FEED YOUR BRAIN

[As you know, Durk and Sandy have passed on.  Durk as “Skye” was beloved on TTP.  We are preserving his and Sandy’s legacy through these “Live Long and Prosper” TTP columns.  The following is an interview they gave to us that is abundantly informative.  Greg and Michelle Pryor of Life Priority]

DURK: Everything that happens in your brain … every memory … every thought … every emotion … every innovation … every “wow, that’s great!” … is a result of the release of neurotransmitters.

Neurotransmitters are not drugs; they are natural substances made by nerve cells in your brain that transmit messages from one nerve cell to another across the synapse that divides them. That’s why they are called neurotransmitters. They are made the nutrients in your diet, but there is a very good chance that even if you have a good diet, you’re not getting the optimum amount of the raw materials that your brain can use to make neurotransmitters. LIFT  is our formula created to help support more get up and go and help eliminate mental fatigue.

The three most important neurotransmitters have been known for a long time: acetylcholine, noradrenaline, and dopamine.

Acetylcholine is involved in memory and organization—the way you order things in your mind, the way you retrieve them in an orderly manner. It’s also involved in focus and concentration.  A good example of what happens if you don’t have enough cholinergic activity can be found in a person who has taken the psychoactive drug atropine or any other anticholinergic drug. In many respects, they resemble someone with Alzheimer’s disease.

The latter are people who have suffered extensive damage to their cholinergic nervous system: they lose their memories, lose their focus, and lose their ability to concentrate.

What do you do to improve your cholinergic memory? Take choline and Vitamin B5.

The vitamin B5 (also known as pantothenate) acts to convert the choline to acetylcholine more efficiently. Now there’s a very good reason to take choline as you get older, because as you get older the ability of your blood-brain-barrier to actively transport choline from your bloodstream into your brain drops dramatically.

By the time you’re in your 60’s most people have perhaps 20 or 30 percent of their young adult capability of transporting choline from the blood stream into your brain.

SANDY: You can compensate for this by taking a choline supplement, choline plus vitamin B5, making it possible for more choline to be transported into your brain.

DURK: And if you don’t do this, something very unfortunate happens as you get older. The cholinergic system is a “use it or lose it” type system; that is, it requires continuous cholinergic stimulation to release neurotrophic growth factors.

Without neurotrophic growth factors the cholinergic nerves start dying off. In fact, in order to make acetylcholine as you get older, your brain will start cannibalizing other brain cells for the choline contained in the cell membranes as phosphatidylcholine. Eventually, you start losing your cholinergic nervous system. You don’t notice the results of this immediately.

Typically, it takes about an 80 percent neuron loss before people notice that they are doing more than just slowing down. Their memory isn’t quite as quick as it used to be or as sharp; it takes more time to do things. As time goes on, simple memory tasks become more and more difficult. So to keep your mind working properly especially as you get older or especially if you’re working very hard—like cramming for a test—you need more of these raw materials to make acetylcholine.

GREG: What is a good amount of choline and vitamin B5 to compensate for the loss, especially with age?

DURK: The U.S. Government asked the Institute of Medicine to determine whether choline was an essential nutrient or not. And they found that—yes—it is an essential nutrient for human beings; you can make a limited amount in your liver, but that’s not enough even when you’re young.

SANDY: They determined that about 550 mg a day would be required for a male adult.

DURK: And 425 mg for an adult female. However, all their data was derived from young college students who acted as subjects in medical experiments. They didn’t consider the fact that as people get older, their ability to transport choline into the brain—which is a major user of choline—is impaired.

We think people should start out, for the first week, taking about 1 g of choline, and 2/3 of a gram of pantothenate each day. During the second week, these amounts should be doubled to 2 grams of choline and about a 1 1/2 gram of pantothenate per day. And in the third week, go to 3 grams of choline a day and a couple of grams of pantothenate per day.

Now, it wouldn’t harm you to immediately jump to 3 grams per day. It’s just that you might possibly end up with a little constipation or tension headache because acetylcholine is what makes your muscles contract as well. If you take too much too fast, quicker than your body can adapt to the increased amount, you may end up with excessive muscle tension.

The first symptom of this muscle tension is usually a stiff neck. I might add that choline is also important for cardiovascular health as well. One of the major risk factors for somebody dying of a heart attack is the inability of their heart to slow down rapidly after exercise. This pulse rate reduction is due to cholinergic stimulation by the vagus nerve. If you don’t have enough choline in your diet, you may be at increased risk for this particular problem.

SANDY: Acetylcholine is also involved in the relaxation of arteries. Which is another one of the things that deteriorates in the development of atherosclerosis; arteries simply do not dilate properly and as a result, your ability to control blood pressure is reduced.

DURK: In fact, the mechanism by which acetylcholine helps dilate arteries is by turning on an enzyme called nitric oxide synthetase found in the lining of the arteries. This enzyme turns the amino acid arginine into nitric oxide which then causes the arteries to dilate. That’s the same mechanism that gives you erections as well. Acetylcholine is involved in muscular contraction. You may think that if you have very intense and prolonged muscle contraction—like running a marathon—you might run low on choline and not be able to make the optimum amount of acetylcholine? And the answer to that is, absolutely yes.

SANDY: In long marathons, choline resources are limited.

DURK: It has been found that giving marathon runners choline, which is completely legal under athletic association rules, that you can run a marathon a little bit faster. And that is a lot when the time separating the winner from the second best may only be a matter of seconds. So especially as you get older you want to be sure you’re providing your brain with adequate amounts of choline and vitamin B5 to be sure you can make acetylcholine to help maintain youthful type mental function, rather than slowly tapering off into the sunset.

Moderator: A paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed a correspondence between choline deficiency and high homocysteine levels.

DURK: Yes, in fact choline is involved in converting homocysteine back into cysteine. Homocysteine… you think of toxic byproducts as being something that oil refineries or automobiles make when they burn fuel. Yes, they make toxic byproducts, but—surprise … surprise—your own body makes toxic byproducts as well.

And one of them is homocysteine. And in fact, choline can act as a methyl group donator to turn homocysteine—which can cause atherosclerosis and is associated with strokes—back into cysteine, which is a useful antioxidant nutrient amino acid, unlike homocysteine which is pro-oxidant and is causally involved in causing an increase in the incidents of strokes as well as hypertension.

GREG: Moving over to the other two neurotransmitters …

To be continued in Part Two

Durk & Sandy’s MIND™ choline formula is available at www.lifepriority.com