Vitamins And Minerals 101

What can we do to ensure we’re getting the most essential vitamins and minerals in our diet each day? Chris Masterjohn has a PhD in nutritional sciences and, today, he helps us get clarity on how to go about it.

Right off the bat, he recommends turning to food first. He highlights the benefits of liver (especially for women) and the importance of DHA and arachidonic acid for gut health, to resolve skin issues and improve neurological function, in addition to avoiding off omega-3 and omega-6 deficiencies.

He also offers his own personal recipe for a perfect whole-food “multi-vitamin.” In short, he equips us with a better idea of what our bodies need and how to provide for them.

Visit Chris’ website: chrismasterjohnphd.com

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Vitamins And Minerals 101

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Chris Masterjohn.

Which are the most essential nutrients for good health? Which foods and supplements should we make sure to include in our diet so that we can live our best lives? This is episode 323 and our guest is Chris Masterjohn. He earned his PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut in 2012. For a number of years, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois and later he served as Assistant Professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. He works on his own as an entrepreneur, conducting independent research, consulting, collaborating on information and technology products, all with the purpose of helping people gain better health.

In our conversation, we focus on what he has learned over the course of decades of research about vitamins and minerals. He touts the benefits of DHA and arachidonic acid, for example, explaining why they are critical for neurological function and a healthy gut. He reminds us also of the importance of liver in the diet especially for women. He clears up the confusion about the whole food vitamin C versus ascorbic acid. Finally, he offers his own personal recipe for the perfect whole food multivitamin.

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Welcome to the show, Chris.

Thank you. It’s great to be here, Hilda.

You released The Vitamins and Minerals 101 Cliff Notes. That PDF that someone called a Micronutrient Cheat Sheet. What made you realize that this PDF was needed?

I get questions all the time about how to make nutrition more simple. Every time I try and make it more simple, I get more questions about how to make it more simple. There are two ways to think about them. One is, particularly if you haven’t been following my Vitamins and Minerals 101 class or my posts about my upcoming book, the best way to think about them is this is the distillation of all the most practical points that I’ve come up with over the years of research into vitamins and minerals, over the course of getting my PhD and beyond. Where they came from is I’m writing a book, Vitamins and Minerals 101: How to Get All the Nutrients You Need on Any Diet and that’s taking a while to produce. While I’m producing it, I have a team that cuts up little snippets of it and puts them out on social media. For example, on Instagram, I got a once-a-day series of little snippets from the middle part of the book that has come out. I’m always getting new people that are coming in and they’re like, “Can’t we get all the stuff in one place?”

I thought, “One way to do that would be to take the 29 lessons on each of the essential vitamins, minerals and fatty acids from the middle-third of the book. In the end, when I summarize stuff, let’s take those summaries and put them all together.” Once I do that, I went through it and realized, “People are using this as a standalone product. They’re going to need this and this.” I re-envisioned it to move it from the distillation of the key points of the book in summary form to more of what I had said, “What are the key practical points that you would need in bullet point form for everything you need to know about each of those vitamins, minerals and fatty acids to sit down and have a quick reference guide or sit down and say, “I’m going to spend an hour or two to redesign my diet. What’s everything you would need to know?”

I’m glad you did that because there is so much information. I’ve sometimes felt like we have information overload and people are looking around for the latest and greatest thing. Bringing this together, you’re taking us back to basics.

That’s fair to say.

Let’s back up and talk to us about why it’s important to understand where our nutrient deficiencies are.

If you don’t understand where your nutrient deficiencies are, you’re going to wind up with health problems. You’re not going to know how to solve them. That’s a simple way to think about that.

How comprehensive is your PDF? Honestly, I don’t even know how many vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids are out there. Do you include all of them in your book?

There are some gray areas that you could cover but I broke it down into 29 and part of that is I made some editorial decisions. For example, I decided to include DHA and arachidonic acid in the mix of vitamins and minerals, even though they’re not vitamins but they’re essential fatty acids. Some people who coined the term vitamin F might overlap with me on this. I think of something that you need in small amounts like milligram or microgram amounts that has a specific deficiency disease if you don’t have it and that resolves a deficiency disease if you get it. It is an essential nutrient that’s very much like a vitamin. I decided to include those.

