transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] RFK Jr has been seen drinking Methylene Blue.

Speaker 2:
[00:03] 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 antidepressant. But here's the problem, if you use Methylene Blue regularly, it's gonna wind up hurting you. There's an exercise that most people don't do called the Turkish getup, where you hold a kettlebell in the air from sitting on the floor, and you hold it in the air, and 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 gotta put your parents on the Turkish getup. That is the solution to longevity.

Speaker 1:
[01:09] 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 Masterjohn is a nutritional scientist and one of the leading voices in mitochondrial biology. After years as a professor and researcher, he founded Mito.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 Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. Please pause and leave a five-star review before we get started and keep the discussion going in the Cute Servetus Facebook group. Please welcome Chris Masterjohn to Culture Apothecary. Okay, so I was just kind of giving you the 411 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?

Speaker 2:
[02:24] Certainly, if you're a cashier, this is a gigantic problem. The receipts are full of BPA, which is plastic-based endocrine disruptor, which messes with your hormones. The absorption through your skin, 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.

Speaker 1:
[03:11] So what do you do?

Speaker 2:
[03:12] Oh yeah, I just say I don't need the receipt.

Speaker 1:
[03:14] And so what do you think that cashiers should do? Wear gloves?

Speaker 2:
[03:16] I haven't thought that much of it. But yeah, I think 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.

Speaker 1:
[03:33] I'm shocked by you saying that there's more problematic chemicals in a receipt than even a plastic water bottle.

Speaker 2:
[03:39] 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. As a result, it can dust off under your hands very easily. Whereas a plastic water bottle, the plastic does degrade over time, and you do get more microplastics, nanoplastics, the longer the water sits in that bottle, and you'll get worse conditions with more heat. But the bottle is still designed to... You can't write in the bottle with your finger, and you can't stamp it with heat and have images come out. 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.

Speaker 1:
[04:41] See, this is why I wanted to interview you. It's so interesting. And now if we see a whole bunch of cashiers across America wearing one glove, getting their Michael Jackson on, we're going to know this was because of you on this interview.

Speaker 2:
[04:51] Well, I'm not the first person to have said that. I am the first person to have said it on Culture Apothecary.

Speaker 1:
[04:56] Exactly. I wanted to interview because you have such fascinating insights on all these different health and wellness trends that we hear about. One of them being Bobby Kennedy, RFK Jr has been seen drinking Methylane Blue.

Speaker 2:
[05:07] I've seen that clip.

Speaker 1:
[05:08] Yeah. Nobody has talked about Methylane Blue on this show.

Speaker 2:
[05:12] Do you know if he did that on purpose? Because someone had the camera in the back seat. I don't know if they arranged it or caught him.

Speaker 1:
[05:19] It could have been a sponsor.

Speaker 2:
[05:20] I don't know if it was a photo op or yeah.

Speaker 1:
[05:22] What is Methylane Blue? Should we all be taking it?

Speaker 2:
[05:26] Well, I talked to someone else in detail who always uses Methylane Blue on airplanes. And what he told me was that he could work while he was on the airplane with a clear head if he took the Methylane 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 Methylane Blue 30 minutes before that. The reason those things can be true for a lot of people is because Methylane Blue rewires how your mitochondria, so you guys know mitochondria are 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 the usable cellular energy which in biology we call ATP, that's the usable cellular energy. Okay, so if you're underwater or you're on an airplane, you have less oxygen. Underwater, 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 5,000 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, you know, they take an example of, oh, it helps me work on the plane, or it helps me hold my breath underwater. 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.

Speaker 1:
[08:22] That's exactly what happens, I think, when it comes to the supplement industry, is like you hear, one thing 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 a lot?

