in 2015, I think, in Oxford University, where they were looking— they were just looking at amino acids And they wanted to see if you ate more of certain amino acids, would you also get more of those amino acids showing up in your blood? They were looking to correlate intake of amino acids with the amount of amino acids in your blood plasma. And so they found that it pretty much worked out if you ate more histidine, 'cause they took 100 vegans, 100 vegetarians, 100 meat eaters, and 100 fish eaters. And they looked at all their, at the amino acids in their diet every day. And they looked at the amino acids in their free amino acids in their blood plasma. And they found generally a very good correlation. If you ate more histidine, you had more in your blood. You ate more lysine, you had more lysine in your blood and so on. But then it didn't work out for glycine. That was the one outlier. Why? Because the meat eaters had the least glycine in their blood. And the vegans had the most, even though the meat eaters, because meat is so high in protein that even if it's just about any kind of protein, you're— if you're a meat eater, that is an omnivore, you eat meat, fish, poultry, all of those things, dairy. If you eat that kind of a diet, you're going to have more intake of all the amino acids, including glycine, but they're not going to be in balance. Oh, so it turns out that the meat eaters had less glycine. So that's one of the reasons why we are so deficient now.

Oh, okay, it's a smaller percentage of the total.

I mean, that's right, right, the balance is off. So if you eat glycine-poor protein, even though it's, it's, it's got plenty of glycine in it, but relatively speaking it's got less glycine in it, you're going to have, uh, less glycine if you eat that kind of protein because the more methionine needs to use up some of the glycine to clear it. That's the other Caveat here is that when you eat too much methionine, even though that's essential, we eat far more than we need. So when you eat too much glycine, in the hour after you eat that cheeseburger, your liver is not doing the recycling that we all learned in biochemistry class about the methionine cycle, how the body recycles this key amino acid.

Mm-hmm.

After an hour after you've eaten that cheeseburger, your liver is busy getting rid of it as fast as it can. Because it has far too much. But for every molecule of methionine it needs to get rid of, it needs to use up 2 molecules of glycine.

Oh, wow.

So it— that's what, that's what we found in our experiments, really. Ultimately, that was the right answer.

Yeah, yeah.

Was that the excess— feeding an excess of glycine protected the body from the stripping of glycine that the methionine otherwise would cause.

So it gives it more—

so meanwhile, speaking of not drawing the right conclusions, the Oxford people had no idea why. They couldn't explain it. They couldn't explain their finding that, that the reason why meat eaters had less glycine in their blood. Couldn't explain it. But it's very simple, you know. Okay, things are too specialized these days, and they were amino acid people. They weren't aging people. They weren't biochemists. They were, you know, They had their little, their little lane, which was, oh, how much of this and how much of that, why is it? And then, because you have to understand with that research these days is now leaning on a lot of these tools called omics. Omics. O-M-I-C-S. Metabolomics, genomics, lipomics, where they will look at every gene or every gene product or every protein or every metabolite. So they were doing a metabolomic study where you can take a drop of blood and measure like 300 or 400 different things in it. So now, in the old days, you couldn't do that. So, but now they do what is called data-based research. They collect enormous amounts of data and then they publish all the results there. They put it down in their, in their paper and they let the computer decide what's significant, what isn't significant. They do what they call heat maps. Just to show what's different between, let's say, cases and controls in a study. So they're basically throwing the data up against the wall to see what's going to stick. And then they'll spend their discussion section of the paper— usually that's about half the words in a paper, or the discussion, which is where you actually interpret what you found— and then they would— so then they would speculate, well, it might be this and it might be that because glycine does this and glycine does that, and glycine does so many other things. And they were speculating all over the place. Meanwhile, the reciprocal relationship between glycine and methionine had been in the literature for years. But they didn't, you know, they just didn't know it. So it's, it's very, very compartmentalized. And, you know, in the old days, we used to do what is now called hypothesis-based research. And we used to just call it Science nowadays, what they call database science, we used to call a fishing expedition, right? You could never do it. Nobody could afford to fund a fishing expedition where you measure hundreds of different things because you couldn't do it. You can only measure a few things, so you better have a pretty darn good reason for looking for what you were looking for if you want to get that grant and do that stuff.

