This is how to get GABA from your food.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about
getting GABA from food.
In the last two weeks, I've done some
episodes on GABA and its use in doses of
100 to 800 milligrams acutely dosed to
produce effects like less anxiety, less of a
tanking of your immune system when you face stress—
when you face your fears under high-stress
situations, and making better, faster
decisions under pressure. In the last
episode, I talked about why some people
get adverse reactions to GABA that are
countered by carbohydrate. Well, if you
get your GABA from food, don't worry,
you'll be getting your carbohydrates
simply because of the types of foods
that it's found in.
In the food supply,
there are some foods that are quite high
in GABA naturally, but mostly it's being
produced through fermentation, either
lacto-fermentation, like you get in
sauerkraut, or kimchi, or yogurt, or kefir,
or yeast fermentation, like you get in bread
or beer. So, in terms of
foods that just have their own GABA in
them, wheat germ clocks in quite high at
160 milligrams per 100 grams. Barley
bran has 95 milligrams per 100 grams
of food. Black soybeans are
high in GABA. Black soybean milk for
100 milliliters has 542 milligrams
of GABA. Red mustard leaf, if you get
100 grams, you get 178 milligrams of GABA.
Adzuki beans, if you get 100 grams,
you get 201 milligrams of GABA.
White tea is 50 milligrams of GABA for
100 milliliters of tea, so double it
up, and you get that 100-milligram
GABA dose. Potatoes vary, and you can get
anywhere from 16 to 61 milligrams of
GABA from potatoes, so if you have—
so, some potatoes are
fairly high in GABA where if you doubled up
on them, you'd get up to that
100-milligram dose of GABA.
Now, the issue
with fermentation is that it's so
strain-dependent that if you're trying
to get a reliable amount of GABA from
fermented foods, really you must use
fermented foods that have a verified
strain that produces GABA
where the amount of GABA produced is
verified. So, there are products
out there that are fermented, or maybe
they're not even fermented, maybe it's
germinated rice, where you might get a
listed GABA content, and if you get
a GABA content listed on the table—
listed on the label, then as long as
there's nothing untrustworthy about that
company, you can probably trust that at
least that's the average value in
that food. But if you're just relying on
fermentation, you're likely to be a
little bit disappointed, or your brain
likely would be a little bit
disappointed because if you're looking
at something like fermented milk
or cheese, it is so different depending
on the specific strains used. But if
you're consuming a lot of fermented
foods, and you find that these foods have
effects on you that feel like a GABA
effect, like less anxiety, for example, or
any of the effects that I talked about in
the beginning, like better, faster
decisions under pressure, or better
ability to face your fears
without really tanking your immunity
from the stress response, then it at
least is plausible that those foods are
giving you some extra GABA benefit and
that continuing to consume those foods
might continue to provide you that benefit.
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All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.