Mastering Nutrition – Details, episodes & analysis

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Mastering Nutrition

Chris Masterjohn, PhD

Health & Fitness

Frequency: 1 episode/5d. Total Eps: 703

Welcome to the Mastering Nutrition podcast. Mastering Nutrition is hosted by Chris Masterjohn, a nutrition scientist focused on optimizing mitochondrial health, and founder of BioOptHealth, a program that uses whole genome sequencing, a comprehensive suite of biochemical data, cutting-edge research and deep scientific insights to optimize each person's metabolism by finding their own unique unlocks. He received his PhD in Nutritional Sciences from University of Connecticut at Storrs in 2012, served as a postdoctoral research associate in the Comparative Biosciences department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's College of Veterinary Medicine from 2012-2014, served as Assistant Professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College from 2014-2017, and now works independently in science research and education.

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https://www.mito.me/
1371 shares
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass
480 shares
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/q&a
406 shares

https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/about
78 shares
https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/qanda
74 shares
https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/p/recording-and-transcript-of-the-august
22 shares

https://www.youtube.com/user/74jessicarose
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehfdd1eH4g4
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhgGGbdw4zE&t=8621s
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Depression Starts In Your Mitochondria

Monday, December 15, 2025 • Duration 06:47

You could be one metabolic bottleneck away from feeling amazing.

Mitome is the first at-home test that measures your cellular energy directly and gives you a personalized roadmap to optimize energy, slow aging, and protect against disease.

Find it at mito.me

This is not medical advice and is for educational purposes only.

Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is the Founder and Scientific Director of the mitochondria test Mitome.

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Why Doctors Think They Can Ignore the Studies Suggesting Seed Oils Cause Heart Disease

Sunday, December 7, 2025 • Duration 02:01

This is a clip from Joe Rogan Experience JRE 2420.

Watch the full interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBn54YNnKD0

The Problem With Seed Oils and Why They Are So Controversial

Friday, December 5, 2025 • Duration 05:16

This is a clip from Joe Rogan Experience Episode 2420. You can watch the full interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBn54YNnKD0

Mitochondria: Why They Control Everything in Human Health

Thursday, December 4, 2025 • Duration 01:42:57

Mitochondria govern everything.

Watch this with the slides here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mED1_L3wZbc

Mitochondria convert your food to usable energy in the form of ATP, which is used to produce, maintain, repair, distribute, and organize everything in your body.

Abundant health right now, and preserving your health throughout the lifespan toward your longevity, all depends on your mitochondria.

In fact the best explanation for aging is that its a vicious cycle of declining mitochondrial function.

We should always be thinking of mitochondria first. SSRIs, acne treatments, and statins are given as examples. Targeting mitochondria without proper testing has its own set of problems.

This video covers the top things we should all be doing for our mitochondria and how to figure out our own mitochondria's unique needs.

This is not medical advice and is for educational purposes only.

1:20 Mitochondria govern everything because they convert food into usable energy

7:25 Mitochondrial dysfunction drives aging

10:43 Depression starts with your mitochondria

17:26 The problem with SSRIs

21:59 Acne should start with vitamin A, zinc, B5, and mitochondrial function

28:00 Cardiovascular disease starts with mitochondrial dysfunction

SSRI Withdrawal Is Mitochondrial Dysfunction

Sunday, November 23, 2025 • Duration 01:29:04

Chris Masterjohn, PhD, Founder and Scientific Director of mito.me, explains why SSRI withdrawal is mitochondrial dysfunction and what to do about it.

This is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

29 million Americans and about 5-10% of the world's population are on SSRIs, which have become the first-line treatment of depression.

These can cause sexual dysfunction and emotional blunting in up to half of people, an unclear incidence of sleep disruption, and a rare risk of suicidality, self-harm, and new-onset psychosis.

On the other hand, 20-50% of people who go off experience SSRI discontinuation syndrome.

This can involve irritability, anxiety, mood problems, crying, dread, suicidal ideation, insomnia, nightmares, excessive dreaming, lethargy, fatigue, headache, tremor, sweating, anorexia, flu-like symptoms, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, pain, numbness, tingling, feeling like something is crawling on the skin, electric shocks running through the brain or body, rushing noises, visual traces (seeing something persist when it is no longer there, or seeing moving objects leaving illusory streaks of light behind them, etc), dizziness, light-headedness, "brain zaps," vertigo, confusion, difficulty concentrating, amnesia, genital hypersensitivity, and premature ejaculation.

