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Health & Fitness Redefined
Health and Fitness Redefined with Anthony Amen. Take a dive into the health world as we learn how to overcome adversity, depict fact vs fiction and see health & fitness in a whole new light.Fitness Is Medicine
Health & Fitness Redefined
Unlocking Longevity: The Essential Role of Glycine and Methionine in Diet
Transform your understanding of amino acids with insights from Dr. Joel Bryn, a leading expert in biochemistry, physiology, and immunology. Discover the surprising impact that dietary choices on amino acids like methionine and glycine can have on longevity. Dr. Bryn shares groundbreaking research from the Orentreich Foundation, suggesting that a reduction in methionine intake and an increase in glycine might hold the key to a longer life. Prepare to challenge your preconceptions about what makes an amino acid "essential" as we uncover the significant health benefits of glycine.
The episode takes a closer look at the often misunderstood term "non-essential" in the context of amino acids. Learn how glycine, despite being classified as non-essential, plays a vital role in managing inflammation and preventing chronic diseases like cancer, autism, and cardiovascular issues. Through Dr. Bryn's analysis, we explore how glycine deficiency impacts our health, particularly in younger generations, shedding light on modern health challenges. With analogies that simplify complex processes, this discussion reveals why rethinking our protein sources could be crucial for our well-being.
The conversation with Dr. Bryn also navigates the historical and modern dietary landscape, emphasizing the importance of collagen-rich animal products to boost glycine intake. These age-old dietary habits might just be the key to combating the chronic inflammation pervasive in today's society. As we close out the episode, we reflect on how a balanced approach, centering on evidence-based nutrition, can lead to improved health outcomes. Tune in for a compelling narrative that intertwines scientific rigor with practical dietary advice, promising to reshape your view on nutrition and longevity.
Learn More at: www.Redefine-Fitness.com
Hello and welcome to the Hedonist Ministry Defined. I'm your host, anthony Amen, and we got another great episode for all of you. Happy, happy, happy December. Christmas is right around the corner, I hope are already got all the gifts purchased done. We, luckily enough, did it prior my I say we. I take that back. My wife did it prior to giving birth. It took care of all the kids and stuff getting getting ready for him to be here. So make our lives a little easier. But enough about that. Let's stop with today's show. That further do is welcome Dr Joel Bryant. Dr Joel, it's a pleasure to have you on today. Oh, it's stop in today's show that further ado. Let's welcome dr joel bryant. Dr joel, it's a pleasure to have you on today oh, it's fine.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's bryn, by the way, yeah well, you know the spelling doesn't tell you it could be either way, so I have to tell you right, it's like starbucks when you come on this show, you never know how I'm going to spell or say your name.
Speaker 2:So well, it's like if you see the word wind, you don't know if it's wind or wind. You have to tell by the context.
Speaker 1:And for a name you have. You know, the guy with the name has to tell you.
Speaker 2:And I neglected to do that, so I apologize. It's all good.
Speaker 1:Before we get into today's topic, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the health fitness realm.
Speaker 2:Oh well, I've been a scientist all my life. Really, I decided I wanted to cure cancer and stuff. You know, be a medical scientist when I was about 10 years old and uh, just, uh. So one of those life magazine articles about you know scientists working on cancer cures and using electron microscopes uh, while I was waiting for a haircut in Tom's Barbershop on 227th Street and Merrick Road in Long Island, in.
Speaker 2:Queens, and that was 1961. That's what I decided I wanted to do and you know. So 10 years later I had my bachelor's degree and 10 years after that I had my PhD in basic medical science from NYU, and that's in biochemistry, physiology and immunology. And then I was a bench scientist for a number of years exclusively, and then, 1986, I got a faculty position at Baruch College, city University of New York, and I taught endocrinology there for over 30 years that's the science of hormones and continued doing research. And on about it was about 2007, I was working with a foundation in the Hudson Valley foundation in the Hudson Valley, which is actually where I had moved to by then, and the the group that I was working with.
Speaker 2:It's called the Orantrike Foundation and they had they had discovered that if you take my they were working on aging mainly and they discovered that if you take rats that had been that were fed a diet almost deficient in methionine, which is an essential amino acid, that's what you need for all your methylation. Lots of people thinking cancer is responsible for not having enough methionine and so forth, but actually they found that if animals were almost starved of methionine like 80 less of it than is in the normal diet they actually lived about 30 or 40% longer, even though they didn't grow to normal size. And that was repeated a number of times and other groups had repeated it in rats and in mice and nobody knew why. So as a consultant then for this foundation, where I had worked full time years before, they wanted me to try and figure out why that was. When I found it they didn't really believe it. That's their problem. But what I discovered was that glycine is really the key, and I'll tell you what glycine is an?
