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Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is a leading expert in nutritional science with a background in the biochemistry and molecular biology of nutrition. He is the host of the "Mastering Nutrition" podcast and founder of Mitomewww.chrismasterjohn-phd.com www.mito.me www.youtube.com/@chrismasterjohn
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Broda O. Barnes & Charlotte W. Barnes, Solved: The Riddle of Heart Attacks
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hi Chris, how are you?
Good, how are you doing?
Very nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you as well.
I have enjoyed your content online for a few years now, so it's really solid
stuff.
And I thought, what better day than to bring Chris in, right after everybody
fucked up their
diet.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, I just want to tell a public health message that you did not get sleepy
because
the turkey was high in tryptophan.
Yeah, that's weird.
Isn't that a weird one?
That's a weird myth that's persisted for a long time.
I mean, the weirdest thing is the origins of it.
Apparently, it came from researchers in the, I'm sorry, not researchers,
journalists in
the 80s who were trying to come up with a reason to explain why everyone was
tired after Thanksgiving
meal, and they just looked as far as, oh, turkey has tryptophan, which is an
amino acid that
is the precursor to melatonin, which is, you know, you could call it a sleeping
chemical.
So it makes you get tired at night.
That must be why.
But it turns out that A, turkey's not that high in tryptophan.
Like, even whey protein is higher in tryptophan than turkey is.
And then B, tryptophan doesn't make you tired.
Yeah, I dare anyone to go out and have, like, just a slice of turkey for
breakfast and see
if it knocks you out.
It's overeating.
It's, like, so obvious.
I mean, people are eating tons of stuffing, tons of sides.
They're eating so much food.
You're gorging.
It's a gorging day.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, it's not good.
And if, you know, if you look at, like, a lion in the wild, one thing that you'll
notice
is that they are on the prowl when they are hungry.
They're alert.
Their body's revved up.
And then they have a feast, and they just fall asleep.
And the reason is that we're, you know, our—you can even see this in
physiology.
They call the parasympathetic nervous system the rest and digest system.
And that's because we are biologically wired to be alert when we need to work
to get our
food.
And then we're wired to, you know, eat that food, feel like we've gotten our
fill, we've
done what we need to do, and now we can rest and take a sleep.
Yeah, it's normal.
I mean, there's a great video of these lionesses, these female lions, after
they've hunted and
killed and ate all this food.
And they're just lying there like this with these enormous bellies, just like,
uh, just
like your uncle on the couch watching football, just, uh.
Yeah.
I, you know, and I think one—so one thing that I think we should talk about
today is I've
been in nutrition research for 21 years, and I'm, you know, I think the crowning
thesis
of my work so far is that we really want to be thinking about mitochondrial
function at
the root of all health and disease.
And so I think an interesting way to see sleep is it's like, why do we have to
sleep eight
hours a night?
And I think with dreaming, there's obviously other things going on there, but
deep sleep,
the—one of the primary things that's happening is you need to give your
mitochondria a rest
because your mitochondria are what produce all the energy that you need for, uh,
for producing
everything in your body, for maintaining it, for repairing it, uh, and for
distributing it
properly and for keeping it going across the lifespan.
And so your mitochondria are going to essentially take a nap, take a rest.
They don't go off because you die, but they really turn down the volume of the
work they're
doing.
But then you take your metabolic rate way lower than that, and so you can build
up the
reserves of energy that you had used up the day before.
Um, and so it's, you know, that—that can explain a lot of recent findings
that are coming
out as well because there was that recent study where they looked at sleep
deprivation with
creatine supplementation.
And so they randomized people to either drink a placebo drink or drink 20 grams
of creatine
through the night, and they kept them awake all night, and they had them do
brain puzzle
quizzes.
And when the subjects were getting the 20 grams of creatine, they did way
better on the brain
puzzles, but they also complained about being tired a lot less.
And so the conclusion is creatine is somehow acutely preventing your brain from
suffering during
sleep deprivation.
And the rationale there is, you know, mitochondria are the powerhouse of the
cell or the power
plant that's producing the energy.
Creatine is like the power grid, and it distributes that energy throughout the
cell.
Um, and so if the purpose of sleep is to restore the energy that you used up,
but then you intervene
by putting creatine in there, now you can keep that energy going, and you can
go more hours
before you need to get rest and restore that energy because you've increased
your capacity
to distribute it.
That makes sense.
Um, that—that is an interesting thing because it's fairly recent that people
have talked about
this, right?
I mean, it used to be—people only thought of creatine as being a muscle thing,
uh, to—to
help you recover and help you build larger muscles.
But then over the last, uh, I would say year or two, I started hearing talking
about cognitive
function, and maybe even more than a couple of years, but about how it improves
cognitive
function.
The sleep thing, though, is very recent, right?
Yeah, the sleep thing was, uh, in the last year.
There is some literature on traumatic brain injury where 20 grams of creatine
for six
months doubles the rate of healing.
Whoa.
Um—
That's incredible.
But it's—yeah, the—the—the field is in its infancy, but I—I think that
I actually
almost a decade ago did a podcast on just creatine.
I called it more than a performance enhancer because there's—if you just look
at where
it's distributed in the body, almost every cell and every tissue has the creatine
system.
And so it really is this—and if you look at the literature, they'll say, well,
it's
more important in certain cells.
Like, it's really important in your muscles because your muscles have this very
polarized—sometimes
they're at rest, sometimes their energy demand is going through the roof.
Um, and it's really important in, uh, like, long cells.
So, for example, your retina is part of your central nervous system, and it's a
really long
cell that's, uh, coming from the brain into the eye.
And, uh, creatine helps move energy back and forth.
But if—if you just look at where—instead of where is it most important, you're
just
like, where is it?
It's like almost every cell in your body has creatine.
And it's helping distribute the energy that the mitochondria make throughout
your whole
body.
And that includes pumping stomach acid.
It includes, uh, sperm, uh, swimming up the vaginal canal.
And so if you—if you just look at where it is, you would think that creatine
would help
a lot more than muscles.
Um, and it just turns out that all you need to do is start studying it to start
seeing those
effects.
Is there any studies on creatine and the improvement of eyesight?
I'm not sure.
They're—not that I know of.
But—
Because that kind of makes sense, right?
I mean, it makes complete sense.
Like, you would—when it comes down to it, your—your ability to produce
energy is producing,
maintaining, and repairing everything in your body.
So you would expect to see anything that does improve your energy metabolism
improve literally
everything.
So it would be kind of shocking if you had no effect on that.
Um, but I'm not sure if—if there are good, uh, trials done on that.
I haven't seen them.
Um, speaking of improving eyesight, uh, I started doing red light about, I
guess, about a year
and a half, two years ago.
Got a red light bed.
And, uh, completely stopped whatever macular degeneration I was going through
and reversed
some of it.
So I don't have perfect vision, but my vision's better.
Like, it's—it's definitely better.
And it's not just through the red light.
It's also—it's got to be some of the supplements that I'm taking.
One of them, uh, I take, uh, a supplement from Pure Encapsulations.
No affiliations with them.
I just buy it.
It's, uh, called Macular Support.
And, uh, let's see what's got in there.
It's got lutein and a few other supplements that have been known to—
Yeah, that'll do it.
Is that it?
Well, yeah.
I mean, so with the red light, it is very interesting.
Whenever you think of red light, you want to think of your mitochondria because
the main thing
that we know about red, near-infrared, and far-infrared that they're doing is
they're
actually going straight into the mitochondrial engines that produce the energy
and helping
them produce more.
And they're also ordering the water structure inside the mitochondria to make
those engines
produce energy more easily.
And there was a study a few months ago that—it was just like a one-day study,
but it showed
that blasting people in the chest with red light improved their eyesight when
it was measured
the next day.
And they covered their eyes to make sure that the red light didn't go into the
eye.
And so the conclusion is, you know, it's not a clinical study, right?
And it's not like a one-year, how does it, you know, does it really improve
your eyesight
over one year?
We don't know.
But it shows proof of principle that red light is doing something systemically
that does not
have to go to your eye that does improve your vision.
And to me, that makes sense because your vision is going to be improved by
anything that acts
directly in your eye to improve energy production.
But you've got coordinated energy metabolism going on through your whole body.
Like your liver is doing tons of stuff to try to make your eyes healthy and
make your brain
healthy and so on.
So it makes a lot of sense.
But that—so I don't doubt at all that the bed is part of that.
But the lutein and zeaxanthin are well known to accumulate in the macula where
they have
a very specific role in protecting against macular degeneration.
And actually, the best source of those is egg yolks from chickens that are fed
anything that
has them.
But marigolds are super high in them.
So if they feed the chickens marigolds, they get super high levels.
And the egg yolk has fat that helps them get absorbed.
So in terms of—I mean, this is—you could take this with some eggs.
But I should feed my chickens marigolds.
Yeah.
If you have—
I have chickens.
If you have chickens and if you're spending your money on a lutein zeaxanthin
supplement,
you might be able to get a—maybe the marigolds are cheaper.
Maybe I'll just double it up.
Yeah.
So this is all the ingredients.
Does this stuff make sense as something that would help support eyesight?
It does.
I mean, the vitamin A is going to—that's going to depend on your genetics in
terms of
how good are you at converting beta carotene into the form of vitamin A that we
need, which
is most abundant in liver and egg yolks.
It's dependent on genetics.
It's—yeah.
So there's—you need—beta carotene is this big.
And if you chop it in half, you get vitamin A.
And so you have an enzyme in your digestive system that does that.
But that enzyme is dependent on a lot of things going right.
So you need to have good zinc status, good iron status, good thyroid status,
and all kinds
of stuff like that.
And actually, seed oils decrease the conversion.
So if you take that with canola oil, you're going to get less vitamin A out of
it than if
you take it with, you know, eggs and butter.
And then vitamin A activation is also dependent on mitochondrial function, too.
So I—you know, but it makes sense.
Vitamin A is great for your eye.
Vitamin C is a great antioxidant.
N-acetylcysteine, great antioxidant.
The glutathione—the Cetria stuff, I'm—I'm kind of—I think it's—I think
it's a little
bit of a over—over-hyped in terms of some—you know, another type of glutathione
I think
would have worked fine.
What's the best glutathione?
Well, the best—is it liposomal?
The best glutathione is the glutathione that you make yourself from protein
that you eat.
But if you're going to supplement with glutathione, there—I don't—if you're
talking about
bang for the buck, I just think straight-up glutathione is good.
And there are studies suggesting that there's marginal absorption benefits for
certain special
types, you know, but then they charge three times as much for that type.
And it's like, well, am I getting three times more glutathione out of it?
Not really.
So, you know, some people swear by liposomal glutathione, and if some—you
know, if you
swear by it, and if it does—it's saying for you, great.
Do you think it's, like, 10% better?
I think the jury is out on whether there might be 10, 20% better value for
those things.
So if I'm—if I'm going to take glutathione, I'm just going to take glutathione.
Got it.
Okay.
Is this—what you're saying about producing your own glutathione, that's the
same thing
as, like, vitamin D, right?
It's way better when your body produces it.
Um, if it does.
I mean, I—I don't think there's anything wrong with getting vitamin D from
food, but
you don't—the thing is, you do need sunlight, right?
So it's—you at least need to get 30 minutes of sunshine in the morning, which
is not going
to give you vitamin D, and then you need to get, like, 10 or 15 minutes of unprotected
sunshine in the afternoon, um, to get—you get vitamin D from that, but you
get other benefits
from it as well.
So I—I wouldn't say that there—that it's necessarily better to get the
vitamin D from
the sun than from a vitamin D supplement or from eating fish or from eating cod
liver oil,
but you don't want to—you don't want to say, well, I don't need to go out in
the sun.
I'm just going to take vitamin D.
Then you're not going to get the benefits of the sun because the sun gives you
other benefits.
Got it.
Yeah.
Is there anything that you can do—say if you live in Seattle and you're in
the winter,
it's just raining constantly.
Is there a tanning bed that gives you some of that?
Yeah, I—I do think that there is, um, there is some risk of tanning beds.
I'm not 100% comfortable—I—when I lived in New York, I would try to spend
40 minutes
in the afternoon sunshine for three quarters of the year, and during the winter,
the UV
index just wasn't high enough, and I—I get eczema in the winter because I'm
not getting
enough sun.
And so I would use a tanning bed not to get tanned, but I'd use, like, two,
three minutes
at a time just because it just had a systemic effect in, like, preventing the eczema
that
I would get in the winter.
I think you have to be careful with it because there—there is some concern
that it's—that
people are just—if they're tanning to tan, they're—they're going to wind up
with
too much damage to their skin.
But what I would do is, um, for morning sunlight, I think you can get, like, a
lux meter app
and just—some people are—some people, they think that it's—there's no sun
outside,
but actually it's, like, a hundred times or a thousand times brighter than
indoors and
their eyes are adjusting, and so it's, like, cloudy or overcast, but there's
still a lot
of value in going outside.
So I would say if you use a lux meter and it's, like, under 10,000, you could
get a,
um, like, a light therapy light at home to use to just, like, turn it on and
not look
straight into it, but kind of have it going into your eyes.
Um, and then for vitamin D, uh, you could—you could do, like, tanning bed,
but just try
to really keep it minimal, like, go in—go in for two or three minutes, not
like you're
trying to tan, you're just—
What I was getting at, is there a different kind of tanning bed?
That's maybe—
Oh, there are—yeah, so there are—there are, uh, different ratios of
wavelengths,
and the ones that have more UVB are the ones that are going to give you more
vitamin D.
