Oxalates. Should you be concerned about
glycine and collagen? Watch this video to
find out.
Hi I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And you're
watching Chris Masterjohn Lite, where
the name of the game is "Details?
Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And I've told you that glycine or collagen that
provides glycine can work for sleep
when you take it before bed, or tendon
health when you take it before exercise,
and for blood sugar when you take it
before meals, but many of you have
asked me does glycine not work for oxalates?
Oxalates can cause problems in a variety
of ways when they're elevated in the
blood, but it's far more common for them
to be elevated in the urine where they will
contribute to kidney stones because
oxalate binds to calcium to form calcium
oxalate crystals. Now glycine can be
converted to oxalate, but this is not a
major fate of glycine. However in gelatin
and collagen you have another amino
acid, hydroxyproline. Oxalate can be a
major fate of hydroxyproline and in fact
gelatin supplements and presumably
collagen supplements by extension,
gelatin supplements have been shown to
increase the urinary excretion of
oxalate at fairly low doses that we've
been talking about in these videos and
can even increase the blood oxalate
concentrations if the dose is really
large such as 30 grams of gelatin. Now
that doesn't necessarily mean you have a
problem. About 1 in 10 people will
develop a kidney stone at some point in
their life and if that's you then you
want to be careful with gelatin and
collagen. You can be proactive about
finding out if that's you by looking at
your urinary oxalate excretion and
looking at whether you have urinary
crystals of calcium oxalate and
discussing those results with your
doctor to have it assessed of whether
you are at high risk of kidney stones.
You could do a 24-hour urine oxalate
excretion on the diet that you're trying
to assess that includes the gelatin or
collagen in the way you typically
consume it and see if it's elevated
above normal. You can look at calcium
oxalate crystals in the same context.
You could do a random or spot urine
oxalate concentration or urinalysis
for the crystals, but if you do that you
should probably do it after consuming a
meal with the gelatin or collagen as you
would usually take it so that you can
actually see what it's doing in that
context. Now you want to make sure that
you're properly hydrated all the time.
Hydration will protect you against the
stones from forming, but also hydration
will protect you against getting a false
positive for the oxalate crystals
because if you don't have enough water
it can make the crystals appear as if
they're very high. Now if you appear to
be at risk it may make sense for you to
try glycine supplements instead of
gelatin or collagen and assess whether
that takes care of the apparent problem
with oxalates. However there are also
other things to consider. So, first of all,
in order for hydroxyproline to be
diverted away from generating oxalate
and actually generate more glycine you
need enough vitamin B6. So assess your
vitamin B6 status, you can look at plasma
levels of pyridoxal-5-phosphate, the
active form, and you can look at markers
that occur in your urine when
B6 is deficient, such as xanthurenate,
kynurenate and quinolinate on a
urinary organic acids test. If you have
signs of B6 deficiency consider
supplementing. Some people may need
doses as low as 5 milligrams, but for
some reason some people only respond
to doses between 30 and a 100
milligrams so you can see if that prevents
the oxalate from accumulating. There are
other things that you can do to protect
yourself against kidney stones
in general and I'll talk about those in
the next video. Those would apply here,
but the main thing that's
relevant to glycine is as follows:
#1 assess your risk for developing
oxalate stones. If it's low then collagen
and gelatin should not be a problem.
If you fall into the substantial minority of
people who are at high risk then you
might want to assess your B6 status to see if that
changes it and you may want to consider
using glycine instead of collagen or
gelatin because pure glycine is very
unlikely to impact that risk.
All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. You've been
watching Chris Masterjohn Lite and I
will see you in the next episode.