Speaker 2:amino acid which is generally considered non-essential, and the reason I came upon glycine was that we were looking at why does having a normal amount, a relatively high amount, of methionine in your diet make you live less long than if you have less methionine. You live less long than if you have less methionine. So others had discovered by this time and published the fact that glycine is the amino acid that actually is used by the body to get rid of excess methionine when we have too much, and so in fact, we do have too much. Your body's really designed for famine, not feast, so you know like we get too much sugar and so forth.
Speaker 2:You know it's difficult to get rid of and that's why we have you know, so much problem with that and so much extra sugar, but also extra protein.
Speaker 2:Right, we eat, you know, lots and lots of meat, fish and poultry. A lot more than our ancestors did or than the rest of the world does, even today. You know, in a lot of parts of the world, you know, you eat meat once every couple of months when the neighbor's goat dies, right, and everybody has a feast and that's about it. Till you know, it's beans and rice and all in the interim. But uh glycine is a way to. Uh is used by the liver as a way to get rid of excess methionine.
Speaker 2:Now what's interesting is that we tried, and so I proposed an experiment to feed glycine as a supplement to try and accelerate the disposal of methionine.
Speaker 1:And it turns out it doesn't accelerate the disposal of methionine.
Speaker 2:It doesn't have any effect on the levels of methionine in the body, but the animals did live significantly longer anyway. So something else was going on. And it turns out what else was going on and the reason that methionine is important in this regard is that because methionine uses glycine to get, because the liver uses glycine to get rid of excess methionine, because the liver uses glycine to get rid of excess methionine, it uses up glycine and glycine is in fact, not non-essential, it's really essential. It's non-essential, they call it, because your body can make it from simpler compounds, which it can, and you also have as much as you need to make proteins with glycine as you can with a normal diet, or your body can make enough glycine to make all the protein. Thing is, glycine has another role in the body and it's the main regulator of inflammation. As the free amino acid, kind of like a salt, like the cells of the body need to be bathed in a high concentration of glycine, otherwise they are hypersensitive to being activated and in particular, it's the cells of the immune system called macrophages, which are the cells that actually do inflammation.
Speaker 2:So everybody knows you can look it up in Wikipedia or anywhere else, that inflammation is the immune system's first response to infection or injury. That is what I discovered to be a half-truth. It is not a natural response to injury, it only hurts. It only injures normal tissue. So if you get a sports injury, what's the first thing you do? Right, you put ice on it. What's the purpose of putting ice on it? To suppress inflammation. Well, that leads to another interesting question, which is why is the body doing inflammation if it's only going to do more harm?
Speaker 2:The answer is it has a nutritional deficiency, there's not enough glycine, and now everybody realizes that almost everything that makes people sick and die these days arthritis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, even autism and other diseases are really rooted in chronic inflammation and science doesn't know why. And that's what I really discovered, is I discovered why, is that most people are glycine deficient.
Speaker 2:We think inflammation is happening normally in response to injury, because it almost always happens. It does almost happen to everybody almost, and it used to happen to me. So the thing is, I was doing an experiment in by 2008, 2007, 2008, 2009,. I was experimenting with glycine and, starting in 2008, I started taking 10 grams a day of glycine Because it's you know, it has a sweet taste. You can easily formulate it with other things to make it taste more like sugar, get rid of the aftertaste. Pretty easy to take 10 grams a day of glycine. And so I started doing that and I did it for a month after month, even for a couple of years, and then in 2010, you'll like this story my brother-in-law had scored us tickets to a Yankee game at the new Yankee stadium. It was only built in 2009, right, so I had not been there yet. So he got us tickets you know a few rows behind the Yankee dugout and I was all excited.
Speaker 2:I never wear a hat, but I had a Yankee t-shirt and a pair of shorts and was great. And it was also around the 10th of June and it was also a cloudless day, sunny day, and the brand new stadium had no obstruction, so there was no shade and because I wasn't going to the beach, it didn't occur to me to put on sunscreen. I used to get very bad sunburns when I was in my teens, and maybe when my early 20s, you know and learned enough to go with sunscreen and sunblock and limit my time in the sun and wear a shirt most of the time, all of that sort of thing. But what happened was I was so interested in the game that around the fifth inning I started to feel a little warm on my thighs. I looked down and from my thighs right at the hemline of my shorts, to my socks and my, my arms, you know, uh and my neck and my face, everywhere that was exposed to the sun, it was boiled lobster time and I had not done this to myself since I was at least in my early 20s and I was sure I was certain that I was going to be, uh, in excruciating pain really, for the next day or two at least dressing, undressing, bathing, doing all of those things.