Speaker 2:
[08:49] Yeah, I run a mitochondrial testing company called Mitome, and at the beginning of our venture, we, you know, I had the time to talk to our customers 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 problem. So the stuff he reads on the internet is, oh, Methylene Blue is going to make you better. But 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 burn those for energy really well. And so, you know, he happens to have done wonders for himself on a carnivore diet now, for example. The real problem is, so Methylene Blue, the real problem is people generalize too much from other people's experiences. Sometimes things are great for one person and they're not for another. Methylene Blue, though, also has a very unique side profile, which is at a dose of 10 milligrams or higher, it actually acts as a pharmacological antidepressant and it actually increases the amount of dopamine in circulating in 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 pharma last. 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 synthetics and drugs and Methylene Blue is a synthetic drug. Once you need to fill in those gaps when you really exhausted your ability to optimize your health naturally.

Speaker 1:
[11:18] And so is that also the window where you would say, okay, that's also where you could bring in things like peptides?

Speaker 2:
[11:22] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think with mitochondrial peptides, or the ones that are out there that have promise, 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 talk 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 effect of 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 jumpstart you. But I don't think someone who's 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.

Speaker 1:
[12:36] 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?

Speaker 2:
[12:44] 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.

Speaker 1:
[12:59] So you were a teenager that was geeking out on nutrition and dieting and food and health?

Speaker 2:
[13:05] Yeah. Well, that was because I was smart.

Speaker 1:
[13:07] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[13:09] But then that got me into more trouble.

Speaker 1:
[13:11] But I think this is interesting. How does a teenager even begin to even care about that?

Speaker 2:
[13:15] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[13:16] Because all the teenagers I know are like snorting Tide Pods and vaping and all that.

Speaker 2:
[13:21] I'm just kidding. It wasn't because I was smart. It was because my mom had gotten real sick. My mom had fibromyalgia. And when I was a teenager, she was in pain every night. Her quality of life was awful. And 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 was 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. I was a vegan for about two years.

Speaker 1:
[14:23] I've never had one guest on this show who went down that path to say it did work. Every single one says they tried it and it didn't work.

Speaker 2:
[14:30] Well, I think there's some selection bias there, but the studies that they've done just asking people, are you a vegan and were 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.

Speaker 1:
[15:03] My worldview on this, I feel like stems from, I think we're supposed to have a very diverse, well-rounded diet. I don't think that forever, I think even veganism, if you are somebody who is primarily consuming an ultra-processed food diet, 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 for a period of time on only meat, but I just think long-term for the rest of your life, only eating this 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?

Speaker 2:
[15:45] First of all, I totally agree with you. I think that we are meant to be omnivores. We are meant to eat both 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 really hard and you really have to go out of your way to design your diet very well. Now, 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 gonna be in 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 from 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 ten years is up where you're like, huh, I really need to eat some carbs. I might need a potato.

Speaker 1:
[18:05] What's your opinion on oysters?

Speaker 2:
[18:07] I think they're a great source of zinc.

Speaker 1:
[18:09] And that's about it?

Speaker 2:
[18:10] Well, no, I'm not saying they're not a great source of anything else. I'm just saying they really stand out as a great source of zinc. You know, 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, pharma last. Supplements are in the middle. One of the reasons that you would want oysters as a source of zinc before you would want, 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 to create those imbalances when you're using foods. I'm not saying there's nothing else bioactive in oysters.

Speaker 1:
[19:00] Yeah, I guess there's just some people who have this extreme concern with heavy metals in shellfish.

Speaker 2:
[19:10] Well, it's a great source of mercury too.

Speaker 1:
[19:12] Right. So 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 natural occurring heavy metal or something, then there's all these other things that help balance it out.

Speaker 2:
[19:26] And he 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.

Speaker 1:
[19:31] Yeah, exactly. So I was just curious what your opinion was. I'm a huge seafood person.

Speaker 2:
[19:36] 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. One of the things that fish do is they bind most of the mercury to selenium, which makes it unavailable. I found a study done on cats once in the 1970s, and they said, 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. And 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 eat fish or oysters are worse off than other people.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[24:35] Have you ever seen that?

Speaker 1:
[24:36] A bunch of popular salts, for example. There's these people like, oh, this salt, you can't eat it. There's lead in it. I mean, how much weight do you put on that?