So if you're—if you're just going to a tanning bed place, you, um, probably
the people—the
staff there tell them that you want, like, mixed wavelength that gives you a
mix of, like,
surface tan and deep tan.
Okay.
I think that's how they—because they don't know the vitamin D science, so, um,
I think
that's how you have to get the—the bed that gives you more vitamin D.
You have to tell them I want a mix of surface and deep.
That's funny.
Um, speaking of red light, and speaking of, um, uh, therapy in—that helps
your mitochondria,
what is your thoughts on methylene blue?
Methylene blue seems to be a very controversial supplement.
Some people think it's amazing, and it's a panacea for all that ails you, and
other people
are like, what are we doing here?
Why are you putting dye in your body?
Your piss is coming out blue.
This is weird.
What school are you in?
Methylene blue is something that could do wonders for your mitochondria if you
need it, and could
really hurt you if you don't.
And I think that there are—there are certainly a lot of people raving about
it on the internet,
and it's because there are—it's a mix of things.
So there are people that are treating themselves for a problem in their
mitochondria that they
don't know that they have, and then they get an outsized voice because they're
the ones
raving about how much it helped them, and so there's, like, selection.
You know, if some—you don't get—if people didn't get a benefit or if they
just felt a
little worse, they don't go raving about it on the internet as much.
Yeah.
So that's part of it.
There is also—part of it is that when you get up to a dose of around 10
milligrams or
so per day, for perspective, in clinical trials of Alzheimer's, they're using
200 milligrams,
but you can buy, like, a 0.5 milligram on Amazon.
So a lot of people are using, like, 0.5 milligrams.
But once you get up to 10 milligrams or so, you're getting some degree of
pharmacological
antidepressant effect because it's an MAO oxidase—monoimmune oxidase inhibitor.
And so I do think that there are some people who are—they're like, oh, I feel
so much
better, and it's like, yeah, bro, you're taking an antidepressant.
So that's part of it.
But if you look at what it actually does, it is a very nonspecific rewirer of
how your
mitochondria produce energy.
And if—you can think of it like, let's say there's a main road in the city,
and it's
the best road, and that's why everyone's on it, but it's blocked, and then they
set
up detours, people are—they're going to help the traffic because that road is
blocked.
There's—you actually can't get through there.
And so the side roads that would take you somewhere are actually better because
they're
not blocked, right?
So in the context where you need the detours, the detours help you.
But if the main road was not blocked and they start putting up detour signs and
people start
going out in the side roads, they're not going to get to their destination
faster.
They're just getting tricked by the mess, the chaos that was created by people
putting
up detour signs that they didn't need.
So methylene blue is something that goes into your mitochondria and sets up detour
signs
all over the place.
How does it do that?
So it—all right.
So what your mitochondria do to produce energy is they extract—they—you
know, you have
a molecule like carbohydrate or an amino acid from the protein that you ate or
fatty acid
from the butter you're eating.
You've got to break that apart.
You've got to take out the energy, and you've got to synthesize ATP with it.
The ATP is the general energy currency of the cell.
So mitochondria produce usable energy from food in the form of ATP.
When they do that, they have a bunch of different pathways through which
electrons flow.
And methylene blue is able to grab those electrons and put them somewhere else.
So it—they call it a redox cycler.
So it's taking an electron here, it's shuttling it over there, it's taking an
electron here,
it's shuttling over there.
And so if you have this very—let's say the normal way for your mitochondria
to produce
energy has a main road where the electrons just flow straight through, methylene
blue is
coming in and it's just, you know, taking that electron over here, it's
throwing it in
over there, and so on.
So if you've got a road that goes like this, and you've got a blockage right
here, and
methylene blue is just taking something out there and it's putting it over
there, you
actually wind up getting better energy with it.
But if you don't have a blockage, you're just creating random chaos in the
mitochondria.
And in animal experiments, what they've done is they've said, okay, let's give
these
animals inhibitors of their mitochondria at specific locations and see what
methylene blue
does.
And if you don't have any inhibitors, and if the animal is genetically healthy,
then you
add methylene blue, they get less ATP.
So the mitochondria is less effective at converting food to usable energy.
But if they do have an inhibitor, their ATP production goes down, you add methylene
blue, it
goes back up, right?
So if there's a blockage to get around, methylene blue helps.
So I think what's important if you really want to make sure that people are
using
methylene blue right is to actually do mitochondrial testing that will tell you
whether there was specific blockages are there.
I ran a biochemical optimization program a while back, and one of the clients
that I
had in there, he tried methylene blue, and he only got up to a half a milligram
or a
milligram, and his mood was worse, his fatigue was worse.
He had more anxiety, a bunch of problems that, you know, the dose was too low
to say it was
doing a pharmacological messing with his neurotransmitters.
And so I think it was just making his mitochondrial function worse.
And so the mitochondrial testing that we did on him showed that, you know, he
was not a candidate
for methylene blue.
And he actually had, you know, some really weird, like his mitochondria were
best at using a specific
amino acid cysteine and for energy, kind of weird and idiosyncratic.
And in his case, it was interesting because he had actually gravitated to a
steak-only carnivore diet, and he didn't feel like it fixed him, but he felt
like it, you know, took the edge off.
Like he was 50% better on the steak-only carnivore diet.
50% is a lot.
Well, yeah, it's a lot, right.
But he wanted the other 50%.
That's why he was coming to me.
So what was, you know, and figuring this out didn't get him to 100%, but it got
him to, you know, to get days with 75% because, you know, because he could use
strategic cysteine supplementation
to mimic the benefit he was getting from the steak, but he would be able to,
you know, be still in the fasting state because his workouts were better in the
fasting state and things like that.
So figuring that out allowed him to, you know, get from 50% to 75%.
But the methylene blue was putting him down at 5% instead of 50, you know.
Can I ask how old he was?
He wasn't that old.
He was in maybe 40.
I forget exactly, but 40, give or take five years.
And is that an age-dependent thing, like mitochondrial dysfunction?
Is it more common in older people?
For sure.
So what, I mean, I would argue that mitochondrial dysfunction and aging are the
same thing.
And, you know, there's a bunch of theories of aging, but if you take them all,
you can always ask the question, why?
There's like the information theory of aging.
Like, why is the information not being carried out correctly?
Or the oxidative stress theory of aging.
Well, why are you making more oxidative stress?
And I actually think it's way more simple than anyone is thinking about it.
It's mitochondrial energy production is producing everything in your body.
It's repairing it.
It's maintaining it.
And it's putting where it belongs.
That means that mitochondria produce the energy that they need to produce
everything in the mitochondria, right?
And so if you have a little gap in your energy production, like let's say you
get, I think one way to think of aging is, well, I've just, I've suffered
through so many cumulative insults.
Like, I got sick so many times.
I got injured so many times.
I had days where I didn't eat optimal nutrition so many times.
And I think what all those things are doing is like, well, you know, you, that
period of overtraining that you did, your mitochondria were, were forced to
help you give you the energy for, you know, that the extra set of squats that
you did.
And they had a little bit left over for themselves and they got, you know, a
half a percent worse at producing energy.
And so that sets up a vicious cycle because now, now that they could not repair
themselves as well, now they get a little bit worse and get a little bit worse.
And what you see, um, in the literature is that as people age starting around
age 18 through age 70 to 80, you're losing your mitochondrial function, average
rate of 1% per year.
So by the time you're 70, you have half the energy that you started out with
that baseline.
And that I, I, I think what explains that is, is just the vicious cycle of the
mitochondria got, they lost a quarter percent here or a quarter percent there.
And they just started repairing themselves less effectively because they're the
engines fueling everything, including that.
And so, but you know, the good news is that age only explains 25% of mitochondrial
function.
So it's the average that's going down at 1% per year.
The average person is half producing half the energy at age 70 than they were
at age 18.
But the spread around that is huge.
And with that, to me, the way that I spin that is that means that 75% of this
isn't under your control.
You're going to, you're going to go in a downward trend, but you're in control
of whether, you know, you're way undershooting that trend or you're way overshooting
it.
What you want to do is make your mitochondrial function as good as it can be at
any given age so that that downward trend will, you know, it'll be a lot slower.
And you can get to age 70 and you're not docked 50%.
You're just docked 10%.
And I think that's what's happening when you see some of these 70-year-olds who,
who, you know, are more fit than a lot of 25-year-olds, you know?
Yeah, interesting.
So what are the primary factors in regards to being able to maintain your
function?
Well, I think that everyone has idiosyncratic things.
And I think mitochondrial testing is, is very important.
But if I were to pick five things that just everyone should be doing for their
mitochondria, a lot of it does look like health advice you might get somewhere
else, but it actually is the best stuff, right?
So we mentioned creatine.
And I think creatine is really important because it's not in the mitochondria
so much as it carries forth the mitochondrial energy of the rest of the cell.
But that also feeds back in the repair functions for the mitochondria.
And so I think creatine, optimizing your creatine status is super important.
And I think that there, everyone who's not eating one or two pounds of meat per
day should be, should probably be taking creatine.
And you can think of it as, if you're eating red meat and you're eating it rare,
you can err on the side of one pound.
And if you're eating, and I would include as red meat salmon, which is like a
reddish fish and is actually quite high in creatine.
If you're eating white meat, white fish, and you're eating it well done, you
want to err on the side of two pounds because they don't have as much creatine.
Then you cook the creatine out of them and you wind up with much lower dose.
We should probably say salmon.
You're talking about wild salmon versus farm salmon, which has a dyed pink skin.
Well, it's not the red color.
I think it's coincidence that it's, that it's, I think the red color is
coincidence.
It's just a helpful way to think about it.
But it probably is the case at least, like every Atlantic farm salmon that I've
seen is, you can tell that it's, well, if you look up in a database, it's way
higher in fat.
But you can tell by looking at it that it just doesn't have that lean look that
wild salmon has.
So I think creatine is a function of the lean tissue mass.
And it might be the case that wild salmon are doing a lot more swimming.
Like maybe the wild environment is encouraging them to use their muscles in a
way that increases their creatine synthesis.
That wouldn't surprise me.
I have tried to steel man the case of, could there be a vegan diet that would
make you not need to supplement with creatine?
And the steel man that I've got for you is you'd have to be eating a half a
kilogram of tofu and a half a kilogram of quinoa per day.
And that's not typically what, and I might rip a hole in your digestive system,
but that's, but that's not typically.
Um, so I, I think that, um, I, most vegans should probably just supplement with
creatine and could call it a day there.
Um, so that's creatine.
I, we mentioned, uh, sunlight.
So sunlight is when you wake up in the morning.
I said before that your mitochondria have not gone to sleep literally, but they've
really slowed down there.
It's like they're on a nap and there's a transition when you wake up or the
mitochondria have to say, oh, you've woken up.
Now I need to, I need to wake up and I need to start producing more energy.
Um, and sunlight going into your eyes, being translated into your brain is the
signal that actually tells your brain to organize that.
And so what happens as a result of that is that signaling helps your mitochondria
adapt and start producing everything.
And it actually helps them adjust.
And if you don't have the morning sunlight, you are, you're going to have your
mornings full of suboptimal energy metabolism that is initiating that, that
vicious cycle of aging is that's what I believe.
Um, and then it's, and then it's also the case that the red and infrared light
from the sun is very beneficial to the mitochondria.
The best time to get that would be in the morning.
Um, when you go out in the afternoon, you've got to deal with like, can I get
two hours of this without getting burned?
But if you go out in the morning, you can stay out there for one or two hours
and you can get a lot of red and infrared light without worrying about burning,
uh, burning wavelengths.
And then the, I think the beds and other devices at home are great.
And where you want to start thinking about that is I'm getting benefit from red
and near infrared light, but I'm getting more.
I know that I could get more benefit if I got more of it than I'm able to get
through sunlight.
So start me, start getting those wavelengths with sunlight as your base and
then do whatever you want on top of that with whatever seems to be working well
for you.
So nutrition would be number three and every nutrient is needed for everything
in your body, but your mitochondria are using all kinds of nutrients and the,
there's this idea that floats around in society that nutritional deficiencies
are a thing of the past.
But if you just look at surveys, 93% of Americans are getting less than they
need of at least one nutrient.
30% have verifiable blood markers of at least one nutritional deficiency and 6%
have blood markers verifying more than one nutrient deficiency.
And I think those are all underestimates because when you're just looking at
the official stats on like how much of each nutrient should you eat, there are
way, there are a lot of people that have needs for way more, right?
So I think those stats are grossly underestimating how many people need to get
better nutrition.
So I think everybody should be getting better nutrition.
To kind of high level what that looks like, I think some good rules of, there's
lots of ways to skin a cat, but some good rules of thumb are different people
will do better with more plants or more animals.
But to, when you do eat animals, you should be eating them nose to tail.
So at least try to work in liver, at least try to work in bone broth or, you
know, something like that.
The closer to nose to tail you can eat your animals, the better.
Do try to diversify across proteins because there's just different vitamin and
mineral profiles in different types of protein.
Like if you can eat shellfish, eat some shellfish.
If you can eat fish, eat some fish.
You can eat dairy, eat some dairy.
And the more you diversify across those proteins, the better.
Most people don't eat enough protein.
Good rule of thumb would be at least a third of your plate should be protein.
But if it's, if you're talking like eggs and dairy products, you've got to
double that because they just, the amount of space they occupy per unit of
protein that they're giving you is, you know, a third of your plate is eggs is
not going to give you enough protein.