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing I did is I, you know, I got out of the sun, I went into some seats that were in the shade. By the time it was late afternoon and then I just sort of forgot about it, kept watching the game. But the funny thing is, by the time I left the game it didn't really bother me. It had actually started to fade and the next day I felt fine I mean fine, it had faded most of the way. Maybe I got a little bit of color, a little tan out of it.
Speaker 2:But nothing like I had always experienced, in which I was sure was going to happen again.
Speaker 2:But that wasn't enough for me, even though I knew I was experimenting with glycine and even though I had worked at NYU in the dermatology department where I did my PhD thesis. So I knew something about sunburn really being inflammation in response to sun damage rather than directly sun damage. So we were actually at the time my wife and I were preparing the house for an influx of relatives because our daughter was getting married, so we were having relatives stay over and I had to finish a project I was doing in the basement I was putting in a bathroom, and so I needed a few pieces of sheetrock which don't fit in the car. So I would go and cut them in the store. You know I'd go up and get on the top of sheetrock which is about four feet high, sitting on a concrete floor in the store. Go up, measure it, cut it, hand the pieces down to my wife, jump down, you know, get them on the on the cart and you know, jump up and do the the other cuts and for some reason I must've been distracted and I stepped the wrong way and I went right down to the floor, four feet onto a concrete floor, directly on my tailbone, and it hurt like hell for about 30 seconds I suppose, and you know it was still hurting, but I managed to hobble around, finish what I was doing.
Speaker 2:That night we had tickets to a dinner dance. We figured well, we'll go anyway. And then, while we were there, we figured well, I'll try a dance or two anyway. And guess what, it didn't bother me and the next day I felt absolutely normal and the only evidence was a huge bruise on my lower back.
Speaker 2:So this was an experiment I was conducting and when the results are that clear, you can't deny it here. I was expecting inflammation, sunburn, blunt injury. Yes, of course you get inflammation. Nope, not a hint of it. So this is what led me on the path of doing some more research, not just in the aging field, did more research and published it on glycine, extending the life of rats. And then, uh, worked with the national institute of aging, one of the nih institutes, and we showed that glycine also significantly extended the lifespan of mice. And uh, this is uh, you know that's so. That's part of the aging part of it.
Speaker 2:As far as the inflammation part of it is concerned, most it's basically going to the literature and seeing what other people have discovered about glycine, and it's just not tends not to be put together because of these certain ideas. You know, when you say that an amino acid part of the diet is non-essential, who's going to study it? Right? Who's going to give you grant money to study? It's non-essential, you don't need it, and we all found that out during covid, didn't we? It's the word non-essential is toxic. Your job's non-essential. Too bad, you're gone right. So, um, that's so that's the problem with it's it's the word non-essential, and it's also the idea of inflammation and the fact that it usually, or almost universally, is experienced as a response to blunt injury.
Speaker 2:But it's also understanding the cell biology of it, and that is that the cells that do inflammation are yes, indeed, they are the immune system's first responders. Well, so what's a first responder? It's like a cop, right? So if you go out on the highway and there's an accident on the highway, so what happens? So the cops come, right, state troopers come, state troopers come, and they'll come, and they'll have their lights flashing in there, you know, and they'll be rerouting traffic, blocking up a lane so that the tow trucks could come. And they call the tow trucks, they call the ambulances, they take the accident reports and then, when they're done, they go back to their base and, you know, then normal function is restored on the highway. Well, they're first responders, right. So they got loaded weapons in their holsters too. They don't use them. If there's an accident on the highway, they wouldn't think of drawing their guns and shooting the place up, but they can, and they, because if there's a bad actor present that needs to be eliminated, a threat that needs to be eliminated, they can do it. Well, so the first responder cells, these macrophages, have the same dual functionality. They can be activated to be just in clean up the mess mode, which is called M2. Now it's understood. It's given a name M2, versus M1, which is where they are activated to produce inflammation, to start secreting poisons that can destroy tissue, because it's there to destroy microbes that might have gotten in during an infection of some kind and kill them before it kills you. Kill the infection before the infection kills you, and that's a whole different thing.
Speaker 2:But because we're deficient in glycine, most of us, this is what happens in the body all the time You're inside your arteries, inside your brain, inside all your other organs. When there is normal injury, even if you don't experience it as injury, it's tissue or cells dying. This happens normally. So, for example, when your blood is circulating, especially at high pressure branch points, your coronary arteries, your carotid arteries, right when there's excess pressure, you get turbulence. If there is inflammation in response, you eventually get damage which can lead to a heart attack or a stroke or kidney failure at these high pressure branch points, because the micro injuries are responded to with an inflammatory response rather than a just clean up the mess and repair it response. And so we have now in our society when.
