Could Your Brain Be Starving for Amino Acids?

Discover how amino acid deficiencies can contribute to anxiety, depression, panic attacks, overwhelm, cravings, poor sleep, and other common mental health challenges.
Understand why neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA, endorphins, and catecholamines depend on adequate protein intake and targeted amino acid support to function properly.
Learn how simple foundations like protein, minerals, gut health, sleep, and personalized amino acid therapy can help restore brain chemistry and create rapid improvements in mood and resilience.

About the Expert

John Nieters, LAc, DAOM, CFMP

Dr John Nieters

Dr John Nieters has been teaching and practicing the combination of Functional Medicine paired with Traditional Chinese Medicine for several decades. He has been practicing Tai Qi, Qi Gong and meditation for 50 years.He has hosted over 500 call-in talk radio shows on "The Balancing Point." He currently lives in Alameda, CA with his wife, Jenny and son, Johnny. His wife, Jenny, is the acupuncturist for the 49ers football and St Mary's Rugby team.He has authored the book "The Sweet Spot," on how to read your blood work and plans to have two additional books published this year.Dr John's patients, staff and listeners call me the "Story-teller".

I use amino acids as my first line of defense so people get a very fast win, John. Because when you can calm the brain, so if I can open up a capsule of tryptophan, for example, put it underneath the tongue and the anxiety that they walked in with dissipates, then that's a win right then and there.

And it's immediate. How many things in our world can you do that you get such an immediate reaction? And you Can with the amino acid. Hi, and welcome to The Balancing Point.

I'm Dr. John Needers and I am here to make traditional Chinese medicine, functional medicine and integrative health simple, practical and fun. So you can restore balance, boost vitality and enjoy a healthier life every single day.

Hi, this is Dr. John back again with another edition of The Balancing Point. I hope you stay till the end today because we've got someone I'm very, very interested in talking to.

I have recently been kind of taking a deeper dive going back into looking at amino acid therapies in conjunction with Chinese herbal medicine and to see how the different diagnostics fit together.

And I'm really excited about it. Then Lori showed up, so I am really exited because she's a functional nutritional therapist. She's the founder of the Take Back My Brain Method.

I love that one. She focuses on helping clients with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other neurological conditions. And her personal journey of overcoming personal health challenges through holistic methods drives her passion.

She's dealt with cancer, celiac disease, bulimia, depression and now she's taken that personal knowledge and shared it with her clients in terms of what she did to overcome those problems.

And one of the things she likes to do is offer hope and practical insights for moms dealing with anxiety, depression, and the overwhelming demands of life.

That's really fabulous because we have a lot of those overwhelmed moms coming in here. So Laurie, yeah. Uh, so today we're going to talk a little bit about amino acid therapy, right?

Taking back your brain. Fascinating topic. So, you know, we see so many people that do the wrong things, but we a fair number of people who seem to do all the right things.

They eat correctly, at least in their mind. They sleep well, they don't abuse drugs or alcohol, and still they're suffering from extreme anxiety. Do you have anything, any insights into that?

Yeah, I see it all the time. I've experienced it myself. There's usually some deficiencies. Like to go back to the amino acid deficancies, because those are foundational to building everything in our body.

So if there is still an underlying deficiency going on, people are still going to be anxious and depressed. And then they're going get misdiagnosed with things that they don't actually have.

Then get drugs that don' actually treat what they have very well. Yes, we could go on that tangent as well, like this work a long time, Right. Well, I look at the percentage effectiveness of SSRIs and it becomes pretty clear when we look how your diagnostics work or look is that it's not going to work for the majority of people.

So let's start with the basics. What are amino acids and why are they so critical for our brain and our mood health? Well, amino acids are the building blocks to peptides, proteins, you know, everything in our body from your…

Most people think of them as muscle building, your hair, skin, and nails, but really it's your hormones, neurotransmitters, digestive enzymes. All those things are dependent upon having enough amino acid in your body so that you can repair and rebuild.

Awesome. And so, how do you identify? the different types of conditions so that you know which specific amino acids to give to your patients. So I'm looking at brain-based amino acid, which ones are going to affect those neurotransmitters.

And so I am looking a five different categories and symptoms in those five categories to assess, is there dysfunction? Is there a deficiency going on?

