What You ACTUALLY Need to Know About MTHFR and The Methyl Cycle

What's the difference between MTHFR and the methyl cycle, and why would anyone care? Let's break that down. I've been working with patients for a very long time and working with things like methyl donors for a very long time. And then in the more modern age where we were able to test things like MTHFR, other SNPs, the whole methyl cycle, all the other cycles related to it, use that information to help a lot of people with chronic illness because they are areas where you can slow down your overall ability to generate robust health. Now, we have other content on the specifics of all of that, but we've never really talked about proper— what the methyl cycle does and the fact that it's a part of a bigger picture. So what I want to do in this one is answer some questions that I got and get into why is MTHFR important, but not the whole thing when we're thinking of methylation. And also, what is the methyl cycle? But then where does it fit in the big macrocosm of the way our body works. That's kind of the way we're going to do this. So the first thing is that MTHFR is a number of genes that all have the same name that code for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase enzyme. That enzyme helps to make a methyl donor, a primary methyl donor being 5-methylfolate or active folate. And that active folate can go over and donate a methyl donor, donate its methyl group to some important place. We talked a lot about on the other videos, but MTHFR gets all of the, you know, kind of limelight there, but it's a piece of a cycle. Most things in our biochemistry work in cycles, especially if there's like a generative portion to it where maybe you start with, you know, a piece of a substrate or a piece of the final product and you have to keep adding to it and manipulating And finally you get it to the final product that gets used up and then you do it all over again. That's kind of the common cycle. Well, what I want to think with you about in order to get the big picture is who else other than MTHFR is in the methyl cycle? Why would we care? And then where does methylation and the methyl cycle affect other processes? And the reason that this becomes very important is that sometimes people will go and because it's real famous on social media that, oh, if you have MTHFR Problem, you need to take like a lot of methylfolate or methyl B12 methylfolate, something. They'll take that and they might feel great for a while and then it stops, or they might feel great for a little bit and then they get weird side effects and they wonder, well, why did that happen? Right? Well, it can be because there's other steps in the cycle and the cycle isn't alone. It's not just sitting out there, you know, making methyl donors as it spins. Other cycles are going on. So if I speed up one cycle, I'm going to burn out all the other parts of the cycle and I'm going to maybe damage other things that it's related to. So I wanted to break down not all of them, certainly, but the main areas where I have clinically seen problems with people maybe overdoing methylation or just not understanding there's other parts of the methyl cycle that really need to be addressed. So let's get into it. So beyond MTHFR, and again, it's in a cycle, so, you know, you could put these in as they need to be, but the other ones, there's a whole bunch of other initials. There's DHFR, MTR, MTRR, BHMT, SAHHMTF, CBS, some other, right? So if you consider that if I have a problem in MTHFR and then I go in and I essentially supplement around it and give methylfolate or methyl B12 methylfolate, that's going to help that one part. But in doing that, I'm going to speed up that part of the cycle, which speeds up all the other parts of the cycle. And they may require different cofactors. In fact, they do. And so then I'm going to be speeding the cycle up and burning up other cofactors. And then the cycle is either going to kind of come crashing to a slow burn, and then I'm going to burn up other cofactors and imbalance other parts. So there's a couple of things that just that can do by messing up the methyl cycle. One is you speed it up, but you don't give the other B vitamins and minerals that help it run. That imbalances the cycle, and you can hypermethylate doing that. The next thing is maybe you push out and you have a bunch of methyl donors available that weren't there before, and you prime another process. Well, A good example of this is the methyl cycle. When it speeds up, it speeds up the donation of methyl groups that help me form my excitatory neurotransmitters, or at least some of them. Dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin are 3 big ones. So if suddenly I'm making a whole bunch more dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, my brain might perk up and wake up, feel better. But on the other side of that formation, we have a balance in that we have enzymes that then degrade those because we don't want like high dopamine, high serotonin forever. It goes, it and flow. So, we produce it and we remove it. What if I put in a whole bunch of methylfolate, methyl B12, et cetera, and I make a bunch of methyl donors, and then I make a bunch of excitatory neurotransmitters, and they're all trying to leave through the same pathway that has not been sped up? Because guess what? Most of the cofactors over here for elimination are not the same ones as for donation. Some exceptions, but most aren't. So