Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinagel. And today

I want to talk to you about Colleen, an important nutrient that you might never have even heard

of. Colleen is sometimes lumped together with the B vitamins, and while it's not technically

a B vitamin, it does share some characteristics that are common to that family of nutrients.

Many humans do have the ability to manufacture Colleen in our livers. We call that de novo

synthesis, or synthesis from new. But we can't make enough of it to meet our needs, and so

even though we can manufacture it, it is still considered an essential nutrient, meaning

we must get it, or at least some of it, from our diets. We need Colleen to make a lot of

biologically important molecules, including phosphatol Colleen, and the neurotransmitter acetyl Colleen.

It's critical to brain and nervous system function, and it plays a very important role in early

brain development, both in the womb and in early life. In fact, new research on the role of Colleen

in fetal brain development has prompted the American Medical Association to push for a higher level

of Colleen in prenatal vitamins. Up until recently, many prenatal formulations didn't even

include Colleen, or included it only in very small amounts. So the AMA would now like to see

450 milligrams of Colleen in prenatal formulations. Now one challenge with this is that Colleen is

sort of a bulky nutrient, and so including it in higher amounts in a prenatal would meet the

tablets a lot bigger. It might be more feasible to recommend that pregnant women take a Colleen

supplement in addition to their prenatal, but for now it's really up to women and their doctors

to make sure that this need is being met. Now Colleen has a lot of other important functions in the

body as well, including protecting the liver. A deficiency of this nutrient can lead to a

buildup of fat in the liver, which can eventually lead to liver damage, or even liver cancer.

I talked a little bit more about this in my episode on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

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