1. Required to Generate a Potent Antioxidant
One of the three amino acids your body needs is glycine to produce glutathione, a potent antioxidant that guards your cells from oxidative damage brought on by free radicals, which is considered to be the root cause of many illnesses.
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Your body creates less glutathione when you don’t get enough glycine, which over time may have an adverse effect on how your body responds to oxidative stress.
Furthermore, getting enough glycine as you age may help your health because glutathione levels normally decrease with aging.
2. A Partially Inert Substance
One of the three amino acids that your body needs to create creatine is glycine.
Your muscles can engage in brief, sharp bursts of activity, like running and weightlifting, with the help of creatine.
Supplementing with creatine has been demonstrated to enhance muscular hypertrophy, strength, and power when used in conjunction with resistance exercise.
Its positive benefits on brain function, bone health, and neurological diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease have also been researched.
Even while you can receive creatine from your food and your body naturally produces it, producing too little glycine may cause you to produce less.
3. Collagen’s Principal Amino Acid
Glycine is present in large concentrations in collagen, a structural protein. In actuality, glycine occurs in collagen every third or fourth amino acid.
The most prevalent protein in your body is collagen. Your muscles, skin, cartilage, blood, bones, and ligaments all get strength from it.
Collagen supplements have been demonstrated to improve joint discomfort, reduce bone loss, and improve skin health.
As a result, it’s critical that you consume enough glycine to aid in your body’s collagen synthesis.
4. Could Possibly Boost Quality of Sleep
Many people have difficulty falling or staying asleep, which makes it difficult for them to receive a decent night’s sleep.
Glycine may also assist, even if there are other strategies to enhance the quality of your sleep, such avoiding bright displays a few hours before bed or avoiding caffeinated beverages late in the day.
This amino acid lowers your body’s core temperature, which may help you fall and remain asleep. It also has a relaxing impact on your brain.
Three grams of glycine taken before bed reduces the amount of time it takes to fall asleep, improves the quality of sleep, reduces daytime drowsiness, and sharpens the mind in those with sleep problems, according to research (17, 18).
Because of this, glycine could be a viable substitute for prescription sleeping medications if you’re looking to improve the quality of your nighttime sleep and reduce daytime fatigue.
5. Could Prevent Damage From Alcohol on Your Liver
Drinking too much alcohol can be harmful to your health, particularly to your liver.
There are three main categories of liver injury brought on by alcohol:
Fatty liver: An accumulation of fat that enlarges the liver.
Alcoholic hepatitis: A liver inflammatory condition brought on by prolonged, heavy alcohol use.
The last stage of alcoholic liver disease, known as cirrhosis, is brought on by destruction to the liver cells and their replacement by scar tissue.
Interestingly, studies indicate that by reducing inflammation, glycine may lessen the damaging effects of alcohol on your liver.
It has been demonstrated to lower blood alcohol concentrations in rats given alcohol by inducing the metabolism of alcohol in the stomach as opposed to the liver, hence averting the development of alcoholic cirrhosis and fatty liver.
Furthermore, glycine may also aid in the recovery of animal liver damage brought on by excessive alcohol use.
Glycine may speed up the healing process even if mild alcohol-induced liver damage may be healed by quitting alcohol entirely.
In a research with rats that had alcohol-induced liver injury, the liver cell health of the group given a glycine-containing diet for two weeks recovered to baseline 30% quicker than that of the control group.
Studies on glycine’s effects on alcohol-induced liver damage are restricted to animals and cannot be extrapolated to humans, despite encouraging results.