Question: Could methylglyoxal be causing elevated fasting glucose in low-carbers?Yes. I did my doctoral dissertation on methylglyoxal so I've covered it in a lot of different contexts, and the basic story is we know that diabetics have high methylglyoxal levels. We know that diabetics have high methylglyoxal-derived advanced glycation endproducts. And we know that this is true even when they're treated. Now that raises the question, does diabetes cause methylglyoxal to increase, or does methylglyoxal cause diabetes? And the answer is both. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: Is it important to hit the AI for total omega-6?I think it's totally normal to not meet the AI for Omega-6 and to exceed the AI for Omega-3. Question is really, if you have systemic inflammation going on, you frame this as, should I strive to at least meet the AI for Omega-6 if I have chronic disease/inflammation? Well, if you have chronic disease/inflammation, you might be depleting your Omega-6, which means depleting arachidonic acid, which means you might need more arachidonic acid. If your arachidonic acid levels look good, you shouldn't worry at all about meeting the AI for linoleate as far as I'm concerned. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: How 30 minutes on the elliptical helps my head and neck tensionSo what the elliptical does is, it doesn't do a whole lot for moving my neck one way or another, but it does a lot for moving my thoracic spine and my shoulders through a pretty defined range of motion, not full range of motion going like this is, but it's a lot of movement through a considerable amount of that range of motion, and I think it's sufficient to give my thoracic spine and my shoulders a lot of circulation of fluid that nourishes the joints and keeps things moving.My experience with this is that 30 minutes on an elliptical three to five days a week, cause improvement. Five days or more cause very marked improvement, three days a week is more like maintenance, and below three days a week... If I had to simplify it, five days a week, 30 minutes a day on the elliptical causes improvement that just gets better week, after week, after week. Three days of 30 minutes on the elliptical per week will maintain whatever improvement I've gotten from doing five days a week, and less than three days a week will cause a regression. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: Why does it take time to be fat-adapted when our body already knows how to burn fat?So the body does need time to get fat-adapted because yeah, the body knows how to burn fat, but fat adaptation is not about the body knowing how to burn fat, it's about the body increasing the expression of enzymes involved in burning fat. So everything that you do in the body requires enzymes. Enzymes are proteins that need to be made. It's going to increase enzymes involved in fat digestion and metabolism if you've been eating fat, and because it's expensive to do that, it's going to cut back on them if you haven't been eating fat. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: What should someone with FH eat if they also have prediabetes?So first of all, it's a separable component of the diet so you need a low-saturated fat, low-cholesterol diet without necessarily eating a low-fat diet. Then second of all, the effect of that on blood lipids is dependent on the healthfulness of your insulin pathway. And so over time, that's something where you can play the balance between those two things and as you improve your blood glucose handling, you can fit in more carbohydrates to have a fuller dietary effect. For managing blood glucose, and I don't think it's a good idea to condemn all carbohydrates as a means of managing that. I think the best thing would be to get a continuous glucose monitor or a regular glucose monitor. If you're using a regular glucose monitor, use 30 minute, one hour, two hour, three hour, four hour time intervals after a meal and collect a baseline before a meal and look at how do different starches that you don't have an immunological response to... so you don't have to test grains because you don't tolerate them, but other foods that are rich in starches, whether it's carrots, or potatoes, or sweet potatoes, or whatever it is. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: How should I take zinc if it makes me nauseous?As far as I know, there's no relationship between the nausea and zinc deficiency. I could be wrong, maybe there's research on it I haven't seen or it could be not researched but I don't think there's a connection. My guess would be that that is either related to her ionizing it faster in the GI tract than you, or something else related to her nausea impulse that might be nutritional, it might be genetic, it might be male/female. You could test out whether a little bit of bone broth or orange juice, or what have you with it buffers that enough to stop the nausea, and if it doesn't, I would just try to take it with a phytate-free meal. And by a phytate-free meal, I mean, a meal that doesn't have any whole grains, nuts, seeds, or legumes. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: Can familial hypercholesterolemia be managed without statins? I think there's the general perspective that there's no point in having LDL-C be any higher than 50; therefore, since it doesn't matter, let's provide a sufficient margin of error where we're real confident that getting it down to 100 is great and so why not get it down to 50? If there is any extra protection we get it and we don't lose it. So my point of view would be, I would personally rather use a more conservative target of lowering down to 100 or so where the confidence is actually really high, because I'm not convinced by the lack of confidence that there's no neurological downside to pushing it twice as low as that. So that's my general perspective and if this were me, and it'll never be because I can't for the life of me get my total cholesterol above 160, but if it were me I'd be lowering my dose on that out of precaution on the other side. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: Is this a biotin deficiency? Beta-hydroxyisovaleric acid is well-established to be the most sensitive marker of biotin status. And actually typically it's done after leucine challenge, which is, no one does that. And so, generally in my experience, the way they have the reference ranges set on that should, on the ones that do have it, so the ION panel has it, the Genova panel has it, and the way they set the reference ranges, I think it works without the leucine challenge. But, I prefer the Genova ION panel because it has more, I just had a spreadsheet made up of the different markers that I wanted and the ones that were on the different organic acid panels and the ION panel has the most that line up with what, what I was looking for. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: Why do vitamin E requirements stay elevated for four years when we stop eating PUFA? None of this really proves that long-term vitamin E status is compromised, and that will make the clinical effect of PUFA be net negative after four or five years. But it does show you that the general relationship between the fact that you get more vitamin E when you eat PUFA oils, right? Because in the plant, the plant doesn't have this turnover problem, the plant makes vitamin E whenever it wants. And it has a certain amount of PUFA for some purpose, and it loads it up and so the plant has the amount of vitamin E that is needed to protect those under those conditions. So the question is, does a person, a human being, eating that oil also benefit from that relationship between vitamin E and PUFA that the safflower plant made? The answer to that is controversial. Important note: In the video, a graph was shown that showed adipose linoleate is cleared in about one year rather than four. This was from an animal study. On page 30 in the PDF and 546 in the journal of this reference: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0079683271900358 … it can be seen that it takes about 50 months (approximately 4 years) for adipose linoleate to bottom out in a human switched from corn oil to beef fat. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Question: How long should our fasting windows be?I think someone who eats three meals a day and no snacking is doing a form of intermittent fasting that most people aren't doing. And I don't even have a basis for believing whether that is superior, inferior, or the same as one meal a day in a 20 hour, four-hour feeding window. And so I think it's very clear that you want to cycle through the fed and fasted states. I think exactly how you do that is all trial and error and anecdotal accumulation of anecdotes and experiences at this point. If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, a private discussion group, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/masterpass/ and use the code QANDA to get 10% off the membership for life. From now through March, I will be working full-time on finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book, while reserving a portion of my time for consulting clients. You can pre-order my book at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/book. You can sign up for a consultation at https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/consultations. DISCLAIMER: I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and my expertise is in performing and evaluating nutritional research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing herein is medical advice. Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.