And then I think try to eat as broadly as you can from different types of
carbohydrates.
If you have to leave out something, leave out grains, try to eat whole, unprocessed
foods and try to eat most of your, try to eat 80% of your foods cooked at home
or prepped at home or whatever instead of eating out.
And make sure your digestion is in good order.
And those are kind of the, you know, the broad basis of nutrition.
Um, and, um, exercise is, is a very interesting one.
Um, so if you exercise is incredibly important to the signaling that produce
mitochondria, but why is that?
It's because you need mitochondria to produce energy for the exercise that you're
doing.
So I think a lot of people are too reductionist when they look at what type of
exercise should you do for your mitochondria.
If you try to do a study that says like, I'm trying to get more mitochondria in
my skeletal muscle, what's, what exercise is going to do it?
You're going to do, you're going to see endurance exercise outperforming other
things.
And that's because endurance activity requires more mitochondrial function in
the muscle.
Um, if you're doing like hypertrophy or strength training and you're doing
short sets, your muscles burning a lot of glycogen, it's less dependent on its
mitochondria.
So you're not going to see the mitochondrial function there, but that doesn't
mean you're not improving mitochondrial function because now all that really
means is the liver is stepping up to assist the muscle.
Like if, if you're doing sprinting, your muscles burning through tons of
carbohydrates, making a lot of lactate.
If that lactate's not being metabolized in the skeletal muscle, it's going to
the liver to get converted back to glucose.
So your liver, now you're training your liver's mitochondria when you're doing
strength training, you're doing hypertrophy.
Um, so I think the right way to look at it is just, you should be exercising
all the things that are functions that you need to keep.
And that means endurance, it means strength, it means mobility, it means
agility, it means balance, it means proprioception, it means being able to
respond to your environment.
I think, you know, to some degree, like just playing a sport that has other
people in it is important because if someone's throwing a Frisbee and you need
to react to that, you're training mitochondria in your brain that are able to
energize the systems that provide your reaction time.
And I think cognitive, um, you know, exercise for your brain is things like
working on your memory and on your, uh, creative synthesis and all, all those
different aspects.
And I, I do think that a lot of people are thinking about this when they're 25,
they're like, well, I don't care if I can memorize a string of 25 numbers, but
you're going to care if you can't remember anything when you're 75, you know?
So I, I think that we, we need, really need a broad, um, thought about this,
but, but by the way, do you know what athletes live the longest from the, from
the pros?
Hmm.
Let me guess.
Baseball.
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's actually gymnasts and pole vaulters have, have
eight years on the general population.
Um, and if you, if you look at, there was a study that came out earlier this
year and it tallied up all of the pro sports players from all of the countries
who had the dates of their death published and who were, who were notable
enough to have been, had an article published about them.
And so they had many hundreds, I forgot, I forgot the exact sample size, but
they were able to, um, uh, statistically adjust the, the mortality rate to the
general population from which the athlete came.
So if, you know, if it was a Greek athlete, they were adjusted to the mortality
rate of Greece when they, when they died, um, like how, what you would expect
after adjusting for location and age and so on.
And in the male athletes, you had gymnasts and pole vaulters with eight years
on the population and you've got cyclists who've, and of course you've got sumos,
sumo wrestlers are 10 years below.
And you have a lot of sports like that have high injury rates that are
especially a lot of stuff that has impacts to the hands, martial arts and
things like that.
We're probably the sport itself and its impact on training your body's energy
systems is positive, but just the injury rate is, is taking you out.
So you're, you're kind of like not, you're kind of in the middle, you're very
close to the general population.
Um, cyclists only have two years on the general population.
And so what, what I thought was interesting, I think a few things are
interesting about that.
So first of all, there's a lot of people in the longevity space are taking most
of their information about how they should train for longevity from people who
specialize in cycling.
Really?
Well, I, yeah, I'm not going to name names, but there's, you know, a lot of
just the people out there who are, you know, that's where it's coming from.
And I, you know, it makes a lot of sense that cycling is, you know, it's good
for cardiorespiratory fitness.
There's a lot of data that having good cardiorespiratory fitness is a key
factor for longevity.
But when you look at a study where gymnasts and pole vaulters have six extra
years on the cyclists and the cyclists only have two extra years on the general
population, I'm like, huh, what, you know, it's not all about the cardiorespiratory
fitness.
And so when I think about there's, it's, you know, it's an observational study.
You can't prove cause and effect, but it just does make you think.
And the way that I think about that is a few things.
So first of all, the commonalities between gymnasts and pole vaulters, they're,
it's definitely not height because gymnasts tend to be short and pole vaulters
are tall.
And so the height cancels out.
Definitely they're fit.
They do both have, it is interesting that they have, you know, cyclists have a
good lower body and gymnasts and pole vaulters have a good upper body.
So I do think that's interesting that it does make you, it does make you wonder
if you could skip leg day, but I don't advocate skipping leg day, but, um, but
to me, like what I think is actually going on here is, um, I, I think that
functionality of movement throughout the whole body to facilitate.
Um, very, uh, to facilitate the kind of skills that they have, um, is, is
training, it's training in things that are getting left out when you just make
sure that your heart and lungs are able to support your running or your cycling.
And I think that some of those involve, are probably related.
I don't know what they're not dying of.
So presumably they're getting less heart disease or like getting less cancer
and they're getting less neurological disease because that's what people are
dying of.
Right?
Like the, in the average, if you get a far enough for someone to analyze why
you died, um, you know, they're like diabetes and hip fractures and things like
that are, are hitting younger people.
But in general, if people are dying cause they got old, they're dying of heart
disease first, cancer second, and neurologic, like they outlive those two
things.
You get this diverse spread of things that people die of in neurologic, diverse
neurological diseases becomes pretty heavy.
So I think cardiorespiratory fitness is probably the biggest thing in
preventing heart disease, but cancer becomes very interesting because.
There was a, there was a, there was a study in rodents that showed that
stretching prevents tumor growth.
And I thought this was wild.
I first heard about this on one of Huberman's shows.
And so I looked up the study and I was like, this is wild because I happen to
know some other things about immune function.
So one, uh, thing is that when, when in T cells, which are important both to
prevent infections and are also important because they attack you during autoimmunity.
And they're also important because they kill cancer for T cells to be activated.
What they do is they don't have enough energy themselves.
So they push off the local environment and that pushing off creates, um, motor
proteins inside that generate the energy to activate the T cell.
And what cancers do is they modify their extracellular environment to
compromise that because it's harder for the T cell to push off of it.
Now I know another thing from Crohn's research, which is that the best way to
cure Crohn's disease besides some of the drugs that they're on is a liquid diet.
And the recent research on how the liquid diet works is that it removes the
pressure in the intestine that is pushing out and is causing inflammation to
activate and attack the body.
Right.
So I'm synthesizing these three things.
And I'm like, this makes a lot of sense that the relative proportions and how
stretched out and like, what is the quality of your joint tissue and things
like that probably has a lot of severely underappreciated, uh, causation in
terms of cancer and autoimmune disease.
So I think it would be very interesting to see if actual like functional
mechanical activity, like if you optimize for functional mechanical activity,
such that you can swing around from acrobat, uh, from a trapeze and flip around
in the air and swing on rings and push yourself up and stuff like that.
Does that pay forward into better immune function because your body is more
properly structured?
I can't prove that, but I think it's very interesting to think about for, for,
for those two exercises.
Um, and then it is very interesting to me that gymnasts and pole vaulters both
spend a lot of time upside down and they don't stay upside down for very long,
but they just, they repeatedly are upside down quite a bit.
Right.
Right.
And so this is just, again, this is all just hypothesizing interesting ideas,
right?
So one interesting idea is that a vibration plate is the sedentary man's
gymnastics and that, you know, flipping upside down, um, is better at
circulating body fluids than walking.
And like a vibration plate is better than walking, but actually spending time
upside in the upside down state and flipping around is actually very good for
circulating the fluids in your body.
I don't, I, you know, I can't prove any of this, but it's all very interesting
to think about.
But what I can't, what I kind of conclude from this is you don't want to get
sucked into just optimizing VO2 max or something like that.
You really want to, the lesson from the gymnast is like, what are all the
things that a gymnast can do that I can't do?
And I should be able to approximate them in the best way that I can.
And I take that a little bit more, more literally.
So I, I actually do like, uh, I am trying to convert all my workouts into like,
what's the gymnastic version of this?
Um.
And you think it's because of flipping?
You don't think it's just, I'm just, I think they're both involving
coordination, explosive movement.
Right.
And I, I think that, I think that, I think that, yes.
So I think this, the skill training is, is big for spill off into neurological
disease because, but I'm just trying to connect them to the three things.
So I, like, like, I, I, I, I'm not sure exactly what they have lower rates of
death from.
We, we need more studies to, to see that.
But the, um, but the body mechanics, I think is a very interesting possible
explanation of why they'd have lower rates of cancer.
And the, what you just said, I think is a great explanation of why they would
have lower rates of neurological disease.
And I think it's kind of like, you know, if you look at, I think another thing
that people mistake in the longevity space is they spend too much time thinking
about.
Revert, like reverse engineering, uh, a hundred backwards.
What do I want to not have lost by that time and not enough time just being in
peak function?
Because if you look at bone mass, for example, bone mass goes, uh, up until you're
in your mid twenties, maybe 25 to 30.
There's a little bit difference with men and women, but then it just goes down
after that.
And if you want to have good bone mass, when you're 75, the, like the most
important asset you could possibly have is to have really good peak bone mass.
So I really think that like, it's just like I said before, you might not think
memorizing a string of 25 numbers is important at any age, but you know, if, if
you're going to have really awesome peak memory, that gives you a lot of room
to decline later on.
Whereas if you're trying to reverse engineer, like what you don't want to be
able to not remember when you're 75, I think you're just setting the bar way
too low.
Right. So if you're, if you're 20, you should be thinking about like, what are
all the sports I can't do and not, you know, I'm not saying there's anything
wrong with picking a sport, but, but I do think it's, it would be good for
everyone.
When they're young enough to do so to just try a different sport once a year
and maybe they don't love it and they don't fall in love with it, but maybe
they learn something like, Oh, I didn't realize I couldn't do that.
So for example, I did a last year, I did a little bit of BJJ and I did a little
bit of boxing and I was like, God damn, like my feet don't move like they used
to, um, in boxing.
And in BJJ I was, I was getting a little dizzy doing forward and backward rolls
and I was like, I don't spend enough, this is before I started thinking about
the gymnast being upside down.
I was like, I don't spend enough time being upside down.
So I was like, so I bought some mats and then now I just, you know, I do, I do
one forward and backward roll every day, no matter, I don't do BJJ right now,
but I just do one forward and backward roll every day as part of my morning
routine.
Um, but I've also switched, like, I was like, why would I overhead press when I
could try to do, um, I can do wall pushups now.
I, my hope is by next year I'll be able to do handstand pushups, but I've, I'm
working on a handstand right now.
So we'll see how that goes.
But, um, I think just cause you can focus on one thing.
You can really miss out that like, Oh, my favorite workout activities don't, I
mean, this is how many people are doing all their favorite workout routine
activities.
And forgetting that they don't have any rotation, they don't have any side
bending, you know, like, like if, if you would just, you just like try a
different sport and be like, Oh, what am, what did I not realize I wasn't able
to do at all?
And, and then pick that and put it in your workout.
Um, you know, cause if you've got a great programmer, then maybe your workout
is perfect, but I think most of us are, can like be gravitate towards some of
the exercises that we think are good.
And even if you, even if you think you're mixing it up, like CrossFit, CrossFit
managed to eliminate rotation from everything.
Like that, like every sport that involves throwing a ball involves rotation,
right?
They do sometimes they throw the ball sideways against a wall.
There's, there's some rotation.
Maybe they worked it in when I did CrossFit, the ball throwing we did was wall
balls.
And it was, so it was like, depends on, I think it depends entirely on who's
teaching it, but if you're doing windmills, windmills are kind of a form of
rotation.
There's a lot of ab exercises they do that are rotational.
Yeah.
All right.
So I, that maybe that wasn't fair, but, um, but my point is that like a lot, a
lot, a lot of, a lot of people are not doing any rotation.
Um, and, and so I, I just, I just, you just want to tap into that, that
diversity of like, what functions am I not exercising when I exercise them?
When we're talking about skills, we're talking about the neurological system
and the cognitive system synergistically in a dance.
Um, when you talk about old people and one of the things that happens when
cognitive function declines is you, you lose your ability to do puzzles.
And one of the ways to stave that off, they believe is like do crosswords, do a
bunch of different things, your concept chess, do something that's actively
making your mind fire and work.
Wouldn't it just make sense that a skill versus just a workout, just bench
pressing and squats and stuff like that, but it's an actual skill where you do
like Muay Thai hitting pads or even light sparring that you're, you're thinking
as well as exercising, which is very different.
Because you're, you're, you're, you're consciously aware of your opponent's
movement, you're calculating it, you're, you're, you're trying to time things.
There's a whole dance going on between your body and your mind that doesn't
really exist in straight workouts.
Yeah.
That alone, I would think would fight off a lot of the age related decline in
physical activity or physical function.
Yeah.
I think there are, you mentioned a couple of things in there.
So I think it's a separate thing to have a skill and have strategy and to have
reaction time.
But I, but I think you definitely want to be hitting all those bases.
So I think it's, it's good to have a general checklist of what should you be
exercising and see that it like takes strength and, and break it down into the
different planes.
