What Happens If You Take Too Much Creatine, A Notorious Deficiency On High-Protein Diets, How To...

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Got a smart cookie on the show today with me, my friend, Dr. Chris Masterjohn. We're gonna talk about what happens if you take too much creatine, high protein diets, and a notorious deficiency that can happen on those, how to become a nutrition ninja, and a lot more. Before we jump into this show, I should tell you that it's brought to you by one of my favorite companies on the face of the planet, Health gains. So Health Gains is.

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In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And if you always wish that you were just a little bit better at putting your propeller hat on when it comes to biochemistry and understanding more about how your body processes food like fat and carbohydrate and protein, and how the. How the insides of your cells actually work when it comes to things like nutrition and diet. Have I got a podcast guest for you today. He's been on the show before and he's. He's pretty brilliant. On his previous show, we talked about why sugar isn't as dangerous as you might think, how your genetics affect your sleep, liver toxicity, and a whole lot more. His name is Dr. Chris Masterjohn, and Chris is not only a brilliant guy with a PhD in nutritional sciences from the University of Connecticut, where he's worked as a professor. Now, were you, Professor Chris?

I was a university professor. I was assistant professor of Health and Nutrition sciences at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York, from about August 2014 to December 2016. Since January 2017, I've been all on my own.

You got fired, you mean?

No, I resigned my position in order to pursue an unemployed life.

Ah, a noble pursuit indeed. And by unemployed, do you mean being a podcaster?

That's one of the things I do. So I do consulting with clients, I have a podcast, I make educational videos, I have a blog, I do some other stuff on my website. I do multiple things that all center around trying to take my fundamental expertise, which is in nutritional science, and my fundamental personality characteristic that I think I can really do something unique with, which is my kind of rebellious streak and my out of the box thinking to take complex science and break it down either in a way that can meet people where they are so they can get something practical out of it and use it, or can just translate it into new ideas that could be used for research or development. I want to work on these multiple fronts, all with taking my out of the box thinking, comparing it up with my expertise in nutritional science and translating complex science that's just sitting there doing nothing into something really useful on these numerous fronts.

Yeah, you do a lot of that on your podcast, which sometimes I think makes smoke come out people's ears because it's so great at diving into the science. It's called Mastering Nutrition. For those of you who haven't heard of Chris's podcast before. I'll put a link to it in the show notes for this show over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

That'S BenGreenfieldFitness.com MasterJohn and John is spelled J O H N. And Chris by the way, presented along with me at the Weston A. Price conference. And so if you're listening in and you feel like heading over to the fantastic city of Minneapolis this November, I'll also put a link in the show notes where you can go and join us at the Weston A. Price conference. What are you talking about there this year, Chris, do you know?

Yeah, I'm giving a couple talks. So one is a Monday session which is like the post game where I'm talking, doing a workshop all day long on testing nutritional status. But then I'm also giving some talks on hormonal health and mental health. I think, man, I gotta look up my talks. Hormonal health is definitely one of them.

I know, it happens to me sometimes. I, I forget what I've actually proposed to talk about until a few weeks before the event when I actually have to bust bud on an eight hour flight to get a PowerPoint done. And then I go back and check.

But for I just give too many talks at that conference.

Yeah, exactly. You're all over the place though. You've been, you've been to the Weston A. Price conference. You were telling me what like 10 times or something like that?

I've been there ever since 2003 and I've been a speaker there every year since 2006.

Oh geez. So like 15 times.

I, I, I often have given two to three talks in one conference several times. Yeah, busy boy. Geez.

Well, it's a great conference. We eat a lot of lard and pork and grass fed butter there. So great place to be.

Yeah, I mean that, that Weston A. Price was really where I was born as a nutrition scientist because I.

We'Ve shared background stories before. I was a history major, before I discovered the work of Weston Price and I was a vegan, my health was falling apart. I discovered Weston Price and that was really what turned my health around. And so at that time, it was kind of early on in the Internet where it was like most people had the Internet but there was no social media, there wasn't even blogging. And so at that time a lot of people congregated on Yoohoo groups, Yahoo groups. Excuse me. And I was going to say Yoohoo.

That's Chocolate milk?

Yeah.

No, we weren't into yoohoo at that time. If we had it, we would be making chocolate milk out of raw milk from the farmer. Anyway, yeah, so that was where I found my online community and really developed a sense of where I could write things that people cared about. And so now I've come in, you know, come into my own thing. I'm spreading out. I'm. I'm all over the place now. But back in 2003, 2004, that was really my community.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a. It's a great conference. So that's. That's November 10th through the 13th. As you listen in, one of the things that, of course we do at that conference, like I mentioned, is we eat. And you had mentioned to me, Chris, one of the things that you wanted to delve into today was why people actually need to eat such an enormous amount of food. I wasn't really sure what you meant by that, if it was because you think people are broken or just the human body in general needs a copious amount of food compared to, say. It's kind of funny, last night I was reading a book to my kids that I just bought them in Iceland called Trolls, and it goes into how, like, trolls sleep so much and lay around so much, and they'll, like, wake up and take, like a week to get out of bed when they wake up. And so, contrary to popular belief, even though they're so large, trolls don't need to eat much food because they just lay around all the time and they have very slow metabolisms. I'm guessing that's not what you meant. But why do people need to eat such an enormous amount of food?

I don't think most people even realize how much we eat because we, first of all, we tend to think of our food, if we quantify it at all, in terms of caloric intake. And most of us don't really have an intuitive way to correlate what is a calorie versus, you know, what is the pile of food I'm actually looking like, that I'm actually eating, I'll look like at the end of the day. And so there was some data that came out a couple years ago showing that the average American eats 2,000 pounds of food per year, which is literally a ton. And there was an NPR article that came out about this that was basically saying, this is why we're fat. We're literally eating a ton of food a year. And actually, it's sort of silly because if you skimmed off of that, whatever the. I haven't calculated it, but if you were to look at how much weight do you gain a year in order to become obese, and then you multiply that by the amount of food and you subtracted it, you wouldn't be eating that much less than 2,000 pounds of food a year. So we all basically need to eat our body weight and food more than once a month. And that's kind of bizarre if you think about it, because where is all the mass and energy going? I mean, clearly we need to eat something because we're made out of matter. And clearly we need more energy on top of that because we do things. And even when we're at rest, our heart's beating, we're creating body heat, this and that. But it really is answered by looking at the laws of thermodynamics. So the first law of thermodynamics is energy is conserved. That doesn't really help us out because if we conserve our energy, why don't we just reuse it? Why don't we just have one heartbeat? Use that energy again for the next heartbeat. Use it again for the next heartbeat. We really shouldn't.

