there's a supplement out there that is also a compound that your body creates itself that is also something that you can get in food but reality is to really get the beneficial amount that you need when you're looking at longevity fat loss muscle building it really should be done in supplement form so that you get adequate amounts now TMG trimethyl glycine is the supplement that we're talking about and you're going to find this in some pre-workouts in like relatively low do some protein powders and then you'll find it independently now all it really is is something called betane and you've probably seen that before but people don't really know what it does and they certainly aren't taking enough to get the adequate benefits specifically when we start talking about longevity or we start talking about like The Fat Loss muscle building effect now trimethylglycine is just a methylated form of the amino acid glycine that probably sounds like Greek what is a methylated form of something it just means that it is an amino acid that has additional methyl groups that can be donated to help the body adapt to certain things you see methylation sounds really bad but methylation is actually good when it's in the right context methylation turns on certain adaptations certain genes certain DNA functions certain just functions in the body to begin with so we need enough of these overall methyl groups for methylation to occur so think of methylation as sort of a switch that turns on activity of certain cells and tissues and DNA it's the simplest way to put it the opposite of methylation is literally demethylation and that's turning off the switch so life and healthy aging and building muscle and burning fat is all a delicate balance of methylation and demethylation but we're going to get into the details of that a little a little bit more when we talk about the longevity piece I want to first talk about what TMG is and how it can impact fat loss first there was a study that was published in the journal nutrients it was a metaanalysis systematic review that looked at Six studies so it was large scale data they found that giving subjects trimethylglycine significantly reduced fat Mass significantly reduced body fat percentage but crazy enough did not not really reduce their body weight it didn't change their BMI this is super interesting because what this tells us is that it was very specifically helping the body burn fat while preserving possibly even building muscle I mean this is something that quite frankly we've reserved just to the world of performance-enhancing drugs to be able to like have something that builds muscle and burns fat at the same time so it almost sounds too good to be true so we need to investigate it a little bit more so there was another study that was published in nutrients this one was done on mice to understand the mechanisms a bit more so check this out this study demonstrated that TMG actually inhibited the production of white fat white fat is the subcutaneous kind of fat we don't want right it's the typical belly fat type stuff it inhibited the production of that now how it did that it's a little bit of speculation but one thing they found is that it increased what's called mitochondrial bio Genesis and sort of the energy demand there so it actually increased the amount of brown fat which increased thermogenesis and calories dispersed as heat but more importantly sort of blocked fuel from being accumulated in the form of white fat now the thing with brown fat and white fat Brown fat is much more powerful in rodents than it is in humans so when you look at rodent model data and brown fat stuff you have to expect that it's going to be exacerbated in rodents although we can't extrapolate some of that to humans but what is more relevant in humans is they found that it inhibited what is called fatty acid synthesis in the muscle so in this study they found specifically that there was less fat accumulation in the form of intramyocellular triglycerides or less fat accumulating in the muscle and they found that it inhibited fatty acid synthese which is an enzyme that allows fat to form essentially in the muscle so that was very interesting but most importantly they saw that there was a decrease in insulin resistance istance in both obese and non-obese mice and researchers speculate that this was probably the biggest driver for improving muscle protein synthesis and decreasing the amount of overall fat accumulation but we still have to answer the question of why they didn't lose muscle like a lot of times when you start having I don't know you take something in and you start losing weight you're going to lose a percentage of muscle too but in this case muscle possibly even increased so this we look at a study that was published in the Journal of the international Society of Sports Nutrition this took a look at two groups and they were giving relatively low dose of 2.5 g of betane TMG or Placebo per day and they had them do three sets per muscle group at about six to seven reps to failure so pretty decent volume pretty decent stimulus they found that training of course increased muscle in both groups the pane group and the placebo group but there was a 2.9 kog increase in muscle in the TMG ban group and a 1.9 kilogram increase in the placebo group so diet about the same training the same but the TMG group ban gained a kilogram more muscle interestingly enough there was only a small increase in strength nothing notable just muscle mass so it's doing something very metabolic perhaps a little less like biomechanical now that same Journal published another paper looking at more trained individuals in this case it was a six- we study with 2.5 g of betane or Placebo and they had them train 6 weeks doing uh standard resistance training they found some interesting results in the more trained group as well they did muscle cross-sectional areas of their arm and they found that after 6 weeks of training there was a decrease in fat mass and an increase in muscle cross-sectional area in the arm so they literally built muscle here's what's Wild the placebo group had an increase in intracellular muscle water but the ban group did not what is really interesting about this is that you would have expected a supplement to increase water weight like if someone goes on steroids or something like that they gain water weight too sure they gain muscle but they gain water weight when they're like on a cycle or something so in this particular case the placebo group actually gained more intracellular water in their muscle so the TMG I don't know what it was doing with the water who knows but the bottom line is that they increased their muscle cross-sectional area and muscle weight more than the placebo group even though the placebo group had gained water weight in the muscle it's mind-blowing and again we don't have a full explanation of what's going on however in that same study there is some interesting mechanistic stuff and then there's other studies that have identified this as well they found that there are increases in igf increases in human growth hormone and increases in akt pathway akt phosphorilation which