And then also take skill, you know, it's hard to work everything at once, but
you got to find a way to, um, maybe, maybe you cycle through switching your
focus, but you find like, what is, if I, if I worked on really being able to
jump rope without tripping my feet up.
So, um, if I, if I worked on this last quarter, um, how am I going to take that
skill and not lose it?
For me, for me, for example, like I really focused on jump roping when I
realized how horrible I was at it when I was forced to do in boxing.
Um, and so I, I very intensively tried to get good at jump roping and now I don't
want to work on it anymore, but I've just taken in like, okay, every morning I
have to do 50 uninterrupted jump ropes just in the course of my warm warmup.
Just to kind of keep whatever skills that you've developed.
Yeah, just to, just to make sure that like, I'm not losing the basic capacity
to do that, that coordination.
Yeah.
And if I start to, then I realize I have to work on it more.
Mm, yeah.
Um, new things I think would enhance that even more maybe than things that you're
very comfortable with and things you're very efficient at.
Like, say if you're an athlete in whatever sport and you say, you know, I'm
going to try jujitsu or I'm going to try martial arts.
Like, something completely new like that where you're working out but you're
really thinking because you've got to like really concentrate.
It's not like a natural movement to throw a sidekick.
You have to really concentrate on picking your knee up, twisting your body and
all that jazz.
Like, I think stuff like that would, you know, just keep everything firing, no?
I think you, yeah, I mean, I think you should do a mix.
Like, you always want to be pushing yourself to a new, um, to new achievements
but then you also, I think you want to structure things so that you don't lose
the ones that you, that you did.
Right.
Like, I, I think a lot of us go through life just making achievement and losing
it.
Oh, yeah.
And we're like treading water and going nowhere.
I, when I really got into jujitsu, I stopped doing any kickboxing for a long
time.
And every now and then I would just hit the bag and just like, oh, I still can
do it.
But then, um, I started training Muay Thai again and it was kind of shocking
how long it took me to get, like, the flow back.
Like, where it really, like, comes off smooth.
Everything seemed like a little labored and it was just disheartening.
Like, oh, I don't really have these skills.
Like, I have to, like, re-acquire them.
You know, I know how to do it.
I've done it.
But it's just like, right now, everything's a little, the pathways are filled
with mud.
You know what I mean?
It's not clean.
It's not nice and sharp.
Everything is a little funky.
And, you know, but if you want to get good at jujitsu, you don't have time for
two hours of Muay Thai a day.
You just don't.
You know, so it's like you got to pick your poison.
You got to pick what you like and what you don't like.
Yeah, well, I think you have to decide what your goal is and what your metric
is.
Like, there's no way that anyone is going to be good at, like, seven, you know,
going to be elite level at any two sports or, like, great at any seven, right?
So, I think you have to say, like, okay, do I want to be really good at Muay
Thai?
And that's, you don't have to do that to have healthy aging.
Right, right, right.
There are things that you do at Muay Thai that you do have to be able to do to
have healthy aging.
So, if you're just thinking about it from the perspective of how do I know that
I'm engaging in healthy aging, I think you don't want to say, like, oh, I need
to be as good as I ever was at Muay Thai.
You just have to say, okay, like, why am I bad at some of that?
And is that something that I need in general?
And I think oftentimes by doing something like that, you can think about it and
you can realize, oh, what I really can't do is I'm not agile anymore.
I really can't, like, shift my weight quickly anymore.
Or I really can't, like, my reaction time is slow.
Like, I just keep getting hit in the head because I don't move it.
You know, if you're realizing those things, then I think you've got to you have
to find some way to train those because you need those for everything.
And it's just it's easy to not challenge yourself in life and don't realize
what you're losing.
So you do have to challenge yourself with something you're not able to do to
figure out what you're weak in.
One of the things I want to bring up you brought up earlier, you were talking
about martial artists and perhaps, like, injuries accumulating over time and
you lose some of your function because of that.
Like, you mentioned hands, hand injuries.
Is that something that people need to take into consideration that maybe they
don't, that maybe just physical damage, like, in terms of getting hit and
physical damage perhaps from overtraining, physical damage certainly from
cutting weight.
You know, a lot of these guys cut weight and they're basically on death's door
24 hours before a fight, which is, I think, completely insane.
And the most avoidable damaging thing about martial arts competition.
And yet it's ubiquitous.
It's like almost everyone does it.
Yeah, I mean, I think there is a degree of subjectivity to it.
If you're, you know, if your idea of what a life well lived is, is to win an
event that might have you die in the next three years, then, you know, how are
you going to argue with that, that value that someone has adopted?
But if, if you are thinking about it from the perspective of how do I stay
healthy through, how do I live a long, healthy life, then injury prevention has
to be your number one consideration, not your number two.
I think even if you're trying to say, like, how, how can I be the strongest I
could be, you would still need injury prevention to be number one.
Because, you know, how many people take three months off from a lift that they're
working on and wind up six months behind where they had been when they start
again as a result of that injury?
And where would they have been if they spent that six months getting stronger?
And if you're going to do that every two or three years, like that's taking a
lot, like a huge toll off even the skill that you could develop and your
maximal capacity at that.
But like I was saying at the beginning, I, I do, I really think that the
simplest explanation for why mitochondrial function declines 1% per year and
gets cut in half by age 70 is just this, like, when I was injured, my mitochondria
were completely obsessed with healing from that injury.
And a little bit came out of the account used to repair the home base.
That's what I was getting at.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So for someone who's had, like, say, a martial artist who's had broken hands,
broken ribs, knee surgery, shoulder surgery, a lot of these guys have gone
through a bunch of stuff like that.
Like, so each one of those things is taking a small toll.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not something that people consider.
You think, oh, you recovered from that injury.
Now you're 100%.
But you're 100% with the tax of having recovered from that injury.
Yeah.
And a lot of people aren't necessarily fully recovered from the injury either.
Oh, many, many aren't.
Yeah.
Many, many aren't.
I, you know, I, I talked to, to, to a guy once who was, you know, he got
injured in marathon running and he, he thought he was recovered.
I thought he wasn't recovered.
And he was, thought he was, there was some kind of metabolic stuff wrong with
him because he's getting sick all the time.
I'm like, bro, you didn't recover yet.
Like, what are you doing going out and doing all that running?
Like.
What was the injury?
I don't remember the, I forgot the specific injury, but, uh, one of, one of the
common running injuries.
Yeah.
One of the things that's really common in MMA, um, is someone getting knocked
out and then getting knocked out again because they come back too quickly.
Uh, it happened recently in a big fight.
Um, uh, and it's just, there's, there's a thing that happens with these guys
where they just want to get back in there and get a win.
And a lot of times they're like, I'll be ready.
I won't get hit again.
I know what I did wrong.
I'll, I'll be better this time.
But they're more vulnerable now.
Like they can get knocked out.
It, is this just neurological damage?
Is this, this just a function of the concussion?
Or do you think it's a function of the concussion, the recovery from it and the
diminishing capacity of the body because it had to recover from that traumatic
injury?
I think it's all of those.
It's the, but that too, right?
So it's not just the fact that you got knocked out and your brain is more
vulnerable now.
It's like, no, no, no.
Your body's more vulnerable.
You're probably not as strong as you were.
You're probably not recovering as quickly.
Yeah.
I mean, the, the brain is, it's a small part of the body, but it's massively
outsized in terms of the energy that it consumes.
And so think about if, think about if you're, you know, if you're actually
healing the ability for it to, like, if it's just sucking even more
disproportionate energy from the body and just think about how much the rest of
the body works to support the brain.
Like the liver is working all day long to make the brain get enough energy.
So, yeah, there's, there's no way that healing from a brain injury is not
taking a toll systemically.
That's impossible.
But to accelerate or enhance that, creatine, you think would be a very good
option?
I mean, creatine is one of the ones that's been demonstrated to do that.
And it, and it's been studied 20 grams a day.
I don't think anyone really knows, like, do you need 20?
Is 30 better?
Could have been done with five.
But the, most of the brain research is being done with doses around 20 grams.
And there's, the thought is that the, you know, the muscles are going to take
first dibs and you need to have a high dose to get it to the brain.
We don't, there's a lot we don't know about that.
But, you know, as a default, like if I was healing from a traumatic brain
injury, I would, I would take the creatine.
And then I, you know, I think when, if you have something that's this serious,
you do want to, like, know what your limiting bottlenecks are.
So I think actually doing mitochondrial testing is, that's, like, one of the
applications would be, like, oh, now it's really important that I have a six-month
window where I need to maximize everything I can.
And so, you know, testing to understand your unique needs, I think, would be,
it would be a way to supercharge that process when it's needed.
And I think that there are, and, you know, so to take this back to, like, what
can people do in general, I think methylene blue, you mentioned, is one of
those ones where, like, I wouldn't even, I personally wouldn't even take it
without testing showing that I need it.
But CoQ10 is an interesting one because CoQ10 is actually made in the body and
it is found in food.
And so there, you know, methylene blue was, a lot of people emphasized that it
was the first, it was the first drug.
So it was, like, the first, you know, example of pharma, basically.
But before that, it was actually patented as something that would turn your
clothes blue but wouldn't come out in the wash.
That was the patent on methylene blue.
And, you know, whereas CoQ10, you eat food, it's there.
Your body makes it itself.
What kind of food is it in?
Heart is the best.
And so I was saying before, you should be eating nose to tail.
Like, if you're going to eat meat, you should be eating heart.
I personally, most of my meat is actually a blend of, it's like 60% ground beef
and the rest of it is a blend of liver, heart, kidney.
And there are some other, mine is just liver, heart, and kidney.
There are some other companies that I've seen recently come out with ones that
include spleen and adrenals and very small percentages.
But that's, I do strongly believe in a food first, pharma last approach.
And that doesn't mean, like, I'm against pharma, but it means that even with
supplements, like, if you can meet a need with food, you should meet the need
with food.
You should use supplements in a strategic sense, not as a replacement for a bad
diet.
And those supplements should, you know, what you would do next is say, like,
okay, I'm really having trouble getting enough whatever nutrient.
Maybe I'll supplement to compensate for that.
But I think you should go down the line with, you know, other things that are,
like, supplements of things that occur naturally in your body that are, of
course, safe to be in your body because they're always going to be there.
Maybe you can supplement with that to help break a vicious cycle of aging or to
stimulate a virtuous cycle of healing that, you know, I would – once you're
getting all your nutrients and you're trying to do that from food, I think that
you could start playing around with that stuff.
But even then – so CoQ10 is a great example.
I would try eating more heart before I would try supplementing with 400
milligrams a day of CoQ10, for example.
Can I ask you this?
Does it matter if it's chicken heart, beef heart?
Is there a superior?
I don't think we have enough data to say that.
So CoQ10 is one of those things where the nutritional databases are not that
– I mean, you're not even going to find it in USDA database, but there's
published literature.
But I have not seen all the different hearts compared.
So how do we know that CoQ10 is in heart?
Well, wherever it's been measured in heart, it's there.
So like the representative examples of heart that were used were like an order
of magnitude higher in CoQ10 than anything else.
And is it dependent upon – I'm sorry.
Oh, we just haven't seen all of the different hearts compared to each other.
Is it dependent upon how it's cooked?
Like whether it's rare, well done?
I think you lose some during cooking, but it's – I forget how much and I don't
think it's all of it.
So it's – I think it's – you're always – I mean, you're always – the
more gently you cook your food, the better off you are in every conceivable
case.
It might not always taste the best.
Except for parasites, of course.
I mean, you don't need to make a steak well done to avoid parasites.
Well, not steak, but pork.
Right, right, yeah.
Or other things, especially some wild game.
Yeah, I mean, right.
So taking that into account, the nutrient value of the food is always going to
be highest when the food has been cooked relatively gently.
But anyway, so CoQ10 is interesting because it's hard to argue against taking
it from the literature because there's dozens of clinical trials.
Quite a bit of it is in heart disease.
It looks pretty promising in various forms of heart disease.
But if you look at that literature, what you see is a dose response where at 1
to 200 milligrams per day of CoQ10, the average person's glucose, insulin, and
blood pressure looks better than not taking it.
But the average person at 400 milligrams of CoQ10 is actually having worse
blood pressure, glucose, and insulin than they were without taking it.
And the variability around that is huge.
So one person is probably going to be worse at 100 milligrams, whereas another
person might get their best at 400 milligrams.
But it's like if you looked at the literature and you would say, where is the
sweet spot where the average person is going to be doing really good?
It would be 100 to 200 milligrams a day.
But I think there are – I've seen a lot of edge cases on either side where
some people get miracles and some people get – I wouldn't say catastrophe,
but they just get worse off.
So a lot of people complain about insomnia.
They complain about their heart racing or heart palpitations, various things
like that, overstimulation, feeling like the lights are too bright or the
sounds are too strong or whatever, just hypersensory awareness.
From CoQ10?
It's not common, but it's –
Is it higher?
I mean, all the people do uncommon stuff always ask me about it.
Right.
At higher levels?
No, at just like 100 milligrams.
Normal level.
There are just hypersensitive people out there.
Okay.
And then –
And is this rare?
Is this like –
I don't know how common it is.
So, I mean, what I can tell you is that across the trials, you see some people
reporting GI side effects, which is super common.
You don't see a lot of this mentioned, but you never know if they were looking
for it.
Like, a lot of times the side effect list is dependent on what side effects
they asked about.
Is this something you take with food or without food?
It would be better to take it with food.
And is the side effects – is it dependent upon when they take it?
Like, whether it's morning or evening?
