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“Stress eating is not about hunger, it’s about emotions and using food as a way to cope with those emotions,” says nutrition expert, Dr. Susan Mitchell. Mitchell has appeared on NBC’s “Today” show, CNN, and the Health Network, and is co-author of three books – Fat is Not Your Fate, I’d Kill for a Cookie and Eat to Stay Young.

Meanwhile, Judith Wurtman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has discovered that certain foods can actually change your mood – at least temporarily – by influencing the chemicals in your brain. Along with MIT researcher Richard Wurtman, she has also proved that high-carbohydrate meals help tryptophan rocket to your brain.

What Is Tryptophan?

Tryptophan is a building block that your body uses to construct proteins for muscle, hair and skin. As an amino acid, tryptophan is absolutely essential to your survival.

Unlike plants, which can synthesize all the amino acids they need, your body cannot produce tryptophan; you must obtain it from food or supplements. Unfortunately, tryptophan is the least abundant amino acid in your diet. The best sources of dietary tryptophan are high-protein foods, such as fish, eggs and dairy products. But even if you eat all those foods, they provide less than 1.5 grams of tryptophan in a single day.

It gets worse. After the tryptophan finally enters your body, it’s still an ordeal to transport the chemical inside your brain. That’s because of the vigilant blood brain barrier, which constantly guards against intruders. Nutrients must be screened, then ferried across the barrier by transport molecules, much like a group of commuters who cram into a single cab.

While this barrier protects your brain against toxins, it also requires tryptophan to ride along with five other amino acids (tyrosine, phenylalanine, valine, leucine and isoleucine). Thus, tryptophan is often out-numbered as it competes for transportation into the brain. That means your brain receives less than one percent of all the dietary tryptophan that you manage to ingest!

Surprisingly, the only dietary strategy that increases the supply of tryptophan to your brain is a high-carbohydrate diet. When your body secretes large amounts of insulin to lower your blood sugar – as when you eat a lot of carbohydrates – the insulin also removes most of the competing amino acids.

Essentially, insulin clears the way – as if laying down a red carpet – so that tryptophan can reach your brain more effectively. This preferential treatment comes at a high price, however, since insulin also enhances the conversion of fats and carbohydrates into stored body fat.

Luckily, there is another solution. L-tryptophan is available as an inexpensive supplement, so that you can easily increase your levels of this essential amino acid… Without reaching for another cookie!

How Does Tryptophan Work?

When the Wurtmans discovered the connection between food and mood, they determined that sugar and starch in carbohydrate-laden foods can boost “serotonin,” another powerful chemical in your brain. An organic compound, serotonin promotes feelings of well-being, calm, relaxation, confidence and security. Additionally, serotonin is needed to induce and maintain sleep.

Tryptophan is a “precursor” for serotonin, which means your body uses a series of chemical reactions to convert tryptophan into the serotonin it needs. (Enzymes convert the tryptophan to serotonin, which scientists call 5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT. Then the 5-HT is transported into cells.) Thus an increase in L-tryptophan tends to increase brain serotonin production, even in individuals who generate very little serotonin on their own.

In turn, the serotonin regulates your mood. This explains why carbohydrate abuse is common among overweight individuals. They are instinctively trying to elevate their mood by loading up on high-carbohydrate snacks.

Coincidentally, the anti-depressant called Prozac – as well as drugs such as Paxil and Zoloft – attempt to enhance serotonin levels in your nervous system by blocking chemicals that remove serotonin. (These drugs are known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.) Since tryptophan does not have the side effects of many drugs, this naturally occurring amino acid is a simple and effective alternative to SSRI drugs.

According to James South, author of L-tryptophan - Nature’s Answer to Prozac, this is definitely a case where less is more. “The lowest tryptophan dose that successfully alleviates serotonin-deficiency symptoms is the most effective,” South says. The resulting serotonin, he adds, “counterbalances obsessive-compulsive actions and over-eating,” especially carbohydrates.

South does advocate supplementing low or moderate tryptophan doses with certain B vitamins. Similarly, research by Eric Braverman and Carl Pfeiffer, authors of the book The Healing Nutrients Within: Facts, Findings and New Research on Amino Acids, suggests that amino acids such as L-tryptophan – along with vitamins B6 and Niacinamide (vitamin B3) – can alter the brain’s biochemistry, thus prompting positive changes in behavior. (L-tryptophan helps produce Niacin and other B vitamins. Similarly, B6 activates the enzyme that converts 5-hydroxy-L-tryptophan to serotonin.)

But is tryptophan truly effective? You bet, says Dr. Elisa S. Lottor, of Pacifica Women’s Health Care in Los Angeles. The California nutritionist says L-tryptophan really works well for her patients with eating disorders. She relates the experiences of one overweight patient, whom she describes as “highly compulsive about watching her weight.” “A note just arrived,” says Dr. Lottor, “And the woman wrote that she loves what I’ve done to help her lower and maintain her weight.”

