Best Anti-Aging Workouts, Seed Oils, Methylene Blue & Mitochondria | Dr. Chris Masterjohn, PhD

Methylene blue is going in and it's helping the mitochondria work without the oxygen.

“At a dose of 10 milligrams or higher, it actually acts as a pharmacological anti-depressant.”

But here's a problem. If you use methylene blue regularly, it's going to wind up hurting. There's an exercise that most people don't do called the turkish get-up, where you hold a kettlebell in the air from sitting on the floor, and you hold it in the air, and then you get up in a step-by-step process until you're standing.

Something like that is going to be phenomenal for preventing you from having fallen and not being able to get up. Everyone at home, you got to put your parents on the turkish get-up, that is the solution to longevity. . Most people aren't tired because they need more sleep. They're tired because their cells literally can't produce energy.

And no amounts of supplements, workouts, or clean eating is going to fix that if you're missing what your body actually needs. We've been sold a version of health that focuses on calories, trends, and expensive protocols, while completely ignoring the one system that controls everything. Your mitochondria.

And that's exactly why so many people are doing everything right and still feel worse. Chris Master John is a nutritional scientist in one of the leading voices in mitochondrial biology.

After years as a professor in research, or he founded Mido.me, the first mitochondrial

analysis designed for everyday health, where he helps people identify and fix. The exact energy bottlenecks holding them back. Watch today's episode on the real-out-slark YouTube channel or culture-pothagiri on Spotify, please pause and leave a five-star review before we get started and keep the discussion going in the Keep Service Facebook group.

Please welcome Chris Master John to culture-pothagiri. Okay, so I was just kind of giving you the 4011, you know, before we got started about who my audience is and where they're at in their life and you said something interesting which was, they're not still touching receipts. Are they?

And I said, "Oh, they might be what's going on with receipts." Certainly, if you're a cashier, this is a gigantic problem. The receipts are full of BPA, which is, you know, plastic-based endocrine disruptor, which messes with your hormones. The absorption through your skin, like the amount that comes off when you touch that

is through the roof just because of the way that the paper is designed. And so, if you're thinking about how much plastic chemicals you're getting from drinking out of a plastic water bottle, for example, it's nothing like what you're getting from touching receipts. I don't actually get many receipts because I don't go out shopping that much, but, you

“know, so I think there is a dose makes the poison type of issue, but why do you need”

to touch the receipt anyway? I don't know. So what do you do? Oh, yeah, I just say I don't need the receipt. And so what do you think that cashier should do where gloves?

I haven't thought that much of it, but yeah, I think you're, you're better off wearing a glove, even if it's not the best glove, you're better off wearing the gloves. And I think a lot do because they're afraid of the germs, but the germs are not the big problem. The big problem is the plastic in the paper.

I'm shocked by you saying that there's more problematic chemicals in it in a receipt than even a plastic water bottle. Well, it's not that there's more chemicals. It's that the stability of the chemicals to stay where they are is a lot lower. In order to design the paper, to be able to have heat make the writing on it, they have

to have the coating of the paper be very malleable. And so as a result, it can dust off on your hands very easily. Whereas a plastic water bottle, the plastic does degrade over time, and you do get more microplastics, anoplastics, the longer the water sits in that bottle, and you'll get worse conditions with more heat, but the bottle is still designed to like you can't write in the

bottle with your finger, and you can't like stamp it with heat and have images come out, right? It's designed to be a sturdy product.

“And that's an important factor in how much plastic leaves the thing you're handling”

into your body, receipts by their nature are designed for the surface to easily rub off. See, this is why I wanted to interview you. So interesting. And now, if we see a whole bunch of cashiers across America, where in one glove getting their Michael Jackson on, we're going to know this was because of you.

Well, I'm not the first person to have said that.

I am the first person to have said it on cultural apothecary. Exactly. I wanted to interview you because you have such fascinating insights on all these different

One of them being Bobby Kennedy, RFK Jr, has been seeing drinking methylene blue. I've seen that clip.

“Yeah, yeah, nobody has talked about methylene blue on this show.”

Do you know if he did that on purpose, because someone had the camera in the back seat. Like, did I don't know if they arranged it or not? It could have gotten him. Could have been a sponsor. I don't know if he's a photo operator.

Yeah. What is methylene blue? Should we all be taking it?

Well, I talked to someone else in detail who always uses methylene blue on airplanes.

And what he told me was that he could work while he was on the airplane. You know, the clear head if he took the methylene blue first. And usually on the plane, he's just too groggy. And he just, he wants to work, but then he just needs to lay back and close his eyes. That same person also told me that when he swims underwater, he can hold his breath

for several times longer if he takes methylene blue 30 minutes before that. The reason those things can be true for a lot of people is because methylene blue rewires how you're mitochondria. So you guys know mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, you know that from your high school biology, that means your mitochondria are the engines that take the food you eat

and turn it into usable cellular energy, which in biology we call ATP, that's the usable cellular energy. Okay.

So if you're underwater, where you're on an airplane, you have less oxygen.

And the reason you breathe is so that your mitochondria can use that oxygen to make the ATP. So when you're holding your breath underwater, you have less oxygen because you're holding your breath. If you're in a plane, you're at a higher altitude and the composition of the air has less

oxygen available for you. It's like being at high altitude. And they make up for that with the cabin pressure. They try to push the pressure back, but they can't make it equivalent to sea level. So when you're in a plane, it's like being at 5 to 8,000 feet altitude and the oxygen

available to you is lower. And so methylene blue is going in and it's helping the mitochondria work without the oxygen because of the way that it very non-specifically rewires it. But here's the problem. We also know that if you use methylene blue regularly, because the natural system that you

were born with that your mitochondria always use by nature is the most superior one you

can have. When you have all the nutrients you need and you have all the oxygen that you need, taking methylene blue is going to actually hurt your energy metabolism. So a lot of people think that they take an example of, it helps me work on the plane or it helps me hold my breath under water.

And then they exaggerate that and they say, oh, methylene blue is going to totally recharge

“your energy metabolism and you're going to be superhuman and you should take it all the”

time. And that's where you really get into trouble because once you understand the science, it can help you in certain situations when you don't have what you need. But otherwise, it's going to wind up hurting you. That's exactly what happens.

I think when it comes to the supplement industry is like you hear, one thing does does one great thing and so you just think, well, then I should just take it all the time constantly and also that everything is one size fits all. Everybody wants to know my supplement stack and I'm like, I'm not going to tell you because if I do and you start doing exactly what I'm doing, I haven't seen your blood work.

I have no idea what's going on with you. It could severely mess you up. So I think that people can kind of get into trouble with that. Do you see that? What kind of mitochondrial testing company called Midom and at the beginning of our

venture, we, you know, I had the time to talk to our customers and in a lot of depth. And one of the things that our test does is look at what are the bottlenecks in your

“mitochondrial energy metabolism and are you a candidate for methylene blue?”

And so one of our customers had tried methylene blue because he had like very severe fatigue problems. And he reads on the internet, I don't know, methylene blue's going to make you better. But really, what it really did was it wrecked his mood and it made him more foggy headed and it worsened his energy metabolism.

And when we ran testing on him, you know, our test showed that he's not a candidate for methylene blue. So he could have avoided that. But also the solutions that he did have were, you know, very unique and idiosyncratic. Like it turned out that there are certain amino acids that are really high in meat that

he really, his mitochondria just really burned those frenagery really well. And so, you know, he, he happens to have done wonders for himself on a carnivore diet now, for example. The real problem, so methylene blue, real problem is people generalize too much from other people's experiences.

