Picking up where I left off on page 16 re:
glutamate in eyes, there's also much to be said for glutamate made naturally in the body. It's hardly just about dietary glutamate. The building blocks of glutamate are products of microbes, so flora imbalance may lead to excess glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter.
In the photoreceptor cells of the retina are opsins which "mediate the conversion of a photon of light into an electrochemical signal."
From Wiki:
The opsin found in the photosensitive ganglion cells of the retina that are involved in various reflexive responses of the brain and body to the presence of (day)light, such as the regulation of circadian rhythms, pupillary reflex and other non-visual responses to light, is called melanopsin. Atypical in vertebrates, melanopsin functionally resembles invertebrate opsins. In structure, it is an opsin, a retinylidene protein variety of G-protein-coupled receptor.
When light activates the melanopsin signaling system, the melanopsin-containing ganglion cells discharge nerve impulses that are conducted through their axons to specific brain targets. These targets include the olivary pretectal nucleus (a center responsible for controlling the pupil of the eye), the LGN, and, through the retinohypothalamic tract (RHT), the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus (the master pacemaker of circadian rhythms). Melanopsin-containing ganglion cells are thought to influence these targets by releasing from their axon terminals the neurotransmitters glutamate and pituitary adenylate cyclase activating polypeptide (PACAP).
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/759151
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/...lion-cells-a-bit-of-fly-in-the-mammalian-eye/
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0043787
http://www.plosone.org/article/info...4;jsessionid=8A587AA88568CAC19DD2774C294B76E2
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2435212/
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/09/15/1008533107.full.pdf
http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC3411794/
OK, so what does this have to do with the gut? Where's the gut-eye connection?
I've been trying to learn something about glutamate and how it's naturally made in the body, kicked-out of the Krebs cycle. So, dietary glutamate is one thing and the GARD diet addresses this excitatory neurotransmitter.
But what about endogenous glutamate? Here's a mouthful from Wiki: "α-Ketoglutarate is transaminated, along with glutamine, to form the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate can then be decarboxylated (requiring vitamin B6) into the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA."
Transaminated means enzymes such as ALT catalyze reactions to form glutamate. Where do these enzymes come from? Intracellular organisms. Who's doing the backstroke in cytosol of cells? And how can intracellular organisms be balanced? I'd bet sulfur (like OptiMSM) helps because it makes the cell wall more permeable, allowing antimicrobial peptides into the cell. It also allows acid waste out of the cell to balance pH. Also, niacinamide is said important for protection from excitotoxicity by Dr. Blaylock in this video at 1:04:00 along with a lot of other things. In fact, niacinamide raises NAD which is required for the entire Krebs cycle to work. More than interestingly, CO2 is kicked-out of the Krebs cycle, explaining why I feel so sleepy after taking niacinamide. CO2 is known to halt seizure. Niacinamide is also a known antifungal and antibacterial. It jump-starts the innate immune system.
Potassium is also important to lower endogenous glutamate. I'm learning aloud here, as usual. A food high in potassium is canned coconut milk, the thick kind. Blackstrap molasses is also high in potassium, but also has high sugar content, of course.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00806489
Balancing intracellular pH (that's the pH inside the cell) seems very important. There's an inverse relationship in blood pH and intracellular pH, meaning healthy alkaline blood leads to healthy acidic intracellular pH. CO2 is important for that and overall brain pH:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673408/
So, here's how a microbial enzyme, ALT, commonly considered a liver enzyme, but is made everywhere, leads to glutamate formation: "It catalyzes the transfer of an amino group from L-alanine to α-ketoglutarate, the products of this reversible transamination reaction being pyruvate and L-glutamate.
L-glutamate + pyruvate ⇌ α-ketoglutarate + L-alanine"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alanine_transaminase
So, what's this α-ketoglutarate? It can be made from glutamate and it makes glutamate (reversible transamination). It's a keto acid sold as supplement to body builders called AKG to reduce ammonia! I wonder if it's manufactured using microbes as so many pharmaceutical supplements are . . . but also let's wonder about where the ketones are coming from to form α-ketoglutarate. Ketones are products of microbes. The most basic ketone is acetone, known product of clostridium bacteria. Clostridium also make butyrate and acetate which are the building blocks of other ketone bodies, acetoacetate, and beta-hydroxybutyrate.
How interesting that autism which is high in seizure disorder is also known high in clostridium. So, what's the real mechanism in the ketogenic diet known effective in autism? I don't believe it's about raising ketones. Studies show ketones actually lower over time on the ketogenic diet. Moreover, I don't believe there's any proof ketones are raised on the diet over time, yet the diet remains protective in seizure disorders. So, what's happening? Flora shift which also leads to a shift in amino acids (that's right, amino acids are produced my microbes, it's hardly just about dietary amino acids). I believe the ketogenic diet is lowering Firmicutes such as potentially overgrown clostridium. But then why would resistant starch known to raise butyrate be effective via raising clostridium? Note: more than half the flora in the large intestine are clostridium normally, but that can shift radically via diet, especially a diet high in meat and low in fermentable fiber. The important thing is to know where a person is on the spectrum of flora amounts, also known as the Firmicutes/Bacteroides ratio. Dr. Blaylock also talks about limiting meat consumption in the video above to, I believe, 4-6 ounces daily (lowers nitrogen and ammonia and meat is also high in glutamate). Now this might work for some people, but for an autistic child on the ketogenic diet, it's a different story. A couple days ago I began this exploration as to how meat shifts flora, killing clostridium while raising Bacteroides (bacteroides are known helpful in autism).
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?....246428715601.298680.518250601&type=3&theater
The first step in treatment should be knowing an individual's flora balance using a PCR stool test. Some folks are high clostridium, but others may be high in bacteroides (making matters even more complex are two major types of bacteroides, some digesting grain like Prevotella and some digesting meat like B. fragilis). And what seems to go along with any form of gut dysbiosis is fungal overgrowth.
Here's an example: Significantly Increased Bacteroides in type 1 diabetes:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/46
So, how would you treat a child with T1D? This is an epidemic, btw, as children are born imbalanced. Maybe the course of action would be to increase Firmicutes and Actinobacteria (bifidobacteria) using resistant starch to balance out the overgrown Bacteroides. I recently spoke with an adult T1D sufferer who began supplementing with potato starch and says he's never slept better and his dreams are improved. Evidence is mounting that resistant starch balances blood sugar as the Firmicutes (mainly clostridium) produce butyrate which converts to glucose.
Recent news speaks toward using resistant starch to feed bacteria which produce short chain fatty acids converted to glucose, previously unknown. So this is about blood sugar control, both hyperglycemia and
hypoglycemia. Now that's a gut-brain breakthrough. There are other explanations for how resistant starch controls blood sugar, but this seems like a darn good one.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...eed:+sciencedaily/health_medicine/diabetes+%2
