Bone broth soup seems to be a traditional home remedy for feverish colds and flu-like respiratory illness. This is true cross culturally and many different cultures seem to converged on it being a good treatment.
Traditional diets included collagen-rich connective tissue such as skin, tendons, cartilage, and bone broth, which is about 33% glycine.
It’s 33% of the amino acids in collagen counting amino acids. It’s less if you count them by weight/mass as glycine is lighter than other amino acids. Connective tissue also contains a lot besides collagen, so 33% is overcounting it on that front as well.
Estimated total requirements range from 10 to 60 grams per day depending on health status
That sentence sounds like different people estimated the requirement with some saying you need 10 gram and others say you need 60 gram. Your link mainly seems to show that there’s one blogger who thinks that the needs are in that range.
When trying to reproduce the 10 gram number myself, I get the impression it counts the total need of glycine in a normal state for bodily processes against dietary consumption while ignoring the amount of glycine that gets freed by the breakdown of the body own proteins including collagen. A lot of collagen production is collagen turnover where old collagen (sometimes damaged by AGEs) gets replaced with fresh new collagen where the individual glycine can in principle be reused.
This is not comprehensive nutritional advice. For instance, cysteine is the other bottleneck for glutathione production, and people who eat little animal protein or are acutely ill may benefit from supplementing NAC (N-acetylcysteine) alongside glycine.
In some cases that might be beneficial but NAC supplementation can decrease muscle hypertrophy, so supplementing NAC per default when not ill probably only should be done when it’s well-thought out and not just by random supplement consumption.
It’s 33% of the amino acids in collagen counting amino acids. It’s less if you count them by weight/mass as glycine is lighter than other amino acids.
This was a mistake on my part and I’ll correct the article.
Masterjohn’s lower bound of 10g matches Meléndez-Hevia et al. 2009, which explicitly accounts for glycine recycling, while 60g is the highest dose used in schizophrenia treatment. He didn’t cite sources in the linked piece, though, so I’ll add a footnote with the sourcing I could find.
I haven’t been able to find evidence that typical oral supplement doses of NAC meaningfully reduce hypertrophy. I did find one paper reporting that an NAC infusion can blunt some ROS signaling after exercise, and a 2017 meta-analysis found no benefits from NAC supplementation on exercise performance, but I can’t find evidence of harm at oral doses.
I still endorse the very limited recommendation I made that people with specific reason to think they have elevated need or meaningfully limited supply of cysteine “may benefit” from the supplement.
Having thought about NAC a bit more, I think I agree with you. The one paper about the signaling seems to be less important than the actual observed effect in exercise. Additionally, even if given NAC to a normal person who has a glycine deficit leads to more glutathione synthesis at the cost of less collagen synthesis which could have a negative effect on hypertrophy that concern is less if you just supply both NAC and glycine.
Estimated total requirements range from 10 to 60 grams per day depending on health status
That sentence sounds like different people estimated the requirement with some saying you need 10 gram and others say you need 60 gram. Your link mainly seems to show that there’s one blogger who thinks that the needs are in that range.
Also, on the upper end of that range, this would mean that ~50-60% of an average person’s daily protein intake should consist of glycine, which seems incredibly unlikely.
Not directly relevant to the schizophrenia doses (for reasons I noticed after I initially published the post), but maximum useful uptake of protein (and other structural inputs like cholesterol) can go up a lot in extreme cases; physicians reported good results from administering 35 eggs per day to severe burn victims to help them heal, which amounts to 210g/day of protein just from eggs, 314/day total, for people who aren’t even huge or on anabolic steroids. Followup here.
Bone broth soup seems to be a traditional home remedy for feverish colds and flu-like respiratory illness. This is true cross culturally and many different cultures seem to converged on it being a good treatment.
It’s 33% of the amino acids in collagen counting amino acids. It’s less if you count them by weight/mass as glycine is lighter than other amino acids. Connective tissue also contains a lot besides collagen, so 33% is overcounting it on that front as well.
That sentence sounds like different people estimated the requirement with some saying you need 10 gram and others say you need 60 gram. Your link mainly seems to show that there’s one blogger who thinks that the needs are in that range.
When trying to reproduce the 10 gram number myself, I get the impression it counts the total need of glycine in a normal state for bodily processes against dietary consumption while ignoring the amount of glycine that gets freed by the breakdown of the body own proteins including collagen. A lot of collagen production is collagen turnover where old collagen (sometimes damaged by AGEs) gets replaced with fresh new collagen where the individual glycine can in principle be reused.
In some cases that might be beneficial but NAC supplementation can decrease muscle hypertrophy, so supplementing NAC per default when not ill probably only should be done when it’s well-thought out and not just by random supplement consumption.
This was a mistake on my part and I’ll correct the article.
Masterjohn’s lower bound of 10g matches Meléndez-Hevia et al. 2009, which explicitly accounts for glycine recycling, while 60g is the highest dose used in schizophrenia treatment. He didn’t cite sources in the linked piece, though, so I’ll add a footnote with the sourcing I could find.
I haven’t been able to find evidence that typical oral supplement doses of NAC meaningfully reduce hypertrophy. I did find one paper reporting that an NAC infusion can blunt some ROS signaling after exercise, and a 2017 meta-analysis found no benefits from NAC supplementation on exercise performance, but I can’t find evidence of harm at oral doses.
I still endorse the very limited recommendation I made that people with specific reason to think they have elevated need or meaningfully limited supply of cysteine “may benefit” from the supplement.
Having thought about NAC a bit more, I think I agree with you. The one paper about the signaling seems to be less important than the actual observed effect in exercise. Additionally, even if given NAC to a normal person who has a glycine deficit leads to more glutathione synthesis at the cost of less collagen synthesis which could have a negative effect on hypertrophy that concern is less if you just supply both NAC and glycine.
Also, on the upper end of that range, this would mean that ~50-60% of an average person’s daily protein intake should consist of glycine, which seems incredibly unlikely.
If you read further and look at the footnote to the 10-60 claim this is answered.
But also I revised the post to make more accurate and clearer claims in response to criticisms
Not directly relevant to the schizophrenia doses (for reasons I noticed after I initially published the post), but maximum useful uptake of protein (and other structural inputs like cholesterol) can go up a lot in extreme cases; physicians reported good results from administering 35 eggs per day to severe burn victims to help them heal, which amounts to 210g/day of protein just from eggs, 314/day total, for people who aren’t even huge or on anabolic steroids. Followup here.