then what happens, I can get a bottleneck and people will feel hypermethylated. What they're really feeling is too much catecholamine, too much dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine peripherally. And so they might get shaky, they may not sleep, they might get headaches, they might get angry, may get anxious. They get all sorts of stuff just because they have too much excitatory neurotransmitter. So it's not a bad thing that you supported this, but you supported it in an imbalanced way. And now I can't handle all the neurotransmitter processing on the other end. Same as not a bad thing you support MTHFR. HFR, but he burned out all the other cofactors on around, and now I'm not doing the processes and all the other steps the way that I ought to. So when we overwhelm the excitatory pathways on the way out, great to make them, but you got to get rid of them in an equal and balanced manner. Another way that this can play itself out is again cycles in biochemistry. You think of them kind of going around, you know, maybe like clock or something, and they're going to be Touching another cycle. So if I speed up the methyl cycle, let's say I do all the cofactors here, I am now going to be dumping into another cycle it's connected to. Now the methyl cycle is connected to other things, but a famous one that we see that creates symptoms is what we sometimes refer to as the thiol cycle, which is the cycle that is connected from the methyl cycle to the thiol cycle through the CBS enzyme or cystathionine beta synthase. And this is where we're trying to get rid of homocysteine, which is great. That's a good thing to do. But if we speed up the methyl cycle and there's no support down here in the thiol cycle, we may be dumping through CBS to cystathionine, but that could back up our either formation and/or breakdown of glutathione and other thiols. And then what happens is they create in their breakdown process the sulfur residues. Thiols are sulfury molecules. So they create breakdown processes, and some of it is sulfite. You've heard of sulfite sensitivity. People drink red wine, get a migraine, or, you know, they eat some sulfite food and get sick somehow. That's sulfite sensitivity. Well, your body naturally has a way out for the sulfites, and it converts them to sulfate, which can be eliminated more easily through sulfite oxidase. That's an enzyme too. But if suddenly you've lived your whole life with a real slow methyl cycle, and it's always been running in first gear, really slow, and so the thiol cycle and glutathione Breakdown, all that stuff, that's going in first gear too. So sulfite through sulfite oxidase to sulfate is going in first gear. As I start spinning the methylation wheel up here and I'm really cranking on the thiols to get rid of sulfites, and sulfite oxidase can't go faster in first gear, I'm going to suddenly blow up the amount of sulfite, especially in my brain, and I'm going to have some kind of symptom. Again, headaches are not uncommon. Itchiness is not uncommon. Rashes, redness, all sorts of things happen with sulfite toxicity. So this is just another example of how trying to quote unquote fix one thing can create a problem elsewhere. So again, sulfite oxidase can be assisted in running faster, but again, the stuff you're giving to help MTHFR doesn't do anything for sulfite oxidase. That's different stuff to help that. So there's all, and we could go on with other connections that happen. So what is the point here? The point is not so much that helping a methylation problem is a bad thing because it can be very helpful. It's that you have to consider that number Number one, MTHFR is famous, but it's one point on a big cycle with lots of other points that need other nutrients to support it. MTHFR supports a lot of neurological chemistry, brain neurotransmitters, and we don't want to be overdoing those and overwhelm the elimination pathways. So we get that out of balance. And then the methyl cycle also directly speeds up the thiol cycle and the processing of good things like glutathione and cystathionine and all sorts of goodies. But also then that has a waste product in sulfite. And if we back that up, that doesn't feel very good either, right? So a lot of it is about kind of taking a macro look and making sure you're supporting everything. And especially if it's a person who, you know, just because they read something real cool online, and so they ordered a supplement with like a ton of 5-methylfolate and maybe methyl B12 or something, and they took it and they felt great for 2 days, and then all of a sudden they can't sleep or whatever, or all of a sudden they're getting headaches from the sulfites, et cetera. It's not that that's bad. It's that you're trying to drive a very complex system that needs about 15 or 20 parts with 1 or 2 parts. So it's better to kind of take care of everybody and then do just enough support in the methyl area so that we don't burn anything out. We improve our neurotransmission, we improve our processing of homocysteine, we improve methyl donation, et cetera, et cetera, without overburdening any other part of the system. All right. I'm Dr. A. Love doing these videos to answer your questions. Thank you so much, listeners. Thank you, subscribers. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe, like, share, comment, do all the stuff. We're going to put some other videos to watch here. Go look at the playlist on YouTube, and I'll see you all on the next one.