Question: Are bilirubin and uric acid useful markers of antioxidant defense and oxidative stress? What are better markers? I think intracellularly where most of antioxidant support is highly relevant, then they're not that big a deal. In the plasma, they can be a big deal. It's quite possible that uric acid is one of the most important antioxidants in plasma. But I would say it's highly debatable whether we put uric acid into the blood specifically to achieve that versus that happens to be an ac...
Mar 26, 2020•5 min
Question: Does it matter what form of B12 you take? Cyanocobalamin is cheap and there's not really any clear evidence that it's harmful, but I just don't like the idea that it is cobalamin bound to cyanide. It's not found in the food supply. Forming cyanocobalamin and peeing it out is actually one of the main ways you detoxify cyanide. Hydroxocobalamin is also relatively inexpensive. It's relatively easy to get as injections. It is not an end product of detoxification. It is found in very high c...
Mar 25, 2020•9 min
Question: Is it useful to measure urine pH? The urine pH is telling you the acid burden that your body has been subjected to. It's telling you, you can make an inference about the compensations that your body has had to engage in. You can also make an inference about the limitations of your body in compensating for that because even your urine pH should be buffered. It's not the case that you put a little bit of acid in the urine and then boom your pH is going to go down. It's the case that your...
Mar 24, 2020•7 min
Question: Why AGEs and deficient insulin signaling are the main problem in diabetes. The reason that methylglyoxal, which I did my doctoral dissertation on, the reason that methylglyoxal, which is quantitatively the most important form of advanced glycation end products in diabetics, the reason that it is elevated is not because of hyperglycemia. It's because of deficient insulin signaling. That is for two reasons. One is that you can derive methylglyoxal from glycolysis. You can derive methylgl...
Mar 23, 2020•11 min
Question: Nutritional recommendations for MTR and MTRR polymorphisms. In the methylation cycle, I've talked a lot about MTHFR, which helps finalize the methyl group of methyfolate. But then folate has to donate that methyl group to vitamin B12 in order for vitamin B12 to donate it to homocysteine. In that process, that's how you clear homocysteine primarily in the fasting state rather than the fed state. It's also how you recycle homocysteine to methionine to use for methylation, again, primaril...
Mar 20, 2020•11 min
Question: Nutrition for children with ADHD. In adults 100 to 800 milligrams per day has been used in a couple studies showing effects in the brain. One of the things that's going wrong in ADHD is that the brain is not getting dopamine's signal that something is valuable enough to keep paying attention to it. I think the drugs that are used to treat ADHD are increasing the tonic level of dopamine in the frontal cortex, and they're increasing the tonic level of dopamine in the basal ganglia. In th...
Mar 19, 2020•12 min
Here's what I'm doing about the coronavirus: chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid19 Here's my 41-page 92-reference guide, The Food and Supplement Guide for the Coronavirus: chrismasterjohnphd.com/coronavirus Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is the Founder and Scientific Director of the mitochondria test Mitome ....
Mar 18, 2020•26 min
Question: Nutrients important for neuroregeneration. Iron, phosphorus, and sulfate are very important for regenerating nerves. Magnesium. Acetylcholine is a major factor in regeneration of nerves, and so choline is important. If you were to use a supplement, alpha-GPC would be the ideal choline supplement to use because it's superior at generating acetylcholine. Vitamin A and zinc are very important for nerve regeneration. DHA, which is one of the omega-3 fatty acids that you find in fish is ver...
Mar 18, 2020•2 min
Question: Advice for what to do after suffering a transient ischemic attack. A TIA, a transient ischemic attack, is like a mini stroke, but they all kind of fall into the same category where the development of plaque is a very significant part, is the major thing disposing you to having an event like that. Nutritionally, the major factors in blood pressure are potassium is the biggest one, the salt-to-potassium ratio, not eating too much. Some people are salt-sensitive, some aren't. But the majo...
Mar 17, 2020•9 min
Question: When on a ketogenic diet, it is a problem if ketones are going up to 5 to 6 millimoles per liter? One of the popular ketogenic advocates was saying that if the ketones are getting above 3, then it's from not eating enough protein. I don't really see it that way. I think that protein will suppress ketogenesis, and so will carbs. Five to 6 millimoles per liter is what you see in therapeutic ketogenic diets. In terms of how you could bring the ketones down, more carbs or more protein are ...
