AMINO ACIDS: What are they What do they do?

Hey, it's Dr. A. Wanted to come back and answer some more questions that I got. This one tagged on to our what are macro versus micronutrients talk that we had in one of the earlier YouTube videos, so you can go back and look that one up if you want. But one subpart of that was talking about going from proteins to amino acids, and so someone asked a very logical follow-up question, You know, what, what are amino acids? What do they do in your body? I've heard of taking them as a supplement, you know, is that necessary? Where do we get them in our food and all that? So I thought we'd just take a couple of minutes and go over that. The first thing is amino acids, as we talked about in the macronutrient to micronutrient YouTube, come from your proteins. So basically, you You have food that usually has a mixture of things. Some foods are pure carbohydrate or pure fat, etc., but let's say, for example, you eat meat or you eat certain plant products. There will be some protein and maybe some fatty acids and some other things mixed in there, so it's not always all one thing. Well, let's say you eat a protein source such as meat or a non-meat protein source People have heard of, you know, eating soy-based products like tofu and other things of that nature, and you do want to keep in mind there are proteins in a lot of other things in the plant kingdom. So we don't always just think of like meat, or maybe eggs are another good, good place, cheese, stuff like that, but there are vegetarian sources as well. The bottom line is the protein goes in and then it's digested in pieces because proteins are very complex. And they're made out of amino acids, which is why we're talking about this here, but they go through a breakdown digestive process, and first they're chunked up into peptides. Now, peptides are strings of amino acids, and those are, uh, technically speaking, not absorbed completely, although they can be found in the bloodstream after you eat things. You can also, if someone has a leaky gut or membrane permeability in the GI tract, you can find larger peptide groups or whole proteins in the blood. So what we teach people in traditional, you know, digestive physiology is you break it down to 2 or 3 amino acid units, and then the cells in the GI tract break that down to 1 and put them in. You should know there are some exceptions to that. So peptides are on the way to being broke down to their individual constituent amino acids. Now what's important about that is different proteins have different groups of amino acids, and there are amino acids, uh, there's a large group of amino acids, but there's a subset of them that are necessary for your body. And by necessary for your body, what we usually talk about is those are required in the diet so that you have those amino acids to make into other things that we're going to talk about inside your body because your body cannot synthesize those amino acids, whereas other amino acids your body can actually synthesize. So if you have these required amino acids, you've got to get them somewhere in your diet. So this is one of the things about somebody going on, say, an extremely low protein diet, and there sometimes there's medical reasons for that. Usually it's more restriction of certain amino acids, but if you did go, or let's say you were, you know, you couldn't eat for a long time, or there's some other problem, you do have to be careful that you're getting enough of the necessary amino acids into your diet that would help you to make, you know, all the other ones if you need to. So this is one of the things where when people are switching from from eating meat or maybe even switching from eating meat and eggs and dairy products and stuff to none of that, like in a vegan diet, they will usually, you know, be counseled to eat a particular way so that the plants that they're bringing in are bringing along those requisite amino acids. Now, the next part of the person's question was, okay, so we break these things down from proteins these single individual amino acids, what do we do with them in the body? Now, we could talk a really long time, and in, say, a physiology course or even biochemistry course, we would talk a long time about this. But basically, you can chunk the fate of your amino acids into a few places. The first one is that the body can reassemble the amino acids back into A number of things. So if you think about amino acids in the— in, say, a peptide, you can think of like a train, and each of the cars are going to be different amino acids that are going to be stuck together, usually by a covalent bond. It's a really strong bond. And then we make those peptides. Now, sometimes what the body will do is synthesize those peptides and then hook them together with other ones, depending on what the coding is for. Now when we make these and we reassemble peptides or amino acids structures in the body, we can then export them, say from the liver, which is a big synthetic place, and we can make the structural amino acids and proteins for our own bodies. That's one source or place that the amino acids go. The next place, which is very, very important, are called the biogenic amines. And so these are amino acids that turn into currency in the body. So there's a lot of neurotransmitters that come from amino acids. For example, you have serotonin that is going to be made from tryptophan, for example. You have dopamine and norepinephrine that are going to be made from tyrosine. You have GABA, a big neurotransmitter that calms your brain down, being made from glutamine. You also have glycine, G-L-Y-C-I-N-E, glycine, which is its own neurotransmitter, and it doesn't get converted to anything. It just works as glycine. It's usually a calming neurotransmitter. So those are the biogenic, those are the helpers in the communication in the body. You also have things that would be, say, a simple amino hormone structure, and we talked about this a lot in thyroid. Thyroid is tyrosine, the amino structure that has iodine added to it, so it's not really a peptide, it's just a tyrosine molecule with iodine added on. And you go look at the thyroid talks to get into that more if you want to. Then there are peptide hormones, so if you have aminos that are strung together into strings, they become peptides, and then if you start to fold those together and hook them together in particular ways, you can make a big lumbering structure that could be a hormone, and in the case of, say, insulin, That's a large polypeptide-type hormone. Now protein can break down to amino acids that can be used for energy, but most of our energy comes from the carbohydrate world or the fat world. Amino acids are sort of a secondary source of energy. One of the things you want to keep in mind with proteins is if you're not getting enough or if you don't have enough of the necessary amino acids, your body will start to break your own proteins down and cannibalize the proteins to get the amino acids that it needs. So this is one of the things that you can see in starvation. You can see this happening in starvation-type diseases such as anorexia nervosa. You can see it in a lot of other conditions where the body just doesn't have enough protein going in. So to answer the question from the macro point of view, we take in protein from our food, we break it down into peptides, and then take the peptides apart so we have individual amino acids. Those are then either used directly for something like a biogenic amino acid or like thyroid hormone, and Or they might be reassembled into a structure, say they could be an enzyme or a peptide hormone. They can also go to forming new body proteins as we regenerate our tissues and our cells, and if need be, they can be converted into energy, although that's one of their minor— that's one of their minor things that they do in the body. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Again, Really appreciate everybody liking, sharing, and subscribing. If you're not subscribed or don't have notifications on, please consider doing that if you like these things. And you can always put into the comments questions for me to answer next or topic areas you'd like me to go into, that sort of thing. I do try to get to those every week and get them cleared out. I've just found some new ones today. So thank you again. Like, share, subscribe. I'm Dr. A, and I'll be back with the next one soon.