I think for some people that have complained about insomnia, they have thought
that it was worse when they took it in the evening.
Makes sense, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, maybe increase function if you took it early or maybe increase energy
levels?
Well, you know – okay.
So, I think – let me set the stage for this with just kind of like – I
think this really helps explain, like, what should you actually be thinking
about to know that you're healthy?
And I think we struggle a lot with – like, I think the medicine just thinks
that being healthy is just not having any disease.
And I think we, as kind of the wellness community or whatever, like, like, a
really good definition of health for me is you should – you should be abundantly
supplied with all the energy that you need to fulfill the goals that you're
trying to fulfill.
You should be adaptable and you should be adaptable enough to be able to handle
things changing that were out of your control or your own purposeful changing.
And I think the North Star for you to see when – to know that you are healthy
is that your energy to anxiety ratio is very high and your libido is very
strong.
And so, I – when you start losing – you use energy not only to produce,
maintain, repair everything, but you also use it to distribute everything.
And so, one of the things that you do with, like, the last 10% of energy you
make is help determine where all the energy goes.
And so, a lot of people think that, like, if their mitochondrial function is
declining, they should feel tired all the time.
But that's not necessarily the case.
It might be that you're just losing the energy that you need to actually help
– you know, the mitochondrial chemical energy to help control how you use
energy.
And so, you are wasting it as anxiety and that's coming out of productivity.
So, it's like you look at – you look at how much energy did I have yesterday
and what did I get done?
If the answer is, well, I felt wired all day, but I wasted most of it thinking
about why my wife insulted me and then worrying about how I was going to pay
the bills.
And so, I didn't actually get any work done.
Like, that's a good sign that you're – you are losing control over where your
energy is going.
So, you're not – you're just – that's not good.
That's not healthy.
Healthy is you have abundant energy to put towards productive things.
And so, you should see from that that you feel energized when you need to be
alert, that your anxiety levels are very low, that your libido is very high.
And, you know, you can adapt that on an age-dependent manner but – and that
you are able to sleep very deeply.
And if all your energy is keeping you up at night and then the next day you're
sleep-deprived, like, your biggest problem is you're just not putting the
energy to where it's supposed to go.
So, I think when you're looking at something like that, you could say, well,
maybe CoQ10 is just increasing their energy.
But to me, that – they lost a little bit of energy and they lost the energy
that they needed.
Like, they lost the top 10 percent of their energy and then they – that made
them not be able to control where the next 20 percent went.
And so, it spilled over into their heart was racing or it spilled over into
they couldn't fall asleep at night.
But I've also – you know, I've also seen other edge cases where people get
miracles from CoQ10 that you also are not going to find in the literature.
So, I had this –
What kind of miracles?
I'll give you one example.
So, in the program that I had, I had a client named Jacqueline and she lost her
period at 28.
So, she – you call that amenorrhea but she described it as I hit menopause
way too early.
She didn't have her period for 10 years.
So, we did mitochondrial function testing on her that showed that, like, you
have a specific need for a lot of CoQ10.
And what was crazy was she had gone to functional medicine practitioners, did
homeopathy, all kinds of – you know, just went to whatever she could find.
And nothing ever changed that.
But what's crazy is that, like, functional medicine practitioners often give
bagfuls of supplements to their patients.
And, you know, so she had gotten, like, normal doses of CoQ10 in the past, like,
100, 200 milligrams.
But based on the testing that we did, we said, like, you should probably
experiment with 700, 800 milligrams.
Whoa.
So, which, you know, by the way, is above where the average person's glucose
and insulin gets worse.
But two weeks into taking the CoQ10, she got her period back.
Wow.
After 10 years.
That's crazy.
After 10 years, yeah.
That's nuts.
That's crazy.
So, I think the – I think CoQ10 is a – it's methylene blue.
I'm a little bit more hardcore.
Like, you really got to do the testing.
Whereas CoQ10, I'm kind of like, you know, you should play around with it.
Like, you very well may benefit from 100 to 200 milligrams a day.
But my food-first, farm-to-last approach says, are you eating heart?
Right.
Did you eat heart today?
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Well, that completely makes sense.
And it also completely makes sense that it would be more bioavailable in food.
You'd absorb more of it.
I think that's – you know, that could be part of it.
But then it's just –
Comes in a natural form.
It's just also there's so much other stuff in the food, you know?
Right.
So, it's like people get obsessed with whether they should be taking this thing
or that thing.
But that thing, if you got it from that food, give you 36 other things.
Right, right, right.
And it's just –
And they work together.
Yeah.
And they work together and they can also become imbalanced.
So, I think a lot of – mitochondrial energy metabolism is – the bottlenecks
that people can have is kind of like jammed up traffic.
And a lot of times you can megadose something.
And the main problem of megadosing that for anyone would be it would be imbalanced
with something else.
But if you've got a blockage and that's something else, now you've just got
like a train wreck happening in your mitochondria because you're activating one
pathway that has to flow through the next one where you had your blockage and
it's just like that.
So, you can go online, for example, and find communities where people are raving
about high-dose thiamine.
And the RDA, the government-recommended amount of thiamine to get is around
like 1.3 milligrams.
There's people out there who are like, oh, everyone should be taking 2,000
milligrams per day.
But I saw one case where this happened before I knew the person, but they had
fatigue so bad that they couldn't get off the couch.
And so, she was self-rating her energy at zero.
And a practitioner said, oh, you should really try this high-dose thiamine.
So, she went on 1,100 milligrams a day.
So, not 2,000, but big, right?
And a lot of people get miracles out of this and they are vocal.
They make communities on Facebook and so people get the idea that everyone who
tries it is benefiting from it.
But she – her energy did improve a little bit, but she developed a new,
completely new motor dysfunction problem, unsteady gait.
It just kept getting worse the whole time she was taking the thiamine.
She had an existing problem with dizziness that got a lot worse.
And a major issue for her was that she had to clear out the thiamine.
But the mitochondrial testing that we did on her basically showed that, like,
it explained it because it's – because she, you know, had a block in the
pathways that would be most sensitive to megadosing that supplement.
And so, you know, winding that back and re-nourishing those other pathways
helped her.
I do think that a lot of people, if they're going to go into the wild, wild
west of megadosing random supplements, should do their own testing of glucose,
ketones, and lactate at home.
A lot of people test their glucose.
Not a lot of people test their lactate.
But I'm 100% confident that that woman, had she – had the practitioner said,
try the thiamine and see what it does to your lactate.
And if it goes down, it's good.
And if it goes up, it's bad.
I think she would have stopped it after the first few days.
And the new onset motor dysfunction never would have happened.
And so maybe she wouldn't have done mitochondrial testing with me until months
after that, but it wouldn't have been a big deal because she had this real-time
indicator of mitochondrial dysfunction that she tested herself at home that
showed her, oh, I'm trying this, you know, out-of-left-field thing.
Let's see, am I getting a stress signal out of it or am I getting the signal
that my mitochondria are calming down and are more happy with their function,
which is really what lactate is telling you.
And, you know, most people who do lactate testing do it in exercise.
And what you see in exercise is when your body is under an incredible amount of
stress, you see lactate levels go up in the blood.
You know, halfway through a pro basketball game, lactate is through the roof,
right?
Well, you know, if I took – if I take thiamine and the next day it looks like
I'm halfway through the basketball game when I wake up, that's a sign that
something is out of whack in my body, right?
So, but, you know, to go back to, like, if they – if the perspective was you
might need more thiamine, so you should try adding some nutritional yeast to
the dishes that you want to impart a cheesy flavor to, which is what
nutritional yeast tastes like, because nutritional yeast is really high in thiamine.
Then that probably wouldn't have happened because the dose would have been a
lot lower.
She would have gradually gone into it much more gradually.
But also, whatever those blockages were would have the other nutrients
assisting them, so the thiamine wouldn't be so out of balance.
So it's not just that you absorb it better or whatever.
It's also just the food – going food first really helps correct for errors
that are a problem with your expertise.
Warren Buffett once said that a diversified portfolio is great protection
against ignorance.
He said it doesn't really make sense if you know what you're doing.
But if you don't know what you're doing, you really should diversify.
Yeah, and so that's what food – food is a diversified portfolio.
And if you don't have the expertise to run around taking different things that
you don't – if you don't understand the biochemical pathway of the thing you're
megadosing, you are not a candidate – that's like buying an ETF and you don't
even know what an ETF is.
You know, like it's like – give that to your financial advisor.
And so, yeah, I think that food first, pharma last is the food first part of
that is really just a protection against – but like I do have the expertise
and I still do food first because I know that my expertise in my own body is
incomplete.
And so, you know, I might know a thousand times more than the average person
about what thiamine does in the body, but thiamine is doing things in my body
and I don't know what they are.
So I'm not going to – I'm not going to assume I know everything just because
I have like, you know, top-notch expertise in the field.
Right.
When you're talking about methylene blue and CoQ10 and the benefits on
mitochondria, is – what are the – what's the mechanism?
And are they similar?
Is it – are they interchangeable?
They are not similar and they're not interchangeable.
So CoQ10 is – and, you know, ask me if you want me to go into even more
detail, but if you extract energy from food and then you need to carry that
energy through a pathway, CoQ10 is about two-thirds through that pathway.
And it's just – it's like if you were going down a road and you had to take a
shuttle across the river to get to your next destination and then you go get on
the next train or something like that.
But so CoQ10 is just part of the transport pathway as the electrons come
through that are taken out of food to ultimately convert to ATP.
Methylene blue is – you know, if CoQ10 is like the main ferry, methylene blue
is this guy running around waving his hands in the air.
Oh, you know what methylene blue is like?
It's like those fake taxis at the airport where like you're trying to go to the
taxi line and they come right up to you and they're like, excuse me, sir, do
you need a taxi?
But it's like the shady taxi where – so methylene blue is like the – it's
like an army of the shady taxis.
And they're like, oh, don't take the ferry.
Come over here, right?
And so if the ferry is blocked, methylene blue would be great because, you know,
if there's no taxis left, you want the – you'll take the shady way because
you've got to get somewhere.
So methylene blue is – it's operating on the outer edges of the main pathway
and it's giving you alternatives.
But the mitochondrial pathway that you were born with is the one that is best.
It's the most efficient one.
So like I was saying before, methylene blue is great if you have a blockage
there and you need a detour.
It makes you worse off if you don't.
CoQ10 is – it's the reason you can overdose on it is because it's like, okay,
there's a river and you've got to get a ferry going across it.
Well, what happens if there's 10 ferries or there's 50 ferries or there's 150
ferries?
At some point, they're going to be running into each other and you're just
going to clog up that – at some point, putting more vehicles into any pathway
just makes things worse with the traffic that results.
And if you have too much traffic, you get accidents.
And, you know, train wrecks and car crashes and your mitochondria aren't good
for you.
Do CoQ10 have a similar benefit in terms of like red light therapy, increasing
mitochondrial function?
I think they could be synergistic.
CoQ10, by the way, it also helps you make more mitochondria and that's called
mitochondrial biogenesis.
Exercise also helps you make more mitochondria and I do think that you – like
– so you should never take CoQ10 as an excuse to not exercise because
exercise is very specifically putting the mitochondria where they belong to
meet the adaptation that you are stressing.
So that's – you know, that's mitochondrial biogenesis number one.
But CoQ10 will help with that.
You don't always want mitochondrial biogenesis.
I do think like testing is another case where – that might be a case where
like you could use a high-dose CoQ10 to try to stimulate more mitochondria if
testing shows that you're – you don't have enough and that's your like
limiting bottleneck.
So like the average person whose CoQ10 levels are just a little lower where
they should be, it really is just acting as that kind of like you open up the
biochemistry textbook, you see the place of CoQ10 in the mitochondrial energy
production pathways and it's just doing the basic textbook thing of helping you
move those electrons along on the path to convert food to ATP.
One of the things you brought up earlier was seed oils impeding the absorption
of certain nutrients.
Seed oils are a weird thing because, you know, so many people pushed against
them and said, hey, these are essentially industrial lubricants that have been
converted to food oil for profit and it's not really the best stuff that we
should be consuming.
And then you have a bunch of online contrarians that say, oh, there's nothing
wrong with seed oils.
This is all nonsense.
There's no data.
There's no studies.
And I don't understand that thought process.
And when you know what they're made with, with hexane and all the whole fucking
disgusting process of making them versus pressing olive oil.
Look, to me, it just seems so obvious that one of them you should probably
avoid.
And then when it's connected to all sorts of inflammation and all sorts of
various issues and what you were talking about earlier, impeding the absorption
of certain nutrients.
What do you think is going on?
First of all, why are people defending seed oils?
And what is the real problem with seed oils in a human diet?
Seed oils make your tissues more vulnerable to damage and they don't damage
your tissues.
And so one of the problems that has caused a lot of controversy, and I think
the reason there's so much back and forth over this, is that it takes the right
type of study to see seed oils making your tissues more vulnerable to damage.
Because you need enough time for the damage to play out, and you need people
who are more vulnerable to the damage.
And we've been talking a lot today about how aging is increasing that tissue
damage.
Like everything is, your repair capacity goes down as you grow older because
your mitochondrial energy production is going down.
And one of the things you want to look at is what do seed oils do to you by the
time you're 75, and you don't just want to look at what do seed oils do to you
when you're 25, because you might not be seeing the capacity for the increased
vulnerability of tissue damage.
Another thing is the trials have to be long enough, both because it takes time
to see the process of tissue damage play out, and also because we know from
long trials of seed oils that short trials are useless.