So methylene blue, though, also has a very unique side profile, which is a dose of 10 milligrams

or higher. It actually acts as a pharmacological antidepressant and actually increases the amount of dopamine in circulating your brain, for example, which can make your mood be way better, but not because you've improved your energy metabolism, but simply because you're taking a drug that's designed to do that.

And so you do have a lot of people that say, oh, whenever I take methylene blue, I feel amazing, there are people that should be taking it for that reason, first of all, if you're depressed or you don't have good energy levels, you shouldn't be going to drugs as your first resort.

“You should be going to them as your last resort.”

My general principle is you always want to use food first and farm a last, right?

So first figure out if you can fix your problems with food, then figure out if you can fix your problems with supplements, go to two synthetics and drugs and methylene blue is a synthetic drug. Once you need to fill in those gaps when you've really exhausted your ability to optimize your health naturally.

And so is that also the window where you would say, okay, that's also where you could bring in things like peptides? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think with mitochondrial peptides, or the ones that are out there that have promised, I would say, are peptides that your body produces naturally when you exercise?

From what I've heard, and I don't use these on people, but I talked to people who do. From what I've heard, the people who really benefit from them are the people who are older and who have a vicious cycle of having been sedentary because they didn't have the energy to exercise and then because they don't exercise, they just get stuck in a rut. And so having a peptide that mimics the effective exercise when you don't feel like you can

get your energy up to do it can help break the vicious cycle and then can allow you to now establish good exercise habits and in the future you won't be dependent on the peptide to do that, but it can jump start you. But I don't think someone who's 25 to 25 to 30 years old should be thinking about peptides unless they're very sick.

“I think they should be thinking first on optimizing their exercise program, because exercise”

will make the peptides. When it comes to you, you went down this whole path of nutritional research. Did you do that because you were sick or because you were smart? I probably got sick because I was too smart. My path comes from having done a lot of dietary experimentation because I read a lot

when I was a teenager and having taken some wrong paths. So you were a teenager that was geeking out on nutrition and dieting and food and health? Yeah. Well that was because I was smart, but then that got me into more trouble. So how does a teenager even begin to care about that?

Because all the teenagers I know are like snoring tide pods and vaping and all that. I'm just kidding. It wasn't because I was smart. It was because my mom had gotten real sick. My mom had fiber myelgia and when I was a teenager, she was in pain every night.

Her quality of life was awful. So she went down her own journey into macrobiotic dieting and herbalism and yoga and tai chi and everything that was available to someone who's seeking alternative health back at that time. And I saw her make dramatic recovery and so that inspired me and that gave me a sense

of the power of nutrition and lifestyle and these alternative modalities and that made me interested in it.

“And so because I was interested in it, that's why I read about it.”

And I read a lot of books and some of the books had ideas that didn't work very well for me. Veganism did not work very well for me. How is it vegan for about two years?

I've never had one guest on this show who went down that path say it did work.

Every single one says they tried it and it didn't work. Well, I think there's some selection bias there, but the studies that they've done just asking people are you a vegan and where you a vegan show that there's a lot more people who used to be vegans than there are people who are vegans. So I do think that it doesn't work for the majority, but I don't think we have enough

of those studies on carnivores yet to know if the same thing is true for that. If you look at that and you don't have the data on carnivore, you could say, well, that's just because veganism sucks and carnivore diets are great.

well-rounded diet.

“I don't think that for ever, I think for us, I think even veganism, if you are somebody”

who is primarily consuming an ultra-processed food diet, you know, like you're just eating

crap all the time then you go vegan, you probably are going to feel amazing for a little

bit because you're cutting all that out and then you have carnivore people, I think they're feeling amazing, you know, for a period of time on only meat, but I just think long term for the rest of your life, you know, only eating the small, select amount of food, I don't know, I mean, you would know more than me, do you feel like you can really thrive to your full capacity as a human being on such a strict diet?

First of all, I totally agree with you. I think that we are meant to be omnivores, we are meant to eat both animal plants, animals and plants, and so I do think that the more you divert from that, the more trouble you're likely to get into, but I do think that part of that is that it becomes much more difficult to manage all the deficiencies that you could get on either of those diets, and that's

because animal foods are great sources of some nutrients like zinc and iron and protein, and plant foods are great sources of other nutrients like vitamin C. So therefore, if you cut big food groups out of your diet, you now need to think, oh, I cut out plants, where am I going to get my vitamin C? If you look at animal foods, where do you get vitamin C?

There's some vitamin C in shellfish, there's some vitamin C in liver, there's a tiny bit in meat that gets killed if you cook it, but it's just, it's really hard and you really have to go out of your way to design your diet very well. There's other things that just aren't in animal foods like plant fibers are not in animal foods.

So if you really need those, then you're going to be a trouble long term. We don't have enough data, but my position is that you really shouldn't do dietary extremes

“unless you need to, and if you need to, you need to put a lot more effort into designing”

your diet well and you should probably educate yourself more or get expert help more to make sure you're doing that and you should check in on your health more as well because it's

always the case that all of us have different needs for me, each other and our needs will

change over time, but also the impacts of the diet that you're eating, take many years. There are some things that happen over the course of minutes when you eat something. There's other things that happen over the course of weeks, months, but there are other things that happen over the course of years and just because you're doing great on something at two years out doesn't mean that there's not going to come a time before 10 years

is up where you're like, "Huh, I really need to eat some carbs. I might need a potato." What's your opinion on oysters? I think they're a great source of zinc. And that's about it.

“Well, I'm not saying not a great source of anything else.”

I'm just saying they really stand out as a great source of zinc. So if I were to add oysters to my diet, it would be because I wanted to add zinc to my diet. I said before, food first, farm a last supplements are in the middle. One of the reasons that you would want oysters as a source of zinc before you would want

to say a zinc supplement is because the oysters have a bunch of other minerals in there. And if you bomb yourself with zinc, you wind up creating imbalances with other minerals. And so if you take a food like oysters that really stand out as a source of zinc, it already is balanced with those other minerals. And it's a lot harder to create those imbalances when you're using foods.

I'm not saying there's nothing else bioactive in oysters. Yeah, I guess there's just some people who have this extreme concern with heavy metals in shellfish. Well, it's a great source of mercury too. Right.

I'm with you on like, they have all these other, like, God made it perfectly. So that sure, there's, maybe if there's like some, you know, natural occurring heavy metal or something, then there's all these other things that help balance them. And you made it perfectly. And then he said, eat it.

And then he said, don't eat it. And then he said, okay, you can eat it now. Yeah, exactly. So I was just curious what your opinion was. Yeah.

I'm a huge seafood person. There is more risk of heavy metals in seafood. It does depend on where they come from.

There has always been heavy metals in the ocean.

And that's because of the cycle of rain taking them and moving them there. And so as a result of that, marine life has developed systems to deal with those heavy metals.

it unavailable. Right. I found a study done on cats once in the 1970s and they said, we wonder, they're wondering,

“what's the importance of the balance in the mercury and the selenium in the fish?”

So they fed several groups of cats, diets that either had fish or they had extra selenium or they had extra mercury. And the fish was actually protective of the extra mercury that they added. And it's because all those other nutrients are protective against the heavy metals. So I don't think you can eat a natural diet that has no toxins and no heavy metals.

I mean, certainly you can say that our environment is worse now than it was before the industrial revolution in some ways. So there are more heavy metals in the environment. But I don't think it's true that this problem is a result of the industrial revolution. I think 5,000 years ago, there was mercury in fish and fish have a way to deal with that

because of that. And the evidence, there's not really much data to say that people who we fish or oysters are worse off than other people. Everyone's talking about taking control of their health right now.

And I love that people are finally waking up to the fact that waiting until you feel awful

is not a strategy. But let's be honest, a lot of these health platforms still feel overwhelming, confusing or honestly kind of passive.

