Glutamate - the powerful effect of food on your body

Food has a powerful effect on our body, something I have said for over a decade. How powerful is a lesson I continue to discover.

To illustrate, let us look at the effect of glutamate on our body.

Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitter means something that transmits signals through neurons in your brain. Excitatory means it activates neurons.

Glutamate is by far the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter, accounting for over ninety percent of connections made between neurons.

Healthy levels play a role in memory, learning and in regulating mood, and pain.

Unhealthy levels can cause headaches, migraines, high blood pressure, stress, anxiety and depression.

Can food create a situations where you trigger unhealthy levels?

The easiest way to have unhealthy levels is to consume food with monosodium glutamate also known as MSG. MSG is an ingredient commonly found in Chinese food, though the use has become more widespread. MSG is banned for pregnant women, by the way.

Mushrooms, peas, grape juice, tomatoes, walnuts, parmesan cheese and hydrolyzed foods such as hydrolyzed protein or hydrolyzed yeast also produce high levels of glutamate.

Parmesan, for example has 1680 milligrams of glutamate in 100 grams of cheese. Just for context, you need aproximately 630 micrograms of gluatamate in your bloodstream for a man who weight seventy kilogram.

1680 milligrams of glutamate is approximately 25,000 times more than you need.

No you dont need to stop eating parmesan completely.

Your body has two filters, the liver and the kidney, which regulate the release of glutamate into your blood and clean up excess. These filter are tasked with preventing toxic levels in the bloodstream.

However, you do not want to test the capacity of your filters on a regular basis.

So if you prone to headaches, migraines, stress and axiety, limiting or reducing processed foods such as hydrolyzed protein or mushrooms helps.

Food has a powerful effect on your mind and body.

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