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Dr. Osborne’s Zone
Lysine - The Essential Amino Acid You Might Be Missing!
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My go to for Lysine supplementation: https://www.glutenfreesociety.org/shop/health-focus/immune-health/immune-protocol/l-lysine/ In this episode of Dr. Osborne's Zone, we dive into the importance of lysine, an essential amino acid that many...
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Today on Dr. Osborne's Zone, we're doing a deep dive on an amino acid that's largely devoid in today's cereal based diets. This amino acid is critical for collagen formation, bone health, immune health, heart health, and so much more. Stay tuned. We'll be right back to do a deep dive on lysine. You unlock this door with the key of compassion. Beyond it is another world. A world of science, a world of common sense, a world of sanity. You're moving into a land of both empathy and ethics, of nutritional knowledge and empowerment. You've just crossed over to Dr. Osborne's zone. Welcome back. Today we're doing a deep dive on lysine. Now, what is lysine? It's an essential amino acid that plays a vital role in several processes, physiological processes. It was discovered in 1889 by a German chemist who isolated this from the protein casein, the dairy protein. And it's been extensively studied for its role in protein synthesis, immune function and overall health. Now, as an amino acid, it's important that you understand amino acids are the building blocks to proteins. And, and so lysine being One of the nine, there's 20amino acids. Nine are essential. What does that mean? What does it mean when we say it's essential? It means you have to eat it from your diet. You cannot produce it in your body. So if you don't eat enough of it and you become deficient, it can deteriorate your health and even kill you. So essentiality means essential for Life. Now, there's 11 what we sometimes call non essential amino acids. And you can watch my crash courses on amino acids if you want to do a deeper dive. But lysine is one of the nine very important. Now, I want to bring up some things because the American diet today is predominantly a grain based diet. We look at the average quantity of calories that a person consumes. We get 60 to 70% of the calories are wheat based. And this is us statistic. And so here's what I want to show you. So this is from the Journal of Cereal Science. Cereals are important sources of protein for human nutrition. Now, I would argue they're not important sources of protein because they're incomplete proteins. They don't contain enough of the essential amino acids. But you see, they go on. Cereals are important sources of protein for human nutrition, but have low quality due to limitations in the amounts of essential amino acids. So again, what I just said, notably though, lysine, in essence the storage proteins inside of grain, the prolamin storage proteins are low lysine. Now this gets worse when you use nitrogen fertilizer. So when you put nitrogen fertilizer on the ground to grow that wheat faster, it grows faster. And there's less lysine when that happens. So nitrogen fertilization reduces it even further. So get 60, 70% of the calories coming from wheat which is devoid of adequate lysine. And it's even more devoid when you use nitrogen fertilizers. And we do, we use plenty of those. We use so much nitrogen fertilizer in the US that we have growing dead zones off the coasts where you have pesticide nitrogen residue runoff because too much nitrogen inhibits growth. And see here, this is from Berkeley lab. Missing lysine link could improve plant based nutrition. So there's this huge push for plant based nutrition. And other than a bunch of billionaires that just want to make money off of ignorant people who don't understand nutrition, there's no scientific validity for using plant based diets predominantly in humans. Humans are not vegetarians and not designed to be purely plant based. That being said, if you're a vegetarian, I'm not trying to pick on you, so please reserve your comments, but see here, lysine is an important amino acid that must be supplied in our diets as our bodies can't produce it. Low lysine content in crops such as cereals and legumes results in protein, energy, malnutrition and 30% of the population of the developing world. I would argue because this is true in the US that it's not just the developing world. What they're calling the developing world is the engineering of crops with higher lysine levels is a goal. In other words, they want to manipulate, genetically manipulate more of our food because it's not nutritious. And they want to try to make a non nutritious food be more nutritious so that they can recommend it. With this final piece of the lysine metabolic process in place, the researchers hope that a more complete understanding of lysine catabolism will aid in the successful development of stable high lysine crops to combat malnutrition globally. Why can't we just add some meat to the diet and be okay with that? Why can't we quit picking on cow farts as a cause of global warming? Why can't we just have animal protein? And this is more of the rhetoric around that in today's scientific world, government funds things that feed into a paradigm that is not necessarily true. And one of Those is the whole global warming, that humans are the direct cause of global warming. We know that's not true now. That does not say that there isn't climate change that's occurring. But to blame humans and to blame cows and to blame meat farmers for that as a consequence is just a ridiculous notion. But that's what they keep trying to do. And you can see that that's very evident in this group of researchers who were able to get published. You can see here what they're saying. Cereal grains main dietary source of energy, carbs and plant based or plant proteins. Worldwide, currently only 41% of grains are used for human consumption. 