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Reducing One Amino Acid Could Increase Lifespan
John Bryson writes "Eating less of one amino acid might lengthen your life. There have been lots of previous studies showing that many species live long on highly restricted calories, but a lot of this benefit may be possible by only restricting one amino acid. Amino acids that have shown this have been tryptophan and methionine. A recent study, published online December 2 in Nature, a highly respected journal, may help explain some of the health benefits of restricted-calorie diets."
Tryptophan also naturally occurs in bananas. It metabolizes through a few stages into serotonin.
Tryptophan inducing the Thanksgiving sleep is a nice myth--- but it's a common amino acid, and is actually in a higher concentration in chicken than turkey.
:)
The sleep inducing factor in your favorite November holiday is actually the fact that you stuff yourself. Eat four pounds of chicken and gravy, and then we'll see if you stay awake.
TFA directly addresses that point:
Piper and his colleagues don’t know what the correct amino acid balance might be for humans, and he says it would be a nearly impossible feat to adjust people’s diets to get just the right mix. Instead, the team is investigating how tweaking amino acid content in the diet affects cells. If the researchers can identify pathways affected by amino acid imbalances, they might be able to design drugs or other therapies that could give the benefits of caloric restriction without cutting calories.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08619.html for the actual study
I am the one slashdotter that reads TFA (the full article) before posting. I even did a search for tryptophan. Nope, it's not there. Maybe the submitter forgot a link, but tryptophan is never mentioned in the sciencenews.org article.
anecdotes =/= science
Not sure what your point was. Were you saying that there isn't any science in your post?
I found the answer in a wikipedia link provided in another message. The link suggests that the sleepiness is not caused by tryptophan alone. Rather, carbohydrates trigger the release of insulin. Insulin causes muscle to take in LNAA, but not tryptophan. This leaves a larger ratio of tryptophan in the blood to be taken across the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system. There it is converted into serotonin. The serotonin is metabolized into melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy.
So, tryptophan by itself does not make you sleepy. However, tryptophan combined with carbohydrates leads to the right conditions needed to make you sleepy. It has nothing to do with stuffing yourself. Nor is tryptophan's involvement a myth. It just needs the right conditions. Skip the mashed potatoes and you shouldn't get sleepy from turkey.
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``Ideally, if giving up Trytophan is beneficial with no negative side effects, they'd create a pill that prevents your body from digesting it.''
Interestingly, there are actually pills that contain tryptophan. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid and is one of the precursors to serotonine. Serotonine is a neurotransmitter, and low serotonine levels are associated with such conditions as depression and anxiety disorders. So people take extra tryptophan (or, more commonly, 5-HTP, the direct precursor to serotonine) to boost serotonine levels.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.