Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)

Key Takeaways :

  • GABA’s Two Roles: This molecule acts as the brain’s main “calming down” chemical and is naturally produced in the body.
  • Boosting GABA Naturally: Focus on a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, fermented foods, nuts, and seeds. Regular exercise, quality sleep, and stress-reduction techniques can also help.
  • Talk to Your Doctor: While GABA supplements exist, research is mixed on their effectiveness. Consult a doctor before trying them or taking any other supplements.
Written by Vahid Epagloo, Food Consultant Updated:

Gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a non-protein acid; it is also a chemical messenger in the human brain. GABA is a neurotransmitter. This sentence shows that we have it in our body and our body and our brain need it. Here are its effects and features.

What is Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA)?

Neurotransmitters are the chemical messengers in our body they send different messages. In other word, our body uses especial messenger for each message.

GABA is non-protein amino acid of four-carbon. It has a crystal substance, white or light yellow color and it is soluble in water and it cannot solve or solve poor in other solvents.

Our body needs GABA. It is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that found in mammalian brain.

What GABA does in our body?

GABA is known as an inhibitory neurotransmitter or chemical messenger, due to its effects on blocking the certain signals in the brain and reduces the activities of your nervous system.

Actually, GABA brings the calming massage. When this amino acid attaches in its receptor, a protein in the brain that called GABA receptor, like a key and a lock that only work in pairs, the calming effect is produced. When do we need to calm? In anxiety, stress, and fear situations, our brain releases GABA to protect us.

GABA or any other inhibitory neurotransmitters block or control chemical messages and reduce the nerve cells stimulation in the brain. All neurotransmitters work in the same way generally. They carry messages through the nerve cells by the synapses, a tiny fluid-filled space.

The Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid could also help to reduce seizures.

GABA could improve your sleep too. As we mentioned above, GABA has the calming message, we can say that it is the convenience and calmness messenger. Due to this message GABA could improve your sleep and helps you to experience a calmer and more relax sleep.

The effects of GABA

GABA has many different effects on the human body. The main effect of GABA is reducing stress and helps our body for calmness. You may think this is not a very important effect, and we can have it with foodstuffs or chemical drugs. We should say that if you think about chemical drugs that mean you need this effect. The main important point about the effects of GABA is that this transmitter affects our brain. We use different foodstuffs to be calm and stress less, but none of them would affect our brain. The anti-stress chemical and natural drugs usually try to reduce the effects that stress causes in our body, like sleeping disorders. GABA is the treatment of stress in the brain, and has awesome effects that could help our body to be healthier.

Effects on neurons

The reports show that the nervous damages trigger inflammatory responses, and cause various inflammatory mediators release. These mediators can help several neuronal to degenerate in nervous system and help human with disorders like Alzheimer, Parkinson, and sclerosis. Different studies showed that Gamma-aminobotyric acid has an important role on neuro-protection against the degeneration that caused due to toxins or injury. One study reported that GABA could have protective effects against neurotoxic even on cell death. GABA could also improve cell viability, and decrease lactate dehydrogenase release. Another study finds that GABA receptor agonists have neuroprotective effects against the ischemic injuries of the brain.

Anti-Hypertensive effect of GABA

Hypertension relates to high blood pressure and could cause many different cardiovascular and heart diseases like hemorrhagic stroke. The human body has various methods to fight high blood pressure and the conditions caused due to it. Studies show that angiotensin-l converting enzyme ACE) that cause regulation of blood pressure, has an inhibitory activity that observed by GABA. That means GABA could help the blood pressure regulation mechanisms.

Antioxidant

The free radicals are somebody factors that contain one or more unpaired electrons, these unpaired electrons generated from living organisms or external sources. If the levels of these free radicals increase in the human body, the body tissues and cells could be damaged. One of the most famous diseases that cause due to the high levels of these free radicals is cancer. To prevent the diseases that caused due to the free radical our body needs the consumption of natural products with high anti-oxidant effects. Many studies reported the antioxidant properties of GABA.

Anti-cancer

The cancer treatments today, are surgery, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy. These therapies cause many different harms and disadvantages. GABA has anti-cancer effects and could be a promising compound that can help inhibition of proliferation and metastasis. Studies found the inhibitory effects of GABA on the colon cancer cells.

GABA effects on Growth hormone

Many sports supplement have GABA as main ingredients, and champions should add GABA supplements to their daily diet. That is due to the effects of GABA on the growth hormone levels. Studies reported that GABA increased serum growth hormone levels and consider as an energetic aid.

