Optimize Your Glycine: Your Key to Better Sleep, Stress Relief, and Total Body Health
This 7-Page Quick Guide to optimizing glycine guides you step-by-step through all the reasons your glycine levels or glycine tolerance could need improvement.
Glycine is central to keeping you calm, helping you sleep, and relaxing your muscles. Paradoxically, you also need it to stay alert and to function at your best.
Glycine helps detoxify foreign chemicals and cool down our immune system when it gets out of hand.
High-dose glycine is a powerful antipsychotic in schizophrenia, showing just how powerful it is as a brain-boosting and brain-optimizing nutrient.
If animal studies are to be believed, glycine is central to lengthening lifespan.
Yet, glycine has a dark side. It can generate oxalate, which forms crystals in the kidneys, joints, and brain. Oxalate poisons the mitochondria throughout our body, and messes with the metabolism of neurotoxic D-lactate in the brain. Too much glycine can overload the respiratory chain, making it harder to produce cellular energy. And if glycine cannot be broken down effectively to CO2, it can accumulate to levels that cause headaches, or, when high enough, serious neurological problems.
So, how do we leverage all these benefits without risking any of the downside?
My 7-page Glycine Protocol outlines three approaches to boosting glycine status: the simple approach, which provides dietary principles for a baseline diet and for two levers to use to boost glycine status; the data-lite approach, which covers how to use glucose and lactate measurements to optimize glycine status; and the comprehensive approach, which covers how to use labwork to determine the exact reason your glycine levels might be low and how to fix the underlying problem. The last section covers how to deal with glycine levels that are too high, or problems that occur whenever glycine levels go up. This includes a number of deficiencies that can be fixed and concludes with five different approaches to deplete glycine from the body if needed.
This is educational in nature and not medical or dietetic advice. See terms for additional and more complete disclaimers.
The Protocol Series
This is part of a series of protocols. See all of the protocols here:
The Science Behind This Protocol
The science behind this protocol will be covered in a future article.
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