Supplements and Safety - Why Your Supplement May Damage Your Health (L-Arginine)

I’ve always promoted live healthy, eat healthy, sleep healthy, play healthy, and you will be healthy.
It works for me pretty good. I’m not too concerned how other people are destroying their bodies.
My fatal vice is that I smoke. But I’m also fit and trim. I’m a lean mean fucking machine.

Just let me catch my breath here a moment ….

My philosophy has always been that the great creator combined with a million years of evolution, created man
in a manner in which his body would receive all that it needs from it’s environment. Man polluted that concept.
Animals don’t suffer from the stuff we do until we start feeding them the same garbage we’re eating.

With that said. I’m also the king of adverse reaction when taking medication or supplements. I think I was a lab rat in a past life and I’m still suffering the effects.

It probably explains why I’m not a big fan of supplements. A lot of this stuff hit the market in the late 80’s.
Back then every snake oil salesman was hocking his garbage all over the place. Make it sound like you know what your talking about and people bought it. Slowly people repeated the claims and before you knew it other people were spouting the claims of the snake oil sales pitch like it was gospel. Hasn’t Mr. Coral Calcium been indicted NUMEROUS times and barred from hocking his crap in the U.S.?

L-Arginine and L-Lysine

Now I’m not a Doctor and I don’t even play one on TV either. From what I’ve been able to ascertain from researching it, is that L-Arginine works INCONJUNCTION with L-Lysine. In that their is a cause effect inverse relationship between these two amino acids. That is, one balances the other. When one is high the other is low.

I noticed in Endow’s post above that one of the side effects of “too much” L-Arginine was an “increased activity of some viruses”. But that really doesn’t go far enough because what they’re talking about is herpes and herpes related viruses.
Which means Herpes, shingles, chicken pox, and a host of other viruses of the herpes family, such as the common cold.

Why is this? Well what I learned from my research into the subject is that L-Arginine is the amino acid that all herpes related viruses need for cell replication. So what this means is that if take L-Arginine you could cause a herpes or shingles out break, should you already have either virus lying dormant. I never came across anything in my studies to suggest it, but one could SURMISE that if you are taking substantial amounts of L-Arginine then you MAY also have created a fertile ground for contracting any of these viruses should you come in contact with any of them. There are literally thousands of viruses in the herpes related family of viruses.

L-Lysine has long been known as the supplement alternative to taking Valtrex among herpes suffers. I myself took it when I had a case of the shingles. Yes it sucked but this is what led me into my research in the first place. For me, both Valtrex and L-lysine worked equally as good as the other. What I learned from researching both is that both work by shutting off the production of L-Arginine and thus starving the virus of the amino acid necessary for cell replication.

I further learned that L-Arginine also increases oxygen levels in the blood and dilates vessel walls. Great we can all use more oxygen right? Well not so fast. First there’s the obvious risk factor to people with cardiovascular conditions. I also learned from researching Candidiasis (yeast infections) is that oxygen is the number one thing Candidiasis requires in order to thrive. A internal Candidiasis infection is difficult to get an accurate diagnosis of but can reek havoc with your body for years. Increasing the oxygen levels in your blood woulde not be a good thing in this case and may even lead to a Candiasis infection in the first place.

I cannot believe that your body would simply piss away any excess of either supplement. In any case that would only be after a point of total saturation had been reached. What is the end result of total shut off or artificial mass production of one amino acid over another? There’s not enough research out there. But there’s enough to know that it can’t be a good thing.

Yes moderation may indeed be the best route to follow should you decide to take these supplements.
But EDUCATION is the key to staying safe, and making INFORMED decisions. Don’t take someone’s advice just becasue it was on the internet, some radio show, or printed on the side of some plastic bottle. I can’t tell you how many health food / vitamin stores I’ve been in and the guy behind the counter didn’t know shit about what he was selling. But he sure was more than happy to parrot some wild ass claim to you about it.

The real trouble with documentary’s is that tell a story from a view point. That of the person telling the story. It doesn’t matter that they’ve sited sources, studies, or what ever. It’s still being told from someone’s point of view. So as it’s already been stated in this thread, it’s your job to research those studies, trials, sources, etc, that have been referenced in the documentary AND COME TO YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS. This means scrutinizing the source and the motives and affiliations of the source as well.

We have an unofficial policy around here about NOT handing out medical advice. So this not medical advice. Opinions expressed were mine. Anything I have stated here YOU are responsible for checking into. I’m sorry I don’t have links to specifics, my statements were based upon an large amount of cumulative research that I did for myself. If you want to continue to play around with your own health based on the claims of others, then I suggest you do your own research into matters.