Laura Schoenfeld: With the reactions with the glutamates or just having a reaction to bone broth in general, there are usually two different issues that I’ll see causing a reaction to bone broth. One of those could be a SIBO response. Bone broth, depending on how you make it, can actually have fermentable carbohydrates in it. Something called—I always mispronounce this word—it’s GAGs, but it’s glycosaminoglycans. It’s like a protein-sugar complex that bacteria can degrade. I’ve seen some SIBO guidelines that say that bone broth, if it’s going to be made, needs to be made from marrow bones only and not the joint bones that tend to have a lot of those GAGs.
The other typical reaction, which is a lot more common, I haven’t really seen many SIBO reactions to bone broth, but I see a decent amount of histamine responses to bone broth, so that’s basically anyone with histamine intolerance. Bone broth is a very high-histamine food, so if they’re doing a lot of bone broth or if they are cooking the broth for a really long time, putting it in the fridge, leaving it there for multiple days, there’s a lot of opportunity for those proteins to break down and then release histamines. That’s usually the patient population that reacts poorly to bone broth.
Glutamate sensitivity, you’ll probably see a little bit of that with bone broth as well. Now, if somebody is having a reaction to bone broth, I don’t know if meat broth is necessarily going to fix that reaction mostly because, again, the histamine issue is the main issue I see with bone broth sensitivity, and meat broth is still going to have a lot of histamine in it. Bone broth is really helpful for gut healing, but it’s not essential. If somebody doesn’t have the opportunity to have bone broth or isn’t able to drink bone broth because of health issues, they’re not not going to heal from their gut issues, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. They don’t have to have it if they can’t tolerate it.
As far as supplementing GABA with excess glutamate, that’s something that I’d like to defer to Chris to answer just because GABA as a supplement, there are questions of whether or not it actually does what it’s supposed to do because technically the GABA molecule, if you take it as a supplement, is not able to cross the blood-brain barrier, so the question would be, would that be something that’s actually helpful? Anecdotally, I’ve seen GABA supplements be helpful for glutamate toxicity or reactions or just anxiety in general, but that said, it could potentially be a placebo effect. So I don’t necessarily know if GABA is going to correct the bone broth reaction that somebody would be having. So if somebody is having some major neurological reaction or physical reaction to bone broth, I would just skip it and not worry about it right now.