Ep 168 - Dr Brind | Glycine Fixes Inflammation & Increases Deep Sleep

this episode is brought to you by nordstrom for 125 years nordstrom has been part of your story the stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview the first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old the tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe these are the moments that make nordstrom nordstrom big or small we're here for all of it celebrating 125 years with new moments still add discover it all in nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com late night bites with friends already hard to beat that first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for followed by ice cold pepsi now that hits different suddenly the energy kicks back in the night goes longer and the laughs don't stop because pepsi brings out more flavor more fun and more of the moment food deserves pepsi grab a pepsi zero sugar today what is it in magnesium glycinate that could help you. somebody fall asleep maybe the fact that magnesium glycinate is a six percent lysine just getting good sleep is a game changer and of course not having all those aches and pains all of these things really are signs of glycine deficiency dr jill brind has spent 50 years as a research biochemist and today he proves that the one nutrient you're missing is glycine glycine is in the bones in the connective tissues well wait a minute that's the stuff we usually throw away i don't care what culture you came from your grandma didn't throw it away she threw it in the soup not the trash if you're deficient in something that is virtually universally needed for almost everything that goes on in your body all kinds of processes are going to suffer and not be functioning exactly right cancer patients obese patients diabetic patients all of these conditions are known to be conditions where glycine is particularly low inflammation is not a natural response to injury this is really an essential nutrient so you need to have it every day dr brind welcome thanks for having me here you know i'm so excited to have you here on the podcast because i realized i was doing something majorly wrong in my lifestyle from learning about honestly from learning about all the work that you do um but here is how i'd love to start this conversation i'd love to for you to speak to the person watching this right now who has woken up this morning with aches and pains and maybe they have been exhausted because they can't sleep and if they take to heart everything that you're about to teach us today about glycine glycine glycine about glycine and inflammation and sleep how do you think their life might change well their lives might change certainly by uh ending those difficulties that they have i mean just getting good sleep is is a game changer and of course not having all those aches and pains and that that's all all of these things really are signs of glycine deficiency a lot of the research that's been done has shown that oh glycine is good for this it can help with sleep it can help with inflammation it can and you read these papers and they all treat it as if it's some kind of a drug you know and and people who buy glycine supplements do too you know they'll they'll buy it and they'll say wow this is good this got rid of my knee pain or my shoulder pain and then they figure okay now i'm done with it and they don't realize this is really an essential nutrient so what's been happening is really you've been missing an essential nutrient and not only the the damage from that deficiency but you've been missing an essential nutrient and you've been missing an essential nutrient and you've been missing an essential nutrient and you've been missing that deficiency creeps up over time but glycine is a nutrient that your body can make just doesn't make enough but it makes less as you get older so all these aches and pains that we attribute to aging well not entirely correct not entirely incorrect uh but it's indirect and that is that because your body makes less glycine the glycine deficiency that we have that we all generally have most of us have is exacerbated and it's exacerbated also by the modern diet uh you know what do we eat when where where is first of all where is glycine in the diet in the normal diet uh glycine is in the bones in the connective tissues well wait a minute that's the stuff we usually throw away well you whatever i don't care what culture you came from your grandma didn't throw it away she threw it in the soup not the trash and so uh that's where the glycine is so the modern diet we get rid of the part that has the glycine number one number two we eat more of that glycine and we get rid of the part that has the glycine and we get rid of the muscle meat and the muscle meat has another amino acid called methionine or you might say methionine i'm not sure depending on where you come from but that actually requires glycine and uses up glycine in order to clear the excess of it that we eat takes two molecules of glycine to clear away every excess molecule of methionine that we eat and then on top of all of that we eat so much that we get fat and when you get fat your body actually makes less glycine so what understand that if you take this supplement or any supplement that has glycine in it and it gives you that roughly uh total of about 10 grams a day you get about eight grams in addition to the two or three that most diets provide if you do that you're now getting a normal a really appropriate level of this nutrition of this nutrient which is actually cleared in a matter of hours half life is measured in hours not hours and that's what you're getting and that's what you're getting about days so you need to have it every day it's not a drug it's a it's a key nutrient and one of the greatness understandings of modern science and medicine is that we think it's non-essential and uh that's and so understand that this will change your life by alleviating the symptoms of difficulty sleeping and pain due to inflammation but also understand that when the when all those things go away you don't stop eating extra glycine you really needed it just to complement and really make your diet whole and wholesome wow dr brand i think someone is going to be thinking i want to take it right now because i want to see those changes and you know earlier on when i said that i have been making that biggest mistake which you just mentioned we eat the muscle meats you know i eat ground beef and chicken breast and what don't eat chicken breast but chicken thigh and all the fatty cuts of meat but throwing away the tendons throwing away all the bones and not having all that good you know bone broth which we'll talk about and i'm going to talk about that in a little bit but i'm going to talk about that and i think a lot of people are like me out there where we just go buy ground beef and there's nothing wrong with it but when we're missing these essential crucial minerals which we need the glycine which you're talking about the nutrient when we're experiencing all this pain and inflammation along with all the other things that we're eating but your story is very very interesting because you have been doing this since 2007 and and i've got your bio here um you have been studying amino acid metabolism since 2007 um teaching human biology and endocrinology for 34 years and get this a medical research professional for 54 years that's longer than i have been living and you wrote the glycine miracle i'm old you're not old okay that's great so you told me i'm old i'm not telling you that you're old what i'm trying to say is that you have been doing this stuff for a long time yes and the question for you is how did you get so obsessed with this molecule why is it so important to you oh it's it's not an obsession at all this is this is nothing that i started on as glycine i'll tell you how i got involved in it i was involved in a uh a research foundation and we did research on all kinds of things it was actually starting in about 1993 that some of my colleagues had had a finding that if you take rats and mice and you feed them a diet that is not quite deficient but almost deficient very highly restricted in the essential amino acid methionine the rats and mice will actually live 30 to 40 percent longer wow this was amazing this was called methionine restriction and it has been verified over the years by other labs and other animals and it is a thing if you will in aging research that methionine restriction extends lifespan well so they they published that originally in about 93 i think it was and i was a consultant to this foundation and uh finally they asked me point blank they said well you're a biochemist and a consultant you know why don't you figure out what's going on here so i took a more so i took a more keen interest in it and glycine was something that i came