Chris Masterjohn, Ph.D.: Navigating the many pathways to health and disease - NAD and sirtuins, methylation, MTHFR and COMT, choline deficiency and NAFLD, TMAO, creatine, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So, all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now, the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you can trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time, and that is to create a subscriber support model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest.
If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member and support us at whatever level works for you. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon, such as the downloadable transcripts for each episode. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal, and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free, and have them pass savings on to you.
Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Chris Masterjohn. I've known Chris for probably about six or seven years. He's an incredibly bright guy, and we've been going back and forth over the past several months just trying to figure out a date when we could get together, and I knew this was gonna be an exciting episode. I also want to preface this by saying this may rank among one of the more technical episodes that we've done, and that's probably saying a lot given our podcast. So this is definitely one where the show notes are going to be helpful. So Chris earned his PhD about 10 years ago in nutrition science, and after a brief stint as an academic, he has largely devoted himself to creating just a vast wealth of information for people to help them understand so many aspects of nutrition. I have learned so much from Chris over the years, and I must say I probably learned more on this podcast than I learn on many of the podcasts that I host, although I do like to learn something on every podcast and think that I do. What do we talk about? Well, we talk about a ton of stuff. We kick this episode off by going deep on choline. Choline deficiency is something that, as Chris explains, predisposes us to a whole bunch of bad stuff, not the least of which is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which, if you've heard me rant on this before, you realize is an enormous epidemic and is, in fact, on pace to become the leading cause of liver transplant in the United States. Of course, that leads us into a lengthy discussion of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and also a detailed discussion about the different types of fats and how they may predispose us to different types of illnesses. We also get into a topic that I get asked about all the time, and I have purposely not gone into this in detail because I've known that I want to have Chris on, and I want to discuss this with Chris. And those are the enzymes MTHFR and COMT. I get asked tons of questions about these, and many of you ask questions about methylation. They're great questions, and I think it's safe to say virtually every question you have on the topic of MTHFR, methylation will be addressed here. We save the best for last. And again, many of you have asked this question, Peter, what is your view on nicotinamide riboside or NMN or NAD, Sirtuin activators, all of these things? Now, we talked about this stuff in pretty good detail with David Sinclair on one of the previous episodes. We go a little deeper here, and in particular, that's because since the episode with David Sinclair, there has been a little bit more research that's been published, and we go really deep on some of those papers. So I would say that by the time you're done with this episode, you will have as much information as one could say is available on the use of supplemental products that contain NR or NMN. So obviously the two of these that are most commercially known are Elysium's Basis or Chromadex's True Niagen. Again, I wanna just say this episode is a little more technical than most of our episodes, and again, I acknowledge the irony of that statement. That means it's really technical. The show notes will be helpful. There may be parts of this that are more interesting to you than others, although personally, I found every minute of this to be like drinking from a fire hose and truly learning this stuff. You can certainly find out more about Chris and his work on his site, which is chrismasterjohnphd.com, and that's basically spelt as you would expect it to be. John is J-O-H-N. Chris is very active on social media, loves to interact with people. So if you haven't heard about Chris prior to this episode, I suspect you'll become a fan of his going forward. So I hope you'll enjoy my interview with Chris Masterjohn.