#2420 - Chris Masterjohn

Chris Masterjohn (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Hi, Chris.

SPEAKER_4 (0:13)

Good, how are you doing?

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Very nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_4 (0:15)

Nice to meet you as well.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

I have enjoyed your content online for a few years now, so it's really solid stuff. And I thought, what better day than to bring Chris in, right after everybody fucked up their diet.

SPEAKER_4 (0:25)

Yeah, that's right. Well, I just want to tell public health message that you did not get sleepy because the turkey was high in tryptophan.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Yeah, that's weird. Isn't that a weird one? That's a weird myth that's persisted for a long time.

SPEAKER_4 (0:40)

I mean, the weirdest thing is the origins of it. Apparently, it came from researchers in the... I'm sorry, not researchers, journalists in the 80s who were trying to come up with a reason to explain why everyone was tired after Thanksgiving meal. And they just looked as far as, oh, Turkey has tryptophan, which is an amino acid that is the precursor to melatonin, which is, you know, you could call it a sleeping chemical. So it makes you get tired at night. That must be why. But it turns out that A, Turkey is not that high in tryptophan, like even whey protein is higher in tryptophan than Turkey is. And then B, tryptophan doesn't make you tired.

Yeah, I dare anyone to go out and have like just a slice of turkey for breakfast and see if it knocks you out.

Joe Rogan (1:30)

It's overeating. It's like so obvious. I mean, people are eating tons of stuffing, tons of sides. They're eating so much food. You're gorging. It's a gorging day.

SPEAKER_4 (1:40)

Yeah, for sure.

Joe Rogan (1:41)

Yeah. I mean, it's not good.

SPEAKER_4 (1:44)

And if, you know, if you look at like a lion in the wild, one thing that you'll notice is that they are on the prowl when they are hungry. They're alert. Their bodies get revved up. And then they have a feast and they just fall asleep. And the reason is that we're, you know, are, and you even see this in physiology. They call the parasympathetic nervous system the rest and digest system. And that's because we are biologically wired to be alert when we need to work to get our food. And then we're wired to, you know, eat that food, feel like we've gotten our fill. We've done what we need to do. And now we can rest and take a sleep.

Joe Rogan (2:25)

Yeah, it's normal. I mean, there's a great video of these lionesses, these female lions after they've hunted and killed and ate all this food. And they just lie in there like this with these enormous bellies, just like, it's just like your uncle on the couch watching football. Just.

SPEAKER_4 (2:43)

Yeah. I, you know, and I think one. So one thing that I think we should talk about today is I've been in nutrition research for 21 years and I'm, you know, I think the crowning thesis of my work so far is that we really want to be thinking about mitochondrial function at the root of all health and disease. And so I think an interesting way to see sleep is it's like, why do we have to sleep eight hours a night? And I think with dreaming, there's obviously other things going on there. But deep sleep, the one of the primary things that's happening is you need to give your mitochondria a rest because your mitochondria are what produce all the energy that you need for, for producing everything in your body, for maintaining it, for repairing it. And for distributing it properly and for keeping it going across the lifespan. And so your mitochondria are going to essentially take a nap, take a rest. They don't go off because you die. But they really turn down the volume of the work they're doing. But then you take your metabolic rate way lower than that. And so you can build up the reserves of energy that you had used up the day before.

And so that can explain a lot of recent findings that are coming out as well because there was that recent study where they looked at sleep deprivation with creatine supplementation. And so they randomized people to either drink a placebo drink or drink 20 grams of creatine through the night. And they kept them awake all night and they had them do brain puzzle quizzes. And when the subjects were getting the 20 grams of creatine, they did way better on the brain puzzles, but they also complained about being tired a lot less. And so the conclusion is creatine is somehow acutely preventing your brain from suffering during sleep deprivation. And the rationale there is, you know, mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell or the power plant that's producing the energy. Creatine is like the power grid, and it distributes that energy throughout the cell. And so if the purpose of sleep is to restore the energy that you used up, but then you intervene by putting creatine in there, now you can keep that energy going, and you can go more hours before you need to get rest and restore that energy because you've increased your capacity to distribute it.