35% are used for animal feed. Cereals have been overlooked as a source of environmentally sustainable and healthy plant proteins. They've not been overlooked, they're just not good. And people generally want to gravitate away from using only cereal because they're not healthy when they do. So I would say they're not necessarily overlooked. But anyway, their goal, a healthy plant proteins could play a major role in transitioning towards a more sustainable food system for healthy diets. Cereal plant proteins are of good nutritional quality, but lysine is often the limiting amino acid. Again, we're talking about lysine. When consumed as whole grains, cereals provide health protecting components such as fiber and phytochemicals. Shifting grain use from feed to traditional foods and conceptually new foods and ingredients could improve protein security and alleviate climate change. So again, this is the rhetoric, right? This is the nonsense. Quit trying to scare people into thinking that eating meat is causing climate change and that we need genetically modified development of wheat in order for it to contain more lysine. It's a ridiculous notion. That's just my opinion anyway. But rapid development of new grain based food ingredients, rapid development, that's never a good idea when you're talking about new food grain based ingredients. That means they're going to be doing some rapid genetic manipulation of things that they probably won't adequately study that will probably have health consequences on people who are just trusting these guys to basically to help them. Meat analogs. Here you go. Nobody wants to eat meat analogs. If they want to eat meat, they want to eat meat. This review discusses recent development and outlines future perspectives for cereal grain use. I would just say if you want to eat cereal, if you're not gluten sensitive and you're eating cereal, then eat normal cereal that's organic grown, preferably locally milled and not got chemicals added to it. Outside of that, quit messing with our food supply and trying to tell us that meat is bad and that we need to eat an incomplete food to try to save the plan from global warming. Now that the ran is over, let's get back to lysine. So what are the key functions or key roles of lysine? Number one, it helps to build protein. We know that lysine helps to preserve our protein integrity. It helps our body from losing protein through the kidneys. So it also builds protein, but it also helps to maintain protein, so supports tissue maintenance and repair. As a key building block, strengthens collagen. Lysine residues help to create something called collagen cross links, which I'll show you here in just a moment. We know it boosts bone health. Lysine has several functions on bone building cells. We know it's important for energy metabolism, and we know it also enhances and aids in our immune system. Again, this is an essential amino acid, something your body can't do without because of these key roles and these key functions. So let's look at lysine's role, one of its roles in bone. So you see here the effect of essential amino acids on bone health. Here's lysine in the green in the middle of this diagram down here. So you see lysine right here, and you can see its impact. So one of the things that it does is it blocks a chemical called interleukin 6, which is an inflammatory cytokine that up regulates the cells called osteoclasts that break bone down. So it blocks that, it basically preserves bones from breaking down by blocking, helping to block that chemical. Now, the other thing lysine is important for in bone health, come over here. Is it upregulates IGF1, that's insulin growth factor one, which stimulates osteoblasts. Blast means to build. These are cells that build new bone. We also know that lysine is responsible for the upregulation of nitric oxide, which also helps to stimulate osteoblasts. So it's got kind of three critical roles here as it relates to the bone maintenance, the bone turnover. One role is in blocking bone breakdown. The other two roles are in allowing bone cells that build new bone to work and upregulate. So one of lysine's other functions you see here is in the production of something called carnitine. Now, carnitine, I've done an entire crash course on carnitine. But carnitine's role is very critical in human biochemistry because it helps us to metabolize fat. This is especially important for those of you who are following a keto or a carnivore type diet. You're eating a lot of fat and not a lot of carbohydrates. And what our bodies use in our cells, our bodies use carnitine to shuttle fat into into energy burning. So we use carnitine as a transfer agent in a process called beta oxidation, which is how we break fat down and make it and turn it into energy. So if you don't have adequate lysine, you're going to be less efficient at generating energy from fat sources. Now, carnivore diets are definitely not low in lysine. There's plenty of lysine in the carnivore diet, but depending on what kind of keto diet that you're following, some keto diets, they're, I won't say tremendously low protein, but some of them can be lower in protein. So you just want to be aware. Lysine, you see here, lysine goes through several chemical reactions. So we go, lysine gets methylated by SAMI s adenosylmethionine and it makes this next chemical in the chain. And we just follow that down through here all the way we get over here into the mitochondria. You can see vitamin C and iron play a role in that reaction. And then vitamin B6 plays a role in this fourth reaction. And then vitamin B3, that's NAD plays a role in that fifth reaction. So you've got SAMI, which is a source of methionine, vitamin C, iron, vitamin B6 and