Speaker 2:
[24:44] There's a problem 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 bullet spreads the lead throughout the animal. So anyway, my point is if you're hunting your meat, you should use lead-free bullets. If you have the means at your disposal, I think you should opt for things that have been verified to have less lead than other things.

Speaker 1:
[25:14] But isn't there a certain amount of naturally occurring lead?

Speaker 2:
[25:17] 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, a thousand milligrams of calcium in your diet than it is if you're getting 200 milligrams of calcium in your diet. To get a thousand 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, but they're not that great.

Speaker 1:
[26:31] I just recently became obsessed with bok choy. It's my new favorite vegetable.

Speaker 2:
[26:34] 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.

Speaker 1:
[26:45] It's just oysters and bok choy. That's all I eat. Just kidding.

Speaker 2:
[26:49] That bok choy is going to be excellent protection against the lead in those oysters. Let me tell you that.

Speaker 1:
[26:54] No, I'm obsessed with it. I had it, somebody served it at 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. It's just, I love this vegetable. And I don't know, I didn't grow up in a home that made bok choy. So why do you like it?

Speaker 2:
[27:06] Because it's a great source of calcium. The dark green vegetables, some of them have problems.

Speaker 1:
[27:11] Like kale.

Speaker 2:
[27:12] Kale is okay. I mean, I don't know if your 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?

Speaker 1:
[27:21] Oh, no, this is just controversial. I mean, you hear Paul Saladino just ragging on kale.

Speaker 2:
[27:25] Oh, 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. So I'll say that. Every food has some problems. And what you want to do is get more good things than problems, right? 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, it 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 Popeye 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 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. Problem 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 principal role is to make thyroid hormone and thyroid hormone's 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 by having enough seafood because seafood is the most reliable source of iodine. So if your diet is oysters and kale, you're okay. But at a certain amount 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 for a lot of that to be kale, not in really a bad position, if you go start juicing kale smoothies every morning, you could wind up over consuming it and really run into a problem. And if your iodine intake is really low, you could wind up into a greater problem. Bok choy is low in oxalates, but it's a lot higher in calcium than kale. And so bok choy is really in the same family of kale, and it has all the same problems, but its nutrient value is way higher.

Speaker 1:
[30:58] Ivanka Trump has recently been singing the praises of creatine. How do you feel about creatine?

Speaker 2:
[31:05] I had no idea that I had so much in common with Ivanka Trump.

Speaker 1:
[31:09] There you go. We're just learning so much.

Speaker 2:
[31:11] So if the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, creatine is the mitochondria's energy grid. Because what 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 got your power plant in town, you need the energy grid to power the lights in here. And so you could imagine if the power plant is the mitochondria, our lights are on because of creatine. If you look at the literature, it's been studied way more in athletic contexts. If you look at the 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.

Speaker 1:
[33:19] Is it okay to take every morning? Because I take it every morning in my smoothie.

Speaker 2:
[33:23] 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.

Speaker 1:
[33:35] Okay, okay. Liposomal vitamins, are they actually better?

Speaker 2:
[33:38] 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 survive 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 in 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 in a randomized 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 outperformance 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 bioavailability and are you paying three times for it? What's the actual cost benefit analysis? So I'm not against liposomal vitamins. And I know some people who swear that liposomal vitamin C destroys a cold right in its 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. It's choline, 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 mileage they get out of it. And I generally trust people's experiences with that. But I don't think the data is at a place where we can make strong statements that you should get your supplements as liposomes and not as the old form of vitamin.

Speaker 1:
[36:21] So if mitochondria are the key to health, what's the one daily habit that people are doing that's wrecking them?

Speaker 2:
[36:28] It's a competition for eating poorly, exercising poorly, staring at their phone all day, and not getting sun in the morning.

Speaker 1:
[36:37] Do you think EMFs are actually something we should be worried about?