Arachidonic acid and DHA are the omega-3 fatty acids that you would get from animal products and that you can make from plant oils. Other people have a perspective that linoleic acid is mostly found in animals but it’s most abundant in vegetable oils or alpha-linolenic acid which is most abundant in things like flax oil. Some people would say, “Why didn’t you include those? You shouldn’t have 29. You should have 31 if you include those.” That comes down to my perspective of, “I don’t think the evidence is strong that you need those in your diet if you are getting the forms from animal foods.” Even if you need them in small amounts, you’re going to get them from the animal foods that you would need to get the arachidonic acid and DHA anyway. There’s a gray area on what the exact number would be if you counted up all the essential nutrients

Thanks for covering all that. I want to go back to something you said about arachidonic acid and DHA being able to make those out of oils. I never heard anyone say that before. In other words, there can be plant-based versions of that. Is that what I am hearing you say?

WT 323 Chris Masterjohn | Vitamins And Minerals — Vitamins And Minerals: Soap disrupts the lipid barrier of the skin, making it dry out.

Let me back up a little bit, give the bigger picture and fill in some of the details. There are three groups of fatty acids, monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats and saturated fats. Saturated fats are the ones that are, if they’re very abundant in that fat, it’s probably going to be solid at room temperature or like butter, maybe it softens a little bit but it doesn’t turn into a liquid. Monounsaturated fat is going to be an oil that would be liquid at room temperature but would probably harden in the refrigerator like olive oil. A polyunsaturated fat would be something like corn oil where you put it in the fridge for six months and it’s still liquid. Within the polyunsaturated fats, that’s where there are essential fatty acids, which are fatty acids that you can’t synthesize on your own that if you don’t get in the diet, you’ll get a deficiency of them that will lead to health consequences.

Within the essential fatty acids, there are two classes, omega-6 and omega-3. We need both omega-6 and omega-3. There are specific deficiency syndromes that we would get if we didn’t have one or the other. If you don’t have omega-3 fatty acids, you’re primarily going to get neurological consequences from that. For example, if you don’t grow up getting enough omega-3 fatty acids while you’re developing when your mother was pregnant with you during nursing. During early childhood, you’ll probably have lifelong detriments in IQ because of that and lower visual acuity due to a deficiency in the retina, which is part of the central nervous system that is responsible for vision in your eye.

There are also some immune consequences that you would get from that. If you don’t have enough omega-3, you will have trouble resolving inflammation and that could lead to chronic inflammation as an example. Omega-6 fatty acids are responsible for more things than that. The most obvious manifestation of the deficiency would be skin problems because omega-6 fats are responsible for creating barriers between cells. In your skin, they’re responsible for waterproofing your skin. If that skin barrier is disrupted, the water will evaporate and your skin will dry out. That is a major cause of eczema. There are probably a lot of people that have discovered that since they’ve been more obsessive in washing their hands since COVID, they have developed eczema on their hands. I know that has happened to me and I know I’m not the only one.

If that’s the case, it’s because soap disrupts the lipid barrier of the skin and causes the water to evaporate. The skin dries out and then becomes vulnerable to secondary infections. A lot of the eczema creams that are recommended by dermatologists that you can find in drug stores have topical components that are meant to reconstruct that skin barrier but dietarily, if you just don’t have enough omega-6, you can have disruptions with that skin barrier. In the gut, you can have disruptions of the gut barrier and so you can get leaky gut from not having enough. Omega-6 fats are essential to the integrity of the gastrointestinal tract all the way through and for tolerance to foods. Both these fatty acids seem to play different roles in the brain in terms of making you feel confident and low stress.

I’m so glad you included these in your book because the Weston A. Price Foundation has one of its principles the fact that you need the right balance of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. You’re preaching to the choir here on this part.

That’s the background to answer your question, which is we can make one fatty acid out of the other. If you take omega-6 or omega-3, we have an enzymatic system, basic machinery within ourselves to convert numerous fatty acids multiple times along a string of conversions that will ultimately yield arachidonic acid and DHA. Arachidonic acid is the key omega-6 fatty acid and DHA is the key omega-3 fatty acid that’s needed to prevent deficiency. Those conversions happen beginning from linoleic acid which is an omega-6 fatty acid that’s abundant in vegetable oils and alpha-linolenic acid which is an omega-3 fatty acid that’s abundant in plant oils that are known to be high in omega-3 such as flaxseed oil.