And there are a lot of the people who are talking the loudest in defense of
seed oils are looking at trials that last seven weeks long or 12 weeks long,
and they're ignoring trials that were done in the 50s, 60s, and 70s that were
five to eight years long.
And I'm just like, you know, by all means, analyze the shorter trials, but do
it in the light of what we know from the longer trials.
And the most important of the longer trials was the LA Veterans Administration
Hospital study.
And this was the primary paper on it was published in 1969.
So it takes us back in history.
But there was a period between World War II and 1970s where there was a lot of
motivation in the research community to do these grand randomized control
trials of nutrition.
We don't have that anymore, and I think it's because scientists love to, in
their collective imagination, to say that what they're doing is they're just
carrying forth a linear path of addressing knowledge gaps left from the
previous literature and just making a linear progress in science.
But they're really not because the incentive structure is to publish a large
number of papers in high-impact journals on a yearly basis as your university
reviews get done.
And so if you're going to – and then there's other incentives too because you
have to get grants with preliminary data.
So you have shorter studies that you then say, well, I'm going to do a longer
study now, and it keeps the grant cycle going.
And then the people who write the grants want to see things getting published
out of those papers.
So for you to be like, I'm going to do a 12-year randomized controlled trial of
seed oils is – it's going to be hard to get the people – get all this box
checked.
Like you might not be publishing a paper for a while.
So what the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study showed was that they
randomized people to seed oils or traditional fats.
So the – in the first two years, you had a little bit of a heart disease
benefit, but then it wore off over time.
And so the heart disease mortality basically by the end of the trial was just
kind of flat.
But the cancer was the same for the first two years.
But then at the two- to five-year mark, it started diverging, and you see, oh,
it looks like there's something there.
The five- to seven-year mark, it's, you know, traditional fats down here, and
this gap starts widening where seed oils are up here.
And then by the end of the study, total mortality was kind of flat the whole
time, but it just started to diverge at the end of the study to favor seed oils
causing more death.
And this study was the longest, and it was also the one where the only trial
ever done with seed oils where the people – the mean age was 65.
So the people were older than in every other trial.
And one of the important things about being old is that that's what makes you
able to get cancer.
There are some childhood cancers, but in general, people start getting cancer
when they live long enough to not die of heart disease first.
So doing the trial in older people for longer is what allowed you to see that
the seed oils seem to be able to cause cancer.
And what the author's conclusion was, was that because the total mortality was
just starting to diverge at the eight-year mark, and because they had a
plausible reason for it, that the cancer was exploding,
they said, we have ultimately left the question of whether these oils are toxic,
unresolved, and the one thing that we need is instead of the previous goal of
the trials being five years long, that the trials be done well in excess of
eight years.
So scientists think that they're just, like, looking at the older children,
they're saying, oh, what was the gap in the knowledge that we need to solve
next?
Well, I'm telling you, they concluded in 1969 that the gap in the knowledge was
we need a trial that's a lot longer than eight years, and what did we get?
Seven to 12-week trials.
It's kind of like that, who was it, Peter Thiel, or someone had a tweet that
was like we, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 180 characters or
something like that, whatever that quote is.
You know, they promised us well in excess of eight-year trials was the next
thing we needed to study, and, like, you know, 50, 60 years go by, and all we've
got is these seven-week trials and 12-week trials.
Now, we also know why seed oils would take a while to have such negative
effects, because it actually takes you four years just for your tissues to
start looking like the seed oil you're eating.
Like, if you switch from butter and olive oil today and you go on corn oil, it's
going to take four years for your tissues to fully look like the corn oil.
And then once that happens, you've got secondary effects, so you start getting
your vitamin E levels depleted much faster.
But it takes a while for the vitamin E levels to go down in order for other
effects, other results of that, like the increased vulnerability to the tissues
being destroyed.
All that stuff is like you're not even starting to see it until five, six years
go by.
And so I think that's the big reason that there's so much controversy is that
for whatever reason, there's some people who just don't want to look at the
older trials that were very long, and they're spending all their time looking
at these very short-term trials.
And, you know, is there a motivation behind that, or is it just laziness? I'm
not sure.
I think it's attention.
I think part of it is attention.
Yeah, it's a big part of it.
Part of it is justifying the contrarian position with these short-term trials,
because then you could dunk on people and get attention.
Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
Like, everyone has to get attention somehow if they want to make it in this
world.
Well, that's the side effect of this influencer culture, you know, and it's one
of the things I really appreciate about your work.
You are very evidence-based, and you, you know, I've been paying attention to
your stuff for a long time.
It's, you're, you're never hyperbolic, it's always very rational, it's very
balanced, and I think that is really important, because there's a lot of people
that they make these videos, or they have social media posts, and it's
insulting, inflammatory, and they're doing it for attention.
And they're doing that, you know, that kind of behavior for attention, along
with science.
They're, they're adding the science into it.
But it seems like the science is just a vehicle for them to get attention.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's, that's unfortunate, because there, there is health
hanging in the...
I know, I know, it is unfortunate, but it's also common, you know, it's really
common.
You know, you, you see it in all sorts of different disciplines, you know, you
see it in our archaeology, you see it in everything.
There's people that want to dunk on their opposition, and that's part of how
they're getting attention, is by insulting people, and you see it, but when you
see it in nutrition, it's just, it's really weird, you know, because it's not
necessary.
And the people that are getting attention, whether it's Andrew Huberman, or
yourself, a lot of people that are just doing evidence-based stuff, and being
really rational about it, and that's how they're getting attention.
And other people are seeing them and going, I need to dunk on that guy in order
to elevate my social profile.
And the seed oil thing is a weird thing to defend.
It's just, just on the way that it's manufactured.
If you just watch the process and go, do you want to eat that?
Do you want that?
Or do you want butter?
Butter seems way better.
It seems way more normal.
It seems like your body would accept butter a lot easier than it would accept
this fucking insane process where you're dumping a bunch of chemicals into this
goop,
this nasty shit that you're pushing out of rapeseed oil, and you're calling it
canola oil.
And you know how many people think canola oil is corn oil, because corn is canola?
You know, you think of corn, oh, corn oil, it must be good for you, it's
vegetable oil.
Well, it is funny that they named it after a con.
It's fucking weird.
A con?
Yeah, there's an article, not by me, but by someone else, called The Great Canola,
and it's about how canola oil is a con.
Yeah.
It's a big name, but anyway.
That's a good way to put it, because canola oil is a con.
Yeah.
Because many people, I've seen canola oil where they have a fucking image of a
corn, of an ear of corn.
Have you ever seen that on the label?
I don't look at canola oil labels, but this was-
It's been a while since I bought a bottle of canola oil.
If there's something you can find that shows that, because I hope I'm not
having a false memory,
but I'm pretty sure there used to be a canola oil that had like an ear of corn
on it.
It's rapeseed, and it's an industrial lubricant, and that's what they used to
use it for, and it's a byproduct.
It's a weird, funky thing that they have to pour a bunch of shit into just to
take the smell out of it, just to take the rancid smell out of this weird oil
that you're cooking with.
Yeah.
You can buy cold-pressed seed oils.
It's not what most people are eating food with, but I still think that the
fundamental problem with-
It's not just the processing.
It's also, if you look at ancestral human diets, no one ate fatty acid
compositions that looked like that,
because the reason that they usually use hexane to extract it is because it's
actually difficult to extract using purely mechanical methods.
So olives can be pressed into oil-
Right, and that is a type of seed oil, right, if you thought about it.
Well, no, an olive is a fruit oil.
A fruit, but avocado, is that a fruit as well?
Avocado oil?
Yeah, avocado oil is pressed out of the avocado.
Right, and that's specific-
Because the flesh is super high in fat.
Right, so it's just the pit inside of it is the seed.
Yeah, I don't think they make-
You're not getting anything from that.
Yeah, I don't think they make oil out of that.
So it's a fruit oil.
So whether it's olive oil, the high heat ones are avocado oil.
That's one that people like to cook with, right?
Yeah, well, okay, so-
Are there any issues with that?
So cooking with an oil, one issue is the smoke point, because the oil is
burning at its smoke
point, and that probably is more of an indication of flavor than it is of
health, but it is generally
going to correlate.
Like if the oil is burning, you're more likely to have damage to the oils, and
consuming damaged
oils is bad for you.
So there's the smoke point, there's the fatty acid composition, and there's the
solvents
and other chemicals left over from the processing, and I think all of those are
an issue.
But the fatty acid composition is like, seed oils has become the common thing
to use as
a nickname, but what you're really thinking about is that they're high in polyunsaturated
fatty
acids, or PUFAs, and those polyunsaturated fatty acids are just like, it
happens to be most
things, most oils that are currently on the market for food consumption that
are very high
in polyunsaturated fatty acids, are what we call seed oils.
So that's, you know, that's why we call it that way.
But the actual fatty acid composition, like if you go back to any oil that was
easy for humans
to produce before, say 100 years ago, then you don't see those, like there, you
don't see a strong
tradition of large consumption of rapeseed oil going back because, or cottonseed
oil, or corn oil,
because it's, I mean, try squeezing a corn kernel, it's not that squeezable.
And so when you have
these very small, hard things, that's why you wind up getting solvent
extraction, but you had to do the
solvent extraction because it was not easy otherwise to get oil out of those
things. The solvent is a whole
other thing. I was in a lab once where someone had us analyze residual hexane
in foods, and they just
bought a bunch of grocery store foods. And I was, I was kind of managing the
data analysis while someone
I worked with was doing the hexane measurements. But let me just say that if it's
extracted with
hexane, it's got hexane left over. And we saw something that was not hexane. We
didn't know what it
was, but it was some chemical solvent that was massive in the pump spray oils.
And I, after I
saw that, I was like, I'm never using a pump spray oil. Cause they, cause they,
like you could put
olive oil in like a mechanical spray bottle and that's fine. But like Pam and
those other ones,
they, they're using chemicals to, to make the, the spraying work. And it's,
there's something that's
some chemical solvent that's just like way, like massive proportions in it. So
after I saw that,
I just stopped, stopped using that. I won't go near those.
Yeah. I don't go near those anyway. But what about a grapeseed? I know grapeseed
is one that people
like to cook with cause it has a high smoke point.
Yeah. I, I would put grapeseed oil in the category of a seed oil that I wouldn't
consume in high
quantities.
And is hexane an issue with that as well?
Not, I mean, not if it's cold pressed. I mean, you can get like organic cold
pressed
grapeseed oil that is not solvent extracted. It's not RBD. It's, it's, you know,
not heated.
But you still have to deal with the polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's very, you're, you're paying a lot to get a high
quality product,
but it's still like, you know, there might be studies out there about some
therapeutic benefits
of some of the components of the grapeseed oil, but I don't, I wouldn't want to
make those fats be
the major oil in my diet because I think you're just overload. Like it's high
in antioxidants.
And so you're going to get benefit. There's going to be beneficial things in it,
but I don't think
that those fats are what you want to be your main fatty acid consumption.
What about if you were searing a steak in grapeseed oil? Would that be an issue?
I mean, the less of the oil that's there, the less of an issue it is. You know,
if you're just
coating the pan with it and it's convenient because it doesn't have a high
smoke point,
I wouldn't worry too much about it. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't be one healthy
fats.
I wouldn't want to be consuming like a tablespoon or upwards of grapeseed oil a
day.
So I think we would agree that the issue with saturated fatty acid, saturated
fats and just
in the zeitgeist, saturated fats, we have demonized since whatever that study
was with the,
where the sugar company bribed those scientists. Was it the fifties, the sixties,
wherever it was,
where they spent, uh, it started, uh, it started back then. The, the kind of
the, the crowning
turning point was 1984 when time magazine had, uh, a picture of a frowning face
made out of eggs and
bacon. And, and the cover said, hold the eggs in butter. Uh, cholesterol has
been proved deadly
in our diets. We'll never be the same.
And we got to pull that photo up. That's so crazy. They really did that.
Yeah. They, they actually, they, they reversed it a few years ago where they,
they took the same
image, but they made it a smiley face and they were like, now we know eggs are
good for you.
But meanwhile, how many lives did you ruin with your shitty advice? Um, it's so
stunning.
Yeah. You can do it. You can see the two right there. Yeah. You can see both
side by side.
Crazy. Um, yeah. So the one on the right is the upper left hand corner. Yeah.
That the upper
left hand corner is the new one. And the one on the right is the 1984 one.
Scientists labeled fat,
the enemy. They were wrong. Yeah. You didn't print the whole thing. They got
fucking bribed
and not a lot of money. That's, what's really crazy. It ruined society, ruined
diets for what?
$50,000. So for $50,000, people started eating margarine and eating seed oil
and not eating
butter and not, not consuming cholesterol, which is, you know, the building
blocks for hormones.
It's such an important aspect of the human diet. And when you tell people that,
like I tell
people I eat mostly meat, they go, what about your cholesterol? I just take a,
I don't know
what to tell you. Go, go read. I just can't, you know, I can't sit there and
tell you
that higher LDL cholesterol is actually associated with longer lifespans. It's
like, there's,
there's a lot to this whole cholesterol thing. And I think it's kind of been
fucked around
with by the mainstream media reporting on these sort of ancient narratives,
these narratives
that, not ancient, but you know, these narratives that were set up in the fifties
and sixties,
whenever it was in the eighties, the time magazine thing that people just
repeat, they don't look
into it. They just repeat it over and over again. And they're really worried.
