#118 Chris Masterjohn PhD on Avoiding Nutrient Deficiencies and Structuring a Robust Diet

Chris Masterjohn (0:00)

You know, think of your diet as an economic portfolio of nutrients. That's essentially what it is.

If you diversify, then you don't have to micromanage. But the less you diversify, the more you have to micromanage to compensate for that. The diversification across animal and plant foods, across organ meats and muscle meats, across different types of plant foods, all those axes of diversification are things that make the network of your diet more robust to errors, whether they're your mental errors or the physiological errors in your liver, whatever errors those are, that diversification makes your diet robust to them.

Siim Land (0:39)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:41)

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Siim Land (0:47)

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Siim Land (0:53)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Chris Masterjohn. Chris has a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and is currently an independent researcher. He has a website, chrismasterjohnphd.com, where he creates content and courses about optimizing nutrition.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Masterjohn (1:12)

Thank you so much, Sam. It's great to be here.

Siim Land (1:13)

Yeah, and I've been looking forward to having a podcast with you after hearing some good things from other researchers about you, so it's gonna be good. I'm excited to talk.

But maybe let's start off, what got you into the field of nutritional sciences?

Chris Masterjohn (1:30)

Yeah, it really starts back when I was a teenager.

My mother had fibromyalgia, which was keeping her in pain every night. And often I didn't sleep when I was a teenager because she was moaning in pain and was in so much pain that it was keeping me up. And I watched her get into macrobiotics, yoga, Tai Chi, alternative medicine, herbs, and all kinds of things like that. I don't know exactly what was the key ingredient, but she recovered dramatically to the point where she was no longer in pain every night.

And so that was an early experience that gave me an appreciation for the power of diet and nutrition and lifestyle, although that kind of got me in trouble. So I started exploring a lot for my own health. And that took me through the Zone Diet, which is a fairly higher protein diet, low-ish carb, not by today's standards though, and then into veganism. And as a vegan, my health really fell apart. So I thought I was getting into veganism to save the animals, to save the earth and to save my own health.

But what happened to my health at least was not at all what I was expecting. So my teeth fell apart. I went to the dentist and found out that I needed two root canals, I had over a dozen cavities.

My mental health fell apart. So I had anxiety disorders that began in my early teens. But in my teens, they were really just a nuisance. When I was vegan, they got 10 times worse to the point where they were really interfering with my life. So as an example of what a night might be, I would examine my foods, expecting them to be poisoned or drugged. And I would just inspect the seals and not find any evidence of that and just keep inspecting it and inspecting it and inspecting it until I accidentally caused a tear in the seal or something that I would then convince myself had been there all along. And then I would throw the food across the room in anger, both because it was poisoned or drugged and also because I was angry at myself for not being able to eat anything. And during that time, I don't even remember this very well. Like I do have vague memories of it, but I was talking to my mom recently and she said that there were like seven times where she brought me to the emergency room when I was in the peak of the panic attack. And I very vaguely remember one of those times. So I think even my memory was significantly impacted during that time.

And there were a couple turning points in the story. So the sort of intellectual turning point for me was finding out about the work of Weston Price. He was a dental researcher for what became the American Dental Association in the early part of the 20th century. And in the late 1920s, early 1930s, he became a pioneer of nutritional anthropology. He was trying to find out how everyone in America, the nutrition was so bad at that time that everyone had tooth decay. So he was going out trying to find people who didn't have tooth decay. And he heard that there were populations that had not been exposed to modern foods who were fairly isolated in all different parts of the world who were immune to tooth decay. And so he went off to find them. And he wrote a book called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration with his findings.