never heard of it before today, but that doesn’t mean anything. a quick google gives me
Neurotransmitter Replacement Therapy
and
curse the edit window!!
meant to add more what it is - figure out what neurotransmitters you are low on & supplement.
This generally involves an all-natural replacement of specific amino acids, vitamins and minerals. The plan we develop for you is designed to help your body produce the neurotransmitters it is lacking.
in theory, I suppose you could eventually go off SSRIs if it works.
Off the top of my head, it is ludicrous to think that a lack of neurotransmitters is likely to be due to a deficiency in “amino acids, vitamins, or minerals.” It’s like diagnosing a complex computer virus as being caused by “not enough electrons”.
My BS meter is pinging, but not very strongly. But it’s not BS to say that amino acids are unrelated! You can’t take pills for many neurotransmitters because they can’t cross the blood-brain barrier. But tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin and melatonin. And 5-HTP is between those in biosynthesis. Tyrosine eventually can become dopamine, epinephrine (adrenaline), and norepinephrine. Tryptophan depletion is shown to lead to depressive symptoms (but not in non-depressed people). Basically, you give people a bunch of amino acids, except tryptophan. Your body expects the tryptophan but doesn’t get it, leading to depression. By the way, we can’t really measure serotonin levels in humans, but we can measure 5-HIAA levels semi-invasively, which is a metabolite of serotonin.
So, in theory there is science behind it. The question remains whether this therapy is actually effective and not a waste of money.
First, for depression, all signs currently point to the glutamate pathway being implicated rather than serotonin, norepinepherine or dopamine.
Second, just providing your body with the raw precursors for various neurotransmitters is no guarantee that it will manufacture more of them
Third, many receptors like NMDA and AMPA that are implicated in depression are voltage gated and depend on other factors such as ion balance across the cell membrane as well as structural aspects that relate to those receptors such as the availability of serine and magnesium
And these are just the issues I can think of off of the top of my head.
I was thinking, why can’t you just eat more protein and your body breaks it down to what you need?
I’ll be here tomorrow if you think any deeper about it. 
Your cite does not back up your assertion. E.g. “30 to 40 percent of adults are unresponsive to these medications.” So the other 60-70% either involve serotonin or norepinephrine, or something else besides glutamate. Not “rather”; it just supports that not everybody is identical. And here’s the thing - glutamate receptors are everyfuckingwhere in your nervous system. It’s the most common excitatory neurotransmitter. Too little glutamate globally in your body means that every system is in trouble. This article is talking about making very selective drugs, not targeting glutamate in general.
There are instances of mental illness like pellagra being caused by a deficiency in an essential vitamin (B3 - niacin) and also the essential amino acid tryptophan I think, so there is some truth to that in extreme cases involving malnourishment. Plus there is probably an argument to be made for subclinical deficiencies that have psychiatric implications, but I don’t think these have been very well studied. (Just on general principle I would personally recommend everyone consider taking a chelated magnesium supplement together with a good multivitamin that has the DV of zinc and at least 400 IUs of D3, although this is more for general health rather than psychiatric reasons specifically)
The problem with trying to fake your body out is that it has too many feedback loops to ever be able to do it successfully. Even with psychotropics that target a particular neurotransmitter for example, it can choose to dial back the expression of the receptor for that transmitter, dial up the expression of the receptors that clear the transmitter from the synaptic cleft, or defeat the drug in a variety of other ways.
Also consider that many transmitters bind to multiple receptor subtypes. For example with serotonin, there is one type that is found almost exclusively in the GI tract. The anti-nausea drug Zofran is very specific to this receptor and is a wonderful anti-emetic. So presumably, even if you could increase serotonin through diet, the issue would then be how would you control where it was expressed and what types of tissues would it have an affinity for.
Right, but it’s a glutamatergic pathway that seems to be involved in the release of BDNF which seems to be the key to relieving depression. SSRI’s seem to exert their anti-depressant effect through neurogenesis which involves the release of BDNF - at least if I understand this article correctly.
Not legit at all. This total bullshit, quackery. Although quite a bit of of what they say on that web site about neurotransmitters is true, it is nonsense that they could get “out of balance” due to your diet, or that you are at all likely to run low on any, and likewise nonsense that you could improve their “balance” (inasmuch as that even means anything) by changes to your diet.
In general, absolute amounts in the brain of the different neurotransmitters, or even their relative amounts, are not what matters. What matters is that the right type of neurotransmitter is secreted (in miniscule amounts) at the right place in the brain at the right time. At the current or foreseeable state of medical science, there is very little we can do to help with this. Diet will not do anything, and drugs, although some can maybe of some very limited help, are a very blunt instrument.
You can. That is exactly what happens. Your body is perfectly capable of synthesizing all the neurotransmitters it needs from the foods in a normal diet (or even most fairly abnormal diets), and that is what it does.
Actually, it is very unlikely that you need more protein than you are already getting. Most western diets are already probably higher in protein than strictly necessary (not that there’s anything wrong with that). (Vegan may be an exception, but even that is not going to leave you short of neurotransmitters.) You only need neurotransmitters in tiny amounts anyway. Even if you have a very poor diet, there are lots of things your body will run out of long before it runs out of neurotransmitters.
Full disclosure - my statement was overly broad (from the article)