Low tryptophan diet?

[yesterday]

Hi all, I'm new. I joined because I saw the thread on urecholine, got hopeful, and then lost hope when I saw it was a scam. Well, I'm here now.

I am a bit hesitant to try treatments on the very long list of things that have been tried. Firstly, nothing seems like a cure - some things work for some people some of the time. Secondly, since PSSD is itself a drug side-effect, it's made me more cautious about other potential drug side-effects. My PSSD isn't complete; I have like 10% of normal function, so I have something to lose if the treatment goes wrong. You won't catch me trying low-dose SSRI reinstatement. I'm interested in treatments that are very unlikely to have serious side effects.

Here's my idea. Raising serotonin caused PSSD, so lowering serotonin might cure it. Serotonin synthesis is dependent on tryptophan, an essential amino acid. A low-tryptophan diet could lower the amount of serotonin our brains produce. It's a simple idea, and it should be doable if we can get the diet right.

There's a highly-cited paper from 1980 on controlling neurotransmitter levels by controlling their precursors: http://web.mit.edu/dick/www/pdf/466.pdf . It has sections on tryptophan for controlling serotonin - usually from the perspective of raising serotonin by increasing tryptophan intake. Tryptophan competes with other large neutral amino acids to get absorbed through the brain barrier, so what matters most is the relative concentration of tryptophan compared to other amino acids.

The paper also mentions that eating carbs raises the relative concentration of tryptophan, because carbs make your body release insulin, and insulin causes the other large neutral amino acids to be stored away, leaving mostly tryptophan in your blood. So the low-tryptophan diet should also be low-carb, or low-GI-carb (since low GI foods don't provoke as large an insulin response).

Rather than trying to remove tryptophan from the diet, another option would be to supplement all the other amino acids besides tryptophan, thus lowering the relative concentration of tryptophan. This would be (a) expensive and (b) tricky to get right - the ratio of the amino acids would have to be healthy. There's research showing that some amino acids, like methionine, are harmful in large doses.

On the other hand, this option would allow one to do a blind trial - just mix up two batches of amino acids, one with tryptophan and one without, and have a friend put them into containers labeled "A" and "B"; your friend makes a record of which letter refers to which mixture, and keeps it secret from you until you've finished your trial. It would be easy to create a blind like this when adding something to the diet, but impossible if you're removing normal foods from your diet.

Has anyone else tried anything like this? Do you have ideas for how to go about it?

[Ghost]

Welcome to the forum. I think you raise a good point and one that would be worth trialling. I think that people might have tried this in the past - might be worth looking into throughout the forum.