Glucose Tolerance, Fasting & Radiant Health Unlocking the Peacock Effect with Chris Masterjohn

7:19AM Sep 26, 2023

Speakers:

Angela Foster

Chris Masterjohn

Keywords:

salt

glucose

eat

people

workout

health

lactate

glycogen

cod liver oil

spike

grey hair

status

hair

glucose tolerance

zone

interesting

energy metabolism

nad

methylation

good

There's no better way to make yourself glucose intolerant than to not eat things that spike your blood sugar. And there's no better way to make yourself glucose tolerant than to eat things that spike your blood sugar.

You're listening to the high performance health podcast helping you optimise your health performance and longevity. My name is Angela Foster and I'm a former corporate lawyer and high performance health coach. Each week I bring new cutting edge biohacking, inspiring insights and high performance habits to unlock optimal health performance and longevity. So excited that you've chosen to join me today. Now let's dive in. My friends in this episode, I'm chatting to Chris master John, whose work I personally followed for some time, Chris is hugely knowledgeable in the area of nutrition, genetics and longevity. He has a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut. But after working in academia for many years, he left to pursue entrepreneurship. And he's really passionate about translating and sharing complex science into practical principles that each of us can use to better support our health. And in this episode, we talk about a wide range of topics including glucose tolerance and fasting, the effects of high intensity workouts how to avoid nutritional insufficiencies, and also a phenomenon known as the peacock effect, where you are nutritionally replete and effectively can show off your genetic potential and health status. Great skin and hair would be an example of this because while genes do play a part, obviously, in how our hair looks, hair is not a priority when micronutrient status is low. So glossy, shiny hair and glowing skin are often indicative of our health status. It's kind of like a sort of primal area around attraction and fertility. And we also touch on the reasons for greying hair, which in itself isn't straightforward. Chris has a wealth of knowledge, and he shares much of this on his substack, we will put a link in the show notes as to how you can connect with Chris and also his work. And the show notes to this episode are also on my website at Angela Foster performance.com. So Chris, firstly, a very warm welcome to the show. I've been looking forward to this, this interview, I know we had to reschedule. I'm a big fan of your work. So from across the pond. But welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.

Let's kick off we were talking about there because your content is very deep, and you're incredibly knowledgeable. I think a good place to start is when we're thinking about nutrition. I know you talk about eating nose to tail, there isn't a kind of perfect diet, quote unquote, for every individual. And I think there's I've heard you talk about limitations when people talk or think about things like genetics. But if we start with the premise of somebody who wants to live well and really increase their healthspan. So I think a lot of people are obsessed with longevity. I'm kind of more focused on how can we live really healthily and vibrantly? What would be the foundations that we need to be thinking about?

I think the first rule would be that you want to try to get all the nutrients that you can from Whole Foods. And I mean with respect to nutrition, right? So there's other pillars of healthy life like movement and sleep and all that. But if you're just thinking about nutrition, I think Rule number one is, how could you get all your vitamins and minerals and proteins, fats and carbohydrates and calories and everything that you need from Whole Foods. And an interesting point, I think, is that the public health authorities have basically made it so that we don't have to try to do that by taking the foods that people commonly eat and then fortifying them with what they think the population on average will be deficient in. And it's interesting, if you look at history, how that generally only works for a period of time. So for example, they started ionising salts when they saw that iodine was a major deficiency risk. And they figured people eat a lot of salt. So we'll put iodine in the salt. And the salt will be a vehicle to get iodine to the people to make sure that they don't have thyroid problems. But fast forward a few decades. And now they're telling people to restrict salt for their blood pressure and cardiovascular health. And so iodine deficiency is rising because of that. There's other examples of that with white flour. White flour is if you look if you go by white flour, or you look at the ingredient list on something you'll see enriched white flour, it's enriched not with the things that the whole wheat was rich in that have been removed. It's just randomly enriched with things that they think people will be deficient in. So they think, well people could have iron deficiency anaemia is a major problem. So we'll throw iron in there and so on. And because of that, it's kind of taking responsibility away from us to think about how to construct a good diet because we don't have to think about whether they're we're getting an A folate from liver lagoons and leafy greens, because there's folic acid in the white flour so we can eat three sandwiches. De with six pieces of white bread. And on paper, it looks like we're getting all the folate we need. So when I say rule one is trying to get all the vitamins and minerals from whole foods that you could get, I mean, exclude the stuff that's added. And if you actually had a little bit more responsibility to think about what you would construct as your own diet, and you learned a little bit enough about nutrition to think about what are the what kind of foods would I need to piece together in order to make sure I'm doing that, then I think that pushes automatically pushes you into a much healthier diet, because now all of a sudden, you can't cheat with white bread. And that means that you have to eat more green vegetables. And now, that also means that you have to not eat frozen vegetables, because frozen vegetables lose their folate over time. So actually, you could watch or you could actually wind up with folate deficiency just from switching from white bread to frozen vegetables, but that means you have to eat fresh vegetables. And so as soon as you don't have these cheat codes that the public health authorities gave you, and you have to think about, like what is what is a well rounded enough diet for me to get my vitamins and minerals, you're automatically pushed into much better food choices. And then once you're there, you need to think about what that means. And I would say basic principles are you need a certain amount of protein, probably a third of your plate, at every meal should be something very rich in protein. And really that means meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, if you're vegetarian, you could you could kind of put lagoons in there, which are lentils, peas and beans. But you're it's stretching it to call those rich in protein. But that's the best you can do on plant foods. And actually, you want to if you're doing that you want more than a third of your plate, you want like two thirds of your plate or three quarters of your plate if you're going to try to get protein from those foods. And then diversify those proteins across the different types. So and keeping in mind that if you don't talk, if you're allergic to eggs, I'm not saying you should eat eggs. But within what you tolerate, diversify that across meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, etc. And then within those animal products try to diversify across the animal, as you mentioned before by nose to tail. And that's what our ancestors did by and large was eat the whole animal. It's a bit much for most modern people. But you could start on your journey to nose to tail by adding liver once a week. And by consuming bone broth, that would be two ways that you could eat very important other parts of the animal. And then I think carbohydrate fat balances is something that everyone needs to play around with on an individual level. But let's say there's a certain amount of carbohydrate in your plate, diversify that across. Not you know the default in the standard diet is refined grains, making those refined grains whole grains that are properly prepared through souring, fermenting. And other traditional means like that is a good choice. But you really want to diversify that to include starchy tubers, and the goons and fruits and relatively higher calorie vegetables. Because the nutrient part the reason for the diversification is that the vitamin and mineral content of all these things is very different. So if you look at whole wheat, whole wheat bread, let's say whole wheat, sourdough bread, you are getting important nutrients in there that you're and I'm not gonna I'm not saying a Celia Cassidy wheat, but if you tolerate it, you are getting important nutrients from whole wheat that you're not getting in a lot of these other foods, especially on the choline and beat betaine side of things. But you know, you're really bad off. If you're mostly eating whole grains, you you will be much better off if you are only eating lagoons or you're only eating starchy tubers. But you're the best off if you're eating all of those because the goons are a great source of molybdenum, which is a very important mineral. And the others really aren't. And fresh fruit and vegetables have vitamin C and lagoons don't and so on starchy tubers and legumes are very good sources of potassium grains aren't. So if you if you the more you diversify across these things, the less you have to think about it. Whereas the more you say, Well, I'm intolerant to 50 of the things that you mentioned, do you really want to start tracking your vitamin mineral intake in an in an app and micromanaging it because the more you violate these rules, it's not that you can't eat. So like I could pick out five foods to eat for the rest of my life and have not been sufficient in all the nutrients. But that's because I'm I have the expertise to have thought about it and picked out those five foods. If you are trying to eat a very restrictive diet, you really need to think a lot about this. But if you're diversifying like I'm saying you really don't. I think if you I think if we stop right there. I think those are like a very good first three steps for someone to think about how to put their their meal plan together without having to micromanage anything.

