Mastering Nutrition

Question: Is there a potential for adverse effects of 5-10 mg of folate for heterozygous MTHFR? Is there a potential? Yeah. The tolerable upper intake level for folate was set at 1 milligram on the basis that there are rare hypersensitivity syndromes that have caused reactions to 1 milligram or higher. On the basis that in numerous case reports, supplementation of more folate than that has been th...

Question: Is folate unstable in frozen liver or just in frozen veggies? The answer is folate is stable in frozen liver. It is not stable in frozen greens.  This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/podcast/2019/03/30/ask-anything-nutrition-march-4-2019 If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for...

Question: How much vitamin C should I take with collagen? There's no evidence that you need to take vitamin C with collagen. There is a study by Keith Baar, who showed that 15 grams of gelatin, not collagen, but I suspect the collagen is exactly the same, 15 grams of gelatin but not 5 grams, the dose is important, with 50 milligrams of vitamin C taken before exercise improved collagen synthesis in...

Question: Are liver capsules as good as eating liver? Liver pills are mainly for people who are not going to eat liver. That's the first thing. The second thing is, there are advantages to taking the dosing schedule of a little bit of liver every day.  Probably the ideal thing would be to have 10 to 20 grams of fresh liver every day. But the number of people who are going to do that are even small...

Question: Should I take 3 grams of leucine per meal? Leucine is metabolized into a leucine metabolite that is the signal of protein synthesis. It's the thing that tells your muscles whether they should be synthesizing protein. But do you synthesize more protein when you upregulate all the factors of muscle protein synthesis? Well, that is entirely dependent on the amount of amino acids you have su...

Question: What are your thoughts on root canals? Before Weston Price embarked on his journeys that led to the publication of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which is an epic pioneering work in nutritional anthropology, before he did that, he spent 25 years as the first research director for what became the American Dental Association, researching in laboratory science and clinical science wha...

Question: What does it mean when histamine intolerance and blood sugar dysregulation occur together? Well, if his blood sugar is no longer as stable and he has histamine intolerance, then that drug probably interferes with vitamin B6 metabolism. Let me try to take one minute to see if I can find quick information on this. I can't. I can't find it quickly. My instinct is to say that the drug is aff...

Question: If PTH is mid-normal, do I need a calcium supplement? I'm assuming that by midrange you mean it's 30. If you mean it's 40, then no, you're deficient or you're probably deficient. You need to test how you respond. But what I would say is, it would still be good for you to try increasing that and see if the PTH goes down anymore. Because my baseline for where I suspect that someone's PTH i...

Question: What to do about sky-high pyroglutamate? Pyroglutamate, its other name is 5-oxoproline. It is something that is primarily produced when you are synthesizing glutathione, but you do not have enough of the second step in glutathione synthesis to keep up with the first step. Maybe you need more glycine, but your glycine isn't low enough to cause orders of magnitude higher pyroglutamate. It'...

Question: In hemochromatosis, why would ferritin be low but transferrin saturation high? Ferritin is your long-term iron storage. Transferrin is your short-term iron storage. The problem with hemochromatosis is that usually in a normal functioning system, there is a hormonal regulatory system that prevents you from absorbing iron from food when you have enough iron that when you have too much iron...

Question: Does folic acid act differently in the body than natural folate? | Masterjohn Q&A Files #68 They don't really. Everything that is said bad about folic acid is sort of true to an extent but has been completely exaggerated in some circles. What happens is you have an enzyme called dihydrofolate reductase, or DHFR. Its purpose is not to metabolize synthetic folic acid obviously because that...

Question: Can frozen vegetables be trusted for folate? You absolutely cannot trust frozen vegetables as a source of folate ever. That's because folate is extremely unstable in the freezer, and you have no idea how old the vegetables are. If they were fresh-frozen yesterday, they'd probably have plenty of folate. But if they were fresh-frozen three months ago, they may seem completely fresh and yet...

Question: How much spinach, broccoli, and kale is too much? Cruciferous vegetables have an issue with potential goitrogens. At serving sizes like this, the only issue with cruciferous vegetables is that they increase your iodine requirement. In theory, if you are juicing cruciferous vegetables to have like ten servings a day, in theory, you might get to the point where you cannot overcome the goit...

