Chris Masterjohn on Joe Rogan Podcast #2420 (Transcript)

So it makes you get tired at night. That must be why.

But it turns out that a turkey is not that high in tryptophan. Like even whey protein is higher in tryptophan than turkey is. And then B, tryptophan doesn’t make you tired. Yeah. I dare anyone to go out and have like a… just a slice of turkey for breakfast and see if it knocks you out.

JOE ROGAN: It’s overeating. It’s like so obvious. I mean, people are eating tons of stuffing, tons of sides. They’re eating so much food. You’re gorging. It’s a gorging day.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, it’s not good.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And if you look at like a lion in the wild, one thing that you’ll notice is that they are on the prowl when they are hungry, they’re alert, their bodies revved up, and then they have a feast and they just fall asleep. And the reason is that we’re, you know, our… you even see this in physiology. They call the parasympathetic nervous system the “rest and digest” system.

And that’s because we are biologically wired to be alert when we need to work to get our food, and then we’re wired to eat that food, feel like we’ve gotten our fill, we’ve done what we need to do, and now we can rest and take a sleep.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s normal. I mean, there’s a great video of these Lionesses, these female lions, after they’ve hunted and killed and ate all this food. And they’re just lying there like this with these enormous bellies, just like… just like your uncle on the couch watching football, just…

Mitochondria: The Key to Health and Disease

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. And I think one… so, one thing that I think we should talk about today is I’ve been in nutrition research for 21 years, and I’m, you know, I think the crowning thesis of my work so far is that we really want to be thinking about mitochondrial function at the root of all health and disease.

And so I think an interesting way to see sleep is it’s like, why do we have to sleep eight hours a night? And I think with dreaming, there’s obviously other things going on there. But deep sleep, one of the primary things that’s happening is you need to give your mitochondria a rest, because your mitochondria are what produce all the energy that you need for producing everything in your body, for maintaining it, for repairing it and for distributing it properly and for keeping it going across the lifespan.

And so your mitochondria are going to essentially take a nap, take a rest. They don’t go off because you die, but they really turn down the volume of the work they’re doing. But then you take your metabolic rate way lower than that, and so you can build up the reserves of energy that you had used up the day before.

And so it’s, you know, that can explain a lot of recent findings that are coming out as well, because there was that recent study where they looked at sleep deprivation with creatine supplementation. And so they randomized people to either drink a placebo drink or drink 20 grams of creatine through the night. And they kept them awake all night, and they had them do brain puzzle quizzes.

And when the subjects were getting the 20 grams of creatine, they did way better on the brain puzzles, but they also complained about being tired a lot less. And so the conclusion is creatine is somehow acutely preventing your brain from suffering during sleep deprivation.

And the rationale there is, you know, mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell or the power plant that’s producing the energy. Creatine is like the power grid, and it distributes that energy throughout the cell. And so if the purpose of sleep is to restore the energy that you used up, but then you intervene by putting creatine in there, now you can keep that energy going and you can go more hours before you need to get rest and restore that energy, because you’ve increased your capacity to distribute it.

Creatine: More Than Just a Muscle Supplement

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense. That is an interesting thing, because it’s fairly recent that people have talked about this, right? I mean, used to be people only thought of creatine as being a muscle thing to help you recover and help you build larger muscles. But then over the last, I would say year or two, I started hearing talking about cognitive function, maybe even more than a couple of years, but about how it improves cognitive function. The sleep thing, though, is very recent, right?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, the sleep thing was in the last year. There is some literature on traumatic brain injury where 20 grams of creatine for six months doubles the rate of healing.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. That’s incredible.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: But it’s… yeah, the field is in its infancy, but I think that I actually, almost a decade ago, did a podcast on just creatine. I called it “More Than a Performance Enhancer.” Because there’s… if you just look at where it’s distributed in the body, almost every cell in every tissue has the creatine system.

And so it really is this… and if you look at the literature, they’ll say, well, it’s more important in certain cells. Like, it’s really important in your muscles, because your muscles have this very polarized… sometimes they’re at rest, sometimes their energy demand is going through the roof. And it’s really important in, like, long cells.

So, for example, your retina is part of your central nervous system. It’s a really long cell that’s coming from the brain into the eye. And creatine helps move energy back and forth. But if you just look at where… instead of where is it most important, you just like, where is it? It’s like almost every cell in your body has creatine, and it’s helping distribute the energy that the mitochondria make throughout your whole body.

And… and that includes pumping stomach acid. It includes sperm swimming up the vaginal canal. And so if you just look at where it is, you would think that creatine would help a lot more than muscles. And it just turns out that all you need to do is start studying it to start seeing those effects.

JOE ROGAN: Is there any studies on creatine improvement of eyesight?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I’m not sure. Not that I know of.

JOE ROGAN: Cause that kind of makes sense, right?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: It makes complete sense. Like you would… when it comes down to it, your ability to produce energy is producing, maintaining, and repairing everything in your body. So you would expect to see anything that does improve your energy metabolism, improve literally everything. So it’d be kind of shocking if you had no effect on that. But I’m not sure if there are good trials done on that. I haven’t seen them.

Red Light Therapy and Vision Improvement

JOE ROGAN: Speaking of improving eyesight, I started doing red light about, I guess about a year and a half, two years ago, got a red light bed and completely stopped whatever macular degeneration I was going through and reversed some of it. So I don’t have perfect vision, but my vision’s better. Like it’s, it’s definitely better.

And it’s not just through the red light. It’s also, it’s got to be some of the supplements that I’m taking. One of them, I take a supplement from Pure Encapsulations, no affiliations with them. I just buy it. It’s called Macular Support. And let’s see what it’s got in there. It’s got lutein and a few other supplements that have been known to…

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, that’ll do it.

JOE ROGAN: Is that it?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, yeah. I mean, so with the red light, it is very interesting. Whenever you think of red light, you want to think of your mitochondria because the main thing that we know about red near infrared and far infrared that they’re doing is they’re actually going straight into the mitochondrial engines that produce the energy and helping them produce more. And they’re also ordering the water structure inside the mitochondria to make those engines produce energy more easily.

And there was a study a few months ago that, it was just like a one day study, but it showed that blasting people in the chest with red light improved their eyesight when it was measured the next day. And they covered their eyes to make sure that the red light didn’t go into the eye. And, and, and so the, the conclusion is, you know, it’s not a clinical study, right. And it’s not like a one year… how does it, you know, does it really improve your eyesight over one year? We don’t know, but it shows proof of principle that red light is doing something systemically that does not have to go to your eye, that does improve your vision.

And to me that makes sense because your vision is going to be improved by anything that acts directly in your eye to improve energy production. But you’ve got coordinated energy metabolism going on through your whole body. Like your liver is doing tons of stuff to try to make your eyes healthy and make your brain healthy and so on. So it makes a lot of sense.

I don’t doubt at all that the bed is part of that, but the lutein and zeaxanthin are well known to accumulate in the macula where they have a very specific role in protecting against macular degeneration. And actually the best source of those is egg yolks from chickens that are fed anything that has them. But marigolds are super high in them. So if they feed the chickens marigolds, they get super high levels and the egg yolk has fat that helps them get absorbed. So in terms of, I mean, you could take this with some eggs, but…

JOE ROGAN: I should feed my chickens marigolds.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, if you have chickens. If you have chickens and if you’re spending your money on a lutein zeaxanthin supplement, you might be able to get a… maybe the marigolds are cheaper.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe I’ll just double it up. So this is all the ingredients. Does this stuff make sense as something that would help support eyesight?

Understanding Vitamin A and Supplement Quality

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: It does. I mean, the vitamin A is going to, that’s going to depend on your genetics in terms of how good are you at converting beta carotene into the, into the form of vitamin A that we need, which is most abundant in liver and egg yolks.

JOE ROGAN: It’s dependent on genetics.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. So there’s, you need… beta carotene is this big and if you chop it in half, you get vitamin A. And so you have an enzyme in your digestive system that does that. But that enzyme is dependent on a lot of things going right. So you need to have good zinc status, good iron status, you good thyroid status and all kinds of stuff like that. And actually seed oils decrease the conversion. So if you take that with canola oil, you’re going to get less vitamin A out of it than if you take it with eggs and butter.

And then vitamin A activation is also dependent on mitochondrial function too. But it makes sense. Vitamin A is great for your eye, vitamin C is a great antioxidant. N-acetylcysteine, great antioxidant. The glutathione, the cetria stuff, I’m kind of, I think it’s a little bit of a over hyped in terms of another type of glutathione I think would have worked fine.

JOE ROGAN: What’s the best glutathione?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: The best glutathione is the glutathione that you make yourself from protein that you eat. But if you’re going to supplement with glutathione, if you’re talking about bang for the buck, I just think straight up glutathione is good and there are studies suggesting that there’s marginal absorption benefits for certain special types, but then they charge three times as much for that type. And it’s like, well, am I getting three times more glutathione out of it? Not really. So some people swear by liposomal glutathione. If you swear by it and it’s… if it does its thing for you, great.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think it’s like 10% better?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I think the jury is out on whether there might be 10, 20% better value for those things. So if I’m going to take glutathione, I’m just going to take glutathione.

JOE ROGAN: Got it? Okay. What you’re saying about producing your own glutathione, that’s the same thing as vitamin D, right? It’s way better when your body produces it if it does.

Vitamin D, Sunlight, and Tanning Beds

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with getting vitamin D from food. But you don’t. The thing is, you do need sunlight, right? So you at least need to get 30 minutes of sunshine in the morning, which is not going to give you vitamin D. And then you need to get like 10 or 15 minutes of unprotected sunshine in the afternoon to get. You get vitamin D from that. But you get other benefits from it as well.

So I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily better to get the vitamin D from the sun than from a vitamin D supplement or from eating fish or from eating cod liver oil. But you don’t want to say, “Well, I don’t need to go out in the sun. I’m just going to take vitamin D.” Then you’re not going to get the benefits of the sun because the sun gives you other benefits.

JOE ROGAN: Got it. Is there anything that you can do? Say, if you live in Seattle and in the winter it’s just raining constantly. Is there a tanning bed that gives you some of that?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, I do think that there is some risk of tanning beds. I’m not 100% comfortable. When I lived in New York, I would try to spend 40 minutes in the afternoon sunshine for three quarters of the year. And during the winter, the UV index just wasn’t high enough. And I get eczema in the winter because I’m not getting enough sun. And so I would use a tanning bed, not to get tanned, but I’d use like two, three minutes at a time just because it just had a systemic effect in preventing the eczema that I would get in the winter.

I think you have to be careful with it because there is some concern that people are just, if they’re tanning to tan, they’re going to wind up with too much damage to their skin. But what I would do is for morning sunlight, I think you can get like a Lux meter app. And just some people are, some people, they think that it’s, there’s no sun outside, but actually it’s like a hundred times or a thousand times brighter than indoors. And their eyes are adjusting. And so it’s like cloudy or overcast, but there’s still a lot of value in going outside.

So I would say if you use a Lux meter and it’s like under 10,000, you could get a light therapy light at home to use to just turn it on and not look straight into it, but kind of have it going into your eyes. And then for vitamin D, you could do tanning bed, but just try to really keep it minimal going for two or three minutes. Not like you’re trying to tan.

JOE ROGAN: You’re just what I was getting at. Is there a different kind of tanning bed that’s maybe…

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Oh, there are, yeah. So there are different ratios of wavelengths, and the ones that have more UVB are the ones that are going to give you more vitamin D. So if you’re, if you’re just going to a tanning bed place, you probably the staff there tell them that you want, like, mixed wavelength that gives you a mix of, like, surface tan and deep tan. I think that’s how they, because they don’t know the vitamin D science. So I think that’s how you have to get the bed that gives you more. I tell them I want a mix.

JOE ROGAN: Of surface and deep. That’s funny.

Methylene Blue: Benefits and Risks

JOE ROGAN: Speaking of red light and speaking of therapy that helps your mitochondria, what is your thoughts on methylene blue? Methylene blue seems to be a very controversial supplement. Some people think it’s amazing and it’s a panacea for all that ails you. And other people are like, “What are we doing here? Why are you putting dye in your body? Piss is coming out blue. This is weird.” What school are you in?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Methylene blue is something that could do wonders for your mitochondria if you need it and could really hurt you if you don’t. And I think that there are certainly a lot of people raving about it on the Internet. And it’s because it’s a mix of things. So there are people that are treating themselves for a problem in their mitochondria that they don’t know that they have, and then they get an outsized voice because they’re the ones raving about how much it helped them.