Perpetual motion machine.

Right? Right. Yeah. If, if the energy in the universe is fundamentally constant, why do we need. Why, why do we need to dig for oil? Why don't we just reuse everything? And so the real answer is in the second law of thermodynamics, which is often stated in numerous ways. One is to say the entropy or disorder of the universe is always increasing. But one, I think, intuitive way to describe this is the second law is looking at the fact that everything is in motion and everything, no matter how steady it looks, is buzzing around, at least at a microscopic level, with random movements here and there. And if we don't invest our own energy in an ordered and organized way to keep things in a certain place, or to put one thing here and one thing there's, then the dominant movements are random movements in any given direction. And so because of these random movements in any given direction, everything has a tendency to disperse. And if everything has a tendency to dis. Movements, then that means everything has a tendency to fall apart. Because if you look at what the human cell looks like internally, what do you say? I mean, even if you're just to look. To look at you or me, we, on the outside, we look very ordered, right? Like our eyes are fairly symmetrical at the top of our head. The nose is in the middle, the mouth's on the bottom. Like we're Very non random. But when you, when you actually take a microscope and you look at individual cells, you see this stunning complexity that makes even complex human machines. Like I've never like, look inside the inside of an apple watch or something like that. It's not going to look anywhere near as stunningly complex and intricate and organized as the inside of a human cell. And all of these things are kept in this order, despite the second law that says everything is always dispersing, randomly moving and falling apart. Everything is becoming disordered because of the fundamental laws of physics. And the second law then implies that, that if we want to keep that the two eyes at the top of our head, the nose in the middle, and the mouth at the bottom, or at a microscopic level, if we want to maintain that stunning complexity the way it is to make our cells work, we need to invest energy in number one, creating that ordered environment despite the second law. Number two, maintaining it despite the constant pressure of the second law to make it degrade. And then number three, whenever our maintenance fails, we need to come in and repair it. And so if you were to tally up the energy that we're using, we're devoting like half of our energy to just those tasks. But then the second law also says that if you take any given thing that happens in the universe, and some of it is an increase in order, it has to be compensated for by an increase in the disorder of the surroundings. Because the disorder of the whole thing, the universe, everything all has to add up to a constant increase in disorder. So every time that we create order in ourselves, or we maintain that order, or we repair it, we have to release a larger amount of heat into our environment to satisfy the increased disorder of our surroundings. And when you look at that, that explains why we take so much food. We eat our body weight in food once a month or more. And most of what we're doing with that energy is releasing it as heat. And you know, a good test is releasing it as heat into the environment.

And that's why we need to eat so much food, because we as human beings release our energy as heat.

Well, the amount of heat that we release is related directly to the amount of order that we're creating in ourselves. So you could push back on this, like, well, you know, we have to release heat because we need to maintain a constant body temperature or something like that. But we could have evolved if it weren't required by the second law. We could have evolved like better insulation so that we could use that heat more efficiently to maintain our body heat and not release it into the environment. But we can't, because.

The second law of thermodynamics requires that the total disorder of the universe always be increasing. The universe can be conceived of as any given system plus all its surroundings. If you, Ben, are considered a system, then all of the order that you're doing to maintain your stunning complexity inside yourself has to be compensated for by releasing heat into the environment to increase the disorder of the environment. So Ben plus Ben's surroundings is the universe. Ben, as long as you're releasing enough heat into your environment to compensate for what you're doing inside yourself to be healthy, then the net disorder of the universe is always increasing, satisfying the second law.

Okay. Okay, got it. So does this make us different than other creatures walking around? Are we actually eating more pound for pound than any other creature? Are you just saying this is physics? This is life in general?

Well, there's two answers to that. So in terms of the second law and the principles, this is physics. I mean, this doesn't make us different from a rock or like a rock's a bad example on an intuitive level. But any chemical reaction or any physical thing, this is always true. That whatever is going on on the inside to create order, to incorporate energy and build something complex is always compensated for on the outside. You could take the most. You could take a bacterium. And it's fundamentally the case that in a bacterium, you are constantly taking. You know, why does E. Coli need to make ATP? Well, because E. Coli is constantly creating order in itself just to keep everything. Like, you cannot have life without that complexity. And so E. Coli is also releasing heat into the environment that's disproportionate to or that is proportionate and larger than the amount of energy it's incorporating for itself. The difference is with complexity. So if you compare E. Coli to a human being, or you compare human being to many other animals, then the degree to which we are more complex, plus the degree to which we are more active, all of those things are gonna sum up to a greater need for energy.

Okay, okay, got it. So ultimately, like, what. What's the takeaway as far as the practical aspects of this? I mean, are you saying that we would gain less weight, we figured out a way to dissipate more heat, or we should figure out a way to actually better use the foodstuff that we are eating? I mean, like, where. Where does this, like, fit in practically, for a human being knowing why we need to eat so much food?

Honestly, man, this is so devastatingly impractical. But I think you, I think, you know, you're alluding to another point which is like, is it even, should we even bother learning stuff that doesn't have an immediate take home for practical purposes? And I'll tell you, man, I'm teaching this stuff now because when I was in Brooklyn College as a university professor, I was teaching people who were on the path to become registered dietitians nutritional chemistry. And I was trying to make it as practical as possible. And what I found. Now, registered dietitians, just like nutritionists or.