Speaker 2:So why is it worse now? Why even are the? Are the people in your generation more prone to getting cancer. Colon cancer is now more common in your generation. Autism is off the charts. Uh, what's going on? Why are all these seemingly unrelated diseases? Why do they seem to have to do with inflammation? What, what's going on? And that's because there is normally cellular injury and cellular death involved in these conditions, or involved in normal conditions which will lead to inflammation if glycine is deficient. So, for example, I said autism.
Speaker 2:I published a letter about this in the British Medical Journal about five years ago. I published a letter about this in the British Medical Journal about five years ago. Autism has to do with brain development and the way brain develops, just like the way other organs develop, is the brain grows. You get a solid mass of cells and then it is sculpted, All of the cells in between, those little creases and convolutions that had cells in them. Those cells die off and it's perfectly normal for the cells to die off.
Speaker 2:But if you're glycine, deficient you get inflammation in the brain, starting even in utero and by the time the child is born they have autism spectrum disorder. And you keep getting inflammation in the brain all through brain development, which goes in through your mid-20s, all through brain development, which goes in through your mid-20s. If you talk about cancer of various kinds, it's been known for decades that the incidence, for example, of ovarian cancer, cancer of the ovary, is directly proportional to how many times in her life a woman ovulates. Why should that be? Because ovulation is a violent process. Why should that be? Because ovulation is a violent process? The egg is actually shot out of a cannon almost, or like out of a volcano, when, uh when, ovulation takes place, and it does damage to the ovary.
Speaker 2:Well, once every other month to each ovary, no big deal, it just heals, unless you're glycine deficient, and then you end up with chronic inflammation, breast cancer. The breasts grow every month of a normal menstrual cycle. In the third week, the breasts naturally grow because of estrogen and progesterone, the hormones that are there to start preparing the breasts for the big growth that they're going to need to be able to feed a baby when the baby's born. A baby when the baby's born. But suppose there is no baby, suppose it's a non-conceptive cycle, which these days is most of the time, for most women are non-conceptive cycles. So that means all those extra cells that are built up during the cycle they end up having to die off. No problem, perfectly normal, unless you're glycine deficient and then you get a chronic low-grade inflammation what do you know?
Speaker 2:year after month after month, year after year, even decade after decade of this and you end up with uh, with breast cancer, and it's, it's it, and you could see the difference. For example, in ovarian cancer, that's lower if you uh ov less. So if you have kids and you breastfeed them, you're going to ovulate less. But also birth control pills, right, they suppress ovulation. So guess what? Women who take birth controls, they have a lower risk of ovarian cancer.
Speaker 2:But because they have estrogen and progesterone in them, like the normal hormones, and you take those more days a month than they would normally be operating in a normal non-pregnant cycle, you end up with more growth stimulation, more cells have to die off, and taking birth control pills increases the risk of breast cancer, even as it decreases the risk of ovarian cancer. These are all tied to events of massive cell death. To events of massive cell death, which are perfectly normal, but in the context of a glycine deficiency, they produce chronic inflammation. Why is it worse now, though, than it was for our forebears? You know, I didn't really answer that question, and the reason is that our dietary habits have changed, so our four.
Speaker 1:I want to I want to hop in here, dr joel, because there's a lot to unpack of everything you were going through and I think it's important to really first clarify some things and then, okay, go into a little further. So, first being said, there are just basics for people that don't know. You mentioned non-essential amino acids. Basically, that means it's amino acids that our bodies naturally produce, as opposed to those we have to get from food. Scientific, what we have to get is essential right.
Speaker 1:Correct. So, going into your argument about glycine and how people deem it non-essential, meaning you don't need to supplement it, let's do an easier one, which I think is arginine and, coming from the fitness community, arginine has been shown to be beneficial to help have vasodilation and increase your workout capacity in an anaerobic state. So, while weightlifting or supplementing with arginine has been shown to be beneficial, deemed non-essential but taking higher quantities of E has been shown to help. Yes, because that's nitric oxide.
Speaker 2:That's the nitric oxide story, which causes vasodilation.
Speaker 1:Your body makes nitric oxide from arginine, so that's what that's going to be Also to my favorite one, which isn't an amino acid, but you talk about something your body naturally produces, that's creatine. And, as I mentioned time and time before, we do not produce enough creatine naturally in our bodies to have the benefits of it, as we're now showing. Decreasing the risk of depression, decreasing the risk of anxiety have the benefits of it, as we're now showing. Decreasing the risk of depression, decreasing the risk of anxiety, uh, decreasing the risk of dementia. They're not putting a lot of research into on it, uh, it also increases your anaerobic capacity in the gym, helps increase, uh, promote muscle tissue repair, something else we should be supplementing with that we're not, because we produce it naturally right, I'm going to take this together for you well, because you produce it naturally.
