Addition of Copper to the Recipe

I became interested in The Recipe after the Baylor study was published, showing that the health of older people improved with supplementation with glycine and NAC. There are ongoing studies about this, but it is clear that at least temporarily a group of older people will have better health if they supplement these amino acids. There are some caveats, though; if supplementation is stopped the benefits are lost, and long term studies in humans aren't available yet.

I have added copper sulfate supplementation to my regimen, (see The Recipe Update below and bookmarks for reading about copper at the end of the blog).

But let's go deeper into this deficit in glutathione. Glutathione is the major antioxidant system in the body and is involved in healing and repair. It also falls off rapidly around the age of 50 in many people, although not so much in those who remain healthy and live to extreme old age. In people who live to 100, it remains at youthful levels. So one of the driving ideas behind GlyNAC was the observation that feeding the precursors glycine and cysteine reliably raised glutathione to youthful levels much better than any other method like taking glutathione supplements (orally or IV as given by many naturopaths). And people who live to 100 have these youthful glutathione levels naturally, suggesting that a great glutathione system allowed for repair and healing in old age. The thinking went, perhaps a great glutathione level causes health and long life.

But lots of other enzyme systems besides glutathione start declining at 50. To take an example, there is interest in the NAD+/NADH ratio, which also declines with age (supplementing NAD is the approach pursued by David Sinclair and the Harvard group). Do centenarians, with their great glutathione levels, also have better NAD+/NADH levels? What about other enzyme systems? Do they live longer because they have more glutathione, or because the enzymes that make glutathione (along with other enzyme systems) are better?

Underlying our decline in production of glutathione is a decline in the amount, and to some extent the function, of all our enzyme systems. Examples include the enzymes that take glycine and cysteine and make glutathione that Baylor is focusing on, but also those that cycle NADH and NAD+ as David Sinclair emphasizes, and include the enzyme systems that make use of cholesterol in converting it to hormones. And that is why taking GlyNAC, or NAD+ supplements, or supplemental hormones, don't do anything for a young person, and perhaps why the benefits don't extend past the time when supplements are stopped.

A related question- people live for decades, and mice for a few years. Antioxidant experiments have always looked better in mice that in people because we use pro-oxidant pathways to oxidize cancer and infectious diseases. Perhaps "overdriving" our glutathione system by supplementation in an old person may turn out to be ineffective or worse, similar to trials of other "antioxidants".

So, here I am updating The Recipe with some changes I am making to my own regimen, with some comments. As always I do not make personal medical recommendations here, and you are responsible for your own supplement choices.

The Recipe Update

1) Glycine and NAC powders from Bulk Supply on Amazon 1/2 teaspoon of each twice daily.

2) Copper glycinate 2 mg take total of four mg (two tablets daily). Much more on this coming in future blogs.

3) Magnesium carbonate powder 1 scoop in coffee in morning

4) Centrum Silver one daily

5) Vitamin K2 1 mg twice daily

6) Elliptical trainer to induce shortness of breath three to five times daily. (I let out my breath and go until I have to breathe, increased with training from about 15 seconds to 30 seconds). Total peak exercise time daily is under two minutes. More on this method and relationship to enzyme induction and hypoxia inducible factor in a future blog. For some reason, it's difficult for many people to separate the beneficial effects of exercise from their need to suffer.

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Comment: I purchased a gram scale. A level 1/4 teaspoon of glycine powder from Bulk Supplements weighed 2.009 grams. A level teaspoon would be about 8 grams on this scale. A bag left open for a month had the same density measurement as a freshly opened bag, suggesting that some of the measurements recommended by the manufacturer were taken as liquid volume rather than powder volume. Regardless of that, I think there is no problem in taking "excess" glycine.
The scoop that comes with some of the powders seems to be 1/4 teaspoon and I use four heaping of those twice daily for glycine and three twice daily for NAC.
Accurate measurement isn't needed and the teaspoon method is fine.

Some interesting reading:

A new recent positive study from the Baylor group: https://www.bcm.edu/news/glynac-supplementation-improves-cognitive-decline-and-brain-health

Interesting paper on exercise:

A report exploring copper deficiency in the general population and its common and protean manifestations. It's interesting to think about the relationship between skin wrinkles and aortic stiffness and hypertension:

https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000784

A legendary researcher looks at "what is aging"-

Finally, I'm including a copy of a letter I wrote to a copper researcher. Expect much more to come regarding copper supplementation and chronic diseases the future...

"My background is in clinical adult neurology. I'm thinking about copper metabolism, and about your article https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000784.
In a whole-animal diet, or in people living near the coast with a significant diet of shellfish, I am roughly guessing that dietary elemental copper might be evolutionarily adapted to the range of 10-20 mg, which would put 7-17 mg/day of elemental copper into the small intestine.
When I went to medical school we thought of the small bowel as being sterile. We now know the situation is more subtle than that, but the big picture is that intrusion of bacteria into the small intestine is not a sign of health. A small bowel microbiome is now common in the population when previously it was not. Small bowel bacterial growth is directly implicated in disease states such as SIBO (and less directly via the GI microbiome in everything from autoimmunity to obesity and dyslipidemia).
Wide variances in stool, rather than blood, copper levels could be a significant common factor linking diseases associated with lipopolysaccharide endotoxin.
A copper concentration of 10 mg in 1/2 kg (the average stool weight/day of an adult) would be a 2% elemental copper concentration in the stool, which is microbicidal https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6717487/. One could compare an intermittent dietary serving of liver (containing, say, 14 mg of copper) to a dose of an antibiotic.
Because copper is kept within close serum homeostatic bounds by spilling excess into the stool, the attention to serum markers of copper flux may be missing the most significant aspect of changes in dietary copper, which would be stable serum parameters in contrast to marked changes in stool copper. Changes in microbicidal stool copper would be expected to have major effects on the gut microbiome.
Could our autoimmune epidemic (as well as, closer to my specialty, neurodegenerative diseases and any condition linked to endotoxin)- with all the links to various alterations in microbiota- be simply caused by a lack of dietary copper in the stool?
One simple way to study this would be to look at the stool copper levels of SIBO patients, which in the chronic state would be expected to be very low, and then supplement them with 10 mg copper glycinate (the maximum tolerable upper limit by the FDA and safety has been studied by this group https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0716-97602006000100020) daily and determine their stool lopper levels at three months with a survey of their response to symptoms. SIBO patients often respond temporarily to an oral antibiotic and then relapse.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this and any suggestions on how this idea might be further tested..
With sincere appreciation for your fascinating research,

Charles Matthews M.D.

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