Oh, Yeah, I would agree with that. There's a couple of things I think drawing from that, that I'd like to speak to you about. And I guess one is, why would we develop a sort of micronutrient or mineral insufficiencies in certain areas. So I've noticed if I use myself as an example, I seem to really struggle with enough potassium, that's just something. It's been right from the days when I was practising as a lawyer, if I'm testing, it comes up as potassium seems like I seem to struggle a bit with magnesium. I've tested with her and I've tested with blood and it seems to correlate. And it's just kind of curious, yes, I don't really and this is this would lead on to my second question, which we'll come on to. So I don't tend to eat I know, like, bananas might be a good source, for example, I intend to eat them. They do spike my blood glucose. And I'd like to speak to you later around Whole Foods that are actually healthy, that spike potentially spike blood glucose and what the implications of that are in people. But if you're eating a kind of broad diet, and you're including a lot of different plant based foods with some animal foods, do you find that there's certain things in people's lifestyle that are affecting it? So for example, some people, you know, people who, for example, have a high energetic output, maybe they are busy, I'm very busy with three kids business, I work out a lot, maybe the the overall demands on someone's body are that much greater. I'm just curious how you then go on to adapt it. There seem to be so many different ways that we could look at whether we look at genetics, whether we look at energetic output, all these different things. But have you found that there are some people who just seem to be iron would be another one for me? And I know the reason for that, because that's been historical hormonal problems, actually, that have depleted iron. I'm just curious what you found that?

Well, there's, I could speak to that generally, or specifically. So generally speaking, there's a number of factors. One is just that different people's needs are different for I mean, you can unpack many, many, many reasons for that, as an example, the foot with iron, the primary determinant of your of your iron requirement above the average for men, is because the average woman has has almost the same average iron requirement as the average man. But if you look at the RDA, the the RDA for women is way higher than men. And that's because the RDA is meant to cover 97.5% of people's needs. Notice, by definition, two and a half percent of people are supposed to be deficient if everyone's eating the RDA. But, but what so what they did is they they looked at the variation among women, and it was the variation in their estimation was much greater because of the variation in menstrual blood loss. So the there's basically like a three fold variation in iron requirement that is solely driven by how much how heavy is your period. And so the heavier, heavier your period, the more blood is not menstrual fluids, not blood, but blood is a component of it. And most of your iron is in your blood. So if you blood loss is the major cause of iron leaving the body. So if you have a heavier period, you will have a much higher iron requirement. And so the RDA is kind of it can be misleading if you don't read the report. So the like the average woman's iron requirement is a lot lower than the RDA, because the average woman's period is much lighter than the 97 point fifth percentile of heaviness a period, which is what the RDA for women is basically, that's just one example. But at the end of the day, there's there's just many 1000s of reasons to make someone's needs different than others. And certainly lifestyle is part of that you mentioned having higher demands and on you, you know, for potassium, sweat could be one, different people, first of all lose different amounts of potassium in their sweat, but also, different people sweat a lot in much different amounts, depending on what their lifestyle is. And depending even on like where they live, right? Like if you if you run for an hour outside at the equator, versus in Maine, in the United States, which is Canada, right? You're gonna sweat a different amount. And so those are just two of many 1000s of reasons for that. Then they're, you know, others could just be like, the metric that you're looking at might be reflecting your long term status. Maybe you are doing things right now, but you had a, you were very depleted when you got to wherever you were in your journey that where you started doing things, right. malabsorption problems can make what gets into your body totally different from what you're putting in your mouth. Lots of reasons like that.

Yeah, it's really interesting because I think a really common kind of I don't want to say a trend. But I mean, I guess it is to a degree is now for everyone to be taking minerals. Like, there's some I'm not gonna mention brands but this concept that I'm going to have a sodium, potassium, magnesium blend once or twice a day, right, regardless of how much they're sweating, for example, it just seems across the board, quite a lot of people are then taking that. And I just wanted to sort of better understand your views on that and where you come out in terms of does the average person need to be supplementing with a mineral based drink? Or are they sufficient just to add a full mineral salt to their food and drink normal water? You know, more about kind of, like, hydrating properly, even often, like with a drip or something like that you're going to have some sodium, and then there's also a bit of glucose. What are your thoughts around proper hydration?

My thoughts are everyone's overthinking it a bit because they all have hypothalamus. So if you, if you don't have if you're not psychotic, and you don't have a neurological disorder, that's wrecking your hypothalamus, you should, you should only drink water when you're thirsty. And a lot of people are told a bunch of BS about how your urine should be whatever colour and you should drink eight glasses of water a day, which, you know, has no basis whatsoever is that that even that number is based on the amount of water that would have to be total, including the water and food. And again, if you're making proper food choices, you're getting high water foods. Whole Foods are very high in water compared to processed foods. So someone who's eating mostly processed foods is going to have to drink more water, but someone who's eating even even meat. I mean, that's why when you cook meat, there's the juices come out in the pan because full of water. Right? So and then of course, whether you consume those juices or not like that's, that's water, right. So if you're not sweating a lot, and you're eating whole foods, you might not need to drink any water at all. And the what you do take in will be much more hydrating. When you have things that water is attracted to along with it. glucose. I don't I don't think is, is necessary, but it can certainly help. And you should certainly I mean, certainly if you are. The thing is like if you have diarrhoea you should probably be on on something like salted white rice, because the salts and the glucose from the rice will draw the water into the intestinal cells when it is when when it's being absorbed. But if if you don't have a problem, you probably don't need glucose, necessarily, but you definitely do want probably something on the order of like a 16th of a teaspoon of salt and a slice of lemon fully squeezed out per glass of water, just for the sake of having things that are attracted to the water to bring it in. And then when it's in to bring it into your cells. But I mean, obviously you're absorbing the water if you're not having new stools. And in fact, that's a perfect, perfect metric of how much water you're absorbing from your intestines. If your intestine if your stool is too hard, it's lower in water and if it's too soft tire and water, providing the softness isn't sort of like making it very light and float and have a look soapy in which case that's fat. But But then once the water is in your body, you know how much do you pee out versus how much do you retain in your cells and that's going to be driven very much by the salt and potassium that is associated with it. And it's it's not a hard and fast rule like you need to have the ratio in the water because you already have salt and potassium in your body. And so that's why it really comes back down to your your thirst and your drive for salt. Now because people overthink it most people have wrecked their own drive for thirst and salt with their overthinking and I'm not sure how to purge the overthinking but my suggestion would be like do the maybe try to do like a salt reset like if you usually regulate your water intake according to a certain number. Maybe you should just like not drink any water for a week. You know but get but like stay hydrated through food. And then like if you normally restrict your salt maybe just like pound your your your just put dump salt all over your food for a week or something like that just to like jolt you out of your usual pattern. I mean granted like if you if you if your salt sensor, hyper salt if you have salt sensitive hypertension, don't do that. But you really shouldn't be thinking about it. You should drink water when you're thirsty and You should eat salt when you when you crave salt and, and if if you put salt on your food that doesn't taste salt do, you should eat more salt. And you should put them together when you crave salt and water, right. So if I go for a morning, one hour run in the summer, I get back and I am craving water and salt. And so I have a like I use element which is very high salt electric electrolyte mix, and I'm also very much craving cold. So I mix it in water, I put some bunch of ice cubes in it, I go take a shower, and I come back. And that's what I drink for the next 20 minutes. But that's that's because I've lost so much water and salt that now I'm craving water and salt. You should not need to think about it at all. Your hypothalamus does that unless it's damaged.