What happened in our body if the GABA levels change?

The changes in GABA levels first make you discomfort able and stressful, by continuing this condition, disorders show themselves.

Anxiety

As you know, anxiety could annoy people and stop their daily routines. Anxiety can reduce our energy and also can cause other disorders. Due to these problems our body has mechanisms to fight anxiety and help our body to be more positive and energetic. One of the duties of GABA in the human body is help to decrease the anxiety levels. When we experience changes in GABA levels, we could feel that anxiety awake and growth.

High blood pressure

As we mentioned in this article, GABA helps the regulation of blood pressure. When the levels of GABA change in the body, the mechanism of blood pressure regulation has a problem and one of its main factors has changed. That means the GABA levels have indirect effects on high blood pressure.

Insomnia

The brain Use GABA to help the body has relaxed sleep. The changes in GABA levels could affect our sleep quality. You may think this is not important, people would sleep when they feel tired, but sleep disorders cause more serious disorders. Sleep disorders do not mean you cannot sleep, in some cases sleepless is a disorder, but having bad sleep, cannot not fall sleep, or jumping out of sleep many times during a night, or even have not deep sleep are serious sleep disorders that lead to more serious disorders and could cause harm. If you experienced one of these annoying sleep disorders, you can understand the importance of GABA, its normal levels, and its role.

Insomnia is the worst kinds of sleep disorders. In this problem, you feel tired and you need to sleep, but you cannot fall asleep, you would try harder, but no result. Your body has no response to your sleeping need. Evan thinking and imagining this situation is unbearable.

Stress and fatigue

GABA helps us to sleep and rebuilt our energy, when its levels in our body change we cannot sleep well and our tiredness, changes in fatigue and every moment this fatigue increases.

The changes in GABA levels reduce sleep quality, and increase anxiety. These two are the main reason for our stress. That means the changes in GABA levels cause stress. Having normal stress would help us to do our duty, while high levels of it stop everything, we cannot think correctly when we stressed, and we cannot do our duty. In other words, stress can stop our daily life. Stress also affects our health and causes other diseases.

Epilepsy

Epilepsy is a disorder that originated in the brain. When some brain cells work more than their routine, the epilepsy seizures happened and the patient experience the bad condition. After each epilepsy attack the patients and the brain need one or two days to regenerate its power and energy. That means each attack would stop the normal life of a patient for at least a day.

The changes in GABA levels could cause seizures and in more serious conditions epilepsy. These diseases have no exact treatment yet, experts test different remedies on patients, and they achieve different responses to each remedy. However, almost all experts believe using GABA supplements could be really helpful.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that could cause due to sleep disorders. Insomnia can progress to mental problems like schizophrenia. One of the beneficial effects of GABA has effect on sleep and calmness. It releases in the brain and helps factors that control the cognitive activity of the brain and body. GABA also affects the sleep and help to improve mental health.

Depression

The chemical drugs for treating depression are soporific, why? Did you ever think about the connection between sleep and depression? A great sleep with normal quality can guarantee our mental health, we think sleeping is not important, but it is one of the most important parts of our life that our body needs it. GABA deficiency could cause mid to moderate depression.

Do we need GABA? Why?

As we mentioned above, GABA has a calming effect on our brain and help our body to fight with stress. Do we need GABA? Do we need to be calm? Should we have stress? Maybe the correct question is “Does having stress important? Or can stress make me problems?” The answer is yes. Stress could cause various disorders and many problems in our body. It is a disorder itself. If it is not important or harmful, our body does not need mechanisms to fight with it.

The deficiency of GABA causes mild to moderate health problems like depression and serious sleep disorders. That means we need to use GABA supplements our body needs it. The GABA effects are really useful.

Sources of GABA

People ask if GABA has positive effects on sleep, anxiety, and stress, can they use oral GABA to help them with these problems. The human brain naturally has GABA, but could our brain use oral GABA. People can use GABA as a supplement in their daily diet; however, in this way GABA may not able to cross the barriers of the blood-brain.

The effect of oral GABA use on the human brain is still unknown. Now, let’s check the GABA sources, and then describe the ideas of experts about using GABA sources.

GABA produced by three main methods, chemical synthesis, microbial fermentation and enzymatic bio catalysis.

Chemical synthesis

In this method GABA can be produced from different routes, for example in one of them, the cooper complex transformation catalyze the carboamination reaction of alkenes and GABA produced. This method is really complicated and has many different phases.

