Chris Masterjohn Profile picture
PhD in Nutritional Sciences. Adding nuance to health science, using biochemistry to find your individuality.
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Feb 21 63 tweets 8 min read
The Glycine-Oxalate Connection Your Doctor Isn't Testing For

Glycine is necessary for a long life, smooth movement, a calm mind, and stable blood sugar, but how would you know if it's too much?

🧵 Image 3 grams of glycine one hour before bed has been shown to reduce daytime sleepiness, help people fall asleep faster, and help people feel more rested and perform better cognitively during the day.
Feb 18 53 tweets 6 min read
Why You Need to Start Juicing Tonight

The Sleep-Anxiety Connection Nobody's Talking About

🧵 Image If you have trouble sleeping, problems with anxiety, or get startled easily, I’ve got a quick solution for you, and it involves some green juice.

There’s about a fifty percent chance your problem is that your glycine levels are low.
Feb 7 56 tweets 10 min read
Now that RFK Jr. has been caught spiking his drink with smurf oil, it's time to talk about methylene blue.

🧵 Two dropper fulls is probably 20 milligrams, assuming 1% solution with 20 drops per dropper. This is a high dose compared to what many in the biohacking community use, but a small dose compared to the ten times higher doses used in some clinical trials.
Jan 29 27 tweets 5 min read
Support RFK Jr. For HHS Secretary

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rein in the corporate stranglehold over medicine, health, and food, in the United States.

🧵 Image The RFK Jr. confirmation hearings for HHS Secretary have started today.

As with anything in politics, it’s going to be messy.
Jan 9 7 tweets 2 min read
The Surgeon General is full of shit and can’t read a meta-analysis.

All but four types of cancer have inverse associations with light alcohol intake, no one has any clue what the causality is. There are as many cancers with a “no unsafe intake except zero” distribution as there are with a “only safe intake is zero” distribution.
Jan 7 54 tweets 7 min read
The Biomechanics of Immune Dysfunction

This is the elephant in the autoimmunity and cancer room that EVERYONE IS IGNORING. Image As I covered in my Crohn’s Protocol, and The Science Behind the Crohn’s Protocol, the big elephant in the room in Crohn’s is that biomechanical dysfunction from joint misalignments is probably the missing ingredient in Crohn’s that no one is paying attention to.
Jan 4 8 tweets 3 min read
The Science Behind the Crohn's Protocol

Anyone who has Crohn's or has a first-degree relative with Crohn's needs to understand the science of Crohn's and the extraordinary power of nutrition. Image Crohn’s disease is one of two disorders grouped together as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the other being ulcerative colitis. Ulcerative colitis exclusively impacts the colon, whereas Crohn’s can impact any part of the gastrointestinal tract from mouth to anus, though the ileum and proximal colon (that is, the last section of the small intestine and first section of the large intestine) are the most often affected. In ulcerative colitis, inflammation is limited to the mucosa, the mucus-rich superficial layer of the inside of the gut.

In Crohn’s, by contrast, the inflammation is considered “transmural,” meaning that it can be found in every layer of the gut tissue, but it is also characterized by “skip areas” where diseased sections of the gut are interspersed by normal healthy sections.
Jan 4 21 tweets 3 min read
How to Heal From Crohn's Disease

This four-page quick guide is a complete strategy to induce and maintain remission from Crohn's disease using diet and supplements. Image Crohn’s disease impacts one to three percent of the population, and first-degree relatives of people with Crohn’s disease have a ten- to 20-fold risk of developing it in the future.
Nov 23, 2024 35 tweets 4 min read
Sulfur Lies At the Crossroads of Obesity and Diabetes

Is sulfur behind your stubborn fat?

🧵👇 Image Obesity strongly predisposes to type 2 diabetes. This is not because fat storage promotes diabetes. Rather, it is because running out of room to store more fat causes diabetes.
Nov 16, 2024 22 tweets 3 min read
How to Lose Fat Without Losing Muscle

NEVER start with cutting food intake!

🧵👇 Image When you “lose weight,” the health benefits you get are from losing fat.
Nov 4, 2024 43 tweets 6 min read
Kennedy is right to stop the war on raw milk. Raw milk has unique health value destroyed by pasteurization and every American should have the right to drink it.

🧵 👇 Pasteurization primarily destroys the natural, healthy microbiome of the milk and a large portion of the whey protein.
Nov 3, 2024 4 tweets 2 min read
Fluoride is not an essential nutrient.

Fluoride is a toxin that antagonizes iodine, which is essential to thyroid function, and thyroid during development is a major determinant of growth and IQ.