Speaker 2:
[36:40] Yes. I consider myself 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 in 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 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 I rented a car, right? And it is unambiguous that the set up for car play is radically quicker if you plug in to the USB and the playback on everything is a tremendously better experience because Bluetooth skips and wire does not.

Speaker 1:
[38:23] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[38:23] So there's so many times where I've accidentally had my Bluetooth on and I turn it off because I'm like, why am I listening? Why is it skipping so much? And I just turn 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 think this trend towards prioritizing wireless is I think 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 not important. Like, my rental car just doesn't have the wired connection, you know? But anyway, 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 is going to exercise consciousness about that.

Speaker 1:
[39:19] Do you think that people were misled into thinking that calories matter more than nutrients?

Speaker 2:
[39:23] 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 end-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.

Speaker 1:
[39:52] But wouldn't obesity be a tell-tale sign that something is not right?

Speaker 2:
[39:57] I think it's a tell-tale sign that something's not right, yeah. I mean, there is a lot of difference between people in what level of body fat is harmful and what level of body fat is not a problem. And I think people radically underappreciate the importance of having enough body fat.

Speaker 1:
[40:14] Especially women.

Speaker 2:
[40:15] It's been understood since the 1970s that this was called the critical body fatness of fertility. It's been understood since the 1970s that having enough body fat is absolutely central to being fertile.

Speaker 1:
[40:31] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[40:31] 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 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. You know, once you get out of the people eating the 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. In the general population, people are too overweight. But once you start getting into 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.

Speaker 1:
[42:03] What is something that women are doing in the name of being healthy that's actually wrecking their hormones?

Speaker 2:
[42:08] Losing too much weight.

Speaker 1:
[42:09] 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 and they're wrong?

Speaker 2:
[42:20] 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 could 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.

Speaker 1:
[42:50] There's a big debate around seed oils. Some people say, you know, avoiding them is overhyped. Some say they're super harmful. You've got to avoid them. From your mitochondria focus perspective, where do you land?

Speaker 2:
[43:01] 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.

Speaker 1:
[43:17] You said a lot of people are low in choline and they don't even know what that is. Why is choline so important?

Speaker 2:
[43:22] Okay. So choline is a B vitamin-like substance. It's gone up and down in its status as a vitamin and a B vitamin, but it's generally grouped with B vitamins because it's very similar to them. But it's found mostly in liver and egg yolks. You can get choline in a lot of other foods. In a broad diet, if you didn't eat liver and egg yolks, you could have enough choline 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 choline too much. And choline plays a number of important roles. One is to form phosphatidylcholine, 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 choline. And so you're way more like for a given level of body fatness, you're way more likely to get fatty liver if you don't have enough choline because you've got some total amount of fat. You've got to put it somewhere, and choline 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. Choline is also the precursor to acetylcholine, 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 acetylcholine. But probably part of the reason they have to use those drugs is because they're not getting enough choline to make the acetylcholine.

Speaker 1:
[45:24] 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 choline?

Speaker 2:
[45:30] Well, you could get more from liver then, but you could also just look at other foods. So the issue is not that there's no choline in other foods, it's that you wind up getting a very broad distribution of smaller amounts. If people Google my name and choline database, I actually have a choline database where people can look up different foods. But you know, vegetables and nuts have choline, meat has choline. It's just if you're not eating the choline superfoods, you want to think more. You might want to pay more attention to whether you're getting enough choline by plugging your, you know, doing an analysis of your diet. I do want to say acetylcholine 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 calmness.