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Really not anything more than the fact of what it means for water absorption. So the problem is it doesn't really give you much insight into causation right? So you can have diarrhoea because you had an infection. Infection is making toxins that are drying water into your intestines. But that has, but that's still you should still be unsalted white rice. I mean, the salted white rice is a cure for diarrhoea that's used all over the world because it's dirt cheap and it provides glucose and salt which will draw water back in regard listed whether there's some infection causing the toxin there. So but, you know, but but looking at the stool quality really doesn't like it doesn't really tell you about the quality of your water habits that much. It just tells you about the fact of whether the waters leave being left behind or being absorbed. So it's like if you're constipated, like the lesson is not, oh, I'm doing really great with my hydration, because all the water is coming inside me. You still have you still have a problem. But um, but I'm just saying like, I guess I'm using it more as I think it's more as like a negative check than a positive insight. It's like, you know, that you don't have to worry about whether you're absorbing your water if you don't have diarrhoea. I guess what I'm saying, right, like, if you're, if you, if you're, if you have, if you do not have loose stools, you do not have water left in your intestines, it doesn't mean that you that you've retained it, you might have peed it all out. But you know that but again, like if you have symptoms of dehydration or something like that, which which really primarily, putting aside all the, your body's many cries for water stuff really is thirst. So if you're thirsty, and you're drinking Latin, you're paying a lot, like put two into get two and two together. Like the problem is you're paying too much. And it's not. You might be paying too much because you don't have enough salt. And can you might not be if you don't have enough salt, it's probably because it's probably your fault, because you're probably going to try to unhealthy and not eating salt or something. Yeah, although this is another problem with processed foods. Most salt on the average diet comes from processed foods, and only 6% of the average person salt comes from salt in their food. So I think a lot of people who ditch processed foods and eat whole foods have no clue how much salt they should be adding to their food and how easy it is to become deficient in sodium as a result of that. And that's also part of the tastes problem because a lot of processed foods have the salt pack. It's like the some of them like a potato chip, the salt is on the surface because they want it to taste salty. But other types of products like sausages are things that are gelled and things like that. This salt. It's there to hold or deli meats are a great example. Like you wonder like, how did they grind this thing up and they could take that shape. And it's because they added all kinds of stuff to it to make like congealing thing that like kept it as a slice. Like, it's obviously like a like you. Like you'd never cut open a turkey and be able to take like sliced turkey out of it. It's totally different, right. And so the the salt in there is part of the congealing process that makes it stick together, and it's not hitting your tastebuds. So if you have been on a high processed food diet, I mean, like technically speaking, bread and cheese is processed and the stuff that we think of process is ultra process. But if you're even if you're on like an 80% Homemade, actually store bought bread and cheese is ultra processed and stuff you may get home is this process. But even if you even if you mostly eat bread and cheese you made yourself a lot of that salt is hidden from your taste buds if you switched to completely unprocessed diet like fresh meat and vegetables, you your your sense of taste for salt will be totally distorted by having had so much salt come in that you couldn't taste it because that's your your hypothalamus is going to calibrate to that. And it's it's going to adjust your taste of salt for what it thinks it means is getting enough salt. So if you suddenly change that ratio to whole foods diet where it tastes salty, but there's 20% as much salt in it, you're that's a case where your tastes might be very distorted. And it can take you a long time to calibrate to that. So you really want to be liberal with salting your food if you're on a whole foods like an authentically whole foods diet.

And by liberal How much do you mean, I'm pretty much eat whole foods I think a lot of the listeners do like and I noticed what you're saying. And I think that salt sensor is quite interesting, quite effective from my understanding of the reading on this is, you know, actually you'll be driven as you did would like you when you're talking about coming back from your run. You're driven towards salt when you need it. And I've noticed that sometimes it's like, oh, I need more salt. I need to add it to my food a bit more. It's difficult, isn't it to judge how much you're having particularly like, if I'm cooking for a family like how do I know I don't have no idea how much salt I'm actually adding it just the Redmond real just kind of gets added in do you know domain and then I see do I feel like anymore or not?

Right? If you're cooking for other people like it gets a little bit hard and I don't know a solution to that. But but you should like I was saying before you shouldn't need to think about it. So if all the evidence points towards your sense of salt saltiness is well calibrated, then you should just stop thinking about it. But I guess all I'm saying is if you if you switch to a whole foods diet and you have have symptoms of not getting enough salt, like especially fatigue, poor nutrient absorption and cognitive decline, then you should think about the possibility that you, you would just cut your salt intake in a fifth, and he needed more salt on your food and you need to recalibrate your taste buds. As I think leaving salt on the table is a pretty good solution to I'm cooking for five people and how do I make sure they'll get it? Right? Because yeah, I think the solution is don't put so much salt in the food that you're over overriding the sort of like minimum, the the lowest ranked need for salt at the table? You know, right. So like the amount of salt that you put in. There shouldn't be anyone who's complaining that it's too salty. Right? If there's one person complaining that it's too salty, you put less salt in it, and then and then the people you don't think it's something up? They just add salt to it.

Yeah, that's pretty much what we do. And it's interesting, because it does vary between individuals. Thank you for that, because I think that clears up a lot. Because I think people are possibly over supplementing with different editions and things when it's just easy to add it to food. We also will look in there at the hydration, right the the hydration content of Whole Foods. vegetable juices are also hydrating. And this is an area where I'm curious as to what your what your opinion of it is. So if for example, we wouldn't have known as actually we didn't like got a creek and we will put a CGM and see what's going on. But we just didn't know right? We weren't tracking our blood glucose. Yes, we were moving around and doing all of the good things. But what I've observed is some particular vegetables will spike blood sugar in certain individuals. And then in others they don't. Right. So if one individual has an apple, they might see a spike and another person doesn't. If I have something like carriages, for example, I'll see it really kind of shoot up. What are your thoughts around Lucas

definition of shooting?

