Matt Kelly explains how the liver enzyme AGT uses vitamin B6 and magnesium to convert glyoxylate into glycine instead of oxalate, a major kidney stone culprit. Managing vitamin C redox cycling also blocks its conversion to oxalate. Together, these nutrients help the liver limit oxalate production.
There are nutrients that help the enzymes inside of your liver to slow down oxalate production and export. So that's another terribly important thing to do to help the process so that we, number one, we don't contribute to oxalates, and then we slow down the liver pumping more oxalates out. Now, those nutrients are simple. It's vitamin B6. We normally use P5P, the active form, and magnesium. And they go to an aminotransferase enzyme, which is called AGT. You might have heard of liver enzymes called ALT and AST. Well, they have a cousin called AGT. AGT has an incredibly long name with a lot of chemistry in it, but what it does is it keeps a precursor to oxalate called glyoxylate moving away from oxalate into the formation of glycine, which is very good for your brain and other parts of your body. So if I have enough magnesium and B6 to run the AGT enzyme, I never make excess oxalate. Oxalate. So, in people who have normal kidney function, they pass all the other tests, the next thing that we look at is how biochemically do we keep vitamin C from creating oxalate? Because we can shut that off. And then, how do we keep the liver from creating excess oxalate? So, on the liver side, we have the support of this aminotransferase enzyme AGT, which is B6 magnesium. And then, on the vitamin C side, not going to the— down to the evil degradation products that become oxalate. We have cycling the vitamin C. Think of it this way. Reduced vitamin C is on top, and then there's a Fenton reaction and it oxidizes. We want that. But in a redox reaction, it doesn't have to go down. It can go back up to reduced vitamin C. As long as the dehydroascorbate, the oxidized form, goes back up to ascorbate or the reduced form, it can't go down to oxalate. This is why in reality we don't see, you know, and after a few hundred thousand of these, you would see more if they were going to happen, right?
