At some point, I found some interesting research articles about glycine which is a “non-essential” amino acid.
There were papers showing that dietary glycine gives a strong protection from endotoxin, and also protects the liver from many kinds of poisons.
But when I looked further, I also found more than two hundred glycine articles showing that this nutrient also protected animals from diabetes, cancer, methionine, ischemia, hemorrhagic shock, hypercholesterolemia, lead and cadmium toxicity, dental caries, gastric ulcers, birth defects, and several other harmful things. In one study, it also significantly increased the lifespan of rats.
But those effects weren’t even the most interesting ones. I got very excited when I saw the astonishing findings of one Mexican research group.
This research group did something quite nasty to their rats. They added 30% sucrose to their water for 20 weeks. Consequently, the rats got a huge amount of calories from their drinking water and thus their food intake decreased by more than fifty percent. That equals a huge decrease in protein, mineral, and vitamin intake as well.
The rats developed full-blown metabolic syndrome in 20 weeks. But then after 20 weeks the researchers also added 1% glycine to the drinking water. In 4 weeks, the sugar-fed rats became almost as healthy as the control group. With glycine, the rats’ blood pressure, fat cells, blood markers and many other things quickly became normalized despite the continued sugar feeding and low nutrient intake.[16]
glycine
This result wouldn’t sound even believable to me, if there weren’t a couple of other reports showing similar effects. For example, one study showed that a high-glycine protein source (scallop) prevented the harmful effects of a high-fat, high-sugar diet while other protein sources led to a very significant weight gain:
“In conclusion, intake of scallop muscle as the sole dietary protein source completely prevented high-fat, high-sucrose-induced body mass gain and fat accretion without affecting lean body mass. Furthermore, scallop feeding improved plasma lipid profile in C57BL/6J mice compared to mice fed diets with protein from chicken, cod, or crab. Correlation analyses revealed strong, highly significant inverse correlations between intake of taurine and glycine and body fat mass, as well as strong, highly significant correlations between glycine and especially taurine intake and improved plasma lipid profiles.”[17-20]
These protective effects of glycine seem to be related to the fact that glycine decreases inflammation by hyperpolarizing immune cells via “glycine-gated chloride channels,” preventing an exaggerated, harmful immune response to endotoxin and other stimuli. I have written about this in my own blog.

I've been upping my gelatin while keeping glycine the same, and am currently at 8-10g glycine and 2-4g gelatin.

About 8-10g of gelatin and glycine combined.

10g glycine and 6g gelatin from direct supplements plus whatever gelatin I get from jello.

I have attached a screenshot with the breakdown of taurine and glycine in the diet. The most slimming diet (scallops) provided glycine and taurine that are equivalent to a human intake of ~15g glycine per day and ~22g of taurine per day. The mice did eat extra calories, I think about 3 times their daily allowance.