What You NEED to KNOW About L-Tyrosine for Focus and Mood
Dr. A explains how L-tyrosine, an amino acid, boosts focus by increasing dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. A purified supplement works faster than protein because it bypasses digestion and enters the bloodstream directly. Start with 500-1,000 mg in the morning on an empty stomach, titrate up to 2,000-4,000 mg if needed, and take it early to avoid sleep disruption.
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Today I wanted to answer some questions we got about a particular amino acid named tyrosine and what that might do to help with mental focus. So let's get into that. Hey, I'm Dr. A, and on this channel we answer lots and lots of healthcare-related questions, usually around the world of integrative naturopathic medicine, cancer, and chronic illness. I've been teaching and writing and practicing in that area for over 30 years now, and that's why we have this To answer your questions, the first thing is what are amino acids? So amino acids are the smallest portion of peptides. So if you string amino acids together, you get a peptide, and if you string enough peptides together, you can get a protein. So they often call them the building blocks of protein, things like that. But here's the other thing that amino acids can do: they can work on their own, or maybe in combination just with a couple of other amino acids where they're smaller than a peptide, and they can do other. things that are not, say, structural or enzymatic, et cetera, in the body. So tyrosine is one of those that we call a biogenic amine because it has 2 direct fates where it becomes a transmitter or hormonal-like substance. And so tyrosine can both help you to create the catecholamine neurotransmitters, which would be dopamine and norepinephrine, mostly in the central nervous system, and epinephrine peripherally, but also Also, tyrosine is the skeleton on which we make our thyroid hormone. So if we think about catecholamines like dopamine, and then we think about thyroid hormone, they're quite different in that, you know, one is a neurotransmitter, the other is a hormone, obviously, but their skeletons come from the same place, which is tyrosine. And one of the things about taking supplemental amino acids or just, you know, the eating the food with protein where it breaks down into amino acids is if there's enough of the amino acid, your body will get to make choices about where that amino acid goes into the formation of, for instance, in the case of tyrosine, thyroid hormone, or the catecholamines for the nervous system. So when people talk about using tyrosine for mental focus, I saw a question come up and the person had sent a link. There were these gummies, you know, everything comes in a gummy nowadays, and they were tyrosine gummies, and it said might help You know, with mental focus. And the person said, would these really work? Well, for many, many years, in fact, decades, I've helped people alongside their medications use amino acid therapies instead of medications sometimes, or in between medications use amino acid therapies. And especially the neurogenic amines, you actually can get benefits from them if you use them and dose them appropriately. So what I wanted to do today is answer that person's question about would it work and why would it work? And are there any safety concerns around it. So the first thing is that it does work. And one of the reasons why taking single amino acids will work is that you have amino acid transporters in your small intestine. So if you eat a big bunch of protein and your body has to break the protein down into peptides and then into amino acids, it's a lot more work to get the tyrosine out of the protein than if you just take a supplement with tyrosine in it, in this example. And then the tyrosine that you took can go down, it can get to the amino acid transporter and it can just be pushed right into the bloodstream. If you have a single amino acid, a 2-amino acid couple, or a 3-amino acid couple, there are either 1 or 2 steps to get those right into your bloodstream. Single aminos go straight in with no change. Di- and tripeptides, 2- and 3-parters, get inside your gut cells and then they're taken apart by peptidase enzymes, and then they're put as single aminos into the bloodstream in most cases. So first thing About taking an amino acid to try and get a benefit. Some people will say, well, sometimes I have taken X amount of an amino acid and one day I'll feel it, and then the next day I won't. Sometimes what happens is if you take the amino acid and then you eat a whole bunch of protein with it, all of the protein breaks down into amino acids. Then the supplemental amino acid you took breaks down and they're all competing for the same transporters. So when we're giving people amino acids for therapeutic purposes, we try and have them take them either with a low protein meal, like a snack, or something like that, or just on their own with say water or juice or something like that so that they're not competing for transporters. So when we look