Fluoride makes mineralized tissues acid-resistant. This opposes tooth decay and in bones it causes defects in strength because acid-mediated bone remodeling is essential to making bones match the needs of their environment. Excess fluoride discolors and mottles teeth but bones are more sensitive to negative effects.

Animal experiments showing behavioral abnormalities in response to low levels of fluoride have been around for decades.

One of the early observations in support of fluoride was a low level of tooth decay in Hereford, TX, where there was a high concentration of fluoride in the water.

This was because they had 13 feet of glacial top soil that mineralized the plants with essential nutrients so well that they rejected all the fluoride and left it in the water.

The butterfat of their cattle was so nutritious that after sampling 20,000 butters across the world Weston Price decided to import all of his cream from that one place in TX. He used centrifuged butter oil from it — containing no fluoride — as part of a protocol to HEAL established dentin-infected cavities in his patients.

Teeth do not need fluoride. They never have. There has never been a good case for its essentiality.

There has always been a reasonable concern over its toxicity. Correction: 3 feet of top soil. Image
Oct 1, 2024 24 tweets 3 min read
Why Your "Allergies" May Just Be a Sulfur Problem
🧵 Image Or why a sulfur problem may be seriously aggravating your allergies.
Sep 16, 2024 12 tweets 3 min read
If you care about your mitochondrial function and your longevity, you need to care about SULFUR.

If you have psychiatric, neurological, or gastrointestinal problems, you need to triple down on your sulfur.

So, here is my Sulfur Protocol. Image Do you ever have anxiety? Depression?

Tremors, twitches, heart palpitations or spasms?

Any psychiatric or neurological issue can be a sulfur problem.
Aug 30, 2024 44 tweets 5 min read
This is FASCINATING.

Infrared energy plays a direct role to supplement the heart in pumping blood throughout the body.

This provides an unexpected explanation for why blood pumping persists in dead humans and animals after the heart stops, and why infrared therapy can improve circulation.

🤯:\\Image The heart pumps blood to the small vessels, the small vessels deliver oxygen and nutrients that promote metabolism in cells, metabolism releases infrared energy, and the blood vessels use it to pump the blood back to the heart.
Aug 22, 2024 15 tweets 2 min read
You knew oxalate could cause kidney stones, but did you know it can form crystals in your brain?

🧵 Image The first report of this was a 1940 autopsy of a 61-year-old woman who died of an aneurysm. Her brain was full of oxalate crystals. Image
Aug 16, 2024 13 tweets 2 min read
CARNIVORE DIARRHEA

What causes it? Here's one thing no one has mentioned!

🧵 According to Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaFuller) 2 out of 3 people get it for 2-7 days:

Aug 15, 2024 13 tweets 14 min read
H2S Clearance: The Gut Health Factor That Matters More Than Your Microbiome

This key to gut health is all about your own enzymes, not what you're feeding the microbes.

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is produced by human enzymes throughout every organ of the body. It is the second most important “gasotransmitter” after nitric oxide, meaning that it is a gas that acts as an important signaling molecule to help cells decide what to do with their resources and when.

As I covered in Maybe THIS Is Why You’re Hangry, S-sulfocysteine is made from hydrogen sulfide and is most likely a normal excitatory neurotransmitter that assists glutamate in the way taurine assists GABA and glycine.

The microbiome also makes hydrogen sulfide. At least 15 different types of microbes, ranging from H. pylori to E. coli to Desulfovibrio and Bilophila wadsworthia, and even certain strains of Lactobacillus can make hydrogen sulfide.

Hydrogen sulfide in the gut directly regulates gut function, just like hydrogen sulfide in the brain directly regulates brain function.

Various studies suggest hydrogen sulfide slows or speeds intestinal transit, and the net effect probably depends on concentration and context. In irritable bowel syndrome, higher H2S levels are associated with diarrhea rather than constipation. Irritable bowel syndrome is associated with accelerated transit time. This is consistent with animal studies suggesting an H2S-producing microbiome drives diarrhea. Overall, then, we should expect that excessive H2S in the gut is most likely to cause faster transit time and diarrhea than slower transit time and constipation. Faster transit time leads to nutrient malabsorption as well, since food moves faster through the gut than the rate at which nutrients can be optimally absorbed.

For clarity, not everyone with IBS-D has fast transit time, and transit time is not the only thing impacting the risk of diarrhea. Water retention in the gut rather than in the body proper is another major factor, so it is possible to have diarrhea with normal or slow transit time.