Mar 16, 2020•3 min
Question: Are there any solutions to getting nauseated from zinc supplements even at low doses and even when the zinc comes as oysters? With the zinc, my general recommendation is to take zinc on an empty stomach. The thing that is not controversial is that phytate is the principal inhibitor of zinc absorption. Phytate is found in whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes. I think there's a very broad agreement across the zinc research community that taking zinc not with a meal that contains whole ...
Mar 13, 2020•5 min
Question: Could low LDL hurt female fertility? I haven't seen evidence of it, but that would not surprise me at all given that cholesterol is what you make sex hormones from. If you see levels that low, I don't know that it's intrinsically a problem. You kind of want to start looking at what are the reasonable things you could expect to happen from that that affect female fertility? Fat-soluble vitamins could be relevant. Sex hormones could be relevant. I'd start looking at those things. I doubt...
Mar 12, 2020•7 min
Question: Is it safe to take creatine when nursing?If you felt fatigued and you took the creatine and all of a sudden that started reversing, then you either felt fatigued because you had low creatine synthesis, or you felt fatigued because you had a methylation problem. Those aren't mutually exclusive. If you're not methylating well, the most sensitive thing that will happen is you'll synthesize less creatine. But I mean it could have gone beyond creatine. It could have been that you're synthes...
Mar 11, 2020•8 min
Question: Can you explain plant polyphenols and hormesis? In brief, our detoxification system didn't evolve to handle the toxins of modern society. Modern society invents a new chemical. Our body knows it's a toxin, but it doesn't know it because we were exposed to it for millions of years. It knows it because it has similarity to other toxins. That similarity may be weaker or stronger depending on the toxin. Our bodies do evolve to be bad at detoxifying. They evolve to be good at detoxifying. O...
Mar 10, 2020•11 min
Question: What to do when serum magnesium is high but RBC magnesium is low? The magnesium in the blood and the hair is high. When you say blood, I'm assuming this is serum or plasma because the RBC magnesium is low. I'm hoping that's not whole blood magnesium in which case it would be hard to separate from the RBC magnesium. But I mean even for whole blood, if the RBC magnesium is low and the blood magnesium is high, then the magnesium that's in the blood that's high is in the serum or plasma, n...
Mar 08, 2020•7 min
Question: Is there a potential for adverse effects of 5-10 mg of folate for heterozygous MTHFR? Is there a potential? Yeah. The tolerable upper intake level for folate was set at 1 milligram on the basis that there are rare hypersensitivity syndromes that have caused reactions to 1 milligram or higher. On the basis that in numerous case reports, supplementation of more folate than that has been the factor that appears to precipitate the neurological degeneration in B12 deficient patients. It see...
Mar 06, 2020•15 min
Question: Is folate unstable in frozen liver or just in frozen veggies? The answer is folate is stable in frozen liver. It is not stable in frozen greens. This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/podcast/2019/03/30/ask-anything-nutrition-march-4-2019 If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, premium features on all my...
Mar 05, 2020•50 sec
Question: How much vitamin C should I take with collagen? There's no evidence that you need to take vitamin C with collagen. There is a study by Keith Baar, who showed that 15 grams of gelatin, not collagen, but I suspect the collagen is exactly the same, 15 grams of gelatin but not 5 grams, the dose is important, with 50 milligrams of vitamin C taken before exercise improved collagen synthesis in the tendons. They included 50 milligrams of vitamin C because it's made for collagen synthesis, but...
Mar 04, 2020•3 min
Question: Are liver capsules as good as eating liver? Liver pills are mainly for people who are not going to eat liver. That's the first thing. The second thing is, there are advantages to taking the dosing schedule of a little bit of liver every day. Probably the ideal thing would be to have 10 to 20 grams of fresh liver every day. But the number of people who are going to do that are even smaller than the number of people who are going to eat the fresh liver. What the liver pills do is, number...
Mar 03, 2020•4 min
Question: Should I take 3 grams of leucine per meal? Leucine is metabolized into a leucine metabolite that is the signal of protein synthesis. It's the thing that tells your muscles whether they should be synthesizing protein. But do you synthesize more protein when you upregulate all the factors of muscle protein synthesis? Well, that is entirely dependent on the amount of amino acids you have supplied. Think about it this way. Why is leucine used as the marker to determine how much muscle prot...