So I can only talk about it in the UK index, which is slightly different. So if it was kind of knocking in and around at, say five, and I had a large glass of carrot juice, it could jump to 1230 which would be a big, kind of quite a big spike.

Yeah, let me Okay, so I don't know what that converts. Calculate calculator. So five millimoles per litre is where to go. One second is 90. And then 12. Is

14. Yeah, that's yeah. That's a big spike right from from what is? And I really,

my question would be how often how often do you drink the characters?

Well, because of that, I don't Yeah. However, it is something that

had you been doing it before you noticed it spiked your glucose that I

it wasn't actually it was when I started to produce an i, we got a juicer and I was experimenting, and I realised that a large class of carriages would spike.

So if you hadn't been drinking character, yeah, so my guess is if you drank the carrot juice each day, five days, Elena happen. Interesting. But it depends, right? So like your this is a huge problem with CG PMS is exactly what you just said, which is, people think that the glycemic response is an intrinsic part of the food. And so they run away from things that have high glycemic responses, which I think is I think that's a terrible way to use them. Because you're, if you're healthy, and there's nothing wrong with your ability to tolerate glucose, that doesn't mean that you'll never have a blood sugar spike, it means that you won't have that kind of blood sugar spike, whatever you do regularly, there's no better way to make yourself glucose intolerant than to not eat things that spike your blood sugar. And there's no better way to make yourself glucose tolerant than to eat things that spike your blood sugar. And there's like the, for the when they test for diabetes, you're supposed to be on to at least 200 grammes of carbs a day, every day for at least two weeks before you take a glucose tolerance test. Because if you're lower than that, you're going to fail it, you're not going to fail it because there's anything wrong with you, you're going to fail it because your body had no reason to tolerate 75 grammes of glucose coming in at once.

I'm so glad you cleared this up. Because this this has been my concern with glucose monitors and everything that we're seeing is that people then immediately start moving away from whole food sources of vegetables and things and

giving yourself hyperglycemia phobia. Yeah, yeah.

Because they're what they become is, is you can become fixated on how do I keep within this narrow window. And what's interesting is, there's things that you can do there that I think disrupt things like the Randle cycle, and you can introduce fats and things. And then actually people see weight gain, right and it might be like, Oh, great, I'm keeping it within this room. The narrower index. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're super healthy. And as you've said, There, you will also, you're less able now right to tolerate, to tolerate carbohydrates. And so people's their, their the amount of carbs they're eating, because for someone who is, for example, like quite active, they should easily tolerate 100 to 200 grammes of carbohydrates from whole food sources a day, right. Whereas the more you restrict that, the more sensitive you become.

Yeah, I would not make any conclusions about anything impacting your blood sugar unless you do it every day for at least five days.

I have a carrot juice experiment coming up. Because I did it. Actually, I was out in Dubai. And it was really, really hot. And I had real swings in blood pressure regulation. So I was getting really low blood pressure. And they were like, have the juices have the vegetable juices. I didn't have a CGM on me. So I didn't have the chance to track. So this is why it's kind of fresh in my mind. And I loved it and love water and things like that. And now I'm curious to see if I regularly do that what happens?

Yeah, I'd also do you look at it while it's happening, or do you look at it like the next day?

Both I mean, it on something like that it will come down actually extremely quickly.

I'm just I'm just wondering, the reason I ask is because I think, I think wondering about it, or seeing the numbers could cause anxiety. But if it's well, if it's well blinded, or and you're very distracted, I guess depends if you're an anxious person or not. But I think a blood a temporary blood sugar spike that high is probably not doing anything of that anything much of significance unless you get like extreme sensory hypersensitivity. So your glucose is your blood glucose is the main determinant of your brain glucose, which is the main determinant of how much glutamate there is in your brain. And in principle, in principle, your blood sugar should be able to do anything, your brain just soaks it up, makes glutamate stores that use it when needed. And so there's no symptomatic response. But, but sometimes I'll get severe hypersensitivity if my blood sugar goes way above 200. And I think that's, that's probably doing some neurological damage. But other than that I get if it goes up and comes down, it's like nothing, real bad happened. And so it's not, it's not, it's not something that you should be afraid of playing around with, like you're not getting a negative symptomatic response to it. You don't want to regularly spike your blood sugar to 200. But like you can afford to do it again and see what the trend is. to that. You also need to take into account you had mentioned activity, you need to take into account how much glycogen you've depleted. So your liver primarily depletes glycogen through fasting and your muscles primarily deplete glycogen through exercising, but you have to get over a certain intensity threshold to use a lot of glucose. So generally speaking, if you're, if your breathing is elevated, like noticeably elevated, you're probably burning some glucose. And if you're huffing and puffing, after you stop exercising for a couple minutes, you've probably burned a lot of glucose, you will probably see that your glucose tolerance is way better when you're glycogen depleted. Because that glucose has a place to go very quickly. If it goes through your liver First, your pancreas doesn't even see glucose until after your liver takes what it needs for glycogen. So your the way your blood is wired as the it goes from the intestines to the liver first, the liver tops off all its glycogen, then what's left from that goes to the pancreas. And the pancreas then makes insulin. And if the insulin is proportionate to the glucose and there's enough room in the muscles to take up as glycogen, the insulin just pushes it into the muscles and you never see the spike in your blood. So you might say what I find, for example, is when I do a one hour zone to run outside, that's the most glycogen depleting work workout that I do. Because even though the rate of burning glucose at Zone Two is basically if for a lot of people that would be like a medium jog, it's basically the point at which you would find it, you would be able to carry out a conversation but it'd be difficult. And the person talking to you would be able to like note, like if you're talking on the phone to be able to notice that you're breathing different. I don't do that. What I do is I My rule is I'm in Zone Two, my personal rule is I'm in Zone Two, if a if I, if I feel the need to slow down at any point, like I can't keep up the pace. I'm going too fast. And if I can't hear myself breathing, and it doesn't take a lot of mental effort to keep my mouth closed to breathe. That's where I want to be for an hour. So my glucose tolerance will get profoundly better for days. After that, and each day, my glucose tolerance will just then get worse and worse until it goes back to where it normally be after a couple of rest days. So if you did if you did like you, if you're not burning any muscular glycogen, you're not going to notice that. But if you cyclically through the week, have a high glycogen burning workout and other workouts that don't burn glycogen and you have rest days. Absolutely, that's going to be determined in your your in your glucose tolerance. So that's, that's one reason that you can't take one trial with carrot juice seriously, if you didn't try it in those different contexts. But then, you know, accounting for that, really, the big thing is, when you repeat it is, is your glucose tolerance, tolerance deteriorating? Or is it? Or is it getting better every day? Now, it could be deteriorating, because the first test was done right after you did a glycogen burning workout. And so of course, it's going to be worse the second time than the first time, because the first time you topped off your glycogen now you don't need to anymore, so you're gonna get so you have to take that into account. But if you control for that, then you should see every single time your glucose tolerance gets better to repeating that. And if it doesn't, that's your clue. Like if it does the opposite, then you then you might have a good then you might have genuine glucose intolerance that's developing, not because you did that experiment, but because of things going on in the background. Yeah, I've

done it a few times, but not in the way you've described. Now, what's really interesting about what you're saying there is I do notice a difference. Let's say for example, I have something like sourdough right post workout, I won't see any spike, and particularly like I'm having with protein and things like that alongside post workout. So I generally work out fasted in the morning, however, glucose tolerance in me, I would say, and I don't know what the listeners are finding. But by lunchtime, if I was to replicate that meal, and it's that much further away from the workout, then I would see a greater spike. So I observed

that even if you didn't eat anything in that window,

if I had fasted all morning, know,

after the workout, are you saying that you that you you, you can assume that after eating other things? Or are you saying that you fast after the workout? And if you fast long enough, then you'll become glucose intolerant?