Whatever, pick your specialty. But this is a deeply practical degree that people are working on. Like, everyone who was in my classes was there because they wanted a career out of being a registered dietitian. What they need to know is to teach people how to eat, to teach people what to eat and when to formulate diets. All deeply practical stuff. But what I found was that I want people to understand nutrition at a level that isn't just what do I eat and when, but is now. Especially if they're responsible for formulating other people's diets and helping other people. Right? These are the real people I'm talking about. So there are people who just don't want to be fat, and that's the extent that they care about nutrition or they just want to be healthy or whatever, and they just want a handful of guidelines. But right now, I'm speaking to the people who teach, I'm speaking to the people who help other people with nutrition. I'm speaking to the people who need to understand it at the next level. And the thing is, when you only understand this is what I tell people to eat and when, how much to eat and when, and you don't understand the whys and the mechanics behind those things, then you become kind of like a. Kind of like an app, but with a less sophisticated algorithm behind it. You can only spit out certain things in response to certain things. And that's great when you're dealing with people who all conform to the average case, but when you want it, but if you want to be in a good position as someone who's helping someone else, you want to be able to understand the, the times when people don't behave normatively. Like, I want to give someone 2,000 calories, but they're behaving as if I was giving them 2100. I want to give someone 5000iu of vitamin A, but they're responding as if they need 20,000. Like when things deviate from the way they look in the textbook of what to do. The only way you can reason through and make sense of that is when you understand how things work. So the reason that I love opening any discussion like this of thermodynamics is not at all because I think that someone is going to say, well, wait a second, I'm going to do something right now with the explanation of why I eat my body weight in food once a month. It's really. Because the next thing that I talk about, no matter what it is, like, you know, you start out talking about nutrition, and someone says, well, the RDA for vitamin A is 3,000 IU a day, but you store it in your liver. Why does someone who. Why does someone who's 40 years old who has a bunch of vitamin A stored in their liver need to eat vitamin A every day? Why don't, you know, why don't they just reuse what they have? Or that comes down to the second law of thermodynamics. Or like, Ben, you're. You come from fitness, right? Why should I bother supplementing with creatine when I have creatine in my. I have a hundred. I have at least 120 grams of creatine in my body right now.

120 grams. And to put that in perspective, like normal supplementation, you'd be recommended to take like five grams a day.

Well, Ben, I took five grams this morning. So. So like. So like, Ben, look, what's the point, right? And the point is that every single day, because of the second law of thermodynamics, because creatine is designed to do something in your muscles, and yet because of the second law is going to move in random motions and do random things. It has this little vulnerability in it where it tends to bind to itself in a totally random fashion, that you didn't try to make it do that at all, but it just happened to bump into itself and it formed a ring that you don't have enzymes to take apart, and you can't use it to supply your muscular power anymore. And that's called creatinine. And now you're peeing it out because you have nothing else to do with it. And so every day, even though I have 120 grams of creatine in my body, I'm peeing out 2 to 3 grams. And if I want to make up for that, I'm going to have to take the amount that overshoots that a little bit to make sure that I'm compensating for it. Plus, I'm compensating for the fact I'm not going to 100% absorb it. And so.

The second law can explain why these things are degrading in our bodies and why we need to input creatine into our system every day. It can explain why when you see.

Creatinine, let's say you get your blood measured and you see creatinine as something that shows up as being high, does that mean that you're taking too much creatine, or does that simply mean that you're using the creatine that you're taking?

Are you talking about in your urine or your blood?

I guess I didn't realize there was a difference. Is there?

Well, so, okay, let's go through this. So you have about 120 grams of creatine in your body. If you're 70 kilograms, you can extrapolate up or down if you're. If your body weight is different. So 70 kg times 2.2 is like 154 pounds, right? So that average. Take that as the average. The average person has 120 grams of creatine, you are losing 2. Maybe you're losing 2 gram. If you have 120 grams, you're losing about 2 grams, maybe a little bit more than that in your urine. But what happens is, first it degrades to creatinine in your muscle, then it gets released into your blood, then it gets cleared by your kidneys. And in fact, it's really interesting. In the kidneys, the kidneys will cycle through sodium and potassium and all kinds of things that they absorb. They reabsorb over 99% of what they take in. And when you. In other words, your blood.

Filters through your kidneys and then your kidney, a lot of the energy that your kidneys engage in all day long is just taking sodium and potassium and other electrolytes that went into that filtrate, that fluid that filtered through the kidney, and then sucking it back up. And you look at that and you're like, why don't you just make less fluid go through so you don't have to expend all this energy trying to reabsorb the electrolytes. And the reason is.

A large explanation of everything that the kidney does is that you have to cycle through all that fluid through the kidney because what you're not reabsorbing is the creatinine. So the kidney is just like all day long passing through fluid that has creatinine and electrolytes, then sucking the electrolytes back up and letting the creatinine go out in the urine. So if your kidney function declines, like if you have kidney disease or your kidneys just stop working as well, the creatinine is gonna get stuck in your blood. So if your creatinine goes up in your blood, that's a sign that your kidneys aren't working as well. If your creatinine goes up in your urine, that probably means that you're degrading more of it. Now, if you're supplementing with creatine.

And, you know, I'm like, I'm not a doctor and I'm not a renal physiologist, but whoever's in charge of interpreting these data are going to have to take into account the fact that you're supplementing with creatine when they're looking at those values. Because if you have five, and just to be clear, I mean, you can get 3 grams of creatine from eating 1 to 2 pounds of meat a day. So you're not doing something very abnormal or unnatural when you're taking 5 grams of creatine per day as a supplement. I mean, that's just. It's sort of like if you were taking 200 milligrams of vitamin C, you say, well, you're probably not getting that from your diet, but if you ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, you would. So 200 milligrams of vitamin C is very natural. Same thing with five grams of creatine. So, you know, it's always the case that people have, like, a significant input of creatine into their diet, but you're probably not gonna get five grams. And so if you go into the doctor and you just took 5 grams of creatine that morning, and they see creatine in their blood, you should. In your blood, it's probably going to be higher than it usually would. And you should tell them that you're supplementing with creatine so they can take that into account. But in a natural functioning body with no supplementation, creatine going up in the blood is a marker of poor kidney function. Creatine going up in the kidney is a marker of increased creatine turnover. And that could be a problem. Like, if your muscles are. If you have muscle, if your muscles are basically falling apart, Right. They're going to release more of it for sure.