vitamin B3, all are necessary to help to convert lysine into carnitine. So very, very important because we need carnitine to make energy from the fat that we eat. It's amazing too. I see a lot of people in my practice who are on a keto and even on a carnivore diet who are carnitine deficient, despite the fact that they're eating ample food sources for it. One of the reasons we see that is mold in their background. There's some mechanisms where mold depletes, it inhibits that process. And so especially as it relates to carnitine synthesis from lysine, because of the effect that mold can have on vitamin C, your body will burn through vitamin C to try to protect you from mold and mycotoxins. So at any rate, in a carnivore diet too, is also low in vitamin C. So that's an important, important note to make. Now, beyond the carnitine synthesis. This is the role that lysine plays in protein production as it relates to collagen. So you see here collagen. This bottom molecule is a healthy collagen microfibril. If you come up to the top, you see amino acid pool. You see on this left side of the diagram, you can see deficiency when a person's deficient. And over here, you can see sufficient. Right, so this diagram is going to the right to show sufficiency, it's going to the left to show deficiency. And so when there's a deficiency in glycine and proline and lysine, what ends up happening? You see, this arrow is emphasized. This arrow right here is emphasized is you get bad folding of collagen proteins. So you get this disorganized protein fiber that can't really be used by the body. You get more of that than you get good protein folding, which is that bottom arrow. Whereas over here, you notice the emphasis is on this arrow where you get more good folding of collagen proteins that lead to stronger, better collagen production now. And so lysine plays a role in that. You can see over here from this study directly. So if we look here at the highlights, this came from this particular study. This is on osteoarthritis. In osteoarthritis, there's a deficiency and a degeneration of collagen. One of the reasons why many people get older, their stomach acid is reduced, they absorb less of the protein, they're eating from their food, or they're taking medicines that block stomach acid. And of course, they're not being able to get adequate lysine. And so a lot of times it's doctors blaming arthritis on age, when in fact it's really arthritis based on poor diet and digestion inhibition that happens as people get older. So it's not technically aging, but we know that glycine, proline and lysine intake and supplementation can help to prevent arthritis through the production of healthy collagen and the maintenance of healthy collagen. One of the things, if you look at collagen, it's a triple helix, and in between each little ladder rung, you have these cross linkages so that it looks more like this. And this is why lysine is important. Lysine strengthens those cross links, and it's what allows your collagen to be strong and elastic. Now, copper and vitamin C also play a role in forming these cross links. So those nutrients, very important for healthy collagen and without healthy collagen, we get arthritis, we can get easy bruising, we can be more prone to fractures, we can be more prone to injuries, brain strains and muscle problems if we're trying to work out, etc. I want to show you a couple of additional studies here on lysine and some of its functions as it relates to children and adolescents. And so what they're doing here in this study out of the Journal of Advanced Research is they were adding lysine supplements to kids that had cereal predominant diets. And this is the US too. I mean, most of these babies now mothers are feeding them cereal, but they're adding lysine supplements. And so here's what they found. When they added lysine, they got, you know, and they did comparative. So they did, you know, children without the addition and then children with the addition. And so what they got in the children with lysine was better height, better, better weight, better Z scores, better body mass index, increased skin fold thickness, so that again, protein production was greater. So their body parts were thicker. They had better nitrogen retention. What does that mean? That's protein retention. Nitrogen is basically what's one of the fundamental components to protein. And then they had improved, they had better developmental quotients. And then serologically in their blood they had better hormone production. I'll show you some of that in just a minute. Which hormones? Better immunological indicators, enhanced protein production, enhanced bone metabolic indicators, and better red blood cell indicators. So lysine deficient diets in kids can really affect their ability to properly grow. And that's not good. You've got children at home and they're eating largely cereal diets especially. That's not good. Put some meat on that plate for those children. Now here's another aspect to the study where they actually compared using oral lysine, 10 grams a day for a year. And these are all in kids that are underground, right? So these are in children that are formerly diagnosed as not growing. So they did a group where they had 57 kids between the ages of 5 to 14 not growing and children that same situation at 57 that they gave growth hormone solution. So this is a comparative, right? On the green side we've got growth hormone, and on the kind of red side we've got giving them lysine daily. And so here's the bottom line down here. Lysine worked better than growth hormone in this study. So you see overall success ratio of the treatment lysine was 95.21%. Successful growth hormone was 82.31% successful. Here's what lysine did. It improved weight, height, growth rate, bone age. It improved something called bap, which is bone alkaline