across that other researchers late in the 90s and the early 2000s had identified as part of a pathway by which excess methionine is cleared is uh is disposed of by the liver so what i what i found out from this is basically from library research if you will that um although the methionine cycle a very critical amino acid needed in methylating you know all kinds of things from neurotransmitters to hormones to dna adding these one carbon methyl groups is methionine is very key because that's essential the body cannot make it if you don't get methionine you die well so but we have much more than we need so then my uh my uh question the the task that i sort of assigned myself and more specifically was what is it that we can add to the diet because it's very difficult to have a methionine restricted diet all the good stuff all those nice fatty meats you know bacon and so they're all loaded with methionine so how do you how do you give somebody to say i have this diet you know they'll they just most people would rather die than having a real methionine restricted diet anyway so what's the point of that so um what is it that then that we could add to the diet so So immediately, I thought of, well, there are some drugs relatively safe drugs, for example, that are cleared through the liver by being methylated. And so they use up methionine by having a methyl group stuck on them. So I thought drugs like, for example, spironolactone might work. And then in my reading, I realized that glycine had just been identified recently at that time as the main pathway or the main donor for the pathway that clears excess methionine, because the enzymes that take methionine or the activated form SAMe as adenosylmethionine, that use it up, they're called methyltransferases or methyltransferases, if you will. And these methyltransferases are for all these specific tasks for adding methyl groups, you know, like, as I say, DNA and hormones and neurotransmitters and so on. But then there was one that was a pathway that clears excess methionine, because the enzymes that take methionine or the activated form SAMe as adenosylmethionine, that use it up, they're called methyltransferases or one of these enzymes, which turns out to be the most abundant enzyme in human liver, which is called glycine N-methyltransferase. What this does is it's present in much higher amounts, much more active. And when there is excess methionine around, this enzyme gets turned on and it uses up methionine, right? Uses it up by donating it to glycine. So, okay, so glycine now is the vehicle by which excess methionine is cleared. If we can do that, if we can mimic that, then maybe we can simulate or mimic the effect of methionine restriction and get people to live 30 or 40% longer while enjoying all those great foods just supplemented with glycine. So we should, we tried in our rats, we did a glycine supplementation experiment. We gave them something like 8% glycine, 8%, 10%, 12% glycine in their feed. And we gave them something like 8% glycine, 8%, 10%, 12% glycine in their feed. And let them eat as much as they want compared to the control diet, which actually has a fair amount of glycine in it, 2.3%. But you start with the animal's control diet. This is a good kind of animal research. We're good to the animals. They get food that's good for them. And it's just, you know, we try to make it a little better for them. We let them eat all they want. They're treated like pets by the technicians and so on until they die their natural death. Then we autopsy them and, you know, collect the statistics on how long they lived and what they died of and so on. So that's the good kind of animal research. We don't abuse any animals there. In Nordstrom stores and at Nordstrom.com. The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Just said that. On the same page that I also understand and the person watching understands why glycine is so important. Methionine, which you are mentioning. You know, if somebody eats like ground beef or chicken thighs or just the meat itself, and there's nothing wrong with that, but basically that has high methionine in it. Now that's not bad in and of itself, but when you just eat that and you don't have the whole animal, which is the tendons, the ligaments, the collagen, everything, the marrow, everything, and the bones, then you don't have the whole animal. You're missing the glycine piece. And then you mentioned methionine restriction. So when you have methionine restriction in your experiment in rats, you saw that people, that they live longer, which is to say that there should be a balance between methionine and glycine so that we can live longer and have all the nutrients that we need. Is that a fair kind of summary of what you're saying? Well, in broad strokes, I would say yes. It kind of speaks to the kind of common lay misunderstanding that if I have enough glycine, like, oh, gee, you know, chicken legs and thighs and breasts and steak, they all have glycine in them because they're proteins. They're loaded with all the amino acids. So I'm certainly getting enough glycine from that, all this glycine supplementation stuff. They don't understand it. Yes, you are getting enough, but you're also getting much more methionine. And methionine, as I said, actually uses up glycine. And so, what we were trying to do by adding glycine to the diet is maybe we can accelerate the clearance of methionine and everybody would live longer. Well, what happened was, guess what? The rats and mice, they lived longer, but not quite as much longer, you know, 10 or 15% longer, but they also didn't have any different levels of methionine in their body. So it wasn't, it was, they were living longer, but it wasn't, it wasn't methionine restriction. It was something else. What was it? And it turns out that it was the fact that the control diet, the diet, which is relatively high in methionine and relatively low in glycine was actually restricting their lifespan because it was, it was clearing glycine. It was the glycine that was really needed to, to do all these other things that would extend lifespan in the way of lowering the level of inflammation and so on. So, so it, it has the beneficial effect, but it's different from methionine restriction. And the importance also methionine restriction is that you're not wasting glycine. If you restrict the amount of methionine, you're not using up any glycine to clear the excess because there's no excess, right? So, you know, these all, this is how these things all balance. In biochemistry graduate school or in medical school, they always teach the great methionine cycle, how that extra methyl group, once it's used up and it forms homocysteine, it gets recycled back into methionine. And that's how the body conserves this essential amino acid. Well, because it's essential, the body has so many ways to recycle and regenerate it that it's needed only in very small amounts. Methionine is only needed in amounts of about 300 to 500 milligrams, more like a vitamin than a bulk nutrient. For glycine, you need about 10 grams a day, about 10,000 milligrams a day of intake to keep a normal healthy level. Not necessarily normal, but a healthy level because normal levels are often lower than they should be. A healthy level of glycine in the blood and in the body. So that's how all of this, these balances, I think, figure out or sort out. The other thing is that it's, we know that the glycine, glycine is one molecule. And you mentioned things like all the connected tissues and the bones and the bone marrow and all of these things are good and they're beneficial. But the particular effects of glycine, we know that they are specifically due to glycine. So for example, bone broth has many good things in it. But the thing that really makes the difference is the glycine. Well, how do we know? Well, because if you just take the glycine, you get the same benefits. So we know from a scientific principle called Occam's razor, which is very often forgotten, that you need to reject the hypothesis because it's too complicated, not because it's too simple. Some people say, oh, too simple. That glycine can do all of this and this and this and that. No, that's too simple. No, you don't reject the hypothesis because it's too simple. It is simple. And it's simple because glycine is so fundamental. It is the most sort of fundamental, if you will, primal molecule to the living body. Glycine is needed in so many different pathways, so many different jobs that it does. And in terms of inflammation, it's not just about the glycine. It's about the glycine. Its job is actually not a biochemical job, which is one of the ways that people got thrown off the path of just how important and essential it is. That's because glycine is one of the most abundant, I think it's the first or the second most abundant amino acid in proteins, lots of it, and