Yeah, now we have massive databases, right, with all the data that's poured in, right?

Now we got to build data centers, and now we got most, most of the energy generation in the country has to feed data centers. And most of the data is, is probably garbage, you know.

One more question, uh, before we break, but, uh, collagen has become a huge topic in wellness and longevity.

What's—

how does that interact with, uh, the—

well, collagen, collagen, as I said, is the, uh, is the main protein that you have in the bones and the connective tissues, right? So if you take— if you get gelatin, gelatin is basically denatured collagen. Collagen peptides, you know, partially, partially digested so that it's soluble enough for your, for your digestive system to handle it. So in fact, collagen or gelatin is approximately 25% glycine by weight.

Hmm.

So that's a good source of glycine and that's why it does you so much good. You know, people say, oh, it's if you eat collagen, it's because your collagen deteriorates because you make less and this enables you to make more collagen. And that's why it's good for you. No. Or you have to have special Type C collagen or Type 2A collagen. And you know, and if somebody's selling you a more expensive kind of collagen, no, they all have about the same amount of glycine. And it's the glycine that is important. And by the way, that's not speculation. That's really, that's really an important scientific principle. If you have, let's say, let's take chicken soup. Which also is a way, you know, chicken soup. Has there been studies on chicken soup to show that yes, it helps you get well when you're ill, so forth? Why? Because that's bone broth. It has, you know, it has a lot of glycine in it because it has collagen in it. Well, but bone broth has so many things. Collagen has so many things, other amino acids. How do you know it's just the glycine and not the combination of that and/or anything else? And the answer is, if you can get the same benefit from pure glycine then you know it's the glycine. You have to reject unnecessary hypotheses. So for example, one of the questions that I tend to get from a lot of skeptics is, "Oh, come on, you say glycine is like a cure-all. It's glycine that does this and glycine that does that. And you know, why is it all glycine and just the glycine and not something else?" And that's because that's the simplest explanation. It's just the glycine. You want to look for that one thing that is responsible for all those effects. That's a principle called Occam's razor. That's a scientific principle. It was articulated by a number of people in history, but one of them was John of Occam. It was something like the 11th century, something like that. And that was— it's basically saying that the simplest hypothesis is the one you have to accept. You have to— so you don't— so people say it can't just be the glycine, that's too simple. But the scientific principle is you don't reject a hypothesis because it's too simple. You reject a hypothesis because it's too complicated. That's why we accepted the Copernican model of all the planets revolving around the sun in simple elliptical orbits rather than all the planets and the sun revolving around the Earth in these complex epicycles. Too complicated. Can't be right. The right one is the simple answer.

Yeah. Yeah. So glycine is really present in so many of these physical symptom systems in our body. I mean, that's—

but it's, but it's, its particular role in inflammation is the one that stands out the most. It's the one that's most obvious.

Yeah.

That produces the most ill effects.

Yeah.

You know, in, in our otherwise long-lived population, things that show up after decades of life. And glycine was always, I'm sure, an essential amino acid. You had to have some. But it's more— it's much more critical nowadays for a couple of reasons. One is we tend to throw the bones in the trash instead of the soup. Another thing is that we eat too much methionine, too much muscle meat, so we end up having to get rid of it. So we end up stripping methionine that way. And the third thing is that we eat so much of everything, guess what? Everybody's fat. More recent research also shows that when you get obese, even kids, this is some studies done on obese kids at the Mayo Clinic, in just a few years ago, that when you, when you're obese, the liver's synthesis of glycine actually goes down. So you're not only, you know, using up glycine, taking in more methionine, which strips glycine, eating not eating the glycine, but even the glycine that your body making, it's making less and less.

It's reduced.

And it makes less and less with age too.

Wow. Yeah.

Wow.

So, well, we could go on.

Oh, we could. I, I could go on. Yes, I could. That's why we have to do different shows, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is great. Yeah. Thanks so much for returning. This is the follow-up conversation that I really wanted to have. So tell us about your website and where, where—

Oh yes.

Can hear more about your work and your products.