Right. But it would be normal if you're taking a lot of creatine for a little bit of. Of extra creatinine to be showing up in the blood or in the urine.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, gotcha. Interesting.

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Now how about.

When we're talking kind of stepping back and looking at big picture because I'm curious about this from a dietary standpoint.

When we're eating protein or carbs or fats, whether it's a ketogenic diet or it's a high carb diet or a vegan diet or whatever. Why does it even matter, like the ratio of proteins or carbs or fat if everything winds up relying upon cellular respiration anyways, like, at the end of the day. And I had a little bit of a talk with Denise Minger about this when I interviewed her, and it was fascinating, this idea behind, like, well, if you eat carbohydrates, you're going to burn carbohydrates, and if you eat fats, you're going to burn fats. And as long as you're not eating too many damn calories, it doesn't really matter what you eat when it comes to macronutrients. What's your take on that? Like, why does it matter whether we eat protein or carbs or fats, you know, assuming we're not eating too much of everything, since it's all gonna get burnt anyways at the end of the day?

Yeah. Yeah. So there are so many answers to this question, and I'm gonna try to get through some of them, and if you want me to go into a different direction, you just, just poke me and put me in one. Because there are. There are dozens of possible answers to this question.

Kind of scared. Kind of scared to poke you, dude, because. Because a whole bunch of information comes out every time I do, man.

Virtual. Virtual poking, man. You just gotta poke me the other way. Like, the problem is you poke me once and you don't poke me twice. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I hear you.

Like, like, if it comes out, you just. I'll help you out. All right, Anyway, so, so, all right, so the, the first answer is it doesn't matter, right? So as, as Denise was saying to you. That's totally true. Like, if you take someone on a mixed diet and then you, you ramp up their carbs real high, as long as they're healthy, their micronutrients are met, everything's balanced. Otherwise they're just. Their carbohydrate oxidation is just going to go through the roof. I mean, you put someone on, even if it's a hypercaloric diet. This has been shown experimentally. If you take someone and you put them on an 86% carbohydrate diet that is massively hypercaloric, so that their total carbohydrate is exceeding their total energy needs, they're going to get almost. They're going to get pretty much all of their energy needs from carbohydrate and then they're going to store the rest as fat. You know, alternatively, if you put someone, if you just ramp up the fat, people are going to fat adapt, they're going to keto adapt and they're going to their beta oxidation, their fat burning is going to be way higher. So that's totally true. And so one of the answers to that question is it doesn't matter. Another answer to that question, which I think is probably your audience is familiar with this, and certainly you are, is you have a certain need for protein because nitrogen in carbohydrate or fat, so we have a pretty remarkable ability to interconvert different things in our body, but we can't make elements, right? And protein is, is the one macronutrient. So you will never take carbohydrate, which.

You cannot generate protein from carbohydrates, no matter what.

So the elementary answer that is correct and the, and the advanced answer that is false. So.

What is true is you will never ever, ever, ever, ever take pure carbohydrate and turn it into a protein because there's no nitrogen in it. The advanced answer is there are pathways by which you could take some of the atoms from the carbohydrate and combine them with the nitrogen from other amino acids and turn. You know, eventually you'd find like the carbons in the carbohydrate would make their way into a protein. You can do that, but you just have to eat a certain amount of protein or you'll never make.

Those muscles. I mean, you have the muscles, right? So if you go on a protein free diet, you're just going to start degrading your muscular protein and you're never going to replace it. So you're going to waste your muscle mass. And to put some numbers on that, the RDA for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight. Probably the minimal that people need for healthy body composition is 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight. That winds up being you multiply kilograms by 2.2 to get pounds. But athletes are routinely eating more than that. And I think that a lot of people who have really specific body composition goals need more than that. But the RDA is based on the principle. We were just talking someone on a low protein diet. You'll watch the amount of nitrogen that they pee into the urine, and if they're peeing out more nitrogen in the urine than they're eating in the diet, they're not in nitrogen balance and if you're peeing out more nitrogen into your urine than you're eating in your diet, then clearly you're not going to be gaining muscle, you're not going to be maintaining your muscle. You're going to be losing your muscle mass over time. The RDA is the bare minimum that you need to prevent wasting your muscle away. So that's one answer that I think is fairly intuitive to people, that you need to eat a certain amount of protein just because of the nitrogen that's there, and you need to make your muscle proteins. But there are other examples where it starts to matter. So, for example, there are things that you can't do with anything except carbohydrate. So someone who's engaging in athletics has at their disposal, in their skeletal muscle, they have three basic systems of energy. You mentioned cellular respiration. That's using oxygen to burn food for energy. You could burn protein, you could burn fat, you could burn carbohydrate, and that's great. You also have ATP and you have creatine. These are already formed in your muscle, just waiting to be burned really fast. So if you're using cellular respiration, it's going to take a little while to burn that energy. If you're using ATP that's already formed, it's really quick because it's right there. Boom, boom, boom. Then the third is anaerobic glycolysis. And anaerobic glycolysis is how you can get ATP from glucose right at the site of muscular contraction without needing oxygen. This is how you produce lactic acid when you exercise. And when you do that.

There are basically two situations where you have obligate needs to use anaerobic glycolysis for energy. One is because of time. So if you start engaging in exercise that is exhaustive over the course of three to six minutes, like really intense exercise that'll flatten you out in a few minutes. There's going to be a period of time where you're. In order to deliver oxygen to your muscles, you need to rewire several things. So you need to breathe faster, you need to pump your blood faster, you need to deliver that. You need to bring the oxygen from your lungs through the blood to the muscle tissue. And you need to do that enough that over time, you raise the amount of oxygen in the muscle tissue and you max it out. But if you spend six minutes of exhaustive exercise, it's gonna take you the whole six minutes before your oxygen levels, like before you actually get to running mostly aerobic. And during the course of those six minutes, you're not gonna be able to run on your ATP and your creatine alone for the speed and intensity you want. And within maybe five to ten seconds you're going to start using some glucose to fuel that. And then maybe 30 seconds later there's going to be a window where if you want to maintain your maximal intensity, you really have no choice but to use that glucose because you haven't gotten enough oxygen into the muscle to maximize your cellular respiration yet. And meanwhile you've already blown through all of the existing ATP and creatine supply. So that window where you want to maintain intensity after 5, 10, 15 seconds, but before 3, 6, probably 9 minutes often, maybe even 15 minutes sometimes to really get maximal aerobic, that time window is one reason you need to burn glucose for your maximal intensity. The other situation is if you're already maximally aerobic.