your body can make lots of it. And so it's there in relatively high amounts anyway, and you never really run out of enough glycine to make protein. So that's why, I mean, we don't have, you know, things like, what are these protein deficiency diseases that you see in cases of mass starvation? You know, beriberi and pellagra and all of these protein amino acid deficiency diseases. You don't find that with glycine deficiency because your body makes enough to make protein. But the inflammation story is a case where glycine is not actually used in its biochemical role or one of its biochemical roles. It's used really as a cellular physiological regulator. It regulates the cells, among other cells, the cells that actually cause inflammation. They're called macrophages. And they get activated to cause inflammation for no good reason, just because the voltage regulation falters because there's not enough glycine around bathing it in very high concentrations. And so it's a case where glycine is used in a very high concentration to keep open these glycine receptors, more formally known as glycine-gated chloride channels. They allow negatively charged. chloride ions to enter the cell, which keeps the switch that would make them otherwise go into inflammation mode, that's called M1 mode, into inflammation mode, keep that switch off unless it's appropriate. That leads into the question as to when is inflammation appropriate? Why are we all suffering from chronic inflammation more specifically? And the reason, and this is the key discovery that I've made, the most important discovery of it all, is about inflammation. And that is, contrary to popular belief among lay people and professionals as well, inflammation is not a natural response to injury. Wait a minute, it always happens, doesn't it? Well, yeah, I thought it always happened too. It always used to happen to me till I embarked on my self-experimentation with glycine supplementation. And for a couple of years, I was taking 10 grams of extra glycine a day. I knew it would be harmless. It would probably help me, but I didn't know exactly what to expect. And what happened was I had a fall four feet onto a concrete floor directly onto my tailbone. And that hurt a lot. But I got up and managed to finish what I was doing. And that evening, I went dancing and it was fine. The next day, I had absolutely no aches and pains or anything. I had this massive bruise on my lower back to prove that I had had this fall, but that was it. And then some weeks after that, I actually got a horrible sunburn. I was attending a baseball game without a hat, short sleeve shirt, shorts in the sun. It was June, right around this time of year. So we're talking about, you know, 16 years ago. And so I got, I was sitting there watching the game. Of course, I didn't bring any sunscreen. Why? Because I wasn't going to the beach. So I didn't give it any thought. But then about the fifth inning, about two thirds of the way through the game, I was, all of a sudden, I felt warmth on my thighs. And I looked down and I saw that right at the hem of my shorts and my sleeves and my neck and everything. It was really beet red. And I'm very fair skinned and I knew my body pretty well, I thought. And so I knew that with this level of sunburn for a couple of hours in the sun, I was going to be in excruciating pain for the next two or three days doing simple things like getting dressed, undressed and bathing. So the first thing I did was I went into the shade and guess what? It just started to fade. And it never, never did what I was absolutely certain it would do. So certain that I would be in tremendous pain for quite a while and maybe debilitated from that fall on my tailbone and certainly in excruciating pain for a period of days after that sunburn. Those things didn't happen. So these were the aha moments. These were the, these were the results manifesting from that self-experiment. Aha. It's inflammation is supposed to happen now, but it's not happening. Now, as we have discussed, what we eat and our insulin levels are crucial for fixing any health issue. But through my experience, it is not quite enough because unless you focus on your thoughts, your emotions, and your mental health, you can still get stuck. Now, I want to give you my personal experience on this, because if you look at me right now, you're probably thinking, well, she's jolly and she's doing very well, but did you know that for over 20 years, I was suffering from anxiety and complete overwhelm. And I didn't know, but it actually came from trauma in my childhood. And I tried everything, but nothing truly worked until I found therapy. And that's why I'm so proud to have BetterHelp as a sponsor of today's episode. Now, over a few months, my therapist gave me lots of different tools to work on, like grounding techniques. But the one thing that made all the challenging my thoughts and asking myself this question, what if I don't do everything on my list today? And through practice, it helped me let go of the constant feeling that I am not good enough or that what I'm doing is not good enough. And if you're like me, I think this could really help you. Now, the great thing about BetterHelp is that they make starting therapy really accessible wherever you are, whether you're online or through the app. And I want to tell you how it works. You just take a brief quiz and you get matched with a licensed therapist quickly. But here's the best part. If the match isn't quite right, you can switch therapists at any time for any reason at no extra cost. So if you feel that you need support from a licensed therapist, like I did, click the link in the description or just go to betterhelp.com forward slash primal podcast to get 10% off your first month of therapy. What you can read in any source you look at, it can be a textbook, it can be WebMD, it can be Wikipedia, it can be any source you like. They will all define inflammation. They do define inflammation as the immune system's first response to infection or injury. That is a half-truth. It is a first response to infection. It does no good at all in injury except cause more injury. And now you can see it was very easy to connect the dots at that point and see why all these diseases from heart disease to cancer to arthritis to all manner of inflammatory chronic disease produce that disease because of inflammation. So the question they usually ask is they say, well, inflammation is a normal response to the immune system to injury and usually it's self-limiting. But for some reason, especially as we get older, it seems not to be self-limiting and we don't understand why it becomes chronic. Wrong question. Wrong question. And I found out, I mean, it took a couple of, you know, otherwise serious, you know, injuries, serious incidents in my own life to, you know, to knock me over the head in a way and get rid of that notion that a very deeply held that inflammation is a natural response to injury because it always happens to us. Well, when I had glycine in my system, enough glycine in my system, it didn't happen to me. And of course, it doesn't anymore. Actually, did get a serious head injury about eight years ago and, you know, took to the ER. I was knocked out. I was unconscious for, you know, some manner of seconds and, you know, confused for a minute or two and so forth. And, you know, just, and then I, they discharged me from the hospital. They recommended that I follow it up, but I knew by then, because now we're talking about, you know, 2018 already. I knew by then that there would be no difficulty. There was going to be no long-term to my concussion or anything like that, that it would just heal. That happens in the brain too. And it did, it just healed. And this is, so it even explains, glycine deficiency even explains the difficulties that we have now with sports injuries. There always used to be sports injuries and so on, but it's, it was never this bad, you know, with, where football players, you know, boxers, we knew that would, you know, likely happen, but where you get this chronic encephalopathy in the brain, you know, you have to, you know, you have to do chronic inflammation in the brain because the macrophages of the brain, they're called microglia. Same, same story. It's the glycine. When you have enough glycine, the injury just heals. So there's another, another myth that's, you know, sort of a corollary of the myth that glycine is a natural response to, that inflammation is a natural response to injury. One of the corollaries of that is that, that inflammation does some good in terms of initiating the healing response. And, and injury, baloney, none of that's true. Found that by simple self-experimentation. And, you know, when, when things are that clear and when it's such a fundamental, a fundamental fact that is discovered or rediscovered or uncovered, you