Question: What are the pros and cons of boosting sulforaphane? Sulforaphane, the nice thing is it promotes detoxification. The bad thing is it raises the need for iodine. I don't know what ratio to take, but you definitely want to make sure that you're getting some kind of iodine into your diet, whether it's through like 200 micrograms of iodine from a kelp powder supplement or you experiment with milligram amounts from a broken up Iodoral tab or whatever. Because I don't know the dose, I'm just...
Feb 14, 2020•1 min
Question: Is it true that we can't absorb more than 1.5 grams of creatine at one time? I don't think that's true. From what I looked at, it looked like the absorption of creatine was really, really good. I don't know if someone was arguing maybe that we don't retain more than that. But I think the retention of your muscles is going to be best with creatine if you take it post-workout and if you take it with carbohydrate to stimulate insulin. But on the whole, I think that the absorption and rete...
Feb 13, 2020•1 min
Question: NMN vs. NR: What's better? And is TMG necessary? Yeah. There are no human studies looking at NMN and how it's metabolized. There are studies of NR. No one has showed any positive benefits of supplementing NR in humans yet, but they haven't really done any long-term studies or looked at many things, and they really haven't looked at anything that I would really want to see for NR. They've looked at things like glucose and lipids and other metrics of metabolic health doesn't really do an...
Feb 12, 2020•7 min
Question: What to do about cataracts. Carl Rayner says, "Cataract in one eye becoming noticeable. This eye had a posterior detachment about 11 years ago, which is basically healed. I've been on a low-carb diet for over 40 years. Eat raw cream cheese, eggs, meat and liver. In the past few years, adding fasting and more keto diet. Saw your thoughts about glutathione on the cheat sheet and interview with Wendy Myers. Am I on the right track and what else could I do? Grain intolerant. What testing b...
Feb 11, 2020•8 min
Question: What can be done nutritionally to specifically improve antiviral immunity? Certainly, the fat-soluble vitamins, vitamins A and D, both important. Lauric acid as a fat. Coconut oil might be a good fat choice for the fat in your diet. Monolaurin would be a very good choice for a supplement. Lauricidin is the best monolaurin to take, 3 to 10 grams a day. Be careful of your bowel tolerance, spread it out among your meals, and cut back if it starts to loosen your stool. Elderberry, which ha...
Feb 11, 2020•2 min
Question: If free T3 looks good, why is TSH still a little high? Why hasn't the T3 brought it down enough? Your thyroid gland makes thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone increases your metabolic rate and does a lot of related things. Your hypothalamus is governing that by controlling your pituitary, the master endocrine gland, and its secretion of TSH, which is what controls the thyroid gland and makes it make more thyroid hormone. The way that the feedback occurs is that the circulating T4 is conver...
Feb 10, 2020•5 min
Question: What food supplements and training programs are good for developing muscle mass? Overwhelmingly, what matters for muscle mass is working out, eating enough protein, and eating enough calories. You want to try and hit 10-20 sets per muscle group per week with eat set hitting within 80% of failure. So, if your doing a set of 8 reps but you could have done 20 reps with your chosen weight, that doesn't count. You would want to pick a weight that you can lift no more than 10 times. Ideally,...
Jan 31, 2020•4 min
Question: Should I manage my total cholesterol of 305 just for my doctor or should I be doing it for my own sake? If so, how should I do it? You should want to improve your lipid profile for a lot more than to please your doctor. Let's revisit this from a cholesterol skeptic point of view. Uffe Ravnskov, he wrote a book called The Cholesterol Myths . In that book, he shows a graph from the Framingham study where he maps out the people who have heart disease and the people who don't. If you look ...
Jan 30, 2020•12 min
Question: "Do you have any recommendations on how to get enough calcium on a low-carb, no-dairy diet? I've read that vegetables provide calcium, but bioavailability is poor." The bioavailability of calcium from different vegetables is highly dependent on the specific vegetables. Cruciferous vegetables have very good bioavailability. It's better than from milk. Spinach has like close to zero bioavailability. It's terrible and you shouldn't even count it. Nuts and seeds have about 20% of the calci...
Jan 29, 2020•3 min
Question: What should people with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency be doing not just about glutathione, but about folate, vitamin K, fatty acids, and neurotransmitters? G6PD, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, is an inborn error of metabolism. It's the most common one in the world. About 8% globally have some impairment in this enzyme. The reason that it's important is because glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase is the enzyme that allows you to make NADPH, which is a specifi...