Acute hydrogen sulfide poisoning usually produces nausea and vomiting rather than diarrhea. Thus, hydrogen sulfide probably has to be produced in the gut to cause diarrhea. However, the intestinal cells themselves make hydrogen sulfide, so that doesn’t mean it has to come from the microbiome.

In much of the body, hydrogen sulfide is pro-growth. In Hydrogen Sulfide Is the New Estrogen, I covered research showing that hydrogen sulfide contributes to breast development, and it is likely a major mediator of estrogen-induced growth in general, including growth of estrogen-responsive cancers. Indeed, hydrogen sulfide is in general a mediator of angiogenesis (growth of new blood vessels) in positive contexts like wound healing and muscle hypertrophy, and in negative contexts like cancer growth.

Hydrogen sulfide signaling is intimately intertwined with the hypoxia response and likely indispensable to it. A central function of the hypoxia response is to accumulate more iron from food and to mobilize iron throughout the body into hemoglobin synthesis, but it has broadly 100-200 targets, and it includes the regulation of the breathing rate and the formation of new blood vessels.

Now think about this: your gut cells can make their own hydrogen sulfide, and they are exposed to the hydrogen sulfide that your microbiome makes, and they want just the right “Goldilox” level of it so they have the proper rate of motility and blood supply.

Does it make any sense at all that which blood vessels you grow in distant tissues like your skin or your muscles, and whether your brain excitement gets turned up or down, should be purposefully regulated to be at the whims of random pulses of activity made by little microbes in your gut?Image Generally speaking, your gut is meant to protect you against the environment. The entire gut, from mouth to anus, is “outside” the body. Things must pass through the intestinal cells to enter the “inside” of the body. Thus, the gut produces a massive excess of enzymes that neutralize bioactive chemicals. For example, diamine oxidase is produced by the gut in such excess that dietary histamine should never enter the bloodstream. This is why the histamine in fermented vegetables doesn’t usually cause hives or panic attacks. The intestines also possess the same detoxification enzymes that the liver possesses, and their systematic rejection of foreign chemicals into the feces is the first line of defense against toxins released from our food during digestion.

It would seem from this that the gut should also have a great excess capacity to clear any hydrogen sulfide that exceeds the level needed for healthy intestinal motility and proper intestinal vascularization.

Indeed, a tissue-based map of the human proteome characterized the expression of human genes in many different tissues. The genes for the two major enzymes involved in clearing hydrogen sulfide — SQOR (or SQRDL as it is labeled in this paper) and ETHE1 — are expressed to a 5.6-fold greater degree in intestinal tissue than in non-intestinal tissue. This supports a massive excess of H2S clearance capacity in the intestines.

Similarly, the expression of the three genes responsible for endogenous H2S production, CBS, CSE, and MPST (called TST in this paper) was 2.4-fold greater in intestinal tissue than in non-intestinal tissue. Thus, endogenous production of H2S by human enzymes is also enriched in the gut, suggesting that our gut cells are not going to let us get away with relying on the microbiome to synthesize the H2S needed for proper gut function.

The relative expression of genes is not the only thing that determines flux through the pathways, so we should not read all that much into this, but the fact that H2S-producing genes are 2.4-fold enriched in the intestinal tissue and H2S-clearing genes are 5.6-fold enriched in the intestinal tissue is vaguely suggestive that our clearance capacity is meant to handle half of our H2S coming from our own production and half of it coming from the microbiome.

The question then arises: what is more important for gut health, maintaining robust clearance of hydrogen sulfide, or controlling its production by the microbiome?
Aug 12, 2024 139 tweets 14 min read
Will Multivitamins Help You Live Longer?

Here are the facts. 🧵 Image Everything I'll say below can be found on my web site with a "short answer" and 39 references.

Click the link in my profile to get the web version. Image
Jul 14, 2024 23 tweets 3 min read
Is Urolothin A the Ultimate Longevity Supplement?

The claims are it will renew your mitochondria, boost your strength, bolster your VO2max, and act like exercise in a pill. Is this fact or fiction? Here's what you need to know.

🧵 Image Urolithin A is claimed to be exercise in a pill, a potent weapon against aging that will rejuvenate your mitochondria and make you stronger and younger even without exercising, eating well, or fasting.
Jul 8, 2024 21 tweets 3 min read
How Low Methylation Destroys Your Energy Metabolism

🧵 Image In How Energy Deficiency Hurts Methylation, I covered the ways that low ATP and a low NAD+/NADH ratio will sap your methylation, and the patterns to look for on a Genova Methylation Panel to verify this is happening.