Humans have a natural tendency throughout their history (from the Stone Age to exponential technologies) to oversimplify complex environments, and as a result they do not evaluate all risks in the best way (or some at all). The reasons for their actions are very complex, and I don’t want to go into all their forms in this series of blogs. However, I do want to address here one specific pattern of decision making and risk assessment that people are fond of (also) in the medical and dietary fields.
So what is the mythical problem? It is the matching of unknown inputs to known outputs, or in other words – confusing causality with correlation. Nassim Nicholas Taleb described this phenomenon very nicely in his book The Black Swan and called it the “narrative fallacy”, or translated as “the fallacy of narrative”. The narrative fallacy describes the tendency of a person to invent a story (input) that illusorily justifies the existence of a phenomenon (output), with the result that the person himself thinks that he understands the phenomenon well enough.
An observant individual has surely caught another individual afflicted with the narrative fallacy at least once in his or her lifetime. Whether it was when he saw an angry gentleman at a bus stop shouting that the cause of his bad financial situation was solely due to such and such a politician, or when a despondent lady at the physiotherapist’s complained that her bulging intervertebral discs were the result of genetics.
However, since this blog series is about nutrition, I’m going to relate the fallacy of narrative exclusively in the context of food.
In the series “Medicine under the guise of dietary narrative”, I want to cover four of the most essential nutrients that I believe are highly misperceived in our civilization, and as a result, many of them are wrongly damned, adored, or ignored, or dosed incorrectly. Or a little of everything.
Humans have a natural tendency throughout their history (from the Stone Age to exponential technologies) to oversimplify complex environments, and as a result they do not evaluate all risks in the best way (or some at all). The reasons for their actions are very complex, and I don’t want to go into all their forms in this series of blogs. However, I do want to address here one specific pattern of decision making and risk assessment that people are fond of (also) in the medical and dietary fields.
So what is the mythical problem? It is the matching of unknown inputs to known outputs, or in other words – confusing causality with correlation. Nassim Nicholas Taleb described this phenomenon very nicely in his book The Black Swan and called it the “narrative fallacy”, or translated as “the fallacy of narrative”. The narrative fallacy describes the tendency of a person to invent a story (input) that illusorily justifies the existence of a phenomenon (output), with the result that the person himself thinks that he understands the phenomenon well enough.
An observant individual has surely caught another individual afflicted with the narrative fallacy at least once in his or her lifetime. Whether it was when he saw an angry gentleman at a bus stop shouting that the cause of his bad financial situation was solely due to such and such a politician, or when a despondent lady at the physiotherapist’s complained that her bulging intervertebral discs were the result of genetics.
However, since this blog series is about nutrition, I’m going to relate the fallacy of narrative exclusively in the context of food.
In the series “Medicine under the guise of dietary narrative”, I want to cover four of the most essential nutrients that I believe are highly misperceived in our civilization, and as a result, many of them are wrongly damned, adored, or ignored, or dosed incorrectly. Or a little of everything.
This part (4) refers specifically to methionine and glycine.
What’s the point?
While I have not done any research, nor have I devoted my time to any study that has examined the knowledge of glycine and methionine across the population, I would still venture to say that most of us have not encountered terms like “glycine” and “methionine” as abundantly as we have encountered “cholesterol“, “omega-3 fatty acid“, or “salt“, which I have discussed in my past articles in this blog series.
That’s why I saved glycine and methionine as the cherry on top.
So what’s the point? What is this mythical glycine/methionine anyway? Well, they’re two amino acids (the building blocks of protein) and each of them has quite different things to do. As with fatty acids, glycine and methionine should be properly balanced in the human body if we don’t want to damage our health.
Methionine
Methionine is an essential amino acid that is required for normal growth and repair of body tissues. The body cannot make methionine and must therefore obtain it from the diet (hence the “essential” amino acid).
There are two types of methionine — L-methionine and D-methionine. Both have the same chemical nature, but their molecules are mirror images. A mixture of these two substances is called DL-methionine.