Speaker 2:You do produce it naturally from glycine so sleeping also increases your production of creatine. So that's?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think it's. I think it's related, and you mentioned, uh, about our dietary habits a little bit ago and I want to talk about that because I think this is probably the most talked about topic and most comfort. Like people just don't agree about dietary habits and I've talked about my viewpoint a lot and I want to approach it directly to you. You mentioned back when we were hunting gathering. I disagree in the sense that we only had, like your goat example, once in a while and we mainly had rice and beans. Oh, because if you go back prior to even us having towns or all coming together as community, that's all we did was animal products and I think a lot of our issues stemmed in with, like we're talking about a body's information spots, even into your argument with glycine and not getting enough of it right. We actually should be eating more animal products than we consume and less of everything else.
Speaker 1:For example, all of these things we mentioned come from red meat all of it right, and we just tend to go strictly straight for cow, which is a lot fattier, especially the way we raise the cows and purposely, like wagyu, make them extremely fatty and which can produce a lot more free radicals in the meat and cause health issues, as opposed to eating what we call gamier meat, which is way leaner and it contains a lot of these EAAs and non-essential amino acids. It contains the extra creatines we need. It contains the proteins we need, which, in turn, would help us recover faster, put more output into what we needed to go get food for our families.
Speaker 2:And I think that's really the disconnect that we may not disagree where you think. So I was getting to the point where the problem is not that we're eating more meat these days. The problem is that we're eating more muscle meat these days and, as you said, the muscle meat is compromised and we throw the bones into the trash instead of the soup. See, when they talk about it not being as healthy, they say oh, vegans, they live longer than meat eaters. They have, you know, they have less chronic disease like cancer and so on, than meat eaters do. So you should all be vegans, and I say not so fast.
Speaker 2:There was actually a very interesting study that proved my hypothesis on this, and that was. That was back in 2015, not too long ago, and I had been saying listen, the trouble is that meat eaters, or omnivores, end up with less glycine in their blood than than vegans have, even though the meat eaters eat more of all the amino acids, and that was actually approved by a group at Oxford in 2015, where they took 100 meat eaters eat more of all the amino acids, and that was actually approved by a group at Oxford in 2015, where they took 100 meat eaters and 100 fish eaters and 100 lacto vegetarians and 100 vegans and they looked at all the amino acids in their blood and they looked at all the amino acids in their diet to see how it correlated. They really didn't have a hypothesis, they just wanted to see the correlations, one of these so-called database studies, which is not really good science, but it's really a lot of what passes for science these days.
Speaker 2:so then they they found that the vegans had the most uh glycine in their blood and the meat eaters, who ate the most glycine, had the least glycine in their blood and they couldn't figure it out, and it goes back to having more of that muscle meat, which actually helps to get rid of glycine, which you don't want to do.
Speaker 2:But, that's because most of the glycine is in the collagen, and the collagen is in the bones and in the connective tissue and also in the wild game in the muscles. The muscles are more sinewy, the meat is tougher. There's more collagen in it, so the muscle meat is not only glycine deficient, but it's particularly glycine deficient, or glycine poor that's the word you use for the food stuff. That muscle meat is more glycine poor than it used to be. We're also eating more of that glycine poor meat. We're throwing most of the glycine in the trash instead of the soup.
Speaker 2:Right, we're doing that, and you put all those things together and you end up with less glycine in the blood of people in this generation than in previous generations, with less glycine in the blood of people in this generation than in previous generations. So there is a balance there and I do not disagree with you that animal products, the problem with research that has been done and anybody that can listen to Anthony Amen and say, oh well, he says, eat a lot of meat. But I've read all this research has shown for 50 years the meat eaters, they don't live as long, they get more cancer. That you know, and all of that is true. But it's because of the incomplete protein. It's the fact that glycine really is efficient and you're throwing so much of the glycine away and you really need to. So the idea that it's meat protein is bad for you and vegetable protein is good for you is based on bad science, which, when it says the animal protein is causing chronic disease, it's not complete protein. You're not eating the whole animal.
Speaker 1:So there aren't any bone broth enthusiasts who are really glycine deficient. You know, if you talk about the phenomenal.
Speaker 2:What's that? Yes, you gotta eat, not just the muscle, you know that. So that's that's what I would say, especially as you say now the meats that are available are worse than a generation or two ago, when, when, or you know wild meats, if you, if you hunt you and you, you know you have venison, you know stuff that you've gotten from wild game or birds, or fish or that, all of that If you actually eat the meat that has more glycine in it, it's not as bad. But you still need to have more glycine from the you know bones in the connective tissue. And if you don't do that, that's what that's what my product is about. That's what sweetamine does. It gives you, it gives you the glycine. You can just take it straight as a, as a simple amino acid, because it it, you know it's formulated as a sweetener, it's very easy to take and what science tells us really is that it's the glycine that's the important component.