“That's why I've been so impressed with Jevity and yes, if you've heard of function health,”

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for 20% off your first year. Him, we talk about how quickly women get rushed into intense fertility conversations, like you walk into an appointment, and suddenly it's like, okay, here are 14 procedures, spreadsheet and a mild emotional breakdown, and it's like, can we maybe take a breath first because sometimes the body doesn't need more chaos, needs restoration, which is why I love

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basically getting your body back in rhythm instead of forcing it into panic mode.

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>> You can with bullets, too. I talked to a guy once whose lead levels were really high. And he talked to some people in the state and they said that a lot of people shoot an animal when they go hunting. And what they don't realize is that the bullets spreads the lead throughout the animal. So anyway, my point is if you're hunting your meat, you should use lead free bullets.

been verified to have less lead than other things. >> But isn't there a certain amount of naturally

“occurring lead? >> There is a certain amount of naturally occurring lead. And I would pay more”

attention to your calcium intake. Calcium prevents the absorption of lead into your body. Lead when it gets into your body, your body stores it in your bones, which is probably not good for your bones, but it's really good for your brain. Because if you're not storing the lead in your bones, it's going everywhere else. And the storage of lead in bones is definitely protective against the neurological consequences of lead toxicity. And then calcium also helps you excrete

the lead into your urine. So you're circulating lead no matter what your exposure to lead is, is going to be way lower if you're getting say 1,000 milligrams of calcium in your diet, then it is if you're getting 200 milligrams of calcium in your diet. To get 1,000 milligrams of calcium in your diet, that generally means that you're eating either several servings of dairy products, several servings of bones, or you're eating a lot of highly curated dark green vegetables.

There's really only a few that are excellent sources of calcium like bok choy and Chinese cabbage, broccoli and kale are okay. >> I just recently became obsessive bok choy. It's not my new favorite.

“>> This is an excellent obsession. You should become more obsessed with bok choy.”

>> Why? >> I mean, I don't know what the rest of your diet is, but certainly if you're not eating three servings of dairy products, or three servings of bones. >> It's just oysters and bok choy. That's all like, well, that bok choy is going to be excellent protection against the lead in those oysters. Let me tell you that. >> No, I'm obsessed with that. I had it, somebody served it.

This dinner I went to and I was like, oh my gosh, I'd never had it before. And so now I can't stop eating.

It's just, I love this vegetable. And I don't know. I didn't grow up in home that made bok choy. So why do you like it? >> Because it's a great source of calcium. The dark green vegetables, some of them have problems. >> Like kale. >> Kale is okay. I mean, I don't know if you're diet should be mostly kale chips. Maybe at a super bowl party. You can eat the kale chips, but why do you hate kale so much? >> Oh, no. This is, it's just controversial. I mean, you hear Paul Saladino just racking on

>> Well, Paul Saladino just likes a lot of plants. So the set of green plants that are a really big problem is smaller than the set of green plants that Paul Saladino hates. It's all say that. Every food has some problems. And what you want to do is get more good things than problems. So if you have a high good thing to problem ratio, you're good. And that speaks to your point earlier about balance. Where you really get into a problem is if you derive most of your calories from kale,

yeah, you're going to have a lot of problems. But if kale is a minor supplement to your diet because it makes up 20% of your dinner plate every day, you're not going to have much of a problem with kale. A lot of green plants like, for example, rhubarb and spinach are really high in oxalate. And oxalate can form crystals. And it's the primary thing that forms kidney stones. Now, if you look in the medical literature, they think oxalate is all about kidney stones.

But it's not. We definitely know that under some circumstances, you can develop oxalate crystals in your brain, in your breasts, and in your joints. And by the way, the best protection against oxalate is calcium again. On top of that, oxalate turns out is a mitochondrial toxin. So it's

basically cutting your energy metabolism in half when you get to the top of the blood levels found

“in the general population for oxalate. I think that pop-eye was wrong. And that spinach is not a”

superfood. If you look at something like kale, you have more benefits than drawbacks in the sense that kale is quite low in oxalate. So it's a great way to get the benefits of green plants, such as vitamin K. And for someone who doesn't eat dairy and bones, calcium, magnesium, many, many more things that could be said about it. It's a great way to get a lot of those benefits without overloading yourself with oxalate. Palm with kale is that it does have some drawbacks.

So it does have compounds that interfere with the uptake of iodine into your thyroid gland and into your breasts. In the thyroid gland, its principle role is to make thyroid hormone. And thyroid hormones main role is to ramp up mitochondrial energy metabolism. So thyroid hormone is like the dial on your metabolic rate. You can have, if the normal range is here to here, down here, you're going to have half as much energy and you're going to feel it up here,

you're going to have twice as much energy and you're going to feel it. So you can balance the kale

you're diet is oysters and kale, you're okay. But at a certain amount, you could, you could

“really blow through your tolerance for that. And so it's one thing to have a third of your”

plate at dinner, be vegetables and first, a lot of that to be kale, not really a bad position,

but if you go start juicing kale smoothies every morning, you could wind up over consuming it and really run into a problem. And if you're iodine intake is really low, you could wind up into in a greater problem. Back to it is the low in oxalates, but it's a lot higher in calcium than kale. And so back to it is really in the same family of kale and it has all the same problems, but it's nutrient values sway higher. Ivanka Trump has recently been singing the praises of

creatine. How do you feel about creatine? I had no idea that I had so much in common with Ivanka Trump. There you go. We're just learning so much. So if the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the

cell, creatine is the mitochondria's energy grid, because what credit creatine is doing is it's taking

“the power that the mitochondria make and it's spreading it throughout the cell. So getting that energy”

out, it's like if you have, you know, you got your power plant in town, you need all the, you need the energy grid to power the lights in here. And so you could imagine if the power plant is mitochondria, our lights are on because of creatine. If you look at the literature, it's been studied way more in athletic context. If you look at a physiology, you could have predicted decades ago that it would have way more value than that because yes, creatine is very rich in your muscle

doing those things, but it's also helping you see it's also powering your brain. It's also powering sperm to swim up the vaginal canal. It's also powering the production of stomach acid. So it was

never plausible that creatine was just for athletes. And what we're seeing now is there more and more

studies showing that creatine can do other things, especially support brain power. So there's quite a number of studies showing that creatine can double the rate of healing after a traumatic brain injury can be very promising for Alzheimer's can prevent the effects of sleep deprivation. And creatine is another thing that helps in terms of hypoxia as well. We were talking about methylene blue in that context. There's probably no other supplement that's been studied

in randomized controlled trials as much as creatine has. And definitely among the things that are very well studied, there's nothing else that just seems to consistently have benefits with no downsides. And I'm not saying there are no downsides. It's just that the downsides are manageable and they're relatively rare because they're not showing up in the trials, but is it okay to take every morning because I take it every morning and my smoothie? It's okay to take it every morning.

“But I think that you would get the most out of it if you split it up through the day in smaller doses.”

But you don't have to. And I think it's okay to take it every morning. Okay. Okay. Liposomal vitamins, or they actually better. This is, I think, a real gray area. I love supplements. And I love supplement companies. But supplement companies do have an incentive to differentiate themselves by coming up with innovative products and to promote their own product at the expense of the existing ones. There's a lot of questions about whether the liposomes

survived digestion. And so you wind up with studies in, say, cells where there are certain types of cells that don't have a transporter for a certain nutrient. And the liposome helps get into the cells. Cool. Makes sense. There are other studies and animals where it seems like the liposomes get digested. And so it's like are they getting to that cell? Question mark. There are studies where supplement companies will take their new form of the supplement and they'll show that it's great.