Oh yeah, well, I have another product. Another product is a book called The Glycine Miracle, which it's just— if you just search on Amazon my name or the glycine, you'll scroll down, you'll find The Glycine Miracle. And it's, uh, that's available at Amazon. I don't sell that on my website because on my website I only sell Sweetamin' because that's food, and so it's— you get— it's taxed differently, right? So if you want to get the book, get it from Amazon. You can find a link on the website But that link will, will take you to Amazon. Not to give a plug for Amazon, I'm just plugging my own.

I understand. Yeah, it's easier.

Anyway, the other thing is the product itself. Of course you can buy off the website sweetamine.com. Sweetamine, S-W-E-E-T-A-M-I-N-E.com. Or if you want to call up and speak to Dave, my wonderful customer service representative, sure, uh, who's also the IT guy. So if something doesn't work, like if you try to order it off the website and it doesn't work and you get frustrated because your card keeps getting declined or something, you call him, he can answer it. Okay, he'll explain to you. So, uh, and he'll, he'll get the order processed. So there you go, just call 1-855-GET-SWEET, right? 855-GET-SWEET. And you can, uh, do that. And, uh, you know, good. That's the easy way to do it.

How are the— how is it— how is it sold, in packets of what?

Yeah, well, it's sold in, in boxes. Like, if you have a—

okay, okay.

I don't know if this is going to focus on that.

Doesn't focus.

Yeah, something like that, right? It's a box of Sweet. I mean, that's a box that has 30 stick packs in it, so it's a month's supply. And, uh, so that's a month, that's a box. But if you just want to try it, for, for less than $20, for $19.95, you can just get a sample, uh, what's what we call a 12-day challenge. It's enough to try it for a few days, go off it for a few days, try it again. Convince yourself that it really is the Sweet Amine that's doing the trick. And that either way, whether you buy a 12-day challenge or a box, number one, we're not going to sell you any more. You're not going to start getting more orders or more billings or anything like that. You buy it if you want it. You buy it, put your credit card number, subscription.

Yeah, okay.

But it's also, it's risk-free. So if, if you try it for a month or you try your 12 days and you say, I don't like it, I don't like the taste, I don't like whatever it is, that you don't need a reason. You just say, I want my money back. We'll give you your money back. You don't have to send us the empty box or the empty packets.

That's reassuring.

That's risk-free. I always want it to be risk-free, but you got to pony up a little bit at the beginning because I found that if you don't make people put in a little at the beginning, they won't value it. Yeah, so at the beginning I thought, oh, I gotta spend a lot of money on product just to give it away for free. But I don't give it away for free. I give it away for free only if I'm, you know, in a— if I'm doing a presentation to a small group, you know, or I get a chance to talk to somebody one-on-one, you know. Uh, I think I sent you a box. So I didn't send you a box? Tell me I sent you a box.

No, you didn't.

I would love that. I know you'll take it. But that's why I want to make sure they're going to take it. If you just say, try your box for free, people say, oh yeah, it's free. I'll take 10 of these, you know, and you'll never try it.

You said 30.

Don't value it if it's free. So you want, want you to put up at least $20, $19.95 to start with.

And you can get that pack, packet size, Joel, the packet, 36 packets in a box.

30, 30 is a box.

And how, how many grams are the packets?

It, well, it's 8 grams of glycine.

Yeah. 8 grams. Okay.

It's also got some taurine in it.

And, you know, okay. And your website is SweetAmine.com.

And SweetAmine.com.

The, the number is 855-GET-SWEET.

Yeah.

And, well, that's great.

Okay.

Great.

Yeah. See you in another 100 years or maybe, maybe soon.

I don't know. Well, let me just wrap up for my audience. Thanks so much for joining us today. If our conversation gives you something to think about, you'll find more ideas, tools, and discussion at my livingto100.club website. And I also have a livingto100.community where people can join for purpose and interactions and coming together in a community forum. So thanks very much to all of our listeners, and thank you, Dr. Brinton, for being back on our program. Valuable information. I know our listeners We'll enjoy this a lot. Thanks so much. And thanks to all of our listeners. Hope to see you next time.