The Incredible Impacts of GLYCINE on Sleep and Inflammation Support

So let's break down the major areas where glycine is going to work in your body. First off, glycine's job is it's an amino acid, and amino acids are what we make peptides out of, and then peptides make proteins. And amino acids can be used for certain peptide or amino substances like enzymes, neurotransmitters, all sorts of things that amino acids can do. They also, of course, can be involved in the structural portions of our body and other particular types of pathway supports that they do. Glycine is one of those where it has a lot of places it plugs in into human biochemistry and human physiology. And this is why people will potentially use it therapeutically for a lot of different types of things. So one of the things that glycine will do is to be what we would call a chloride channel operator. And what that means is we have these mineral or ion channels on our cell membrane. And that could be in your peripheral body or that could be in your brain. And one of the things that glycine can do is to open a chloride channel. Now, normally when we have, say, a nerve cell, neurotransmitter pathways in the brain, muscle cells, et cetera, we are leaving the chloride channels closed so that we can move the sodium and potassium and calcium and magnesium back and forth to create an action potential, to create electrical energy. If I open up a chloride channel, What happens is I dampen or lower the action potential activity. What happens with glycine is it's used by the body to kind of put the brakes on the action potential or the electrical energy activity that's going on. And so if everything's going along with the chloride channel closed, we may get our action potential, our electrical energy, and we get a nerve impulse or a brain impulse or heart or skeletal muscle or something like that. If I suddenly open the chloride channels, I will lower or even shut off potentially those Action potentials, those electrical impulses. So in our central nervous system, in the brain, glycine, by opening a chloride channel, can actually calm down the neurological impulses. So it's used as a way to slow neurological activity and calm the brain down. So what is one downstream effect of opening a chloride channel? Usually it will be helpful with sleep or calming down, sometimes helpful with hyperirritable muscles. Things of that nature. So glycine can be used therapeutically to help with improved sleep, help with relaxing tight muscles, things like that where we want to calm down the electrical impulses, electrical activity that goes on. Now, other things to consider in the neighborhood in the chloride channel operation is glycine doesn't just work at chloride channels. So one caveat is some people will have a little excitation, the opposite from glycine. And you think, well, you just described to us how Glycine opens the chloride channels and calms everything down. Yes, does that in one part of the nervous system. Over in the other part of the nervous system at an excitatory receptor complex, it actually is what they call an agonist. It turns it on. Now, most people are very insensitive to that activity, but some people's genotypes literally make one receptor category more sensitive than the other. So I always tell people glycine generally, let's say you're going to put it in your tea. It's sweet. It's actually kind of nice. So you're going to put it in your tea at night to help you go to sleep at night. Try a small amount first. We might try a few hundred milligrams or something like that and just make sure it doesn't make you like wake up. If it makes you wake up, there's nothing wrong with that. It just means your body is more sensitive to the excitatory part. By and large, the majority of humans, it's very calming, but some people have that excitatory part and then just, you would just use other things and not use glycine. The next thing is that glycine gets involved both directly and indirectly in the world of the immune inflammatory system. So how would glycine directly get involved in the immune inflammatory system? Well, the antioxidant, one of our primary endogenous antioxidants, glutathione, is 1/3 roughly glycine. So glutathione is a tripeptide and glycine is one of the peptides in there, one of the amino acids. So glycine helps to feed the system that creates glutathione. You've heard of a supplement probably called GlyNAC. The gly is glycine. Glycine and N-acetylcysteine as a supplement help to feed. So glycine is a portion of glutathione. That's a direct way into the antioxidant inflammatory realm. On the other side though, without involving itself in glutathione, glycine also will modulate immune activity. So if we have too low levels of glycine, our immune activity may be unmodulated or hyperreactive, which of course is not good. And if we have a lot of glycine, it may satisfy those needs. So how does glycine without messing with glutathione do this immunomodulatory stuff? Well, it helps to modulate a lot of what we call our pro-inflammatory cytokines or the chemical messengers that create inflammation. Now, a lot of people will listen and hear about inflammation and say, well, wouldn't we all be healthier if we just shut all inflammation off? And the answer is no, you'd actually be dead because we need inflammation for certain things like triggering an immune response and stuff. The problem comes in modern life and in modern living where we're in, you know, toxic environments and under a lot of stress and all that, where where we don't balance, we don't modulate the pro and anti-inflammatory parts of the immune system. So one of the many things that glycine can do is to help by modulating some of the pro-inflammatory chemistry like tumor necrosis factor and certain interleukins and NF-kappaB and things to help to not shut off the immune response, but to keep it modulated. So I get An immune response when I need it, and then I shut it off when I don't need it. So being an immunomodulatory substance is the other way. So indirectly through the formation of glutathione by being a third of the glutathione molecule, glycine helps. And then directly as an immunomodulator to pro-inflammatory cytokines, glycine helps with this immunomodulatory or inflammation support. And then the final part, it's involved in what we call phase 2 detoxification. So you have multiple phases of getting rid of toxins. From your body. Your body, it deals with toxins every day, and it has natural ways that we have developed over the eons to get rid of toxins. Phase 1 is a particular type of reaction that generally doesn't involve glycine. Phase 2 is where things like glycine and glutathione work. And you might say, well, I heard you say that glycine is 1/3 of glutathione, so is that why glycine is important for phase 2? Well, that's one of the reasons, but also glycine has its own phase 2 pathway where it helps in the conjugation steps, which is a phase 2 step where we're going to to get rid of these intermediates that our body does not want and get them out of the body, usually through the urinary system or maybe out through the stool. So glycine is also directly involved in phase 2 detoxification. Well, I hope this helps to answer some of those confusing questions about the purposes of glycine in the body. We certainly didn't talk about all of them, but I tried to hit on the ones that people had asked the most questions about. We love having you guys on here. Thanks to everybody in the community. Please do subscribe, like, share. 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