Cool. But there aren't a lot of studies where a supplement company takes the new form of the supplement compares it to the old form head to head and around the mind's controlled trial. You know, they'll compare it to a placebo. But what you really want is you want to take the existing thing that people are already using. You want to take the new thing and you want to compare them both to a placebo. And you want to see does the out performance of the placebo? Is it better

in the new thing than the old thing, right? And part of the reason you want to do that is because a lot of times the supplements cost a lot more. And so you have these questions of, are you getting 30% more available by availability and are you paying three times for it? What's the actual,

some people who swear that liposomeal vitamins see destroys a cold, right? And it's tracks. And

vitamin C powder at high doses doesn't work for them. But I do wonder myself as a scientist. Is that because you're getting better delivery of vitamin C or is that because the liposome has nutrients in it that is beneficial for you? Because liposomes themselves are nutritional lipids that you will digest and consume. There's colean for example in the liposomes. So I think there's a lot of question marks. I'm not against them at all. And I'm very pro people experimenting

with supplements themselves to see what their, you know, what they mileage they get out of it.

And I generally trust people's experiences with that. But I don't think the data is out of place

where we can make strong statements that you should get your supplements as liposomes and not as

“the old form of vitamin. So if mitochondria are the key to health, what's the one daily habit”

the people are doing that's wrecking them? It's a competition for eating poorly, exercising poorly, staring at their phone all day, and not getting sun in the morning. Do you think EMFs are actually something we should be worried about? Yes. I consider myself a a digital intentionalist. I don't protect myself from EMFs at all costs. But if I'm going to use a digital device I will ask myself the question, what benefit am I getting from this? And I will be intentional

about it. Like so I turn my Wi-Fi off before I go to bed because what am I doing with Wi-Fi in my sleep in an ideal world I would prefer a wired internet connection. But sometimes it's impractical if I'm an environment where there's multiple people who are working on laptops and I don't really

“have the office set up to be wired like that. But it is a pet peeve of mine that designers of everything”

assume wireless is better. When actually wireless is usually worse in performance and experience than wired connections even though the wired connection is often inconvenient. So an example of like the convenience benefit would be if you're working out wired earbuds really get in the way

if you're listening to something on your phone. So when AirPods first came out I was like oh man

I can listen to whatever I want when I work out and I don't have a wire tangling up great. But now I'm realizing like I rented a car right and it is unambiguous that the setup for car play is radically quicker if you plug into the USB and the playback on everything is a tremendously better experience because Bluetooth skips and wired does not. So there's so many times where I've accidentally had my Bluetooth on and I you know I turned it off because I'm like

why am I listening to why is it skipping so much and I just turned it off and I have it plugged in and I'm like oh the sound is perfect and it's not you know a record player but it's good sound so I I think this trend towards prioritizing wireless is I think we we need to somehow communicate to the designers that they're wrecking the experience of many things by putting wireless at the forefront and assuming that the wired connection is is not important because you know not like

my rent a car just doesn't have the wired connection you know but anyway I health wise I think there's enough data to be concerned and my choice is to be concerned in a way that is not going to hurt my productivity but you know is going to exercise consciousness about that. Do you think that people were misled into thinking that calories matter more than nutrients? I don't think what has been said about calories is misleading but I think that people have paid

“off like way too much attention to it. There's a basic fact that if you want to lose weight”

you need a caloric deficit. I think arguing with that is silly but people are just they think the be all lend all of health is to not be fat and that's crazy there's so many other things that you should be thinking about with your health that are unrelated to your body composition. But wouldn't obesity be a telltale sign that something is not right? I think it's a telltale sign that something's not right. I mean there is a lot of difference between people in what

level of body fat is harmful and level of body fat is not a problem and I think people radically underappreciate the importance of having enough body fat especially women. It's been understood

understood since the 1970s that having enough body fat is absolutely central to being fertile.

“And that data indicated that you need to be about 17% body fat to menstruate and you need to be”

about 22% body fat to be fertile. Now are those hard and fast rules? No because just like the amount of body fat of extra body fat that you need to have metabolic dysfunction is

different between different people. So also is the amount of critical body fat that you need to

be fertile as well. But those are good rules of thumb and the problem is that if you look at what people think is attractive, young women are obsessed with being leaner than is compatible with fertility. For image wise, if you are fat, that hurts your fertility as well. But I think there are, I think we have as big of a problem of people not realizing that they have to have a critical level of body fat to be healthy. I think that's just as much of a problem as it is

that we have too many people that are too fat. Once you get out of the people eating a standard American diet and you get into people listening to this podcast, which problem is bigger, I don't

know, you probably know better than I do. But I would guess that with health conscious people,

you have the problem flipped. The general population people are too overweight. But once you

“start getting to health conscious populations, you get into fitness populations, I think you have”

a lot of people that at least should not be fighting to lose another five pounds and maybe could gain two or three. What is something that women are doing in the name of being healthy that's actually wrecking their hormones? Losing too much weight. You have a doctorate in nutrition. You're telling people to eat red meat and butter while most of the mainstream nutrition world says the opposite. Why are you so confident that you're right in their wrong? I think that the claims that

red meat and butter are bad are based on poor quality evidence. I think that red meat and butter have nutritional value and I think that a lot of people aren't getting the nutrients that they can get from those foods. But I'm not a dogmatic. Everyone should be eating maximal red meat and butter. I just think those are two foods that are very useful and a lot of people would benefit from having in their diet. There's a big debate around seed oil. Some people say avoiding them is overhyped.

Some say they're super harmful. You've got to avoid them from your mitochondria focus perspective

where you land. Against seed oils. Yeah, seed oils are basically enriching your mitochondria

in fatty acids that make them more vulnerable to getting damaged by all the other negative things that you're doing in your life. You set a lot of people are low in co-leaning and they don't

“even know what that is. Why is co-leaning so important? Okay, so co-leaning is a”

b-vitamin-like substance. It's gone up and down and it's status as a vitamin and a b-vitamin. But it's generally grouped with b-vitamin because it's very similar to them. But it's found mostly in liver and egg yolks. You can get co-leaning in a lot of other foods. In a broad diet, if you didn't eat liver and egg yolks, you could have enough co-leaning if you designed it well. But liver and egg yolks are the two super foods where if you include those in your

diet, you are not likely to have to worry about your co-leaning too much. And co-leaning plays a number of important roles. One is to form phosphatital co-leaning, which is a major constituent of your cell membranes. And that's very important for avoiding fatty liver. We talked a little bit about obesity. One of the reasons obesity is associated with metabolic dysfunction is because as you get fat, your liver gets fat. But the ability to put that fat in the right place requires co-leaning.

And so your way more, like, for given level of body fatness, you're way more likely to get fatty liver if you don't have enough co-leaning because you've got some total amount of fat. You got to put it somewhere. And co-leaning is needed to move it out of the liver. And so if you don't have that, you're way more likely to get obesity associated metabolic dysfunction because getting fatty liver is part of how you get there. Co-leaning is also the precursor to acetyl-co-leaning, which is

a neurotransmitter that is responsible for a number of things. So in the brain, it's very important for forming memories for wakefulness and for sustained focused attention. It's very important for preventing dementia Alzheimer's, for example, or some of the drugs that they use in Alzheimer's, that are effective are things that prevent people from breaking down acetyl-co-leaning.

co-leaning to make the acetyl-co-leaning. So what happens when people have an egg allergy and so they're

not eating eggs at all in their diet? Where do you think they should be getting co-leaning? Well, you could get more from liver than, but you could also just look at other foods. So the issue is not that there's no co-leaning other foods. It's that you wind up getting a very broad distribution of smaller amounts. If people Google my name and co-leaning database, I actually have a co-leaning database where people can look up different foods, but vegetables and nuts have

co-leaning, meat has co-leaning. It's just if you're not eating the co-leaning super foods, you want to think more. You might want to pay more attention to whether you're getting enough co-leaning by plugging your, you know, doing an analysis of your diet. I do want to say a co-leaning also in

outside of the brain is a key driver of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the

rest and digest nervous system. So it's very important as a way to prevent anxiety and to promote kindness. I need to interrupt this episode with a formal apology to all of you, because apparently I've ruined your lives. I've been getting messages. People saying, Alex, I can't stop. I'm hiding bags. My family is concerned and I just want to say, well, that's not my fault, but also I understand because I've been talking about Massachusetts since late 2022, before they were even a sponsor.