No, what I was saying is, let's say for example, I've done a fasted workout early in the morning, then I have some breakfast. I won't I won't see a spike, right? If it's got carbohydrates in it. Yeah. So I've had that breakfast with carbohydrates, let's say then decide to have some carbohydrates at lunchtime. I will see breakfast. I've had breakfast. Yeah, I've had. Well, that's what Yeah, exactly. Because I've repeated that glycogen, right. So I have noticed that.

Even if you're not eating carbohydrates, you're gonna repeat the glycogen with gluconeogenesis? Yes, if you had, if you ate protein, you're not gonna get the same rapidity of replacing the glycogen. But you're going to be repeating it.

Yes, yeah. And potentially, like if you're not refilling the carbs, putting a bit of stress on the body. What's interesting to me is what you were saying,

let me make one last statement about that. So you're not measuring your lactate. And I honestly think that goes, glucose measurements are, are just totally taken out of context, if you're not measuring ketones and lactate, so I think that everyone would be better off measuring all three. But, but because of that, the lactate that you make during exercise is going to deplete your glycogen as well. So if you're you, it's very possible that your lack that you're suppressing the lactate oxidation by eating the carbs, and you're not seeing glucose spike, but your lactate staying elevated longer. That thing is a terrible thing. But I'm just saying like, even if you didn't eat breakfast, and you generated a lot of lactate, that lactate would be oxidised and re turned back into glucose to restore the muscle glycogen during that timeframe. And so not measuring lactate is I think is can create some misleading effects. Because your your like your total, if you took like the sum of glucose plus lactate, you might it might not make any difference whatsoever, whether you're eating it at lunch versus breakfast. And it might just be the choice of are you replacing the glycogen with the carbs you ate? Or are you replacing it with the lactate that's in your body? Already? That you may during a workout? And it's just which one is going to be left in the blood?

Interesting. Fair point. Yeah. Interesting. And I wanted to pick up on something you were saying there. So you were saying your most glycogen depleting workout that you do is a zone to run and what you were describing there. Just to clarify for listeners is the upper end of zone two, right? Just but you're sort of getting to that threshold just before you go in zone three. So it's like the limit of where you're comfortable. You have no

no basis to be that precise. Okay. I'm just considering myself to be in zone two.

Okay. But it's an easy nasal breathing.

I wouldn't call it easy. I mean, basically, like, if I can hear myself breathing through my nose like it's one of the predominant sounds today. to hear, but I got to be able to do it for it's at the upper edge of what I would be able to sustain for an hour. Okay, like I would I would not be able to go much faster and, and not be able to go an hour without reducing my pace, like I'm at that edge.

Okay? And what about when you do things like, for example, you do a weightlifting workout, what have you found that in terms of glucose tolerance,

I think it's way less of an effect. And it's because it's because of the duration. It's so you're, you're burning more glucose? Well, if you're in like a 10 to 15 rep range, you're and to be clear, like, the assumption is that you're within one or two reps of failure, when you're doing any resistance, like if you're, if you're doing 10, or 15 reps of something, you could have done 20, you're not even exercising, you're warming, period, end of story. So if you're, but if you're in like attendance, and this is going to be different for different people, but on average, 10 to 15 reps, you're burning a lot of glucose, it's just you're only doing it for 30 seconds or a minute. Right. And so the fact that your, your workout, when you lift weights is mostly rest, is if you think about if you do like if you stretch out like a 15, maybe 15 reps takes you a minute or a minute, 10 seconds or something like that. But you're probably resting for at least that in between. And if you're trying to get strong, you should be resting a lot more than that. So for strength, and probably for muscle mass, you probably want to be resting three, four or five minutes. And so in a workout like that, it's the Yeah, you're it's a higher rate of glucose burning, but the bigger muscles resting. Right, so the the thing with the zone two is that zone two is bringing you the real definition of zone two is that your fast twitch muscle fibres are generating lactate at just beyond the threshold that your slow twitch muscle fibres are able to consume it at. So if you're in Zone One, you don't see your lactate rise in your blood. Because all the lactate made by your fast twitch muscle fibres is consumed by your slow twitch muscle fibres. But when you start going above that threshold, this the lactate will reach the blood and your lactate starts going up. So that's the real difference. That's like the biochemical definition of being in zone two. So you're clearly burning carbs. If you're generating lactate, that's, I mean, you are you're burning carbs before in Zone One because you're making lactate that's being consumed by the slow twitch fibres. So you're clearly burning. Even though even though if you measured all the fuel utilisation, it would probably be more fatty acids and glucose. It's still glucose and it's being kept at that constant level for an hour. And so it's that duration that makes the total glycogen burned greater, right.

And when you look at from a longevity perspective, what do you how do you apportion your workouts across a week? What are you looking at in terms of Zone Two lifting? Do you do any high intensity work?

Yeah, my workouts are basically three resistance exercise workouts and one zone to jog. My resistance workouts are basically one lower body, one upper body focused on horizontal and vertical movements and one upper body focused on transverse plane rotational exercises. And in the lower body workout, I have a set of right now I'm doing high intensity intervals with five pound ankle weights on each ankle doing 180 degree turning squat jumps. And this is a mainly picked it because I'm hoping that next this coming winter, it'll help me master the skill of doing 180s off jumps. But in the meantime, it provides some it's like it's sufficiently fatiguing and a squat with no weight, because I'm jumping. So I think it's sufficiently fatiguing in the right amount of time that it's got a hypertrophy stimulus. And it's also high intensity interval. And I and I'm going to measure start measuring my heart rate because I think the one thing that I'm missing from my workout is reaching maximum heart rate once a week, but I think maybe I do do that in this high intensity workout. So I'm gonna be measuring my heart rate because if I can, so I listened to an interview between Andy Galpin and and Haberman and Galpin was saying that he would recommend each person reach maximum heart rate once a week. And that if you're, if you're doing like an all out sprint for duration, you could probably do it if it's like a three minute sprint. But if you broke it up into sets, you would probably have to do five or six minutes of work per week to get there. And then we'd have to be like all out sprint, 20 seconds. 20 seconds off and then like do it. Keep doing that until you hit your maximum Alright, so I think I might hit that, during that that workout. I don't I mean, I'm not really like planning out longevity, I'm, I'm more sort of like, trying to hit all my particular goals. You know, but from a longevity perspective, one thing that I think would be valuable would be I was talking to, I was talking to a client, who was asking me questions about this. And he, he said he hates working out. But he's very focused on his deadlift PR. And I was talking about some neck exercises that I do that are like more like physical therapy. And he's like, Well, yeah, like I like what I've been, I've been noticing now is that, like, if I want to look to the right, I have to, like, turn my torso to do it. And I think that's pretty common. Like, I would think from a longevity healthspan perspective, you would want to be able to look both ways without without having to use your chest.

