Should You Be Taking Methylene Blue? - Dr. Scott Sherr

and I don't have any products with us on on the table but we have a number of one that are based on the the gabaergic system specific oh yeah that's it yeah we have that the Z yeah so the troz is a sleep aid uh that we created that leverages the Gaba system because like while we were looking at products to help our patients with the health optimization Journey we were looking at Energy number one but we're also looking at parasympathetic activation because most of us are just on all the time and don't how to

shut off and that's because we're depleted in one of our major the most important neurot transmitter for inhibition or decreasing firing called Gaba Gaba aminic acid and so Gaba is is 20% of our brain's neurotransmission and nobody thinks about it because everybody thinks about nephrine and dopamine and serotonin but glutamate is the excitatory neurotransmitter that's the primary and Gaba is the inhibitory and they're always in balance and glutamate actually gets converted into Gaba in the brain so it's this fine balance between those two and then if you're always over stimulated you're always going to be

depleting Gaba and you're always going to have too much glutamate around as well because you're depleting other things that help with the conversion of glutamate to Gaba like B6 and magnesium so what we found is that when you're doing testing for people you find it's really important to optimize of course your vitamins and minerals um on all sides but on the Gaba side glutamine is your uh precursor amino acid so glutamine is something we get from our food U meat products typically um cabbage and Sauer CRA too and that glutamine is also the primary fuel

of our gut gut so if you have a leaky gut um you're not going to be getting a lot of glutamine in the system it's mostly being taken away trying to heal the gut but glutamine gets converted into g into glutamate and then glutamate gets converted into Gaba so thinking about the precursor amino acid vitamin B6 and magnesium help the conversion of glutamate to Gaba but we're Gaba deficient for all these other reasons I was describing because of stress because of vitamin mineral nutrient deficiencies because of toxins you know blah blah blah and so the

problem is that repleting the Gaba system is not straightforward Gaba supplements shouldn't work if you take a Gaba supplement and it works for you it means that your blood brain barrier is not doing what it was supposed to do interesting a leaky brain what that really means is that you likely have a leaky gut as well that's causing inflammation and then causing your blood brain barrier which is supposed to keep things out to allow things in so so Gaba shouldn't get across but if it does it's actually almost diagnostic clinically that somebody has a leaky

barrier that needs to be addressed and so what we wanted to do was find a way to enhance the gabis system without using Gaba directly right and so we did that using a couple different compounds that are really interesting one of them is called inro is called agarin agarin is from the fly aaric or the amonita muscaria mushroom have you heard of that mushroom before I've like heard of it but yeah I don't know anything about it so it's the one with a red cap and white spots and it's psychedelic it was it's thought to

be maybe the reason for Christmas and Santa Claus and reindeer like the Super Mario Brothers mushroom and Super Mario Brothers exactly and aliceon Wonderland exactly you got it uh so the mushro itself when it's raw is toxic because it has something called ibotenic acid in it which is neurotoxic um if it's dried there's less of that in there but the other ingredient is agarin and agarin is a long acting molecule that goes to the Gaba receptor binds where a Gaba would bind and sticks on there for about six and a half hours so it's great

for sleep because Gaba is so important for sleep if you're Gaba deficient by the way you have a higher risk of having anxiety insomnia and depression right because when you don't have enough gabber around you can't sleep but also your mind is racing because our thoughts very much are regulated by our gabber production and so do you know how many thoughts we have per day fact any guesses a couple thousand 70,000 70,000 thoughts per day yeah that's why I say don't believe everything you think right so how the hell they quantify that it's interesting right

I have no idea but I they they've quantify this somehow that about 70,000 thoughts per day but when you're anxious and you're depressed you have about 100 20,000 thoughts per day on average right so the idea is to get you back down to your Baseline of 70,000 thoughts so that you can go to bed right and so you having more Gaba around helps regulate the information that's coming from your out from the environment because Gaba has this cool cool mechanism or cool function of being what's called an interneuron so it sticks between other neurons and

helps regulate the flow of information and that's why we don't get like bludgeon by information all the time we have so many inputs but Gaba is kind of helping yes exactly is regulating that also we don't get bludgeon by all that because it's inhibitory so the key for us was to use something that could bind to the Gaba receptor where gabab binds called agarin then we have something else in there called hanuk or hanol from Magnolia bark which you may have heard of before and that's working on another side of the Gaba receptor increasing the

affinity for Gaba to bind or in this case agarin because agrin's around so what we've did differently here is that we've combined them together most supplements will just have something that binds to this a separate site on the Gaba receptor increasing the Infinity for Gaba to bind but the problem is if you don't have enough Gaba around like what's going to happen right it's not going to go well over time so this is people that are taking Cava for a long periods of time right or even or even things like um what's another good example

even uh what's another good example a camomile has also got some gab there's another one that people regardless the Cava is is the big one that I could think of is that you know valan yeah valerian's another one right so valan valan route is also working on the Gaba receptor as well but these are going to deplete Gaba over time even though they're they're not as severe as taking like a benzo diazine like Adavan or xanax which binds to these separate sites on the Gaba receptor too and then increase the Affinity Gaba to bind so