“I had the founder on in 2023, like some kind of snack evangelist, because when I believe in something,”

I'm not casual about it. I go full writer die and Mossa deserves that, because once you switch to chips made with real ingredients, organic, mixed-bolized corn, sea salt, grass-fed beef, talo, you physically cannot go back. You try a regular chip and you're like, what is this? This tastes like drywall dust, fried and engine oil. And now you're stuck, because Mossa actually satisfies you. You eat it and you feel full, calm, stable, no bloat, no crash, no gross luggage feeling,

and your kids aren't bouncing off the walls from artificial junk, which honestly might be the biggest miracle here. So now you're hiding the chips. You've created a secret stash. You've become a person you don't recognize, and again, I'm sorry, but I'm also not, because not only are these the best or two chips I've ever had, their mission is to completely revamp the food system, and I will support that aggressively. So if you're ready to upgrade your family snack game,

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“wagons, and whole foods for the first time ever. But remember, my discount is only on their website,”

MossaChips.com. Can we talk about what people do when they travel? Because it's like the second you step into an airport. Everyone's like, "Well, my health no longer matters. You're eating mystery sandwiches, gas station snacks, something called a protein box that looks like it was assembled during a crisis." And people are like, "Well, I'm on vacation from what? Functioning organs? You don't get to just abandon your body because you're in a different zip code, Hannah.

This is why I bring paleovali's grass-fed organ complex with me." And I know organs. You're like, "I'm not eating liver. Well, you don't have to." I mean, at least taste it. They freeze dried in capsules. So you're getting all the nutrients from organs, like liver, heart kidney, without cooking it, tasting it, or emotionally dealing with it. And this is the real stuff. It's 100% grass-fed, pasture-raised, gently freeze dried. So the nutrients actually stay intact.

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You talk about how nutritional needs for people should change over time. What does a woman in

“or 20s need nutritionally versus a woman in her 30s versus a woman in her 40s?”

So that's one of the two rules. It's partner rule is that everyone's needs are different. So there is going to be an interaction between the individual woman and how she develops over time. I could make some generalizations. So one interesting one is that about 10% of people are prone to iron overload. And in men, that tends to be a problem starting in the 30s because now you've been accumulating iron long enough to get there by the time you're 30s, by the time you're 30. In women,

it's delayed by 30 or 40 years because most women are prone to iron deficiency more than they are to iron overload because they lose iron during menstruation. But the amount of variation between

it's proportional to blood flow because some women have heavy periods of some have light periods.

And some women may have heavy periods and then later have light periods where vice versa. And so that in itself can create variation if you're just going through a period where you have

“heavier lighter periods. But menstruating tends to silence the 10% chance that you need to worry”

about iron overload because your genes say you do, but your menstruations says you don't. And so then later if you go through menopause or if you have some other reason to stop menstruating, that can activate that concern about iron overload. And as we said before, body fat is a key determinant of that. Some women stop menstruating very early because they're in a sport where they're

really have someone breathing down their neck to make sure they don't have a period because they're supposed

to have their supposed to have low enough body fat to support that sport. I've talked to women in gymnastics for whom that was true. But if you have any idiosyncratic problem in your energy metabolism, that can cause you to stop menstruating as well. We had one customer who did her mitochondrial test named Jacqueline and she stopped menstruating when she was 28 for 10 years. And she had adequate body fat. And she went to all kinds of specialists, alternative health

people. And mitochondrial testing showed that she had a very idiosyncratic need for cokeuten supplementation. She had asked me, you know, is this going to fix my menstrual problem? I said,

well, I wouldn't, you know, maybe, but it might take 10 years because you've had it for 10 years.

Two weeks later, she started menstruating and she emailed me about it. And it's been a year now. And totally back to normal just from that one supplement. So anyway, my point is all women are individuals and all people change over time. And when you multiply those two things together, you're going to see a lot of different proliferations of what that could mean. So I do think there are some rules of thumb to be conscious of. But I also think that means one of two things and these aren't

“either or as you can mix them. But one is you need to pay more attention to your assumptions”

and your responses over time. You may assume that because one diet worked for me when I was 20, that diet is going to work for me when I'm 30. But that might not be true. And so you don't want to be come stuck in believing that because it worked before it must be working now. And that's for men and women, right? That's any. Oh, this is for everyone. Yeah. Because you can get, you can develop blind spots based on, you know, your success fuels an assumption,

your assumption fuels confirmation bias fuels, you know, all types of biases of how you think about things. If you're not looking out for, I should check in with myself every year or two to see if I want to change what I'm doing and see how I responded that change. The more flexible and malleable you can be to allow a dynamic evaluation of your own diet and your own success, the better off you'll be. And I think there's also a role for testing that because the thing like

for example, the iron overload issue, testing your your iron in, you know, as as you go through menopause as an example, it's a great thing to look at because that's something where you where menstruating versus not, you could really shift from having iron deficiency to suddenly, now you need to worry about iron overload, which is very counterintuitive because you're your taught throughout your life to be worried about getting your iron up. And it actually

pays off when you do. And then all the sudden, now you need to worry about getting your iron down. It can be very confusing and counterintuitive. And so, you know, incorporating the right testing as you go through life, I think is important. And if you're thinking about fertility, you definitely want to be biased towards getting enough abundance of everything. And I don't think you need that bias when you pass on to the other end. Let's say you divide it between, I want a baby and I

impair menopause. And I, you know, I don't want babies anymore, right? You asked me about like red meat and butter and things like that. A lot of the foods that are demonized because they could

“contribute to heart disease. I think that's like a separate, that's it's own can of worms, right?”

But there's this idea of diseases of poverty and diseases of affluence. And they talk about that in terms of societies. But there's, you can also use that lens for thinking about like if you are trying to have a, if you try to start a family, you want abundant affluence in your diet because all those things are going to help you build the hormones that you need.

saturated fat and cholesterol. You want all the vitamins and minerals that come with foods like

egg yolks and liver and butter and meat. You know, when you're past that, I don't agree that you want to avoid all those foods for heart disease. But you do want to shift how you're thinking about it. And you do want to be thinking more along the lines like, how are the things I'm eating impacting my blood cholesterol? Because that actually becomes relevant when you're looking forward to your longevity. But in a way that you, you don't want to be optimizing for that when you are

when you're 25 years old. You've cited research suggesting that gymnast and pull

“Voltares actually live longer than any other athlete. What does that tell us about health?”