So it's serotonin and GABA and your endorphins, your catecholamines, and then glucose regulation. all of those categories have amino acids that can help.

Awesome. Well, let's start with the serotonin type deficiencies, right? Can we talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. That's one of my favorite topics because SSRIs are such a hot topic right now, which I'm glad they're a I think they're very detrimental to our society as a whole.

And amino acid therapy can provide a beautiful alternative to using mood medication in that manner without side effects. Awesome. So with low serotonin, what types of conditions would you tend to see so that you would know how to identify?

Yeah. I would see anxiety, depression, OCD, panic attacks. your mind rabbit trailing quite a bit, so kind of that hyperactivity, being irritable, PMS, snapping at people, and you're like, why am I snapping people?

This is not my personality. Having issues falling asleep, trouble staying asleep. Afternoon, evening cravings, a lot of those things are serotonin deficiencies.

Awesome. We title our initial intake appointment, getting to the roots. And I'm seeing other people are starting to do that also. That seems to me what you're doing.

You're not treating the symptoms only, although the systems will go away. you know, because medications aren't fixing the root cause of anxiety and depression.

And any more than blood pressure medications are treating the causes of blood pressures. It's because as soon as you stop using them, you have high blood-pressure again, right?

So it's really just treating symptoms and it sounds like what you do goes right to the roots of the problem. Exactly. We want to fix the deficiency and then figure out why did you had the deficiencies in the first place.

I had been fascinated by a book that I've had for a while called Nutrient Power. And he, in that Walsh, was coming at it from a vitamin mineral deficiency, but he doesn't say much about amino acids.

So it seems like a great way to couple things together. Absolutely. I mean, we need the amino acid. We need all those foundational pieces. But I would say, as you were saying before, amino assets are kind of the forgotten foundation.

Yeah, pretty much forgotten by me. 25 years ago, I was using them a lot more than I've used them over the last few years. So yeah, certainly forgotten and certainly forgot by most of the medical community.

You know, and it's hard, you know. It's harder if you have 10, 15 minutes to handle everything and get to the root, right? And it is not super sexy, I mean, amino acids aren't that exciting, biohacking is.

So whether you're talking, mainstream medical or even functional wellness, foundations is missed a lot just because it not all that fun and takes a while to fix those deficiencies.

Yeah. Although I've seen some people add some amino acids and get some pretty quick results. Very fast results, yes. And so I noticed that your focus is on calming the brain first, right?

What does that literally mean in practice? Literally that means I use amino acids as my first line of defense so people get a very fast win, John, because when you can calm the brain, so if I can open up a capsule of tryptophan, for example, put it underneath the tongue and the anxiety that they walked in with dissipates.

then that's a win right then and there, and it's immediate. How many things in our world can you do that you get such an immediate reaction? And you can with the amino acids.

And so when we calm that brain first, it so fast, then they can process everything else that needs to be dealt with. Then we see what's left over, what mood issues are still leftover, if any.

What digestive issues can we deal with? So when the brain is calm, then you know your digestion is easier to heal with, your hormones are easier I use them sublingually all the time for testing to see which ones people are going to respond to.

And then people can take them orally, you know, swallow the pills, when they take on a consistent basis. Or if they're having like a panic attack or an intense food craving or alcohol craving, or something of that nature, they can open up those capsules and get immediate relief and not wait for that 20 minutes to go through your digestive system.

Wow, that's awesome. You know, as you're speaking, I have a pull down menu coming down of all my patients that I need to contact. I did a telehealth with a patient yesterday and this would have been useful information.

Well, just follow up with them. Gotcha. And so it sounds like you are saying that anxiety and overwhelm are really mostly biochemical and if that's the case, which I assume it is, that they could rectify that fairly quickly.

Definitely very quickly and about 90% of the people, things rectified very fast. medical offices treating certain conditions, they will tell people that they may get worse before they get better, right?

And to kind of keep in contact, tell me the symptoms, but don't be alarmed by it. Do you ever find that with amino acid therapies? I mean, every now and then there might be an outlier, but like I said, 90% of the time, no, there's not issues.