And so there’s like selection, you know, if some you don’t get. If people didn’t get a benefit or if they just felt a little worse, they don’t go raving about it on the Internet as much. So that’s part of it. There is also a part of it is that when you get up to a dose of around 10 milligrams or so per day, for perspective, in clinical trials of Alzheimer’s, they’re using 200 milligrams, but you can buy like a 0.5 milligram on Amazon. So a lot of people are using like 0.5 milligrams, but once you get up to 10 milligrams or so, you’re getting some degree of pharmacological antidepressant effect because it’s a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

And so I do think that there are some people who are, they’re like, “Oh, I feel so much better.” And it’s like, yeah, bro, you’re taking an antidepressant. So that’s part of it. But if you look at what it actually does, it is a very non specific rewire of how your mitochondria produce energy. And if you can think of it like, let’s say there’s a main road in the city and it’s the best road and that’s why everyone’s on it, but it’s blocked. And then they set up detours.

People are, they’re going to help the traffic because that road is blocked. You actually can’t get through there. And so the side roads that would take you somewhere are actually better because they’re not blocked. So in the context where you need the detours, the detours help you. But if the main road was not blocked and they start putting up detour signs and people start going out in the side roads, they’re not going to get to their destination faster. They’re just getting tricked by the mess, the chaos that was created by people putting up detour signs that they didn’t need.

So methylene blue is something that goes into your mitochondrion, sets up detour signs all over the place.

JOE ROGAN: And how does it do that?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: So it, all right, so what your mitochondria do to produce energy is they extract, they, you know, you have a molecule like carbohydrate or an amino acid from the protein that you ate, or fatty acid from the butter you were eating. You got to break that apart. You got to take out the energy and you got to synthesize ATP with it. The ATP is the general energy currency of the cell. So mitochondria produce usable energy from food in the form of ATP.

When they do that, they have a bunch of different path, bunch of different pathways through which electrons flow. And methylene blue is able to grab those electrons and put them somewhere else. So they call it a redox cycler. So it’s taking an electron here, it’s shuttling it over there, it’s taking an electron here, it’s shuttling over there. And so if you have this very, let’s say, the normal way for your mitochondria to produce energy has a main road where the electrons just flow straight through.

Methylene blue is coming in, and it’s just, you know, taking that electron over here, it’s throwing it in over there, and so on. So if you’ve got a road that goes like this and you’ve got a blockage right here, and methylene blue is just taking something out there and it’s putting it over there, you actually wind up getting better energy with it. But if you don’t have a blockage, you’re just creating random chaos in the mitochondria.

And in animal experiments, what they’ve done is they’ve said, “Okay, let’s give these animals inhibitors of their mitochondria at specific locations and see what methylene blue does.” And if you don’t have any inhibitors, and if the animal is genetically healthy, then you add methylene blue, they get less ATP, so the mitochondria is less effective at converting food to usable energy. But if they do have an inhibitor, their ATP production goes down, you add methylene blue, it goes back up. Right.

So if, if there’s a blockage to get around, methylene blue helps. So I think what’s important if you really want to make sure that people are using methylene blue, right, is to actually do mitochondrial testing that will tell you whether those specific blockages are there. I ran a biochemical optimization program a while back, and one of the clients that I had in there, he tried methylene blue, and he only got up to a half a milligram or a milligram, and his mood was worse, his fatigue was worse, he had more anxiety, a bunch of problems that, you know, the dose was too low to say it was doing a pharmacological messing with his neurotransmitters.

And so I think it was just making his mitochondrial function worse. And so the mitochondrial testing that we did on him showed that, you know, he was not a candidate for methylene blue. And he actually had, you know, some really weird. Like his mitochondria were best at using a specific amino acid, cysteine. And for energy, kind of weird and idiosyncratic. And in his case, it was interesting because he had actually gravitated to a steak only carnivore diet. And he didn’t feel like it fixed him, but he felt like it, you know, took the edge off. Like he was 50% better on the steak only carnivore diet.

JOE ROGAN: 50%’s a lot.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, yeah, it’s a lot, right. But he wanted the other 50%. That’s why he was coming to me. So what was, you know, and the figuring this out didn’t get him to 100%, but it got him to, you know, to get days with 75% because, you know, because he could use strategic cysteine supplementation to mimic the benefit he was getting from the steak, but he would be able to be still in the fasting state because his workouts were better in the fasting state and things like that.

So figuring that out allowed him to get from 50% to 75%, but the methylene blue was putting him down at 5% instead of 50.

JOE ROGAN: Can I ask how old he was?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: He wasn’t that old. He was in maybe 40, I forget exactly, but 40, give or take five years.

JOE ROGAN: And is that an age dependent thing, like mitochondrial dysfunction? Is it more common in older people?

Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Aging

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: For sure. So what, I mean, I would argue that mitochondrial dysfunction and aging are the same thing. And there’s a bunch of theories of aging, but if you take them all, you can always ask the question, why there’s like the information theory of aging, like, why is the information not being carried out correctly? Or the oxidative stress theory of aging, why are you making more oxidative stress?

And I actually think, I actually think it’s way more simple than anyone is thinking about it. It’s mitochondrial energy production is producing everything in your body is repairing it, it’s maintaining it, and it’s putting where it belongs. That means that mitochondria produce the energy that they need to produce everything in the mitochondria. Right? And so if you have a little gap in your energy production, like let’s say you get, I think one way to think of aging is, well, I’ve just, I’ve suffered through so many cumulative insults.

Like I got sick so many times, I got injured so many times. I had days where I didn’t eat optimal nutrition so many times. And I think what all those things are doing is like, well, you know, you, that period of overtraining that you did, your mitochondria were, were forced to help you, give you the energy for, you know, that the extra set of squats that you did and they had a little bit left over for themselves and, and they got, you know, a half a percent worse at producing energy.

And so that sets up a vicious cycle because now, now that they could not repair themselves as well, now they get a little bit worse. And what get a little bit worse and what you see in the literature is that as people age, starting around age 18 through age 70 to 80, you’re losing your mitochondrial function an average rate of 1% per year. So by the time you’re 70, you have half the energy that you started out with at baseline.

And that I think what explains that is just the vicious cycle of the mitochondria got, they lost a quarter percent here or a quarter percent there, and they just started repairing themselves less effectively because they’re the engines fueling everything, including that. But the good news is that age only explains 25% of mitochondrial function. So it’s the average that’s going down at 1% per year. The average person is producing half the energy at age 70 than they were at age 18.

But the spread around that is huge. And to me, the way that I spin that is that means that 75% of this is under your control. You’re going to go in a downward trend, but you’re in control of whether, you know, you’re way undershooting that trend or you’re way overshooting it. What you want to do is make your mitochondrial function as good as it can be at any given age. So that that downward trend will, you know, it’ll be a lot slower and you can get to age 70 and you’re not docked 50%, you’re just docked 10%.

And I think that’s what’s happening when you see some of these 70 year olds who, who you know are more fit than a lot of 25 year olds, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, interesting. So what are the primary factors in regards to being able to maintain your function?

Top Five Things Everyone Should Do for Their Mitochondria

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, I think that everyone has idiosyncratic things and I think mitochondrial testing is very important. But if I were to pick five things that just everyone should be doing for their mitochondria, a lot of it does look like health advice you might get somewhere else, but it actually is the best stuff. Right.

So we mentioned creatine and I think creatine is really important. Because it’s not in the mitochondria so much as it carries forth the mitochondrial energy of the rest of the cell that also feeds back in the repair functions for the mitochondrion. So I think creatine optimizing your creatine status is super important.

And I think that everyone who’s not eating one or two pounds of meat per day should probably be taking creatine. And you can think of it as if you’re eating red meat and you’re eating it rare, you can err on the side of one pound. And if you’re eating, and I would include as red meat salmon, which is like a reddish fish and is actually quite high in creatine. If you’re eating white meat, white fish, and you’re eating it well done, you want to err on the side of two pounds because they don’t have as much creatine, then you cook the creatine out of them and you wind up with much lower dose.

JOE ROGAN: We should probably say salmon. You’re talking about wild salmon versus farmed salmon which has dyed pink skin.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, it’s not the red color. I think it’s coincidence that it’s, that it’s. I think the red color is coincidence. It’s just a helpful way to think about it. But it probably is the case. At least like every Atlantic farm salmon that I’ve seen is, you can tell that it’s. Well, if you look up in the database, it’s way higher in fat, but you can tell by looking at it that it just doesn’t have that lean look that wild salmon has.

So I think creatine is a function of the lean tissue mass. And it might be the case that wild salmon are doing a lot more swimming. Like maybe the wild environment is encouraging them to use their muscles in a way that increases their creatine synthesis. That wouldn’t surprise me.

I have tried to steel man the case of could there be a vegan diet that would make you not need to supplement with creatine? And the steel man that I’ve got for you is you’d have to be eating a half a kilogram of tofu and a half a kilogram of quinoa per day. And that’s not typically what, and that might rip a hole in your digestive system, but that’s not typical.

JOE ROGAN: That hurt my stomach just saying that.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: So I think that most vegans should probably just supplement with creatine. Call it a day there. So that’s creatine.

The Importance of Sunlight for Mitochondrial Function

I think we mentioned sunlight. So sunlight is when you wake up in the morning. I said before that your mitochondria have not gone to sleep, literally, but they’ve really slowed down. It’s like they’re on a nap. And there’s a transition when you wake up, or the mitochondria have to say, “Oh, you’ve woken up now I need to wake up and I need to start producing more energy.”

And sunlight going into your eyes, being translated into your brain, is the signal that actually tells your brain to organize that. And so what happens as a result of that is that signaling helps your mitochondria adapt and start producing everything, and it actually helps them adjust. And if you don’t have the morning sunlight, you’re going to have your mornings full of suboptimal energy metabolism that is initiating that vicious cycle of aging. That’s what I believe.

And then it’s also the case that the red and infrared light from the sun is very beneficial to the mitochondria. The best time to get that would be in the morning. When you go out in the afternoon, you’ve got to deal with like, can I get two hours of this without getting burned? But if you go out in the morning, you can stay out there for one or two hours, and you can get a lot of red and infrared light without worrying about burning wavelengths.

And then I think the beds and other devices at home are great. And where you want to start thinking about that is I’m getting benefit from red and near infrared light, but I know that I could get more benefit if I got more of it than I’m able to get through sunlight. So start getting those wavelengths with sunlight as your base, and then do whatever you want on top of that with whatever seems to be working well for you.

Nutrition and Nutritional Deficiencies

Then nutrition would be number three. And every nutrient is needed for everything in your body, but your mitochondria are using all kinds of nutrients. And there’s this idea that floats around in society that nutritional deficiencies are a thing of the past. But if you just look at surveys, 93% of Americans are getting less than they need of at least one nutrient, 30% have verifiable blood markers of at least one nutritional deficiency, and 6% have blood markers verifying more than one nutrient deficiency.

And I think those are all underestimates, because when you’re just looking at the official stats on how much of each nutrient should you eat, there are a lot of people that have needs for way more. Right. So I think those stats are grossly underestimating how many people need to get better nutrition.

So I think everybody should be getting better nutrition and to kind of high level what that looks like. I think some good rules of, there’s lots of ways to skin a cat, but some good rules of thumb are different. People will do better with more plants or more animals. But when you do eat animals, you should be eating them nose to tail. So at least try to work in liver, at least try to work in bone broth or something like that. The closer to nose to tail you can eat your animals, the better.

Do try to diversify across proteins because there’s just different vitamin and mineral profiles in different types of protein. Like if you can eat shellfish, eat some shellfish. If you can eat fish, eat some fish, you can eat dairy, eat some dairy. And the more you diversify across those proteins, the better.

Most people don’t eat enough protein. Good rule of thumb would be at least a third of your plate should be protein. But if you’re talking like eggs and dairy products, you’ve got to double that because the amount of space they occupy per unit of protein that they’re giving you is a third of your plate as eggs is not going to give you enough protein.

And then I think try to eat as broadly as you can from different types of carbohydrates. If you have to leave out something, leave out grains. Try to eat whole, unprocessed foods and try to eat most of your, try to eat 80% of your foods cooked at home or prepped at home or whatever instead of eating out. And make sure your digestion is in good order. And those are kind of the broad basis of nutrition.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Exercise and Mitochondrial Training

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And exercise is a very interesting one. So if you, exercise is incredibly important to the signaling that produce mitochondria. But why is that? It’s because you need mitochondria to produce energy for the exercise that you’re doing.

So I think a lot of people are too reductionist when they look at what type of exercise should you do for your mitochondria. If you try to do a study that says I’m trying to get more mitochondria in my skeletal muscle, what exercise going to do it? You’re going to see endurance exercise outperforming other things. And that’s because endurance activity requires more mitochondrial function in the muscle.

If you’re doing hypertrophy or strength training and you’re doing short sets, your muscle’s burning a lot of glycogen. It’s less dependent on its mitochondria. So you’re not going to see the mitochondrial function there. But that doesn’t mean you’re not improving mitochondrial function, because now all that really means is the liver is stepping up to assist the muscle.