know, that finally you have that piece of the jigsaw puzzle, that central piece, and all of a sudden all the research in disparate areas, all the pieces start fitting together and you really see the big picture. And now as more research gets done on different things, you know, it was another little piece. Oh yes, that fits right here and that fits right there. Nothing, nothing that I've seen ever, ever goes in the way of, of, of making the hypothesis somehow less robust of, of requiring its modification in any way. It all strengthens the case. So by now it's, you know, even years ago, it was all very clear to me what was going on. And, you know, and that's, that's all I'm trying to do is share that, share that with the world, which is not so easy. Well, it's not, it's not so easy. That is miraculous that, you know, if anyone has fallen on their tailbone, I think that you said you fell off four foot, four feet, is that correct? Four feet onto a concrete floor. Yes. You know, I was just saying to my husband, like when I heard that story, because I fell on my tailbone, but I only fell from the fourth step from stairs, but it was on a concrete floor. And if anyone doesn't know where their tailbone is, it's right, you know, on their buttocks area. And I could not lie on that area for four weeks, four weeks, you know, I couldn't do Pilates or exercise or anything. Then when you said that that happened to you and you recovered very, very quickly because of this, I mean, that's unheard of. And I hope that people, the person watching can understand that a tailbone injury, takes a long time to fix. And it's extremely painful if anyone has ever experienced that. I also want to throw a question out there, which is if somebody is just thinking, well, how can it just be glycine? You know, if it's just glycine to not have all this inflammation, how is that possible? What would you say to that person who might have that concern before we get to all the other aspects that glycine can be so beneficial? Part of it is what the mind is conditioned to believe. And we're conditioned to believe. You ask an expert, you know, you say, well, inflammation seems to be behind all these chronic diseases. Well, why is that so? So what is an expert, a typical expert going to say? They're going to say, hmm, you know, like the old professor with the pipe in the mouth. They're going to say, hmm, well, you know, inflammation is very complex. They will use complexity as a cover. It really is a way of saying, I don't know. But they don't say that they don't know. And this whole idea of complexity is really anti-scientific. And you can see it even in scientific papers. Who understand glycine and sort of what it can do, they still say, well, it seems that glycine is so useful in toxic shock syndrome and in all kinds of injury and diseases and this and that. And it seems, almost seems, you know, too much to believe that all of this, I could almost quote verbatim from a review by the group at University of North Carolina that elucidated the role of glycine in inflammation in the late 90s. It was very, very good research, but yet they still said, wow, glycine can help this and glycine can help that. And it keeps the animals living in this model and in that model and so on. And it seems hard to believe that so many things could be attributable to glycine, yet evidence continues to accumulate that this is so. And that is, again, the belief that somehow it needs to be more complicated because all these phenomena are complicated. They're complex. Lots of things happen. The cascade of inflammatory mediators causes all kinds of things. And so we believe that the cause is complex. This is actually anti-scientific. There is a principle called Occam's razor, which is, again, as I mentioned before, it says that you need to, it's called scientific parsimony sometimes. You need to be parsimonious in your hypothesis. The simplest hypothesis is usually the right answer. And so when you have competing hypotheses about chronic inflammation, well, it's normal, but something prolongs it because it's complicated and so on. Or, wait a minute, maybe the problem is that inflammation is simply not appropriate in all these scenarios. And we've, of something very fundamental, we believed, we actually believed wrongly, we believed the wrong thing. That's very simple. And so you have to reject the hypothesis that's too complicated. You don't reject the hypothesis that's too simple. That's why we all have come to believe the Copernican model of all the planets, including the Earth, revolving around the Sun in simple elliptical orbits instead of the Sun and all the other planets going around the Earth in these complex epicycles as the Ptolemaic system had. If we all rejected that, that was too complicated, right? So we now understand the solar system. And of course, by projection and observation, now many solar systems, millions of them probably, throughout the universe, we understand that now because that's simple. You have a star, the planets revolve around the star in elliptical orbits. That makes much more sense than the complexity. So we have to, when we see complexity, we have to understand that there should be a simple cause somewhere behind it. I mean, Einstein said the universe, you know, is, you know, we should make sure that our understanding of things should be simple. Our hypothesis should be simple, but not too simple, not simplistic. Simplistic would be something like, well, I can eat all the chicken legs and thighs and steak that I want, and I get the same amount of glycine. What's wrong with that? You know, that's simplistic that it's just the amount of glycine. No, it's glycine. It's that simple. But how it works also, and it's also quite simple in how it works in all these things. So the complexity arises from very simple principles at work. It's not because the explanation or the cause is complex. That's really just a cover for our own lack of understanding. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at Nordstrom.com. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi. Suddenly the laughs get louder. The stories keep flowing. And the food tastes better because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. You know, I love that explanation because I was just thinking as you explained even the planets and the sun and how we simply understand that if somebody like goes to see their doctor, the doctor says you are type two diabetic. It sounds very complicated. But the simple answer to that is that your body has too much sugar. And if you're a type two diabetic, sugar, for example, and that you need to, it's not, for example, take this medication or whatever it is. The simple answer is patient. You have too much sugar in your body and you need to reduce that sugar over time and then see how your body responds. And as you quite said that your body has this way of regulating itself in a simple way. And then that goes to how glycine works in its simple pathway to treat so many different various things. And we just have three things that we're going to talk about here, but I think there's many, many things. If we may turn our attention to three benefits of glycine. So we mentioned the inflammation part, which I'd like to go more into, but I really, really, really want to discuss sleep because millions of people suffer with bad sleep, Dr. Bryn. Like they wake up at 3am looking at the ceiling and they can't sleep and they wake up constantly. So when somebody hears about bad sleep, they think it's cortisol issue. It's a stress issue. How can glycine deficiency maybe play a role in bad sleep? Well, glycine has more, uh, increasingly of late, uh, literature in the last 10 years or so has, uh, really elucidated how glycine is very key in enabling the body to enter what they call non-REM sleep or deep sleep, good restful sleep. And they're very interesting experiments where they, which they, they did in, uh, in, uh, Japan and also in collaboration with Stanford and so on. And you may wonder because glycine, you can't pack it. You can't make big money off of glycine. Who's going to fund this kind of research for something that is so-called non-essential, even though it's essential. Well, the answer is there is a company that makes glycine, Ajinomoto. They make, they make amino acids. And so they have, they devote a certain amount of their, uh, resources into research and they've done some very, very good research. And what they've elucidated about glycine is that glycine has, we know that glycine is a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. We know that there are two kinds of receptors in the central nervous system, brain and spinal cord, that central nervous system, which, um, uh, enable it to modulate the transmission of nerve impulses, the call of action potentials. Well, in any case, the one that acts in inflammation, the