Dr. Allen Bookatz

speaker

1,037 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 4d ago

Dr. Allen Bookatz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 4.

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Health Optimization Medicine Podcast · The Gut-Brain-Microbiome Axis: Understanding Depression, Serotonin, & Probiotics | HOMe Podcast #019 · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

So I the way I think of IDO is it's like it hijacks tryptophan, right? matched

And so for those of you that know, that's the amino acid that your body uses to make serotonin and melatonin. matched

It's the one that is often talked about during, you know, the the Thanksgiving meal and why we get sleepy. matched

That's actually not true, but it's it fits for at least what we're describing here. matched

So I want you to think of it like if IDO fires up, tryptophan then gets redirected down a different road called the kinerin pathway. matched

And that this is what I was mentioning earlier. matched

Two things happen, and neither's really great. matched

First, you lose all your raw materials for making serotonin and melatonin. matched

And then now you're all, you know, your mood is disrupted, you have terrible sleep. matched

And you know, if you talk to anyone in an inflamed state, that's matched

Totally tracks. matched

But second, the kinrion pathway produces this this um this other byproduct called quinolinic acid. matched

And that is actually a genuine neurotoxin. matched

And it the way it the way it acts, it acts on these the NMDA receptors, which already are excitatory and it overactivates them. matched

It's like it turns the volume knob up on the NMDA receptors, and then it directly starts damaging neurons. matched

And so that's actually where you start feeling, or when your clients or patients are telling you, like, I feel cognitive fatigue and brain fog, like that's actually where they come from. matched

So matched

So it's interesting, and here's the part that really gets me is that in psychiatry, we, you know, they they see low serotonin and immediately we say, Oh, that's the issue. matched

And we reach for an SSRI, thinking that that's going to be the root cause of their depression. matched

And I guess if that was how you understood how depression worked, then I g the logic fits. matched

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