Yeah, it's interesting observation in older people that just actually is that they go. As opposed to like this right? Is is interesting. However.

That's only one example. I mean, like how many old people don't know that are getting like steroid injections for their back or whatever, which is, which is 100% exclusively because of their decades of poor movement patterns.

True, I want to pick up on something you said there. Sorry, on the zone on the hitting the maximum intensity. That is something I interviewed Andy Galpin actually, and it is certainly something that I've played with, and you're right, you to actually get to maximum heart rate, it is difficult to do without repeated sets, it sounds like what you're doing is so hard that you would be but I found that in less you do that kind of one to one ratio of work to rest recovery. It's very, very difficult. If you're doing like a 22nd, Sprint, and then you do say 40 seconds of recovery. For example, when you go again, I'll find that all fatigue overall on the workout on say, the 10 sets of Sprint's or whatever, but I can't reach maximum heart rate, you have to really condense that recovery time in order to get there.

Yeah, well, I just started measuring my heart rate during it yesterday, and I haven't looked at the data yet. So I I'll probably try to modify the protocol to try to make it hit maximum heart rate, because I'd rather not add another thing if I can make that thing. achieve that one exercise achieved three goals.

And you're doing the jumps for what was it skiing or snowboarding? Or?

Yeah, so Well, I mean, I don't think it's only beneficial in this context. But But I, it was designed with the goal in mind of being able to snowboard off jumps in a terrain park and do 180s off them, which is which is which involves a lot of skills, because you also have to land and switch, which is like the opposite footing of where you usually are and things like that. But

have you read no country by Steven Kotler? No. Really, definitely worth a read on that. What is it? No country,

no country,

no country, g n A R, and he was specifically as part of that was like ageing and the brain and things but the things that he learned to do in terms of those jumps and 360 degree drums, actually, at a later stage, in his 50s is phenomenal during COVID. And what he showed and about flow states and how he's done it, I think that that would really interest you if you're if you're playing with that. Yeah, really good. Okay, so going back to nutrition then the other thing I want to talk to you about was omega three, six status. So any you talk about what are your thoughts around? How can we optimise for this because I think it is quite a difficult thing. And particularly in a modern modern day diet. I think eating

one or two pieces of fatty fish a week would probably be the simplest thing.

And that's it. No Omega three supplements?

No. I mean, largely No. But if you don't eat fish, I mean, yeah, you got to look at the needs of the whole diet, right. So if one thing you want to think about is fat soluble vitamins, for example, cod liver oil has omega three fatty acids, it's got vitamins A and D. And so you need to think about like do I need vitamins A and D and so on because you're not really going to get much vitamin A and D from from fish you'll get fatty fish has a little bit of vitamin D but not not really any vitamin A. And so you got to think about like Well, usually, vitamin D would be the major the major source would be the sun and vitamin A the major source would be liver and omega three fatty acids a major source would be fish, you know, so if you're missing all three things and maybe you want to take other oil and then high dose fish oil, it has some pharmacological benefits but I don't think that has anything at all to do with nutrition just happens to be a nutrient but um, you know for you can lower triglycerides with like five six grammes, EPA, but that's getting EPA at a way higher level then would be traditional for most people, with the exception of the sea coast dwelling Arctic peoples, but they have totally different genetics than everyone else in the world. So then, then also like there's, there's evidence for treating psychiatric problems with high dose EPA as well. But I think that's, I would also regard that as a pharmaceutical venture. So I think that from a nutritional standpoint, basic needs are two or 300 milligrammes of EPA and DHA with a bias towards DHA. And you're gonna get that if you eat like two pieces of salmon a week, if you take cod liver oil, it'd be an alternative way of getting it. I think for breastfeeding, you might want to go a little higher. So there is there's the problem is there's not that much research about it. But the DHA content of breast milk is very dependent on the maternal DHA intake. And there is evidence that if you get 1.2 grammes of EPA and DHA combined from cod liver oil, which depends on which cod liver oil you're looking at, but that that would often be like a teaspoon, then you increase the IQ of the child by the age of four, although it fades away by the age of seven. And I think that's but there's probably I mean, my view is, there's probably something that's very positively hardwired in the brain, if you've increased the IQ by age four. I think the reason the effect fades away when it's followed up to seven years is because there's so many cultural and other like learning effects on IQ, that they start to overshadow the basic biological effect before the child went to school. My suspicion is that there's something very good in the brain, when you were able to see like that there's something very good that's permanent in the brain, when you're able to see the IQ effect that for, like, it might not be IQ, that you see the effect that seven, but there might be there might be measurable benefits at the age of 65. For the person whose brain was adequately loaded with DHA during development,

which is saying I remember her name. Now, she wrote nutritious minds and had done some research on this. And it was interesting her look at she was looking at the processing speed of children in the classroom. And if they were replete in Omega three, the difference in a child's ability to listen to the question, understand it and formulate a response was I think, like three times faster or something than a child who was not really in Omega three, who would still be kind of listening and trying to figure out what was going on. But in her research, she found that the complementary cofactors of eating oily fish was superior to taking anything in supplement form, which is fine line, but what you're saying as well, right? When we look at something like cod liver oil, yeah,

I haven't read that book. But that sounds like it's based on observational correlations, in which case, I would say that, that also might have to have confounders related to the choices of the parents, other other than the food choices. And I might be wrong. But study, I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the only like large scale human intervention trial is the cod liver oil one with the although maybe she was talking about the same study that I am,

maybe maybe she was looking at more of actual eating fish and how that was superior.

So I don't, or I don't know, I'd have to read the book. I mean, from what from my memory of what I've seen in the literature. Like, I think that the only randomised controlled trial of omega threes on kids IQ is the is the cod liver oil during during breastfeeding study, I think. And so that's why I'm just I'm just guessing. And I might be wrong, but I'm just guessing that that sounds like it's like who is eating more fish? And what how is there? Do you remember? Do

you remember? Remember, it was a while back actually that I interviewed her? I could dig it out? I'll find it and have a look at it.

I mean, I wish that with what I said before, where the diet of the children is going to be another thing that is going to potentially overshadow what the mother was doing when she was breastfeeding. That'd be another another reason that you might that the breastfeeding effect might subside by the time that the child's been in school a couple years

and they've been eating a different diet. The other thing I want to talk to you about before you go was methylation and supporting adequate methylation in the body. I think you have actually a very good handout on MTHFR optimization. Can you share a little bit about that and how haber can support it.