Methionine plays an important role in the growth of new blood vessels. Although the body makes it on its own, L-methionine supplementation has been shown to help speed wound healing and also to treat people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, withdrawal, schizophrenia, radiation, copper poisoning, asthma, allergies, alcoholism, liver damage and depression.
In addition, L-methionine contains sulfur, which the body uses for healthy growth and metabolism, and is responsible for a compound known as s-adenosylmethionine, or “SAM-e,” which, for example, promotes proper immune system function, or the release of many important neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin.
SAM-e supplementation, for example, has been used experimentally to treat depression — in a 2020 research study, SAM-e achieved the same success rate as the tricyclic antidepressant Imipramine (crap), or the serotonin reuptake drug Escitalopram (also crap). Of course, it has also been placebo tested.
Let’s take a look at a couple of other interesting studies together.
According to a study conducted in Australia, methionine, along with B vitamins and other minerals, may also help reduce the risk of colorectal cancer. The study looked at the foods people consumed as well as micronutrients (e.g., folate, methionine, vitamins B6 and B12, selenium, vitamin E, vitamin C, and lycopene). Although the trials studied many of these vitamins, minerals, and amino acids individually, the overall data support the conclusion that a diet containing all of these micronutrients (including methionine) may help reduce the risk of colorectal cancer.
A study conducted on eleven patients untreated for Parkinson’s disease in turn shows that methionine may help with this unpleasant disease as well. Participants were treated with L-methionine for periods ranging from two weeks to six months and showed improvements in akinesia and rigidity, resulting in fewer Parkinsonian tremors than usual. Well, all good things.
Oh, and to make it all even more complicated, methionine also increases bone strength.
Some dudes in Taiwan wanted to better understand how methionine and endurance exercise affect the body, so they started giving rats different diets, some containing methionine foods and others not. After an eight-week period, the exercise-loaded rats had 9.2% less body weight, which is no surprise, since exercise can, of course, help anyone (even rats and Americans) lose weight. However, part of the research showed that the methionine-loaded rats had better bone strength and mineralization compared to rats that were fed a diet without methionine supplementation.
Thus, the results suggest that methionine combined with endurance exercise, while causing lower overall bone mass, size, and/or strength, did increase natural bone strength by an order of magnitude. This is perhaps why there are many claims about how methionine can aid athletic performance.
Glycine
Glycine is also an amino acid that functions as a building block for certain proteins — especially collagen found in skin, ligaments, muscles, bones, and cartilage. It makes up about 35% of the collagen in the human body.
Glycine also helps regulate nerve impulses in the central nervous system, specifically in the spinal cord, the retina, and in the control center of the brain, which is called the brainstem. It also binds with toxic substances and aids in their elimination from the body.
However, unlike methionine, glycine can be synthesized in the human body (which is why it is not considered an essential amino acid).
Glycine is one of three amino acids that the body uses to make glutathione, a powerful antioxidant that helps protect cells from oxidative damage caused by free radicals, which are thought to be at the root of many unsightly diseases. In fact, without enough glycine, the body produces less glutathione, which could negatively affect how we manage oxidative stress as we age. And of course, glutathione levels naturally decline with age.
Glycine is also one of the three amino acids that the body uses to make a compound called creatine. Creatine gives muscles the energy to perform fast and short activities. So glycine should definitely not be avoided by any over-motivated fitness buff.
Last but not least, glycine can also promote sleep and increase sleep quality through its calming effects on the brain and ability to lower basal body temperature.
So let’s take another look at some specific studies.
Research in people with sleep problems has shown that taking 3 grams of glycine at bedtime reduces time to fall asleep, improves sleep quality, reduces daytime sleepiness, and improves focus. Because of this, glycine may be the real solution to the problem, as opposed to the nasty chemical crap that many people pop to get a better night’s sleep.