Speaker 1:
[46:30] 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 Masa chips 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 ride or die. And Masa deserves that because once you switch to chips with real ingredients, organic, nixtamalized corn, sea salt, grass-fed beef tallow, you physically cannot go back. You try a regular chip and you're like, what is this? This tastes like drywall dust fried in engine oil. And now you're stuck because Masa actually satisfies you. You eat it and you feel full, calm, stable, no bloat, no crash, no gross sluggish 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 tortilla 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, you've got to go to masachips.com and use code realalexclark for 25% off your first order. Fair warning, Masa makes their chips in small batches with real ingredients. So certain flavors do go out of stock frequently. I actually just restocked because it wasn't finally back and I wasn't going to miss it again. So grab your favorites while they're available, go to masachips.com, use code realalexclark for 25% off your first purchase. Also, look for Masa in Sprouts, Wegmans and Whole Foods for the first time ever. But remember, my discount is only on their website, masachips.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 Paleo Valley'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 dry it 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 because organ meats are some of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. But no one's out here wanting to saute kidneys on a Tuesday. So this is how you do it. You take a few capsules and suddenly your body has what it needs. Energy, minerals, actual nourishment. This is great if you're pregnant instead of just vibes and airport snacks. So now you can travel without completely falling apart. Head to paleovalley.com, use code Alex for 15% off. That's paleovalley.com, code Alex for 15% off. You talk about how nutritional needs for people should change over time. What does a woman in her 20s need nutritionally versus a woman in her 30s versus a woman in her 40s?

Speaker 2:
[49:32] So that's one of the two rules. The other, 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 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 one woman and another and how much iron she loses during menstruation is enormous if you just assume it's proportional to blood flow because some women have heavy periods and some have light periods. And some women may have heavy periods and then later have light periods or vice versa. And so that in itself can create variation if you're just going through a period where you have heavier or 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 menstruation 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 really have someone breathing down their neck to make sure they don't have a period because they're 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 our 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 CoQ10 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 ors. 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 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 become stuck in believing that because it worked before, it must be working now.

Speaker 1:
[53:03] And that's for men and women, right?

Speaker 2:
[53:04] 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 respond to 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 iron as you go through menopause as an example, it's a great thing to look at because that's something 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 taught throughout your life to be worried about getting your iron up and it actually pays off when you do. And then all of a sudden, now you need to worry about getting your iron down, it can be very confusing and counterintuitive. And so incorporating the right testing as you go through life I think is important. 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...

Speaker 1:
[54:44] And pair menopausal.

Speaker 2:
[54:45] I don't want babies anymore. You asked me about 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 its 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're trying 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 and they're going to help you build the baby's tissues and so on. Like, you want calories. You want 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 don't want to be optimizing for that when you are 25 years old.

Speaker 1:
[56:10] You've cited research suggesting that gymnasts and pole vaulters actually live longer than any other athlete. What does that tell us about health?

Speaker 2:
[56:20] 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 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 to get enough cardio for your heart and your lungs to be working well, do enough resistance training to be strong. And if you look at the longevity space, and podcasts that cover longevity, 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 gymnasts and pole vaulters having eight. And if you look at people who are strong, like weightlifters, 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 gymnasts and pole vaulters is their sports require excellent biomechanics. 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 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 death certificate. So I think cardiorespiratory 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 prevent injury. And I think injury is bad for your longevity. And I see this with people who break a hip. The proportion of women who die in the year after they break their hip is 70%. It's crazy. But actually, functional movement training would be way better to prevent hip fractures because, or to prevent falling and not getting up. Like there's an exercise in that most people don't do called the Turkish getup, 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.

Speaker 1:
[59:26] So we need to all make our parents do that exercise.

Speaker 2:
[59:29] Everyone at home, you got to put your parents on the Turkish getup. That is the solution to longevity, to be more of a scientist. I think that biomechanical excellence is preventing immune problems. One of the things that it does for the immune system is cancer is killed by immune cells called T-cells. Those T-cells, to activate, they actually do their own pushups, kind of. They have motor proteins. They push against their surroundings, and then they transform that kinetic energy into the energy to activate, and that activates them to kill the cancer. 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 combats that process, because you are doing a much better job maintaining the quality of the structures in those areas. And I think that if we studied it more, we would probably see that they're less likely to get certain types of cancer.

Speaker 1:
[60:44] So we need to all be upside down more?

Speaker 2:
[60:46] Well, that's the other thing, is gymnasts and pole vaulters are both upside down a lot. And I actually think there could be something to this. Have you ever heard of vibration plates?