phosphatase. It's a chemical that helps make bone. It improved osteocalcin, which is a chemical hormone that helps make bone. It improved these hormones over here, insulin like growth factor and vitamin D. Taking lysine actually improved vitamin D levels. Remember, vitamin D is a pro hormone. So at the end of the day, anthropometrically, you know, a better weight, height, better triceps, skin thickness, better body mass index, better mid upper arm size, circumference. And in the blood, improved hemoglobin. Also enhanced and improved serum proteins. So albumin, prealbumin and transferrin were better. These are important carrier proteins in the blood, but they also had better T cell levels. CD3, CD4, CD8, T cells, these are very important immune cells. They had better natural killer cells, they had better interleukin 2. And then look here in the middle. IgG, IgA, IgM, what are those? Those are antibodies. And so when kids can't make adequate quantities of antibodies, they're more susceptible to becoming ill. And that last one, C3, that's complement. So kids on lysine, these were the benefits. So imagine kids with a lysine deficient diet. Look, they're not going to grow as well, but they're also going to be immunocompromised and they're also going to be hormonally compromised. So lysine is very, very important. Definitely want to endeavor to make sure that we're getting it in the diet. Now let's talk about some additional studies on lysine in humans and the effect that lysine can have. So this first one up here, we'll pull it down. So oral treatment with lysine and L arginine reduces anxiety and basal cortisol levels in healthy humans. The dietary supplementation with lysine has been shown to reduce chronic anxiety. And in humans with low dietary intake of lysine, a combination of lysine and arginine has been documented to normalize the hormonal stress responses in humans with high trait anxiety. So in this study, what they did is a week long oral supplementation of 2.64 grams per day of lysine and 2.64 grams per day of arginine. And so what did they find? Decreased the basal levels of salivary cortisol and chromogranin A, both stress hormones. These results of this double blind, placebo controlled and randomized study confirm the previous findings in humans and animals and point to a combination of lysine and arginine as a potentially useful dietary intervention in otherwise healthy humans with high subjective levels of mental stress and anxiety. In this case, they used arginine as well. Now arginine is also an amino acid for those of you who maybe haven't heard of it. So it's a combination here. But again, it treated humans successfully that had high perceived stress and anxiety. What a beautiful thing. I mean, what are we using now? We're using drugs like SSRIs and other powerful, powerful chemicals that alter and create tremendous litany of side effects. What we're saying here is that and these individuals got better using amino acids. Well, think about that because here I keep going back to this because our society, our governing bodies of nutrition have been pushing a low meat diet and a plant based diet for decades now. And we have more depression and we have more anxiety in our youth than we've ever had. Is this potentially one of the reasons why? Is it because we're pushing these low protein diets and we're, we're telling these kids that they're killing the planet because they want to eat meat or because they're trying to eat meat? So these kids are trying to be responsible with the information that they have. And so they're trying to be more plant based. And they have tremendous anxiety and tremendous stress. And here we have, just adding 5 grams a day of some amino acids can effectively help them get rid of their anxiety and their stress. I just think that's an amazing thing that needs to be investigated deeper. And I think I'm hoping that now that, you know, now that we have a better, greater focus on trying to make America healthy again, that we get NIH and the CDC to actually fund meaningful studies on nutrition again. All that went away years ago when pharmacy kind of captured the government regulatory bodies. And we just haven't seen the great research on nutrition coming out in the mass quantities that it should be coming out. Because nutrition is where it's at. You just can't patent it. So it's not as profitable. And I think that's part of it. There's a money motivation piece you see in this study. Effects of lysine and arginine association on immune functions in patients with recurring infections. So in this study they combine lysine and arginine. You see here. It's capable of inducting recovery and age related decline of thymic activity. The thymus gland is the gland that helps to basically put white blood cells out into the circulation and it helps to mature your white blood cells. So very important aspect of immunity. The clinical usefulness of the association has also been shown in children with recurring respiratory infections. So both in elderly humans and in children with recurring infections, the lysine arginine therapy helps to improve thymus gland function function. While an increase in the number of CD3 lymphocytes has been shown in patients with chronic lymphatic leukemia. Recently, in vitro effects find the association on neutrophil function. So there's in vitro, which is not in human, but it's petri dish studies that also show that this amino acid can impact neutrophil function, which is another type of white blood cell. But going back to the study, patients with recurrent infection, increase of neutrophil random migration and chemotaxis. Basically what that means is neutrophils. When there's an infection in a tissue, let's just say we're in the bloodstream here and there's some infection, you've got neutrophils that circulate naturally through the blood. Chemotaxis