It basically took all these elite athletes and ranked them in terms of their longevity versus

the general population. We do have to realize that these are elite athletes. So it's, you know, it's not saying that if we do a handstand, we're going to live that long. But I think there are some very interesting ideas that we should be brainstorming from this. And one of the things that I observe about it is that most fitness advice to everyone is, you get enough cardio for your heart and your lungs to be working well, doing enough resistance training to be strong. And if you look

at the longevity space and you know podcasts that cover blood jelly, what are they talking about? They're talking a lot about cardio respiratory fitness. But if you look at the people who have

a lot of cardio respiratory fitness like cyclists and runners, they only have two or three

years on the general population versus gymnast and pull Voltares having eight. And if you look at people who are strong like weight lifters, they really don't have any advantage over the general population. So I think we're really missing the boat when we reduce exercise down to cardio respiratory fitness and strength. And I think the lesson from the gymnast and pull Voltares is their sports require excellent biomechanics, the, you know, their shoulder joints work very well. And they also

require exceptional neurological control. And my hypothesis, I can't prove this, but my explanation for this, if you look at what what kills people in the modern world, we go through a stage where everyone's dying of heart disease. If we get medicine up well enough to save people from dying of a heart attack when they get to the hospital, everyone starts dying of cancer. And if we find a way to kick that can down the road, everyone starts dying of diverse neurological problems or at least

“that's what they write on the dust or tip of a good. So I think cardio respiratory fitness is probably”

good for all those things, but it's mostly good for not dying of heart disease. And strength, I think helps, if it's done right, I think strength helps, helps prevent injury. And I think injury is bad for your longevity. We see this with people who break a hip, the proportion of women who die in the year after they break their hip is like 70%, it's crazy. But actually functional movement training would be way better to prevent hip fractures because, um, or to prevent falling

and not getting up. Like there's an exercise in, uh, that most people don't do called the Turkish get-up where you hold a kettlebell in the air from sitting on the floor and you hold it in the air and then you get up and a step-by-step process until you're standing. Something like that is going to be phenomenal for preventing you from having fallen and not being able to get up. So we need to all make our parents do that exercise. Everyone at home, you got to put your

parents on the Turkish get-up. That is the solution to longevity, to be more of a scientist.

“I think that biomechanical excellence is preventing immune problems and one of the things that”

it does for the immune system is cancer is killed by immune cells called T cells. And those T cells to activate, they actually do their own, uh, push-ups kind of. They have motor proteins. They push against their surroundings and they transform that kinetic energy into the energy to activate. And that activates them to kill the cancers. So the cancer works on the matrix around it to try to make it really hard for the T cell to push off in that process. I can't prove this,

but I think there's something about having excellent biomechanical function of all your joints and your whole body that combatts that process because you are doing a much better job

we would probably see that they're less likely to get certain types of cancer.

So we need to all be upside down more. Well, that's, you know, that's the other thing. Is gymnasts and pull-of-alters are both upside down a lot. And I, and I actually think there's

“there could be something to this. Have you ever heard of vibration plates?”

Yes. Yeah, are those worth it? What are those? Well, I think those are the poor man's gymnastics. Okay. I think that the, you know, things that help vibrate your body or some are cells to your body or shake it up and down. I think those things are helping improve the circulation of two major things. One is Venus return, the blood going back to the heart,

view Google it. You're going to find that walking is supposed to promote that because the

contraction of the muscles send that back. But if you're standing on a vibration plate, you're probably getting a lot more movement there. We also know now, by the way, there was a study that came out last year that there's this age-old mystery of why does the blood keep flowing after the heart stops when someone dies? This goes back to the ancient Greeks. And there is now evidence that your mitochondrial energy production, your mitochondria,

during the course of making ATP, they also make infrared energy. And that infrared energy drives is part of what drives the blood to go back to the heart. And the other thing is the lymph. So the lymph doesn't really have anything pumping it. And it's much more dependent on movement. And so a lot of your immune circulation throughout your body as well as clearing out toxins

“is dependent on the circulation of the lymph fluid. And so I think things like vibration plates”

are a way to try to trigger more of that vibratory movement. But I think flipping upside down is superior to that. Right. But when it comes to all these wellness tools, like red light therapy, blah, blah, blah, like I mean, what do you think is worth it? I think that there are all replacements for natural things. So I think that red light and near infrared is a replacement for the sun. I think far infrared is a replacement for fire. So I think if you go back to the ancestral

human experience, I think you were out in the morning sun by the fire, you were by the fire before you went to bed at night, socializing. We've cut sun out of our lives. It's very easy to restore it. We've cut fire out of our lives. It's kind of difficult to restore it a little bit more. I mean, you don't have to, yeah, I mean setting up a fire pit is more difficult than going outside. Right. And then, you know, PMF is a replacement for being barefoot on the earth. And vibration plates are a replacement

for flipping upside down. The majority of young people are on antidepressants now. Oh, yeah. What are antidepressants doing to mitochondrial health? Oh, destroying it. Like if you're in an L, you've got an elevator pitch to a 24 year old who's on SSRIs. What are you saying to explain to them the seriousness of you've got to get off this drug in a safe way? The earlier the better. That's my elevator pitch because what we think we know from the trials is that it's not that hard to get

off SSRIs. But the average person who's put a SSRI is on SSRI for five years. And there's one trial that's like a year long. There's no trials that are five years long. Almost every trial is 12 weeks or less. And what we see from just talking to people and surveying them is that when people have been on them for a year, they're way harder to get off than when they've been on them for six weeks, 12 weeks. When they've been on them for two years, it's a lot harder. When they've been on them

for five, it's catastrophicly harder. So I think for the person who's on the SSRI, I would say that alone should tell you that it should be a priority now, not later, to work with a qualified professional to get off the SSRI because the longer you're on, the harder it's going to be to get off of it.

And I have to reiterate, never get off an SSRI called Turkey. It could be extremely dangerous,

“you know, massive suicidal ideation, all kinds of problems. You have to wean off of it strategically.”

And sometimes it could take you a year, year and a half, two years weaning off slowly longer. Yeah, depending on how long you've been on. So when you get off, it's very important to understand that you should not tapered linearly. And a lot of people do not understand this. And you want to do what's called a hyperbolic taper, which means that the interval, the dose interval that you go down at first might be kind of big. But the further you go, the smaller the dose interval

that you make. So you might want it, like let's say you're on 20 milligrams, you could go 20 milligrams

You probably want to talk to a compounding pharmacy. I think there are resources on the internet

to help people find compounding that they would need to do this. But because it becomes really hard to write to like if the tablet's not scored for you to do that, it becomes hard to be accurate with that. But the reason is that this is kind of true for everything. It's just really been a focus in people working with SSRI withdrawal. But when a drug is out of very high dose, the marginal increase in the dose does not have that big of an effect compared to going from zero to one.

Like going from nine to ten is not a big deal. Going from zero to one is a huge deal. And so that works in reverse. If you go from ten to eight, not a big deal. But when you go from five to four, big deal. When you go from two to one, like catastrophically big deal. So I would say that you probably want to plan on taking a year to get off of it in a structured hyperbolic

“taper. I do not want to tell anyone to go off SSRIs by themselves. I think you should seek out the”

resources that you need for this. And I've got tons of interviews. By the way, if you just look up culture upon the carry SSRIs, I've done many interviews with doctors who this is their entire specialty is helping you get off SSRI. So please go listen to those. Yeah, I would say you can you can plan on starting it to be six months or a year. But if you've been on them for five years, you should not be surprised if it takes you five years to get off. That's how it would say that.

We need to talk about something that no one wants to say out loud. Your elbows are disgusting. Men, women, everyone. You're like, what do you mean my elbows? Yeah, they're dry gray,

ashy, collecting debris like a forgotten shelf. The problem is you don't see them, right?

