Amino Acids
Amino Acids & Quality of Life
How amino acids shape your quality of life: cysteine, glycine, taurine, and carnitine are key compounds for skin, hair, bones, immunity, and mental health—primarily from animal proteins.
Amino Acids
How amino acids shape your quality of life: cysteine, glycine, taurine, and carnitine are key compounds for skin, hair, bones, immunity, and mental health—primarily from animal proteins.
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What is the right way to eat? These days there are as many dietary approaches as there are grains of sand. The good part: you can choose what suits you. You can basically invent your own approach and then find a diet to match.
This is the curious nature of nutritional science (often more like folklore): Much of it is just a nice narrative. People don't look at human biochemistry and ask what an organism needs, how it functions best, or how to optimize it. No, with nutrition people always tell stories. Some tell stories about Stone Age humans, others about the "Mediterranean diet," still others believe they should eat like a cow... or a gorilla. Of course, all the appropriate associations come along with that.
What hardly anyone talks about is the simple yet incredible importance of amino acids in the body. Maybe from ignorance. Maybe because people believed the myth that "protein is harmful" or "amino acid deficiency doesn't exist" or something like that. And here comes the real reason we always recommend a paleo template for your own nutrition. It doesn't matter whether you believe in the hunting Stone Age human or someone else. The fact is: for 99.5% of our evolutionary time, we ate certain things regularly and others rarely.
The following selection of amino acids and amino acid derivatives shows, on the one hand, the incredible importance of these compounds for our wellbeing and quality of life – and on the other, they indirectly reveal what dietary approach might produce outstanding quality of life:
Cysteine is a sulfur-containing amino acid. What's special about this wonder amino acid is that it has a so-called terminal thiol group. This sulfur group is exposed and can react with other thiol groups (from other cysteines), creating stable bonds.
In the body, many proteins use these cysteine-cysteine bonds to create, for example, stability. Cysteine is found in high amounts in keratins. These are proteins that make up the main component of our fingernails. The cysteine-cysteine bonds make the fingernail hard. Our hair also consists largely of keratin and thus of cysteine!
Cysteine also plays a major role in the immune system. Through its reactive thiol group, harmful substances can be bound and excreted. This is how glutathione works, perhaps the most important antioxidant in the body. It detoxifies... with cysteine. Because glutathione consists of just three amino acids: glutamic acid, cysteine, and glycine, which we'll discuss next.
⇨ Animal proteins, especially eggs and whey protein, are very, very rich in cysteine.
We called glycine the "[source no longer available]" a few years ago. Even then, we were fans of how this amino acid works and the protein in which it occurs naturally: collagen. Our body's collagen is also very rich in glycine. As the smallest of all amino acids, it creates the special structure and twist of long collagen chains. At every third position, you find this tiny amino acid. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body, giving it durability, structure, and elasticity. Ligaments, tendons, cartilage, bone, skin – all of it is made of collagen.
Glycine itself has wonderful effects in the body. For example, in the brain and nervous system, glycine acts as a natural "sedative". High levels of glycine in the body install a dampener in the brain. This is essential knowledge. And: it's also essential to know that collagen is making a serious comeback. Once dismissed as slaughterhouse waste, today we know: [source no longer available]. Additionally, it's becoming increasingly clear that supplied collagen peptides can build your body's own collagen.
⇨ Glycine is found in significant amounts almost exclusively in animal collagen proteins – collagen hydrolysate or bone broth contain substantial amounts of this amino acid.
Amino acids are unfortunately getting a bad reputation again. After much work in health circles to help people understand the importance of amino acids and especially protein – that protein doesn't harm the kidneys and so on – you increasingly read headlines saying that higher amounts of protein are "unhealthy".
Total nonsense, because: the body can process incredible amounts of protein. None of us reach this natural limit. On the other hand, the toxicity threshold is well known among indigenous peoples. Many hunter-gatherer cultures live almost exclusively on meat and fish at certain times of year. They knew: we can't meet our entire energy needs from protein, or it becomes toxic. Every culture has its own term for this; among the Inuit it's called rabbit starvation.