Microbial fermentation

Actually, this method is the manufacturing method for commercial use. Although, bacteria and fungi are great sources to produce GABA, the lactic acid used to produce GABA. To illustrate, the Solid-state fermentation is one of the microbial fermentation methods.

Enzymatic bio catalysis

When the glutamic acid decarboxylation by glutamate decarboxylase in the reaction catalyzed GABA would form with the help of a coenzyme named pyridoxal-5’-phosphates. This method is not viable in commercial application due to its complexity and costs.

GABA supplements

There chemical and natural GABA supplements. People believe that natural supplements are better than the chemical ones. Generally, this belief is true. Natural supplements are better and more effective. There are different natural GABA supplements; here we introduce some of them.

Green and black tea

Black and green tea are two great GABA natural supplements that are available everywhere. You can use them easily during the day, without limitation.

Tomatoes

Yes, that is right, tomatoes are the GABA supplement. You may never think about it, but this is a great supplement that you can add it to your food easily.

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are another GABA supplement. However, the people who use them are not a lot. People may do not like the taste of mushrooms or would have allergy, but if you can and like to use mushrooms, these are beneficial.

Broccoli

Who likes broccoli? That is the exact problems of broccoli. Many children do not like it, and they do not eat it. But it is one of the wonderful GABA supplements with lots of health and nourishing benefits.

Spinach

The beautiful green spinach leaves could help our body to make Gamma-Aminobutyric acid. Spinach leaves in all kinds of backing are a great and delicious GABA supplement, while we say spinach is delicious some kid and some people do not like to eat this and think it is not delicious.

Sweet potatoes

One of the most popular foodstuffs is the sweet potato. If your children denied eating other GABA supplements, they love to use all kinds of sweet potatoes.

Brown rice

There are different kinds of rice; the most famous of them is white rice. The brown rice is a delicious rice with a light brown color that could cook like other kinds of rice. It is a great source and GABA supplements.

Saffron

The best and most complete Gamma-Aminobutyric acid is saffron. If you search about saffron and its properties you would find that saffron has great effects just like GABA. Saffron could be the treatment for many diseases that cause due to GABA deficiency. These disorders could be the reason of other things, but GABA deficiency is one of the reasons that could cause them, saffron can be a wonderful natural drug for all of them.

Do not forget that you need to check limited cases and toxic amount of saffron usage. It is recommended to consult an expert before starting to use saffron as a medication. You can use saffron as a spice in foods and desserts; you can also make saffron beverages, while if you want to use it to cure a disease you should use especial amount of saffron per day.

Conclusion

We need GABA in our body, the make, but we can help our body and brain by using foods with GABA and GABA supplements. Saffron is one of the best foodstuffs that could be GABA supplements due to its properties.

Experts recommend adding saffron to your daily diet. In addition to its magical health benefits and profits, it can help your body and brain about providing GABA that it needs.

Using saffron in our daily diet could be very effective.

The changes in GABA level could make you stressful and cause many disorders, it is recommended to use GABA supplements to help our body fight stress and stop the harmful disordered that cause due to high levels of stress and discomfort.

FAQs

If I use GABA supplements my sleep disorders would be treated?

You would have better sleep if you use GABA supplements. The reasons of your sleep disorders are important for the best treatment, but GABA supplements could affect your sleep totally. It is better to consult an expert before start using GABA supplements. Maybe you need chemical drugs, or maybe your doctor could recommend you better method. The experts may introduce you the best GABA supplements for you.

Are GABA supplements the treatment for the disease that cause due to the changes in its levels?

Actually, when the disorders cause due to the changes in GABA levels, the GABA supplements could be helpful. But if they are the treatment or not depends on many different conditions, like what is the disorder? Is it moderate or chronic, is it the result of GABA changing level only?

It is recommended to use GABA supplements in your daily diet, but when you need treatment, it is better to consult an expert. Maybe it is not the problem you think. Experts would consider the problem and prescribe the best remedy.

What is the best GABA supplement?

If you search about saffron benefits and properties, you can find that most of them are the same as GABA effects. In other words, we can claim that saffron is the most complete GABA supplement that has a simple usage method and many awesome properties that can help you to improve your health.

What kinds of saffron should I use as a GABA supplement?

You can use all kinds and types of saffron as a GABA supplement, but it is better to use the high quality saffron. The highest quality of the golden spice belongs to Iranian saffron. You can buy your saffron from Ghaaneh brand, the best Iranian saffron in all types.

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