Like I'm
trying to eat less, less red meat. Like why, why are you trying to eat less
meat? Well, it's,
you know, cholesterol. Like, Oh boy.
Yeah. I, well, I do think that you don't, you don't want to see your blood
cholesterol
going crazy high because that can be a sign that you're not using it well,
right? Like
if your cholesterol is turning over and it's being used to make bile acids to
support your
digestion, it's being used to make adrenal hormones and sex hormones. It's
being used to
make testosterone. It's being used to make brain synapses to support your
memory. Like all those
things, uh, that cholesterol does are incredibly important, but I think a lot
of people, their
cholesterol going up can be a sign that they're not using it properly. And so I
think that's
why you do see, uh, you know, there, it like the, it, it is true that if you
take people at a certain
age, um, you can see inverse correlations between cholesterol levels and
mortality. But if you take
people who are younger and you look at who's going to get heart attacks later,
you do see that higher
cholesterol when you're younger prospectively predicts a higher risk of heart
disease later.
And I don't think that's because cholesterol causes heart disease, but I think
it's because
it's a reflection of your overall metabolism being more slow in terms of
actually using up the
cholesterol. And that's, and that also, but it's interesting though, that if
you look at the
mechanisms of how does cholesterol, like how does cholesterol cause atherosclerosis,
the cholesterol
is inside a lipoprotein, which is like a spherical container for the
cholesterol. It's got a bunch of
fat soluble vitamins and other things in it. But the outside is, uh, fatty
acids, uh, specifically
in the form called phospholipids. But the, what happens that drives the atherosclerotic
plaque is
that the fats you get from seed oils that are carry that are on the outside of
it get damaged.
And when they get damaged, the immune system recognizes it as a toxin that
could hurt the
blood vessel. And so the immune system gobbles it up and sequesters it. And
that, that
sequestering is like a quarantine. Um, and that's, that's what the plaque
develops from.
And so that's why, like, even though you see prospectively that if your
cholesterol is higher,
that that predicts that you're more likely to get heart disease later in the
randomized controlled
trials, you saw something quite different when they used seed oils to lower the
cholesterol. So
the Minnesota coronary survey was another, uh, it was, I mentioned the LA
veterans administration
hospital study. That was, these were the two double blind randomized controlled
trials that were done
of seed oils. The Minnesota coronary survey was very big. It was the only one
that included women
and it wasn't as long, but, um, but it was way larger.
And back when they published the results, it looked like there was an 8%
increase in the risk of heart
disease with the seed oils, but they mentioned that they measured actual atherosclerosis
and they
didn't report it. So decades later, like, I think it was about 10 years ago,
researchers noticed this
and they said that, well, these guys that did the study are dead, but I wonder
if the atherosclerosis
results are around. So they did some digging and it turned out that in the
basement of the house
that the lead investigator lived in, who had died a long time ago, uh, there
were boxes of data that had
not been published from that study. And they included all the atherosclerosis
measurements. And what they
found was that the seed oil group had double the atherosclerosis. Not only that,
but every 35
milligram per deciliter drop in cholesterol was associated with something like
30% more heart
disease. And so the original results didn't look very, they didn't look good
for seed oils. They
looked bad, but they didn't look that bad. And they, you know, they weren't
statistically significant,
but it was because there was a lot of, uh, you know, people were coming in and
out of the, of the trial
and kind of weakened the results. But this, you know, the, the atherosclerosis
results and the correlations
that were buried in those boxes show that when you look at the data from that
angle, like the seed oils
look a lot worse. And I think what you're seeing there, this is one of the
reasons why there's so
much, um, material to work with to, to make controversy out of this is that you
see that people with
higher cholesterol when they're younger are more likely to go on to have a
heart attack.
But when you use seed oils, which lower the cholesterol in the blood, but
increase the
amount of these easily damaged fatty acids that carry the cholesterol and they
get damaged and
they drive the atherosclerotic plaque. That's why you see this, this divergence,
like that correlation
exists there, but not everything that you do with your diet to change it, to
try to make the
correlation work in your favor. Does you good?
Right. Yeah.
Right. I read that. Um, I'd read something about that and also something about
there is, uh, there's
a profound difference between someone who consumes their cholesterol. Like say,
if you're on
you just a seed oil free, um, just vegetables and meat with healthy fats, like
those kinds of
carbohydrates or those kinds of proteins and fats without complex carbohydrates,
without consumption
of a lot of grains, without that, there's a difference in the, the results that
they were
having in terms of the impact of cholesterol.
In general, you are going to have higher cholesterol if you're eating less
fiber.
Right. And is it in, in, in at all dependent upon the activity level of the
person? Like
you're talking about using the cholesterol.
Well, I, yeah, I think, I mean, this, this is a great tie back to the things
you were talking
about before, because the clearance of cholesterol from your blood is driven by
the mitochondrial
energy production that gives your brain the signal that you are in a state of
abundance and
should put that cholesterol toward good things. And you have a bunch of
hormones that communicate
that leptin, insulin, thyroid hormone are all involved. But what is ultimately
driving
this is your brain, especially in the hypothalamus is taking information in
that says, are you getting
enough food for me to consider this a state of abundance where I ramp up your
digestion? I ramp
up your libido, I ramp up all these things. Um, and we tend in nutrition
science to think that this is
about calories or it's about carbs and it is about those things. But if you are
half as good at
mitochondrial conversion of food to ATP as the next guy over, um, you know, is
your hypothalamus going
to, going to give you full credit for the food you ate in terms of calculating
your state of
abundance? It's not, it's going to dock you by half. And this is because the
hypothalamus takes all
these signals. And then it looks at inside the hypothalamic cells. It looks at,
okay, how well do I
convert that those food molecules into ATP using my mitochondria? And if it's
50% dropped, it's going to
dock you in your state of abundance. And it's going to say, you know, actually
you ate all the food, but you
didn't get all the energy. And so we're just going to let things stagnate. And
the cholesterol is going
to go up in the blood, your sex hormones are going to go down. And, you know,
you can get, you can look at
that and say, well, there's an age, you're going through andropause, there's an
age dependent decline
in testosterone and adrenal hormones and stuff like that. And then you can do
hormone supplementation
therapy, but what you're not actually fixing in that, but that can also be kind
of a negative feedback
loop. Like if you're supplementing everything that your cholesterol would turn,
that your body would
turn cholesterol into, that also is going to slow cholesterol turnover because
your body's like,
oh, I don't, I don't need, like, I don't need to turn that into testosterone if
I'm supplementing
with it. So I think that we, what we're missing in the whole discussion is
thinking about how do we,
how do we ramp up mitochondrial energy production? How do we prevent it from
declining and aging
so that the body, so that the brain can rightly perceive that I am in a state
of abundance and it is
rational to turn, to ramp up this metabolic rate. I think there are, it's, when
you have a marker like
this, it's not like every single case of high cholesterol represents a failure
to convert it
into anything good. Some people just produce more cholesterol or they absorb
more cholesterol.
And I don't think those are all equal in terms of their heart disease risk or
their health
implications, but sluggish metabolism, like high cholesterol is in general a
sign of sluggish
metabolism under the average, the average set of circumstances. And a really
interesting thread that
got left behind in 1976 is Brota Barnes wrote this book called Solved the Riddle
of Heart Attacks in
1976. And his perspective was all about thyroid hormone. And he argued that
people who died of infectious
diseases were hypothyroid, um, we allowed them to live longer. Now all the hypothyroid
people are
getting heart disease. The reason he thought that is because thyroid hormone
communicates to your whole
body that you are in a state of abundance. And so if your brain thinks that you're
not, and you add
thyroid hormone in now, your whole body is receiving the false signal that you
are in a state of
abundance and you feel better and many things improve. And you can argue about
whether that's good or bad,
but you're intervening at the point of the communication instead of at the
point of actually
creating the abundance. But thyroid hormone does signal, uh, take up
cholesterol from the cell,
move it along, do things with it. And so no matter whether you're hypothyroid
or not,
people were up through the night up until the 1970s, they were lowering
cholesterol and they were
lowering heart disease risk by just putting everyone who had high cholesterol
and thyroid hormone.
And the reason they stopped doing it is because, uh, some practitioners got
overzealous and they
killed a few people because they overdosed them. Um, but Broda Barnes argued
that you will, we don't
have to be overzealous and overdose. Then we can just be rationally dosing
thyroid hormone. I,
my perspective is different from Broda Barnes. I, you know, I take what he said.
I think there's a lot
of value to it, but I say like, why is thyroid communicating the state of
abundance? It's because
your mitochondria are doing a great job producing, converting your food to ATP.
Now you don't have
to have a mitochondrial dysfunction to have low thyroid hormone because you're
not in a state
of abundance. You can just not eat any food. So, you know, if you look at the
metabolic consequences
of starvation, you just don't eat any food, your thyroid hormone go in the gutter.
Um, so there are
people out there who just aren't eating enough. Like that is a thing, but it's
also just natural in the
process of aging that we're all getting progressively dysfunctional mitochondria
and that we can
intervene at any point to have at least 75% of control over that. And so we
want to step up the
game and, you know, work. So I, if there's two things that people take away
from this, from me
today, I would want it to be always think about your mitochondria first. And
when you're thinking
about them, always go with a food first, pharma last approach. So naturally
create a state of
abundance in the best way that you can, and then move on to other things after
you've done that.
That way, if you're going to intervene with testosterone replacement or thyroid
hormone or
statins or whatever else, I mean, statins are mitochondrial toxins. They're
kind of kind of productive
from a mitochondrial energy production standpoint. Um, and on that note, you
know, so statins for the
debates of statin associated myopathy are, are, are the rates of them are
debated. The rates at which
statins cause diabetes is debated, but it's there. And it's because statins
actually inhibit your CoQ10
synthesis, but they also inhibit other things in the mitochondrial energy
production engines that you
can't take a supplement for. So there's just no way around that statins will
decrease your
mitochondrial function. So I think by not thinking about mitochondria first, it's
like,
instead you take these people with mediocre mitochondrial function, um, their
LDL in their
blood would get taken into their cells. You would do valuable things with it.
If the state of abundance
was present, because not only does this, all the signaling say, do something
with the cholesterol,
but the way you can actually get cholesterol into the cell is to burn through a
bunch of ATP with
motor proteins that actually move it from outside the cell to inside the cell
in order to facilitate
that turnover. So we've got a situation where we know that everyone could
improve their mitochondrial
function, but instead of doing that and then saying, okay, do we really need a
statin? We just say,
oh, go straight for the statin. And now you're hurting the mitochondrial
function even more. And you're
saying, well, it's a, it's the ROI is good enough because I'm lowering their
cholesterol and they won't get
heart disease. And yeah, their mitochondria aren't doing as great, but that's
okay. Cause we lowered
the cholesterol. I think that's totally backwards. You should, you should
always be trying to optimize
mitochondrial function first. You should always be doing that with natural
foods before you try
anything else. And then, and then move on, like just set the foundation, set a
good foundation and
then build your house on top of it. However you want. I'm not saying never do,
never use any
pharmaceuticals. I'm just saying, you know, if you're going to put, if you're
going to build your
house out of pharmaceuticals, do it on a good foundation.
Right. Do make an educated decision. What, what can be done to increase thyroid
function?
The first thing is you actually want enough food and you want good mitochondrial
conversion of the
food to ATP, but there's other things that could be important to having good
thyroid function as well.
Like having, if you just look at what is thyroid hormone. So thyroid hormone is
made from the amino acid
tyrosine, which you get from the protein in the food that you eat, and then you
add iodine to it. So if you
don't have enough protein, you're not going to have good thyroid function. If
you don't have enough
iodine, you're not going to have good thyroid function. So those are the, those
are the, you know, step one
basics of the one-on-one of the nutrition that I need to have good thyroid
hormone.
And is iodine from supplementation or from food?
You can supplement with it, but I, again, I always believe in food first.
And what's rich in iodine?
There are many things that can be rich in iodine, but it's highly dependent on
the soil. So a potato,
for example, from one part of the United States could be a hundred times richer
than a potato from
another part of the country. So that's a problem. Seafood is reliably high in
iodine because the
rainfall just facilitates the minerals just falling into the ocean. So it's,
you know, a lot of the places
that are low in iodine, it's because the pattern of the evaporation causes the
iodine to evaporate
into the clouds. But then like the cloud pattern goes around some mountain and
it never drops back
down on you. And so you get these areas of the country where they're just on
the wrong side of
the mountain and they just get, you know, progressive decline in the iodine. So
I do think that it's good
for people to eat just some seafood because like if you eat one or two pieces
of fish per week,
for example, or you eat a little bit of seaweed every day, that's going to
cover your bases.