Speaker 2:There are other people who say oh yes there's so many collagen peptides and you kind of take a type two or a type three and not a this type or that type and no collagen peptides or gelatin. You know, any formulation of those things is fine as a source of glycine. It's got about 25 percent glycine by weight and uh, it's, it's a very good source of glycine. It doesn't really matter what it is.
Speaker 2:Some people say, oh it's, you got to take glycine with n-acetylcysteine and it's the combination no it's not the combination, and science tells us that, because when that one component is enough to account for all of the benefits, you know, that's what it's doing. That's the principle of Occam's razor, which is one of the scientific principles that tends to be forgotten these days, unfortunately, by scientists.
Speaker 1:Crazy. I talk about that all the time and you're absolutely right, I mean, this is, you know the. I don't even think people know what that expression means.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, it was coined by John of Ockham in, I don't know, the 12th century or something like that, which is basically, if you have, when you have a scientific question, you ask a question. That which is basically, if you have, when you you have a scientific question, you ask a question, the answer, what appears as a hypothetical answer, is your hypothesis. That's what you want to test experimentally. And so the the Occam's razor says that the simplest hypothesis is is is probably the right one. You know, you, you don't, you have, you have to eliminate, you don't. So some people have said to me, for example oh, glycine for all these conditions. Nah, it can't be that simple. You even read scientific papers. Oh, no, it's very complex, it's such a complex symptomatology, we need customized medicine, and you need. You know. You need one medicine for psoriatic arthritis and another one for Crohn's disease and another one for, you know, irritable bowel syndrome and another one for arthritis. No, it's a common denominator, you know it's all chronic inflammation.
Speaker 2:So why shouldn't it be a simple thing? You don't when you have a hypothesis that you're testing scientifically. You don't reject a hypothesis because it's too simple. You reject a hypothesis because it's too simple. You reject a hypothesis because it's too complicated. When Ptolemy, back in the old Egyptian and Greek times, hypothesized and this was viewed as dogma for some centuries that the planets and the sun all revolved around the earth in complex epicycles and the Sun all revolved around the Earth in complex epicycles. And then along came Copernicus, you know, who said it makes more sense for all the planets, and the Earth as one of them, to revolve in simple elliptical orbits around the Sun. So we threw away the complicated epicycles of Ptolemy Because it was too complicated. Now we all know the planets, you know orbit around the sun.
Speaker 1:Well, after he was told he was wrong, Well, yeah, I mean, but Locked up.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, this happens all the time, though with you know, I mean Copernicus, and then, of course, galileo was locked up for echoing and using a telescope and calculations there to confirm Copernican theory.
Speaker 2:You know the church locked him up and all that kind of thing, so but I don't really. I mean you and I both rely on evidence. You know scientifically verifiable evidence and when we actually hash it out here you know there's really not any disagreement. It's just a matter of getting getting to the fine points. You know a lot of people they'll just look at oh say oh 17 studies say this and only two studies say that.
Speaker 2:So this must be correct, and they don't. They have no way of evaluating whether science is good or not, and a lot of it isn't.
Speaker 1:Well, I said it all the time p values. Uh, oh sorry, n values two people in it.
Speaker 2:You can't take a study with two people, well you know you can take a study with one actually, and that is you know, you before and after, you know and you can. You can repeat it x number of times. I mean, that's what I did. Self-experimentation, if you look back, is what people like Pasteur did and other scientists did. They would test it on themselves, because then you have a before and an after and so on. Two people, if they're identical twins is a great end for a study like that, because they're identical in every other aspect.
Speaker 2:But you're right when you want to confirm it. You know we do hundreds of mice, hundreds of rats, hundreds of people, and there have been some. That's what a clinical trial right, a placebo controlled clinical trial is always looking for, you know, looking to emulate a controlled experiment. It's as close as you can get to a controlled experiment using people, so it's ethical. And there was actually done, at least one or more, I think, on diabetes. It was one that was published as early as 2008, where they took a bunch of diabetic people in Mexico, mexico City. There's a lot of research on diabetes in Mexico because that population is particularly, particularly strongly prone to get diabetes, especially Pima Indians, you know, people of Mexican Native American origin. So a lot of research on diabetes. So they had these, they had diabetics, they took I think it was only 37 people, half men and half women, roughly um, who uh were given 15 grams of glycine every day.
Speaker 2:You know, uh, that's about two, two packets of sweet amines worth and you know they were like most people with diabetes. They were moder, were mild to moderately overweight, and they were to make it an ethical trial. You can't say, okay, stop your diabetes medication while we do this trial for three months, that's not ethical either because they need the medication to keep their sugar in control.