But: more protein in the diet is worth its weight in gold for most of us. The immune system is made of protein (antibodies), muscles need amino acids, and even the enzymes and proteins that keep the human chemistry set running are made of amino acids. But most importantly, neurotransmitters in the brain are made from amino acids. Drive, desire, mood, power: all of these are feelings made from amino acids, and researchers have known for decades (!) that protein availability in the body has a direct influence on how these substances are produced.
⇨ The highest quality protein comes from meat, fish, eggs, and milk. These protein sources have perfect digestibility and the highest content of essential amino acids.
Taurine is found primarily in seafood. It's not actually a true amino acid, but an aminosulfonic acid. Most of us know taurine from energy drinks. It's added there because it has a calming effect. It dampens the stimulating effect of caffeine. And indeed: taurine acts, similar to glycine, as a brake in the brain.
In [source no longer available] you read amazing things about taurine: "Taurine crosses the blood-brain barrier and has been associated with a variety of physiological phenomena, including inhibitory neurotransmission, long-term potentiation in the striatum/hippocampus, membrane stabilization, negative feedback inhibition of the neutrophil/macrophage burst, regulation of adipose tissue and possible prevention of obesity, calcium homeostasis, recovery from osmotic shock, protection against glutamate excitotoxicity, and prevention of epileptic seizures."
In other words: taurine protects. It acts as an antioxidant, has a positive effect on the immune system, on the brain (learning!), regulates body fat, protects cells (calcium influx; osmoregulation), protects the brain (against the effects of the glutamate neurotransmitter), and much more. It's also been shown that taurine is essential for the power plants of our cells, the mitochondria, to function normally.
In humans, the enzymes that are supposed to produce taurine work rather slowly, which is why we need taurine from food to maintain normal taurine levels. In cats, taurine is essential – these strict carnivores (hypercarnivores) can no longer produce it. A deficiency in these animals results, for example, in heart disease (the heart is the most important muscle in the body...) and blindness.
⇨ Taurine. Only in animals.
It's made in the body from two amino acids. For this, you need the cofactors vitamin C, vitamin B6, niacin, and iron (ahem, ahem). A bit complicated. A few milligrams are produced – roughly 10 to 20 mg. The body is supposed to make do with that. The truth: [source no longer available] (just like Chris) make dietary carnitine intake necessary. In fact, 100g of red meat often contains 50 (pork), 100 (beef), or even 400 mg (ostrich) of carnitine. An incredible amount!
Carnitine is known as a "fat burner". Of course, that's an exaggeration. The truth is: carnitine is essential for getting fatty acids into the mitochondria, where they are burned. It doesn't take large amounts, but studies with labeled fatty acids showed 20 years ago that carnitine can significantly increase fat burning (cf. [source no longer available]).
But that's not really what this is about, because carnitine is much more than that. Carnitine has an enormous influence on the health of the body. [source no longer available], where male aging is the topic, carnitine administration works as well as or better than testosterone administration for "erectile dysfunction, depressed mood, and fatigue related to male aging".
That's not all: carnitine itself regulates genes. [source no longer available] in muscle, where testosterone then works better. Carnitine acts on muscle like fertilizer, can make it much more anabolic by activating the so-called anabolic pathway (cf. [source no longer available]). And carnitine isn't just fertilizer for muscle, but also for the brain. Recently, [source no longer available] showed that carnitine works on mood as well as an antidepressant.
⇨ Carnitine is found exclusively in meat.
Nutrition determines how good we feel. And amino acids and amino acid derivatives are largely responsible for that. Ultimately, it turns out that a good part of our food should be from animal sources for good reason. Anyone who doesn't want to live this way has to accept that they're missing such important key substances – if possible, they should supplement them. The good news is that you don't need large amounts and even small amounts of animal products can make a big difference.
So:
Amino acids shape your quality of life.
