I remain decidedly on the fence with glutamine. In very large doses (30-40g daily) it helps people with intestinal disorders such as Celiac disease, and leaky gut syndrome, precisely because it is largely taken up by the gut when consumed orally.
In well-fed bodybuilders in a nitrogen-positive state (read: bulking), unless there is an underlying gut issue, the evidence is rather thin. Not only is glutamine not an essential amino acid (you'll hear the term "conditionally essential" but that's only under catabolic/wasting conditions - the opposite of nitrogen-positive), but it is also the most abundant amino acid in your diet - about 10% of the protein most of us consume is glutamic acid: glutamine. Considering how much protein most in this sport consume - you for instance, Eric, likely consume well in excess of 300g daily, am I right? That means you're getting in 30g daily from your diet alone. In a caloric excess, I'm not clear on any possible benefit to be had from supplementing with more. What the research is clear on is that it won't hurt you (other than possibly causing some GI distress).
Addressing your comment about how the world is your lab, I see how you can make that mistake, but the problem with experimental hypothesis testing is the subjects need to be blind to the process, and that's simply not possible when you use yourself as a guinea pig, not unless you were to set up a test for yourself with a placebo control and a treatment and somehow hide the labels until you were finished your analysis. If you did this, you could reasonably argue for your real-world lab. What you have, in fact, is a real-world demonstration, but those are vulnerable to the confound of placebo.
Don't think I'm dismissing the value of observation though; I'm not. What you CAN find from the real world is the basis for experimentation - it all starts with observation. If the effect is real, it will not only stand up in "the real world", that is to say, accompanied by its placebo, but also to hypothesis testing, when the effect of placebo is controlled for.
This is certainly true for the best-studied supplement of all time: creatine. Science is STILL uncovering new uses for this supplement, including improved cognitive function in Alzheimers and cardiac function following surgery. And science has had no difficulty whatsoever establishing creatines efficacy as an ergogenic aid.
Glutamine has been shown to be of tremendous benefit in burn units. It has to be delivered via IV drip, however, and the catabolic conditions of near-death are nowhere near the piddling bit of microtrauma we in physical culture make way more of than is really the case.
Dave Barr had this to say in his two-part article, Glutamine, destroying the dogma (parts
I and
II):
It's the mark of a great person who can devise a theory, drawing from many different ideas, and stick to it. Without this, science would be meaningless. But it's the mark of an even greater person when they can admit, without shame, that their idea is wrong.
Sometimes theories pan out and sometimes they don???t, but we have to be able to let go of them once they're shown to be incorrect. This doesn???t mean that we shouldn???t believe new theories when they first come out; it just means that we have to be conscious about the fact that they aren???t dogma and may be wrong.
Case in point: The theory behind glutamine was so great that I refused to believe the authors of the Candow et al. (2001) study when they told me the results in person. I was an educated bodybuilder and I wasn???t going to let some egghead scientist (who was actually more muscular than I was, and therefore far from being just an "egghead") tell me that I was wrong. Of course, I wanted to believe that glutamine was useful (even though I got nothing from it) and when someone wants to believe something you can???t convince them otherwise.
Since then I???ve had a while to let the results sink in. I know that most believers in glutamine will also have a hard time accepting the reality of the situation, which is why I didn???t just try to convincingly show that glutamine wasn???t as great as everyone thought; I tried to overwhelmingly demonstrate it.
Bottom Line
Glutamine is good for hospital patients and rich people with money to waste. If you???re involved in resistance training and already have proper post workout nutrition, along with a moderate carb intake, then glutamine probably won???t do anything for you. In fact, none of the proposed theories dealing with glutamine supplementation have worked out in the athletic world. It???s also one of the most expensive supplements around (simply based on dosage recommendations), so it???s way too costly to use for personal experimentation ??? especially when the updated scientific literature doesn???t support the theories.