Like, if you’re doing sprinting, your muscle’s burning through tons of carbohydrates, making a lot of lactate. If that lactate is not being metabolized in the skeletal muscle, it’s going to the liver to get converted back to glucose. So your liver, now you’re training your liver’s mitochondria. When you’re doing strength training, you’re doing hypertrophy.

So I think the right way to look at it is just you should be exercising all the things that are functions that you need to keep. And that means endurance, it means strength, it means mobility, it means agility, it means balance, it means proprioception, it means being able to respond to your environment.

I think to some degree, just playing a sport that has other people in it is important because if someone’s throwing a Frisbee and you need to react to that, you’re training mitochondria in your brain that are able to energize the systems that provide your reaction time. And I think cognitive exercise for your brain is things like working on your memory and on your creative synthesis and all those different aspects.

And I do think that a lot of people are thinking about this when they’re 25. They’re like, “Well, I don’t care if I can memorize a string of 25 numbers,” but you’re going to care if you can’t remember anything when you’re 75. So I think that we really need a broad thought about this. But by the way, do you know what athletes live the longest from the pros? Let me guess.

JOE ROGAN: Baseball.

Which Athletes Live the Longest?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: It’s actually gymnasts and pole vaulters have eight years on the general population. And if you look at, there’s a study that came out earlier this year, and it tallied up all of the pro sports players from all of the countries who had the dates of their death published and who were notable enough to have been had an article published about them.

And so they had many hundreds. I forget the exact sample size, but they were able to statistically adjust the mortality rate to the general population from which the athlete came. So if it was a Greek athlete, they were adjusted to the mortality rate of Greece when they died, like what you would expect after adjusting for location and age and so on.

And in the male athletes, you had gymnasts and pole vaulters with eight years on the population. And you’ve got cyclists who’ve, and of course, you’ve got sumos. Sumo wrestlers are 10 years below. And you have a lot of sports that have high injury rates that are especially a lot of stuff that has impacts to the hands, martial arts and things like that, where probably the sport itself and its impact on training your body’s energy systems is positive, but just the injury rate is taking you out.

So you’re kind of not, you’re kind of in the middle. You’re very close to the general population. Cyclists only have two years on the general population. And so what I thought was interesting, I think a few things are interesting about that.

So first of all, there’s a lot of people in the longevity space are taking most of their information about how they should train for longevity from people who specialize in cycling.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, yeah, I’m not going to name names, but there’s people out there who are, that’s where it’s coming from. And it makes a lot of sense that cycling is good for cardiorespiratory fitness. There’s a lot of data that having good cardiorespiratory fitness is a key factor for longevity.

But when you look at a study where gymnasts and pole vaulters have six extra years on the cyclists and the cyclists only have two extra years on the general population, I’m like, “Huh, what?” It’s not all about the cardiorespiratory fitness.

And so when I think about, it’s an observational study. You can’t prove cause and effect, but it just does make you think. And the way that I think about that is a few things. So first of all, the commonalities between gymnasts and pole vaulters, it’s definitely not height because gymnasts tend to be short and pole vaulters are tall. And so the height cancels out.

Definitely they’re fit. They do both have, it is interesting that they have, cyclists have a good lower body and gymnasts and pole vaulters have a good upper body. So I do think that’s interesting that it does make you, it does make you wonder if you could skip leg day. I don’t advocate skipping leg day, but to me, what I think is actually going on here is I think that functionality of movement throughout the whole body to facilitate very, to facilitate the kind of skills that they have.

JOE ROGAN: Is.

Training Beyond Cardio: The Overlooked Elements of Fitness

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Training things that are getting left out when you just make sure that your heart and lungs are able to support your running or your cycling. And I think that some of those involve are probably related. I don’t know what they’re not dying of. So presumably they’re getting less heart disease or getting less cancer and they’re getting less neurological disease, because that’s what people are dying of. Right?

Like in the average, if you get far enough for someone to analyze why you died, diabetes and hip fractures and things like that are hitting younger people. But in general, if people are dying because they got old, they’re dying of heart disease first, cancer second. And if they outlive those two things, you get this diverse spread of things that people die of. And diverse neurological diseases becomes pretty heavy.

So I think cardiorespiratory fitness is probably the biggest thing in preventing heart disease. But cancer becomes very interesting because there was a study in rodents that showed that stretching prevents tumor growth. And I thought this was wild. I first heard about this on one of Huberman’s shows. And so I looked up the study, and I was like, this is wild because I happen to know some other things about immune function.

So one thing is that when T cells, which are important both to prevent infections and are also important because they attack you during autoimmunity, and they’re also important because they kill cancer—for T cells to be activated, what they do is they don’t have enough energy themselves, so they push off the local environment. And that pushing off creates motor proteins inside that generate the energy to activate the T cell.

And what cancers do is they modify their extracellular environment to compromise that because it’s harder for the T cell to push off of it. Now, I know another thing from Crohn’s research, which is that the best way to cure Crohn’s disease, besides some of the drugs that they’re on, is a liquid diet. And the recent research on how the liquid diet works is that it removes the pressure in the intestine that is pushing out and is causing inflammation to activate and attack the body. Right?

So I’m synthesizing these three things, and I’m like, this makes a lot of sense that the relative proportions and how stretched out and, like, what is the quality of your joint tissue and things like that probably has a lot of severely underappreciated causation in terms of cancer and autoimmune disease.

So I think it would be very interesting to see if actual, like, functional mechanical activity—like, if you optimize for functional mechanical activity such that you can swing around from acrobat from a trapeze and flip around in the air and swing on rings and push yourself up and stuff like that—does that pay forward into better immune function because your body is more properly structured? I can’t prove that, but I think it’s very interesting to think about for those two exercises.

The Gymnast Advantage: Being Upside Down

And then it is very interesting to me that gymnasts and pole vaulters both spend a lot of time upside down. And they don’t stay upside down for very long, but they just—they repeatedly are upside down quite a bit. Right. And so this is, again, this is all just hypothesizing interesting ideas, right?

So one interesting idea is that a vibration plate is the sedentary man’s gymnastics and that, you know, flipping upside down is better at circulating body fluids than walking. And, like, a vibration plate is better than walking. But actually spending time in the upside down state and flipping around is actually very good for circulating the fluids in your body. I don’t, you know, I can’t prove any of this, but it’s all very interesting to think about.

But what I can—what I kind of conclude from this is you don’t want to get sucked into just optimizing VO2 max or something like that. You really want to—the lesson from the gymnast is like, what are all the things that a gymnast can do that I can’t do? And I should be able to approximate them in the best way that I can. And I take that a little bit more literally. So I actually do—like, I am trying to convert all my workouts into, like, what’s the gymnastic version of this?

JOE ROGAN: And you think it’s because of flipping. They’re both involving coordination, explosive movement.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Right. And I think the skills—I think that, yes. So I think the skill training is big for spill off into neurological disease because—but I’m just trying to connect them to the three things. So I’m not sure exactly what they have lower rates of death from. We need more studies to see that. But the body mechanics, I think, is a very interesting possible explanation of why they’d have lower rates of cancer.

And what you just said, I think is a great explanation of why they would have lower rates of neurological disease. And I think it’s kind of like, you know, if you look at—I think another thing that people mistake in the longevity space is they spend too much time thinking about reverse engineering 100 backwards. What do I want to not have lost by that time and not enough time just being in peak function.

Peak Function vs. Reverse Engineering Longevity

Because if you look at bone mass, for example, bone mass goes up until you’re in your mid-20s, maybe 25 to 30. There’s a little bit difference with men and women, but then it just goes down after that. And if you want to have good bone mass when you’re 75, the, like, the most important asset you could possibly have is to have really good peak bone mass when you’re 25. Right.

So I really think that, like, it’s just like I said before, you might not think memorizing a string of 25 numbers is important at any age. But you know, if, if you’re going to have really awesome peak memory, that gives you a lot of room to decline later on. Whereas if you’re trying to reverse engineer, like, what you don’t want to be able to not remember when you’re 75, I think you’re just setting the bar way too low. Right.

So if you’re, if you’re 20, you should be thinking about, like, what are all the sports I can’t do? And not, you know, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with picking a sport, but I do think it’s, it would be good for everyone when they’re young enough to do so, to just try a different sport once a year. And maybe they don’t love it, they don’t fall in love with it, but maybe they learn something like, oh, I didn’t realize I couldn’t do that.

So for example, I did last year, I did a little bit of BJJ and I did a little bit of boxing and I was like, God damn. Like, my feet don’t move like they used to in boxing. And in BJJ, I was, I was getting a little dizzy doing forward and backward rolls. And I was like, I don’t spend enough—this is before I started thinking about the gymnast being upside down. I was like, I don’t spend enough time being upside down.

So I was like, so I bought some mats and now I just, you know, I do, I do one forward and backward roll every day. No matter—I don’t do BJJ right now, but I just do one forward and backward roll every day as part of my morning routine. But I’ve also switched—like, I was like, why would I overhead press when I can do wall push ups? Now? My hope is by next year I’ll be able to do handstand push ups, but I’m working on a handstand right now, so we’ll see how that goes.

But I think just because you can focus on one thing, you can really miss out. That, like, oh, my favorite workout activities don’t—I mean, this is how many people are doing all their favorite workout activities and forgetting that they don’t have any rotation, they don’t have any side bending. You know, like, if you would just—you just try a different sport and be like, oh, what am—what did I not realize I wasn’t able to do at all? And then pick that and put it in your workout, you know, because if you got a great programmer, then maybe your workout is perfect.

But I think most of us are—can, like, we gravitate towards some of the exercises that we think are good. And even if—even if you think you’re mixing it up, like CrossFit. CrossFit managed to eliminate rotation from everything like that. Like, every sport that involves throwing a ball involves rotation, right?

JOE ROGAN: Well, they—

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: They do.

JOE ROGAN: Sometimes they throw the ball sideways against a wall. There’s—there’s some rotation.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Maybe they worked it in. When I did CrossFit, the ball throwing we did—we was really wall balls. And it was—

JOE ROGAN: So it was like, depends. I think it depends entirely on who’s teaching it. But, yeah, then it’s doing windmills. Yeah, windmills are kind of a forward rotation. There’s a lot of ab exercises they do that are rotational.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. All right, so that—maybe that wasn’t fair, but—but my point is that, like, a lot—

JOE ROGAN: A lot of people.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: A lot of—a lot of people are not doing any rotation. Right, Right.

JOE ROGAN: And.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And so I just—I just—you just want to tap into that—that diversity of, like, what functions am I not exercising when I exercise them?

Skills, Strategy, and Cognitive Function

JOE ROGAN: When we’re talking about skills, we’re talking about the neurological system and the cognitive system synergistically in a dance, when you talk about old people. And one of the things that happens when cognitive function declines is you lose your ability to do puzzles. And one of the ways to stave that off, they believe, is, like, do crosswords, do a bunch of different things. Chess, do something that’s actively making your mind fire and work.

Wouldn’t it just make sense that a skill versus just a workout, just bench pressing and squats and stuff like that, but it’s an actual skill where you do, like, Muay Thai, hitting pads, or even light sparring, that you’re thinking as well as exercising, which is very different because you’re consciously aware of your opponent’s movement. You’re calculating it, you’re trying to time things, there’s a whole dance going on between your body and your mind that doesn’t really exist in straight workouts.

So that alone I would think would fight off a lot of the age related decline in physical activity or physical function.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, I think there are—you mentioned a couple things in there. So I think it’s a separate thing to have a skill and have strategy and to have reaction time. But I think you definitely want to be hitting all those bases. So I think it’s good to have a general checklist of what should you be exercising and see that it takes strength and break it down into the different planes.

And then also take skill, strategy, reaction time, agility, quickness, balance, power. And you have to find a way to, you know, it’s hard to work everything at once, but you got to find a way to maybe, maybe you cycle through switching your focus, but you find like what is—if I, if I worked on really being able to jump rope without tripping my feet up last quarter, how am I going to take that skill and not lose it?

And so for me, for example, like I really focused on jump roping when I realized how horrible I was at it when I was forced to do in boxing. And so I very intensively tried to get good at jump roping and now I don’t want to work on it anymore. But I’ve just taken in like okay, every morning I have to do 50 uninterrupted jump ropes just in the course of my warm up.

JOE ROGAN: Just to kind of keep whatever skills that you’ve developed.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, just to make sure that like I’m not losing the basic capacity to do that coordination. And if I start to, then I realize I have to work on it more.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. New things I think would enhance that even more maybe than things that you’re very comfortable with and things you’re very efficient at. Like say if you’re an athlete in whatever sport and you say, you know, I’m going to try jujitsu or I’m going to try martial arts, like something completely new like that where you’re working out but you’re really thinking because you’ve got to like really concentrate.