Like we don't usually look at our elbows. But look right now. I'm serious. Just look at them. I already scrubbed mine. So I know they're good to go. You think everything is fine. Uh-huh. Meanwhile, everyone's looking at your elbows and judging them like, what's happening here? Was this a controlled burn? And it's not just elbows under arms, too. Build up deodorant residue. All the things that you've been layering on for years, like a skin care hoarder. This is why

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like, this is not good for anyone, especially her brain in more ways than one. Because here's the thing, those wireless headphones are constantly emitting EMFs. Even when you're not using them, they're searching for signal right next to your head, which is exactly what you do not want. So, instead, get your mom something that actually makes sense. Tech wellness, air tube headphones get yourself a pair while you're at it. They look normal, but instead of wiring sound directly

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“Why is it so important to get off an SSRI sooner rather than later because of what it's doing”

to your mitochondrial health? This is another case where there's a lot of idiosyncrasy involved. In 2024, there were dozens of reports of search lane, which is the loft, causing a condition called multiple acylcoa dehydrogenase deficiency, which is we can abbreviate it mad with two D's, but it's a condition of profound neuromuscular dysfunction. We'll put it like that. There are other problems

And these people didn't have the genetic disorder. They were referred to clinics for genetic disorders, and it turned out that the common thing was all these people were on search lane, and they were mimicking this one in 200,000 genetic disorder. So you have people who just straight up have a clinical severe mitochondrial dysfunction, and that's like playing Russian Relet. It's not common, but it can happen. And that you might not know it's happening until

“two or three years out before that damage occurs. Much more commonly, I think, what is happening”

is that the SSRI's first of all are playing with serotonin, which we don't understand correctly.

Serotonin's primary function is to assist mitochondrial function in adapting to low oxygen levels. And you know, an interesting tie-in is, and I think we should say this to the people who are not on SSRI's. There are hundreds of randomized controlled trials showing benefits of nutrition, hundreds showing benefits of psychotherapy, and hundreds showing benefits of exercise. And the pool data shows that those are just as effective or more effective than SSRI's. So I think if someone

is depressed and they are thinking about going on SSRI's, they should be told, "Look, hey, wait a second, there's a bunch of things that you can do first." But interestingly enough, one of the things that is incredibly helpful, according to at least one of those studies, even twice as effective

as exercise, is morning sunlight. And the reason that morning sunlight is so powerful in helping

with depression is because when you wake up in the morning, your mitochondrial need to wake up. That takes a little bit of a lag, but you need a whole process initiated to make

“all the adaptations to wakefulness occur. That's why when you get up in the morning, sometimes”

you're not running at 100% right away, some people are, but most people aren't. You know, so if you feel a little groggy as you're walking down, trying to make a cup of coffee or whatever, that's because you need all the signaling processes to happen to wake your mitochondria up and get them fully active for the day. And one of the key things that happens is when you're exposed to sunlight, the sunlight activates serotonin production in your brain, and the serotonin is the

primary thing, making the mitochondrial wake up and helping them to adjust to that state of wakefulness. We think serotonin is all about mood, but serotonin is really all about coordinating our energy metabolism in response to stress. And so, lessons or eyes are messing with serotonin doing things that we don't understand at all. One of the things that serotonin has to do in order to do all that stuff is get into the cell. But the SSRI literally blocks that,

that's its purpose, right? So your causing mitochondrial problems just by blocking serotonin

“getting in there, and they think it's okay to do because they think that the only thing serotonin”

does is act on the outside of a neuron to make you happy. And so they think, oh, we'll just stop it from going in this cell and we'll be happier. But that's very limited thinking and it's really profoundly misunderstanding things. And taking the SSRI is preventing serotonin from doing

essential things that it has to do to promote mitochondrial function. SSRIs are also going into

cells themselves, and they're doing all kinds of things that most people don't understand at all as well. So one of the things that I am going to be studying this year is what happens to mitochondrial function as someone goes off SSRIs because my explanation for why people have such catastrophic experiences is that the SSRI is basically acting like a mitochondrial drug. And in some ways it's causing problems, but in other ways it's making you addicted to it. And so a lot of people develop

nuanced mitochondrial dysfunction when they go off the SSRI because they had become so dependent on it. We had one customer as well named Miguel who he had gone off one antidepressant, he had gone back on and he switched to a different one. So he was on Paxil, pretty healthy, went off Paxil, he had some problems that came up when back on it switched Alexa Pro, then ultimately had to get off that because he was developing problems with cramping and twitching. And then when he went off it,

his problems just exploded. And he developed, you know, he couldn't travel because whenever

problems from being coming deficient electrolytes, basically his body was just falling apart.

And he lost 17 pounds of muscle mass during that period because his energy metabolism was so defective, right? How did you help him fix that? So what his testing showed was that he had a block in his the ability to have you heard of MTHFR? Yes. Okay. So MTHFR is an enzyme involved in methylation. One thing that people don't know about methylation is that those methyl groups have to go into your mitochondria to support mitochondrial function. So he had a genetic block in the transporter

“that does that. People that have the MTHFR gene should that automatically mean you should stay away”

from SSRIs in your opinion. I wouldn't say that. I would say that people who are who are not

on SSRIs should stay away from SSRIs. That's true. I mean, I mean, is it extremely problematic if you

have MTHFR gene? You know, in his case, I think that you could say that, like, yes, for that reason he had more of a problem with SSRIs. The issue is, I think this degree to which people have problems with SSRIs is like grossly underappreciated. You know, so do you have to have his problem? I have a problem with SSRIs now. I don't like the genetic variations what they're doing is they are creating variation in how your problem manifests and what you should do about it.

Okay. But they're not acting as a binary switch that's saying you're going to have a problem with the SSRI and other people will be okay. So do you find a key has this and then what do you do? He had a methylation centric protocol that was based on the idea that he, you know, had to do much more work than even someone with MTHFR would have to do to support methylation. And what's interesting though is he and this kind of gets to whether everyone should be taking creatine. So

he had to microdose creatine at a hundred milligrams a day and work his way up to one gram over the course of three to six months. The average person taking creatine is taking five grams. Some people taking three grams. Some people taking 20 grams for him. He really had to titrate it up really slowly but he emailed me at the six week mark at the six month mark and at the eight and a half month mark. And over the course of that year he regained all his 17 pounds of muscle

that he had lost. Great. You know, it's a lot easier to gain 17 pounds of muscle when you've lost 17 pounds of muscle but still. If you've lost 17 pounds of muscle and you're able to gain it back in the year it's a pretty impressive achievement. But all the other problems had, you know,

he said like basically like I feel like I'm myself for the first time in the years and that's been

“very stable going out across across the year. So I think what we're going to find when we study it”

more is that you're going to have very common, it's going to be a very common problem that when people go off SSRIs, they have new problems. And these by the way, I'm sure you've talked about this with the other guests but these are not like their depression came back. They're like really weird stuff happening with their brain and their neuromuscular system. Things that are obviously not just the disease came, you treated the depression it came back. It's not like that.

So it is kind of a mystery and I think what we're going to find as we study it more is that there are a lot of people who have problems with those drugs but the reason that they have problems and the things they need to do about it are going to be very different from each other. If you were to say like what are the bad things that happen when people get old? You probably say something different about your grandfather than your grandmother and you'd probably report something

different, right? And because when we start to lose our ability to like you're investing so much energy in preventing all kinds of things from going wrong and you're not going to know what they are for about 50 years because it's when you lose the ability to support robust cellular energy production that all your unique negative traits start to manifest. Now you have enough energy to keep stay alive but that 20% you lost was what was keeping that one really nasty thing from manifesting.

And I think that people who go off as a surprise and have catastrophic results as a result of that

“in a lot of ways that's what's happening. It's like those traits are like what happens to that”

person when they're at their worst and wrecking you know really messing with their mitochondrial energy metabolism is making it a lot harder for them not to be their worst even though they might only be 30 years old. So many women that listen, their boyfriends or their husbands are

what else is super problematic about Peter Atia? As a scientist, I do disagree with

some of his ideas and I don't disagree with everything, thinking about longevity and thinking about

“how we can leverage health and nutrition and lifestyle towards it. I think is a good thing.”

