Posted by Larry Hoover on July 21, 2004, at 10:53:29
In reply to Re: Where to start?-Indie, posted by Patient on July 19, 2004, at 14:45:43
I'm going to focus on just a couple of points.
> Some amino acids have potentially toxic effects when taken in high doses (over 6,000 milligrams per day) and may cause neurological damage.
Dose makes the poison. It would take extraordinary behaviours to induce neurological damage, absent some basic genetic metabolic abnormality.
I wish to now focus on two mutually exclusive explanations.
> Glutamic acid can detoxify ammonia by picking up nitrogen atoms, in the process creating another amino acid, glutamine. The conversion of glutamic acid into glutamine is the only means by which ammonia in the brain can be detoxified.
> Glutamine is the most abundant free amino acid found in the muscles of the body. Because it can readily pass the blood-brain barrier, it is known as brain fuel. In the brain, glutamine is converted into glutamic acid-which is essential for cerebral function-and vice versa.
If glutamine is converted to glutamic acid, you are left with ammonia once again. If the former explanation that glutamic acid mops up ammonia via transformation to glutamine holds, and that ammonia is otherwise neurotoxic, then the latter postulate that glutamine is brain fuel cannot possibly be true.
In other words, there is far more to this story than the simplistic explanations with which we have been provided. Modelling, or any other simplification (including those which I provide), inevitably involve the loss of information, and thus of real-life application. The simpler the explanation, the less useful it becomes. Please always consider that factor when you are trying to understand a complex phenomenon.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:367111
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20040718/msgs/368582.html