It’s not like a natural movement to throw a sidekick. You have to really concentrate on picking your knee up, twisting your body and all that jazz. Like I think stuff like that would, you know, just keep everything firing.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: No, I think you, yeah, I mean, I think you should do a mix. Like you always want to be pushing yourself to a new achievements but then you also—I think you want to structure things so that you don’t lose the ones that you—that you did.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I think a lot of us go through life just making achievement, losing it, and treading water and going nowhere.

JOE ROGAN: When I really got into Jiu Jitsu, I stopped doing any kickboxing for a long time. And every now and then, I would just hit the bag and just like, oh, I still can do it. But then I started training Muay Thai again, and it was kind of shocking how long it took me to get the flow back, like, where it really comes off smooth.

Everything seemed a little labored, and it was just disheartening to, like, oh, I don’t really have these skills. Like, I have to reacquire them. You know, I know how to do it. I’ve done it. But it’s just right now, everything’s a little—the pathways are filled with mud.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: It’s not clean. It’s not nice and sharp. Everything is a little funky. But if you want to get good at Jiu Jitsu, you don’t have time for two hours of Muay Thai a day. You just don’t. So it’s like, you got to pick your poison, got to pick what you like, what you don’t like.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. Well, I think you have to decide what your goal is and what your metric is. Like, there’s no way that anyone is going to be good at seven—going to be elite level at any two sports or great at any seven, right?

So I think you have to say, okay, do I want to be really good at Muay Thai? And that’s—you don’t have to do that to have healthy aging, but there are things that you do at Muay Thai that you do have to be able to do to have healthy aging.

So if you’re just thinking about it from the perspective of how do I know that I’m engaging in healthy aging? I think you don’t want to say, oh, I need to be as good as I ever was at Muay Thai. You just have to say, okay, why am I bad at some of that? And is that something that I need in general?

And I think oftentimes by doing something like that, you can think about it and you can realize, oh, what I really can’t do is I’m not agile anymore. I really can’t shift my weight quickly anymore, or I really can’t—my reaction time is slow. Like, I just keep getting hit in the head because I don’t move it.

You know, if you’re realizing those things, then I think you have to find some way to train those because you need those for everything. And it’s just easy to not challenge yourself in life and don’t realize what you’re losing. So you do have to challenge yourself with something you’re not able to do to figure out what you’re weak in.

The Toll of Physical Damage and Injury

JOE ROGAN: One of the things I wanted to bring up, you brought up earlier, you were talking about martial artists and perhaps injuries accumulating over time and you lose some of your function because of that. Like you mentioned hands, hand injuries.

Is that something that people need to take into consideration that maybe they don’t? That maybe just physical damage, like in terms of getting hit and physical damage perhaps from over training. Physical damage, certainly from cutting weight.

You know, a lot of these guys cut weight and they’re basically on death’s door 24 hours before a fight, which is, I think, completely insane. And the most avoidable, damaging thing about martial arts competition. And yet it’s ubiquitous. It’s like almost everyone does it.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, I mean, I think there is a degree of subjectivity to it. If your idea of what a life well lived is, is to win an event that might have you die in the next three years, then how are you going to argue with that value that someone has adopted?

But if you are thinking about it from the perspective of how do I stay healthy through—how do I live a long, healthy life—then injury prevention has to be your number one consideration, not your number two.

I think even if you were just trying to say, how can I be the strongest I could be? You would still need injury prevention to be number one. Because how many people take three months off from a lift that they’re working on and wind up six months behind where they had been when they start again as a result of that injury?

And where would they have been if they spent that six months getting stronger? And if you’re going to do that every two or three years, that’s taking a huge toll off even the skill that you could develop and your maximal capacity at that.

But like I was saying at the beginning, I really think that the simplest explanation for why mitochondrial function declines 1% per year and gets cut in half by age 70 is just this—like when I was injured, my mitochondria were completely obsessed with healing from that injury. And a little bit came out of the account used to repair the home base.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what I was getting at. Yeah. So for someone who’s had, like, say, a martial artist who’s had broken hands, broken ribs, knee surgery, shoulder surgery, a lot of these guys have gone through a bunch of stuff like that. So each one of those things is taking a small toll. Yeah.

That’s not something that people consider. You think, oh, you recovered from that injury, now you’re 100%, but you’re 100% with the tax of having recovered from that injury.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. And a lot of people aren’t necessarily fully recovered from the injury either.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, many aren’t. Many, many aren’t.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I talked to a guy once who was—he got injured in marathon running, and he thought he was recovered. I thought he wasn’t recovered, and he thought he was. There was some kind of metabolic stuff wrong with him because he’s getting sick all the time. I’m like, bro, you didn’t recover yet. Like, what are you doing going out and doing all that running?

JOE ROGAN: Like, what was the injury?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I don’t remember the—I forgot the specific injury, but one of the common running injuries.

Concussions and Recovery in Combat Sports

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. One of the things that’s really common in MMA is someone getting knocked out and then getting knocked out again because they come back too quickly. It happened recently in a big fight, and it’s just—there’s a thing that happens with these guys that they just want to get back in there and get a win.

And a lot of times they’re like, I’ll be ready. I won’t get hit again. I know what I did wrong. I’ll be better this time. But they’re more vulnerable now. Like, they can get knocked out.

Is this just neurological damage? Is this just a function of the concussion? Or do you think it’s a function of the concussion, the recovery from it, and the diminishing capacity of the body because it had to recover from that traumatic injury. I think it’s all of those, but that too. Right.

So it’s not just the fact that you got knocked out and your brain is more vulnerable now. It’s like, no, no, no. Your body’s more vulnerable. You’re probably not as strong as you were. You’re probably not recovering as quickly.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. I mean, the brain is—it’s a small part of the body, but it’s massively outsized in terms of the energy that it consumes. And so think about if you’re actually healing the ability for it to—if it’s just sucking even more disproportionate energy from the body.

And just think about how much the rest of the body works to support the brain. Like the liver is working all day long to make the brain get enough energy. So yeah, there’s no way that healing from a brain injury is not taking a toll systemically. That’s impossible.

JOE ROGAN: But to accelerate or enhance that creatine you think would be a very good option.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I mean creatine is one of the ones that’s been demonstrated to do that and it’s been studied. 20 grams a day, I don’t think anyone really knows, like, do you need 20, is 30 better? Could it have been done with five? But most of the brain research is being done with doses around 20 grams.

And the thought is that the muscles are going to take first dibs and you need to have a high dose to get it to the brain. There’s a lot we don’t know about that. But as a default, if I was healing from a traumatic brain injury, I would take the creatine.

And then I think if you have something that’s this serious, you do want to know what your limiting bottlenecks are. So I think actually doing mitochondrial testing, one of the applications would be like, oh, now it’s really important that I have a six month window where I need to maximize everything I can. And so testing to understand your unique needs I think would be a way to supercharge that process when it’s needed.

And I think that there are—and so to take this back to what can people do in general? I think methylene blue you mentioned is one of those ones where I wouldn’t even—I personally wouldn’t even take it without testing showing that I need it.

But CoQ10 is an interesting one because CoQ10 is actually made in the body and it is found in food. And so, you know, methylene blue was—a lot of people emphasize that it was the first drug. So it’s like the first example of pharma basically. But before that it was actually patented as something that would turn your clothes blue but wouldn’t come out in the wash. That was the patent on methylene blue.

You know, whereas CoQ10, you eat food, it’s there, your body makes it itself.

CoQ10 and the Importance of Organ Meats

JOE ROGAN: And what kind of food is it in?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Heart is the best. And so I was saying before you should be eating nose to tail—if you’re going to eat meat, you should be eating heart. I personally, most of my meat is actually a blend of like 60% ground beef and the rest of it is a blend of liver, heart, kidney, and there are some other—mine is just liver, heart and kidney.

There are some other companies that I’ve seen recently come out with ones that include spleen and adrenals and very small percentages. But that’s—I do strongly believe in a food first, pharma last approach. And that doesn’t mean I’m against pharma, but it means that even with supplements, if you can meet a need with food, you should meet the need with food.

You should use supplements in a strategic sense, not as a replacement for a bad diet. And those supplements should—what you would do next is say, okay, I’m really having trouble getting enough, whatever nutrient. Maybe I’ll supplement to compensate for that.

But I think you should go down the line with other things that are like supplements of things that occur naturally in your body, that are of course safe to be in your body because they’re always going to be there. Maybe you can supplement with that to help break a vicious cycle of aging or to stimulate a virtuous cycle of healing that I would—once you’re getting all your nutrients and you’re trying to do that from food, I think that you could start playing around with that stuff.

But even then—so CoQ10 is a great example. I would try eating more heart before I would try supplementing with 400 milligrams a day of CoQ10, for example.

JOE ROGAN: Can I ask you this? Does it matter if it’s chicken heart, beef heart? Is there a superior—

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I don’t think we have enough data to say that. So CoQ10 is one of those things where the nutritional databases are—not that—I mean, you’re not even going to find it in USDA database. But there’s published literature. But I have not seen all the different hearts compared.

JOE ROGAN: So how do we know that CoQ10 is in heart?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, wherever it’s been measured in heart, it’s there. So the representative examples of heart that were used were like an order of magnitude higher in CoQ10 than anything else.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sorry?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Oh, we just haven’t seen all of the different hearts compared to each other.

JOE ROGAN: Is it dependent upon how it’s cooked? Like whether it’s rare, well done?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I think you lose some during cooking, but it’s—I forget how much and I don’t think it’s all of it. So it’s—I think it’s—you’re always—I mean, you’re always—the more gently you cook your food, the better off you are in every conceivable case. It might not always taste the best.

JOE ROGAN: Except for parasites, of course.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I mean, you don’t need to make a steak well done to avoid—

JOE ROGAN: Well, not steak, but pork.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Right, right, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Or other things, especially some wild game.

CoQ10 Dosing and Individual Variability

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, right. So taking that into account, the nutrient value of the food is always going to be highest when the food has been cooked relatively gently. But anyway, so CoQ10 is interesting because it’s hard to argue against taking it from the literature because there’s dozens of clinical trials. Quite a bit of it is in heart disease. It looks pretty promising in various forms of heart disease.

But if you look at that literature, what you see is a dose response where at 100 to 200 milligrams per day of CoQ10, the average person’s glucose, insulin and blood pressure looks better than not taking it. But the average person at 400 milligrams of CoQ10 is actually having worse blood pressure, glucose and insulin than they were without taking it.

And the variability around that is huge. So one person is probably going to be worse at 100 milligrams, whereas another person might get their best at 400 milligrams. But it’s like if you looked at the literature and you would say, where is the sweet spot where the average person is going to be doing really good? It would be 100 to 200 milligrams a day.

But I think there are, I’ve seen a lot of edge cases on either side where some people get miracles and some people get, I wouldn’t say catastrophe, but just they just get worse off. So a lot of people complain about insomnia, they complain about their heart racing or heart palpitations, various things like that, overstimulation, feeling like the lights are too bright or the sounds are too strong or whatever. Just hyper. Some kicks. It’s not common, but it’s, I mean, all the people with the uncommon stuff always ask me about it.

JOE ROGAN: Right. At higher levels or?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: No, no, just like at 100 milligrams, like normal. They’re just hypersensitive people out there.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And then…

JOE ROGAN: And is this rare? Is this like…

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I don’t know how common it is. So, I mean, what I can tell you is that across the trials you see some people reporting GI side effects, which is super common. You don’t see a lot of this mentioned, but you never know if they were looking for it. Like, a lot of times the side effect list is dependent on what side effects they asked about.

JOE ROGAN: Is this something you take with food or without food?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: It would be better to take it with food.

JOE ROGAN: And is the side effects, is it dependent upon when they take it, like whether it’s morning or evening?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I think for some people that have complained about insomnia, they have thought that it was worse when they took it in the evening.

JOE ROGAN: Makes sense, right? Yeah. So maybe increase function if you took it early or maybe increase energy levels.

Defining Health: Energy, Adaptability, and the Energy-to-Anxiety Ratio

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, you know, okay, so I think, let me set the stage for this with just kind of like, I think this really helps explain what should you actually be thinking about to know that you’re healthy. And I think we struggle a lot with, I think the medicine just thinks that being healthy is just not having a disease. I think we as kind of the wellness community or whatever, struggle to come up with a good definition for health.

But I think a really good definition of health for me is you should be abundantly supplied with all the energy that you need to fulfill the goals that you’re trying to fulfill. And you should be adaptable enough to be able to handle things changing that were out of your control or your own purposeful changing.

And I think the North Star for you to see when to know that you are healthy is that your energy to anxiety ratio is very high and your libido is very strong. And so when you start losing, you use energy not only to produce, maintain, repair everything, but you also use it to distribute everything.