is these blood cells are attracted chemically to that area where the infection is and so they migrate to that area. Better chemo chemotaxis is when the cells migrate to the area more effectively so that they can deal with the infection. So when you see that term chemotaxis, that's what that refers to. Now, furthermore, an increase in the absolute number of lymphocytes, so improved lymphocytes and improved neutrophil honing in or chemotaxis migration to the area of infection. They also showed igg levels improved as well. So more impact on the immune system. And arginine, I'm sorry, and lysine plus arginine. We got some more on the immune system. Lysine for herpes simplex. I was saying earlier that lysine is used as a prophylactic for the prevention of fever blisters and ulcers that are caused by herpes type viruses. So there's herpes one, there's herpes two. Herpes one are like the cold sores that happen in people's mouths or even sometimes fever blisters. But you see here, L lysine supplementation appears to be ineffective for prophylaxis or treatment of herpes simplex with doses less than one gram per day. So not effective given in doses under one gram. Okay. Without low arginine diets. So the low arginine diet, and if they gave a low arginine diet to the patient and gave them the lysine, it was more effective. Now, doses in excess of 3 grams a day of lysine appear to improve patients subjective experience of the disease. So it's a dose dependent thing. Why are we talking about arginine and lysine in context with one another? Because lysine, lysine and arginine compete with each other. They compete for uptake in your intestines and they compete for binding sites. And so if you have a really high arginine diet or you're supplementing with high levels of arginine, it's going to reduce the availability of lysine. And so what happens is, if you're trying to take lysine for fever blisters, but you have either a high arginine or high arginine supplementation, then lysine is going to be less effective. But if you reduce the arginine, the lysine becomes more effective. They have this interrelationship where they compete with each other, so too much of one inhibits the other, et cetera. So there's a balancing issue here. That's why you keep seeing these studies and pulling up, having that, talking about both of them. You see another study here on the treatment of herpes simplex infections with lysine monohydrochloride. In a prospective, randomized, double blind, placebo controlled crossover study of 41 patients, we found that oral ingestion of 1248 milligrams a day of L Lysine shows evidence of decreasing the recurrence rate of herpes simplex attacks in non immunocompromised hosts. A dose of 624 milligrams a day was not effective, so they gave 624 not effective, but they doubled it 1248 and it was L. Lysine may also be capable of decreasing the severity of symptoms associated with recurrences. And I have seen this to pan out over and over and over again. And people that have a history of fever blisters or recurring aptis ulcers in the mouth, if they take lysine, it keeps those things at bay. And if they get them and they take extra lysine, it gets those things to go away much quicker. I've just seen that to be the case repetitively. Now, one of the things that also causes herpes outbreaks or increases the risk of herpes outbreaks, it's gluten, as A matter of fact, there was a study done years ago and it was polling celiac patients on their symptoms. And the number one symptom of gluten exposure was mouth ulcers. And so if you're having mouth ulcers repetitively and you're thinking, man, I'm going to take me some lysine, you might also think, hey, maybe I ought to get tested to see if I have a gluten problem. Because I have also seen cases where people would report to me their whole life had problems with aphthous ulcers or mouth ulcers and when they went gluten free, it never happened again and they didn't need to use lysine to get it to go away. So key point to highlight now, this next one. You can see effective lysine supplementation on hypertension or high blood pressure in men and women. And you can see lysine, one of the essential amino acids and in cereal based diets is known to be the most limiting. The study was a randomized double blind placebo controlled, made of adult men and women assigned to a lysine group. The subjects were between 18 and 45 years, totaling 180 participants. What they find the mean systolic blood pressure of lysine supplemented groups significantly dropped from 146 0.11 to 128.95. That's a total of almost 12 point drop just by taking lysine. So lysine in these people had a almost a 12 point drop in total. So lysine supplementation resulted in normalization reduction of blood pressure of hypertensive subjects who have suboptimal lysine intake. Key thing here, it's not in subjects that have lysine that have a good lysine intake. It's basically in people that are lysine deficient. It's not going to work for you. You're not going to lower your blood pressure. If you're on a carnivore diet and you have high blood pressure, for example, and you're trying to take more lysine, that's probably not going to be effective for you because that diet's super high in protein. If you're eating a high protein diet, you're probably not going to see this type of benefit. But if you guys, if you have a wife who's trying to feed you rabbit food every night and take away all your meat because of a heart attack or heart disease, you have to understand lysine might help you. There's Extremely compelling evidence that lysine is a key ingredient that helps to reverse heart disease and plaquing. And I'm going to show you that next. But the key is if you're trying to lower your blood pressure, it's probably not going to work if you're not on a low lysine type diet. So if you're not on a plant based