has to do with muscle protein synthesis so all these things have to do with how much muscle we're able to build so perhaps it's kickstarting those a little bit more so muscle protein synthesis is increased now we get into the extremely interesting stuff where we talk about how TMG has profound and I mean profound impacts on longevity but first outside of supplements like where can you get TMG what kind of foods well the first place you can get TMG or betane is going to be beets and it's an easy one to remember because beets Beane right so win in doubt have some beets plus the nitric oxide effect it's a very good compound to just consume alongside TMG because it's all very good for homocysteine and vascularization and overall just like blood flow okay so that's a good one shrimp as far as meat and seafood is concerned is just about the highest TMG content that you're going to find spinach as well but I have some qualms about raw spinach I would prefer that it's cooked okay and then what's interesting wheat brand has the highest amount of TMG than any food that's out there with over 1300 milligrams per 100 gram serving compare that to like beets that have like 200 okay so huge huge difference but I don't recommend people just go scarfing wheat brand because there's other issues that come with that especially if you're sensitive to gluten so that may not be the route that you want to go I went ahead and I put a link down below for 30% off through Thrive Market because they have some really cool beet options so like freeze-dried beets uh different kinds of like bags of beets that are just air dried or whatever so you can get your Bain in they have lots of wheat brand options but they also straight up have TMG supplements as well I have no affiliation with any TMG brand at all I just figured this is a way that you can just choose the option that you want to choose and get 30% off so you get 30% off your entire first grocery order through Thrive Market they an online grocery store so load up your cart whatever you want 30% off plus you get a free $60 gift when you use that link Down Below in the description so that link again gets you 30% off you can get some beats you can get some TMG whatever no pressure you can skip through this if you don't want it but at the end of the day it saves you some money so that link is down below Top Line of the description we need to talk homo assistin this is really important I have a very scary statistic for you okay and it comes from a very reputable study that looked at over 27,000 people okay homo sisting is a serious thing the highest levels of homosysteine were related to an 80% increase in all cause mortality above those that had low levels of homosysteine so if you have high homosysteine you have an 80% higher chance of dying of anything based on these statistics than if you had low levels of homosysteine essentially for every 5 micro per liter increase in homosysteine you have a 33 % increased chance of dying that is insane homosysteine is one of the strongest predictive indicators as far as lab work is concerned of when how unhealthy someone is and their risk of all cause mortality now TMG has long been associated with lowering homosysteine because it converts it into methionine which can get excreted and removed we used to think before that you would need at least 6 G of betane to have the homosysteine lowering effect how however there was a recent study that took a look at 1.5 G compared to 3 G compared to 6 G and they found that there was a respective 12 15 and 20% decrease in homocysteine levels at those amounts so it looks like you can take a lower amount of TMG or betane and still get the effect but it is dose dependent the more you take the more you lower homosysteine so if your homosysteine levels are high you may want to seriously consider increasing that dose there's no real downside that people have found I can't find anything in the literature that finds a downside it's just a methylated Amino you could be wondering what the heck homosysteine does uh to make it very very simple it predominantly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease that's where it's most noted okay but it can also just cause circulatory vascular damage to begin with so this can lead to all kinds of different things not just cardiovascular disease now here's the big piece for longevity remember how I mentioned that TMG is a methyl donor as we get older we we lose some of our ability to methylate that is exactly why when we age our ability to adapt and change and express certain genes and have DNA changes that we want to occur happen like it just gets harder as we get older so the more that we can contribute to quote unquote our methyl pool the better now this is one thing the other side of the equation is we need to increase what's called NAD nicomide Aden dinucleotide one of the common ways to do that is through supplementation of something that's called nmn nicomide mononucleotide and I know I've talked about it on this channel and don't worry I'm not pitching you a product or anything I'm literally just talking about nmn if you use nmn to increase your energy and your cellular energy availability it does come at a small cost there is something that is called The Savage pathway and in order to increase na ad from nmn so if you're taking an nmn supplement you have to be aware of this you actually decrease your methyl pool because you require a lot of methyl groups methyl donors to convert nmn or ultimately create NAD through nmn big problem it's like you increase NAD but then you decrease your methylation ability what's interesting is combining TMG with nmn actually cancels that out so it allows you to get the NAD nicomide Adin dinucleotide improvement from nmn without the methyl pool depletion this is huge and I know it may sound like Greek but let's just put it simply if you take something like nmn to improve longevity you're improving One Direction of it but you're borrowing from Peter to pay Paul this way you are paying Peter and and Pang Paul everybody's happy there's one other really important thing I have made it a mission this year to make a bigger push to take care of my gut health I eat well but actually focusing on gut health there is some interesting literature starting to come out that suggests that TMG improves gut barrier integrity at least mechanistically by doing a couple of things it decreases the expression of what's called a tolllike receptor tlr4 in the gut and it actually increases the expression of a protein called zulin which restores gut barrier Integrity so this is fascinating newer research that's showing that taking betane trimethyl glycine could actually repair potentially a leaky gut or at the very least make your gut stronger and then at that it's also improving the microbiome but there's a lot of things that improve the microbiome so I don't want to draw any inference there bottom line this stuff is cheap this stuff is effective and it's effective that doses of as low as 2 and2 G up to 10 G and it's effective for longevity for fat loss and for muscle building as always keep it locked in here on my channel I'll see you tomorrow