And so one of the things that you do with like the last 10% of energy you make is help determine where all the energy goes. And so a lot of people think that, like, if their mitochondrial function is declining, they should feel tired all the time, but that’s not necessarily the case.

It might be that you’re just losing the energy that you need to actually help the mitochondrial chemical energy to help control how you use energy. And so you are wasting it as anxiety, and that’s coming out of productivity.

So it’s like you look at how much energy did I have yesterday and what did I get done? If the answer is, well, I felt wired all day, but I wasted most of it thinking about why my wife insulted me and then worrying about how I was going to pay the bills. And so I didn’t actually get any work done. Like, that’s a good sign that you’re, you are losing control over where your energy is going. So you’re not, you’re just, that’s not good. That’s not healthy.

Healthy is you have abundant energy to put towards productive things. And so you should see from that that you feel energized when you need to be alert, that your anxiety levels are very low, that your libido is very high. And you know, you can adapt that on an age dependent manner, but, and that you are able to sleep very deeply.

And if all your energy is keeping you up at night and then the next day you’re sleep deprived, your biggest problem is you’re just not putting the energy to where it’s supposed to go.

So I think when you’re looking at something like that, you could say, well, maybe CoQ10 is just increasing their energy. But to me, that they lost a little bit of energy and they lost the energy that they needed. They lost the top 10% of their energy. And then that made them not be able to control where the next 20% went. And so it spilled over into their heart was racing or it spilled over until they couldn’t fall asleep at night.

But I’ve also seen other edge cases where people get miracles from CoQ10 that you also are not going to find in the literature. So I had this…

JOE ROGAN: What kind of miracles?

A CoQ10 Miracle: Restoring Lost Menstruation

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I’ll give you one example. So in the program that I had, I had a client named Jacqueline and she lost her period at 28. So she, you call that amenorrhea, but she described it as, “I hit menopause way too early.” She didn’t have her period for 10 years.

So we did mitochondrial function testing on her that showed that you have a specific need for a lot of CoQ10. And what was crazy was she had gone to functional medicine practitioners, did homeopathy, all kinds of, you know, just, just went to whatever she could find and nothing ever changed that.

What’s crazy is that like functional medicine practitioners often give bagfuls of supplements to, to their, to their patients. And you know, so she had gotten like normal doses of CoQ10 the past, like 100, 200 milligrams. But based on the testing that we did, we said like you should, you should probably experiment with 700, 800 milligrams.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: So which, you know, by the way, is above where the average person’s glucose and insulin gets worse. And, but two weeks into taking the CoQ10, she got her period back after 10 years. That’s crazy. After 10 years? Yeah, that’s nuts.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

Food First, Pharma Last: The Case for Eating Heart

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: So I think CoQ10 is methylene blue. I’m a little bit more hardcore. Like, you really got to do the testing. Whereas CoQ10, I’m kind of like, you know, you should play around with it. Like, you very well may benefit from 100 to 200 milligrams a day. But my food first, pharma last approach says, are you eating heart? Did you eat heart today?

JOE ROGAN: Well, that completely makes sense. And it also completely makes sense that it would be more bioavailable in food. You’d absorb more of it.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I think that’s, you know, that could be part of it. But then it’s just, it’s just also there’s so much other stuff in the food, you know. Right. So it’s like people get obsessed with whether they should be taking this thing or that thing. But that thing, if you got it from that food, give you 36 other things.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And it’s just…

JOE ROGAN: And they work together.

Mitochondrial Energy and Supplement Balance

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, and they work together. And they can also become imbalance. I think a lot of mitochondrial energy metabolism, the bottlenecks that people can have, is kind of like jammed up traffic. And a lot of times you can megadose something. And the main problem of megadosing that for anyone would be it would be imbalance with something else.

But if you’ve got a blockage in that something else, now you’ve just got a train wreck happening in your mitochondria because you’re activating one pathway that has to flow through the next one where you had your blockage and just like that.

So you can go online, for example, and find communities where people are raving about high dose thiamine. And the RDA, the government recommended amount of thiamine to get, is around 1.3 milligrams. There’s people out there who are like, oh, everyone should be taking 2,000 milligrams per day.

But I saw one case where this happened before I knew the person, but they had fatigue so bad that they couldn’t get off the couch. And so she was self-rating her energy at zero. And a practitioner said, well, you should really try this high dose thiamine. So she went on 1,100 milligrams a day. So not 2,000, but big, right?

And a lot of people get miracles out of this and they are vocal, they make communities on Facebook. And so people get the idea that everyone who tries it is benefiting from it. But her energy did improve a little bit. But she developed a new, completely new motor dysfunction problem. Unsteady gait. It just kept getting worse the whole time she was taking the thiamine. She had an existing problem with dizziness that got a lot worse.

And a major issue for her was that she had to clear out the thiamine. But the mitochondrial testing that we did on her basically showed that it explained it, because she had a block in the pathways that would be most sensitive to megadosing that supplement. And so winding that back and renourishing those other pathways helped her.

I do think that a lot of people, if they’re going to go into the wild, wild west of megadosing random supplements, should do their own testing of glucose, ketones, and lactate at home. A lot of people test their glucose, not a lot of people test their lactate. But I’m 100% confident that that woman, if the practitioner said, try the thiamine and see what it does to your lactate, and if it goes down, it’s good, and if it goes up, it’s bad, I think she would have stopped it after the first few days and the new onset motor dysfunction never would have happened.

And so maybe she wouldn’t have done mitochondrial testing with me until months after that, but it wouldn’t have been a big deal because she had this real-time indicator of mitochondrial dysfunction that she tested herself at home that showed her, oh, I’m trying this out of left field thing. Let’s see, am I getting a stress signal out of it, or am I getting the signal that my mitochondria are calming down or more happy with their function, which is really what lactate is telling you.

And most people who do lactate testing do it in exercise. And what you see in exercise is when your body’s under an incredible amount of stress, you see lactate levels go up in the blood. Halfway through a pro basketball game, lactate is through the roof, right? Well, if I take thiamine and the next day it looks like I’m halfway through the basketball game when I wake up, that’s a sign that something is out of whack in my body.

But to go back to, if the perspective was you might need more thiamine, so you should try adding some nutritional yeast to the dishes that you want to impart a cheesy flavor to, which is what nutritional yeast tastes like, because nutritional yeast is really high in thiamine, then that probably wouldn’t have happened because the dose would have been a lot lower. She would have gradually got into it much more gradually.

But also, whatever those blockages were would have the other nutrients assisting them so the thiamine wouldn’t be so out of balance. So it’s not just that you absorb it better or whatever. It’s also just the food. Going food first really helps correct for errors that are a problem with your expertise.

Warren Buffett once said that a diversified portfolio is great protection against ignorance. He said it doesn’t really make sense if you know what you’re doing. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, you really should diversify. And so that’s what food does. Food is a diversified portfolio.

And if you don’t have the expertise to run around taking different things that you don’t understand, if you don’t understand the biochemical pathway of the thing you’re megadosing, you are not a candidate. That’s like buying an ETF and you don’t even know what an ETF is. Give that to your financial advisor.

I think that food first, pharma last, the food first part of that is really just a protection against. But I do have the expertise and I still do food first because I know that my expertise in my own body is incomplete. And so I might know a thousand times more than the average person about what thiamine does in the body, but thiamine’s doing things in my body and I don’t know what they are. So I’m not going to assume I know everything just because I have top notch expertise in the field.

CoQ10 and Methylene Blue: Different Mechanisms

JOE ROGAN: When you’re talking about methylene blue and CoQ10 and the benefits on mitochondria, what’s the mechanism and are they similar? Are they interchangeable?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: They are not similar and they’re not interchangeable. So CoQ10 is, ask me if you want me to go into even more detail, but if you extract energy from food and then you need to carry that energy through a pathway, CoQ10 is about two thirds through that pathway. And it’s just, it’s like if you were going down a road and you had to take a shuttle across the river to get to your next destination and then you go get on the next train or something like that.

So CoQ10 is just part of the transport pathway as the electrons come through that are taken out of food to ultimately convert to ATP. Methylene blue is, you know, if CoQ10 is like the main ferry, methylene blue is this guy running around waving his hands in the air.

Oh, you know what methylene blue is like? It’s like those fake taxis at the airport where you’re trying to go to the taxi line, and they come right up to you and they’re like, excuse me, sir, do you need a taxi? But it’s like the shady taxi. So methylene blue is like an army of the shady taxis. And they’re like, don’t take the ferry. Come over here, right?

And so if the ferry is blocked, methylene blue would be great, because if there’s no taxis left, you’ll take the shady one, and you got to get somewhere. So methylene blue is operating on the outer edges of the main pathway, and it’s giving you alternatives. But the mitochondrial pathway that you were born with is the one that is best. It’s the most efficient one.

So like I was saying before, methylene blue is great if you have a blockage there and you need a detour. It makes you worse off if you don’t. CoQ10 is, the reason you can overdose on it is because it’s like, okay, there’s a river and you got to get a ferry going across it. Well, what happens if there’s 10 ferries or there’s 50 ferries or there’s 150 ferries? At some point they’re going to be running into each other and you’re just going to clog up that. At some point, putting more vehicles into any pathway just makes things worse with the traffic that results. And if you have too much traffic, you get accidents and train wrecks and car crashes. And your mitochondria aren’t good for you.

JOE ROGAN: Would CoQ10 have a similar benefit in terms of red light therapy, increasing mitochondrial function?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I think they could be synergistic. CoQ10, by the way, it also helps you make more mitochondria, and that’s called mitochondrial biogenesis. Exercise also helps you make more mitochondria. And I do think that you, so you should never take CoQ10 as an excuse to not exercise, because exercise is very specifically putting the mitochondria where they belong to meet the adaptation that you are stressing. So that’s mitochondrial biogenesis number one.

But CoQ10 will help with that. You don’t always want mitochondrial biogenesis. I do think testing is another case where that might be a case where you could use a high dose CoQ10 to try to stimulate more mitochondria if testing shows that you don’t have enough and that’s your limiting bottleneck.

But the average person whose CoQ10 levels are just a little lower where they should be, it really is just acting as that, kind of like you open up the biochemistry textbook, you see the place of CoQ10 in the mitochondrial energy production pathways. And it’s just doing the basic textbook thing of helping you move those electrons along on the path to convert food to ATP.

The Seed Oil Debate

JOE ROGAN: One of the things you brought up earlier was seed oils impeding the absorption of certain nutrients. Seed oils are a weird thing because so many people pushed against them and said, hey, these are essentially industrial lubricants that have been converted to food oil for profit and it’s not really the best stuff that we should be consuming.

And then you have a bunch of online contrarians that say, oh, there’s nothing wrong with seed oils. This is all nonsense. There’s no data, there’s no studies. And I don’t understand that thought process. And when you know what they’re made with, with hexane and all the whole f*ing disgusting process of making them versus pressing olive oil, it just seems so obvious that one of them you should probably avoid.

And then when it’s connected to all sorts of inflammation and all sorts of various issues and what you were talking about earlier, impeding the absorption of certain nutrients, what do you think is going on? First of all, why are people defending seed oils? And what is the real problem with seed oils in a human diet?

The Problem with Seed Oil Studies

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Seed oils make your tissues more vulnerable to damage, and they don’t damage your tissues. And so one of the problems that has caused a lot of controversy, and I think the reason there’s so much back and forth over this, is that it takes the right type of study to see seed oils making your tissues more vulnerable to damage, because you need enough time for the damage to play out and you need people who are more vulnerable to the damage.

And we’ve been talking a lot today about how aging is increasing. That tissue damage, like everything is. Your repair capacity goes down as you grow older because your mitochondrial energy production is going down. And one of the things you want to look at is what do seed oils do to you by the time you’re 75? And you don’t just want to look at what do seed oils do to you when you’re 25 because you might not be seeing the capacity for the increased vulnerability tissue damage.

Another thing is the trials have to be long enough, both because it takes time to see the process of tissue damage play out, and also because we know from long trials of seed oils that short trials are useless. And there are a lot of the people who are talking the loudest in defense of seed oils are looking at trials that last seven weeks long or 12 weeks long, and they’re ignoring trials that were done in the 50s, 60s and 70s that were five to eight years long.

And I’m just like, you know, by all means analyze the shorter trials, but do it in the light of what we know from the longer trials.

The LA Veterans Administration Hospital Study

And the most important of the longer trials was the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study. And this was the primary paper on it was published in 1969. So it takes us back in history, but there was a period between World War II and 1970s where there was a lot of motivation in the research community to do these grand randomized controlled trials of nutrition. We don’t have that anymore.