(When I’ve popped a scoop of hydrolyzed collagen in before bed, Oura has always measured super results for me in the “latency” and “deep sleep” categories. However, this is an experiment that I conducted with 5 times repetition, and the only subject observed was me, so I acknowledge the possibility of confusing causality with correlation and succumbing to the narrative fallacy. I draw no drastic conclusions from this.)
Anyway, now for something about alcohol and the study related to it.
I drink alcohol practically every morning, but I take it in microdoses in my tibicos (that’s probably the only form in which alcohol is health promoting). However, many people feel the need to drink alcohol in macro doses (and ideally in combination with colourings and sugars) in an attempt to poison themselves. And if they take it in the evening, they also take it in the evening in an attempt to wreak havoc on their circadian rhythm (as the excitatory neurotransmitter adenosine is suddenly boosted during their nightly sobriety).
Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid this kind of alcohol consumption in my life, just as I’ve managed to avoid watching sports, voting for political chieftains, or going to church, but every time I interact with people practicing this kind of activity, a chill runs down my spine.
But to the point. If you become intoxicated with alcohol, you are damaging your entire body, but especially your blood vessels and liver (since alcohol enters your brain just after it is metabolized in the liver, where it is carried through the blood vessels). There are three primary types of alcohol-induced liver damage:
- fatty liver — a build-up of fat in the liver, increasing its size
- alcoholic hepatitis — caused by inflammation of the liver as a result of long-term drinking
- alcoholic cirrhosis — the final stage of alcoholic liver disease, which occurs when liver cells are damaged and replaced by scar tissue (I call this condition Zeman’s syndrome)
Research suggests that glycine may prevent inflammation by reducing the harmful effects of alcohol on the liver. Glycine has been shown to reduce blood alcohol concentrations in alcohol-fed rats by stimulating alcohol metabolism in the stomach rather than the liver, directly preventing the development of a fatty liver and alcoholic cirrhosis.
What’s more, glycine can also help reverse liver damage caused by excessive alcohol intake in animals (i.e., animals suffering from Zeman’s syndrome). While the mild liver damage caused by alcohol can be reversed by abstinence, glycine can improve the recovery process. In a study on rats with alcohol-induced liver damage, liver cell health returned to baseline levels 30% faster in the group fed a diet containing glycine for two weeks compared to the control group.
Increasing evidence further suggests that glycine also offers protection against heart disease. It prevents the accumulation of the compound, which in high amounts is associated with atherosclerosis, hardening and narrowing of the arteries. This amino acid can also improve the body’s ability to use nitric oxide, an important molecule that increases blood flow and lowers blood pressure (I wrote more about nitric oxide in my last blog on salt).
In an observational study of more than 4,100 people with chest pain, higher glycine levels were associated with a lower risk of heart disease and heart attacks at 7.4-year follow-up. After accounting for cholesterol-lowering drugs, researchers also observed a more favorable blood cholesterol profile in people who had higher glycine levels. In addition, glycine was also found to reduce several risk factors for heart disease in rats fed a high-sugar diet.
Eating and drinking large amounts of added sugar can also clearly raise blood pressure, increase blood fat levels, and promote dangerous fat gain in the abdominal area. And these are all things that go nicely hand in hand with heart disease.
And of course, glycine can primarily reduce muscle wasting — a condition that occurs with aging, malnutrition, or stress, for example. Muscle wasting leads to a reduction in our strength, fascia overgrowth, and many other annoyances, which impairs our usability and can complicate other potentially present illnesses.
The amino acid leucine, for example, has been studied as a potential treatment for muscle loss because it strongly inhibits muscle breakdown and promotes muscle building. However, several changes in the body during muscle wasting conditions impair the effectiveness of leucine to stimulate muscle growth. Interestingly, in mice with muscle wasting conditions such as cancer, research showed that glycine was able to stimulate muscle growth, while leucine did not. Glycine therefore promises to improve health by protecting muscle from wasting (whatever the cause of the wasting).