same one is this, what's called the classical glycine receptor. This is that glycine gated chloride channel. Uh, but there is also another receptor called the NMDA receptor, N-methyl-D-apartheid. Receptor for which glycine is a co-activator. So it's, and we don't know for sure all the molecular details because dare I say it, the brain neurochemistry is very complex. It is, but the players are simple and how they operate are simple. It's just, they're called a lot of complex interactions, but it seems to be that the NN, N-methyl-D-apartheid receptor, the aspartate receptor and glycine acting as a co-activator is important. For inducing the physiological state that enables deep sleep, which is what lowering core body temperature. Well, how does it do that? Well, it does that by inducing the dilatation of peripheral arteries, peripheral capillaries in the skin. There are sphincters that control how much blood flow goes into the skin. So if it's cold outside, the capillaries will shut down, you know, for example, to conserve heat. This is the opposite. When you go into deep sleep, those capillaries open up and the blood flows into the skin. So if it's cold outside, the capillaries will shut down. Allowing more circulation to the skin, to the surface of the body. And of course, the result from that is the temperature goes down. So core temperature goes down. It also induces what's called an atonia, which is that all of a sudden the muscles, the muscles go slack. Even voluntary muscles will go slack, which led to a hypothesis on my part. I haven't published it, but it's, it occurs to me that one of the sleep problems, which I haven't seen anyone written about in the to these things is that some people have a problem with somnambulation, sleepwalking. And I have a feeling, because of the way glycine enables the body to go into deep sleep, that perhaps a glycine deficiency may be responsible for sleepwalking. And if you take more glycine, that won't happen, because there is this muscle atonia that is part of the picture by which glycine works to enable a good, restful, deep sleep. So anyway, I say hats off to Ajinomoto, the company that makes glycine. They're doing some really good research. They're really interested in figuring out how it works. And I applaud them for that. And they produce some very good research, that and Stanford University. So if I take 10 grams of glycine every day, do you think that's going to fix my sleep? I don't know. You could, I mean, it, well, you know, when we talk about the body has natural, you know, natural, ways of compensating for things and keeping everything in balance. But glycine is so fundamental that it doesn't allow some of these natural checks and balances to work properly, these regulatory agencies within the body to work properly. And so that's what throws it off. So this will, I would say it would, it will keep your natural sleep regulating chemistry in good shape, or render it in good shape, you know, it should improve that. But that's, that's not to say there may be something else that's keeping you up at night. Okay. I understood. I think that you are very diplomatic with your answer, let's say, because, you know, if somebody can't sleep, there could be other reasons like stress or et cetera, et cetera. But if it's simply that allowing your core body temperature to come down, so you're in a cooler state, calmer state, maybe that can help, help with sleep and deep sleep. And I also wanted to ask a question around magnesium glycinate, because many people, and I, and I still see on my carnivore keto community, they always say, when I take magnesium glycinate, I can sleep like a baby. I fall asleep so easily. What is it potentially in magnesium glycinate that could help somebody fall asleep? Well, maybe the fact that magnesium glycinate is 86% glycine. You ever notice how you take, you take these, you know, like two, two or three horse tablets. Of magnesium glycinate in order to get that, you know, two or 300 milligrams, two or three horse tablets, that's a couple of grams. They don't weigh a couple of milligrams. So what's all the other stuff in the tablet? It's the glycine. Magnesium glycinate as a compound is actually, this is simple chemistry, chemical arithmetic. It's 86% glycine. So you're getting a substantial amount of glycine and it may be the magnesium too. I mean, there, there's a lot of ongoing research about the importance of magnesium. And so, so that's what I would say. Certainly it gives you, it gives you a significant amount of glycine. If you need to take, if you need an intake of about 10 grams a day and the diet gives you two and you need another eight, this gives you another two, which is not insignificant. It's not really enough to, to balance everything completely, but it certainly makes, it's enough to feel the difference, especially if you are severely glycine deficient to begin with. That is fascinating if somebody was to think about glycine and even, you know, just thinking and learning about glycine, it changes the way that whenever you hear glycine in something like glycinate, you say, oh, there's a glycine component in that. And as you said, glycine can help calm the system down, turn off inflammation. So that would be a part of the magnesium glycinate to help you sleep. Right. And of course you need with the caveat that, you know, you can't just simplistically assume that because it has glycine, like a lot of people say, oh, is, is trimethyl, trimethylglycine just as good? No, that's, that's really a whole different thing. And, and that's a good supplement to use if you have problems with methylation, but it's not, it's not a, not a good way to replace glycine. Understood. Okay. By the way, the gly in glycinate, glycine is, is, uh, means is from the Greek word meaning sweet. So we have glucose and glycerol and all of these names for substances, which are sweet. I've definitely got a question about the fact that it's sweet later on when we talk about how to get glycine. Um, what about relating to blood sugar? And, you know, a lot of people have elevated insulin and how can something like glycine or even 10 grams of glycine, could that help with, um, high blood sugar and high insulin levels? Yes. And in fact, one of, you know, one of the reasons why your, your sugar tends to be out of control is not just the dietary intake of sugar or of carbohydrates. It's, it's the fact that, uh, typically there is some inflammation going on because of glycine deficiency. Uh, it right in the, in the pancreas, in the islets of the pancreas, in the visceral fat tissue, the more of which you have, the more prone you are to diabetes. Uh, glycine has an important role there. I could also use my own experience, but there was a very good, uh, randomly controlled placebo controlled, uh, clinical trial done in, uh, Mexico. Mexico, by the way, because the indigenous population is largely of, uh, like Pima Indian, uh, uh, ethnicity, they, that's particularly prone to diabetes. So in Mexico, almost more than anywhere else, endemic, uh, type two diabetes is a very, very serious problem. Mexico is also not a really rich country. So something like glycine is, is what the government is interested in funding because they're not so much interested in funding to find new expensive drugs. They want to basically find the least expensive option to provide benefits to the population. So anyway, some of this good, um, research done by, uh, uh, Cruz and, and coworkers in 2008 was published where they took people, they, they took type two diabetics, usually a little chubby. The BMI was, you know, over 25 and, uh, they took some diabetics and gave them either glycine or placebo three times a day, five grams. So that's 15 grams a day for three months. And they found that all kinds of inflammatory markers were decreased, but also, and one of the problems with this study is they didn't publicize their most important finding well enough. It's, it's in the itty bitty small print in a table showing you that hemoglobin A1C, which is the gold standard marker for diabetes, because it shows you an ongoing chronic level of sugar in your blood that it took the, uh, the beginning level from, uh, from 8.3, which is diabetic down to 6.9, which is right borderline almost normal. And, uh, in three months it actually took down the A1C. And by the way, I have, I have a lot of, a lot of customers that, you know, report the same kind of thing with their A1C. I had also myself, my, I was always in this area of impaired glucose tolerance, creeping up, creeping up, creeping up back in the, you know, in the nineties, in the early two thousands until finally my, my, my fasting glucose tripped up into like 129. Anything over 125 is considered diabetic. So I thought, well, you know, I'll control it with diet and so on. But fortunately it was right about the time I started working with