Glycine Overdose and Osmolarity Issues

So you were mentioning one about glycine. Oh, glycine, yeah. So, yeah, so I was at a seminar years ago, probably 2010, and I was rooming with a couple of guys, and what we were doing at the time was pretty brutal. It was like a lower body training internship, and we had to do 10 training sessions of lower body in five days. So everybody's over-trained, no one can think straight, and we were making our shakes every day after we trained, And we had a bar where you could do all these different types of workout, amino acids and shakes and all that. And one of the guys pulled down a tub of glutamine and a tub of glycine. And the tubs looked exactly the same. And so he thought he was doing 20 grams of glycine and 80 grams of glutamine, but he got it backwards. So on the drive home, he didn't look so good. And he's driving the car, and I look at him. I go, are you feeling okay? He goes, nah, nah, I don't feel good at all. he pulls over on the side of the road and starts retching and just retching and so uh good friends that uh we are that were with him we pulled our phones out try to record it but it was too dark and after he got done dry heaving we get in the car and we get back to the um apartment and you just hear him for hours in the bathroom just retching his guts out wow and it was it was pretty pretty nasty so what does what does glycine do if you overdose on it well this is a thing and it's the funny thing is it's not that hard to overdose on glycine with if you're a avid user of supplements because glycine is quite an abundant amino acid anyway in our food um but you know when you get chelated supplements like magnesium diglycinates they're 80 glycine you know 15 20 magnesium so you can get glycine in there remember there was that phase where people were spiking up protein powders like up to about 30 of the volume of the protein powder could be glycine it was significantly cheaper to waste so people taking 30 gram dose of protein sometimes could have been getting 10 grams of glycine and all that sort of stuff. So glycine is an important amino acid. A lot of functions in and around the liver for processes known as glycination, detoxify things like salicylates and other compounds. In fact, there's a whole school of thought out there of megadosing glycine for detox where you build up to like megadoses of 10 and 20 grams of glycine to strip out certain toxins. And I know some pretty hardcore people that have done some pretty full-on stuff to their body that have sent themselves blind after taking 10 to temporarily blind after 10 or 20 grams of glycine as part of a detox program. Yeah. The glycine's a very small molecule as far as amino acids go. Sorry to get chemical on you. Do it. Yeah. And so what it does, it has a very high osmolarity reading. So basically it pulls water into the GI tract like a mineral would basically. So it can cause huge amounts of nausea. But 80 grams is an extraordinary amount. That was an accident. Yeah, yeah. glutamine on the other hand is quite abundant in amino acids like it's the most abundant amino acid in way and so it's the body and your muscle and your muscle absolutely so body can tolerate more that's why he was going for the 80 i mean still that's huge still 80 20 though still makes me think 20 grams of glycine the madman yeah so yeah but and also so you have a look at glycine so a lot of people think oh it's cool it's an amino acid it's going to help detox um it's going to help have some effects on my nerves where it has it helps to the relaxing compounds to relax a little bit more and that sort of stuff. But if you're in a calorie deficit and you're taking supplements with mega, so you're in a calorie deficit because you want to burn fat and all that sort of stuff and you take mega doses of these amino acids such as glycine, they will have an effect of calorific action. So you might think you're mega dosing on something because detox is going to help me lose fat and detox is going to make me lose weight and stuff like that. But the glycine itself ends up going through as a source of fuel. Yeah. Things like alanine too, where people overdose on things like alanine and it stimulates gluconeogenesis in the liver and all that sort of thing. So they're the sort of common mistakes.