LEMON, just trying to be helpful.

for a patient just starting on sinemet, the normal dosage is 300-400mg/day. i'm not saying take sinemet, just trying to impress upon you how little dopamine the brain needs daily.

that's 300-400mg of levodopa which gets converted to dopamine in the brain. of that amount, it is estimated less than 10% gets into the brain, the other 90% gets converted to dopamine outside the brain so can't get into the brain. so 30-40mg getting into the brain is all that is needed to treat an early pd'er. obviously there are checks and balances on not letting too much amino acids getting into cells, too much would kill them. plus in early pd dopamine is stored in the cells, you have a buffer.

i just don't understand how anyone eating a balanced diet can have a dopamine precursor deficiency.

Thanks for the heads up Soccertese! I was curious about the normal dopamine depletion in the average person and ran across one of your post, from a while ago, that said 1% per year is normal. I haven't been able to find any other detailed information. Do you remember a source or link for that info?

i assume you are referring to the normal loss of dopamine producing cells in the brain?

this article doesn't give an exact number but does a good job describing the loss of neuron function and PD
http://www.parkinsonswny.com/Parkinson-Handbook.pdf

I prefer answers to be less scientific to understand what they mean. I would recommend the following article from a magazine written for "Nutrition Wonderland." It describes in a easily understood way how to apply Dialectal Therapy to change to a mindful way to eat.

http://nutritionwonderland.com/2009/...amine-rewards/

This article was written in 2009. Not much research has been done on nutrition and dopamine. It will improve your food choices.

Dianna

Hi I had forgotten I had posted this thread in 2011. I was going to post something similar today but it was removed and now I see why, this thread already existed. I bet some people a quarter today that I cold post this high dopamine diet and not a single person would try it. Looks like I win my bet because a truly amazing 18.000 views later and not a single person has said they tried it.

So let me make it official so I can collect my quarter. DID ANYONE TRY THIS DIET? IF so how did it turn out, could you feel the dopamine sense of well being in a couple of minutes or could you not. For a quickie test, eat some blackberries on a totally empty stomach after not eating for 8 hours so no current competititon from a suppressor of dopamine although there will still be dopamine suppressing fats in your brain from the night before and days before so you wont be getting the maximum possible effect in this super short test, but you will almost for sure be able to feel the rush or sense of well being if you pay attention for the five plus period after eating the blackberries, beginning in me two minutes after the first bite. . Then after you do, eat a couple of bites of say, anything with soy oil in it and kiss your dopanine pleasure from the blackberries good bye in five minutes or so.

BTW one respondent said my loss of dopamine from eating certain foods must be individual. Really? AFTER I started telling people about how soy suppresses my dopamine I read a huge medical journal study out of Hawaii in which they showed that the people who ate the most tofu (soy) had brain matter missing on MRI, brain loss , lower IQ and more alzerimers. In the blackberry soy test I just described t its perfectly obvious what I am alleging about raising and suppressing dopamine. I believe anyone who is paying attention will be able to notice it. \

Villiers, you expressed interest it this diet, you were the onl one who did, but , why didnt you try it? Or did you? ALso to the person who asked about Brewers Yeast, it suppresses dopamine after eating it. Regarding the allegation one person postod on this thread that meat raised dopamine, yeah if you had no other protein in your diet and so had no raw materials to work with, it would be better to eat some kind of protein , even meat, but this isnt Bangladesh and none of us is deficient in protein, and I promise you one thing, if you eat meat in between two to five minutes you will start to feel like you loaded some lead into your brain and afterwards will feel like taking a nap. Dopamine suppressed. + THe best 4 frutits , 100 percent cconcord grape juice, blackberries, blue berries and black grapes make a person feel like shouting , the energy and sense of well bing if so energyizinig. In fact I commonlly do shout after eating them. BUt that is a temorary fix, the diet I posted about is constructed to keep our dopamine level higher throughout the day than any person has ever experienced, I would bet. OF course a person witih PD isnt going to feel it perhaps to te degree of a non PD , but you are going to tell a huge difference and maybe, just maybe it the full diet dont exactly as described at al times, will take some of you out of the Parkinsons zone into the normal zone. I hope. BUt I am very very pessimistic that anyone well eer try it after 18000 already passed on it.

STeve Lord.

were're all taking very strong medicines, the equivalent of 100's of mgs of dopamine, you think we'd be taking these medicines if diet made a difference? do you know anything about the underlying biochemistry of parkinson's?

it's likely 1 egg has enough tyrosine, a precursor to dopamine, to supply our needs for a week.
people who are fasting for weeks don't start "freezing" because of a lack of dopamine, they can still move. obviously even in starvation we can mfg all the dopamine we need in a normal brain.
i miss 1 dose of my dopamine medicine and i have a very hard time moving smoothly. that kind of tells me diet isn't my problem.

we are lacking the enzyme necessary to produce dopamine from precursors in food and the cells in our brain that store and protect dopamine from being broken down in the brain, we are getting plenty of precursors. and dopamine doesn't penetrate the BBB.

THANKS BUT NO THANKS

Here's the problem with such diet: PD sufferers have a huge deficiency in dopamine-producing cells. So such a diet would have a minimal effect because of lack of dopamine cells.

Ah, so what is a small amount of cells times two, or times three?

Steve Lord

Steve, i don't understand what you are asking or saying here?
I do know that i function well in the morning after my medication and I attribute that mostly due to fasting overnight so the tablets are not competing with food protein.

The Hinz amino acid protcol tries to fill the dopamine pipeline so that the lack of dopamine receptors is overcome by enough L-dopa to make up the difference.