What Happens to Your Body When You Take Tyrosine?

Tyrosine. What's it gonna do to my body if I take it? I'm Dr. A, and I've been answering questions like this for over 30 years for people, and I use this channel to memorialize those answers and answer your questions. So let's get into it. Tyrosine is an amino acid. Amino acids are the structural building blocks for proteins. In between an amino acid and a protein, which is a really long string, there are things called peptides. And so you string enough aminos together, you make a peptide, string enough peptides together, You're gonna make a protein. So tyrosine is one of many, many, many amino acids the body can use for many different things. So the first thing, if we're asking globally what happens in my body if I take tyrosine, is tyrosine is going to go into the formation of a number of things. But 2 things that you would feel potentially, depending on how much you take and how well your gut absorbs the tyrosine, the 2 fates that you feel more than others, one would be it is the skeleton upon which we make our thyroid hormone. So tyrosine in some people will increase their thyroid hormone production a little bit. And thyroid hormone is related to our basal metabolic rate. Thyroid hormone gives the marching orders to the mitochondria as to how fast they're going to make energy, things like that. The other way beyond thyroid potentially that tyrosine would be felt in your body is in your nervous system. You have tyrosine Tyrosine going and making catecholamines? Well, catecholamines in the central nervous system are mostly dopamine and norepinephrine. In the peripheral nervous system, catecholamines also include epinephrine. And of course, there's a little crossover there where the tyrosine is feeding in. So for example, if the tyrosine goes to your brain, central nervous system, we're going to be more probably priming the production of dopamine and norepinephrine, which are the things that give you focus and keep your body Animated and you, you know, sort of awake and aware and all those things. Peripheral nervous system, let's say it goes to chromaffin tissue, which the biggest collection of chromaffin tissue in one place is in your adrenal medulla, the middle part of your adrenal glands. And if the tyrosine goes in there, which we hope it does, the chromaffin tissue goes down, it turns the tyrosine into dopamine, norepinephrine, and then methylates it into epinephrine. The last step is a methyl transfer step called N-methyltransferase. This is why sometimes if people take methyl B vitamins like methyl B12, methylfolate, they will get higher heart rate or excitatory. And one of the reasons for that is that the methylation step and methyltransferase that take you from norepinephrine to epinephrine needs methyl donors. Well, what are those? Those are methyl B12, methylfolate primarily. And there's a bunch of other ones, but those are the big ones. So if you suddenly have not been used to taking like methyl B12, folate, and you take a whole bunch of it because you heard it was good for you, you might feel a little overamped and it's It's because it's going in there and it's helping you to produce more epinephrine among a number of other things. So the body is using tyrosine for all sorts of things. But if you think about what I just said in the last couple of minutes, what is the theme of tyrosine and the way my body feels? It's going to be things, whether thyroid hormone, catecholamine central, catecholamine peripheral, it's going to be things that are stimulating. When we have stimulating activity, that can be good because we may have more focus. We may be more awake. We may have less fatigue. We may have more desire to do things, all of that. But when we have extra catecholamine and stimulating type things like that, if it goes too far, we can feel overstimulated. We cannot sleep very well. We can feel like we drank a lot of coffee. Maybe we're overcaffeinated. People with too many catecholamines can, I said, not sleep. Sleep well, they can also feel jittery or jumpy, you know, a little bit like you just took too much of a stimulant. Now, because most people probably know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody who's on a stimulant drug, let's say they give them for, you know, ADHD spectrum, that sort of thing. You've noticed maybe that, well, stimulants in people with maybe ADD, ADHD, the stimulant might actually calm them down. Well, how is that working? Well, the stimulant drug in the case of that is bringing some balance back into the excitatory inhibitory pathways in the brain. And the ones that are involved in focus, which are largely catecholamine, are affected the most by the stimulant medication. Same thing can happen with tyrosine. So some people who are real tyrosine sensitive take it and they feel jittery and overcaffeinated and they don't sleep well. So they stop taking it. Other people who maybe need more focus or are fatigued, et cetera, will actually feel better. They'll feel more calm. They'll feel more themselves when they take the tyrosine. Now, over the last 3 decades using amino acid therapies with people, I've used these with children with ADHD spectrum, with adults with fatigue and all sorts of other stuff. And largely, if you get the right match for the right person, they can be very supportive to whatever else is going on. People will often ask the next important question, which is, are there any cautions, concerns around when I dose it or how I dose it or whatever? And generally speaking, we dose to tolerance. So your dose may be very different from your neighbor's dose or your spouse's dose or anybody else's dose. So we usually start with a test dose with tyrosine around 500 milligrams for adults. Take it in the morning because it can be stimulating. And so then if you have tyrosine and you, 500, no problem, didn't feel anything from it, we have you ramp up until you feel maybe that focus or the energy or whatever. And then sometimes later, a few months down the road, It'll actually— your need will go down. So that's the first thing. The next thing is if you get any signs and symptoms of overstimulation, stop it, or at least back off on the dose. And I always tell people, it kind of feels like you just drank too much stimulant, too much coffee, too much energy drink, something like that. That means you've got too much of the tyrosine that you're taking. And the final thing is more of just an absorption optimization strategy. And tyrosine's an amino acid inside of your digestive tract and small intestine. You have these amino acid transporters. A single amino acid, like you take a powder or a pill of tyrosine, it'll get down there and that tyrosine will be directly pumped right into your bloodstream. If you eat a protein that has some tyrosine and other amino acids in it, that's great, but your body has to break the protein down into subconstituents and then peptides and then break the peptides down into amino acids. So it's a lot more work. So because there's only so many protein amino acid transporters in the GI tract, what we want to do if we're going to use it as a supplement is take it away from high protein meals. So with tyrosine, people often just take it when they first wake up with a glass of water or juice or something. And you can eat 30 minutes later, but it's just better to separate it a little bit away from a high protein meal. Now, if you have a snack that say you ate an apple or, you know, something like that, or had a glass of juice, there's not enough protein in any of that to be a problem for your tyrosine. So you could take it then. But conversely, if you had a meal with say eggs or meat or tofu or something like that, you're going to have so much protein there that you're going to have a lot of competition. for the tyrosine to be absorbed. So just take it separate from high protein meals. All right, I'm Dr. A. Thanks for all you subscribers. If you haven't subscribed, please consider subscribing. Comment, like, share, do all this stuff. Love the growth of the community. We're here to answer your questions and we're going to have a lot more coming up in the coming days, weeks, and months. I'll see you all on the next video.