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Oxytocin - Playing with dogs
I was watching a documentary about dogs last night and I learnt that if you look into the eyes of a dog, it’s blood oxytocin level goes up 30%, and yours too.
Now we know that this hormone is linked to parturition, lactation and obviously to moments when vA is moved from mother to kids. VA is given to autistic children because they are supposed to be vA deficient, so some people think there is an oxytocin-vA link.
We have noticed an increase in oxytocin in ourselves on this vA free diet: no testing done, but we suffer from a serious increase of cuddling times (to a point which cannot be attributed to our softer skins alone), and a new intense love of dogs and this is reciprocal (Blandina and the lions come to mind).
So if something happens at the same time oxytocin and vA are present, what happens really? Are we getting rid of this vA in some way? Could it be that we make it less toxic by switching genes as it goes out? I so ardently wish that I had the scientific background to devise a solution!
@johannes2 touched the subject of THY1. Is there a way we could boost our detox safely by playing with dogs?
@ourania. Love is good for us. It brings balance to our bodily processes. It has been known that people in love are healthier. Knowing the mechanism of the physiology of love would be fascinating.
Incidentally, lately I have had a tremendous need to get a dog. Coincidence of course. Or is it? 🧐😌
I grew up with cats and always loved them. Later in my early thirties, I started to get wary around cats, suddenly being concerned about some bacteria and fungi somehow infecting me simply petting them. It's as if I've become more neurotic? Right now I'm rather neutral in regards to animals.
But I observed a new interest in art. I've started to draw again, often trying to release emotions this way. If I feel like it, I practice gesture drawing.
I’ve spent some more time reading about Thy-1 membrane glycoprotein (THY1), a fascinating protein. From what I understand, the function of THY1 in neurons is to inhibit their inhibition:
“In a healthy individual, a fine balance is maintained between excitatory circuits and local inhibitory neurons that allows excitatory circuits to fire, modulated by inhibitory synapses that refine, restrict and finally return the circuit to its resting potential. Failure to terminate firing of excitatory circuits can lead to recycling pulses of excitation seen as seizures.” (Morris 2018)
Overexpression of THY1 prevents the inhibitory synapses from returning excitatory circuits to their resting potential, producing an excited state for longer periods of time. The inhibitory γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) signaling pathway is the pathway responsible for “resetting” neurons after excitation, and specifically GABA type A receptor signaling is inhibited by THY1. Since vitamin A causes a body weight-proportional increase in THY1, it may be that this is a mechanism through which vitamin A causes anxiety. By inducing expression of THY1, vitamin A is essentially a psychoactive drug with the opposite effect of anxiolytics like Valium (diazepam) and even alcohol, since alcohol induces GABA signaling.
I no longer believe that the “group-think” effect of vitamin A is a primary effect, but rather a side-effect of the anxiety produced by vitamin A. Firstly, anxiety isn’t overtly apparent to other members of a species, so the baseline assumption of any animal would be that the remaining members of its group are unaffected by anxiety. If an animal is then unexpectedly affected by anxiety, a natural response would be to mimic or imitate the behavior of other animals in the group, since they do not appear anxious, and mimicking their behavior should therefore attenuate the animal’s own anxiety.
If the animal mimics its companions’ behavior and is still unable to resolve its anxiety even after some time, I believe that depression will ensue. Symptoms of depression may be a consequence of persistent, unresolved or unresolvable anxiety. Moreover, if the source of anxiety is pharmacological (vitamin A), the resolution can only be pharmacological, and therefore the body deals with the problem in the only way it knows: by synthesizing fatty acids and esterifying the vitamin A. This would be a mechanism to explain the link between depression and weight gain. I’m not arguing that all anxiety, depression or weight gain is caused by vitamin A but rather that there is a plausible mechanism through which vitamin A can first cause anxiety, then depression and finally weight gain.