You're going to get immediate. Well, that's awesome. Yeah. That's great. So going back to serotonin. Are you willing to share what kind, and this is not for people listening to do it themselves because you really should have someone that's highly trained because the last thing anyone should do in most cases is self-diagnose.

And I can tell you half a dozen stories about me self diagnosing and getting it wrong. If it had been one of my patients, I would have gotten it right away, right?

But I'm a little too close to my own problems. suggestions or answers that Lori gets, please don't run out and just start experimenting with your amino acids.

Do you do telehealth, Lori? I do Telehealth. About 80% of my practice is TeleHealth. Yeah, so if you have questions about what, where to start, just give Laurie a call and, you know, get an expert on your side.

And again, once you figure it out, it may not take a lot of additional appointments. I don't know. But once I figure out it should be a little bit easier to get clear sailing.

So going back to serotonin, any general things that you would tend to look at as amino acid treatments? You mean what supplements I use? So I would tend to use 5-HTP or L-tryptophan.

I like to start with L tryptophane first because it converts into different things, not just serotonin, where 5HTP only converts in to seratonin. So, I love to go to the fact where let the body do what the needs to do with what you get with it.

And so that's why I liked serotonin or trypophan first. But if somebody doesn't respond to trypsophana, we will use five HTP. Yeah, I remember decades ago and I don't know how many decades because I'm old enough that I Don't remember all my past so well.

Yeah. But when tripped a fan got a really bad name it Yeah and that was like that's probably 25 or 30 years ago Oh, yeah, cuz that wasn't the late 80s when that happened in 1989. And it wasn'nt Tripped fans fault Yeah, well, you see that so often.

It's like when you look at HRT and there were increasing cancer risk and they blamed it on the estrogen. Well, that wasn't accurate. Yeah. That was the progestins.

Okay, that's a great start. And so what about, my first question when I have a patient come in and they say, I'm depressed, and I would say first I try to divide it into two bigger categories.

Do you have lot of negative self-talk or do you just don't have enough energy to get off the couch? You just do not care anymore. They will identify usually one or the other, sometimes both.

So for the blahs, the I can't get of the coach, you know, interest in life anymore, apathetic. How would you look at that? I would look that as more of a catecholamine deficiency.

And so then I will assess that with like a DLPA, D-L-phenylalanine or L- phenyl alanine, or some tyrosine. If somebody is a lot of negative self-talk, we're going to go back to serotonin for sure.

Right. Okay. What about protein intake? Do you find that to be a significant issue? A significant issue. Most people are under-eating protein, especially animal protein.

I've had clients go home and eat hamburger or steak and they'll send me a message like, my brain is tingling after I ate protein because it was starving.

Yeah, exactly. That's a good point. What about the people? Well, I'll have a specific for you. I've run into the too sensitive and sometimes called. Usually we'll see this historically in females around menopause most often.

It could certainly could affect other people. But lately, one of the people that works for me has four or five nieces that just, if you say the word no, they go off.

I mean, that are totally uncontrollable. And I had not seen that in, at least in kids as much until pretty recently. How would you call that type? I would definitely go back to serotonin and I will go to GABA.

And then of course we'll look at some neurological toxicity after that. Yeah, exactly. New study I saw yesterday, 187 chemicals in the cord blood. I've seen others that had higher amounts.

287, 307. Exactly. You know, I'll have patients come in and Usually don't have that talk up front so much, but I will then get into toxic elements. And they said, and my doctor said that can't be an issue.

You know, what am I exposed to? You, know I live a good clean life. Well, you came into the world with two to 300. Your bucket's already three quarters full.

Yeah, exactly. Of course I remember my first functional medicine class was a weekend class in leaky gut and that was in 1999 and I got dragged there by one of my friends and said I don't want to do this and she bribed me and went and about an hour into it My mind almost exploded.

It was like, oh my God, this fits Chinese medicine absolutely perfectly. But then of course I came back and I'd see patients and they clearly in my estimation had leaky gut.

So I tell them and then they'd go to their doctor and say, you know, he said I have leky gut and the doctor would say don't ever go see that lunatic again.

You can't have a lekey gut, it's not even possible. And ofcourse now they're the ones talking about it. Right, right. Everybody has a leaky gut in this society anymore.

