Food and Your Moods - How Amino Acids Feed Your Brain

Written by Julia Ross

Mood Foods: How Amino Acids Feed Your Brain

The four key mood chemicals (neurotransmitters) are made of amino acids. There are at least twenty-two amino acids contained in protein foods. High-protein foods, such as fish, eggs, chicken, and beef, contain all twenty-two, including the nine amino acids that are considered essential for humans. Other foods, such as grains and beans, have some but not all of the essential nine aminos, so they need to be carefully combined to provide a complete protein (for example, rice and beans, or corn and nuts).

If you are eating three meals a day, each meal including plenty of protein (most people with eating and weight problems are doing neither), your positive moods and freedom from cravings can be maintained. But most people need to kick-start the brain's repair job, using certain key amino acids. This will allow you to actually enjoy eating protein and vegetables instead of cookies and ice cream. After a few months, you will be getting all the aminos you need from your food alone and won't need to take amino acids as supplements any longer.

Restoring depleted brain chemistry sounds like a big job - but it isn't. Three of the four neurotransmitters that color all your moods are made from just a single amino acid each! Because biochemists have isolated the key amino acids, you can easily add the specific ones that may be deficient. These "free form" amino acids are instantly bioavailable (in other words they are predigested), unlike protein powders from soy or milk, which can be hard to absorb. Hundreds of research studies at Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere (some of which date back to the early part of this century) have confirmed the effectiveness of using just a few targeted amino acid "precursors" to increase the key neurotransmitters, thereby eliminating depression, anxiety, and cravings for food, alcohol and drugs.

Stopping Carbohydrate Cravings

It may sound impossible, but you can stop your food cravings almost instantly with just one amino acid supplement. Any absence of fuel for your brain's functions is perceived correctly by your body as a code-red emergency. Powerful biochemical messages then order you to immediately eat refined carbohydrates to quickly fuel your brain. There are only two fuels that the brain can readily use:

1. glucose, which is blood sugar made from sweets, starches, or alcohol
2. L-glutamine, an amino acid available in protein foods (or as a supplement, carried in all health food stores). L-glutamine reaches the starving brain within minutes and can often immediately put a stop to even the most powerful sweet and starch cravings. The brain is fueled by L-glutamine when glucose levels drop too low. Don't be intimidated by the strong effects of supplementation. L-glutamine is a natural food substance; in fact, it's the most abundant amino acid in our bodies. It serves many critical purposes: stabilizing our mental functioning, keeping us calm yet alert, and promoting good digestion.

Restoring Energy and Focus

When your brain is adequately fueled with its back-up emergency supplies of L-glutamine, you are ready to rebuild your four key neurotransmitters, starting with dopamine/norepinephrine, your natural caffeine. Without this natural brain stimulant, you can be slow and tired and have a hard time concentrating. You don't sparkle and can't stay on track mentally. It's hard to get things done and you can feel dull and sometimes just want to stay in bed. Your physical as well as your mental energy drops without adequate norepinephrine. The amino acid that provides this jet-fuel is the nutritional powerhouse L-tyrosine. L-tyrosine produces thyroid hormones and adrenaline as well as well as norepinephrine. Like L-glutamine, L-tyrosine goes to work in minutes to perk you up.

Enhancing Your Ability to Relax

The next key mood-enhancing chemical is GABA (gamma amino butyric acid), our natural Valium. GABA acts like a sponge, soaking up excess adrenaline and other by-products of stress and leaving us relaxed. It seems to drain the tension and stiffness right out of knotted muscles. GABA can even smooth out seizure activity in the brain. My colleague, Elliot Wagner, a specialist in drug detox, taught me that GABA can even give relief to heroin addicts going through the severe anxiety of early withdrawal. Think what it can do for garden variety stress and uptightness!

When Food is Comfort

For many people, overeating helps compensate for a depletion of the natural pain relievers, the endorphins. Life's pain can be unendurable without adequate amounts of these buffer chemicals. Some of us (for example, those of us from alcoholic families) may be born with too little natural pain tolerance. We are overly sensitive to emotional (and sometimes physical) pain. We cry easily. Like our alcoholic parents, we need something to help us endure our daily lives, which seem so painful. Others of us use up too much endorphin through trauma and stress. We just run out, especially if we were born short on endorphins to begin with. When our comfort chemicals run low, many of use turn to comfort foods.

If you need food as a reward and a treat, or to numb your feelings, your natural pleasure enhancers, the pain-killing endorphins, are probably in short supply. Foods that elevate your endorphin activity can easily become addictive. If you "love" certain foods, those foods are firing a temporary surge of endorphins. Euphoria, joy, the "runner's high" - these are all feelings produced by endorphins. Some people have so much natural endorphins that they smile all the time and get great pleasure from everyday life. Of course, we all endure suffering and loss. But, with enough endorphins, we can bounce back.

For anorectics and bulimics, the trauma of starving and vomiting can trigger an addictive endorphin high, because trauma of any kind can set off an automatic burst of soothing endorphins. You may know of people who felt no pain for hours after a terrible physical injury. Runners don't get their big endorphin high until they have run past "the wall of pain." At that point, they have run too far!