glycine. So soon thereafter, and as I started taking glycine, 10 grams a day, it turns out that it took about 15 years till 2024 before my blood sugar started creeping up enough to become diabetic again. Well, I knew I had to lose 20 pounds and that helped, but the study, uh, in Mexico in 2008, the, not only did the hemoglobin A1C go down from 8.3 to 6.9 on average and very significant, uh, in the, uh, glycine treated study group, but they didn't lose a pound without, because we know that if you have type two diabetes, if you lose a lot of weight, the diabetes will go away. This is, this is not news. So you think, oh, well, maybe glycine just helped them lose weight. Like some of these, you know, like these, uh, these, uh, you know, GLP-1s, you know, um, uh, analog GLP-1 agonists that are on the market now that are all the rage. No, it doesn't do that. It just, it just lowers the inflammation. And so the, the whole insulin resistance syndrome, this whole metabolic syndrome is calmed down because that has to do with inflammation. So, but the weight, you know, the weight has to do with it. Glycine has to do with it. Genetics has to do with it. But again, glycine is so fundamental. That's kind of, it's kind of in there in the works of just about everything that happens. And if you're deficient in something that is virtually universally needed for almost everything that goes on in your body, all kinds of processes are going to suffer and not be functioning exactly right. And that's what happens with, with the lack of glycine. Now, as we have discussed, our health is so much more than what we eat. It is actually what we can absorb. Now think of it this way. If you aren't prepared to eat it, you probably shouldn't be putting it on your skin because most of the commercial skincare that we're buying every day and using is actually loaded with synthetic chemicals and microplastics. And it's not just the lotions we're using. Think about those synthetic plastic loofahs that most people are using every day in a hot shower, just like this one. And I used to use this until I found out that it literally sheds microplastics and hormone disruptors directly onto our open pores. Stripping away our skin's natural microbiome. But then I went on a holiday to Egypt and I found this natural loofah. and I threw this one out because this loofer is actually natural. And here's how it works. This is actually grown on a vine, just like a giant cucumber. And once it's dried out and the outer layer is peeled away, what's left is this amazing natural fiber that our ancestors have actually been using for thousands of years. And when you get this wet, the fibers actually soften up and they gently and effortlessly sweep away dead skin cells. Now, my husband loves this full loofer sponge every single day, but I absolutely love our loofer pad because it has this natural cotton backing and it's perfect for daily use or for gentler areas like my chest and my face. Now, I want you to try them for yourself with a special discount. All you have to do is just head to theprimal.com forward slash loofer to get 40% off. Plus check out our natural soaps to go with it. If somebody is thinking, okay, you've just mentioned inflammation, you've mentioned sleep, you've mentioned insulin, resistance, and high blood sugar diabetes. So if somebody is watching this and they're like, well, how do I know if I'm low in glycine? Is there any signs that we can look at, a test that we can do to know? These are the moments that make Nordstrom so special. Nordstrom. Nordstrom. Food deserves Pepsi. Okay, good question. This is a blood test for glycine. If you want to spend the money, you can have your blood drawn, have a physician order a blood test for glycine, and you can measure it. It's a simple blood test. It's called Analyza, the kind of blood test that they do. I don't know what they charge for it. I guess, it depends where you are. But I say, why is that necessary? The important thing is, if you suspect that you're deficient in glycine because maybe you have aches and pains, maybe because you have difficulty sleeping, the best thing to do is to try it. Because one of the most important aspects of this is that glycine is really harmless. An estimate for the LD50, the dose that would actually kill half the people who took it, is something like five grams per kilogram. So for me, I weigh, for example, 75 kilograms. So we're talking about 375 grams of glycine in one shot might kill me. 312 ounces of glycine powder. I mean, we're talking about taking a few grams a day, not close to a pound of it or half a kilo of it or something like that. So it's almost impossible to take enough glycine by mouth to actually do any damage. There are some people who, when taking the free amino acid, will have some discomfort. They may have digestive discomfort, GI issues from stomach cramps to diarrhea, something like that. It can happen in a minority of people. And then you can take it in more divided doses. But it's harmless. It's absolutely harmless. So many other things that are viewed harmless, if you take enough of them, they can kill you. You can drink enough water in a short enough period of time to kill yourself. You can't take enough glycine. You can't take enough glycine to do that. It's curiously enough, the literature that shows what the limits are of glycine intake are not really from the several studies that have been done, for example, on schizophrenia, where they give people 60 grams a day. I took 40 grams a day for a month before I would sell it to anybody, just even sell it intellectually to anybody as being safe. And the way to do it is, the literature that actually shows this is from the urologic surgery. There is a urological surgical procedure called a TURP. And it's for benign prostatic hypertrophy. It's literally like a roto-rooter job through the urethra, where they remove the urethra that way. And it's a very, very sort of crude, bloody procedure. And it was invented 100 years ago, and they still do it. They still do it, actually, because men tolerate it very well. And it seems, I would say they tolerate it because their glycine levels become astronomical. Astronomically high. So much so that a few patients have even reported transient blindness for a couple hours, they might go blind. But for some reason, when even though this has been reported, none of the patients ever get anxious about it. Oh, well, no, don't worry, your site will come back in a few hours or, you know, oh, okay, you know, they don't get anxious about it. Because their blood glycine levels are so high, up to 100 times normal. And there is no real harm done. So don't be afraid to try glycine. Just make sure it's glycine. People can tell anything is a white powder and call it glycine. But you know, make sure it's glycine. You know, it's so interesting. I had a conversation with Dr. Darren Kandao about creatine. And it's the same conversation around, it's safe in these amounts, there's brain benefits, there's muscle benefits, there's all these different benefits, bone benefits. But just make sure that you get the right one. Because as you know, when you're trying to sell something, there's so many different brands out there, and it's really hard to know what to trust and who to trust. Because they can say something on the label, but it's not really the main thing and the main ingredient there. And we're going to talk about exactly how people, if they want to take the glycine, because even you said that it doesn't matter even if you're feeling aches and pains, if you suspect that your poor sleep could be, you know, glycine could help. If you suspect that somebody has joint pains and aches or whatever the case might be, you might just want to take some glycine because it's not going to do any harm. Right. And one other thing I would add to that is also you can look at your intake and say, what is your diet? You can say, well, I eat a lot of meat. Do you ever eat the bone broth? No. Chicken soup? No. Do you like jello? Gelatin dessert? Oh, no, I don't like jello. You know, that sort of thing. You can look at your diet and say, where's the glycine? You know, you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to be deficient because your body makes it, but it can't make it. And when you get old and when you get fat, it makes less and less. And so there are all these other conditions. I mean, even COVID was largely, and COVID pneumonia is largely from glycine deficiency. You know, I got COVID and I had all the classical signs of COVID. You know, I got a fever, I got diarrhea for about a day and I felt awful for about three weeks and so forth, but no coughs, no sneezes, no sniffles, no shortness of breath. It was not a respiratory disease. It was like a nasty, really nasty kind of stomach virus. And I was, you know, so I had a moderate case that way. And all of the people that I