Vera Verba

I am officially dying.

I had a physical just the other day and my doctor told me that I am going to have to start watching my cholesterol levels which are apparently on the high end of the normal range. Also my balance of the different types of cholesterol is not particularly good. Basically I have been informed that it is all down hill from here on out, and I probably have less than 5 decades to live.

However, this bad news led me to some good news. My doctor suggested that I take fish oil supplements for Omega-3 fatty acids to help balance my cholesterol, so I went to Ye Olde Vitamin Shoppe to purchase these supplements. While there, I made a very happy discovery:

It seems that L-tryptophan is once again legal to sell as a dietary supplement in the United States of America.

This makes me feel a quite optimistic. The FDA’s prohibition on the sale of L-tryptophan has been (at least for me) a symbol of the evil that governments so often do under the guise of protecting us from ourselves. I am glad to see the end of it.

There are exactly 8 essential amino acids that the human body needs to function properly, but which it can not produce from other chemicals. If you don’t consume these eight substances regularly, you will die. So make a note - these are all very important things to include in your diet. These eight amino acids are: L-isoleucine, L-leucine, L-lysine, L-methionine, L-phenylalanine, L-threonine, L-tryptophan and L-valine.

Since the FDA’s 1989 ban on the sale of L-tryptophan, one of my favorite things to say has been, “I am proud to live in a country that has not yet outlawed 7 of the 8 essential biological ingredients of human life.” While I will certainly miss being able to throw this statement into almost any political discussion with a totally straight face, I have decided to take it as a good omen that this ban has finally ended.

So I am feeling very good today - although this could just be a result of the L-tryptophan supplements I am now taking.

Ingesting L-tryptophan helps the human body produce serotonin. This makes L-tryptophan an anti-depressant as good or better than Prozac, while being both cheaper and healthier than Prozac. It is a healthier because it stimulates the creation of more serotonin which promotes an ongoing feeling of well being. Prozac, on the other hand, acts as a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, causing an overall decrease in serotonin levels over time, while producing temporary good feelings as the existing serotonin is burned up at a faster rate.

Since L-tryptophan is both healthier and cheaper, one would imagine that Prozac would never have made much headway in a free-market economy. But fortunately for Eli Lily and company, the corporation that developed and patented Prozac, free market economies are few and far between. By a “lucky coincidence” shortly after the FDA approved Prozac for sale it then banned the sale of L-tryptophan.

Now some might cynically believe that the existence of a newly patented and approved drug and the banning of an un-patentable dietary supplement that performed the same function better, by the same regulatory agency that approved the drug, was more than a lucky coincidence. They might be especially inclined to believe this if they have read the 1993 report of the FDA Dietary Supplement Task Force that shines some light on an oddly pro-pharmaceutical policy by admitting that, “The Task Force considered various issues in its deliberations, including… what steps are necessary to ensure that the existence of dietary supplements on the market does not act as a disincentive for drug development.”

But Not me.

I am feeling so good from taking my L-tryptophan that I will happily buy into the official story that after a contaminated batch of imported L-tryptophan caused 37 deaths in 1989, the only safe thing for the FDA to do was to completely ban the sale of this essential amino acid.

It makes a lot of sense - at least if you look at it from the government’s point of view.

It is just easier to ban a substance, than to figure out what actually happened. And since L-tryptophan isn’t a patented drug, even if Eli Lilly was not specifically lobbying against it, there wasn’t anyone lobbying for it. There just weren’t any big monopoly profits to be made by going through the expensive process of lobbying the FDA to reconsider their decision. The FDA’s operational model is that someone should petition them and pay for the necessary studies and the time of FDA employees. Why should they ever bother to allow any dietary supplement or food additive to be sold if no one is specifically paying them to do so? And to maximize their authority, the logical default is to prohibit everything new, and ban anything old given any possible excuse to do so.

Of course, in banning one of the eight essential ingredients to human life, it is inevitable that some inconsistencies would crop up, so we shouldn’t blame them if some of their necessary decisions made the ban seem hypocritical. For example, even while the official position of the FDA was that L-tryptophan was a dangerous untested drug rather than a nutritious foodstuff, they still had to allow it to be added to baby food. After all, they couldn’t have babies dying from an amino acid deficiency drawing attention to the fact that this prohibited substance has been an historically vital component of the human diet as far back as our ancestors have had mammalian body types.

And it is probably also just another coincidence that the L-tryptophan ban was lifted the very next year after the patent on Prozac (fluoxetine) finally expired. It would be cynical to think that the ban was lifted when someone stopped receiving their regular bribe money, and I just can’t work up a good dose of cynicism right now - not with all the serotonin I have in my system. So I will just have to be happy in the knowledge that the government finally got it right.

I can sleep soundly knowing that my government has finally corrected its one and only mistake, is certainly not currently enforcing any other stupid laws, and will surely never make any similar mistake in the future now that they have seen the error of their ways.

Or my sound sleeping might just be an effect of the additional melatonin that L-tryptophan allows my body to produce. In addition to regulating sleep, melatonin is an excellent antioxidant that can reduce my cancer risk. I may even lose some weight by reducing the carbohydrate cravings commonly caused by L-tryptophan deficiency. (Is there anything that this wonderful substance can’t do?)

Now I can legally die a happy man.