10min chapter

Dr. Joseph Mercola - Take Control of Your Health cover image

What You Need to Know About Estrogen and Serotonin - Discussion Between Georgi Dinkov & Dr. Mercola

Dr. Joseph Mercola - Take Control of Your Health

CHAPTER

GABA, Theanine, and Magnesium Supplements for Anxiety and Sleep

In this chapter, the speakers discuss the effectiveness of GABA, theanine, and magnesium supplements for relieving anxiety and improving sleep. They explore the optimal dosage and the importance of taking these supplements in combination. The chapter also highlights the potential negative effects of serotonin, tryptophan, and estrogen, and their relationship to certain conditions and cancer.

00:00
Speaker 2
And many people are only going to need a half a gram or one gram, right?
Speaker 1
Well, you went 100 milligrams, which was that study with people. That's right. Chronic anxiety and depression. They were diagnosed with official conditions.
Speaker 2
And the beautiful thing about this, and I would just not take a GABA supplement by itself, I would definitely take it with theanine and many of them also have magnesium, which is really good, unless you go too high, then of course you're going to get loose stools. But the good thing about these is they're relatively inexpensive. This is not going to seriously impair your budget at all in any way, shape or form. They're really easy to find. They're all over the place. Yep.
Speaker 1
I can count at least 20 vendors selling tea in on Amazon, probably more than 50 selling GABA. All of these things are magnesium countless, right? That's probably not a single vitamin vendor that doesn't sell magnesium somehow. Yeah, but
Speaker 2
it'd be guess just to take one supplement that combines all of them.
Speaker 1
I will do one after the other, take one on the first day by itself, see how it affects you. Really? Yeah, maybe play with the dosage a little bit. Find out which one of the supplements works best at what dose. And then when you start combining them, try to lower the dose of each one and then arrive because they should synergize. So let's say just just as an example, 500 milligrams of GABA by itself is enough to lower your anxiety. 500 milligrams of magnesium by itself is enough to lower your anxiety and prove sleep. And let's say 200 milligrams of theanine is enough to cause both of these. Then maybe 100 milligrams of each combined should be enough. My personal experiment is like that. I actually tried all three and 100 milligrams of each in combination is a very good pressure relief valve for me and also improve sleep.
Speaker 2
Yeah, so there's two subsets of people who will be trying this healthy people like you or really sick people who have submitted to the pharmacological paradigm and are taking these drugs. So in my view, there's really limited time to have them play with it, especially when you're going to your goal is to increase compliance. So you want to hit them with the kitchen sink initially. So they get relief and then work down. So I think what you're doing is perfect if you're a biohacker and you're healthy, do it singly and increase. But if you're already on taking medications for these conditions, and I think you might just want to shotgun it and then go down from there.
Speaker 1
I agree. Take this high dosage as it relieves your symptoms and the main thing to remember is if you own an SSRI drug, your GABA is by definition low. Serotonin inhibits the sink. Yes, and also in inhibits its synthesis, you'll be very low on GABA in general, not to mention that serotonin can block the GABA receptor really nefarious substance when it comes together.
Speaker 2
It's worse than I
Speaker 1
thought. And maybe
Speaker 2
review the impacts of serotonin and estrogen being anti-metabolic and the connection between those two items and the thyroid gland.
Speaker 1
Well, serotonin is derived from tryptophan and tryptophan is the only amino acid that is known to be directly carcinogenic. Probably why it's found in the lowest amounts of any amino acid, no matter where you look in nature in terms of food or any kind of protein composition.
Speaker 2
It's an essential amino acid, but it's one that you would should not take as a supplement.
Speaker 1
Yes. It caused actual deaths, if you remember in the early 90s, it was late 80s. Late 80s. It was an affiliate myalgia syndrome. And they blamed it on impurities. But if you look at the symptoms of those people, they all died from serotonin syndrome, classic signs of serotonin syndrome. Needless to say, if you have chisarotonic, it can kill you directly. In fact, medicine has a special term for it. It's called serotonin syndrome. Recently discovered that the so-called post-surgery delirium, which many patients experience, or post-anesthesia delirium, is actually due to it's a mild form of serotonin syndrome, and cyberheptating completely stops it. So serotonin and tryptophan are actually thyroid inhibitors. Multiple studies have demonstrated injecting tryptophan or chirrotonic into the blood, raises the levels of TSH, which is a sign that thyroid gland function has been inhibited, or something is going on at maybe increased degradation of thyroid hormone, because the body perceives the presence of these two amines as an anti-tyroid signal, so it