A closely related problem is post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), which can cause total inability to feel the penis for males or for females the genitals and nipples, loss of sexual pleasure, weak orgasms, decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, and premature ejaculation. PSSD is often associated with general anhedonia, apathy, and poor mood.

In this video, Masterjohn maintains that the reason there are no good solutions to these problems is because we have completely misunderstood the role of serotonin and SSRIs.

Serotonin's role is to help mitochondria adapt to changing demands for oxygen-based energy production.

SSRIs enhance some of the mechanisms, and interfere with others. They enter the cell and stimulate independent mechanisms of mitochondrial stress adaptation, but in doing so they turn a cyclical and rhythmic pathway into a constantly stimulated one, creating mitochondrial dependence and making mitochondria vulnerable to new-onset dysfunction upon withdrawal. Once they make it to the mitochondria itself, the SSRIs act as mitochondrial toxins.

How Lactate Alkalinizes Your Muscles

Friday, September 6, 2024 • Duration 01:34:50

For a long time, most people believed that when we exercise, our muscles make lactic acid, this acidifies the muscles, and the acidity contributes to contractile failure, fatigue, and delayed-onset muscle soreness. Some people still believe this.

You may have heard the argument against it from well-known figures like Andy Galpin, or, if you're deep into the science, you may have read the work of George Brooks.

In this lesson, we are going to cover the biochemistry of lactate production. We will see that we never make lactic acid, ever. We make lactate. Making lactate is fundamentally alkalinizing.

We will take a look at the presentation of glycolysis in the Berg and Lehninger biochemistry textbooks to see that, on the one hand, they give us everything we need to know to understand that the human body never makes lactic acid, but, on the other hand, they really do not equip us well to understand where acidity does comes from during exercise. This is because they do not consider acid-base balance important enough to completely present the proton balances of the chemical reactions.

Finally, we will cover what does cause muscular fatigue, take a look at the research on lactate supplements, and come to some conclusions about the best way to manage acidity during exercise to maximize performance.

This is part of a larger course on the biochemistry of how we derive energy from food and use it to fuel our wellness, performance, and longevity. Take the full course here:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/p/masterclass-with-masterjohn-energy

To see the slides, watch this lesson on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrpbLllsSHQ

To obtain the written version with timestamped slides for better studying, see here:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/p/how-lactate-alkalinizes-your-muscles

D-Lactate: Groundbreaking Research No One Is Talking About

Wednesday, July 31, 2024 • Duration 01:30:24

D-lactate is commonly stated to be exclusively a microbial metabolite.

This is found in assumptions within the medical literature for decades even when it was long-known to be false.

While D-lactate is indeed made by bacteria, D-lactate is also inarguably and irrefutably produced by human enzymes.

In this podcast, moreover, I will argue the following:

Microbial contribution to D-lactate in humans under normal circumstances is negligible.

I coin the term "the D-lactate shuttle" to describe a role for D-lactate that should eventually make its way into biochemistry textbooks alongside the malate-aspartate shuttle and the glycerol phosphate shuttle.

The D-lactate shuttle operates alongside these other shuttles to balance the priorities of conserving cytosolic NAD+, reducing cytosolic acidity, bypassing complex I, or generating ATP. It is uniquely useful as a shuttle when there is an absolute deficit of niacin or NAD(H).

D-lactate is an important contributor to gluconeogenesis that could account for up to 11% of it and rival an individual amino acid.

While D-lactate concentrations in human plasma are infinitesimal, when the downstream metabolism of D-lactate and L-lactate are blocked by genetic disorders, the concentrations of the two forms are similar in plasma. This contrasts wildly with the common claim that flux through D-lactate is "minuscule." Most likely D-lactate is produced in considerable quantities in liver and kidney but is rarely secreted into plasma because doing so would risk neurotoxicity.

D-lactate should be taken seriously for its potential role in Parkinson's and in neurological problems generally, for its role in diabetes, and for its extremely underappreciated roles in glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, and the respiratory chain.