I read one study, and this is a long time ago, 20 years. And they found that of the population they were testing, which is pretty healthy population, they we're finding severe leakey gut, in about 10%. In regular Advil users, there were 70%. And this was going way back, way Yeah.

Well, if you have mood issues, If you're anxious, depressed, OCD, all those things, you know that there's a leaky gut component there too. Cause the neurotransmitters, 80% of your serotonin is in your gut.

So you can't have anxiety and not have a Leaky Gut. Right. Good point. You know, one of the, a large group that I see are females with pretty severe, what has been called What is MEC, now it's called M-E-C-F-S, but there's a type that I see and it is usually high functioning females, attorney.

I have half a dozen attorneys that have children, two to three children and they are now suffering from severe fatigue. They can barely get off the couch.

Right? Is that a, is that type you would see? And any comment about how you might treat it? Yeah, so I would say, as we're talking about the five categories again, they probably fall into all five.

They're probably low in serotonin, GABA, their endorphins, the catecholamines. Most of those high functioning women are in vivance or another, you know, Adderall type medication.

And then their glucose regulation is horrific. So we would test all of five of these categories with amino acids and then, of course, assess their adrenal function and all those things as well, which I'm sure you do as Yeah, I would say it's the whole picture there.

Yeah. Which is why it's so difficult. Yes. I've had patients go to Stanford, to their chronic fatigue clinic. And I'm supportive that they go because they get thousands of dollars worth of testing done by Stanford.

But generally, no matter what they find, they come back with pretty much the same drug regimen. One patient, one of the first people that went there who was told, and she had two little kids, she'd been a very high functioning athletic trainer, and they told her, go to bed, don't get out of bed for two years, unless it's to go the bathroom or to eat.

That's what they tell her. Right. So yeah, right. Yeah. Okay. She was obviously then even more depressed. I'm sure. How discouraging. And I've had several patients that have gone to pretty high level clinics.

specialty clinics and being told pretty much the same thing. And I was clear with her that, yeah, it's not going to happen overnight. You're not gonna get better overnight because this is a very deep-seated problem.

Obviously, your adrenals are taxed, you're mitochondria, they're in a death spiral kind of, and so it takes some time. So when you say test for amino acids, are you talking in person just with the sublingual?

Yeah, I'm talking about the Sublingua testing. If you're a distance client, you know, i'll send you a kit in the mail and then we'll get on a zoom call and Then we will test them like you and I are talking right now.

Wow, that's fabulous. And so in high functioning women that maybe don't have chronic fatigue to that point, is there any way, like you talked about working with moms.

In our culture, moms are going to be stressed. You know, when I was a kid, I played sports all year round. My mom never went to a game, never drove me to game.

It was just a different time. And now I'll see families who are The parents are constantly busy on the weekends driving one kid to soccer, one kids to volleyball, and it's just nerve wracking.

So for that high functioning female, any suggestions other than slow down? Well, protein, you have to fuel your body. So if you're not eating well, your not going to feel well of course.

Good protein good fats, get in some fruits and veggies as you can, but if nothing else, take a full spectrum amino acid supplement that is going feed your brain in a way that nothing can.

I like Total Amino Solutions by Genesa because it's all of the amino acids. says, I don't think we're just deficient in those eight or nine that they, you know, tell us are essential.

I think were deficien in all of them. Would you be willing to spell Genesa? Yeah, here I actually have it on my desk, but it's G-E-N- E-S-A. And if you're, watching, this is a picture of it.

Cool. Excellent. Thank you. If someone was going to just take one simple thing, one simply shift to support their brain health, do you have any recommendation?

I would say make sure you're getting enough protein. Okay. I've become a protein fanatic lately. Yeah. And I'm not talking like 200 milligrams a day. Just eat.

Or else is it each meal? Just start there. I weigh about 245 pounds. And so if I look at the dietary recommendations or whatever recommendations for protein intake, I couldn't eat that much.

So I aim for a little bit lower, but there's so many supplements now, you know, and I try to get everything or as much as I can from food, kefir with 30 grams of protein and I get a cacao drink with thirty grams a protein.

And I drink those at the office. So then I'm pretty well on my way. If I eat a decent meal in the afternoon, I am going to be getting over a hundred grams at least.