And that can't be done by deriving your glucose from the glycerol backbone of say, fats or something like that.

Well, I mean, not immediately, no.

I mean, I guess what I'm saying is like, I couldn't eat like a high fat, extremely low carbohydrate diet, go out and do a very glycolytically demanding event and be using glucose from the actual fat breakdown.

There's a yes to that and there's a no to that.

So, alright, what's the yes and what's the no?

Yes to that is over the long term. Actually, let me explain the no first because the yes will make more sense. So the reason that one of the reasons that anaerobic glycolysis is so valuable in that context is because it can produce ATP in the muscle in the absence of oxygen right at the site of the action. But there's a second reason why it's so valuable, and that's because the muscular glycogen is contained in the muscle cell right next to the contractile proteins that are contracting. So there's basically no transport time to get glucose from that glycogen at the site of the action. There is about five seconds of regulation time. If you are at rest and then you start sprinting, there will be a 5 second lag before you can tap into that glycogen store, because it takes five seconds for your cell to realize that you're sprinting and realize that, oh, you gotta go over and unlock that glycogen storage, but there's no transport time to get from one tissue to the other. Even if you were talking about Transporting glucose from the liver. The fact that the glucose needs to be released from the liver and travel through the blood and get into the muscle cell makes it way slow. Like, really makes it as slow as burning fat. If you're talking about adipose tissue having triglycerides and releasing the fatty acids and the glycerol from the adipose tissue, the transport time to get into the muscle cell is the limiting factor. And why that's not fast. That's the no answer. The yes answer is, number one, yes. If the glycerol is there, it can get into glycolysis. But more importantly, one of the ways that you would not have your muscular glycogen tank on a high fat, low carbohydrate diet is that you would eventually, not eventually, but you would over time accumulate some glycogen from the glycerol backbone of the fatty acids. So, yeah, the carbons from the glycerol are ultimately capable of making their way into the muscular glycogen supply. But the real limiting factor at the time where you actually start sprinting is, or doing anything else that requires intense work is not. It's not the possibility of getting a glycerol molecule in there, it's the fact that you already have the glycogen stored there and maybe some of it came from glycerol. That's the yes aspect to your question.

Okay, got it. So it would be more of the glycogen that you have stored.

So, yeah, but look, there's controversy over how low carbohydrate high fat diets affect your muscular glycogen stores. And there's a lot of room to figure out why different studies conflict. So Finney in 1983, put people on for four weeks, put them on less than 20 grams of carbohydrate a day, and their muscular glycogen was cut in half. But when they were exercising at moderate intensity.

They shifted their work away from burning glycogen and towards burning fat, their exercise capacity. That much. Volek in 2016 took people that were self. That were themselves put themselves on low carbohydrate or high carbohydrate diets for six months and were marathon runners and they didn't have any difference in glycogen storage or glycogen metabolism.

Some people say, I know, I was in that study.

Oh, you were?

Oh, oh, it was a faster study. I was part of that. I actually followed that diet for six months.

Yeah. Did you get your individual data?

Oh, yeah. I have all my individual data. I've posted it on my side. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for faster study F A S T E R. I have it there. I posted on Facebook too. But yeah, I mean, that study was crazy. We rewrote the fat burning textbook in terms of nearly doubling the amount of fat that we oxidized during exercise after following that high fat diet for not just like two weeks or a few days, but before the test, which is how most of these studies go. But for, you know, again, for me it was 12 months. I followed like a ketotic diet. And yeah, we spared our muscle glycogen.

How many grams of carbs are you eating?

I was at right around 100 a day.

Okay.

Which for my level of physical activity at the time, competing heavily in Ironman triathlon was pretty dang low.

Yeah. Was your glycogen similar to the average trend there where it was basically not different?

Yep, exactly. So my glycogen, you know, and they did a pre and post muscle biopsy to analyze your glycogen. And if you've never had that done, for those of you listening. And it's like a needle, a guillotine that they jam down into your thigh to take the muscle out to see how much glycogen is in it before and how much is in it after. In this case, we ran on a treadmill for three hours. So we actually had to get the, get the punch of the needle into our thigh, then go pound on the treadmill for three hours, which was horrible, while staring at this white wall in the middle of the lab because there were no TVs. And then we came back and we got the glycogen taken again. And yeah, it turns out that there was a pretty significant sparing effect on glycogen by following this high fat diet.

Anyways, now wait a second. So I think this is a really important point. So you can look at that and you can say, well, your glycogen was spared because you were on that diet for 12 months and not for four weeks. But one of the big differences between what you were doing and what the subjects in Finney 1983 were doing was you were eating 100 grams of carbs a day. Finney restricted the carbs to less than 20 grams a day in the subjects in the 1983 study.

So I wonder how much they were training compared to like an Ironman trial.

Well, I'm sure they were not doing what you were doing. I'm sure they weren't. So. But like, look, that's what I'm, that's why I'm saying there's some legitimate controversy here because, because, you know, is it fair to point out that you were 100 grams and they were less than 20 when you were burning through more carbs in your Ironman triathlon? Well, I don't really know because there's too many questions of to what degree is this difference from the absolute reduction in carbs versus the, versus the training versus the length of time. So I'm not saying that, I'm not saying we can look at these two studies and just come out and say, look, you slash your glycogen in half when you're less than 20 grams and you do nothing to it when you're 100 grams. But I'm also going to push back when someone tells me, look, what we showed here was that if you eat the diet for 6 to 12 months, your glycogen is normal and if you eat the diet for four weeks, it's cut in half.