Speaker 1:
[60:57] Yes. Yeah. Are those worth it? What are those?

Speaker 2:
[60:59] Well, I think those are the poor man's gymnastics.

Speaker 1:
[61:01] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[61:02] I think that the things that help vibrate your body or somersault your body or shake it up and down, I think those things are helping improve the circulation of two major things. One is venous return, the blood going back to the heart. If you 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. 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 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.

Speaker 1:
[62:31] Right, but I mean, when it comes to all these wellness tools, like red light therapy, blah, blah, blah, I mean, what do you think is worth it?

Speaker 2:
[62:36] I think that they're 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 out by the fire before you went to bed at night socializing. We've caught 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. And then, you know, PEMF is a replacement for being barefoot on the earth. And vibration plates are a replacement for flipping upside down.

Speaker 1:
[63:22] The majority of young people are on antidepressants now.

Speaker 2:
[63:25] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[63:26] What are antidepressants doing to mitochondrial health?

Speaker 2:
[63:30] Oh, destroying it.

Speaker 1:
[63:31] Like, if you're in 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?

Speaker 2:
[63:42] 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 on an SSRI is on an 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 catastrophically 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 it, the harder it's gonna be to get off of it.

Speaker 1:
[64:43] And I have to reiterate, never get off an SSRI cold turkey. It could be extremely dangerous, 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, depending on how long you've been on.

Speaker 2:
[65:03] So when you get off, it's very important to understand that you should not taper 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 to, like, let's say you're on 20 milligrams, you could go 20 milligrams to 5 milligrams, but then you would want to go to 12.5. And then you would want to work, 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 at a 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.

Speaker 1:
[66:49] Yep. And I've done tons of interviews, by the way. If you just look up Culture Apothecary SSRIs, I've done many interviews with doctors who this is their entire specialty is helping you get off SSRIs. So please go listen to those.

Speaker 2:
[67:00] I would say 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 I would say that.

Speaker 1:
[67:15] 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, 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?

Speaker 2:
[67:36] Uh-huh.

Speaker 1:
[67:36] 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, underarms too, build up, deodorant residue, all the things that you've been layering on for years, like a skincare hoarder. This is why Primally Pure has got to be your number one, okay? Their coffee body polish game changer. You use that on your elbows, suddenly you're like, oh my gosh, I've got baby smooth elbows again. You don't even realize how rough and nasty your elbows are till you exfoliate them. And it's like, what have I been missing out on my life? It exfoliates smooth, removes all the buildup you've been pretending doesn't exist on your whole body. And then you can move up. They do have a product called the Underarm Detox Scrub at Primally Pure. It's activated charcoal, clays, antibacterial oils. It cleans out your underarms, balances your skin, reduces odor. If you've been wanting to switch to non-toxic deodorant, but you're kind of freaked out by that process, you should use this first and then kind of switch your deodorant. You're not just covering things up anymore. This is how we're going to fix the situation. And again, this is a Christian conservative-owned company. Everything is clean, non-toxic, small batch, intentionally made. I also love their tallow balms and deodorant. Once you switch, you cannot go back to the chemical lifestyle. It is thoughtful, it's useful, it's non-toxic. It's something people actually will use every day. Use code alexclark at primelypure.com to get 15% off. That's primelypure.com. Code Alex Clark for 15% off. Mother's Day is coming up and I'm begging you to not get your mom another candle. She's got 47 candles. She's running a boutique spa at this point. Now, what you need to do is get her off her AirPods because every mom right now is sitting there scrolling Instagram reels at full volume. AirPods in, they're locked in to a loop of sourdough tutorials and conspiracy theories. And you're 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 into your ears, they send it through tubes, which helps reduce that EMF exposure. So she can still scroll, still watch her little reels, still ignore your texts, but without blasting her brain with signals all day. This is also a great grad gift. You've got that coming up in a month, because if your kid is about to go live on their phone for the next four years, maybe don't have them fuse with it on a cellular level. Small upgrade, huge difference on your health. Use code Alex for 15% off. EMF-free air tube headphones at techwellness.com. Use code Alex for 15% off. EMF-free air tube headphones at techwellness.com. Why is it so important to get off an SSRI sooner rather than later because of what it's doing to your mitochondrial health?