Yeah. methylation is a process in your body that is needed for many hundreds of things. But some of the highlights are, it's needed to make creatine which makes you strong. And as ever, a lot of people know that. But a lot of people don't know that creatine is also important for your digestion and your eyesight and your reproductive fertility and all kinds of things like that. It makes phosphatidylcholine, which is important for your liver health and your gallbladder health as well as many other things. The choline synthesis can also increase acetylcholine, which is good for your memory and attention and is good for your muscular power, as well as having a calming effect in the parasympathetic nervous system. It's important for clearing away histamine, which is important for reducing anxiety as well as stomach acid problems and allergy type symptoms. It's important for metabolising dopamine in a way that makes you more mentally flexible, and therefore less ruminating and less stuck on things and is probably helpful in OCD, and is probably helpful in certain subtypes of anxiety and depression. And, and then it's just doing many, many hundreds of things. And so, methylation requires a lot of nutrients. Some of the key star players are fully B, 12, and choline. But really, it's dependent on the rest of the B vitamins, a bunch of minerals and your energy metabolism.

And you have a good I think, download Dhoni on substack. If people want to find out more,

yeah, let's see the easiest way to get it. I mean, it's I got a, if you just search start here for MTHFR and methylation, that's probably the best way to do it. So if I go to let's see, I go to Chris, Master John, PhD comm Chris, Master, John phd.substack.com. If I just type in MTHFR pops up, start here for MTHFR methylation, that's a free PDF.

Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes. Anything else that people should be thinking about? I think you have recently talked about reversing greying hair. But

yeah, well, I mean, I think the gist of what I put out is that the research basis is, is pretty horrible. And that's, I think that's because your hair and your, and, you know, to, to large extent your skin as well, but especially your hair is functionally useless peacocking. And so you're putting out your hair to advertise the resources that you can waste on looking good. And as a result of that, it's a general reflection of the state of your energy metabolism. If you're in a state of energetic abundance, you're gonna have great hair. And, and I think that that the reason that the kind of alternative treatments for reversing hair greying research is so horrible is because everyone's different, and probably has their own limiting factors to their energy metabolism. And you can take something that's common, like hypothyroidism, or obesity. But even then, and this is a much broader topic. I guess if there's one thing that I wanted to add in this is a very immersed in unravelling this right now. So every person on average has one, two, maybe three rare genes that are genes for genetic diseases that are too rare to be accurately tested by things like 23andme, and ancestry, and can only be looked at with whole genome sequencing. And generally speaking, having carrier status for one of these hundreds of genetic diseases, has gives you 50% of the defect that someone who was homozygous for them would. So these are diseases where they'd be like debilitating or fatal in early childhood or infancy in severe cases. And so most of us are walking around with one, two or three of these at a 50% level. And the way medicine looks at it is to say, Well, you're a carrier, you're not like the reason you're called the carrier is because you carry the potential to have that disease it can pass on to someone else, you don't have it. But but everything in medicine and everything and medical diagnosis is a reality distortion filter, that is meant to use as a model for what medicine is trying to do, which is filter the information to make it more usable to their purpose, which is decide to categorise you into which drugs you should be on. And so medicine can say. And I mean it's broader than that then that might come across Little disparaging, which is kind of half intentional. Yes, doctors do more than just put people on pills. But it's still the case that what they're trying to do with medical diagnosis is triage, what belongs where and what, what effort should be put on what, for the sake of a efficiency, and if you talk to, like, if you talk to them about it, and I'm not sure how much this is a genuine concern versus like a meme that the, that the insurance companies invented. But a lot of doctors are concerned about over testing because they think it, you'll just get false positives for things that don't matter that much and create anxiety for the patients. And I think this is a really weird point of view, because you only will do that if you tell the patient in a way that makes them anxious. Information could could be empowering, right. And so that's why I think this whole idea might be a scam that the health insurance companies came up with. And it just like sounded good enough to doctors to like, take the lead in believing it. Because if they can limit what gets tested, they don't have to pay for it. So if you can, if you can say like whole genome sequencing is, is frivolous, and there was no diagnostic basis for the pay for it, then that's 400 bucks, that you don't have to pay for as an insurance company, which added at a billions of people, and that's a lot of money. So anyway, the medical paradigm is very much it's not really designed on like, the premise of like, how do I optimise your biochemistry to make you healthier? It's, it's designed on this? How do I decide whether you are a justifiable treatment case, given the medications that I can give you and what your insurance is willing to pay for? Right? Because at the end of the day, like most of their justification is, like how often is a doctor justifying to an ethical board about their decisions versus justifying to an insurance company. It's like 99.9, and then and then and then and then percent, they're justifying to the insurance company, right, which means that medical definitions are not about you optimising your health they're about, they're about the insurance companies dictating to doctors what they're able to get away with, you know, so that's the main, but to the medical, the medical diagnosis of these diseases is, is pigeon holed into something where like, we can define a very strict number of people that should get treated in this way. The reality is that if you're a carrier that has a 50% effect on your biochemistry in that area, and quite often these are nutritionally actionable things. And so it's, I'm in the process of of categorising 1800 of these according to what the impact would have on their nutrition, right now, I would estimate that probably about 30% of people have things of this nature that would impact what macronutrients they can best tolerate. And maybe 20, or 30%, have significant limiting factors and their metabolism as a result of these call for certain nutrients, supplements. And so if your energy metabolism is sapped by 20%, you probably wouldn't have a neurological disorder, although you might and you, but you and you probably you may well have neurological symptoms, like how many people have benign for circulation syndrome, which means benign and syndrome both mean I can't figure it out to go home. And so it's like annoying that your eyes twitching all the time. But it's benign fasciculations in order to deal with it. Right. So it's like, I would say the number of people who have unacknowledged neurological problems is really high. Like the number of people who are like, Dr. My, my arms twitching like I don't know why they're like, I don't know why either. Something about it. Like that. None of those that number of people I think is extremely high.

Extremely high and frustrating for people. Right? Because, yeah,

kind of 40 50% of people

face unexplained things. Yeah. Which,

which is also the the rate of like paragraphing is also very high, right? And so I'm not so I'm not I'm kind of torn about like, what is the threshold of age at which you can say greying hair is normal. I mean, certainly, it's hard to say like, you know, certainly like in biblical times, it was it was considered normal to be grey haired when you were old, which meant you were wise. You know, but it's but in biblical times, people were also like in, in a stressful hierarchical societies that were eating grains mostly right. So, it's, it's tough to say like, like, if you go back as far as there's a written record and you and you are in a very hierarchical, kind of like not the best, probably not optimised, optimised nutrition era, so it's very hard to get my for me to wrap my head around. Like is it normal for 70 year like this is a 70 year old person who's in absolutely peak health Are they supposed to have grey hair? I don't know. I'm like, I'm agnostic on it. But I think it was like, totally wrong that I got my first grey hair when I was like 25.

I think that have you got siblings? Did they get a grey hair early?

I don't have any siblings. But my mom got her first grey hair when she was 14.