Now, to your point, I mentioned earlier that GABA is an inhibitory pathway, but that isn’t always the case. In fact, GABA is excitatory in growing neurons, until an excitatory-to-inhibitory switch is activated and the neuron matures. Surprisingly, oxytocin (OT) is a peptide capable of activating this switch (Tyzio, Cossart et al. 2006). The effect of THY1 on immature neurons is unclear. OT also inhibits the transmission of pain signals via multiple pathways, and enhances GABAergic transmission (Gonzalez-Hernandez and Charlet 2018). Thus, it would appear that OT could reverse the effects of THY1 on GABA. Therefore, playing with dogs may, in fact, attenuate some of vitamin A’s effects and, moreover, promote overall wellbeing.
As a personal anecdote, when I recently visited a new friend for the first time, her three dogs mostly sought intimacy from me and not so much from the other people there. Now, I might naturally be good with dogs, but I have also long suspected that stopping vitamin A alters the lipid composition of human sebum, resulting in a more agreeable lipid mix and scent for animals. Plasma docosahexaenoic acid (DHA; C22:6; n-3), for example, increases by 110% in rats after stopping vitamin A while palmitoleic acid (C16:1) decreases by 38% (Raja Gopal Reddy, Pavan Kumar et al. 2016). These changes to our scents may partially explain the more affectionate behavior of dogs towards us after stopping vitamin A.
Bibliography
Gonzalez-Hernandez, A. and A. Charlet (2018). "Oxytocin, GABA, and TRPV1, the Analgesic Triad?" Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience 11(398).
Morris, R. J. (2018). "Thy-1, a Pathfinder Protein for the Post-genomic Era." Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology 6(173).
Raja Gopal Reddy, M., C. Pavan Kumar, M. Mahesh, M. Sravan Kumar, S. Mullapudi Venkata, U. K. Putcha, A. Vajreswari and S. M. Jeyakumar (2016). "Vitamin A deficiency suppresses high fructose-induced triglyceride synthesis and elevates resolvin D1 levels." Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Molecular and Cell Biology of Lipids 1861(3): 156-165.
Tyzio, R., R. Cossart, I. Khalilov, M. Minlebaev, C. A. Hübner, A. Represa, Y. Ben-Ari and R. Khazipov (2006). "Maternal oxytocin triggers a transient inhibitory switch in GABA signaling in the fetal brain during delivery." Science 314(5806): 1788-1792.
Thank you so much @johannes2 for this extremely interesting reply!
I wonder if this more agreeable lipid mix could be the basis for odour of sanctity, the sweet odour emitted by the body of saints.
And also there is this saying by Kabir, a 15th century Indian saint, who said that being in the presence of saints is like sitting in the perfumer's shop.
Nice to know how this is done! Luckily, there is a group pf people walking dogs nearby. I shall attend as often as possible.
My personal belief is that our unique “lipid mix” is a complete characterization of our lives, representing and incorporating all of our past experiences in a compressed format that can be understood by a number of species with more diverse olfactory receptors than humans. (Vitamin A, by the way, represses the expression of many olfactory receptors and this effect is body-weight proportional)
Every time we feel joy, anger, fear or other emotions, I believe that these emotions will be reflected very slightly in our sebum. After a long enough period of time, someone who is constantly happy will have a vastly different sebum than someone who is anxious all the time. If our entire lives are characterized by constant neutralization of an oversupply of vitamin A, this will of course be reflected in sebum. Similarly, I also believe that the lines in our hands reflect challenges and experiences we’ve had throughout our lives, and there may be other biological records of our lives that we haven’t yet discovered.
Yes @johannes2 this has happened to us too, a great improvement in differentiation of scents and tastes. Making it impossible to eat things of medium quality. We now have acquired the abilities to smell of our new dog friends!
I suppose alchemists must have been on a diet excluding vA, otherwise they could not have done their research.
The lines in our hands maybe are scars. I wonder if this also affects the bones. Dogs to check you out first lick your hands.
Personally, I am wary of this. Rather negatively. I remember noticing an increase in oxytocin during the days of my life when I was stressed. I don't like the state of high oxytocin, I like a more "cold" view of the world. Ray Peat cited a number of negative studies on oxytocin.