Certainly, the fat-soluble vitamins, vitamins A and D, both important. Lauric acid as a fat. Coconut oil might be a good fat choice for the fat in your diet. Monolaurin would be a very good choice for a supplement. Lauricidin is the best monolaurin to take, 3 to 10 grams a day. Be careful of your bowel tolerance, spread it out among your meals, and cut back if it starts to loosen your stool. Elder...

Question: Can you give any suggestions for increasing delta-6 desaturase activity? There's a bunch of nutrients involved in that, so many that you basically just need to do a comprehensive nutritional screening for whether something is missing there. You might just have low activity by genetics. It's probably not worth solving that problem. The big governor though is if you have if you have insuli...

Question: What are the pros and cons of boosting sulforaphane? Sulforaphane, the nice thing is it promotes detoxification. The bad thing is it raises the need for iodine. I don't know what ratio to take, but you definitely want to make sure that you're getting some kind of iodine into your diet, whether it's through like 200 micrograms of iodine from a kelp powder supplement or you experiment with...

Question: Is it true that we can't absorb more than 1.5 grams of creatine at one time? I don't think that's true. From what I looked at, it looked like the absorption of creatine was really, really good. I don't know if someone was arguing maybe that we don't retain more than that. But I think the retention of your muscles is going to be best with creatine if you take it post-workout and if you ta...

Question: NMN vs. NR: What's better? And is TMG necessary? Yeah. There are no human studies looking at NMN and how it's metabolized. There are studies of NR. No one has showed any positive benefits of supplementing NR in humans yet, but they haven't really done any long-term studies or looked at many things, and they really haven't looked at anything that I would really want to see for NR. They've...

Question: What to do about cataracts. Carl Rayner says, "Cataract in one eye becoming noticeable. This eye had a posterior detachment about 11 years ago, which is basically healed. I've been on a low-carb diet for over 40 years. Eat raw cream cheese, eggs, meat and liver. In the past few years, adding fasting and more keto diet. Saw your thoughts about glutathione on the cheat sheet and interview...

Question: What can be done nutritionally to specifically improve antiviral immunity? Certainly, the fat-soluble vitamins, vitamins A and D, both important. Lauric acid as a fat. Coconut oil might be a good fat choice for the fat in your diet. Monolaurin would be a very good choice for a supplement. Lauricidin is the best monolaurin to take, 3 to 10 grams a day. Be careful of your bowel tolerance,...

Question: If free T3 looks good, why is TSH still a little high? Why hasn't the T3 brought it down enough? Your thyroid gland makes thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone increases your metabolic rate and does a lot of related things. Your hypothalamus is governing that by controlling your pituitary, the master endocrine gland, and its secretion of TSH, which is what controls the thyroid gland and makes...

Question: What food supplements and training programs are good for developing muscle mass? Overwhelmingly, what matters for muscle mass is working out, eating enough protein, and eating enough calories.  You want to try and hit 10-20 sets per muscle group per week with eat set hitting within 80% of failure. So, if your doing a set of 8 reps but you could have done 20 reps with your chosen weight,...

Question: Should I manage my total cholesterol of 305 just for my doctor or should I be doing it for my own sake? If so, how should I do it? You should want to improve your lipid profile for a lot more than to please your doctor. Let's revisit this from a cholesterol skeptic point of view. Uffe Ravnskov, he wrote a book called The Cholesterol Myths . In that book, he shows a graph from the Framing...

Question: "Do you have any recommendations on how to get enough calcium on a low-carb, no-dairy diet? I've read that vegetables provide calcium, but bioavailability is poor." The bioavailability of calcium from different vegetables is highly dependent on the specific vegetables.  Cruciferous vegetables have very good bioavailability. It's better than from milk. Spinach has like close to zero bioav...

Question: What should people with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency be doing not just about glutathione, but about folate, vitamin K, fatty acids, and neurotransmitters?   G6PD, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency , is an inborn error of metabolism. It's the most common one in the world. About 8% globally have some impairment in this enzyme. The reason that it's important is be...