You can make that conversion. This is something less than Price Foundation emphasizes sometimes in this context, as well as others like vitamin A. It’s very analogous to vitamin A where what we need in our bodies is retinol but we eat beta-carotene, other carotenoids and plant foods. Those are rich in red, orange, yellow and green vegetables. We have an enzymatic system to convert carotenoids into retinol. There are numerous other nutrients that need these metabolic conversions. Another one is vitamin B6. In any of these, the basic principle is that the form we need in our bodies is a form that’s found in animal foods. Another one would be MK-4 in the case of vitamin K2. In all five of these cases, we need metabolic conversions to get something that is naturally found in animal foods and is not found in plant foods. We can get that from plant foods but because it requires enzymatic machinery, there could be genetic differences, things that regulate those enzymes that are different between different people and disease states that interfere with that conversion.

Animal food is a more reliable source of it but plant food is still a source of it. One person’s ability to get it from the plant food is going to vary from another person’s ability to get it from the plant food. No one ever knows. No matter how many genetic analyses you do, there are so many unknown genes and non-genetic factors that contribute that it’s impossible to know your exact conversion rate. My personal preference is to say that it’s best to get at least the basic minimum requirement from animal foods. What you layer on top of that from plant foods is valuable but because you don’t know its exact value, at least as an insurance policy, you’ve gotten the animal for that although there are vegan compatible supplements that do have these.

For example, arachidonic acid can be found in mushrooms. If you go on Amazon, there’s a supplement called X-Factor. It’s arachidonic acid that is produced from a specific mushroom that is marketed to bodybuilders for breaking through plateaus. It’s much more well-known that there are vegan algae-derived DHA supplements. The Weston A. Price Foundation tends to take the stance of like, “This is why you don’t be vegan,” but I know there are a lot of people out there that are going to be vegan anyway. My position is that it’s better to get the basic requirement from animal foods but if you have an ethical objection to eating animal foods, I’m not going to get into an argument about your ethics. I’m just going to tell you, “You’re probably better off taking the mushroom and algae-derived supplements to get those fatty acids than assuming that you’re going to convert them from plant oils.”

The foundation has an overall list of eleven principles that we recommend for people’s dietary health. We recognize that some people may be sensitive to dairy so they might not want to do it, including dairy products or animal products. They might have ethical reasons they might not want to. We just say pick and choose what works for you. Let me talk about getting all of these vitamins and minerals from our food. Is that possible? Can we do it without supplementing?

Yes. My approach isn’t a food-only approach. It’s a food-first approach. I have a chapter of my upcoming book called The Case for Food. It outlines the argument for a food-first approach. Supplements are called supplements for a reason. It’s because they supplement a good diet, not replace a good diet. There are numerous reasons why you should try to get all the nutrients that you need from food before you add anything else to your diet. There are also numerous reasons why it would be better to use superfood supplements than isolated vitamins and minerals but I’m not ideological about it. I do think that there is a place for supplementing isolated vitamins and minerals. It’s very much a case-by-case basis.

There’s no reason to think that the average person can’t meet the average person’s requirement for all the vitamins and minerals from food but it is a little bit difficult. For example, there are numerous nutrients that you’re probably not going to meet the requirement for if you don’t eat liver. A great example of one would be molybdenum. Molybdenum is a mineral that is needed to properly metabolize sulfur. If you eat sulfur and you don’t have enough molybdenum, you get sulfite. Sulfite can cause allergy-like reactions. Many people avoid sulfites that are added to wines because of that but you make your own sulfite if you don’t have enough molybdenum from the sulfur in your diet. It can also contribute to glutamate sensitivity, overstimulation and intolerance of slowly cooked foods.

If you look at the distribution of molybdenum in foods, there are only two places you get it and that’s liver and legumes. There are some exceptions to that but you would have to be very much micromanaging your diet to meet the exceptions. If you’re eating a Weston A. Price diet and you don’t have any food intolerances. You’re eating properly prepared legumes and liver once a week, you’re probably going to get all the molybdenum that you need. You can easily imagine people who do, for example, paleo, you get rid of legumes. If you’re doing paleo without liver, you’re in trouble because on paleo you’re eating a lot more meat and meat is your main source of sulfur. You’re eating a lot more sulfur from meat and you’re not getting any molybdenum from legumes. If you’re not eating liver, you’re not getting any molybdenum from anywhere.