knew, customers and friends and family who were taking glycine when they got COVID, not, you know, even I had even a friend who was in her late 60s and less than a year prior had had lung surgery for air blebs in her, you know, air bubbles in her lungs and so on. And it took her 10 months to recover from that. And then she got COVID. And she was fine because it was not even a respiratory illness because the spike protein is really good at stimulating the cells in the lung, the alveolar macrophages, the thing, the cells that cause inflammation in the lung to do just that. And then, you know, those people who were in the groups that were the groups, the high comorbidities, cancer patients, elderly, very elderly patients. Obese patients, diabetic patients, all of these conditions are known to be conditions where glycine is particularly low. And so, you know, those are the people who succumbed because there was no way for the body to limit that cytokine storm, which is the extreme, like the nuclear warfare of inflammation. You know, when your body has nothing else left, it just throws everything at it. And even then, that reaction is self-limiting. But the reason it's self-limiting is because glycine is also active at the very end of inflammation, the very first step of inflammation with the glycine-gated chloride channels, and the very last step with another protein called NINJERIN1 that's just been characterized recently, last couple of years, that makes it block that very last nuclear detonation, if you will. And so, what happens then is that if that happens, and the cells literally blow up and their contents, inflammatory radiators are splattered all over the place, how is that self-limiting? Well, it's self-limiting because glycine levels are higher inside cells than they are outside cells. So, all cells pretty much have glycine pumps that pump glycine in from the plasma into the cell. So, when a cell lices, when it's destroyed, and it blows up in the final stage of inflammation, it's also splattering around more glycine. So, the whole cytokine storm can be self-limiting. But if you're very old, if you're diabetic, if If you're obese, if you're in any of these low-glycine conditions, even that is not enough to limit the reaction, and you have an unstoppable cytokine storm, and no matter of artificial ventilation is going to fix that. What they use to fix it now is they use corticosteroids, anti-inflammatory corticosteroids as a standard protocol because that is a heavy pharmaceutical way to stop inflammation, and that is effective too, but wouldn't it be better if it just didn't happen because you had enough glycine in your system? So. Fascinating. Dr. Bryn, if somebody is saying, okay, I want to go to my kitchen right now, and I want to get more glycine, what can they do today? What foods, if they just want to do it naturally, before we talk about exogenous supplementation? Oh, gelatin. Gelatin. Okay. Do they have to make it? Well, you can buy, no, you can buy gelatin, right, as a powder. You know, usually we have, you know, something like Knox gelatin. You can have Jell-O. You buy unflavored gelatin, you can then mix with your typical fruit juice. So, for example, it comes, in the U.S. anyway, it comes usually in these little boxes that have four packets in them. And so the four packets, each packet has enough gelatin to make four ounce servings of gelatin dessert. So you get this little box that's sold for about a dollar and a half, two dollars, something like that. It has enough. It has enough gelatin in it to make 16 standard servings of a gelatin dessert, right? And if you get the unflavored one, you can make it with your favorite fruit juice. Well, those 16, those four packets with so-called 16 portions for a gelatin dessert, that whole box has as much glycine in it as one packet of sweetamine, which is the glycine supplement that I make and sell, right? So. Just a question for you. When you mentioned the gelatin, how else that we can get it? Bone broth, eating the whole, you know, gelatin. Tenders and cartilage and bone marrow. If you just do that from food, how much glycine can you get per day? And how much do we need again? Well, you need about eight grams a day, uh, because you're, you know, in addition to what you normally eat, because if you eat any protein, it has some glycine in it, of course. Um, but, uh, if you have about something like, uh, a quart a day, so that's like a liter a day of bone broth, which is a lot. Even people. Yeah. Who like bone broth don't usually drink that much, but that would give you about those eight grams. Okay. So just again, so it's a liter, one liter, a quart a day of bone broth and you can get the full eight grams. Yeah. That would give you all. Okay. So just so that people can really understand so that they have practical takeaways, like tomorrow I want more glycine. I'm going to do this. Let's just say they're like, Dr. Bryn, that is damn too hard. You formulated a fantastic supplement called sweetamine that has helped so many patients. You know, I went on your website and there's just a lot, a lot of real testimonials. Why did you formulate that supplement? Okay. Very interesting because my, uh, in my family, you know, I was, I was raised to be, you know, an academic or a doctor, you know, that was, it was all academia that was praiseworthy in my family. I mean, in my, my father's sister, for example, was a well-known psychiatrist and, and, and her husband was a physics professor. And, and, uh, so I had. I had some of that professorial background in my family, but my father was a grocer. He wanted people to, he wanted to feed people. He, he sold food. So I cut my, uh, so my, my background is kind of a synthesis of the two. You know, I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to cure cancer and, you know, all these great things, uh, that scientists want to do when they go into medical research. And I wanted to do that from, well, I actually decided specifically to do that when I was 10 years old. So that was nice. That was 1961, a long time ago. And, um, the, uh, the trouble with that is that, so you do this research and you find people to collaborate with, you write grants and everything like that. And then you, you publish your paper. Yes, I published a paper and, you know, all, all 20 people in the room think you're great and whatnot. And the world never hears about it or, and it gets buried because then of course you have lots of people saying, well, this isn't true because this, this and that, and then their experiments don't show this. And so I could slug it out with academics for 20 or 30 years and maybe nobody would find out about it. But when I realized, wait a minute, this stuff is, it's cheap, it's totally safe and it's tasty. Wait a minute. I think I've got something here where I can just be all of a good old, all American way, just put it on the market, just sell it. And that way at least people can find out about it because even if it's a product that not that many, every, every person who can see it. The website or hear one of these videos or see one of my presentations or read my book on glycine called the glycine miracle available on Amazon. But you know, they give you the whole story, but anyone who can do that, at least they have an opportunity to try it. If it's just tied up in academic wars and publications, it can, it can go on for, you know, for decades before anyone will discover it in terms of being able to put it to practical use. Because in the long run, it's not going to be a good thing. It's not going to be a good thing. In the larger sense of our, you know, of our commercial, commercialized society, it doesn't make big money. You can't patent it. It's just a natural compound. So who's going to want to spend money on it? So they call it non-essential, right? Like they call so many jobs non-essential. Now we understand that the word non-essential is toxic. Seriously, it's a toxic word. So, you know, this, so this is why I decided, I said, well, at least people will be able to use it. And then as the money starts coming in, it just plowed back into the business to get more and more and more exposure. So write a book, be on podcasts and so on and so forth. And so what if I haven't published a hundred papers, you know, like some of these academics who are, you know, they say, oh, he's had two or 300 publications, you know, well, no, I haven't, you know, let's leave it at a few dozen. That's about it over my career. But there's, but all of my papers are papers that I actually. Authored or coauthored in a very serious way. And they have something important to say. And, you know, what's important for the general public, I just went straight to the general public with it and that's working out. It's slow. I mean, I, I, I founded this company, natural food science in 2010, the end of 2010. So we're talking