Boy, do I feel a 100% better when I do that. Yeah, we're expecting, well, you can't drive your car if it's on empty. It's the same thing like your body.

You can drive you body doing all the things that we do in our current society when it, when its running on, empty with no protein, no, healthy fats and no hydration or minerals.

One of the other things I would say is get yourself some, Redmond sea salt. I keep this on my desk all day long. And I lick my finger, I stick my fingers in it.

Put it on tongue and I move on with my day. Yeah, Katherine and I have a book called The Sweet Spot. And so it's looking at, one book is looking the complete blood count and the other one's are looking a metabolic panel.

and we go through and talk about kind of the, you know, the boilerplate. But then I went through, and Katherine did that, I want through. I probably read close to a thousand studies and looked for huge studies that were quite clear about what the best values were to say in that sweet spot, you know, with the U-shaped curve.

And you want to be right down here to have the lowest mortality risk. In one of those books, we have an entire section on salt, right? Because it's a mineral in there.

I'd give several. case studies of patients that just had to increase their salt intake, you know, because we are so salt phobic and, with good reason, many people eat way too much salt.

But I had a patient come in, type A, just driven. I mean, she was just, the way she fired questions at me and she'd seen four or five doctors, a naturopath and She said, you know, every day while I'm driving my daughter to school, I have to actually pull the car over and I can't function for about 20 minutes.

And I said okay, well, what do you do before you drive your daughter the school? She says I get on my Peloton. I say, do have a nice easy ride? No, she says, no I am a fanatic.

60 minutes flat out. Do you perspire much? I put towels all around the Pelaton. Right? I said, okay, I've got a very expensive fix for you. I want you to do half a teaspoon of salt before you get on to ride and a half teaspoon afterwards.

And I wanted you take electrolytes later in the day. So I saw her once more and she was fine. Right. That was it. Yeah. Again, don't try this at home because you might be one of the people that are salt sensitive, but I find very little.

hyperendotremia, elevated sodium levels, I find a lot of low. Yeah. I had a client once and we did the amino acid therapy and she got about I would say 70% better with with amino-acid therapy, but she still had The PMDD, so you know that premenstrual, very bad dysfunction.

And we started increasing her salt. She got to like four, between four and five teaspoons of salt, like right before her period, and it was a game changer.

game changer. Now, I wouldn't recommend, you know, most people don't need that much salt, but for her body and her situation, she was so depleted and the cycle depleting her of minerals so profoundly that until we put that salt in her, She didn't feel a hundred percent.

It was amazing to watch. And it was just salt. Just, Redmond sea salt Wow. And one of the things that's really resonating as I listen to you is how individually you look at people.

You know, it's not one size fits all and you say, of course, and I would say of, but, you know in the medical world, there's a lot of one-size-fits-all treatments.

So, yeah. What's the best way to get ahold of you? You can find me on all social media channels at Take Back My Brain. That's my podcast as well. I'm very active on Instagram, so if you want to message me there, I'd be happy to chat with you.

Okay, that's delightful. Any—that's taken me through all of my questions, anything you wanna add about anything? Oh gosh, amino acid therapy is just so fun.

I, every time I do a trial and when somebody is like Christmas to me and at the end, they're like, I cannot believe this happened. Like I can't believe all of these things happen this fast.

I'm like yeah, we're just feeding your brain. Amino acids are just little pieces of protein because amino acids make, you know, up a protein. And it's just that simple.

You just have to get the right combination and the correct dosing. So I love what I. Do I've been doing this for decades and I wouldn't change it. That's awesome.

So anybody that's interested, check Lori out. Again, Lori Hammer. She's a functional nutritional therapist and the founder of Take Mac My Brain. Lori, I think that about it for today.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate this and how value it's going to get for the people that listen to it. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for joining me on The Balancing Point.

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Ancient medicine for our modern world

Could Your Brain Be Starving for Amino Acids?

About the Expert

Recent Posts

Interested in knowing if we are the right fit for you and your condition?

Alameda Acupuncture

Ancient medicine for our modern world

Could Your Brain Be Starving for Amino Acids?

About the Expert

Recent Posts

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Interested in knowing if we are the right fit for you and your condition?