Speaker 2:So, even though they were still taking the medication, the A1C, for example, was reduced from an average of 8.3 to an average of 6.9, right down to the bottom of the diabetic range even though they were still taking the medication and even though they didn't lose any weight. Because if you're 20 or 30 pounds overweight and you have diabetes, if you lose that 20, 30 pounds, the diabetes will go away. But so they they here. The diabetes went away even without losing the weight. So you could see it was not. It's because it's not the fat tissue itself, it's the macrophages, the inflammatory cells that are embedded in the fat, that caused the trouble.
Speaker 2:So if you lose, all that weight yeah it'll go away because those macrophages are not there either. So the thing that's really amazing about the science is once you it's like doing a jigsaw puzzle you find this sort of central piece to the picture. All of a sudden you see something like it's a recognizable object in the picture, all of a sudden, all the other pieces in the puzzle. You couldn't figure out where they went. They all make sense. So it was kind of like that.
Speaker 2:And I've been a scientist all my life really, I mean, as I told you earlier, and so I've never had such clear, dramatic results from my own self-experimentation, from the experimentation we were doing with rodents in the laboratory, such clear, dramatic results from my own self-experimentation, from the experimentation we were doing with rodents in the laboratory, from all the research that's been published in all kinds of disciplines. And unfortunately, in science it's not so much the end, as you say, which is a problem in a lot of research, but it's also the way the experiment is set up, but also the hypothesis Everybody says show me the data. Right, that's science, show me the data. The data is the last thing you do.
Speaker 2:The good part about science, or the important parts about science are, in the beginning, mainly asking the right questions and then setting up an experiment that can actually test the hypothesis and rejecting a hypothesis that's either too complicated or unnecessary. So this happens all the time is that now everybody thinks it's the data. The reason for that is now you can gather immense amounts of data. You can take a drop of blood, stick it in a machine and analyze 300 or 400 different metabolites, 300 or 400 different gene products, mrna, all of that stuff. So there's an explosion of papers being published. Oh, yes, we did diabetics versus non-diabetics or we did prostate cancer versus non-cancer or we did whatever. We're studying the experimental group and the control group. And yes, there was a significant difference in methionine or a significant difference in some marker, creatine, or a significant difference in something.
Speaker 2:And then, now that the computer has identified a difference between the experimental group and the controls, then they try to speculate as to why that might be based on what else is known. So they're basically shooting in the dark. Instead of starting with a hypothesis, they're just collecting data. Now, in the old days and I'm an old guy, an old scientist, so the old days for me, I'm talking 1970s and 80s- Okay so 40, 50 years ago you couldn't do that.
Speaker 2:If you wanted to do that and say, wow, you know, there probably is a difference in the amino acid combination. So wait a minute, we're not going to do amino acid analysis on all that.
Speaker 1:We don't have the money.
Speaker 2:Nobody's going to give us the money to check everything that's called. That would be a study in what they call now today's metabolomics or genomics or lipomics. All these omics disciplines are disciplines or really methodologies that can measure simultaneously hundreds of different substances. And they wouldn't do it in those days. Nobody would ever give you any money to do research like that, because they called it a fishing expedition. That's what it is.
Speaker 2:So now probably most science that's done is fishing expeditions, because because they got these trawling nets, they can haul up so many fish and and then they look at them and figure, oh, how come we have more mackerels than we have, uh, tuna fish, you know, and figure it out that way. But that's, that's not really good science. Good science is what they have called now hypothesis based science. In the old days that was called science and now they're. Now it's all. As you see, show me the data and you know the data may corroborate what your hypothesis is, but it might not be valid. You know, yes, it's not as good to be a meat eater as it is to be a vegan if you want to live longer and not get cancer because the animal protein.
Speaker 2:Wait a minute you didn't look at all the animal protein because you threw the bones in the trash and not in the soup. So it's, all of these things are important to consider and that's you know. If you're an old school scientist, you look at these things instead of just accepting the fact that, oh, such and such a study from such and such an institute found ABC and they must be right because they have a high impact journal and a famous institution and the scientist is well known and you know and all and that's you know. Unfortunately, most people, if you're not a science, a scientist, you're not, you're not really trained to look at all this stuff. You know to look at a scientific study, you know and just. But you can, if you are. You know it's like anything else. If you are trained to look at it, like when you're trained to look at anything else, you can see the flaws, like a, you know, like a jeweler who you know knows diamonds. He can look at a diamond and see the flaws in it and tell at a glance if it's a real one or a laboratory created one, or if it's got a lot of flaws or defects in it. Everybody else, oh, it's a diamond, you know. Or if it's got a lot of flaws or defects in it. Everybody, oh, it's a diamond, you know, looks the same to me. $10 diamond, $10,000 diamond, right? So it's like that with science. Unfortunately, these days there are not too many real experts, real scientists around who are not somehow compromised.