Mar 02, 2020•4 min
Question: What are your thoughts on root canals? Before Weston Price embarked on his journeys that led to the publication of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which is an epic pioneering work in nutritional anthropology, before he did that, he spent 25 years as the first research director for what became the American Dental Association, researching in laboratory science and clinical science what were the causes of tooth decay and the consequences of tooth decay. Price's argument was that no m...
Feb 28, 2020•10 min
Question: What does it mean when histamine intolerance and blood sugar dysregulation occur together? Well, if his blood sugar is no longer as stable and he has histamine intolerance, then that drug probably interferes with vitamin B6 metabolism. Let me try to take one minute to see if I can find quick information on this. I can't. I can't find it quickly. My instinct is to say that the drug is affecting vitamin B6 metabolism on the basis that 80% of the vitamin B6 in the body is used for glycoge...
Feb 27, 2020•4 min
Question: If PTH is mid-normal, do I need a calcium supplement? I'm assuming that by midrange you mean it's 30. If you mean it's 40, then no, you're deficient or you're probably deficient. You need to test how you respond. But what I would say is, it would still be good for you to try increasing that and see if the PTH goes down anymore. Because my baseline for where I suspect that someone's PTH is maximally suppressed is 30. But the evidence that it's maximally suppressed is that it doesn't get...
Feb 26, 2020•5 min
Question: What to do about sky-high pyroglutamate? Pyroglutamate, its other name is 5-oxoproline. It is something that is primarily produced when you are synthesizing glutathione, but you do not have enough of the second step in glutathione synthesis to keep up with the first step. Maybe you need more glycine, but your glycine isn't low enough to cause orders of magnitude higher pyroglutamate. It's almost certainly the case that you have a glutathione synthetase deficiency, unless you have extra...
Feb 25, 2020•10 min
Question: In hemochromatosis, why would ferritin be low but transferrin saturation high? Ferritin is your long-term iron storage. Transferrin is your short-term iron storage. The problem with hemochromatosis is that usually in a normal functioning system, there is a hormonal regulatory system that prevents you from absorbing iron from food when you have enough iron that when you have too much iron, shuttle the iron into ferritin which is protective both against pathogens eating the iron to grow ...
Feb 24, 2020•8 min
Question: Does folic acid act differently in the body than natural folate? | Masterjohn Q&A Files #68They don't really. Everything that is said bad about folic acid is sort of true to an extent but has been completely exaggerated in some circles. What happens is you have an enzyme called dihydrofolate reductase, or DHFR. Its purpose is not to metabolize synthetic folic acid obviously because that folic acid molecule doesn't exist in the food supply. Its normal purpose is that every time that...
Feb 21, 2020•16 min
Question: Can frozen vegetables be trusted for folate? You absolutely cannot trust frozen vegetables as a source of folate ever. That's because folate is extremely unstable in the freezer, and you have no idea how old the vegetables are. If they were fresh-frozen yesterday, they'd probably have plenty of folate. But if they were fresh-frozen three months ago, they may seem completely fresh and yet they don't have any folate in them. I'm not a fan of frozen vegetables mainly on the folate issue, ...
Feb 20, 2020•2 min
Question: How much spinach, broccoli, and kale is too much? Cruciferous vegetables have an issue with potential goitrogens. At serving sizes like this, the only issue with cruciferous vegetables is that they increase your iodine requirement. In theory, if you are juicing cruciferous vegetables to have like ten servings a day, in theory, you might get to the point where you cannot overcome the goitrogenic effect with iodine. That is based entirely on animal experiments that were done a long time ...
Feb 19, 2020•3 min
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 has mostly been studied in the context of flu, that probably has good antiviral propert...
Feb 18, 2020•2 min
Question: Can you give any suggestions for increasing delta-6 desaturase activity? There's a bunch of nutrients involved in that, so many that you basically just need to do a comprehensive nutritional screening for whether something is missing there. You might just have low activity by genetics. It's probably not worth solving that problem. The big governor though is if you have if you have insulin resistance or you have low insulin levels from chronic carbohydrate restriction, that might increa...
Feb 17, 2020•2 min
