COMT and Protein — The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Protein Intake for Your COMT Variant

COMT stands for Catechol-O-Methyltransferase, which is an enzyme that plays a central role in breaking down catecholamines like dopamine, epinephrine (adrenaline), and norepinephrine (noradrenaline) in the brain and body. It therefore is central to the body’s regulation of mood, cognition, and stress.

Slow COMT (Met/Met Variant) leads to:

• reduced enzyme function,

• high tonic (baseline) dopamine and catecholamine levels,

• ultimately contributing to increased susceptibility to psychological stress, anxiety, and emotional dysregulation.

Fast COMT (Val/Val Variant) leads to:

• increased enzyme function

• lower tonic (baseline) dopamine and catecholamine levels,

• ultimately contributing to potentially impaired focus and motivation.

It’s therefore important to customize your diet, nutrition, and supplemental plan to your specific COMT variant. And a central element of this is protein intake. Note: This piece of the puzzle becomes even more relevant if your MAO-A, MAO-B, and DBH variants are aligned with your COMT variant.

Why protein intake needs to be modulated commensurate to COMT function:

At the microscopic level, the protein that you consume is basically made up of strings of amino acids, the fundamental building-block of protein. Almost all proteins contain some combination of the 20 basic amino acids that make up most protein in living beings, but each protein will contain different proportions of these amino acids. For example, meat tends to be higher in the amino acid methionine whereas plant-based proteins like beans and nuts tend to be lower in methionine but higher in lysine and arginine.

In the context of COMT function, the most directly relevant amino acids to our discussion are tyrosine, methionine, tryptophan, and glycine. Each of these amino acids has a different role in the regulation of COMT function, and how much you get of each very much depends on your COMT variant.

So what’s important is that you control the proportions of the different amino acids in your diet, more so than the total amount of protein that you consume.

First of all, generally how much protein do you need to consume?

Starting with the most general question—i.e. how much protein should someone with slow or fast COMT function consume—my answer is pretty straightforward:

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Keep in mind that this is not official medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is established through this article or through any other information provided on this website.