about a quarter century and still most of the world doesn't know about it, but it's, it's certainly, it's certainly getting out there more and more. But just, just to finish off the answer to the last question you had about how to do it, you talked about magnesium glycinate. So if you, if you have some gelatin desserts and you have, uh, you know, some, uh, and you take magnesium glycinate, that gives you two grams and gelatin desserts, you can get a couple more grams a day. Then even without taking a straight glycine supplement, you can certainly make it a lot better. The glycine supplement, it's, it's just, it's very easy one and done, put it in your coffee or your tea or your lemon juice. Like I like to do now, I make lemonade, you know, uh, all of those things. It's just one and done. And it guarantees that you have enough, just like people will pop a vitamin pill to make sure that you, at least you have enough of the, of the basics of the essentials. So just glycine is one of the basics. The difference between that and all the vitamins is that it's not a micronutrient of which you need micrograms or milligrams a day. It's a bulk nutrient. So you need grams every day and that's the easy way to do it. So I just came, came up with an. An easy way to do it. It's one way to do it. I invite you to try it. And I sell my product risk-free by the way, if you try it and you don't like it, just tell me you don't like it. And I give you your money back. I don't ask you to return the empty box. If you buy one, what box, you know, this episode is brought to you by Nordstrom for 125 years. Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview, the first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old, the tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe, these are the moments that make Nordstrom Nordstrom bigger, small, we're here for all of it celebrating 125 years with new moments still add, discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi at a couple of friends. And now that's next level. The stories keep flowing and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. So when I was thinking about sweetamine, because I think that, you know, most people, including myself, we don't like to take supplements, but then when you really hear the real life testimonials that somebody could experience, it changes your brain towards maybe I might try it. I'm going to try the natural foods like bone broth. I'm going to try eating. Nose to tail. But if I still feel these aches and pains and I can't sleep, maybe I might try a product like sweetamine. I just want to read one testimonial. It's a bit long, but I just, it was really pertinent to me. I thought it was just amazing. This is off your website. I first heard of your product. At the time I was skeptical at best about its efficacy. And I've suffered from a lot of inflammatory illness, celiac disease, leaky gut, spondylitis. And I thought I would try it out for a couple of weeks to see if it would help with my back and joint pain. What I did not expect. was the effect of my migraines to give a bit of context in the last 15 years, I've suffered from increasingly severe migraines. They've been diagnosed as hemiplegic, where one side of my face and body will occasionally become paralyzed for short periods of time. At that time, I ordered my first package of sweetamine. I was on average getting one or two migraines a week, if I was lucky. Since I've been using sweetamine every day, I don't think I've had one serious migraine in four months. For me, your product has worked wonders, completely curing my migraines and freeing me from a great deal of back and joint pain. Thank you for creating this product. There's nothing that you can say in words that somebody can feel the benefit of that. No more joint pain, no more back pain, debilitating migraines, paralyzing half of his face from taking sweetamine. I just really hope that the person watching really understands and appreciates that. How much benefit that can have for somebody. That must make you feel amazing. Well, it certainly encourages me to keep going. That was very humble. We'll also get some mail from people that say, oh, this tastes awful. It took me so long to get here, and I thought it was going to do this and to do that, and this still hurts. What I usually say is, if you have these aches and pains, glycine will stop inflammation. If that's what it's from, inflammation is not the only source of pain. You really ought to see your doctor and find out what it is, because it's probably not inflammation if glycine doesn't help, if sweetamine doesn't help. The other thing just about migraines is, there used to be, migraines was a terrible thing that nobody could figure it out, and people would grin and bear it, try this, try that. Nothing seemed to work. In the last few years, they've been touting on TV, this product is one of the biologics, monoclonal antibody, one of these MABs for migraine that they now target specifically. It's been specifically approved for migraine. What is it? It's an antibody to tumor necrosis factor alpha, which is one of the substances at the top of the inflammation cascade that is actually an inflammation. That's why glycine works, because it stops the secretion of TNF among all the other inflammatory mediators. Importantly, it's not a drug. Which means, A, it's not expensive. B, it doesn't really have any side effects. And C, it's not going to remember that, since inflammation is a natural reaction of your immune system. It's a natural function of the body. That means sometimes you need it. Like when you're exposed to some serious infection. That's why they tell you in the small print at the end of these ads, don't do it if you're going near people who've had a tuberculosis, or you've been to a country where there's some fungal infections going on, or anything like that. Because these products specifically are intended to disable the part of your immune system that is malfunctioning. Well, it's better to not have it malfunction in the first place. And so, glycine is, you might say then that glycine, if you have any problem that just might be related to inflammation in any way, try glycine as a supplement, sweetamine or any other source of it, as a first resort, rather than a last resort. And that's what we're going to do. That's what we're going to do. Then you can cross out and say, well, it looks like it's maybe something else that I had, or something more serious or something different. Dr. Brian, thank you so much for your time. I'm going to leave the links for sweetamine and also your book, The Glycine Miracle, in the description that people can definitely check you out. I just want to say thank you for being open and transparent, because you're not trying to say that your product or glycine is going to fix every kind of problem, sleep pains and aches and everything that somebody could, experience. But if you have a symptom that is based from inflammation, it may help you. And I think that people really appreciate when somebody like you is just honest and transparent, speaking about the science, speaking about how it happens in the body, as simple as possible. Sometimes it was getting a bit technical, but people need to try to understand the technical side so they can work in the body. What would you say is the one main takeaway that you want that person, watching right now, to really listen and take to heart? Dr. I have to go back to what I think is the principal discovery here, is that the inflammation, which is now known to be the basis of almost every kind of chronic disease that we have, is not a natural response to injury. Even the ordinary injuries, micro injuries from blood circulation or ovulation or any of these other things in the body that naturally involve cell death, those are supposed to repair without inflammation. So if you're suffering from inflammation, even if it's inflammation from identifiable injury, it's still not natural to be inflamed from that. So if we can correct that misunderstanding, oh, I got injured and so I got inflammation in my ankle or my head or my skin or anything like that, not natural. It's correcting, I mean, it always comes down to correcting a general misunderstanding of human physiology that I see as my role as a scientist, as a medical research scientist for 54 years. I think that's my greatest accomplishment, frankly. Dr. Yes. And you're not old. You're just fabulous. Dr. Brin, thank you so much for your time. Dr. I'm old. I'm just not elderly. Dr. Thank you so much for watching right to the end. And you might be thinking, well, Reena, what should I watch next? Well, I think you're going to love this episode right here. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Brin Show. On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? 2538. 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