This is how to make your own GABA.
No, this is not the next organic chemistry
project of Walter White.
This is how to make GABA in your brain.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. 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
making your own GABA, not in your
basement, but in your brain.
Now, in the last couple weeks, I've been doing
a lot of episodes on using GABA
supplements, and in the last episode,
I talked about getting GABA from foods,
but most of your GABA most of the time
should be made inside the cells of your
nervous system that use the GABA.
You shouldn't have to consume GABA to get
the calming effects, to get the effects
on better, faster decisions under
pressure, to get the effects on helping
you face your fears. So now we're
going to talk about what do you need if--
if there are signs that you do need
exogenous GABA, GABA from outside of
yourself, that may be an indication that
you need to get your nutrition
straightened up to provide the raw
materials to your brain to make its own
GABA. And at the very least, you should
make sure that you have these bases
covered before you start piling GABA
supplements on top of your diet.
You always want to use supplements to
supplement your diet, not as a
replacement for getting enough nutrients.
So, what are the nutrients that we need
to make GABA? Well, first of all, in
order to make GABA, we need to make
glutamate because glutamate, which is an
excitatory neurotransmitter, is actually
what we make GABA,
the inhibitory neurotransmitter, from.
And to make glutamate, we need glucose.
We need to get glucose spiked into the
brain. That means our blood sugar has to
remain high enough to feed that supply
of glucose into the brain, and if we get
our blood sugar up a little bit, even
though we don't want it to go too high
too often, getting the blood sugar up a
little bit after a meal will help get
more glucose into the brain. That glucose
then to be converted into glutamate
requires many B vitamins: vitamin B1, thiamin;
vitamin B2, riboflavin; vitamin B3, niacin;
vitamin B5, pantothenic acid.
It requires a compound that's very similar
to a B vitamin but is not one, lipoic acid.
And then finally it requires vitamin B6,
the last of these B vitamins.
So, the king of all B vitamins is liver.
If you consume liver once or twice a
week in three or four
ounces per serving one or two times per
week, then that will go a long way
towards providing you with better--with
the B vitamins that you need. Liver is also
a very good source of lipoic acid,
which is otherwise a pretty expensive
supplement. Kidney and heart are also
good sources of lipoic acid, so if you
focus on liver but you also work these
other organs into your diet, like kidney
and heart, that will go a long way
towards getting your B vitamins and the
lipoic acid that you need into your diet
naturally. Nutritional yeast is also a
good source of many of these B vitamins
and in general, lean animal proteins,
legumes, and whole grains are good
sources of most of the B vitamins. With
B6, in general animal products across the
board are fairly good sources, better
than plant products, but cooking hurts B6
bioavailability. It not only destroys B6,
but it also creates a vitamin B6
antagonist that leads to about 40%
losses of B6, so it's also good to get
foods that can be eaten raw, and in terms
of plant foods, bananas happen to be a
very good source of B6, both because of
the high absorption rate from bananas,
the content of bananas, and the fact that
usually when you eat bananas you eat
them raw. So, when you're trying to get
all these nutrients, think liver once or
twice a week, when you can fit them in,
other organs like kidney and heart, lean
proteins, that doesn't mean you can't eat
the fat, but you're getting the B vitamins
from the lean portion of your
protein foods, nutritional yeast,
legumes, and whole grains, and bananas
are the collection that give you those--
a collection of foods that best
give you those nutrients.
Okay, so say we
have our glutamate. In order to transport
it into the neuron that's going to turn
it into GABA, we need first to convert it
into glutamine, and that's because
glutamate is not something that you
want transporting between cells in your
brain because it's a neurotransmitter.
So, you basically hide its
neurotransmitter effects by turning it
into glutamine so you can get it into
the neuron that's going to make the GABA.
And in order to make that conversion, you
need magnesium and ATP. Magnesium
you best get from a diet that is rich in
a broad array of whole, unrefined plant foods,
and ATP you have to make in your
system of energy metabolism that
requires all of the B vitamins that
I was talking about before but also
requires biotin, which is very abundant
in liver and egg yolks, and it also requires
a number of minerals, especially iron,
copper, and sulfur. And then on top of
that, it requires that you have good
thyroid status and that you have good
insulin status. So, if you have things
that would affect your energy metabolism,
like insulin resistance, diabetes, or
hypothyroidism, then you really want to
address these underlying factors because
they could be messing with your ability
to make GABA. Then finally,
once we have the glutamine in the neuron
that's going to make the GABA, we then use
vitamin B6 once again to make the GABA,
and B6, as I mentioned, is rich in all
those high-B vitamin foods plus the
bananas. And then finally we need GABA
to function correctly, and I'll link to the
episode in the description of this one,
but I did an episode before about how if
your energy metabolism is messed up or
your electrolytes are messed up, then
GABA could not be--might not be
functioning properly. So, to get
well-functioning GABA, you want to make
sure that you're getting enough salt and
that you're getting enough potassium and
that your energy metabolism,
things with thyroid and insulin, once
again, are all straightened out. So, to get
enough salt, you want to salt your food
to taste. To get enough potassium, you
want a diet that's very high in fruits
and vegetables or a diet that is
fairly low in fat while containing very
few grains, no refined grains, no refined
sugar, and plenty of potatoes and legumes.
Now, if you eat a lot of fruits and
vegetables, you can get away with eating
more fat, but if you're not eating a lot
of fruits and vegetables, you really have
to lower the fat content of your diet to
get in enough of these medium-potassium
foods. These nutrients are the raw
materials that you need to make GABA,
but the last thing that we could say is,
there's one dietary approach that
increases GABA levels in the brain, and
that is the ketogenic diet, which is a
high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet.
Its ability to increase GABA levels is the
basis, or the probable basis of why it is
used to treat epilepsy. So, you
could consider it one of the tools in
your kit if you're
looking for ways to increase your own
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.