Whereas like if your food comes from one area, you might be able to get enough
iodine just eating
whatever you want. And in another area you won't. I personally add in a quarter
teaspoon of kelp
powder to my food prepped meals per day. It's just always in there. It's got a
little bit of flavor,
but I just mix it into everything so you don't even taste it. It's like, it's
just like I fortify my
own. I fortify my food myself instead of letting the government do it. But, you
know, so that's one
way to do that. And then there are some things that increase your iodine
requirement. So women
with big breasts, for example, can need much more iodine because iodine, the
breasts are a sink for
iodine. Part of that is just the nature of the tissue. And part of it is very
logical because if you do have
a baby, you are going to start feeding the baby the iodine. And so that might
be part of why that's
prepped. But there's some evidence that a lot of breast problems are solved by
extra iodine. So
fibrocystic breast disease, for example, there's some support for getting 10,
15 times the normal
amount, or even 50 times the normal amount of iodine. And I think that's
because some women with very
large breasts just, they just, you know, 98% of it goes there. And then there
are also like the less,
the more toxic your living environment is, the more iodine you're going to need,
because there's a lot
of bromine that's in synthetic materials for couches. It's flame retardants. So
all kinds of paint and
materials that are used in household living can be a source of environmental
bromine. And then fluoride,
if you drink fluoridated water and you brush your teeth with fluoridated
toothpaste, it's going to
increase your need for iodine as well. So there are, there's a bunch of reasons
that people might
want to, well, I'll say this. I think it's crazy that every time I've seen a
woman who's on thyroid
hormone and I've seen, and I've, you know, had them get iodine data, their iodine
is low and they've
never gotten it tested before. And I just, you know, there's these, medicine
has these myths about
nutrition that like we solved all the nutritional deficiencies a hundred years
ago. So we don't
need to think about it, but they did these dumb ass things that made that like
nullified that. So
for example, the reason that we didn't have iodine deficiency anymore is
because they fortified salt
with it. They said, everyone eats salt. So let's just put the iodine in the
salt. And so everyone
got, had fortified salt, but then what did they do? They came along and they
said, don't eat the salts.
It's going to give you a heart attack. And so what they didn't realize was when
they told people to
not eat the salt, now they're not getting their iodine. And now, you know, so
there's some places
where there's like, I talked to one cardiologist who works out in the Midwest.
He says, I see people
walking in with a, look, you can see the lump in their throat now. And, um, and
they have a goiter,
which is just like the, a goiter is a very hungry thyroid gland where it's like,
I don't have any
iodine. Where's the iodine just starts growing to try to find it. And you wind
up with, you can feel
a lump in your throat, not see anything, but if it gets really, really bad, you
can see a bump in
the neck. And if it gets insanely bad, you can have like a grapefruit hanging
from the neck that
doesn't happen anymore. But, but, you know, this cardiologist told me like, I
actually see people
with goiter now, but no one's looking for it because they don't think people
get goiter anymore.
And so most, they just, most of them just walk around with a lump in their neck
until they find
me, he said. That's wild. Yeah. No salt in the diet is so wild. Yeah. That,
that one is so crazy.
And then there are, there are other things too, like you, you, the supplement
that you're taking
has glutathione in it. Well, selenium is a mineral that helps you use glutathione
to protect
your thyroid gland from damage. And there are a number of trials that show that
selenium lowers
the, the autoimmune antibodies that occur in Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is
a type of
autoimmune thyroid problem. And the reason it does that is because it's helping
glutathione protect
the thyroid from damage because producing thyroid is a very messy process. But
that also, you know,
if you look at what that would imply, it would also imply that all the other
antioxidant nutrients are
very important in the thyroid as well, because vitamin C and zinc and copper,
manganese, and a whole
suite of iron, even, you know, too much iron is bad for you, but you need iron
to protect yourself from
oxidative stress. So all of these things are helping prevent tissue damage in
the thyroid gland, which
helps prevent the immune system from going haywire, trying to deal with that
damage. And so all of
those things are, are important for thyroid hormone.
One more thing I want to talk to you about is you brought up our arterial, I
don't know how to say
that word right, arterial sclerosis. What is the supplement natto kinase?
Yeah, natto kinase is an enzyme that helps break down blood clots. And atherosclerosis
is what it
really is, is the immune system quarantining damaged particles. Those particles
are damaged because you
loaded them with seed oils, and then your mitochondrial function declined, and
you lost your defense against
the damage. And then you got, you know, progressively more seed oil damage that
in the immune system is
trying to protect the blood vessel from it. That's what the plaque is. But that
plaque is highly
inflammatory.
This is a crazy statement. So plaque that people have always considered to be
from the most people
will tell you it's from cholesterol. If you ask the average person, you believe
it's really from
seed oils.
I'm not alone in this. So if you...
No, I don't think you are.
If you go back, so if you go back to 1984, when we saw that Time Magazine
picture, the other thing
that was going on politically and scientifically in 1984 was the NIH consensus
conference that said that
they had proven, like Time Magazine cover was a reaction to the NIH consensus
conference,
where they said, we as the scientific community now certify that we are in
consensus that cholesterol
is the cause of heart disease. And that's why Time Magazine ran with that cover.
Was Fauci running the NIH back then?
Ha ha ha ha ha. Fauci...
Because that's when did the age crisis start?
That was... So Fauci was not running this, but that was, I think, possibly also
the year that
Fauci took over at NIAID.
Oh, okay.
Yeah. It's, you know, it's a sidebar, but there's a very interesting study that
looked at
the average age of principal investigators of studies. Principal investigator
means like the guy who ran
the lab. And so since 1984, the average age of an NIH funded principal
investigator has gone up by
one year per year. And so that looks like the one group took over the money in
1984, and then they've
just been giving themselves grants ever since. And now they're really old. That's
what that looks like.
But anyway, so yes, I think, I believe, you can fact check me on this, but I
believe Fauci took over
NIAID, where he got, where he became very in control of a lot of NIH money in
that same year.
So it's really weird the way these years work out. Like, you know, like 1913,
you've got
Federal Reserve, you've got World War I, you've got all these changes to the
structure of the government.
Like, they picked this year out of history, and there's always these big,
massive big things all
happening in different areas. But anyway, so there was something in there in
1984. Maybe it was
self-fulfilling prophecy from Orwell. But anyway, so the chair of the NIH Consensus
Conference in 1984
was Daniel Steinberg. Daniel Steinberg passed away a few years ago. But he was
kind of, there were three
big names that came out of that conference. And Steinberg was one of them. And
the others were
Brown and Goldstein, who won the Nobel Prize in 1985, the next year, for, you
know, you can see how they
hooked up their Nobel Prize. So they, 1985, they got the Nobel Prize for
discovering the LDL receptor,
which is the thing that brings cholesterol from your blood into your cells. And
all the drugs that
work on this are targeting that receptor. So that became the springboard for
all the drugs that
people are on for cardiovascular disease now. So this is kind of funny that the
Nobel Prize was,
it was probably in the fix in 1984. You know, that was the other thing they
were working on.
But because there's no way that would have happened if the 1984 Consensus
Conference didn't happen.
But the point I want to make is that Daniel Steinberg agrees with me. I didn't
come up
with this idea myself. I mean, he's dead now. But, you know, for decades, he
was one of the people
who believed that because it was his lab that discovered that the PUFAs, which
are seed oil
fats, have to become damaged on the outer membrane of the LDL particle for it
to get taken up by the
immune system. That was his discovery. And he's the guy that chaired the
conference that led to
the Time Magazine cover. So I'm not pulling this out of my ass. I'm pulling
this out of my having
read Daniel Steinberg's papers. And so he was, this is how olive oil became the
darling
of the Mediterranean diet, which is, you know, the Mediterranean diet is kind
of funny because it's
not that big. It's very loosely based on what they eat in the Mediterranean.
And it's really just kind
of like a branding thing where they said like, okay, well, this diet is good
enough for us to say,
eat this, this, this, and this, and we're going to call it Mediterranean. But
anyway,
so what happened was after the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study showed
in 1960,
well, actually they published it a few years later. So somewhere in the early
seventies,
it's kind of looking like seed oils cause cancer. And so they're looking at
that and they're like,
well, maybe corn oil is not the best. And they're like, well, we already told
people to eat the corn
oil because they can't eat the saturated fat. So we can't tell them, go back to
the butter.
So what are we going to tell them to eat? And they were like, well, olive oil
is a nice balance.
It's kind of in between the two. It's not saturated fat, but it's probably not
going to cause cancer
like we're worried about this. And so olive oil was kind of born out of that.
And Steinberg's
perspective on promoting olive oil as being good for heart disease was, you
know, Steinberg is saying,
I'm worried that the real problem with these lipoproteins in the blood causing
the plaque
is actually the seed oils that we're telling people to eat. And so, yeah, we
can use cholesterol as a
marker for that, but I don't know that I want to be telling people to eat corn
oil. So what am I
going to tell them to eat? Cause I'm going to have egg on my face, pun intended.
If I, you know,
if I tell them to go back to eating eggs and butter. So olive oil is this happy
middle ground where
maybe we can consume a lot of, we can consume olive oil to our heart's content
and it's not going to
create the tissue damage that drives the plaque, but it's also not going to
ramp up the cholesterol.
And so we can just navigate the middle that way. And I, you know, I, the reason
that no one
appreciates this is because medicine thinks in binaries. So I, I have this
saying, all medical
diagnoses are false, but some are useful. And I, I take this from a staying in
statistics,
which is all models are false, but some are useful. And what that is, is an
appreciation that
once you impose a model on the data, you're now biasing it towards the way you
think about it.
And, you know, the, and so it's like, it's a reality distortion filter to make
the data more
usable. So if I can use the model to try to predict something and I see it's
true, I might leave details
behind, but I'm focusing on the things that helped me make those decisions. So
a medical diagnosis is a
hypothesis that the patient will respond to the treatment that they're given.
And you test that
hypothesis by giving the patient that treatment, and then you see if they get
better. And if they don't
get better, you take them off the treatment. That's why, you know, some things
they just,
people just stay on the drug they're put on, but look at how they, they treat
depression or
epilepsy. They, you know, the epilepsy, they just put them on one benzo and it
doesn't work. They
put them on the next one. They keep rotating until they find one that, that
stops the seizures
depression. They put people on one antidepressant. Oh, it doesn't, didn't work.
We'll put them on the
next one. They just rotate through it because they're, they're just looking at
it. Like they have a
model that's predicts their hypothesis that they'll respond. They didn't. So
they switched them
onto the, onto the next approach. So because medicine cares about triaging
decisions about
what to do for, for treatment, they say, I only need a model that helps me do
that. And I can ignore
all the other details. But what happens is you leave these historical threads
behind. Like the fact that
the chair of the conference that proved to put in your magazine that everyone
had to change their diet
because of the concept that they said was proven, that is now the basis for the
drugs that I'm going
to prescribe you. The fact that he had these, you know, that he also showed
that it was seed oils in
the membrane of the LDL particle that drive the plaque doesn't matter because
that doesn't change
whether I'm going to give you a statin, you know? And so, and so if it doesn't
change how I'm going to
treat you, it doesn't matter, which means that I could ignore it. If someone
asked me what you should
eat, you know, but, but, but the problem was when they did the randomized
controlled trials with the
seed oils, they were like, Oh, it doubled the atherosclerotic plaque. What do
we do? Put it in the box in the
basement? Um, you know, and so there's all this, this like, well, yes, those
details are true, but
master John, get out of my hair. I don't want to, but I don't, I can't handle
the truth, you know?
Right, right, right. And so how does natokinase? Oh yeah, right. Cause I
brought you way off track.
I did it. I, I did it. Uh, okay. So the problem, when you get out, when you get
a heart attack or a
stroke from atherosclerosis, it is not because in all, in like 98% of cases, it
is not because
the plaque occluded the blood vessel and stopped the blood flow. In fact,
usually when a plaque
develops, it, it develops backwards. Like it, it just, um, so you're like, let's
say this is your
blood vessel. The plaque's going to bulge out this way instead of this way,
because your body tries not
to narrow the blood vessel because you do need the blood flow, right? So it's
almost never the case
that the plaque is just squeezing the blood vessel shut. What happens is the
inflammatory process
inside the plaque, which is especially driven by the seed oils oxidizing in
there and going rancid.
That's not the only factor, but it's one of them. That process degrades the
collagen that covers the
plaque and it makes micro tears and the micro tears and the collagen get healed
by scar tissue that gets
laid on top of it. And so when you get narrowing into the blood vessel, it's
because you're building
up scar tissue on top of like, it keeps breaking and you keep building scar
tissue on it. But if it
breaks and you get a blood clot that is big enough in the acute moment to block
the whole artery, that's,
that's what usually causes most heart attacks. Natokinase is an enzyme derived
from natto, which is a
Japanese fermented soybean paste. That is also incidentally very high in
vitamin K2, which helps you protect
against calcium deposits that weaken the plaque and make it more likely to rupture.
So actually just
eating natto would be better. This is food, why food first works, right? If you
had K2 and natokinase,
you'd be even better off, but the natokinase helps break apart blood clots. So
if in some people you
might just have a predisposition because you've got systemic inflammation where
like you just clot more
easily, or you might have someone who's got a genetic defect and the ability to
degrade clots.
And so their baseline clotting is higher than normal. If that's the case, then
they're even more
likely to get a heart attack or a stroke when the plaque ruptures because their
baseline predisposition
to clot is higher. And then on top of that, if you've got someone with really
bad atherosclerosis,
they might be clotting all the time. Like any, every day might be a new day
where they can have a heart
attack. And so in both of those cases, natokinase is going to degrade the clots
as soon as they occur
and it's going to lower the total clotting. And the downside risk of that is,
you know,
maybe you bleed too easily if you get cut, but the upside potential of that is
if you're one of the
people who are a candidate for any one of these days now, you're going to get a
heart attack or
stroke, having taken nine, 2000 IU of natokinase that day may have prevented
you from getting a
heart attack or stroke because the clot formed and you degraded it more quickly.
Fascinating. Listen, this is a lot to take in, but let's do this again.
Yeah, please. And tell everybody where they can find you and where you are on
social media and your
website and all that. I write a newsletter at chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com
and you can
look into my mitochondrial testing at mito.me. All right. Thank you very much.
This is really
fun. I really appreciate it. I'm glad we did it. All right. Bye everybody.