Speaker 2:And when I say that that's usually because of granting agencies. You know it gets into. You know, gets into global warming and all that other stuff. If you don't kowtow to the prevailing dogma that is driving the funding machinery, then they're not going to give you a grant, then you're going to get canceled. Scientists get canceled all the time when they can't get grants. So I was fortunate in my career, able to basically do what I wanted, working for a small research foundation, and you know, that's just. You know God's grace, I guess, put me in a position where I could actually just function as a scientist and not have to worry about functioning as a fundraiser or a political operative or a you know what's the word I'm looking for or a political doctrine massager or promoter, and you know, and there's politics in everything, and so that's how I published the book you know this.
Speaker 2:You know the there's politics in everything, and so that's how I published the book. You know this. You know the glycine miracle Right, I showed this before. That's that's the science behind this product, behind Sweden, and in the book I talk about all these things that we touched on here about the status of science and research and how you have to evaluate it and what's wrong with a lot of it.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of science which is good science, at least in part, and how you can take what's good in it and understand what's good about it and what's really meaningful, and throw out the part that may be throwing us off the scent, but it's amazing, it's there. I hope now that everybody knows that that chronic illness is largely due to inflammation. Uh, so we're not talking about, you know, building more muscle and health, you know, and having health like that, but not talking about building up the health, but avoiding building up the, you know, the, the inflammation and and you even find this in muscle recovery too, because when you, when you work out, what do you do?
Speaker 2:You tear muscle fibers, you cause injury and then the next day, you know, you know, it gets sore because of inflammation. Most of that pain is because of inflammation. I remember when I was living in the Hudson Valley and shoveling snow every year, you know I used to. When I was in my 30s my back used to bother me the next day, but by the time I was in my 60s it didn't bother me anymore because I was taking glycine supplements, I was taking sweetamine, and so I didn't get that inflammation the following day, you know, so that you know the muscle might be sore. If I tried to shovel snow, it might be a little sore, but if I, if, but the muscle wasn't sore, it didn't hurt If I wasn't straining it. You know, because, because there isn't that inflammation and that's really the killer and it really is because of glycineine deficiency. So it's that's not the whole story to health. I mean, if you really want the whole story to health and fitness.
Speaker 2:Well then, you got to watch anthony amen every day, you know, every week appreciate it? Okay, people do and continue to keep up with the whole five years in yeah, you got to keep up with the whole story.
Speaker 2:But for this part of the story, the inflammation, which inflammation? Which is really the big kahuna in chronic disease. Right, rfk Jr says the country's having a chronic disease epidemic, especially in children, and I'm trying to. I'd love to be able to get to him to say you know, it's not really what you eat, it's what you don't eat that's killing you, not just the creatine or the arginine, but also, in terms of the inflammation and the chronic disease, it's really the glycine. That's my story.
Speaker 1:I'm sticking to it.
Speaker 2:I hope you appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for coming on and doing this. I'm just going to ask you two final questions. The first one, which I think you know the answer to, is if you were to summarize this episode in one sentence, what would be your take-home message?
Speaker 2:the take-home message in one sentence is uh, most people are glycine deficient. That's why they have inflammation and therefore you need a glycine supplement, like sweetamine, to avoid chronic inflammation, which is most of what makes us sick and die these days.
Speaker 1:So that's it. And the second question how can people find you and get a hold of you to learn more?
Speaker 2:Ah, very good, so that's just sweetaminecom S-W-E-E-T-A-M-I-N-E, sweetaminecom, and that's you can get. If you want to just try it, we have a 12-day challenge for $19.95, free shipping, and it's so totally risk-free. If you don't like it for any reason, it just let us know. Email text, whatever it is, let us know and you get your money back. You will find the difference.
Speaker 2:If inflammation is bothering you, you should feel the difference within two or three days and it gives you time to experiment with it. Try it for a week. Oh, it seems to be working. Go off it for a few days, see what happens. Try it for and then, if you, if you like it, especially if you order it soon you know, by until the end of the year, we have a special going on on six packs. So if you have six months supply or a full case of a 15-month supply, if you really like it, you'll still be able to take advantage by January 1st. You'll still be able to take advantage of much lower prices on quantity discount. But most people who use it regularly spend a dollar a day or less on larger quantities and that's pretty reasonable. And it's not just a sweetener. That's a lot to pay for a sweetener, but this is really a very important glycine supplement and you should feel the difference, especially if you work out. Now. I'm going on and on.
Speaker 2:I guess we're supposed to be done by now, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. Thank you, dr Joe, appreciate you coming on. Thank you, guys, for joining us in this week's episode of health and fitness redefined. Don't forget, hit that subscribe button and join us next week as you dive deeper into this ever-changing field, and remember thanks for having me on. So bye.
