I wanted to clarify something from last
month... I mentioned that I'm looking for the next big project that I want to take on. I'm not looking for a 'job' or a traditional consulting gig, but thanks to everyone who reached out with offers. What I'm specifically looking for is a problem to solve that's particularly interesting to me. If solving this problem will help out a small business, even better! If you think you have something that fits this bill, definitely let me know about it.
Originally, I planned to discuss a beverage study that I recently participated in. This was for a hemp-derived, THC beverage that was legal to mail to most of the states in the US. Many of my friends in craft beer have been sounding the alarm on consumer trends moving away from that form of beverage for quite some time. Many of them have been looking into non-alcohol,
legal THC beverages as a potential way of mitigating this.
Almost immediately after I wrapped up my involvement with this study, a federal law was passed that ended up closing the legal loophole that was being used to produce these types of beverages. It's unclear what the company now intends to do considering they spent so much effort researching ways to produce this in a way
that they could sell it in most of the country.
Instead, I thought I'd give a teaser to some future piece that I plan to write on using different sequences of amino acids to essentially 'program' a more healthy lifestyle. I mentioned peptide experiments in the past, but haven't really discussed them at length or really what my overall goals have been. Much of what I'm
playing around with has come out of research that I've done into methionine restriction.
Following a plant based diet is likely the easiest way to reduce
the amount of methionine that someone takes in. For me though, following a plant based diet for an extended amount of time makes it impossible to gain muscle. In many cases, I will even lose muscle unless I'm supplementing with Essential Amino Acids (EAAs). Since these contain methionine, it essentially defeats the purpose of restricting it in the first place. I then started purchasing each of the EAAs individually instead of as a combined product. This led me to
researching the ideal ratios for how they should be combined in order to replicate what you would get via different diets.
During this research, the fact that the standard American diet in particular is severely lacking in the amino acid glycine compared to more ancestral diets kept showing up. I mentioned experiments in using glycine (which is naturally sweet) as a component in
my healthy dessert challenge. One of the reasons that I started playing around with this was speculation that I found online that focusing on the methionine:glycine ratio could provide many of the benefits of methionine
restriction without suffering the drawbacks that I've experienced. Let's just say that I've been playing around with many threads that have opened up based on this and will definitely summarize my experience at some point in the future.
