Matt Kelly explains how L-glutamine fuels gut cells, protects against inflammation, and supports your microbiome. He addresses whether glutamine feeds cancer, arguing that oral doses are mostly consumed by the gut itself and unlikely to reach systemic levels that would fuel tumors.
The amino acid glutamine can create a lot of excitement when you talk about it, a lot of misunderstanding, and also a lot of just confusion around why it might be helpful for digestive function, for example. So let's get into that. First off, how does the digestive system cells operate and why would glutamine interface there? Well, digestive system cells have high energy requirements because they're not just sitting there kind of passively doing whatever they do. They are there to help with digestion and absorption of your food from macronutrient to micronutrient, get the micronutrients into the blood. And in many cases, some of the specialized digestive system cells are a big part of the breakdown of the macro to micronutrient stages, et cetera. So they use a lot of energy to do all of this work. Well, it turns out that one of the primary sources for the digestive system cells, energy requirements comes from the amino acid glutamine. Now, if you look and you were to take all of your tissues and your blood, all the fluids in your body, and look at the mass of amino acids that are in there— so amino acids are the little pieces that make proteins— so if you look at the mass of amino acids that are in there, the largest quantity of one amino acid is glutamine in your body. It's used in your immune system, in your gut, as we talked about, your kidneys, everywhere. So because the GI are so energy demanding and they require glutamine as a source for that energy, the glutamine and the GI cells go hand in hand. So GI cell energy requirements, which are very high and very demanding for us to digest and absorb correctly, can be helped to be met by glutamine. So that's one big way it helps. There's also a protective benefit of glutamine for really all your cells, but especially the GI tract cells to protect them from the effects of stress, inflammation, and other types of damage to the GI tract cells. So while the glutamine is there helping with the energetic demands of the cell and all the energy that they're using to do their business as GI cells, it is also helping on the protective side by helping to mitigate some of the negative effects that come from chemical stressors, physical stressors, antioxidant imbalances, and other types of cell damage. So you have feeding the cell on the energy side and protecting the cell on the protection antioxidant balance side of the equation. The next thing is that the glutamine, either in our diet or as a supplement, let's say, is going to be extremely helpful to the microbiome. So the microbiome, of course, is a lot— we think of good bacteria, right? Well, most of the microbiome is going to be bacteria of different types, and the human microbiome has particular species of bacteria that are going to be useful. There are also some viruses and some fungi and other stuff that might be part of the human microbiome, but generally we're looking at the major types of bacteria, the ones you hear about like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, things like that. Those are very common in the microbiome. Well, L-glutamine or the amino acid glutamine is also very supportive to proper microbiome function, proper replication of the right microbiome cells. And that is a two-way street with GI health. So the microbiome, your good bacteria, let's say, that are in your GI tract are not just sitting there passively, again, doing some microbiome business. They are also helping you with things like digestion and absorption of nutrients, GI immune function. GI inflammation balancing and things of that nature. So when we look at glutamine, it's also secondarily supporting all those GI cells by supporting the GI microbiome. So we have it as an energy source for these high-energy demand cells. We have it as a protective barrier supplement. So it's going to help with the protective immunologic activity. And we have it as a support to the microbiome, which is going to support all of those other functions. As a matter of fact, the better your microbiome, is, the less damage and inflammation you'll have. So it's sort of like a little circle of life in there with glutamine holding everything together. Now, one question we normally get, so I'm going to try and answer it ahead of time because I bet it'll come up in the comments, is, well, I've heard that glutamine can fuel cancer. Well, that is true and not true at the same time. And what do I mean by that? Well, if we look at tumor biology, and so we're looking at tumor cells versus normal cells, the metabolism between normal cells and tumor cells can be quite different. And sometimes some tumor cells will go into a process called glutaminolysis, and they'll go into other types of problems in their metabolic functioning, and glutamine could be fuel to some of that. But when we're thinking about taking glutamine orally, think of Everything I said before I got to cancer, your microbiome, your membrane, so the cell outer membranes that are inside the gut and the cell energy itself are going to use up huge amounts of glutamine that you take in orally. So if I have somebody and they have a damaged digestive tract and I want to use, say, glutamine as an oral supplement for, say, 12 weeks to help recharge everything, I'm not terribly worried about raising their systemic glutamine. Levels because I'm going to give them doses that are just going to be chewed up by the digestive tract and the microbiome, and you're not really going to get that much glutamine into your peripheral circulation, which is where it would potentially bother a cancer cell. The GI tract— and generally, let's say you're recovering from surgery or an ulcer or something— the GI tract will completely use up grams and grams of glutamine. So a gram is 1,000 milligrams, and so we will often dose people who are in recovery from surgery or gastritis, ulcers, something like that, or maybe, you know, exposure to medications. And we might give them glutamine throughout the day and we might give them 1,000, 2,000, even 3,000 milligrams 3, 4 times a day. Most of that is not going to absorb anyway. So on the cancer side of things, while it's kind of complex and glutamine sometimes is a cancer fuel and sometimes is not, if you're using it to support the digestive system through all of these mechanisms we've talked about, you're not going to get enough Enough in orally if you're doing a few grams throughout the day to really cause a problem anywhere else with any other cells other than your GI tract cells. All right, well, I hope that answers the question. 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