Nutrients
How Arginine Keeps Arteries Healthy
How the amino acid arginine supports arterial health through nitric oxide production and why a healthy lifestyle can reverse metabolic dysfunction.
Nutrients
How the amino acid arginine supports arterial health through nitric oxide production and why a healthy lifestyle can reverse metabolic dysfunction.
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When metabolism goes awry—meaning for many: when you eat a typical Western diet—a few unpleasant biochemical changes occur in the body. That is, "metabolic dysfunction" essentially means there are a multitude of biochemical changes in the body that ultimately make us sick.
This is wonderfully easy to describe and has been demonstrated hundreds—perhaps thousands of times in animal studies. One such change is that under these conditions, an arginine-degrading enzyme called arginase becomes upregulated.
Arginine is an amino acid that you automatically take in when you eat protein. It plays important roles in your body's metabolism. For example, it is a substrate of the powerful endothelial nitric oxide synthase. This enzyme is produced by arteries and has the task of producing, among other things with the help of arginine, the gas nitric oxide (NO).
Perhaps some of you have heard of Viagra. In this case too, there is "expansion" because one forcibly increases NO production. For which arginine is needed again. In any case: NO, or rather arginine, relaxes the blood vessels, widens them, and as a result blood flow improves. Medically, this process is called vasodilation.
If you eat poorly, your metabolism goes awry, and you have less arginine available because arginase (which breaks down arginine) becomes upregulated. This causes so-called endothelial dysfunction (= arteries no longer work normally, don't dilate properly) and high blood pressure. Clever scientists naturally came up with the idea to reverse this spectacle [source no longer available].
Let's listen in:
"In contrast, arginase inhibitors or L-arginine enhanced vasodilation in metabolically unhealthy rats and abolished the differences between healthy and metabolically unhealthy animals. Finally, blood pressure was significantly elevated in metabolically unhealthy rats. Administration of L-arginine or arginase inhibitors lowered blood pressure in metabolically unhealthy, but not in healthy animals, and this was associated with an improvement in systemic arginine bioavailability."
That amounts to this: by administering arginine or giving an arginase inhibitor, you can simply reverse these anomalies. So healthy arteries despite an unhealthy lifestyle. But wait: of course the goal cannot be that you eat poorly and then take an amino acid to compensate. But it illustrates two things beautifully:
The step toward a healthier life could therefore be accompanied by, for example, a high protein intake or an extra dose of arginine. By the way, good to know: citrullin [source no longer available] is the better arginine, because arginine—given alone—is quickly metabolized by the gut. Citrullin, on the other hand, is quickly converted to arginine in the blood and as an arginine precursor thus produces higher arginine levels than arginine itself.