But I think that for example the obsession over VO2 Max, I think is misplaced. One of the ideas that he's promoted is that your in exercise science measurement that you could do called VO2 Max is the principal driver of longevity. It's like the one marker to look at. As we were talking about in the beginning, I think the data indicate that people who have very good cardiovascular fitness have a benefit but it's not the be all-end all of exercise. And so I think

making people focus on exercises that are just going to optimize one metric is misplaced because

we really want to very well-rounded exercise routine that has cardiovascular respiratory fitness, has strength but also has functional movement capacity and and other things built into it. One of his ideas is that we should try to reverse engineer what we want to have the capacity for one were a hundred and use that to support our current health regimen. I think that that is kind of a mistake. I think people should be focused on reaching their peak performance. Now I will say

I do think that for longevity you should not dismiss things cavalierly that you think are not your goals. I'll give you an example. You may think that your memory is great right now and you may have no problem with the fact that you can't remember the number pi out to the 17th digit. But you are going to be very disheartened if you can't remember your aunts name when you are 72. So I do think we want to be thinking about longevity to realize that we don't want to have blind spots in our

“current regimen. You should be doing things that improve your memory. But I think the way you want to”

think about it is really that you want to be maximizing your performance in all domains. And so if you have a fitness program you do want to be maximizing your cardiovascular respiratory fitness. You also want to be maximizing your strength. You also want to be maximizing your ability to carry out functional movements that are relevant to, you know, it would be a good idea to play a sport or to, you know, or dance or something that requires functional movement capacity and to maximise your performance

at that. Because I think that's, I think it's going to do a lot more for your longevity to maximise your performance now and to maintain the things that you get out of that than it will be to be trying to, I just think it sets a little bar too low if you're trying to think about like, well, I want to be able to pick my grandkids up off the floor. Tell me if I'm wrong in this. So

“what I think is weird when I started looking into the stuff that he talks about, what I think is odd”

is like he's seen especially among men as this like Godfather of the wellness space. And I'm listening to his ideas and I'm just like, I mean, this sounds like conventional advice to me on health. I mean, he's like really killing his. He is the limited hangout of alternative health. Okay, so right. So this is what is confusing to me. It's like, you know, I talk to a lot of people like this is more of a, you know, wellness, you know, maha alternative medicine, those types of things.

Like we're getting, oh no, he can be sure that he was personally offended when people in a restaurant have a seed oil free menu. Exactly. So personally, so what I think is weird is like, so the wives are listening to my show. But a lot of their husbands are listening to him thinking he's, he's like, got some crazy insight on this and he's been doing this forever. But when I listen to him,

he just seems like the conventional advice that we've always been getting from doctors and experts,

quote unquote, that have made a sick in the first place. So like he's talking about statins. He's saying, you know, worrying about seed oils is stupid. Like, so what I'm, I'm just like, how is he in this space? You know what I mean? It doesn't seem like he's offering new ideas. Well, the one thing that that has irritated me is that in the podcast space, I would say like a lot of things in the alternative wellness space, pre podcast gold and era had a lot of broad debate,

like the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease was very vigorously debated in the alternative health space before the golden era of podcasting. But what happened was some

became kingmakers of people in the science realm. And so Tim Ferris, who I love and I, I owe a lot too, you know, he played a big role in kind of making Peter a Tia, the force that he became

because the podcast world was so powerful and then a Tia used what he, you know, what he had learned

from Tim to develop his own podcast and capitalized on that. And then a Tia has taken people who are niche scientists, not science communicators, and he's become the kingmaker of them. So Peter Tia coronated Thomas Dayspring as the one, he's a doctor lipid on, on X. A Tia kind of

“coronated him as like the one person that you should listen to about cholesterol. And I think that”

really took over the discourse in our world on how to think about preventing heart disease in a way that made it all about statins. That's super interesting. And I, you know, I don't have a problem with Thomas Dayspring having a voice, but I do not like the way that the dynamics in podcasting have created this kind of like, okay, the general podcast or picks the health guy, the health guy picks the science guy, and it's really kind of narrowed all the debate around

like a handful of people. So from then, who are, you know, the wives got redpilled on this first, so they're like all in on the health and they're wanting to totally change their lives and they're

seeing their wives do it and the wives like you got to get into this. This is amazing. I'm feeling

so good. And they're like, okay, well, who do I listen to? You know, like what guy, what podcast bro? Do you like in the health space that you think is doing amazing? I guess our secretary of HHS has become kind of a podcast bro. A little bit, yeah, but who's like hosting a current podcast? Yeah, I like Max Lugavir. I think I was going to say, do you know Max? Because I feel like you guys would be such good friends. Max and I are pals. Yeah, I should have a better answer to this,

but my gut instinct is, you know, try not to get sucked into any one person's podcast. Yeah. I really think it would be better if people said, all right, for this the next three months, I'm going to start listening to a new podcast and I'm going to see if I get any new ideas. Yeah. And then they say, okay, for three months, I'm not going to listen to any podcast, and I'm going to try some of those ideas I learned and I'm going to see if any of those insights

actually did something for me. And then the next three months, they should pick someone else.

So first of all, if you get lost in just listen, and I, and I, I'm not saying people should

ever stop listening to your podcast. Of course. But, um, but I secretly holding a God behind you.

“But, but after you after you finish listening to culture apothecary, you should go on”

do something besides listening to another podcast. Yeah. And here's why I think what you're saying is actually super important. And people are like, oh, but he says saying does did he could break from your show? He's honestly right. And this is why, like some of you guys get mad at me because I have different guests that contradict each other. Like you're like, what do you mean? This guy last week said this. And then this girl this week said this and that totally contradicts.

And I'm trying to give you guys new ideas. One to challenge, you know, what you think you believe. Okay, strengthen your ideas. If you do feel set on something, uh, hearing someone else's opinion, or, yes, to hear something else, maybe try something else. Everybody's different. Like, right, health is very individual. So what Chris is saying might really apply to you, what, you know, someone else I interviewed this afternoon might, you know, be a better fit based on what's going on in your

“health journey. So I think it's important to have these different ideas. And once in a while,”

they can contradict each other. But I think that's healthy. Yeah. And I think it's also the case that you can, you can get into like a health and wellness porn trap, where, uh, you know, you do a lot more listening to health and wellness content than you do. Implementing health and wellness, you know. And I think that is true across disciplines. And if you're the type of person who likes to consume a lot of content, that's the thing that you need to be wary of is how much applying of the content

am I doing. And so I think it's, it's good to make sure you have a balance of, only listen to so many ideas that you can then have some time to implement them and evaluate how they're working for you. And I think that ultimately every, every individual should be the ultimate arbiter of what's working for them, rather than putting, you know, I've said a lot of stuff on here. And I wouldn't say it if I didn't want people to listen to me. But, you know, if if I said

something and it was useful, you're going to see that usefulness in your own life. And I think that is the, the ultimate arbiter of, you know, the things that I'm doing differently because I listen to that podcast, what is it doing for me? And if you can confirm that that's, that that does have

If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, physically emotionally or spiritually,

“what would it be? Pray to God for guidance. Where can people read more about your work?”

I'm Chris Master John PhD.substack.com for my newsletter and might adopt me for my medical

control testing. Who are some of your favorite people on substack? The two substacks that I read quite a bit

“are this guy, Nate Jones, who build stuff with AI. Okay. And this guy Steven Paranod, who's an”

astrophysicist that has applied his science to bit studying Bitcoin. Oh, interesting. Okay, fun. Chris, it was so cool that have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, have me on. If you're doing everything right and still feel terrible, now you know why.

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regarding any questions or decisions related to your health or medical care. Amalg's Clark and this is Culture Apothecary.