Oxalate powerfully impairs D-lactate clearance, so D-lactate should be investigated as a potential link between oxalate and autism, and oxalate-lowering strategies should be seen as a way to improve D-lactate clearance and reduce its potential role in diabetes and neurological disorders.

Handling Creatine Side Effects

Friday, July 12, 2024 • Duration 02:02

In this podcast we cover elevated creatinine, insomnia, cramps constipation, water retention, hair loss, irritation and anger, lightheadedness during lifting, bloating, aggravation of restless leg syndrome, irritation of asthma, bloody noses, anxiety, headaches, heart palpitations, twitching, and fast or slow heartbeat.

The full podcast and article can be found here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/p/handling-creatine-side-effects Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is the Founder and Scientific Director of the mitochondria test Mitome. https://substack.com/profile/116592149-kin-hang-lam?utm_source=post-reactions-face

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Your Cells Are Starving For Creatine

Friday, July 12, 2024 • Duration 28:47

Creatine is like your second mitochondria. Or, the mitochondria's chief of staff. Or its co-pilot.

Your mitochondria make ATP so you can see clearly, hear accurately, digest your food, power your brain, show off your your shiny skin, lift heavy things, and perform your best at the challenges you face. They do that all with the help of creatine.

Creatine is responsible for spreading the impact of mitochondrial ATP production into the general area of the cell known as the cytosol, and into every organelle outside the mitochondria.

While it is more important in cells with high ATP requirements, variable ATP requirements, and long distances between mitochondria and the source of ATP utilization, it is still incredibly important in every cell.

There is no point in optimizing your mitochondria if you don't also optimize your creatine.

Many people may believe that the high muscle creatine stores that athletes achieve with creatine supplements are "unnatural" and something not achievable until creatine supplements were available.

Here, I argue that nothing could be further from the truth. Every muscle fiber wants to be exactly as rich in creatine as achieved with creatine supplementation.

All of your cells want to be rich in creatine. Your brain is dying to be this rich in creatine. Your muscles are starving to be this rich in creatine.

It is completely natural to be this rich in creatine, yet most of us in the modern era who don't supplement just aren't that optimized.

The creatine we require to be optimized is likely etched deep into our beings by our ancestral consumption of one to two pounds of meat per day. When red and rare, one pound can give the dose that saturates tissue stores. When white and well done, two pounds may be required.

But can we synthesize enough creatine ourselves when all the precursors in place?

Here we examine that question.

Is Whole Food Vitamin C Really Different? | Masterjohn Q&A Files #330

Monday, December 18, 2023 • Duration 23:16

Question: Is whole food vitamin C superior to natural because it is part of a tyrosinase complex?

Short Answer: Vitamin C is nearly ubiquitously distributed in plant tissues, and is never bound to any enzyme as a structural complex. Vitamin C promotes absorption of iron from plant foods, inhibits copper absorption, and de-loads copper from ceruloplasmin, which may play a role in distributing copper to tissues. Vitamin C is not capable of destroying ceruloplasmin. These functions follow directly from vitamin C as an electron donor and there is no evidence whatsoever that whole food vitamin C behaves differently in these respects than synthetic vitamin C. However, daily needs in most contexts are 2-400 milligrams of vitamin C per day, which is below the dose shown to potentially cause problems with copper. Getting this from whole foods or whole food supplements is better than using synthetic vitamin C because it avoids GMO corn and Chinese synthetics and provides a host of other beneficial constituents alongside the vitamin C.

This is a clip from a live Q&A session open to CMJ Masterpass members. In addition to this episode, you can access two other free samples using this link:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/p/questions-on-hair-trace-mineral-analysis

In that batch of free episodes you will also find the answer to this question:

Is Hair Mineral Testing Useful?
What's the Deal With Seed Oils?

If you want to become a Masterpass member so you can participate in the next live Q&A, or so you can have access to the complete recording and transcript of each Q&A session, you can save 10% off the subscription price for as long as you remain a member by using this link to sign up:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/qanda

Learn more about the Masterpass here:

Mastering Nutrition – Details, episodes & analysis

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Mastering Nutrition – Details, episodes & analysis

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