amps up its own production of thyroid. Things that serotonin also does, it blocks the activity of the enzyme pyruvide chiderogenase. So you're going to get into basically excessive glycolysis and high levels of lactic acid situation. Another situation where you're shifting towards the redox, state-toered reduction, serotonin itself is a reductive. So yeah, and just like estrogen, so it's cortisol. So all of these steroids and amines and neurotransmitters are basically anti-metabolic simply by interfering with the proper flow of electrons from food to oxygen. So estrogen also is known to inhibit the work of pyruvide chiderogenase. Also inhibitor directly of cytochrome C oxidase. And I think it's an inhibitor of also complex stool of the electron transfer chain, which is known also known as succinic acid, the hydrogenase, which also participates in the Krebs cycle. So estrogen can inhibit all of these. And again, it makes it sound like these are very toxic and bad things, but they're there for a reason. And the revolutionary reason is probably that in times of stress and trouble and injury and whatnot, these things rise in order to help you repair. But it should be acute only. And unfortunately, these days we have them chronically elevated. And that's a signal to the body that things are chronically bad. And it will dispose of any known essential function that it thinks it can do in order to conserve energy, which means your high metabolism, which means you're gaining weight, means you're good mood, which means you're going to be depressed. And eventually, if things go down that route, the body will start turning off nonessential organs if you think that there are some. By turning them into fibrotic clumps of meat, and so that they don't have to waste energy on repairing them. And that's how you get fibrosis. And ultimately, the end stage of fibrosis is invariably cancer, unless you die from the organ failure before that.
Speaker 2
Yeah, so again, further proof that serotonin and estrogen are precurs of cancer. So you mentioned earlier that serotonin is the precursor for melatonin. So we need some of that. How do you reconcile that? My guess is it's just because it's a relatively small level of serotonin you need to make adequate melatonin, and you don't need anything excess. There's always a basal level that will produce an optimal amount of melatonin, anything extra is going to be detrimental. What's your take
Speaker 1
on? Healthy levels, healthy people have been demonstrated to have high levels of melatonin, and medicine has used that as an excuse to start advocating for supplementation with melatonin. But what we need to keep in mind is that if you take melatonin, it has basically a reverse feedback, negative feedback. It's going to raise your serotonin. And it's very well-mucided.
Speaker 2
No, I talked to Russell Ryder, who's probably the world's foremost researcher of melatonin. He never mentioned that at all. But that is, I did
Speaker 1
not realize that, but it makes perfect sense. Very easy way to prove it. Take a hefty dosage of melatonin, which means three milligrams or more, and just watch what kind of bizarre nightmares are you going to have that night? And the nightmare driver is serotonin, and that's being recognized by psychiatry, because now it's doing clinical trials with cyproheptidine to cure a very, very pernicious sign of PTSD, which is chronic recurring nightmares. And another sign that probably PTSD is driven by serotonin as well. Wow.
Speaker 2
That's pretty crazy. So any other insights to share with serotonin and estrogen that you'd like to conclude
Speaker 1
with? So basically, since you mentioned endotoxin, and most of serotonin is produced in the gut, keeping the bowel clean, keeping bowel transit rapid and frequent without getting into diarrhea case, obviously, because then you're interfering with absorption of the nutrients. Why? Because anytime you overproduce endotoxin, it acts on the something called the enterochromophen cells, which are lining the intestine. And those cells are the main factories for producing serotonin. So endotoxin by activating a receptor and just mechanically irritating those cells, it's a signal for these cells to start producing serotonin. Things that mechanically injure the intestine or stresses such as stretching, bouncing around are also probably not beneficial. And in fact, there's this thing called runners diarrhea. And you know, it's a mystery of why it occurs. But now that we know that serotonin causes diarrhea and running for extended periods of time, the oldest bouncing and stretching and twisting of the intestine causes mechanical irritation and these cells start to overproduce serotonin. So clearly not a good situation. Long distance runners are also known to have higher levels of peritoneal and pulmonary fibrosis, which are known to be caused by serotonin.
Speaker 2
Did not know that. So glad I stopped running about 20 years ago.
Speaker 1
You can run, but don't get it to the point where people are killing themselves. So you should, I think the good thing is to keep it so-called glycogen bound. Once you deplete the glycogen, and you start getting into fatty acids, since then the problems start.
Speaker 2
Yeah.

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