FEED YOUR BRAIN- PART TWO

[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 Part Two of an interview they gave to us that is abundantly informative.  Greg and Michelle Pryor of Life Priority]

GREG: Moving over to the other two neurotransmitters …

DURK: Noradrenaline is nature’s natural speed. It is your “get up and go” juice. But unlike speed, it doesn’t cause free radical damage that burns out the neurons in your brain. Noradrenaline … if you have enough of it you’re full of energy, you’re excited, you’re self-confident. If you don’t have enough of it …

SANDY: You can be depressed, but you’re certainly going to be having less energy, less drive. You may just lose interest in doing most things.

DURK: If you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning and maybe even feel like you’d like to go jump out a window, except it’s too much trouble…. chances are you’re suffering from an inadequate supply of noradrenaline.

Now, if you’re seriously depressed you do need to go see a doctor because there are a lot of other things that could be responsible. Such as hypothyroidism or some things that are a lot more complicated like too much cortisol being produced.

But in the case of people who, getting older, don’t have the spring to their mental step they did when they were teenagers, it’s because their noradrenaline levels drop off with age. And noradrenaline also causes the release of neurotrophic factors that help the noradrenergic nerve grow as well.

So again, it’s a case of “use it or lose it.” Fortunately, you can make noradrenaline from either the essential amino acid tyrosine or the nonessential amino acid phenylalanine. You also need the help of some essential nutrients, specifically vitamin B6, C, and the mineral copper.

A lot of people are deficient in copper; a lot of people aren’t getting the RDA of copper. So it’s not surprising that the number one complaint people bring to their physicians is they just don’t have enough energy.

Part of it may be because they’re only getting 6 hours of sleep a night, and part of it may be because they’re getting older and they’re making less noradrenaline.

Now in our formulations, we use phenylalanine rather than tyrosine because you cannot convert tyrosine into a neuromodulator called beta-phenethylamine. Neuromodulators modulate the effect of neurotransmitters, they turn up the effects or turn them down.

Beta-phenethylamine turns up the effects of noradrenaline and by giving the person a phenylalanine, vitamin B6, copper, vitamin C combination, we’re actually able to give people the system of nutrients that their brain can use to make more beta-phenethylamine and more noradrenaline.

So if you’re “get up and go” has “got up and went,” get yourself one of our formulations, LIFT™, with the phenylalanine and the necessary nutrient cofactors to make it into noradrenaline.

GREG: Would you say that beta-phenethylamine is kind of a kick start modulator?

DURK: It sure is … and in fact it is thought to be involved in the mechanism, the euphoria of being in love. Beta-phenethylamine levels do go up when people are in love, but I’ll also add that it’s found in chocolate. Chocolate is probably your richest food source of it.

But you can make the stuff in your brain if you have adequate phenylalanine (not tyrosine), vitamin B6 and adequate copper which we provide in all of our phenylalanine-containing formulations.

Now, noradrenaline works very well in conjunction with caffeine. That first cup of coffee you drink in the morning gives you a real lift. It makes you work faster and harder and more accurately and with less effort.

Yet, by the middle of the afternoon, drinking another cup of coffee may just make you space out, jittery, nervous, bad tempered. What’s going on here is pretty simple. There are two mechanisms by which caffeine works. One is that it antagonizes adenosine receptors and this is something we won’t get into, but it is one of the mechanisms by which caffeine keeps you awake.

Another is that it makes you release noradrenaline in your synapses and also makes you more sensitive to noradrenaline because it preserves the effect of the second neurotransmitter, cyclic AMP…

SANDY: It’s called the second messenger.

DURK: Noradrenaline crosses the synaptic gap, and the reason it produces a signal in the receiving nerve is that is causes the production of cyclic AMP, the second messenger. Caffeine slows the rate at which the cyclic AMP is destroyed. Just like Viagra® slows the rate at which nitric oxide — stimulated cyclic GMP is destroyed.

And so you get a stronger message. If you take a little bit of  caffeine along with the phenylalanine and cofactors combination, you get a much better lift, and much longer lasting lift than taking just the caffeine alone.

In fact, Sandy and I always take our choline formulation MIND™ and our phenylalanine plus cofactors plus a little bit of caffeine formulation  LIFT™. before we do any lectures and that’s the reason we’re able to remember all of this stuff and put it together in a way people can understand.