tightly that you get tolerance and withdrawal and dependence as a result of that alcohol the same thing binds super tightly to the Gaba receptor at these separate sites increasing Gaba to bind depleting your Gaba as well so so supplements can do this but not as significantly but so what we did in troz and also troom our other product that work on the Gaba system is that we have a combination of the two together the combination is this one that's increasing Affinity that's the hanuk Kyle and then the other one that's binding to the where the

gab would bind itself the hanuk Kyle itself sorry excuse me the agine so you guys have pretty high dose melatonin yeah here that's five milligrams in that one yeah isn't that pretty high though so melatonin physiologically dosing is probably in the microgram dosing for however with a lot of people as they're getting older um they do need more melatonin production right so I find that for this one if you're already sensitive to melatonin that you probably don't need a whole lot of the TR it to make it work um it's really great as well if

you're already if you're traveling a lot the dosing of 5 migs is really quite good overall for jet lag and things like that so um I I find that it's a great reset for people that are having a difficult time sleeping because it does help but what I tend to do in clinical practices is I will use it but I will try to wean people off of it so they're not using it all the time um because I my there's a couple things that people worry about with melatonin that I think are unfounded one of

them is that it's going to decrease your own melatonin production there really is no evidence of that so um if you take exogenous melatonin or you take it by pillar or whatever it's not going to decrease your own production that's number one number two people worry about testosterone production here um they think that you know melatonin is going to decrease testosterone there's really no evidence that that's the case either actually I've never even heard that yeah it's another thing that's been around for a while um I have my colleagues in the uh in the ant

in the cancer space that are using very high doses of melatonin because melatonin not only works to help you sleep it also is a profound antioxidant it's one of the most powerful antioxidants that we have so we're using an inro for that reason too so melatonin we think about in the brain but actually melatonin's the primary antioxidant in our mitochondria and so we need melatonin production and we need extra support when we have mitochondrial dysfunction too it's super interesting yeah I want to go back to uh to methylene blue isn't there any interesting uh synergistic

relationship between methylene blue and um photobiomodulation like red light exposure there is yeah so so near infrared light specifically around 680 nanometers has been shown to donate electrons or rev up energy production by donating electrons sorry not electrons photons specifically to complex for the mitochondria and so what methine blue can do as well is donate electrons directly to the same location so they are synergistic in that capacity so if you take some methyl blue and go out in the sunlight you're going to see and feel a significant rise in energy as a result of that

interesting now that's at low doses at high doses what what neur infared light or what methine blue is is actually a photosensitizer so it's being used in cancer treatment now and other an infection as a what's called a photosensitizer which means you can use methylene blue on board while you give high strength and High um High directed NE infrared light for things like breast cancer actually some interesting studies on breast cancer using methine blue as a photosensitizer so and it's also been studied in there's a gr paper that used methine blue at high doses where

with with sunlight or like sunlight exposure for Co infection actually as well so um so we know that it's an anti-infective at these high doses and also can be um potentially anti-cancer as well which pretty interesting can it make you more prone to sunburn not that I'm aware of no no I I don't think it would have a mechanism in that in that capacity I think one it's kind of funny story for me like I was I didn't you can potentially overheat so be careful because funny story I was taking a walk at 105 degree

heat here in California actually and uh with a friend and I had taken meth blue earlier in the day and I I was drinking water but I was trying to figure out like why I was overheating and I didn't know why and when I got we got back to his house I had to like cover myself in ice packs because I was I had I was on the verge of heat stroke and I was like what did I do differently I was like oh it was the methylene blue so because it was it was providing

me so much energy and making like that synergistic heat that was you know the byproduct of of of energy production um I was getting you know overheated as a result so just be aware of that I guess like if you're if in very very hot weather potentially that could happen so damn very interesting I had all these like ice pack it was it was a good picture it was kind of fun yeah yeah when I was a a kid like in high school I um I read about I was reading about for whatever reason well

actually I know why I was prone to I grew up in New York City and I was prone to Seasonal effective disorder yeah yeah um just the winters and whatever I just could be rough I grew up on Long Island so I know yeah we had more Sun than the city I think though in Long Island yeah for sure because I mean the city what little Sun there is is like blocked out by the buildings I just get I would notice every winter my mood would get so Dow that I began looking up natural anti-press

presence and I stumbled upon uh the research on St John's wart yeah and so I went to um my local like GNC at the time and I picked up a bottle of St John's W and I was actually taking it for quite some time and I remember that I it could I mean it very well could have been a placebo but I I did notice that it boosted my mood but then I found out the hard way that um one of the side effects of St Johns Wart is that it's a photosens sensitizer and if

you're taking St John's wart and you're already prone to to burning in the Sun and then you go out and you spend like you know an excessive stupid amount of time in the sun it can like really damage your skin okay so I went on vacation one uh one week with my parents my my my family and I got really badly sunburned to the point that I had like scabs on my face oh no it was really bad yeah that can happen with some of the antibiotics that cause photosensitization but but it's not methine blue

doesn't do that overall so you don't have to worry about that but you do have to think about if you have relatively if you're in the Sun for a long period of time you're going to make a lot more energy and I didn't realize that's what I was doing and that's why I had to decrease my core body temperature pretty quickly so I didn't have to take myself to the ER so crazy hey if you like that video you need to check out this one here and I'll see you there [Music] [Music]