Jan 28, 2020•14 min
Question: If my tryptophan is low, and I'm on a low-carb diet, would you recommend 5-HTP supplements or tryptophan supplements or both? There are multiple reasons why tryptophan could be low. It could be that you are not eating enough protein, or it could be that you have a high utilization of the tryptophan. I would look in the test and see if the 5-hydroxyindoleacetate is elevated — because if it is, then that would suggest high serotonin production, and that might explain the low tryptophan. ...
Jan 27, 2020•3 min
Question: What to do if signs and symptoms of zinc deficiency persist despite taking 75 mg zinc gluconate per day. You should do plasma zinc. Also you know I kind of wonder whether you're taking that right. So if you're taking 75 milligrams of zinc like at one time then it's not surprising because you're absorbing like seven of those milligrams. The rest you are not. To maximize absorption take them on an empty stomach in 10-15 mg which is typically the smallest dose available. If you're doing t...
Jan 24, 2020•2 min
Question: Is a high value of arsenic a concern? Yes, arsenic is a toxin. You probably don't want a lot of it, if it's just a little high it might not cause terrible damage. I would look at methylation if I saw high arsenic, because methylation is needed to get rid of arsenic. Oh actually I should add that methylation supplements have been shown to help arsenic detoxification in areas of the world where arsenic was a serious concern. This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode...
Jan 23, 2020•24 sec
Question Are low polyunsaturated omega-6 values on the ION test a concern? Not the total, but if the arachidonic acid levels are low I would look at low arachidonic acid intake, or inflammation, or oxidative stress. It would concern me because arachidonic acid is important to a lot of physiological functions, but I don't care about the total omega-6. This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/podcast/2019/02/24/ask-anything-nutrition-feb...
Jan 22, 2020•26 sec
Question: When high selenium does not come down in response dietary efforts and cessation of supplementation, what's going on? Either there's high levels of selenium in the soil where your food is grown, or you have low methylation because methylation is needed to get rid of excess selenium. This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/podcast/2019/02/24/ask-anything-nutrition-feb-17-2019/ If you would like to be part of the next live Ask ...
Jan 21, 2020•21 sec
Question: Creatine, when is it recommend that if you don't have the MTHFR SNP that causes methylation problems? 1.)When you want to improve your physique. 2.)When you want to improve your athletic performance. 3.)When you have a rare creatine synthesis disorder. 4.)If you have depression, it might help. 5.) If you have any signs that something else is messing with your methylation even though your genetics don't explain it. This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: h...
Jan 20, 2020•38 sec
Question: When should tryptophan be taken on a keto diet? Night, day, both? Presumably you're doing this to try to increase tryptophan getting into the brain. The best thing to do is to take it two to three hours away from other protein. The second consideration is if you have an allotment of carbs that you concentrate at one time of day, then it would be best to take the tryptophan then. With the caveat being if you're eating protein with the carbs. In that case it would be best to take it away...
Jan 17, 2020•48 sec
Question: Do you think there are true non-responders to creatine, or do you think that those apparent non-responders have some defects in methylation that makes typical doses of creatine sufficient only for other needs. Alex Leaf would be a great person to ask about this and he's not here right now… [Alex appears] Alex, so Jen's question is are there true non-responders to creatine or do you just think that non-responders likely have some defect of methylation. It means the typical doses of crea...
Jan 16, 2020•1 min
Question: How do I bring up low levels of arachidonic acid? Should I supplement with 250 milligrams? What brand is there from well-known company? If you want 250 milligrams of arachidonic acid, eat an egg. I don't know anything about arachidonic acid supplements yet, except that they exist because you can eat eggs and you'll get plenty. Do you want to try the supplement? Well you can, but I don't think it's necessary. You eat two eggs a day already, so eat four. The oxidative stress and inflamma...
Jan 15, 2020•1 min
Question: How to interpret the pattern of high citrate, low cis-aconitate, low glutamate, and high glutamine. The aconitate and citric acid are markers on the citric acid cycle where we metabolize most of our energy. If citric acid is high and isocitric acid is low, (this must be the Great Plains Test which doesn't have isocitrate/cis-aconitate) that would indicate oxidative stress. In terms of the glutamate being low --- if your glutamate is low and your glutamine is on the high side, then you ...
