Carnivore, Keto Sleep Issues - Could this be causing your 3 AM wake up?

welcome back to my channel so in today's video I want to give you an update on my carnivore insomnia related issues I did a video on this previously and lately it's been receiving a lot more views and comments and questions if you don't know what I'm talking about there is a group of us out there who have an issue where we don't have any problems falling asleep generally speaking but we end up waking up between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. more often than not it's closer to 3:00 a.m. and we're just wide awake and that is the new start of our day 3 a.m. or earlier and that is very early and it's really difficult to deal with something like that one potential issue for people who are eating low carb keto or carnivore is that your tryptophan levels may end up being too low and this can affect your serotonin and your melatonin which can affect your mood and your sleep tryptophan is an essential amino acid meaning it must be obtained through your diet but simply eating foods that contain it when you're eating very low carb it may lead to depleted levels this may not affect everyone though tryptophan is the sole precursor to serotonin which impacts your mood and this leads to the production of melatonin which is vital for your circadian rhythm and for your sleep Studies have shown that women are more vulnerable to issues of low tryptophan levels and this is supported by Imaging studies that provide evidence of sex differences in brain serotonin synthesis let's say you're eating all meat and it does contain decent amounts of tryptophan or even high amounts of tryptophan it doesn't mean that that is going to make it into your body where you need it or into your brain once it's in your bloodstream the tryptophan competes with other large neutral amino acids for transportation to your brain meat is very high in veine Lucine and isol leucine which are the most potent competitors for tryptophan transport so according to research the amount of tryptophan that can successfully cross the bloodb brain barrier depends on the amount of the other amino acids that it's competing with so if you can alter the ratio of tryptophan to the competing amino acids that can have a significant effect on the concentration of tryptophan that manages to enter the brain scientists have conducted studies to understand how manipulating tryptophan levels in the body affects its conversion to serotonin to cause the depletion and tryptophan in most studies they administer an amino acid beverage that contains 100 gram of 15 amino acids but that does not include tryptophan the intake of this drink stimulates protein synthesis in the liver but without the proportionate intake of tryptophan this caused a great depletion in the existing tryptophan levels the other amino acids were competing with tryptophan to make it to the brain resulting in a significant decrease in tryptophan and serotonin and melatonin the reason I'm sharing this is because of its Downstream impact on melatonin in other studies they used a depletion drink that contained 50 g and it still showed vast reductions in tryptophan there have been so many studies on tryptophan depletion by using this type of drink collagen powder supplements are very common nowadays and one of the most popular ones I've seen is the vital proteins powder the serving size is 20 G if you're somebody who takes a collagen powder drink supplement that actually generally contains all of the amino acids except for tryptophan which is not naturally in that so as a result you could be further depleting your tryptophan levels most companies don't add in tryptophan so in my mind we're sort of recreating the acute tryptophan depletion experiments from the research and I used to use collagen powder too the vital proteins collagen which I'm just using as an example here has a 20 G serving size according to this research study a 25 G tryptophan depletion drink reduced human plasma tryptophan by 42% It's also important to note that the 50 g and 100 G depletion drinks caused a mood lowering effect if you think you could be dealing with a low tryptophan related issue there are some research-based solutions I'm not here to sway anyone away from eating carnivore because you should do whatever you want to do with your diet and your health and your life but one of the potential Solutions involves a little bit of a dietary change and this is just based on Research so I'm going to share that with you there's another option that does not involve your diet in order to improve the amount of tryptophan that you are actually getting when you're eating meat it is recommended according to the research studies to eat some carbohydrates Ates and it's especially recommended to eat those earlier in the day if you want to improve your tryptophan levels better eating carbohydrates does not directly increase tryptophan levels but it triggers insulin release and the insulin promotes the uptake of the competing amino acids into your muscle cells so it shuttles them away into your muscle cells so that increases the availability of tryptophan for the serotonin and melatonin synthesis in your brain so the research basically suggests that consuming carbohydrates along with tryptophan rich foods can can enhance your tryptophans entry into the brain according to a research paper consuming the carbohydrates plus protein with your first meal of the day can have a greater impact on the amount of tryptophan making it to the brain compared to later in the day okay so if your tryptophan levels do become quite low that is a problem and your body and your brain have kind of a backup plan if that happens there may be a separate transport system that is specifically for tryptophan and it becomes more active when tryptophan levels are low this could be why some people don't have any issues of tryptophan depletion one other thing that is very interesting is that if you drink alcohol that greatly depletes your levels of tryptophan and the synthesis of Serotonin and that can directly impact your mood and a lot of you guys can probably relate to that if you've ever had any drinks and you just don't feel right and you just don't feel good the next day you don't feel like yourself you've depleted your happy hormones and your serotonin when it comes to trying to fix this issue some people may incorporate some carbohydrates in first meal of the day would be best according to the research or some people might want to try taking a tryptophan supplement another thing that could be happening is that we could be experiencing issues of you know like a low blood sugar issue at night which could trigger your cortisol and a stress response that could wake you up there are days where I am getting good sleep and I'm getting enough hours but the weirdest thing is that I'm finding that in order to get enough hours of sleep I I'm going to wake up at 3:00 or 1 to 3: no matter what I do and so the only way I can get enough sleep this is horrible is if I go to sleep much earlier and so sometimes my bedtime is 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. it's usually where it's at if I want to get like a lot more sleep even 8 hours then it's usually that I'm going to sleep at 6:00 p.m. I don't know how I managed this yesterday but I went to bed at 5:30 and that's like not the best way to live going going to bed that early I'm really hoping that as the weather changes coming up it seems like it's sunnier out right now and the weather's getting nicer I'm hoping that as summer approaches that I can push things back and go to sleep later closer to 8 or 9 closer to a normal bedtime and see how that goes a lot of people have recommended that I just go to sleep a bit later and I will adjust my sleep but it does not work for me personally if anything I often wake up earlier if I go to bed later so then all of said I'm up at midnight and I've had that happen numerous times and it's not fun so some days I'm getting enough sleep some days I'm not I'm kind of well adjusted to this thing where I'm going to bed around 6:00 to 7:00 and waking up around 3 hopefully 3 there are times when it's been 3:45 there are times lately where it's been 1 and another thing to keep in mind is that some of us are undergoing stressful situations and I feel like that can also impact your sleep for sure it's just another Factor so there's so many factors going into this and it's really hard to figure it all out I'm going to keep testing and keep tracking and I hope that I can find more answers and this is the reason why I haven't posted the sooner is that I don't have a clear answer yet I can't believe this but I'm still a work in progress if any of you have found a way to fixed your sleep issues or if you figured out what caused it and you know you found a solution please share that down below we would all love to hear that thank you so much for watching and take care