Wow. So so this is interesting, because I got my first grey hair probably a year ago. And I'm 40 a year or two ago. So it was definitely after COVID and I'm 47 going up to 48. Right. And yet, my sister got her first grey hair at 23 That's, that's a big difference.

Yeah, lucid living through COVID. And in New York made my hair fall up.

Though you're gonna tell me that's why I got grey hair. I was doing well. I was on track for 70 until COVID hit.

I'm sure a lot of people like I don't think COVID lockdowns is like as bad as being president united states, but certainly is a struggle. So, yeah, anyway, to sort of wrap this up to the point. I think that the reason you're never going to find like, oh, folate supplementation cures everyone's grey hair, is because there's probably a lot of people whose grey hair is driven by the fact that they need more folate than the average person, but it's highly unique to them. And it's not as a result of common polymorphisms that people are getting in these. I think a lot of the what people are getting their genetics is like total noise. And there's like, yes, there's Yeah, you can get someone to test 500,000 of your 6 million polymorphisms and then give your like 100 pages of reports on this one up 5% That went down 5%, whatever. And like, yes, it's impacting you. But if everyone's walking around with like three things that are half of what would kill or maim an infant, I think that those three things are probably a lot more likely to be limiting bottlenecks in their metabolism. And so I think there's just a lot of inter individual variation, where it's just like one person's grey haircare is probably 500 milligrammes of vitamin A Day, but it's not going to work for their friend.

Yeah, none of that makes sense. I was, funnily enough, a bit folate deficient. When I found out I was getting the grey. I mean, what about thinning of hair? Because you make an interesting point, if if lustrous hair is identifying have to do with energy metabolism, right? But then you also have people like, you can look at kit if I look at my kids, right? My daughter has beautiful, abundant hair. She might have a friend, for example, who has much thinner hair, right, some of that's natural. That's not to do, presumably at that age. Otherwise, we could say what if we make everybody really repeating certain nutrients? We're all going to have this incredible

hair. Yeah, I mean, not all rich guys drive a Lambo. Right. I mean, it's it's very analogous. The, the status. So there's there's genetic variation in what your body would choose to use as a status symbol. I mean, ultimate.

Oh, I see. Okay. Oh, so it's effectively displaying a former status symbol? Yeah.

I mean, so, like, in the, I mean, in part of slang, we say, someone's peacocking if they're like, boasting, or like, you know, kind of like, doing excessive display of status or whatever, which is taken from the peacock. Which, which, you know, the male peacock has, like this. Ridiculous, you know, pimped out beautiful that but then, and, and so, in reality, like, all of all animals are doing this in some way. It's just the Peacock has its particular niche that it's decided what, right like not, I mean, it's, it's very, it's sort of, like, there's, there's that that style of the pimp, with the purple fur coat. And, like, not all people who have a lot of status dress like that. But that's, that's a particular niche, of what type of, you know, you're combining I have high status with, this is what my status is right? In the male peacock is combining. I have high status, and I'm a male peacock. And so this is a particular niche of, of how they display status. And, you know, in humans, humans do this more through, like, conscious behaviour than anything else. Right, like, because our, our status in the society that we built as, as sort of like, built on this natural biological thing that's based mostly on biological energy, and has become about societal energy and societal status. And so a lot of a lot of like, the pressure on our genetics has probably, I would say it's part Probably the case that as humans have become more hierarchical, the pressure to maintain biological forms of energetic status has probably been diminished a lot. Because now you get, like, now you can drive a Lambo or get the PIN code or like, wear the the, you know, expensive suit instead of the cheap one or, you know, when it really depends on

that'd be true of hair loss as well then, like, would that would hair loss be driven in any way by insufficiency? Nutritionally? Or is it just because you read something that's Talks about Fathers right that if is it though, the grandfather or something, then the grandsons are more likely to lose their hair early? And I don't know if there's any truth to that?

It's an interesting question. I haven't done a deep dive into the, into the, like, evolutionary genetics of, of hair loss, but I but it would certainly fit in with what I'm saying that, that those jeans have been allowed to perpetuate. Because if you can prove your status through other means. I mean, like how many how many bald, short guys have high status and really hot wives? Right? Like, it's, that's why they're proving their status some other way. Right? And all of the genetics is all about the fertility, right? So if you can, if you can win the hot wife and have her knockout seven kids, be short, bald, ugly, and have a lot of money. Like that's a that's an alternative path to fertility. Yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's true. It's not necessarily genetically superior. Um, it's really interesting, cuz when I interviewed Emily Fletcher, the founder of Ziva meditation, she has reversed greying hair with meditation, which is kind of I guess, in linking in with the stress and the output and everything.

So stress, stress is a signal of energy demand, right? That stress is saying, well hold up, like, I don't know if we can spend this energy on the hair. Because right now we've got serious issues at hand. Right. So the brain is calculating a budget based on long term and short term energy stores based on insulin and leptin, which are signalling how much body fat Do you have? Have you eaten? And saying, like the prop, like, the long term energy store is your body fat, which is basically saying, how, you know, what's the what's sort of like the long term likelihood that I will have enough food six months from now versus today, right? Whether you've eaten today tells your brain like right now we have enough energy, but your body fat is signalling, like if I'm not underweight, I probably have had energy the last six months, I'll probably still have energy the next six months. And then stress and inflammation are signalling. I would categorise inflammation as a subcategory of stress. So psychosocial, emotional stress is largely signalled through the fight or flight response. And infectious stress is largely signalled to the inflammatory front. But both of those things are signalling acute requirements of energy that are more important in the short term. And that's just impacting your budget, in the same way that your salary might have stayed the same. But if all the sudden, you had to pay for a family member who had a major surgery and didn't have their insurance covered, or something like that, you would probably alter your spending habits on the basis that something came up. And so I think that's the stress effect. And what I was saying before is not that the genetic have decided that it's not important, it's just that the pressure for everyone to be able to do all the same types of things that we would want, I think has gotten dimmed. And so there's probably a more, there are probably more people now than there were 10,000 years ago, who have less of a genetic drive to use their energy status to display in their hair, as a result of being able to display it in other ways. But that doesn't mean that the basic biological drive is gone from anyone, and, or that it is not just as strong as it ever was, in a lot of people.

Interesting is a bit a little bit like the jaw line with kind of masculinity and women, I think, you know, often will find that men with a really solid jawline more attractive, right? Because that's a sign of fertility and strength, and then that's gonna pass on to their, their children.

Yeah. Although I think that hair is probably more like short term malleable. You know, like you were saying if you can reverse, it would probably be easier to reverse hair greying than it would be the reverse a narrow jawline, but

yeah, I guess maybe you'd have to do some more lifting. You give me some things to do now, Chris. I'm definitely doing a character use challenge for the next five days. And I'm going to measure it with a CGM and see what happens. I'm definitely going to measure Take more and reduce these few Gray's that have popped off and see what happens. And then maybe you're so interesting where we can do a party. Cool. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, thank you. Where can I think we did link but say again? Where can people find you because you have phenomenal content.

Chris master John phd.substack.com. This is where you can find me.

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