Speaker 2:
[70:09] This is another case where there's a lot of idiosyncrasy involved. In 2024, there were dozens of reports of sertraline, which is Zoloft, causing a condition called multiple acyl CoA dehydrogenase deficiency, which is, we can abbreviate it MAD with two Ds, but it's a condition of profound neuromuscular dysfunction. We'll put it like that. And there are other problems with the organs that happened too. The crazy thing is that this was thought to be a rare genetic disorder. 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 Sertuline, and they were mimicking this one in 200,000 rare genetic disorder. So you have people who just straight up have a clinical severe mitochondrial dysfunction, and that's like playing Russian roulette. That'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 SSRIs, 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. So, and an interesting tie-in is, and I think we should say this to the people who are not on SSRIs, 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 SSRIs. So I think if someone is depressed and they are thinking about going on SSRIs, 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 mitochondria 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, like 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 mitochondria 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 SSRIs 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 you're 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 new onset 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 then he switched to a different one. So he was on Paxil, pretty healthy, went off Paxil. He had some problems that came up, went back on it, switched to Lexapro, 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 he did, his body was under so much stress. He was constantly peeing. He was developing twitching problems from being coming. Out of the chondria to support mitochondrial function. So he had a genetic block in the transporter that does that.

Speaker 1:
[76:26] People that have the MTHFR gene, should that automatically mean you should stay away from SSRIs? In your opinion?

Speaker 2:
[76:33] I wouldn't say that. I would say that people who are not on SSRIs should stay away from SSRIs.

Speaker 1:
[76:39] That's good, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[76:40] No, I mean-

Speaker 1:
[76:41] But I mean, is it extremely problematic if you have MTHFR gene?

Speaker 2:
[76:46] 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, the degree to which people have problems with SSRIs is, like, grossly underappreciated. You know, so do you have to have his problem to have a problem with SSRIs? No. 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, but they're not acting as a binary switch that's saying, you're gonna have a problem with the SSRI and other people will be okay.

Speaker 1:
[77:28] So you find out he has this, and then what do you do?

Speaker 2:
[77:30] 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 e-mailed 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. Granted, 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, he said basically, I feel like I'm myself for the first time in years, and that's been very stable going out across the year. So I think what we're gonna find when we study it more is that you're gonna have very common, it's gonna 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, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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, your friends would 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 gonna 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 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 asteris 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, 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.

Speaker 1:
[80:42] So many women that listen, their boyfriends or their husbands, are obsessed with Dr. Peter Atiyah.

Speaker 2:
[80:48] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[80:49] You've been pretty critical of him. Besides being BFS with Epstein, what else is super problematic about Peter Atiyah?

Speaker 2:
[80:57] 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 you're an 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 cardiorespiratory 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 a very well-rounded exercise routine that has cardiorespiratory fitness, has strength, but also has functional movement capacity 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 when we're 100 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 aunt's 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 cardiorespiratory 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... It would be a good idea to play a sport or dance or something that requires functional movement capacity and to maximize your performance at that. Because I think that's... I think it's going to do a lot more for your longevity to maximize your performance now and to maintain the things that you get out of that. Then it will be to be trying to... I just think it sets the 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.

Speaker 1:
[84:10] 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 chilling statins and things.

Speaker 2:
[84:33] He is the limited hangout of alternative health.

Speaker 1:
[84:35] 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 away from conventional advice.

Speaker 2:
[84:48] I was personally offended when people in a restaurant have a seed oil free menu.

Speaker 1:
[84:52] Exactly. 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 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 us sick in the first place. So he's talking about statins. He's saying, you know, worrying about seed oils is stupid. So 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, really.