or largely plant based diet, trying to lower your blood pressure with lysine may not work as effectively as a 10 point drop for you. There are better things to do like CoQ10 and magnesium and vitamin B1 in those types of situations. Now I want to show you this case report. This is from Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling. If those of you don't know who Linus Pauling is, he won two Nobel prizes, one for vitamin C. Brilliant, Brilliant. Probably, arguably, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant men in ever in nutritional biochemistry. And so he published this paper on a case study and I'm just going to read some things to you here. So the amelioration of effort angina. Angina, which is basically somebody who's trying to do activity and then they get chest pain. So effort angina by the use of high dose L, lysine and ascorbate in a man with severe coronary artery disease. This regimen was based on the hypothesis that in thrombotic atherosclerosis that's basically plaquing of the arteries. Lipoprotein A lp, LDL like particles displaying independent risk activity for coronary artery disease initiates plaque formation by binding to fibrin in the damaged arterial wall. So there's this theory which we've seen this theory play out, proven in animals, but nobody will pay for the human studies. So you get case studies and you get anecdote. But Linus Pauling did this case study. Let's go back to our picture of a blood vessel. So you got a blood vessel here and you get damage and inflammation in that blood vessel wall. If you have high LP lipoprotein A, what happens is that type of lipoprotein binds to collagen fibers in the damaged blood vessel and creates plaque atherosclerotic plaquing. So now what happens when that plaque builds over time and that, let's say this vessel bifurcates, you know, breaks off into two separate branches and this plaque gets big enough and that LPA just keeps laying it down, that plaque breaks off, you know, and it's, and it's now floating free in the bloodstream. And it goes this way and then it closes off. This is where heart attack, this is, forgive my drawing, but when you block a vessel, you get lack of blood flow or an absence of blood flow. And so you get hypoxic ischemia damage, which is basically a heart attack or an infarction. And so it can be caused by this lipoprotein, a depositing, because it binds to fibrin and materials inside of a damaged blood vessel. And so Linus Paul, that's what Linus Pauling was trying to describe here in this paragraph. Now, part two to this case study that he wrote. So he began, this gentleman, that he put on. That he put on lysine and ascorbate, which is vitamin C. So he began taking 1 gram of lysine in early May of 1991, and he reached 5 grams and divided doses eight hours apart by mid June. In mid July, his HDL was, as usual, a low 28 milligrams per deciliter, a low normal 0.9 milligrams per deciliter Blood creatinine. He could now walk the same two miles and do yard work without angina pain. So now this gentleman, taking large doses, 5 grams a day, up to 5 grams a day of lysine and ascorbate, could now walk two miles a day and do yard work and not experience the angina. And wrote. This is the gentleman's words. The effect of the lysine borders on the miraculous. By late August, he cut up a tree with a chainsaw and in early September started painting his house. By late September, possibly from overexertion, he again began to have angina symptoms during his walks. But after stopping strenuous work and increasing lysine to 6 grams, calculated to provide a peak 280,000 molar excess in the blood over his then 6 milligram deciliter of LPA to help compensate for the relatively high disassociation constant of lysine. Lipoprotein A, the symptom, stopped entirely by mid October. So started at 1 gram, progressed all the way up to 6 grams. Angina went away, chest pain went away. So that was a case study published a number of years ago by Linus Pauling. As I mentioned earlier, we've got a lot of anecdote. Here's a paper that was recently published. It's a commentary that was published. I believe this came out of jama. Actually, it was Archives of Internal Medicine. Sorry. You see, this is thus, after a thorough review of the literature, I began to follow the Advice of Linus Pauling. So again, setting you up with Linus Pauling. For individuals who have an LP level higher than 25 milligrams per deciliter and a family history of heart disease, the recommendation is to take 3 grams a day of both ascorbic acid, that's vitamin C and L lysine monohydrochloride. After six months of this regimen with no adverse effects, my lipoprotein A level decreased to 14. So started out high at 25 and dropped to 14. That's a reduction of 48%. The lipoprotein A testing was done by the highly reliable Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The theory is that lysine is a lipoprotein A binding inhibitor and thus blocks the lipoprotein A attachment to the arterial blood vessel wall. And that ascorbic acid helps to repair the collagen injury to the blood vessel wall and acts as an antioxidant. So back to our kind of simplified diagram here. You got damage to the blood vessel wall. You've got this lipoprotein A that's attracted to that damage. You've got lysine theoretically inhibiting or blocking lipoprotein from attaching. And then you have vitamin C coming in here to repair the damage so that no plaquing occurs. That's the Linus Pauling theory of how vitamin C combined with adequate doses of lysine can actually help to prevent and possibly even do some reversal of atherosclerotic plaquing. Again, this is anecdote, this is theory. Nobody's funding these studies because you know as well as I do, most of you watching me for any length of time know as well as I do that the pharmaceutical industry would never have this study