Tryptophan and Dieting

Scientists now understand that traditional dieting can actually hinder weight loss, because it reduces tryptophan and serotonin levels. Study after study links diets with low levels of serotonin. For instance, Barbara Wolfe, Eran Metzger, and Carol Stollar – of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital – determined that dieting behavior diminishes the body’s ability to synthesize serotonin.

Among its other attributes, serotonin is the neurotransmitter that is associated with satiation, or how much you must eat until you are satisfied. “Neurotransmitters are like cell phones,” explains nutritionist Catherine Christie. These “chemical messengers” transmit information from cell-to-cell, whether inside your brain, or from your brain to other parts of your body.

When we eat various foods, Christie says, “these chemicals can change our mood or performance.” In fact, scientists say that low levels of certain neurotransmitters – particularly serotonin – can cause depression. Serotonin deficiency has also been implicated in cases of obesity, as it is associated with the brain’s perception of hunger and satiation.

A University of Oxford study determined that low-calorie diets significantly reduce plasma tryptophan, or tryptophan levels in the blood. The researchers noticed that this reduction was especially heightened in women.

“Women may be more sensitive to changes in serotonin than men,” explains food/mood specialist Christie. When estrogen levels fall, serotonin levels can also drop. “We postulate that this drop is why women crave carbohydrates during the menstrual cycle. If serotonin levels fall, appetite increases, particularly for carbohydrates.” She reports that dieting women often experience “carbohydrate craving and reported weight gain. This may also be related to changes in serotonin,” she said.

The Oxford scientists also determined that dieting reduces tryptophan’s ability to “compete” against other amino acids for passage to the brain. South agrees with those studies: “Eating a high-protein diet worsens the problem; it increases the intake of the five competing amino acids.”

While it’s bad enough that a serotonin deficiency can sabotage your diet, it’s even scarier to understand the implications to your emotional health. Oxford scientists Katharine Smith, Clare Williams, and Philip Cowen studied women who were recovering from depression, and how those women were affected by dieting-induced tryptophan depletion.

The researchers proved that women with a history of depression are especially sensitive to the mood-lowering effects of acute tryptophan depletion (caused by dieting). In fact, Smith, Williams and Cowen determined that low levels of tryptophan can actually cause a relapse of acute depression!

Nada Stotland, of the American Psychiatric Association, expresses concern about such findings that dieting itself may trigger the recurrence of depression. “Both depression and obesity are prevalent among women,” says Stotland, and “given the value society places on being thin, a large population who have experienced depressive illness may be attempting to diet.”

Tryptophan – Your Dieting Supplement

We’ve seen that most dieting behavior lowers your levels of tryptophan, causing a deficiency in serotonin levels. This means that dieting can make you cranky and obsessive, to the point where you think of nothing but food. (Sound familiar?) Yet we know that the food-mood response is short-term, and carbohydrate binges have long-term implications that we want to avoid.

So what’s the solution? The only reliable way to increase brain tryptophan – and your serotonin levels – is with dietary supplements. Unlike tryptophan that is obtained from a food source, concentrated tryptophan supplements can compete against other amino acids, so plenty of tryptophan can cross into the brain. Consider the natural supplement, L-Tryptophan, which boosts your serotonin levels, without the risks that are associated with prescription drugs.

But remember that not all L-tryptophan is made the same way. For instance, medical researcher Morton Walker says he is concerned that “a flood of inferior ingredients is pouring into our country, from unmonitored manufacturing plants around the world.” Stuart Freedenfeld, medical director of the Stockton Family Practice in New Jersey, agrees. Freedenfeld says he only uses L-Tryptophan from Lidtke Technologies, citing their “high standards of quality.”

Only Lidtke Technologies produces L-Tryptophan that is registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Not only do Lidtke Technologies’ products exceed all European and United States Pharmacopeia standards, they are Kosher, pyrogen-free, and free of EBT.

Using L-tryptophan is also endorsed by numerous scientific studies. A Princeton microdialysis study of serotonin and ingestive behavior determined that tryptophan increases extracellular serotonin in the hypothalamus. (The hypothalamus is the part of the brain that regulates body temperature and certain metabolic processes, including satiety and feeding reward.)

Similarly, Jason C.G. Halford and John Blundell, of the University of Liverpool, determined that serotonin helps control satiation both during and after meals. “Hypothalamic 5-HT receptor systems inhibit neuropeptide Y (NPY),” they said, “a potent stimulator of hunger and food intake.” (NPY is an amino acid neurotransmitter.)

John Blundell and AJ Hill also studied how serotonin helps regulate eating patterns. The scientists at the University of Leeds demonstrated that 5-HT not only helped their patients reduce the size of their meals, but also curtailed the rate at which they ate.

So talk to your doctor for ideas about a healthy diet and a sensible exercise routine. And instead of reaching for that cookie, grab a bottle of L-tryptophan and consider the words of Dr. Mitchell: “Healthy living and eating is not about deprivation, where the word ‘diet’ takes on a new meaning – drop the ‘t,’ and you feel like you’re going to die!”