SANDY: We’ve discovered by experience that getting up far earlier than we normally do in the morning and having to do television shows during which you’re lucky if you get two minutes, you have to talk very fast, and have answers to questions. Meaning, you can’t spend any time thinking about the answers.

Do this all day and it totally fatigues you; you’re depleting your supply of neurotransmitters like acetylcholine and noradrenaline and you just don’t have the ability to do a very good job of answering questions real fast. So that is originally how we developed these formulas, in order to help us to perform better while we were on publicity tours for our first book, Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach.

DURK: We developed a choline formulation back in the late 1970’s and it had a dramatic effect on Sandy. We started writing the book in ’78 and didn’t yet have a word processor so we were typing all of this stuff up. I literally had to take scissors and cut Sandy’s stuff apart and reassemble it in a different order. What she said was right but not well organized and it was literally cut and paste.

Naturally, Sandy got a bit tickedoff about that but once she started taking the choline supplement it was like everything flowed in the proper order. It was all organized when it came out of her fingers to the typewriter.

SANDY: It was effortless. It was one of those things that if you're a writer and the words are flowing it just feels completely differently than when you’re writing and it feels as though you’re squeezing the last toothpaste out of the tube.

DURK:  We had our choline formulation for the first tour for Life Extension, but we had not yet developed the phenylalanine plus cofactors formulation. And after 5 weeks on the road doing all those TV and radio shows, newspaper, magazine interviews—boy—“our get up and go” “got up and went.”

So we decided to figure out what was going; we were using noradrenaline a heck of a lot faster than we were able to make it. So we fixed that by providing the right formula to enable us to make more and the next tour was so much easier.

SANDY:  It was easier to do a good job all day and we felt better at the end of the day….we weren’t as fatigued.

GREG: How much phenylalanine do you recommend people take on a daily basis? Or is it dependent upon what they’re doing?

DURK:  Well, it depends on what they’re doing. For example, I particularly like a version of our formulation which has green tea polyphenols in it that are potent antioxidants, and have some psychoactive effects … they make colors brighter, make you feel cheerful, they’re a natural upper.

In addition, it has phenylalanine and cofactors and 40 mg of caffeine which is the same amount you would get in a Coke®—which is actually about 50 mg. It’s the same amount you have in two cups of green tea. I normally use about 2 servings a day.

One as soon as I get up, and the other in mid-afternoon when I start slowing down. But if I’m doing something really complex and mind numbing, like filing out my income tax with schedule A, B, C, D, E and F, I’ll use more. When I’m doing something really mind numbing like that or writing for a deadline, I may consume 5 or 6 servings a day. However, you don’t want to take it too close to bedtime or you are not going to get to sleep.

GREG:   I’m curious, has anyone ever attempted to determine the essentiality of phenylalanine or tyrosine, and set daily values? And if not, why not?

DURK:   Well, tyrosine is an essential nutrient. And phenylalanine can be converted to tyrosine in your body so that is not considered an essential nutrient because you can replace it with tyrosine. However, as I mentioned tyrosine doesn’t help you make beta-phenethylamine. Scientists conducted a double-blind, placebo-control study on human beings that were subjected to very long hours of hard work; they were basically taking a test for several hours.

They found that the tyrosine was an anti-fatigue agent that didn’t produce an excitatory effect, it didn’t act as an upper whereas the phenylalanine acted both for anti-fatigue and as an upper. So we prefer the phenylalanine for that reason.

GREG: You recommend between 1 and 3 grams of choline plus cofactors per day. What are your recommendations for phenylalanine plus cofactors?

DURK: For phenylalanine, it depends on the individual. Anywhere from half a gram to 3 grams per day. And I might add the choline plus vitamin B5 formulation can be taken at any time, including with food though of course, if the food remains in your stomach while being digested for awhile, there will be a delay before the choline is absorbed.

In the case of the phenylalanine plus cofactors supplement, for best effects, you want to take that on an empty stomach because other large amino acids in the diet can interfere with the passage of phenylalanine across the blood brain barrier.

SANDY: Certain amino acids compete to be carried across and there is limited capacity for carrying them …

DURK: For example, if you eat a big hamburger you could easily get yourself a half a gram of phenylalanine, however its likely to put you to sleep rather than waking you up because there are other things in there like the amino acid tryptophan that will interfere with phenylalanine crossing the blood brain barrier and that acts as a sedative. So you want to take phenylalanine on an empty stomach.

To be continued in Part Three

Durk & Sandy’s MIND and LIFT formulas are available at www.lifepriority.com.

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