published because it would ruin a multi billion doll industry of pumping people full of statins. Because they're all claiming that this is cholesterol and specifically LDL cholesterol. But LP is not LDL and statins do not lower lp. There's really no known agent that lowers LP outside of lysine and vitamin C. And I've seen, in some cases I don't. This is not my forte. I'm not a cardiovascular doctor or a cardiologist, so this is not my forte of what I do in my practice. But I have seen cases where people had LP taking lysine and vitamin C, watching their LP go down. So take that for what you will. Take that information about lysine and apply it as you will in your own life. Let's Talk a little bit more about some of the other studies on lysine. This was in a study done where they used a lysine, a 15% lysine cream to treat diabetic foot ulcers. And so you see it's a randomized open label interventional study on 40 volunteers with diabetic ulcers. They had a treatment group of 20 people who received the cream twice daily and the control group just received normal therapy. And the lysine treated group showed a significant improvement in wound healing compared to the control group. The conclusion, the present study demonstrates that a 15% lysine cream can significantly improve wound healing in diabetic foot ulcer patients. What I have seen, because I don't treat diabetic ulcers, but what I've seen post surgery, I've seen a lot of post surgical people. So post surgery when we get an increase in key amino acids including lysine and ideally even before. So we would do pre surgery prep, nutrition prep with an increase in amino acids to include lysine. And we always see better outcomes when we bump people on our surgery protocol. Mel, if you, if we want to post that. So I'll put a link to my. For those of you who are interested in reading more about it, I'll put a link to my. The surgical protocol that I commonly recommend. But again, in this case, lysine being effective. Here's a study done on lysine being effective to treat pityriasis rosea, which is an infection herpes, like a skin infection. You can see it kind of looks, you see the picture of what one little lesion looks like. This is typically how it starts. And then once it takes on it spreads all over the trunk and can become pretty problematic. So you see here, L Lysine was prescribed for 30 days on an empty stomach. After the fourth day of therapy, the cycle of new eruptions was interrupted. Initial lesions regressed, accelerating the repair of larger lesions, resulting in an improvement of the clinical condition. We concluded that the administration of L Lysine in therapeutic doses can be a safe alternative for pityriasis rosea. So that's a nice study written up. And then we also have the effect of lysine on muscle function and insulin sensitivity. You see here. Over an eight week controlled feeding period, an intake of 80 milligrams of lysine per kilogram of body weight per day had a small positive effect on muscle strength. So it improved muscle strength in those doing exercise. And then we have another human study on lysine. You see here in healthy adults, lysine slightly reduced the glycemic response to an oral mixed macronutrient drink. Basically, it reduced the blood sugar spike. So as I was saying, if we could get more funding, we could do more fantastic research similar to what some of these other doctors have done, but in larger scale so that we could come to better conclusions. Now, who might benefit from lysine supplementation? Some of the key things I've shown you today, we've got people with cold sores. We know there's ample evidence, plenty of evidence, that shows that lysine helps reduce the frequency and severity and duration of cold sores by inhibiting the virus itself. We know that lysine can lower cortisol levels and reduce anxiety, and that's been shown in human trial. We know that lysine is important for bone formation and can lead to stronger bones overall through many mechanisms. We know that it can aid in wound healing, both on the skin, but also we know it can help post surgery for wound healing and post repair, so muscle repair and growth as well. I showed you the kids and how much better they grew, the ones that had lysine versus the ones that did not. You got a couple more here. I think I showed these already, Mel. I'm going to say I don't have a couple more here. I'm not going to say that. I'm just going to slide over. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about lysine requirements in humans. So you can see here, this was a comprehensive review from the Journal of Nutrition. Intake of lysine from food by adults with adequate diets is in the range of 4 to 5 grams a day. So if you're eating an adequate diet, you're generally getting 4 to 5 grams of lysine a day in your diet. Now, if you're eating a plant based diet, you're probably not getting that. The minimum dietary requirement for lysine has been studied extensively and it's established that 37 and 64 milligrams per kilogram of body weight for adults, six month old infants, respectively. So if you're an infant, you need more. You need 64 milligrams per kilogram, so you need more per body weight, right? Whereas you're adult, you need 37 as a minimum. So kids are growing more, they need that extra lysine to grow. This is just another example of why predominantly cereal based diets are a bad idea for growing children. Based on animal studies and high dose trials in humans, lysine hydrochloride dose of 6 grams a day was also safe for long term use. So we're talking about the top end of the range. If you're considering supplementing with lysine and you're thinking, okay, is this dangerous? Is this safe for me to do? It's very safe, up to 6 grams a day. What we generally get with high doses of lysine over long periods of time are these symptoms right