Cause of the imbalance
Guess who is to blame for the glycine and methionine imbalance. Clearly, in this case it is again the culture and the competition of memes for the largest number of individuals. The memetic fetishization of diet and all the mess that goes with it.
Our proto-human ancestors didn’t have the bizarre eating habits that humans have today. If they killed an animal, they made sure to use everything they could out of it. It’s called nose to tail eating. On the other hand, many people today eat only the muscles of the animal itself (ideally also spiked with speedo and hormones), and the most nutritious parts — the organs — are thrown away.
And that is the stumbling block of this whole imbalance. For meat is a significant source of methionine, while it usually contains very little glycine. Our other favourite sources of protein, including eggs, dairy products and fish, are similarly affected.
Glycine, on the other hand, is mostly found in foods that few people eat these days. This includes hides, bones, cartilage, organs — things that are associated with cheap cuts of meat and that people normally throw away.
Consequence of methionine and glycine imbalance
As mentioned above, glycine is not an essential amino acid for the reason that the human body can make it on its own. However, our bodies are not always able to make enough of these “non-essential” substances for optimal functioning. The average 70-pound person needs about 10 g of glycine per day, while the body produces somewhere around 3 g on its own. Apparently, this is because we have always had enough glycine in our diets throughout our evolution.
Moreover, too high an intake of methionine in the diet means increased glycine consumption. One reason probably has to do with the fact that when methionine is metabolized, an unwanted substance called homocysteine is produced. Homocysteine, by the way, is associated specifically with inflammation and diseases of the cardiovascular system. And it is glycine that is needed to rid our bodies of homocysteine.
Glycine, on the other hand, is recognized for its many anti-inflammatory effects that dampen not only the negative effects of methionine, but also other types of inflammation.
In short, glycine is very important for our bodies and by neglecting its intake in favour of methionine we can very easily cause ourselves increased inflammation, poorer sleep and all the opposites of what I have happily discussed in the previous chapter of this article, relying on scientific studies.
How to fix your glycine to methionine ratio
Whether you’re a full-carnivore, an occasional meat-eater, or a vegetarian (vegans aren’t; they’re doomed), you need a source of quality gelatin or collagen in your diet. That’s why I think at the very least, bone broths or adding a hydrolyzed collagen in your coffee (or cocoa) should be on everyone’s daily agenda.
And, of course, such a foie gras or a so-called “tlačenka” are absolutely perfect meals, since in them, besides collagen, we also find organs and all sorts of other connective tissues and super sources of glycine (of course, it doesn’t matter from what source they are).
And if you want to be nutritionally absolutely perfect, for every 10 grams of animal protein, at least one gram of collagen is recommended. Oh, and if for some reason you’re taking in more protein than you need (because you’re an over-motivated fitness junkie and you think protein will give you nice muscles, which is your only motivation), then it’s recommended to add 2 grams for every 10 grams of animal protein over and above your intake.
Personally, I’m not very sure about my own adherence to this nutritional ratio, and since I don’t count any calories, I’m only intuitively estimating my protein intake. Even so, I think it makes more sense than nutritional tabulation to increase your glycine intake as much as possible in the form of broths, organs, and other forms of gelatin, while adding a good quality hydrolyzed collagen to the mix.
(I use Powerlogy’s collagen practically every day.)
While some studies suggest that a significant excess of collagen may be dangerous for people at increased risk of oxalate kidney stones, it is much safer for most people than excess methionine. And truth be told, most people have a problem with collagen deficiency rather than collagen excess.
I’m ending my blog series with a farewell interpreted as sharing with you my hack that I use to stabilize blood glucose — about 3 to 5 grams of glycine (which is about one scoop of Powerlogy collagen) before a meal should actually help me reduce blood glucose spikes from a higher-carb meal.
This is why I carry collagen with me when I travel — eating at Asian bistros and Jewish restaurants full of rice pasta and falafels does make my memetic culinary experience while traveling more pleasurable, but it certainly doesn’t do my low-carbohydrate etiquette any good.