There's just a lot of things that need to be ferreted out about.

How many carbs are you eating versus how are you training versus how long are you eating those diets? And I don't think we have the answers to that yet.

Got it. Now, when it comes to eating protein versus carbs versus fats and our percentages, what about how much it requires of the body from a micronutrient or vitamin perspective to process certain nutrients like carbohydrates? Carbohydrates require a lot more thiamine to, to be burnt as a fuel compared to fat. Like, do we need to take into account some of these examples of certain macronutrients like carbs or protein or fat being a little bit more demanding of the human body?

Oh yeah.

When it comes to actually processing those.

Oh yeah, I think.

Can you, can you, can you throw in some examples of how thathow that would actually work? Like explain why that would be important?

Yeah, man. Soso, carbohydrates requiring more thiamine is probably the best example of this because there's a lot of research on why it's actually really practically relevant. And there are some other reasons why it may be really relevant from anecdotes that are really interesting. So first of all, thiamine is basically every time that you burn a carbohydrate and take a two carbon unit from it known as acetyl coa and throw it through the citric acid cycle, so it can get burned for energy. Every time you do that, you use thiamine twice. Every time you do that with fat, you use it once. So thiamine requires twice as much. Excuse me, carbohydrate burning requires twice as much thiamin as fat for protein it requires. There are some cases where you use thiamine for certain amino acids. And if you look at the percentage of those amino acids in your total protein intake and what you're burning for energy, it's basically like you use a little bit more thiamine when you use, when you burn protein for energy than when you burn fat for energy, but not that much. So the real big player is you're using way more thiamine for carbohydrate than for your other fuels. And so that's interesting for two really practical reasons. One is that if you have someone with glucose intolerance, then thiamine supplementation may be able to help them. And in fact, there's some data on that. There's not a large body of literature, but there are. There are some studies suggesting that.

Thiamine supplementation at 100 mg of thiamine hydrochloride a few times a day will. Will significantly improve glucose intolerance, although not get rid of it. So it's probably a pretty important piece of the puzzle. We should also keep in mind, and this hasn't been well studied, but there are other forms of thiamine. There's benfothiamine, there's thiamine pyrophosphate, which is the activated form. And we know from alcoholics that ethanol, for example, basically poisons thiamine metabolism at many steps of the way. So it hurts its intestinal absorption, it hurts its storage in the liver. I'm talking about chronic alcoholism here. I'm not talking about having a glass of wine at night a couple times a week. But chronic alcoholism is also damaging the activation of thiamine to thiamine pyrophosphate, the active form inside the brain. And so I think we could take a lesson from that and say, well, hey, if you have people with glucose intolerance, maybe they're not chronic alcoholics, but who knows what else there is in our environment or in our diets or in our byproducts of poor metabolism that might be hurting thiamine absorption from the intestine, thiamine storage in the liver, thiamine activation in the brain, just like with alcohol. So I think there's a lot of room for experimentation, too like thiamine hydrochloride has been tested. What happens if you take the actual active form, thiamine pyrophosphate? Do you get a better blood glucose response or do you get a better neurological response? So if you look at thiamine deficiency, the symptoms are overwhelmingly neurological. So.

In fact, in severe, severe deficiency, you get encephalopathy and psychosis. But I think at a moderate level of deficiency, maybe you're running on brain fog. Maybe if you eat carbohydrate and you don't feel very good in the head, you feel a little foggy in the head, you feel like your brain isn't running right and you feel better on fat. Well, maybe that may well be related to thiamine. And it may not be the case that your diet's thiamine deficient. I mean, you eat one serving of meat or even on a vegan diet, you just eat some unrefined plant foods, know you, you should be able to meet your thiamine requirement. But what if thiamine's being lost or degraded or it's not being activated in the brain? And what if we can study what's the best form of supplementation or the best intervention to improve thiamine activation in the brain? Can we help these people who feel a little foggy headed when they eat carbohydrate or feel like their cognitive performance just doesn't get right until they go high fat, low carb, can we improve the diversity of foods they can tolerate? If we can study how to better improve thiamine activation in the brain, I think that's really important. But I also think if you look at ketogenic diets, and I'm not saying there is an intrinsic benefit to ketones, but if you look at ketogenic diets, providing they have enough protein, so if you're super keto and you're trying to eat no protein, so you can maximize your ketones or something like that, you could wind up with a lot of deficiencies. But if you eat a ketogenic diet that will include a couple servings of meat, for example, so you get all your thiamine, you get your B vitamins and stuff, that diet is really the diet that maximally spares thiamine. And so thiamine deficiency symptoms are overwhelmingly neurological. And if people are reporting, hey, I got Lyme disease or I got, I was exposed to household mold and I got brain fog and it never turned around until I started burning on ketones, well, I think, like, it's very possible that that's because whatever that environmental exposure was, was doing something bad either to thiamine or to thiamine dependent enzymes. And that's why burning on fat as.

The alternative, and they couldn't burn their carbohydrates efficiently because they didn't have enough thiamine.

I should also note that all of the enzymes that use thiamine also use other cofactors that are, that also use lipoic acid, which is.

As you well know and your audience well knows, hurt by oxidative stress and heavy metals and all kinds of that stuff like that. So a lot of this, you know, some of these problems are not just about the thiamine, but they're also about the other cofactors in those thiamine dependent enzymes and really correlate with thiamine in that way.

Okay, got. What would be another example of the type of macronutrient intake that we consume, creating a specific like micronutrient or vitamin or mineral need. Because Iwell, one example that comes to mind, I'm gonna take one right out from underneath you in case you were going for the low hanging fruit would be like people who eat a higher fat diet seem to have an increased need for like higher mineral intake or higher electrolyte intake. You know, which is one reason why a lot of people do like a ketogenic diet. Need more salts, need more electrolytes.

Or am I wrong? Go ahead.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. So to the extent, I mean, when you eat a ketogenic diet, you do pee out some of the ketones and you pee out sodium when you pee out ketones. So that's part of it. But I think what you need to realize is that a high fat diet is really low in electrolytes. I mean, think about where the electrolytes are in your body fluids, water. Think about.

