Arginine Paradox and Cardiovascular Risks

Arginine's probably the most common one I ever saw. So in my naturopath clinic experience, I dealt with a lot of men in my clinic because I come from a country, the mining area and that sort of stuff. But arginine was something they all wanted to take because as far as they knew, it was going to drop their high blood pressure and give them erections. So they were all taking megadoses of arginine as a vasodilator to drop their blood pressure and have this erection effect, and it never worked. And there's all these products getting released, all arginines with antioxidants, all about vasodilation. And they're all using these studies showing that it can work. And then all the studies we realised were a bit bullshit because they were doing intravenous or they were doing megadoses. So the funny thing is if you have a look at arginine some people it easy to overdose on arginine as well because you get plenty in meats and nuts and seeds and you get plenty in your food You can flat out find a pre that not loaded up with mega doses of arginine and I don't care if it's attached to an alpha-ketoglutarate or something. We're talking about the same sort of process here. When you take arginine, what happens is the liver gets better at converting it into things such as urea and those urea compounds, it takes it away from its vasodilating effects down a totally different pathway. and those byproducts of that will actually shut down the enzymes that make arginine from citrulline. So to cut a long story short, the arginine paradox lists off a study where they gave people that had had myocardial infarctions, and they were using infarctions. I don't know if I can say that word. Infarctions. Infarctions. Where's my infarction? So what happens where they gave these people arginine after having heart attacks. That's a better way of saying it. So they had heart attacks, and they thought, oh, we'll give them some arginine to dilate their blood vessels, take the burden off their heart, and that sort of stuff, reduce the pressure. they had to scan that study because all these people were dying um and so they can and it created this arginine paradox and they realized that when you take it in high doses or moderate doses longer period time it actually works less and less and less and can start causing heart disease arginine is probably one of the most common ones i saw in my clinic for being weird ass overdose the rest of it would just be vitamins the about that arginine study the just to go in detail it was a 70 70 people in the placebo group 70 in the active group and in the active group the one that was given arginine, six of them died. Yeah, wow. And zero in the placebo. Wow. Nearly 10% of people participating in the study died. And they had to intervene and stop the study. They had to stop the study because it got to a... There's an acceptable level of death in any studies, but they exceeded that. Yeah. The only other study that was stopped early, quite in dramatic fashion, was of course the drug that's still on the market now. It's the HRT drug, Premarin. WIMS study, wasn't it? Yeah, WIMS study. And it stopped early because there was too many cancers and heart attacks. That product had been on the market for 50 years before they did the study to see if it worked. And it's still on the market now, by the way. And it's still on the market. Yeah, well, there's nothing wrong with that. Dear Lord, anybody talk about getting melatonin in Australia? That's something dangerous like that. Especially three milligrams. It's hard not to be a bloody cynic, isn't it? So, yeah, I'd love to hear some more stories in terms of it because obviously you're working with a lot of personal trainers. You're working with a lot of professionals that are coming to you. So you're like the master trainer. People come to you to learn about training, but a lot about nutrition, a lot about supplementation, a lot about getting the most out of their body. So what are some of the other crazy things that you've seen?