Two Reasons Glutamine May Be Good for Athletes

Mood: Fascinated
Music: Two Door Cinema - "This Is The Life"
Medicine: Kidney Pathophysiology

Glutamine gets a pretty bad wrap, and rightfully so; most Americans do not build muscle.

Glutamine has been often pitched as a "brain food", since its metabolism is increased to form ketoacids in the face of glucose starvation, which are used by the brain for energy. The problem is, in non-starvation situations, glucose is abundant, and this is often the case in Americans. Another use of glutamine in the brain is to create glutamate, which is an excitatory neurotransmitter. You need neurotransmitters for appropriate neural function, thus giving more credence to sell glutamine as a brain food. The problem is that when you have too much glutamine, glutamate accumulates, and this can actually cause neural synapse damage. Neural synapses become too excited, overstimulated, and compensate by undergoing apoptosis and dying. The neurons are trying to reach homeostasis (a balance), and you end up losing neural function as a result.

However, glutamine is definitely NOT a bad thing in avid athletes, and there are two great reasons.

1. Glutamine is the main protein in muscle. So in weight-trainers and athletes that are working out to gain muscle, glutamine is a useful tool to improve muscle building. In inactive people, glutamine won't go to the muscle; in short, the body needs a reason to build muscle. If you're not using your muscles, then why expend energy in making more muscle?

2. Working athletes usually experience respiratory acidosis; as the body's muscles work hard, they undergo oxidative phosphorylation, a process that uses oxygen to create energy. One major byproduct of this process is carbon dioxide. Excess carbon dioxide combines with water to form an acid, carbonic acid, which dissociates into bicarbonate and a proton (protons are responsible for acidity!) Normally carbon dioxide is cleared efficiently through the lungs. However, in more strenuous and chronic exercise, the lung is not entirely capable of clearing this carbon dioxide. So what happens? The kidneys step in to help. They take this carbon dioxide, combine it with water to form carbonic acid, and take the proton created from the dissociation of carbonic acid and pump it into the kidney tubules for excretion in urine. But something needs to carry this proton, and guess what does that? Ammonia. Guess where you get ammonia from? Glutamine! So to avoid the respiratory acidosis caused in athletes, glutamine is used to balance the body's acid (pH).

Just like most aspects of our diet, and of our lives, glutamine just needs to be used in moderation. A balanced use of glutamine leads to a balanced outcome.

"Feel something right, and feel something good. Cause if one thing works, you might know it's true..."