Yeah, but that's what I'm saying is, is like if you're eating like a high fat diet, you would, you'd still have an increased need for.

Yeah.

For like extra electrolyte supplementation because of that, right?

Oh, for sure. But that's because you're not eating them.

Yeah. It's not because the processing of fats is, is causing some huge increase for mineral consumption. You're just not getting them in a high fat diet.

Yeah, there's a little bit of that, but it's mostly because you're not eating them. And so, and actually there were. I don't remember the details about all the studies, but in some of the early studies on ketogenic diets, they resolved some of the problems by retaining the juices of the meat. Because they realized that if they were eating meat and they were cooking it in a pan, a lot of the smaller number of electrolytes that are in that meat are all coming out in the juices. And that was one way of losing it. But if you're on an all meat diet, you're not really, you're not eating like a mostly fat diet. Are you eating like a half, if it's beef, you're eating like a half fat, half protein kind of diet. So if you're eating like, the more you eat fat, the less electrolytes you're getting, because there's very little electrolytes, if any, in fat. I mean, by definition, these are the minerals that are dissolving in water. So I mean, just to give you an example, you know, I was dealing with some of my own health problems related to heavy metal toxicity and mold toxicity. And I was needing a really high level of potassium in my diet. I just had to eat pretty low fat to get that potassium, man. Just take a milk product like yogurt. I'm a fan of milk fat, I really am. I really don't recommend most people eat low fat milk. But I'll tell you what, you're going to get twice as much potassium from 0% milk, 0% fat yogurt, as you are from full fat yogurt because the potassium is in the water, the aqueous portion of that food, not in the lipophilic portion of that food. So it's a combination. You lose some electrolytes when you're peeing out ketones. You're not really trying to pee out ketones though. As you keto adapt, you should ideally consume your ketones for energy rather than pee them out. And so that loss is not huge. And mainly people need to supplement because they're just not eating it in the diet.

Okay, all right, got it. What would be another example then?

And by the way, man, real quick, that can be true for thiamine too. So in the 1970s, there was a paper where they, where they put people on a ketogenic diet for refractory epilepsy. And this is epilepsy that doesn't respond to drugs, but it may respond to a ketogenic diet. And the refractory epilepsy ketogenic diet is an extreme one. So it's really low and it doesn't have a lot of meat because they're trying to overwhelmingly run on fat. And if you don't supplement with B vitamins and you're on that classical super, super high fat, low protein, low carbohydrate diet, you can get optic neuropathy. In the case of that report, I was just talking about degeneration of the optic nerve from thiamine deficiency because you're not eating it. And but like I said before, I said the ketogenic diet maximally spares thiamine when it has enough thiamine in it. And you need to eat some meat for that. Because you can get your thiamine from meat, you can get it from legumes, you can get it from grains. A vegan can get it.

A carnivore can get it. You just can't get it. If you're only eating the fat and you're not eating the non fat portions of your foods. It doesn't have to be carbs, it can be protein. But you got to eat something besides fat to get your micronutrients in.

Okay, got it. Throw one other common deficiency that you tend to see in people based on their either their protein intake or their fat intake or their carb intake.

You know, I think thiamine is really the biggest one here that actually plays out commonly. But the one other one that I think is relevant but less well studied and much harder to figure out is vitamin B6. So when you burn protein for energy, you need to get rid of the nitrogen. And getting rid of the nitrogen almost always requires vitamin B6. And in fact, they discussed this a lot when they set the rda for vitamin B6. And there were a lot of conflicting studies about whether high protein diets cause vitamin B6 deficiency. And they didn't set the RDA as a function of protein intake for vitamin B6 because there was too much conflict in the literature and there wasn't a straightforward way to calculate. Well, when you eat this many grams of protein, you need this many milligrams of vitamin B6. And I think the reason there's so much conflict around that is because let's say that you're in the gym five days a week doing a bodybuilding routine, trying to maximize hypertrophy and you come back and you eat 400 grams of protein a day, 4,000 calories, and you take a bunch of anabolic stimulator supplements or something like that. Well, you're going to eat ton of protein, but you're not burning it for energy. For the most part. You're stuffing it into your muscles. Now you Take some other couch potatoes. Who watches TV all the time and doesn't really do much of anything but occasionally goes runs on the treadmill. And that person, maybe they don't eat enough food. Maybe that person's eating slightly hypocaloric. Maybe they're trying to lose weight. They don't really know what they're doing nutritionally or with their workouts. So they're burning energy and they're just stuffing in 2 or 300 grams of protein because they read it was good for them on the Internet or something like that. Right. So in that person, they're gonna be burning protein for energy because they don't have the anabolic stimulus to put it into their muscles. They're in a hypocaloric state trying to lose weight. So they're looking for whatever they can burn for energy, and they're just putting way more protein than they need into the system. I think that person's gonna have their vitamin B6 needs go way up. And that's a case where you could start to see problems. Now. There are a lot of cases in between. And there are also just, you know, there are so many factors where.

You wouldn't really, like, know it as the extreme case, but you might see, you know, you might see like, I don't know, signs on their blood work or their organic acids or something like that that they're not metabolizing their protein. Right. Their protein. Protein intake is pretty normal. You know, vitamin B6 is one of the nutrients that you'd consider in those cases because everyone's a little bit different. You never know when the protein someone's eating is actually getting burned for energy. So that's why it's hard to figure out is because it's burning protein for energy that's gonna increase the vitamin B6 requirement. It's not eating the protein. And you really have to beyou have to be smart when you look at a case like that to really figure out whether that's the problem or not.

Okay, got it. So B6 would be another one, and B6 would be. In the case of higher intake of. You said protein for B6.

Yeah, higher intake and burning it for energy. Right. So if you can eat the high intake, and as long as you're stuffing it into your.

You're just getting bigger biceps today because you ate more protein, that's not really taxing your vitamin B6 supply the way it would. If you're just eating that protein and getting rid of the nitrogen, trying to get rid of it through Burning it for energy. Thatburning protein for energy is really where you're hitting your vitamin B6 needs, Doctor.

