Why You Need to Start Juicing Tonight

The Sleep-Anxiety Connection Nobody's Talking About

If you have trouble sleeping, problems with anxiety, or get startled easily, I’ve got a quick solution for you, and it involves some green juice.

There’s about a fifty percent chance your problem is that your glycine levels are low.

Supplementing with glycine could certainly help. After all, glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that acts primarily in the brainstem where it helps lower your startle reflex, relax your muscles, calm your mood, and cool your body in preparation for deep sleep.

However, glycine supplementation can increase the production of the mitochondrial toxin oxalate. Oxalate can form crystals in the kidneys where it causes kidney stones, or in the brain, where it causes cognitive problems. It impairs glycolysis, which could contribute to diabetes, and it impairs gluconeogenesis, which could lower blood sugar. It impairs the citric acid cycle, which could cause fatigue and could impair myelin synthesis, leading to long-term neurological problems. Oxalate also powerfully inhibits D-lactate dehydrogenase, which is responsible for clearing away D-lactate. If D-lactate isn’t cleared, it poisons the brain, at extreme levels causing confusion, disorientation, slurred speech, difficulty coordinating movements, walking awkwardly, headache, hunger, irritability, aggression, hallucinations, and paranoia.

Glycine supplementation itself, in excess, can overload complex I of the respiratory chain, which can back up metabolism at a much more general level, worsening most metabolic problems.

None of this is to say glycine supplementation is bad. In fact, I supplement with glycine myself.

However, most glycine is synthesized from glucose with the help of several vitamins and minerals.

It is far better to enable your own glycine synthesis as a foundation for your calmness and great sleep than to supplement with megadoses of it.

Always start by giving your body what it needs, not what you want it to have.

This is educational in nature and not medical or dietetic advice. See terms for additional and more complete disclaimers.

The One Form of Folate No One Is Talking About

A major reason for poor glycine synthesis can be lack of a specific form of folate called tetrahydrofolate (THF).

The supplement industry has seriously under-thought the provision of folate supplements, as a THF supplement is critically necessary to round out what can be gotten from food. In fact, if you take methylfolate or folinic acid, it is possible you could worsen the problem. The industry unfortunately has given up on offering THF supplements because THF is unstable in free form.

THF can quickly oxidize to dihydrofolate (DHF) and then break down spontaneously to pterin and p-aminobenzoate, compounds with no nutritional utility to humans. In free form, THF disappears within an hour.

This Form of Folate Is Stable in Raw Milk and All Liver, But You Need MORE Of It

However, THF is strongly stabilized by folate-binding protein, which is present on the surface of most mammalian cells and is involved in shuttling folate into the mammary gland, where it is released into milk. It also increases its absorption in the intestinal tract. Folate-binding protein is destroyed by pasteurization. Raw milk is an incredibly important source of folate for an infant or a small child, but the amount of folate — about 12 micrograms per serving — is too small to be of use for an adult trying to combat anxiety, elevated startle reflex, and sleep disruption due to poor glycine synthesis.

Folate is named after the Greek word for “leaf” due its abundance in leafy vegetables, though I like to think of the “three L’s” as sources of folate: liver, legumes, and leafy greens. In reality it does not matter if they are leafy, it just matters that they are green. For example, broccoli crowns are great sources of folate.

In most vegetables, folate is largely found as methylfolate, which is far more stable than THF and is in fact the most stable form of folate. Despite this, cooking vegetables causes loss of 25-70% of the folate. Greater losses are incurred when folate can be lost in cooking water, and if you chop or shred veggies before rinsing, folate will be lost in the rinsing water in proportion to the surface area you created. Further, vegetable folate degrades during frozen storage: after 3-9 months, 75-95% of the folate is lost. Dried legumes seem to be stable when stored properly, but cooking them causes loss of about half the folate, which is evenly distributed between destruction and loss in the cooking water.

In liver, cooking has no effect on total folate, but some of the methylfolate turns to THF, causing the proportion of total folate as THF to increase from 26% to 37%. If the liver is frozen, 80% of its THF is retained after six months.

This indicates that THF is stable in raw milk and liver, but even methylfolate is unstable in vegetables during cooking and freezing.

However, raw milk has too little folate, and while the amount in liver is substantial, you would overdose on vitamin A and copper if you tried to meet your folate requirement from liver alone.

The Supplement Industry Is Failing Us

The industry could step up and either make a folate-binding-protein-bound THF, or figure out what makes THF so stable in liver and add those components to the THF supplement.

Why You Need to DRINK Your Lettuce

Instead, we will breeze past the industry at lightning speed and come up with our own solution: drink your lettuce.

As can be seen in the table below, methylfolate and other folate forms convert to THF during juicing, and the THF can be found in both the juice and the pulp. The highest amounts of THF are found in juiced beet greens, turnip greens, broccoli, and romaine lettuce.

Beet greens are loaded with oxalate. Turnip greens have a modest amount of oxalate. Broccoli is incredibly nutritious, but when you start juicing it you really get the opportunity to overload your system with thiocyanate-generating compounds that inhibit the uptake of iodine into the thyroid and mammary glands. By contrast, romaine lettuce has no oxalate and no cyanide-related toxins.

Some lettuces exude a milky white substance rich in lactucarium or related compounds, which can have sedative and analgesic effects and are toxic in very large quantities. However, this generally correlates to bitter taste, and romaine lettuce is very mild rather than bitter, a sign that it should be tolerated well in quite high quantities.

If you diversify your vegetables, you will protect yourself from overloading on any one particular bad component; however, juiced romaine lettuce appears to be the best all-around way to load up on THF to improve glycine synthesis.

How Drinking Lettuce Can Complement Creatine

I personally found that creatine massively helped my sleep, yet it also increased by startle reflex in a manner that responded to glycine, and keeping my glycine levels up was needed to stabilize the sleep benefit. Blending 300 grams per day of romaine lettuce in a Vitamix, which seems to be like juicing except it includes the pulp, minimized the amount of glycine I needed to take.

If you aren’t using creatine, you need to read this article:

If you get any side effects from using creatine, that’s actually a sign you need it. Use my guide to handling creatine side effects here:

Don’t Forget About Sulfur

The other major cause of elevated startle reflex is disrupted sulfur metabolism. Read How Sulfite Destroys Your Mental Health for more.

Fix sulfur issues with my Sulfur Protocol here:

Lots More to Methylation

Get my MTHFR protocol here:

Solve complicated methylation cases with labwork:

Got THF?

Don’t wait for the supplement companies. Try drinking your lettuce now.