Speaker 2:
[85:21] The one thing that has irritated me is that in the podcast space, I would say a lot of things in the alternative wellness space pre-podcast golden 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 people succeeded dramatically at podcasting and really took all the attention away, and they became kingmakers of people in the science realm. And so Tim Ferriss, who I love and I owe a lot to, he played a big role in kind of making Peter Attia the force that he became because the podcast world was so powerful. And then Attia used what he had learned from Tim to develop his own podcast and capitalized on that. And then Attia has taken people who are niche scientists, not science communicators, and he's become the kingmaker of them. So Peter Attia coronated Thomas Dayspring as the one, he's a Dr. Lipid on X, Attia 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.

Speaker 1:
[87:06] Super interesting.

Speaker 2:
[87:07] 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 podcaster 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.

Speaker 1:
[87:29] So for men who are, the wives got red-pilled 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 are like, you gotta get into this, this is amazing, I'm feeling so good. And they're like, okay, well, who do I listen to? What guy, what podcast bro do you like in the health space that you think is doing amazing things?

Speaker 2:
[87:50] I guess our secretary of HHS has become kind of a podcast bro.

Speaker 1:
[87:56] Yeah, a little bit, yeah. But who's like hosting a current podcast?

Speaker 2:
[87:59] Yeah, I like Max Lugavere.

Speaker 1:
[88:01] I think I was gonna say, do you know Max? Because I feel like you guys would be such good friends.

Speaker 2:
[88:05] 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. I really think it would be better if people said, all right, for the next three months, I'm gonna start listening to a new podcast and I'm gonna see if I get any new ideas. And then they say, okay, for three months, I'm not gonna listen to any podcast and I'm gonna try some of those ideas I learned and I'm gonna 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 listening, and I'm not saying people should ever stop listening to your podcast. Of course.

Speaker 1:
[88:49] I'm secretly holding a gun behind his back.

Speaker 2:
[88:52] But after you finish listening to Culture Apothecary, you should go out and do something besides do another podcast.

Speaker 1:
[88:57] I agree. Here's why. I think what you're saying is actually super important. And people are like, Oh, but he's saying to us to take a break from your show. He's honestly right. And this is why some of you guys get mad at me because I have different guests that contradict each other. 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 what you think you believe. OK, strengthen your ideas if you do feel set on something. Hearing someone else's opinion or yes, to hear something else, maybe try something else, everybody's different, right? Health is very individual. So, what Chris is saying might really apply to you. What someone else I interviewed this afternoon might 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.

Speaker 2:
[89:46] Yeah, and I think it's also the case that you can get into a health and wellness porn trap where you do a lot more listening to health and wellness content than you do practicing health and wellness. 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 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 individual should be the ultimate arbiter of what's working for them rather than putting to, 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 if I said something and it was useful, you're gonna see that usefulness in your own life. And I think that is the ultimate arbiter of 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 does have utility for you, that is what determines whether you should keep that practice in your stack.

Speaker 1:
[90:59] If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, physically, emotionally or spiritually, what would it be?

Speaker 2:
[91:05] Pray to God for guidance.

Speaker 1:
[91:06] Where can people read more about your work?

Speaker 2:
[91:08] I'm chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com for my newsletter and mito.me for my mitochondrial testing.

Speaker 1:
[91:15] Who are some of your favorite people on Substack?

Speaker 2:
[91:16] The two Substacks that I read quite a bit are this guy, Nate Jones, who builds stuff with AI. And this guy, Stephen Paranod, who's an astrophysicist that has applied his science to studying Bitcoin.

Speaker 1:
[91:32] Oh, interesting. Okay, fun. Chris, it was so cool to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 2:
[91:37] Thank you for having me on.

Speaker 1:
[91:41] If you're doing everything right and still feel terrible, now you know why. Leave us a five-star review to celebrate the important work done by my team. New episodes come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern, anywhere you get your podcast. This content is for informational purposes only, and is not intended to be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional regarding any questions or decisions related to your health or medical care. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.