And I think it’s because scientists love to, in their collective imagination to say that what they’re doing is they’re just carrying forth a linear path of addressing knowledge gaps left from the previous literature and just making a linear progress in science. But they’re really not. Because the incentive structure is to publish a large number of papers in high impact journals on a yearly basis as your university reviews get done.

And so if you’re going to sit and then there’s other incentives too because you have to get grants with preliminary data so you have shorter studies that you then say, well, I’m going to do a longer study now and it keeps the grant cycle going. And then the people who write the grants want to see things getting published out of those papers.

So for you to be like, I’m going to do a 12 year randomized controlled trial of seed oils, it’s going to be hard to get the people, you know, get all those box checked like you might not be publishing a paper for a while.

So what the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study showed was that they randomized people to seed oils or traditional fats. And in the first two years you had a little bit of a heart disease benefit, but then it wore off over time. And so the heart disease mortality basically by the end of the trial was just kind of flat.

But the cancer was the same for the first two years. But then at the two to five year mark it started diverging and you see, oh, it looks like there’s something there. The five to seven year mark, it’s you know, traditional fats down here and this gap starts widening where seed oils are up here. And then by the end of the study, total mortality was kind of flat the whole time. But it just started to diverge at the end of the study to favor seed oils causing more deaths.

And this study was the longest. And it was also the one where the only trial ever done with seed oils where the people, the mean age was 65. So the people were older than in every other trial. And one of the important things about being old is that that’s what makes you able to get cancer.

There are some childhood cancers, but in general, people start getting cancer when they live long enough to not die of heart disease first. So doing the trial in older people for longer is what allowed you to see that the seed oils seemed to be able to cause cancer.

And what the author’s conclusion was, was that because the total mortality was just starting to diverge at the eight year mark, and because they had a plausible reason for it, that the cancer was exploding. They said, we have ultimately left the question of whether these oils are toxic unresolved. And the one thing that we need is instead of the previous goal of the trials being five years long, that the trials be done well in excess of eight years.

Okay, so scientists think that they’re just like looking at the old literature and they’re saying, oh, what was the gap in the knowledge that we need to solve next? Well, I’m telling you, they concluded in 1969 that the gap in the knowledge was we need a trial that’s a lot longer than eight years. And what did we get? Seven to 12 week trials.

It’s kind of like that, that. Who was it? Peter Thiel or someone had a tweet that was like, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 180 characters or something like that. Whatever that quote is. They promised us well in excess of 8 year trials was the next thing we needed to study. And like 50, 60 years go by and all we’ve got is these seven week trials and 12 week trials.

Why Seed Oils Take Time to Show Effects

Now we also know why seed oils would take a while to have such negative effects. But because it actually takes you four years just for your tissues to start looking like the seed oil you’re eating. Like, if you switch from butter and olive oil today and you go on corn oil, it’s going to take four years for your tissues to fully look like the corn oil.

And then once that happens, you’ve got secondary effects. So you start getting your vitamin E levels depleted much faster. But it takes a while for the vitamin E levels to go down in order for other effects, other results of that, like the increased vulnerability to the tissues being destroyed. All that stuff is like, you’re not even starting to see it until five, six years go by.

And so I think that’s the big reason that there’s so much controversy is that for whatever reason, there’s some people who just don’t want to look at the older trials that were very long and they’re spending all their time looking at these very short term trials. And you know, is there a motivation behind that or is it just laziness? I’m not sure. I think it’s attention.

JOE ROGAN: I think part of it is tension. Yeah, it’s a big part of it. Part of it is justifying the contrarian position with these short term trials because then you could dunk on people and get attention.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Like everyone has to get attention somehow if they want to make it in this world.

The Influencer Culture Problem

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s a side effect of this influencer culture, you know, and it’s one of the things I really appreciate about your work. You are very evidence based and you, you know, I’ve been paying attention to your stuff for a long time. You’re never hyperbolic. It’s always very rational. It’s very balanced.

And I think that is really important because there’s a lot of people that they make these videos or they have social media posts and it’s insulting, inflammatory and they’re doing it for attention and they’re doing that, you know, that kind of behavior for attention along with science. They’re adding the science into it, but it seems like the science is just a vehicle for them to get attention.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, well, I mean, that’s unfortunate because there is health hanging in the balance.

JOE ROGAN: It is unfortunate, but it’s also common. You know, it’s really common. You know, you see it in all sorts of different disciplines. You see it in archaeology, you see it in everything. There’s people that want to dunk on their opposition and that’s part of how they’re getting attention is by insulting people.

And you see it, but when you see it in nutrition, it’s just, it’s really weird, you know, because it’s not necessary. And the people that are getting attention, whether it’s Andrew Huberman or yourself, a lot of people that are just doing evidence based stuff and being really rational about it and that’s how they’re getting attention and other people are seeing them and going, I need to dunk on that guy in order to elevate my social profile.

And the seed oil thing is a weird thing to defend it just, just on the way that it’s manufactured. If you just watch the process and go, do you want to eat that? Do you want that, or do you want butter? Butter seems way better. It seems way more normal. It seems like your body would accept butter a lot easier than it would accept this f*ing insane process where you’re dumping a bunch of chemicals into this goop, this nasty shit that you’re pushing out.

Rapeseed oil and you’re calling it canola oil. You know how many people think canola oil is corn oil because corn is canola. You know, you think of corn, oh, corn oil must be good for it. It’s vegetable oil.

The Canola Con

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, it is funny that they named it after a con.

JOE ROGAN: It’s f*ing weird. A con?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. There’s an article, not by me, but by someone else called “The Great Canola.” And it’s about how canola oil is the con. But it’s, yeah, they named it.

JOE ROGAN: But anyway, that’s a good way to put it, because canola oil is a con. Because many people, I’ve seen canola oil where they have a f*ing image of a corn, of an ear of corn. Have you ever seen that on the label?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I don’t look at canola labels. It’s been a while since I bought a bottle.

JOE ROGAN: Is there something you can find that shows that. I hope I’m not having a false memory, but I’m pretty sure there used to be a canola oil that had like an ear of corn on it. It’s rapeseed, and it’s an industrial lubricant. And that’s what they used to use it for. And it’s a byproduct. It’s a weird, funky thing that they have to pour a bunch of shit into just to take the smell out of it. Just to take the rancid smell out of this weird oil that you’re cooking with.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, you can buy cold pressed seed oils. It’s not what most people are eating food. But I still think that the fundamental problem with it’s not just the processing. It’s also, if you look at ancestral human diets, no one ate fatty acid compositions that looked like that because the reason that they usually use hexane to extract it is because it’s actually difficult to extract using purely mechanical methods. So olives can be pressed into oil.

Fruit Oils vs. Seed Oils

JOE ROGAN: Right. That is a type of seed oil. Right. If you think.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, no, olive is a fruit oil or fruit.

JOE ROGAN: But avocado, is that a fruit as well? Avocado oil.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. Avocado oil is pressed out of the avocado. Right. Because avocados are, the flesh is super high in fat.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s just the pit inside of it is the seed.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, you’re not getting anything from that. Yeah, I don’t think they make oil out of that.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s a fruit oil. Whether it’s olive oil, the high heat ones are avocado oil. That’s one that people like to cook with, right?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. Well, okay.

JOE ROGAN: So are there any issues with that?

Cooking Oils and Fatty Acid Composition

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Cooking with an oil? One issue is the smoke point, because the oil is burning at its smoke point, and that probably is more of an indication of flavor than it is of health. But it is generally going to correlate. Like, if the oil is burning, you’re more likely to have damage to the oils, and consuming damaged oils is bad for you.

So there’s the smoke point, there’s the fatty acid composition, and there’s the solvents and other chemicals left over from the processing. And I think all of those are an issue. But the fatty acid composition is like we—seed oils has become the common thing to use as a nickname for it. But what you’re really thinking about is that they’re high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs.

And those polyunsaturated fatty acids are just like it happens to be. Most oils that are currently on the market for food consumption that are very high in polyunsaturated fatty acids are what we call seed oils. So that’s why we call it that way. But the actual fatty acid composition, like if you go back to any oil that was easy for humans to produce before, say 100 years ago, then you don’t see those.

You don’t see a strong tradition of large consumption of rapeseed oil going back because—or cottonseed oil or corn oil, because it’s—I mean, try squeezing a corn kernel. It’s not that squeezable. And so when you have these very small hard things, that’s why you wind up getting solvent extraction. But you had to do the solvent extraction because it was not easy otherwise to get oil out of those things.

The solvent is a whole other thing. I was in a lab once where someone had us analyze residual hexane in foods, and they just bought a bunch of grocery store foods. And I was kind of managing the data analysis while someone I worked with was doing the hexane measurements. But let me just say that if it’s extracted with hexane, it’s got hexane left over.

And we saw something that was not hexane. We didn’t know what it was. But it was some chemical solvent that was massive in the pump spray oils. And after I saw that I was like, I’m never using a pump spray oil because they—you could put olive oil in like a mechanical spray bottle, that’s fine. But like Pam and those other ones, they’re using chemicals to make the spraying work and there’s something that’s some chemical solvent that’s just like way—like massive proportions in it. So after I saw that, I just stopped using that. I don’t go near those.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t go near those anyway. But what about grape seed? I know grapeseed is one that people like to cook with because it has a high smoke point.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, I would put grapeseed oil in the category of a seed oil that I wouldn’t consume in high quantities.

JOE ROGAN: And is hexane an issue with that as well?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I mean, not if it’s cold pressed. I mean you can get like organic cold pressed grapeseed oil that is not solvent extracted. It’s not RBD. It’s not heated.

JOE ROGAN: But you still have to deal with the polyunsaturated fatty acids.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, I mean it’s very—you’re paying a lot to get a high quality product, but it’s still like there might be studies out there about some therapeutic benefits of some of the components of the grapeseed oil. But I wouldn’t want to make those fats be the major oil in my diet because I think you’re just overload. It’s high in antioxidants and so you’re going to get benefit. There’s going to be beneficial things in it. But I don’t think that those fats are what you want to be your main fatty acid consumption.

JOE ROGAN: What about if you were searing a steak in grapeseed oil, would that be an issue?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I mean, the less of the oil that’s there, the less of an issue it is if you’re just coating the pan with it and it’s convenient because it doesn’t have a high smoke point. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, but I wouldn’t be wanting healthy fats from the—I wouldn’t want to be consuming like a tablespoon or upwards of grapeseed oil a day.

The Demonization of Saturated Fats

JOE ROGAN: So I think we would agree that the issue with saturated fatty acids, saturated fats, and just in the zeitgeist, saturated fats we have demonized since whatever that study was with the, where the sugar company bribed those scientists. Was it the 50s, the 60s? Wherever it was, where they spent it.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Started back then, the kind of—the crowning turning point was 1984, when Time magazine had a picture of a frowning face made out of eggs and bacon. And the cover said, “Hold the eggs in butter. Cholesterol has been proved deadly and our diets will never be the same.”

JOE ROGAN: We got to pull that photo up. That’s so crazy. They really did that?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, they actually—they reversed it a few years ago where they took the same image, but they made it a smiley face. And they were like, now we know eggs are good for you. Oh, God.

JOE ROGAN: But meanwhile, how many lives did you ruin with your shitty advice? It’s so stunning.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, you can see the two right there. Yeah, you can see both side by side.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. Cholesterol.

JOE ROGAN: The good news is the upper left hand corner.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. The upper left hand corner is the new one. And the one on the right is the 1984 one.

JOE ROGAN: “Scientists labeled fat the enemy. They were wrong.” Yeah. You didn’t print the whole thing. They got f*ing bribed. And not a lot of money. That’s what’s really crazy. It ruined society, ruined diets for what, $50,000?

So for $50,000, people started eating margarine and eating seed oil and not eating butter and not consuming cholesterol, which is the building blocks for hormones. It’s such an important aspect of the human diet. And when you tell people—I tell people I eat mostly meat, they go, what about your cholesterol? I just take a—I don’t know what to tell you. Go, read. I just can’t, you know, I can’t sit there and tell you that higher LDL cholesterol is actually associated with longer lifespans.

It’s like, there’s a lot to this whole cholesterol thing. And I think it’s kind of been f*ed around with by the mainstream media reporting on these sort of ancient narratives. These narratives that—not ancient, but, you know, these narratives that were set up in the 50s and 60s, whenever it was in the 80s. The Time magazine thing that people just repeat. They don’t look into it. They just repeat it over and over again.

And they’re really worried, like, I’m trying to eat less red meat. Like, why? Why are you trying to eat less meat? Well, it’s, you know, cholesterol. Oh, boy.

Understanding Cholesterol Metabolism

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. Well, I do think that you don’t want to see your blood cholesterol going crazy high because that can be a sign that you’re not using it well.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Like, if your cholesterol is turning over and it’s being used to make bile acids to support your digestion, it’s being used to make adrenal hormones and sex hormones, it’s being used to make testosterone, it’s being used to make brain synapses to support your memory. All those things that cholesterol does are incredibly important.