Okay. All right. Got it, man. There are a ton of things when it comes to, like, little micronutrients that we should be getting, how we process the things that we do process. I know you got your podcast where you talk a lot about this, but you're doing, like, classes now as well, online, is that correct?

That is absolutely true, man.

Okay, so how do those work?

Yeah, so look, I started making these classes because I got a lot of people. I got a lot of people, man, who would say to me, like, I really love your stuff, but I get, like, 50% of it. And if I could get 80% or 90%.

I know the only reason I get it is I have a degree in physiology, dude.

Right.

If I didn't, I would have to be taking these classes to be able to just, like, digest the amount of material you put out.

Right? Exactly, exactly. So.

There'S, like, three categories of people that I'm making these classes for, and one of those categories is the people who listen to this stuff. And they're like, if I just had the background to be able to understand all that, I could really take what I do for myself, maybe what I do for my clients, what I do for my friends, what I do for my families, what I do for my patients, depending on who they are, I could really take that to the next level. And I don't want it to cost. Whatever the price of colleges these days, I don't want it to cost $70,000 for someone to be able to. To get that value out of my podcast when I dive deep or out of a lot of the other stuff on the Internet, when other people are diving deep or out of a lot of stuff on the Internet that anyone with a background in science would be like, that's B.S. i'm going to spend my time elsewhere, right? So I want to find a way for people who really love understanding nutrition to get the background from step one to step two and secure that foundation at their own pace without spending a ton of money on it, like a college education would cost, and really be able to listen to something like this podcast and get 99% of it and get the other 1% when they listen to it a second time instead of getting 40% and giving up. And so what I'm doing right now is I'm making a class on energy metabolism. And this is, like, the biochemistry of energy metabolism, but it really starts from the bottom. So I never assume anyone knows anything. And if someone jumps in on lesson 30, they're going to be like, man, that stuff goes over my head. But I'm telling you, it won't go over your head if you start at lesson one and you do lesson two after lesson one. Man. So I really start from the bottom. And I don't even assume people had chemistry. I just explained the basics and whatever, because I really want to hit those people who don't have the background and give it to them if they want to work hard enough to watch the videos straight through.

And I think these are also great for people who are.

Maybe they already studied this stuff, but they need a way to review it. And maybe they're taking the RD exam or they're taking the mcat or they're taking something that's going to require them to tap into the biochemistry knowledge that they already learned. And it would be more interesting or more fun for them to review that stuff in my classes than to do it elsewhere. It's for them, too. And then there's other people who, like, you have a degree, you already have all this background, but, hey, some of it you studied 10 years ago, some of it you forgot about. So you want to be able to go in and maybe find what I have that's unique to say and filter it out from all the stuff that I'm like, you don't want to go in there and learn why a chemical bond forms. You want to skip over that. Right? So I set this up in a few ways so you can. Basically, this is Masterclass with Masterdron energy metabolism. And there's three ways to engage with it. One is if you subscribe to the Mastering Nutrition podcast. I send out the Cliff Notes, where each lesson is condensed into 10 minutes of audio where you just listen to it over breakfast or whatever you're doing, and that comes out every day that there's not something else on the podcast for the most part. And the second way is on YouTube and Facebook and on my website, ChrisMasterJohnPhD.com, you can watch the full lessons, the videos. The reason I made them videos is because there are killer graphics that help really visualize all the stuff I'm talking about. I think you can understand it way better if you watch the video.

Got it.

Than if. Than if you listen. Then the third way is you sign up for masterclass with MasterJohn Pro, MWM Pro, and.

This is premium features that you pay for that are all targeted towards you mastering the material and studying it. At your own pace. So for example, there's keyword searchable videos. Like you say, hey, I want to know what MasterJohn says about Succineil Coa or something like that. You go into the main lesson page, you search for your search term, all the videos that have it pop up, you click on the video, you just search for the term and it just brings you right to where I'm talking about that in the video. There's lots of self pacing tools, there's lots of additional formats. You want a transcript, the transcripts are in webpage or PDF format. You can download them. You got the slides in the transcript matched with the text that's talking about the slides, right? From there you can hyperlink to specific textbook pages, to PDFs of research articles, to whatever relates to that forums, all kinds of tools, all geared at really mastering this stuff and doing it at your own pace in your own way. And so the price of MWM Pro is $120 a year. And it's not for the class, it's for the whole system. So after I do energy metabolism, I'm going to start tackling other topics related to nutrition. You can imagine in like five years it's going to be like an academy. Right. So MWM Pro is your permanent access into getting the lessons to you before they're released in public, getting all those additional tools. And for listeners of Ben's show, I have a special discount. That's not just a one time discount, it's a lifetime discount of $20 a year. So it brings the price from 120 to 100 forever and for one week from the opening.

100 bucks a year.

Yep. And you go to ChrisMasterJohnPhd.com Ben that'll tell you all about it. And you get the lifetime discount.

Nice. I like it. And for those of you who have difficulty remembering any of that, just go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com MasterJohn and I'll link to Chris's website and the other podcast that we recorded where we cover a ton of nutrition science as well and you can access that. And also I'll put a link to Chris's podcast and his website over there too. But the thing that Chris was just referring to is called the master class. So if you want to become a complete nutrition ninja, that's the one you need.

Chris, you want to master Master class of Master John.

That's right.

WM Pro is where it's at.

That's right. It's a good thing you have the word master in your name, dude. Otherwise you'd be.

Yeah, man, I'm capitalizing for marketing materials.

I know. Well, Chris, thanks so much for coming on the, on the show today and sharing this stuff with us. We really only like scratched this surface of the kind of stuff that you go over in the masterclass, but I know that's why you created the masterclass.

Yeah, man, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it was amazing. As usual. You're brilliant. And for those of you who want to tap into Chris's brilliance even more, check out the masterclass with masterjohn. And again, that will all be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MasterJohn and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Chris Masterjohn signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a great week.

You've been listening to the Bengreenfield fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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