Are you noticing that you have an elevated homocysteine, and you're making diet changes and finding that it's actually going up and not down? In this video we're going to look at the role of diet in causing high homocysteine. We're going to look at what foods have the highest homocysteine, what some of the research says about this, and why it's important to make sure you have enough B12 and folate when you're trying to answer this question.
I recently had a question from a viewer about his homocysteine levels. Originally it was 13.7 micromoles per liter, and after following a carnivore diet with lots of red meat it went up to 26.9 micromoles per liter. So what could be the reason?
While this question is pretty straightforward, I did want to double check that I wasn't missing anything, and I wanted to look into the methionine sources of different proteins and different foods in general.
As I've said in other videos, animal protein is very rich in methionine. Per 100 grams you're going to get somewhere around .9 grams of methionine from whole eggs. Fish sources like tuna might have 7 grams of methionine per 100 grams. Things like turkey, chicken, beef are going to have a little bit less, and so you get the general idea here. And plant sources are going to have very, very little amount of methionine, whether you're eating dark leafy greens or beans or lentils. They're all going to be, relative to these animal sources, much lower in methionine.
So you can see that if someone is mostly eating meat and fish, their methionine levels are going to go up.
Now if you don't know, methionine turns into SAMe, and SAMe then turns into adenosylhomocysteine, and then from that you get homocysteine. If you have sufficient levels of B12 and folate and you're consuming this protein, there should not be any issue turning that homocysteine into methionine again, and being able to use that on a regular basis. If you are deficient in either one of these, that homocysteine just sits there, and the more methionine that you consume, the higher that homocysteine goes.
It's sort of like a river that gets dammed and has a small release valve or release outlet. When it starts to rain, the river levels rise, and so does the dam levels. In this case what you need is to widen the release valve, and this would be the equivalent of increasing your B12 or folate levels.
Now of course B12 is pretty plentiful in animal products, so one would think that if they're increasing the consumption of those, their B12 would be going up as well. But I would suspect that this person for some reason is not absorbing those. In addition, they may just be really low in folate, or they could be having difficulty converting their folate into methyl folate, and this often happens with MTHFR genetic alterations.
But is this always the case? Is there another way to look at that? Is there ever a case where it rains and the dam doesn't fill up? It really depends on how much it's raining, but let's see what some of the research has to say about this question.
There have been some studies looking at dietary patterns and homocysteine levels, and they're mostly observational survey type studies, where you give someone a questionnaire and they fill out what they've been eating. So not super reliable, but somewhat helpful in terms of giving us direction on what's going on with homocysteine.
One was done in Pakistan and they looked at 872 healthy adults, and they found basically what would be expected. A diet higher in fruit and uncooked vegetables had lower homocysteine than those with higher chicken, red meat, milk, etc., who were more prone or more likely to have hyperhomocysteinemia.
Another study out of China found that those eating a cereal-based diet had higher homocysteine, and it was confirmed that they had lower B vitamin intake compared to the intake patterns of other people in the research study. So for example, those that were eating more fruit and milk had the lowest homocysteine level, but they also had the highest B vitamin level.
So I think overall, when it comes to homocysteine and diet's role in elevated homocysteine, is making sure that your body has sufficient B12 levels and folate levels. In some cases B6 may also be important, and some people are obviously more susceptible to vitamin B6 deficiency than others.
Homocysteine is very responsive to these B vitamins, and I don't think I've seen a case that has not responded, meaning going down, when you have elevated homocysteine levels. And I would expect it to go down even in the presence of high meat, fish intake. Even if you're eating those exclusively, as long as you're getting enough B vitamins, that homocysteine level should stay normal.
If you've had issues with elevated homocysteine in the context of diet changes, maybe you should be checking your B vitamin status to get a better understanding of what's going on with those.
If your homocysteine won't come down and you want help sorting out the B12, folate, and methylation picture, schedule an appointment and we can dig into it together.
Topics: Homocysteine, Methionine, B12, Folate, Methylation, MTHFR, Carnivore Diet