Jan 14, 2020•1 min
Question: What are the best ways to optimize glutathione status for someone who has a G6PD deficiency? Riboflavin was shown to be of benefit for normalizing oxidative stress in people who have glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency. So for people who don't know what this is G6PD is, glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase is an enzyme that you use to take energy from glucose specifically, you can't take it from anything else, and you use it to recycle glutathione which is a master antioxidant of...
Jan 13, 2020•4 min
Question: Are there diminishing returns in the amount of fish in a weekly diet? I know you mentioned eating fish about twice a week. I've been trying to eat salmon once a day. Is there an ideal ratio of fish to non-fish protein you should aim for? There's not a lot of data backing that up and the data we have is pretty poor quality. But I'm of the mind that the diminishing returns come after one or two servings of fatty fish per week. I think if you're talking about white fish it's different. Bu...
Jan 10, 2020•57 sec
Question: How to deal with the fact that blood tests for nutritional status aren't adapted to children? There aren't childhood-based ranges that are data-driven. So what if the ranges need to be a little bit different in children? The approach in the Cheat Sheet is not to rely exclusively on ranges, it's also to look at the diet and lifestyle analysis and to look at signs and symptoms. So what you do is you piece together: does the diet and lifestyle analysis, the blood lab, and the signs and sy...
Jan 09, 2020•1 min
Question: I just saw an email from Matt Stone referring to the overly deified nutrient vitamin A. Also, a few Weston A. Price Foundation bloggers are starting to spread the word about being sick on a high vitamin A diet. Any thoughts about this and comments about Vitamin A being toxic? You shouldn't deify any nutrient, right? Any point of view that breaks down the world into good and bad molecules, is a doomed-to-failure point of view because molecules don't have virtues. Everything is about con...
Jan 08, 2020•7 min
Question: Is it ok to mix carbs and fat? There are a lot of people on the internet that claim the Randle cycle is behind America being fat, since the standard American diet is mixed in fats and carbs. Yet, I feel great on a diet of about 30% protein, 30% fat, and 40% carbs, based on meat, potatoes, fruits, and vegetables. The randle cycle addresses why you would have elevated fatty acids or hyperglycemia and hyperinsulinemia due to competition. You're more likely to have circulating energy suppl...
Jan 07, 2020•7 min
Question: Can you explain what parent essential oils are? I was given some articles that seemed to be saying that high-dose cold-water fish oils are damaging to cell membranes and mitochondrial function. "Parent essential oil" is a term invented by Brian Peskin, who looked at some data that said it's not clear that supplementing with fish oil is good for you because doing so can cause oxidative stress and cause damage to cells. That's true because the highly unsaturated oils found in fish oil, a...
Jan 06, 2020•5 min
Question: What are your thoughts on monitoring HRV for optimizing performance? Measure your HRV every night and you stop exercising entirely to get a baseline. You completely stop working out, you don't go "oh no I'm going to lose my muscle mass," nothing's going to happen for a week or two. And this is the whole foundation of you having good data. This baseline ensures that you have good starting data that isn't influenced by anything. Now you start working out. You do one workout that's typica...
Jan 03, 2020•3 min
Question: Why did the FDA have a vitamin A requirement during pregnancy at 8,000 IU, which is much higher than the IOM recommendations in the past? I have no idea. I do know that the concerns around vitamin A during pregnancy are that in the first weeks of pregnancy, 10,000 IU and higher has been associated with birth defects. That was one prospective study in 1995, which is higher quality than retrospective studies, but still contradicted all the retrospective studies that came to the opposite ...
Jan 02, 2020•3 min
Question: Does mixing carbohydrate with fat cause people to get fat because of the Randle cycle? There's a theory floating around on the internet that mixed diets are more fattening than low-carb or low-fat diets because of the metabolic competition between glucose and fatty acids. I don't believe this to be true because, in the context of isocaloric diets, mixed diets don't seem to be more fattening than low-carb or low-fat diets. Isocaloric diets are important for understanding physiological c...
Dec 30, 2019•4 min
Question: What to do if gamma-tocopherol levels are low-normal while taking 100 IU/d of alpha-tocopherol. My initial impression is that there is nothing wrong because I don't care that much about gamma tocopherol. My doctoral research specialized in gamma tocopherol and there is some evidence that gamma tocopherol does some things that alpha tocopherol doesn't do. It's likely that people who take high-dose alpha tocopherol supplements are suppressing their gamma tocopherol levels. But you don't ...
Dec 27, 2019•2 min