But I think a lot of people, their cholesterol going up can be a sign that they’re not using it properly. And so I think that’s why you do see, it is true that if you take people at a certain age, you can see inverse correlations between cholesterol levels and mortality. But if you take people who are younger and you look at who’s going to get heart attacks later, you do see that higher cholesterol when you’re younger prospectively predicts a higher risk of heart disease later.

And I don’t think that’s because cholesterol causes heart disease, but I think it’s because it’s a reflection of your overall metabolism being more slow in terms of actually using up the cholesterol.

JOE ROGAN: Makes sense.

The Minnesota Coronary Survey and Hidden Data

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And that also—but it’s interesting though, that if you look at the mechanisms of how does cholesterol, like, how does cholesterol cause atherosclerosis? The cholesterol is inside a lipoprotein, which is like a spherical container for the cholesterol. It’s got a bunch of fat soluble vitamins and other things in it, but the outside is fatty acids, specifically in the form called phospholipids.

But what happens that drives the atherosclerotic plaque is that the fats you get from seed oils that are on the outside of it get damaged. And when they get damaged, the immune system recognizes it as a toxin that could hurt the blood vessel. And so the immune system gobbles it up and sequesters it. And that sequestering is like a quarantine and that’s what the plaque develops from.

And so that’s why, even though you see prospectively that if your cholesterol is higher, that that predicts that you’re more likely to get heart disease later. In the randomized controlled trials, you saw something quite different when they used seed oils to lower the cholesterol.

So the Minnesota coronary survey was another—I mentioned the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study. These were the two double blind randomized controlled trials that were done of seed oils. The Minnesota coronary survey was very big. It was the only one that included women, and it wasn’t as long, but it was way larger.

And back when they published the results, it looked like there was an 8% increase in the risk of heart disease with the seed oils. But they mentioned that they measured actual atherosclerosis and they didn’t report it. So decades later, like I think it was about 10 years ago, researchers noticed this and they said, well, the guys that did this study are dead, but I wonder if the atherosclerosis results are around.

So they did some digging, and it turned out that in the basement of the house that the lead investigator lived in, who had died a long time ago, there were boxes of data that had not been published from that study. And they included all the atherosclerosis measurements.

And what they found was that the seed oil group had double the atherosclerosis. Not only that, but every 35 milligram per deciliter drop in cholesterol was associated with something like 30% more heart disease. And so the original results didn’t look very—they didn’t look good for seed oils. They looked bad, but they didn’t look that bad. And they weren’t statistically significant.

But it was because there was a lot of people were coming in and out of the trial. It kind of weakened the results. But this, the atherosclerosis results and the correlations that were buried in those boxes show that when you look at the data from that angle, the seed oils look a lot worse.

And I think what you’re seeing there, this is one of the reasons why there’s so much material to work with, to make controversy out of this, is that you see that people with higher cholesterol when they’re younger are more likely to go on to have a heart attack. But when you use seed oils, which lower the cholesterol in the blood, but increase the amount of these easily damaged fatty acids that carry the cholesterol and they get damaged and they drive the atherosclerotic plaque. That’s why you see this divergence.

Like that correlation exists there. But not everything that you do with your diet, to change it, to try to make the correlation work in your favor, does you good, right?

JOE ROGAN: Right. I’d read something about that and also something about there’s a profound difference between someone who consumes their cholesterol, like, say if you’re on just a seed oil free, just vegetables and meat with healthy fats, those kind of carbohydrates, or those kinds of proteins and fats, without complex carbohydrates, without consumption of a lot of grains without that, there’s a difference in the results that they were having. In terms of the impact of cholesterol.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: In general, you are going to have higher cholesterol if you’re eating less fiber.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And is it in at all dependent upon the activity level of the person like you’re talking about using the cholesterol?

Mitochondria, Cholesterol, and the State of Abundance

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Well, yeah, I think this is a great tie back to the things we were talking about before, because the clearance of cholesterol from your blood is driven by the mitochondrial energy production that gives your brain the signal that you are in a state of abundance and should put that cholesterol toward good things. And you have a bunch of hormones that communicate that—leptin, insulin, thyroid hormone are all involved.

But what is ultimately driving this is your brain, especially in the hypothalamus, is taking information in that says, are you getting enough food for me to consider this a state of abundance where I ramp up your digestion, I ramp up your libido, I ramp up all these things. And we tend in nutrition science to think that this is about calories or it’s about carbs, and it is about those things.

But if you are half as good at mitochondrial conversion of food to ATP as the next guy over, is your hypothalamus going to give you full credit for the food you ate? In terms of calculating your state of abundance? It’s not. It’s going to dock you by half.

And this is because the hypothalamus takes all these signals and then it looks at inside the hypothalamic cells, it looks at, okay, how well do I convert those food molecules into ATP using my mitochondria? And if it’s 50% dropped, it’s going to dock you in your state of abundance. And it’s going to say, you know, actually you ate all the food, but you didn’t get all the energy. And so we’re just going to let things stagnate and the cholesterol is going to go up in the blood, your sex hormone is going to go down.

And you can look at that and say, well, there’s an age you’re going through. Andropause there’s an age dependent decline in testosterone and adrenal hormones and stuff like that. And then you can do hormone supplementation therapy. But what you’re not actually fixing, but that can also be kind of a negative feedback loop.

Like if you’re supplementing everything that your cholesterol would turn, that your body would turn cholesterol into that also is going to slow cholesterol turnover because your body’s like, oh, I don’t need to turn that into testosterone if I’m supplementing with it.

So I think that what we’re missing in the whole discussion is thinking about how do we ramp up mitochondrial energy production, how do we prevent it from declining and aging so that the body, so that the brain can rightly perceive that I am in a state of abundance. And it is rational to ramp up this metabolic rate.

I think there are—when you have a marker like this, it’s not like every single case of high cholesterol represents a failure to convert it into anything good. Some people just produce more cholesterol or they absorb more cholesterol. And I don’t think those are all equal in terms of their heart disease risk or their health implications. But sluggish metabolism, like high cholesterol, is in general a sign of sluggish metabolism under the average set of circumstances.

The Thyroid Hormone Connection

And a really interesting thread that got left behind in 1976 is Broda Barnes wrote this book called “Solved the Riddle of Heart Attacks” in 1976, and his perspective was all about thyroid hormone. And he argued that people who died of infectious diseases were hypothyroid. We allowed them to live longer. Now all the hypothyroid people are getting heart disease.

The reason he thought that is because thyroid hormone communicates to your whole body that you are in a state of abundance. And so if your brain thinks that you’re not and you add thyroid hormone in now, your whole body is receiving the false signal that you are in a state of abundance and you feel better and many things improve.

And you can argue about whether that’s good or bad, but you’re intervening at the point of the communication instead of at the point of actually creating the abundance. But thyroid hormone does signal, take up cholesterol from the cell, move it along, do things with it.

And so no matter whether you’re hypothyroid or not, people were up through the night, up until the 1970s, they were lower in cholesterol, and they were lowering heart disease risk by just putting everyone who had high cholesterol and thyroid hormone. And the reason they stopped doing it is because some practitioners got overzealous and they killed a few people because they overdosed them.

But Broda Barnes argued that we don’t have to be overzealous and overdose them. We can just be rationally dosing thyroid hormone. My perspective is different from Broda Barnes. I take what he said. I think there’s a lot of value to it. But I say, why is thyroid communicating the state of abundance? It’s because your mitochondria are doing a great job converting your food to ATP.

Now, you don’t have to have a mitochondrial dysfunction to have low thyroid hormone because you’re not in a state of abundance. You can just not eat any food. So if you look at the metabolic consequences of starvation, you just don’t eat any food. Your thyroid hormone will go in the gutter. So there are people out there who just aren’t eating enough. Like that is a thing.

But it’s also just natural in the process of aging that we’re all getting progressively dysfunctional mitochondria and that we can intervene at any point to have at least 75% of control over that. And so we want to step up the game and work.

Food First, Pharma Last

So if there’s two things that people take away from this from me today, I would want it to be always think about your mitochondria first. And when you’re thinking about them, always go with a food first, pharma last approach. So naturally create a state of abundance in the best way that you can and then move on to other things after you’ve done that.

That way, if you’re going to intervene with testosterone replacement or thyroid hormone or statins or whatever—I mean, statins are mitochondrial toxins. They’re kind of counterproductive from a mitochondrial energy production standpoint.

And on that note, the debates of statin associated myopathy are—the rates of them are debated. The rates at which statins cause diabetes is debated, but it’s there. And it’s because statins actually inhibit your CoQ10 synthesis, but they also inhibit other things in the mitochondrial energy production engines that you can’t take a supplement for. So there’s just no way around that. Statins will decrease your mitochondrial function.

So I think by not thinking about mitochondria first, it’s like you take these people with mediocre mitochondrial function, their LDL in their blood would get taken into their cells. You would do valuable things with it if the state of abundance was present. Because not only does all the signaling say, do something with the cholesterol, but the way you actually get cholesterol into the cell is to burn through a bunch of ATP with motor proteins, move it from outside the cell to inside the cell in order to facilitate that turnover.

So we’ve got a situation where we know that everyone could improve their mitochondrial function, but instead of doing that and then saying, okay, do we really need a statin? We just say, oh, go straight for the statin. And now you’re hurting the mitochondrial function even more. And you’re saying, well, the ROI is good enough because I’m lowering their cholesterol and they won’t get heart disease. And the other mitochondria aren’t doing as great, but that’s okay because we lowered the cholesterol.

I think that’s totally backwards. You should always be trying to optimize mitochondrial function first. You should always be doing that with natural foods before you try anything else and then move on. Just set the foundation. Set a good foundation, and then build your house on top of it however you want.

I’m not saying never use any pharmaceuticals. I’m just saying if you’re going to build your house out of pharmaceuticals, do it on a good foundation. Right?

JOE ROGAN: Make an educated decision. What can be done to increase thyroid function?

Optimizing Thyroid Function

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: The first thing is you actually want enough food and you want good mitochondrial conversion of the food to ATP. But there’s other things that could be important to having good thyroid function as well, like having—if you just look at what is thyroid hormone?

So thyroid hormone is made from the amino acid tyrosine, which you get from the protein in the food that you eat, and then you add iodine to it. So if you don’t have enough protein, you’re not going to have good thyroid function. If you don’t have enough iodine, you’re not going to have good thyroid function. So those are the step one basics of the 101 of the nutrition that I need to have good thyroid hormone.

JOE ROGAN: And is iodine from supplementation or from food?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: You can supplement with it. But again, I always believe in food first.

JOE ROGAN: And what’s rich in iodine?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: There are many things that can be rich in iodine, but it’s highly dependent on the soil. So a potato, for example, from one part of the United States could be 100 times richer than a potato from another part of the country. So that’s a problem.

Seafood is reliably high in iodine because the rainfall just facilitates the minerals just falling into the ocean. So it’s, you know, a lot of the places that are low in iodine, it’s because the pattern of evaporation causes the iodine to evaporate into the clouds. But then the cloud pattern goes around some mountain and it never drops back down on you. And so you get these areas of the country where they’re just on the wrong side of the mountain and they just get progressive decline in the iodine.

So I do think that it’s good for people to eat just some seafood, because if you eat one or two pieces of fish per week, for example, or you eat a little bit of seaweed every day, that’s going to cover your bases. Whereas if your food comes from one area, you might be able to get enough iodine just eating whatever you want, and in another area, you won’t.

I personally add in a quarter teaspoon of kelp powder to my food prepped meals per day. It’s always in there. It’s got a little bit of flavor, but I just mix it into everything so you don’t even taste it. I fortify my food myself instead of letting the government do it.

Iodine Requirements and Deficiency

But, you know, so that’s one way to do that. And then there are some things that increase your iodine requirements. So women with big breasts, for example, can need much more iodine because iodine—the breasts are a sink for iodine. Part of that is just the nature of the tissue. Part of it is very logical, because if you do have a baby, you are going to start feeding the baby the iodine. And so that might be part of why that’s prepped.

But there’s some evidence that a lot of breast problems are solved by extra iodine. So fibrocystic breast disease, for example, there is some support for getting 10, 15 times the normal amount or even 50 times the normal amount of iodine. And I think that’s because some women with very large breasts, 98% of it goes there.

And then there are also the—the more toxic your living environment is, the more iodine you’re going to need, because there’s a lot of bromine that’s in synthetic materials for couches, it’s flame retardants. So all kinds of paint and materials that are used in household living can be a source of environmental bromine.