here? Predominantly gastrointestinal distress. So diarrhea, nausea, abdominal cramps can occur with high doses. Typically those doses are above 6 grams a day. That's not to say that you couldn't take four and experience it. Just be aware of what you might experience. We know that lysine can have some interaction with different medications. One of the things that I don't think that the research is super clear on this benefit. But for caution's sake, lysine may interact with calcium absorption. So there's some minor evidence that shows calcium can increase the absorption of calcium supplements. And so if you're on medications that are affecting calcium metabolism, you know, there's at least a theorized risk of the potential for hypercalcemia, too much calcium in the blood. But I would argue that again, that's theoretical more than it has ever really been documented in people. But for safety's sake, we make a mention of it. Let's talk about eating our food, right, Eating our lysine. So I think that's an important place to start. There are your top food sources for lysine. Of course, animal based is winning in this because it's protein and you're going to have the richest amounts in things like beef, chicken and pork, as well as fish, dairy and eggs. You get some from some plant based sources. So it's not that plants are completely devoid of lysine, it's just that as a general rule of thumb, they're not going to hold a candlestick to these animal based sources. And then as I've mentioned a number of times, I've kind of harped on this quite a bit. But grain based diets are low in lysine for many reasons. You know, to include the fact that grains are just low in lysine in general, but also nitrogen fertilizers enhance that and make it even worse. Okay, let's talk about lab testing. If you're considering supplementation, I always recommend lab testing as a, as a tool to help give you a better indicator for what your needs are. But there's blood plasma, which is very common. A lot of doctors can Run this, it's not a specialty lab per se, it's just a lot of doctors just don't run nutritional labs. But if you're looking at reference range, it's 120 to 300 micro moles per liter is a general normal reference range. Really anything under 100 is going to be considered a pretty bad deficiency. And then my favorite way to do it is intracellular nutrition analysis where you're actually looking at levels inside the cell, which is in my opinion a much more accurate way to assess status. Now if you're looking at supplementing with lysine, again I encourage you to get lab tested. But if you are going to supplement, One gram per day is kind of the starting therapeutic dose. Generally if you're taking like a 500 milligram or 750 milligram capsule of Lysine and that's all you're using, you're probably not going to get much in the realm of therapeutics if you're, if that's what you're after. But the range is, you know, as I've shown you, between really one and five grams a day. And as you saw in the case study by Linus Pauling, the gentleman got up to 6 grams day. But again, if we take that one to six range, depending on what you're after and what you're trying to accomplish. But if you start with testing, you'll have a better indication of what's necessary versus, you know, versus speculative. Maybe this will help me. I'm going to try it for a while, so keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that when you supplement over long periods of time with high doses of lysine, you might interfere with arginine. And I think it's important to bring this up. Arginine is an amino acid as well. Although it's not essential the way lysine is essential, it's a conditionally essential amino acid, meaning under certain conditions you need more arginine. But arginine, one of its major roles is in the production of nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is very important for regulation of blood pressure. It's what helps your blood vessels dilate appropriately. And so if you're taking really large doses of lysine on top of eating a diet rich in lysine, there is a potential possibility that you start impacting your arginine. So I'm going to say if you're doing this, this high dose thing, maybe you've got your LP levels are high and your really interested in maybe trying lysine to see if it'll lower your lipoprotein A. Keep in mind that if you drop your arginine too much, it might make your blood pressure go up. And if your goal is trying to reduce heart disease risk, this right here could actually induce heart disease risk through elevations in blood pressure. Just keep in mind and maybe monitor your levels and make sure this isn't happening. So at any rate, I hope this master class on lysine was helpful for you. If you find these classes helpful, you should check out our masterclass library. I'll put a link below to that playlist. We've got over 40 masterclasses that you can watch on vitamins, minerals, amino acids and other key nutrients, and I encourage you to dive into that library. It's very valuable and it might help you navigate nutrition much more accurately and help you understand how it applies and how it impacts your body and your health. We'll be back next Tuesday for another episode of Dr. Osborne's Zone. If you're not already, make sure you hit that subscribe button. And do me a favor, hit that like button as well and share this with somebody who you feel like could benefit watching. Together, we're out to save 100 million lives and I can't do it without you. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you Thursday for a live Q and A. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to the Dr. Osborne zone. Don't forget to share like and subscribe for more content like this. And make sure you come back next Tuesday at 6pm Central Standard Time and Thursday at noon 30 for more episodes. Sam.