at it and then we want to link, as the person in the question said, the tyrosine as the amino acid and mental focus, what are ways that tyrosine could help me with my mental focus? Well, the biggest thing would be through the assistance in creating catecholamines in the brain because dopamine and norepinephrine are your primary central nervous system catecholamines and they're heavily They're heavily involved in the focusing part of your brain. Now, of course, dopamine and norepinephrine do all sorts of other things, but those are the areas that, for example, in ADD, ADHD, the stimulant class of medications hold those neurotransmitters at the synaptic cleft longer and make it feel like you have more. And so your focus is better. When you take tyrosine, you have more substrate to make the catecholamine. So you actually have more catecholamine. So that's the biggest way it works. But the backup way that it works is you are also feeding the thyroid gland with the substrate to make thyroid hormone. And your brain is very, very sensitive to thyroid hormone. There are people who have certain conditions, especially focusing conditions and fatigues and things like that, where if their catecholamines are corrected, that's part of the puzzle. But then if you look and their thyroid is corrected and the thyroid is working better, that actually makes the brain work better as well. Well, tyrosine hits on both counts. It increases your catecholamines for your brain to use for focus. And then it also feeds the thyroid its synthetic skeleton to make thyroid hormone, again, being tyrosine. So the next step that people will ask about would be, well, okay, well, what are the doses that people take? And are there any cautions or dangers with it? Which you should always ask with anything, whether it's a drug or a natural supplement or whatever. So the first thing is with cautions in using amino acids for therapy with people for a long, long time, most people, because amino acids Are familiar to your body. You have enzyme pathways for them and all that. Most people tolerate them very well. The thing that you watch for, and what I always tell patients or parents of patients to watch for, is you don't want to take so much tyrosine that you make so much catecholamine that you get say jittery or overstimulated or feel like you drank a pot of coffee or something like that. Now the interesting thing is for some people that's 500 to 1,000 milligrams, and then they feel too much. For other people, it can be. Many thousands of milligrams. There are people where we, for example, with inattentive disorders, where their brain obviously needs more, and they'll start out at 500 to 1,000, test it out, seems fine. Then they go to 2,000, starting to feel their focus get a little better, and they may have to go up beyond that. The next thing about that is sometimes, depending on the nutrition and the absorption of amino acids in your stomach and your GI tract, you might need more in the beginning and then less later on. So little takes arbitrary example. This is not medical advice. This is an example from a patient where they had to ramp up to 3,000 or 4,000 milligrams of tyrosine to notice it helped their focus. And then 2 months later, they started to say, well, now I'm getting jittery from it. And they actually were able to ramp down to 1,000 milligrams and they still got the benefit from their focus, but they weren't jittery anymore. So that's a real common thing. I call it sort of like going up the slide and back down. You're not going to zero, but you're going lower than you used to after 1, 2, 3 months of saturation. So the big thing with tyrosine is to watch for feeling jittery or overcaffeinated or having sleep trouble. The final thing about dosing that you really want to keep in mind is you want to take tyrosine for the most part in the morning or morning and lunch. It's not good for most people to take it at, say, dinner or bedtime because that's not when you want your dopamine and norepinephrine to go up in your body is during the night because you're not going to sleep very well. So I always have people start to take it 500 to 1,000 as a test dose in the morning, see how they feel. If they're not feeling what they need from it, they can ramp the dose up. And then if they feel that helps the focus, great, they can keep going. If at some point in the future they start to feel jittery or overstimulated by it, we back off on the dose until they don't feel overstimulated. And normally they still enjoy the benefits of focus from the tyrosine supplementation. Again, this is just my experience with people. I'm not giving any medical advice here, but it answers hopefully the question that I was asked about tyrosine. And interestingly, the tyrosine gummy question that came up. Thank you very much, all of the subscribers. We've got a growing community here. Please do subscribe if you haven't, like, share, comment, all those things. And I will see you guys on the next video. But in the meantime, take a look at some of these other videos we're going to post here for you to look at.