And then fluoride, if you drink fluoridated water and you brush your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste, that’s going to increase your need for iodine as well. So there’s a bunch of reasons that people might want to—well, I’ll say this. I think it’s crazy that every time I’ve seen a woman who’s on thyroid hormone, and I’ve seen—and I’ve had them get iodine data, their iodine is low, and they’ve never gotten it tested before.

And I just—there’s these—medicine has these myths about nutrition that we solved all the nutritional deficiencies 100 years ago. So we don’t need to think about it. But they did these dumb*ss things that nullified that.

So, for example, the reason that we didn’t have iodine deficiency anymore is because they fortified salt with it. They said, everyone eats salt, so let’s just put the iodine in the salt. And so everyone had fortified salt. But then what did they do? They came along and they said, don’t eat the salt. It’s going to give you a heart attack.

And so what they didn’t realize is when they told people to not eat the salt, now they’re not getting their iodine. And now, you know—so there are some places where there’s, like—I talked to one cardiologist who works out in the Midwest. He says, I see people walking in with a—you can see the lump in their throat now. And they have a goiter, which is just like the—a goiter is a very hungry thyroid gland, where it’s like, I don’t have any iodine. Where’s the iodine?

It just starts growing to try to find it, and you wind up with—you can feel a lump in your throat, not see anything. But if it gets really, really bad, you can see a bump in the neck. And if it gets insanely bad, you can have, like, a grapefruit hanging from the neck. That doesn’t happen anymore.

But this cardiologist told me, I actually see people with goiter now, but no one’s looking for it because they don’t think people get goiter anymore. And so most of them just walk around with a lump in their neck until they find me. He said, that’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: The no salt in the diet is so wild. That one is so crazy.

Selenium, Antioxidants, and Thyroid Health

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And then there are other things, too. Like the supplement that you’re taking has glutathione in it. Well, selenium is a mineral that helps you use glutathione to protect your thyroid gland from damage. And there are a number of trials that show that selenium lowers the autoimmune antibodies that occur in Hashimoto’s, which is a type of autoimmune thyroid problem.

And the reason it does that is because it’s helping glutathione protect the thyroid from damage, because producing thyroid is a very messy process. But that also, if you look at what that would imply, it would also imply that all the other antioxidant nutrients are very important in the thyroid as well, because vitamin C and zinc and copper, manganese and a whole suite of iron, even too much iron is bad for you. But you need iron to protect yourself from oxidative stress.

So all of these things are helping prevent tissue damage in the thyroid gland, which helps prevent the immune system from going haywire trying to deal with that damage. And so all of those things are important for thyroid hormone.

Nattokinase and Arterial Health

JOE ROGAN: One more thing I wanted to talk to you about is you brought up arterial sclerosis. What is the supplement? Nattokinase.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah. Nattokinase is an enzyme that helps break down blood clots. And atherosclerosis is what it really is is the immune system quarantining damaged particles. Those particles are damaged because you loaded them with seed oils, and then your mitochondrial function declined and you lost your defense against the damage. And then you got progressively more seed oil damage, and the immune system’s trying to protect the blood vessel from it. That’s what the plaque is. But that plaque is highly inflammatory.

JOE ROGAN: This is a crazy statement. So plaque that people have always considered to be from, most people will tell you it’s from cholesterol. If you ask the average person, you believe it’s really from seed oils.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I’m not alone in this. So if you…

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t think you are.

The 1984 NIH Consensus Conference

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: So if you go back to 1984, when we saw that Time magazine picture, the other thing that was going on politically and scientifically in 1984 was the NIH Consensus Conference that said that they had proven, like Time magazine cover was a reaction to the NIH consensus conference where they said, “We as the scientific community now certify that we are in consensus that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.” And that’s why Time magazine ran with that cover.

JOE ROGAN: Was Fauci running the NIH back then?

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Fauci…

JOE ROGAN: Because that’s when the AIDS crisis started.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: So Fauci was not running this, but that was, I think, possibly also the year that Fauci took over at NIAID. Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s sidebar, but there’s a very interesting study that looked at the average age of principal investigators of studies. Principal investigator means like the guy who ran the lab.

And so since 1984, the average age of an NIH funded principal investigator has gone up by one year per year. And so that looks like the one group took over the money in 1984, and then they’ve just been giving themselves grants ever since. And now they’re really old. That’s what that looks like.

But anyway, so, yes, I think, believe you can fact check me on this, but I believe Fauci took over NIAID where he became very in control of a lot of NIH money in that same year. So it’s really weird the way these years work out. Like, you know, like 1913, you got Federal Reserve, you got World War I, you’ve got all these changes to the structure of the government. Like they pick this year out of history and there’s always these big, massive, big things all happening in different areas. But anyway, so there was something in the air in 1984. Maybe it was self-fulfilling prophecy.

Daniel Steinberg and the Seed Oil Connection

But anyway, so the chair of the NIH Consensus Conference in 1984 was Daniel Steinberg. Daniel Steinberg passed away a few years ago, but he was kind of, there were three big names that came out of that conference and Steinberg was one of them. And the others were Brown and Goldstein, who won the Nobel Prize in 1985, the next year for, you know, you can see how they hooked up their Nobel prize.

So they, 1985, they got the Nobel Prize for discovering the LDL receptor, which is the thing that brings cholesterol from your blood into your cells. And all the drugs that work on this are targeting that receptor. So that became the springboard for all the drugs that people are on for cardiovascular disease now.

So it’s kind of funny that the Nobel Prize was, it was probably in the fix in 1984. That was the other thing they were working on because there’s no way that would have happened if the 1984 consensus conference didn’t happen.

But the point I want to make is that Daniel Steinberg agrees with me. I didn’t come up with this idea myself. I mean, he’s dead now, but you know, for decades he was one of the people who believed that because it was his lab that discovered that the PUFAs, which are seed oil fats, have to become damaged on the outer membrane of the LDL particle for it to get taken up by the immune system. That was his discovery. And he’s the guy that chaired the conference that led to the Time magazine cover.

So I’m not pulling this out of my ass. I’m pulling this out of my having read Daniel Steinberg’s papers.

The Rise of Olive Oil and the Mediterranean Diet

And so he was, this is how olive oil became the darling of the Mediterranean diet, which is, so the Mediterranean diet is kind of funny because it’s not that it’s very loosely based on what they eat in the Mediterranean. And it’s really just kind of like a branding thing where they said, like, okay, well, this diet is good enough for us to say, eat this, this, this and this. And we’re going to call it Mediterranean.

But anyway, so what happened was after the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study showed in 1960, well, actually they published it a few years later. So somewhere in the early 70s, it’s kind of looking like seed oils cause cancer. And so they’re looking at that and they’re like, well, maybe corn oil is not the best. And they’re like, well, we already told people to eat the corn oil because they can’t eat the saturated fat. So we can’t tell them, go back to the butter. So what are we going to tell them to eat?

And they were like, well, olive oil is a nice balance. It’s kind of in between the two. It’s not saturated fat, but it’s probably not going to cause cancer. Like, we’re worried about this. And so olive oil is kind of born out of that.

And Steinberg’s perspective on promoting olive oil as being good for heart disease was, Steinberg is saying, “I’m worried that the real problem with these lipoproteins in the blood causing the plaque is actually the seed oils that we’re telling people to eat. And so, yeah, we can use cholesterol as a marker for that, but I don’t know that I want to be telling people to eat corn oil. So what am I going to tell them to eat? Because I’m going to have egg on my face, pun intended, if I tell them to go back to eating eggs and butter.”

So olive oil is this happy middle ground where maybe we can consume a lot of, we can consume olive oil to our heart’s content, and it’s not going to create the tissue damage that drives the plaque, but it’s also not going to ramp up the cholesterol. And so we can just navigate the middle that way.

Why Medical Diagnoses Are Models

And you know, the reason that no one appreciates this is because medicine thinks in binaries. So I have this saying: “All medical diagnoses are false, but some are useful.” And I take this from a saying in statistics, which is “All models are false, but some are useful.”

And what that is is an appreciation that once you impose a model on the data, you’re now biasing it towards the way you think about it. And you know, the, and so it’s like it’s a reality distortion filter to make the data more usable. So if I can use the model to try to predict something and I see it’s true, I might leave details behind, but I’m focusing on the things that help me make those decisions.

So a medical diagnosis is a hypothesis that the patient will respond to the treatment that they’re given. And you test that hypothesis by giving the patient that treatment, and then you see if they get better. And if they don’t get better, you take them off the treatment.

That’s why some things, people just stay on the drug they’re put on. But look at how they treat depression or epilepsy. Epilepsy, they just put them on one benzo and it doesn’t work. They put them on the next one. They keep rotating until they find one that stops the seizures. Depression, they put people on one antidepressant. Oh, it didn’t work. We’ll put them on the next one. They just rotate through it because they’re, but they’re just looking at it like they have a model that predicts their hypothesis that they’ll respond. It didn’t. So they switched them onto the next approach.

So because medicine cares about triaging decisions about what to do for treatment, they say, “I only need a model that helps me do that. And I can ignore all the other details.”

But what happens is you leave these historical threads behind, like the fact that the chair of the conference that proved to put in your magazine that everyone had to change their diet because of the concept that they said was proven, that is now the basis for the drugs that I’m going to prescribe you. The fact that he had these, you know, that he also showed that it was seed oils in the membrane of the LDL particle that drive the plaque. Doesn’t matter, because that doesn’t change whether I’m giving you a statin, you know, and so, and so if it doesn’t change how I’m going to treat you, it doesn’t matter.

Which means that I could ignore it if someone asked me what you should eat, you know, but the problem was when they did the randomized controlled trials with the seed oils, they were like, “Oh, it doubled the atherosclerotic plaque. What do we do? Put it in the box in the basement,” you know, and so there’s all this, like, “Well, yes, those details are true, but Masterjohn, get out of my hair. I don’t want to, but I don’t, I can’t handle the truth,” you know?

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: And so…

How Nattokinase Works

JOE ROGAN: How does nattokinase? Oh, yeah, right, because I brought you way off track. I did it.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I did it. Okay, so the problem, when you get a heart attack or a stroke from atherosclerosis, it is not because in like 98% of cases, that is not because the plaque occluded the blood vessel and stopped the blood flow.

In fact, usually when a plaque develops, it develops backwards. Like, it just, so you’re, let’s say this is your blood vessel. The plaque’s going to bulge out this way instead of this way, because your body tries not to narrow the blood vessel because you do need the blood flow, right? So it’s almost never the case that the plaque is just squeezing the blood vessel shut.

What happens is the inflammatory process inside the plaque, which is especially driven by the seed oils oxidizing in there and going rancid. That’s not the only factor, but it’s one of them. That process degrades the collagen that covers the plaque, and it makes micro tears. And the micro tears and the collagen get healed by scar tissue that gets laid on top of it.

And so when you get narrowing into the blood vessel, it’s because you’re building up scar tissue on top of, like, it keeps breaking, and you keep building scar tissue on it. But if it breaks and you get a blood clot that is big enough in the acute moment to block the whole artery, that’s what usually causes most heart attacks.

Nattokinase is an enzyme derived from natto, which is a Japanese fermented soybean paste that is also, incidentally, very high in vitamin K2, which helps you protect against calcium deposits that weaken the plaque and make it more likely to rupture. So actually, just eating natto would be better. This is why food first works, right? If you had K2 and nattokinase, you’d be even better off.

But the nattokinase helps break apart blood clots. So if in some people, you might just have a predisposition because you’ve got systemic inflammation where, like, you just clot more easily, or you might have someone who’s got a genetic defect and the ability to degrade clots, and so their baseline clotting is higher than normal.

If that’s the case, then they’re even more likely to get a heart attack or stroke when the plaque ruptures because their baseline predisposition to clot is higher. And then on top of that, if you’ve got someone with really bad atherosclerosis, they might be clotting all the time. Like, every day might be a new day where they can have a heart attack.

And so in both of those cases, nattokinase is going to degrade the clots as soon as they occur and it’s going to lower the total clotting. And the downside risk of that is, you know, maybe you bleed too easily if you get cut. But the upside potential of that is if you’re one of the people who are a candidate for any one of these days now you’re going to get a heart attack or a stroke. Having taken 2,000 IU of nattokinase that day may have prevented you from getting a heart attack or stroke because the clot formed and you degraded it more quickly.

Wrapping Up

JOE ROGAN: Fascinating. Listen, this is a lot to take in, but let’s do this again.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: Yeah, for sure, please.

JOE ROGAN: And tell everybody where they can find you and where you are on social media and your website and all that.

CHRIS MASTERJOHN: I write a newsletter at chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com and you can look into my mitochondrial testing at Mitre Me.

JOE ROGAN: All right, thank you very much. This is really fun. I really appreciate it. I’m glad we did it. All right, bye, everybody.

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