Benquo

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282 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 27 Mar

Benquo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular) · "Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?" by Benquo · 24 Mar 2026 podcast

This is a different operation from the sleep onset mechanism.

The sleep pathway lowers the thermostat from 37°C 98.6°F to 36.5°C 97.7°F to help you fall asleep.

The antipyretic effect prevents the thermostat from being cranked up to 39°C 102°F during infection.

So glycine suppresses fever directly, which might confound the testable prediction above, and unrelatedly lowers core temperature before sleep, and unrelatedly improves specific immune response in ways that reduce the infection-related inflammation that raises body temperature.

Three independent pathways, with no apparent mechanistic connection, all drawing on the same pool of one simple, cheap amino acid that modern diets undersupply.

Glycine powder is cheap, roughly 2 to 3 cents per gram.

It is mildly sweet and dissolves easily in water.

There is no known toxicity at supplemental doses aside from gastrointestinal upset at high doses.

60 grams per day has been used in schizophrenia trials.

For most people, 10 to 15 grams per day in divided doses, some with meals, some before bed, would address the estimated deficit.

3 grams before bed is the dose studied for sleep improvement specifically.

This is not comprehensive nutritional advice.

For instance, cysteine is the other bottleneck for glutathione production, and people who eat little animal protein or are acutely ill may benefit from supplementing NAC, N-acetylcysteine, alongside glycine.

Alternatively, you can eat the way your ancestors did.

Bone broth, skin-on poultry, oxtail, pork rinds, and other collagen-rich foods.

One gram of collagen for every 10 grams of muscle meat protein roughly restores the ancestral glycine-to-methionine ratio.

Before reaching for a pharmaceutical intervention to override a biological signal, it is worth asking whether the signal is accurately reporting a problem you could fix with inputs.

Ocean tells your body about its energy metabolism.

Fever tells your body about its immune status.

If you are not providing the substrates those systems need to function, the signals will reflect that, and the right response is to supply the substrates, not to shoot the messenger.

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