#372 Glycine and Protein for Longevity; Genetic Bottlenecks and MTHFR - Chris Masterjohn PhD

Chris Masterjohn (0:00)

If you're doing everything right, and you're checking all the boxes, understanding what are the one, two, three, or four individual bottlenecks in your metabolism is probably going to be a lot more informative about to how you can get an extra 10 years of high quality life.

Siim Land (0:15)

Chris, welcome back to the show.

Chris Masterjohn (0:17)

Thanks, Siim, great to be here.

Siim Land (0:19)

Yeah, you've been on the podcast for several times, and I always like to refer to you or resort back to you in terms of the finest details and nitty gritty of all the micronutrients and different metabolic pathways because I think you're one of the best people out there who just obviously share such good information about these topics in such a more simplistically understandable way, but also going in all the detail and all the in-depth with all these related metabolic pathways and different kinds of nutrients. So in this episode, I wanted to talk about mostly what's the role of different kinds of micronutrients and vitamins and minerals for longevity because usually people talk about, okay, what foods do I eat? What's the macros and what's the food groups?

Is it vegan? Is it keto? Is it carnivore? Is it paleo?

But I want to talk about what's the actual micronutrients and different kinds of other compounds that are more under underlying the macronutrients, if that makes sense.

Chris Masterjohn (1:28)

Yeah, well, I'm the detailed guy.

Siim Land (1:31)

Yeah. And I think my audience is also very familiar with the idea behind glycine and methionine. And protein is probably the biggest thing that comes up when people talk about food and longevity, so that you need to restrict your protein, eat a low protein diet, because if you eat too much protein, it makes you grow too fast and gives you cancer or those kinds of things. So it's actually many layers deeper than that. Obviously, there's the amino acids that play different roles in that longevity process.

So yeah, maybe you can start with what's the role of these main amino acids in this, like the glycine and methionine.

Chris Masterjohn (2:13)

Well, I think the first thing that you need to think about is you need to get into a little bit more granular detail when you're talking about what you mean by longevity. I think one of the biggest problems in the longevity space is that people focus on longevity at the expense of focusing on what not to die of. And you wind up looking at experiments in worms, or if you're lucky, rodents, maybe monkeys sometimes, where the reality is not like the human reality at all. And I'm not talking about that a monkey is not a human, or a mouse isn't a human, or a worm isn't a human. I'm talking about the fact that in animal experiments, you have highly controlled conditions where they are not likely to die of the things that humans are likely to die of. So if you trace, if you look at like number one, what are the proportions of causes of death? And number two, in what sequence do they occur in?

Most people are gonna die of heart disease or cancer, but if you aren't doing what you need to protect yourself against a physical injury when you're young, there's no point in really optimizing for protection against cancer. At this point, you're lucky, like you are very well-endowed genetically or very well-supported nutritionally and or just lucky if you get to die of cancer because that means that you passed through heart disease. Like if you look at what was the leading cause of death over time, it was tuberculosis in the 19th century, and then it became heart disease because people lived long enough to get that. And as emergency medicine became better at treating heart attacks in the moment, it became cancer because having a heart attack was not necessarily a death sentence. And when you're thinking about that, in order to get to dying of natural causes where you might be concerned with this generic longevity factor type of thing, that you would be studying in animal experiments, you have to make your way through not dying of physical injury, not dying of diabetes, not dying of respiratory infections, not dying of heart disease, not dying of cancer, et cetera. And most of us are not even getting there. So if you're looking at something like protein, you want to be thinking first and foremost what prevents sarcopenia and what prevents osteopenia and osteoporosis. Because if you fall and fracture your hip when you're in your 60s, you're lucky if you make it past the year, according to the longitudinal studies. There's a very high mortality rate from just that, right? So it's almost like, why are we even thinking of someone presented an abstract at a conference in a mouse study about methionine and glycine balance before we're thinking of what's the right amount of muscle mass that we want to have? What's the right amount of bone mass that we want to have? And what's the effect of protein on that, right? So I would say first and foremost, you want a high enough protein intake to maintain high quality bone mass and muscle mass. And you really have to think about this starting young because peak bone mass is age 25 to 30, and it's all downhill from there. Now, it's not necessarily all downhill at an individual level because you can come in with lower than normal bone mass and you can fix your diet and fix your training program and you can increase it. But at a population level, you hit peak bone mass at 25 or 30, and then it's just downhill from there. That means that you want to be thinking about this when you're 20 years old, so that you can prepare yourself to have the highest peak muscle and bone mass that you can have when you're 25 and the slowest descent after that basically.