5 POWERFUL Amino Acids to Improve Brain Health and Mood

I wanna talk about 5 of the more common amino acids that directly affect your brain and your mood. Hey, I'm Dr. A. Thank you for joining us here where we answer lots of questions, all things health, healthcare, chronic illness, cancer, and we try and break those down for you. So to start out with, remember proteins break down into peptides. Peptides break down into amino acids. Amino acids are used for many, many things in the body, but mostly for structural proteins in your body. So we make our own proteins. Next most common thing would be like enzymes. They're the skeleton of enzymes a lot of the time. And then they're used for other things. Well, there's a group of amino acids that are also called biogenic amines. And biogenic amines are simply amino acids that are also used in the neurological system, in the nervous system. So I want to talk about 5 of the many amino That could be used inside your nervous system, and basically what they do. The first one, and these don't really go in any particular order, but tryptophan, or you might see a supplement called L-tryptophan, is the amino acid the body uses naturally to make three primary neurological chemicals, but lots of other ones too. It makes serotonin, it eventually makes melatonin, and it makes niacinamide, all from tryptophan. Now you can obviously get niacinamide from other ways, but. There's accessory pathways for tryptophan to make niacinamide. So if we think about it, these are all in the same sort of family. We think about serotonin. You hear about serotonin drugs for mood regulation or depression, serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other serotonin drugs like serotonin transport inhibitors and all the many other things that they do. Well, the job of those drugs is usually to keep the serotonin around longer. Tryptophan is your body's way of making its own serotonin, and in some cases, tryptophan is used as a way to produce more endogenous or natural serotonin. Now, you might have looked at the supplement shelf and seen there's L-tryptophan and then 5-HTP, which is 5-hydroxytryptophan. And 5-HTP is a little more absorbable form. So the doses are usually lower for 5-HTP and tryptophan. They both feed in the same pathway, just in different places. Tyrosine is number 2, and tyrosine directly goes downstream and helps you make dopamine, And norepinephrine. Interestingly, tyrosine also helps you make thyroid hormone, different pathway, but it helps you make thyroid hormone too. So tyrosine helps you make norepinephrine, dopamine, which are your catecholamines. These are generally stimulating to the body and they're made in a cascade. So tryptophan is the one that turns into directly L-dopa and dopamine, and then dopamine can convert into norepinephrine. They're used for slightly different things, but basically norepinephrine and dopamine are stimulating neurotransmitters and they both come from tyrosine. And as I said, the other one that affects your brain, but it's not a neurotransmitter, is tyrosine also helps you make thyroid hormone. Now there is something above tyrosine, which is our 3rd neurogenic or biogenic amine, and that is phenylalanine. Phenylalanine, which is usually sold as L-phenylalanine, the supplement goes in and can be converted to tyrosine. So in the catecholamine generating pathways in the brain, You can come in above with phenylalanine and it will get converted down to tyrosine and then dopamine and norepinephrine. Or you can come in directly with number 2, we talked about tyrosine, and go to dopamine, norepinephrine. So you might ask yourself, well, why would people bother to take phenylalanine if tyrosine is a more quick route in? Well, one reason is that there are other receptors that get involved and other pathways that get involved. It's not quite as simple as I'm describing it. And sometimes people with chronic pain and also a need for catecholamine production feel less pain when they use phenylalanine as opposed to using just tyrosine. So that's often a clinical decision that's made when we are basing our decision to use a particular amino acid to help us with catecholamines on other factors such as chronic pain and things of that nature. Now, if we say that tyrosine and phenylalanine help make catecholamines, which are stimulating, would you think that it would be good to take those more in the morning or at Nighttime? Obviously the answer is usually people do better in the morning because if you say took a bunch of tyrosine or phenylalanine at dinner, it might kick in and start to make catecholamines at nighttime and then you might wake up. So you want to take the stimulating things like tyrosine, phenylalanine usually in the morning time, and then you're usually going to be okay. The next amino acid that is very important and is completely on the other side of the ledger from catecholamines is glycine. Glycine helps to open chloride channels. and that is a calming neurotransmitter. The interesting thing about glycine is, is that glycine is an unchanged neurotransmitter. So, a changed biogenic amine would be tryptophan, tyrosine, phenylalanine. They have to go through all these enzyme steps to become activated and then become the neurotransmitter. Glycine, the amino acid, goes right in and works as glycine. There's no bioconversion needed. So glycine is used a lot of times in the evening with people to help them relax. It's kind of a sweet amino acid. People put it in their sleepy time tea and stuff like that. And the one caveat that you want to think about with glycine is always do a test with it because in about 90+% of humans, glycine is calming and that's its major action. It has a minor action that keeps your brain on an arousal state. It works in a different receptor complex. In about 10 to maybe 20%, but probably 10 to 15% of humans, that receptor is more active than the calming one. So if you've ever taken glycine because someone told you it was going to help you sleep and you're actually more awake, it's because your body is just naturally set to use the glycine for the more activating side of the coin and not the calming side of the coin. So if that happened to you, don't take glycine to calm down. It's not going to help you. The majority of people, however, find glycine helps them to relax and sleep better, relaxes muscles, all of those sorts of things. And then the last one is used elsewhere in the body, and people think of it for kidney health and GI tract health and other stuff. But the most high concentration, so the biggest number by volume of amino acid in your body is actually glutamine, L-glutamine, glutamine. So if it's the biggest one in our body, it must do all sorts of stuff. And it does. It does stuff everywhere in your immune system, in your kidneys, as I mentioned, your GI tract, in your muscles, all over the body. But in your brain, glutamine can give rise to 2 different pathways. And glutamine as a biogenic amine can either give me glutamate, glutamic acid glutamate, which is excitatory neurotransmitter. So that's one direction. Or it can give me GABA, gamma-aminobutyric acid, which is a chloride channel operator just like glycine was. And GABA is your primary calming neurotransmitter. So glutamine is kind of cool in that it can go into your brain and either go one way to make glutamate, Which is very excitatory, can be inflammatory, or to make GABA, which is calming and will help you sleep. So it's, it's literally like a Jekyll and Hyde molecule. You might ask, who makes the decision? There is an enzyme called glutamic acid decarboxylase, GAD, and there's different types of GAD, but the one that we're talking about here takes your glutamine and decides, is it going to go over to excitatory glutamate or down to inhibitory GABA? And the interesting thing is, is that GADN, enzyme is very dependent on vitamin B6 and magnesium in order to work. It also can be damaged through genetic issues. Some people have hardcore genetic GAD issues and they get neurological problems. Some people have more like SNP inhibitory neurological genomic problems with GAD and it just slows down on them. And what will tend to happen then is instead of making a balance of inhibitory and excitatory, so GABA and glutamate, it just makes all glutamate and it's all excitatory. So that's why Glutamine sometimes gets a bad name in the neurological space, but in reality, if it's balanced in the way that it's going to be used, it's going to be used in a very balanced manner. All right, well, there's my top five for today. Please check out these other videos we're going to put up. Please do subscribe, like, share, do all the stuff, comment. The community is really growing, and we really appreciate it. I'm Dr. A, and I'll see you on the next video.