Another case would be pregnancy. A lot of women when they become pregnant have more GI stress so they reduce their legume consumption. They are more sensitive to off-flavors so they are probably lean to liver if they’re very committed to it. Pregnancy, birth control and estrogen peaks after ovulation and before your period during your menstrual cycle all increase hydrogen sulfide gas production. In the case of pregnancy, it’s because it plays a role in regulating the function of the placenta and that increases sulfite too. Estrogen increases sulfite. If you don’t have enough molybdenum, liver and legumes can save the day there.

You were talking about the food-first philosophy. I was saying, “Do we need supplements?”

It’s possible but it’s very difficult. Clearly, it’s difficult for a lot of people to eat liver. There’s an enormous number of people who won’t go near beans because they make them fart or something ranging from that to worse. If someone has IBS, they might not be able to go near beans without getting a lot of pain from it. It’s better to eat liver or legumes but there are straight-up many people who won’t do that. They’re better off getting molybdenum from a supplement than they are being molybdenum-deficient.

Let’s talk about what nutrient deficiencies do you notice most often? You’ve already mentioned liver and what it does for us. Are there other foods that you’re like, “If only someone ate that, they wouldn’t have this deficiency?”

I find this a popular question and it’s one that I find difficult to answer because the real answer is it depends on who you’re talking to. One of the things that public health people do is they’ve developed a list of nutrients of concern. The way that they’ve done that is they’ve looked at population intakes from NHANES, which is a nationally representative sample of what people are eating. They’ve then looked at the average requirements developed by the Institute of Medicine, which is now the National Academy of Medicine. They’ve said, “X, Y and Z are not nutrients of concern because the average intake is above the average requirement. A, B and C are nutrients of concern because the average intake is below the average requirement.”

First of all, I disagree with this. This method was chosen because they wanted to make the standard American diet not look nutrient deficient. That was driven out of at least the pretense of concern that everyone would be taking supplements if they were all told that the American diet was nutrient deficient. Listen to what the implications of this approach are. Most of the nutrient requirements in the RDA are set on the assumption that there’s an average requirement and then there’s variation around the average. In almost every single case, with the exception of 3 or 4 nutrients, there’s no data on the amount of variation at all. They have arbitrarily decided that a standard deviation in the nutrient requirement is 10%.

The RDA takes the average requirement and adds 20%, assuming that the distribution of requirements is normally distributed which means it takes the shape of the bell curve, which there’s also no evidence for and then saying, “If we take the average and then we take two standard deviations in the bell shape then that will cover 95% of the middle, which means that the RDA will meet the needs of 97.5% of people because only 2.5% on the upper-end of the requirement will be outside the scope of the requirement.” They estimated the average based on data. They have no data that the variation takes a bell shape and on what the variation is. They assumed it’s a bell shape and that the one standard deviation is 10%. They assumed that if you multiply the average by 1.2, that’s how you get to the RDA. That in itself may or may not be correct.

In the 3 or 4 cases where we do have data on the variation, in every single instance a standard deviation is more than 10%. Based on what we do know, we should assume that the variation is greater than what is assumed. The RDA should be higher if they’re trying to cover the needs of 97.5% of people but let’s be generous and assume that they’re good enough. We’re saying that the average person requires the average requirement. What we’re going to do is assume that if the average intake in the population meets or exceeds the average requirement then everyone is getting what they need or most people are getting what they need. In order for that to be true, you have to assume that the people who are eating more than the average requirement are doing so because they happen to be the very same people whose requirement is that much above the average requirement.

Why on Earth would that be the case? That’s impossible for that to be the case because there’s nothing in the brain that knows what your requirement is versus the average that drives your eating behavior to eat the exact amount of folic acid above the requirement because you’re eating that many more sandwiches from the deli. It’s not true. My personal view would be that if you’re going to look at the population level, you should use the RDAs because those are at least putatively supposed to cover most people. If most of the people in the population are eating what covers most of the people’s needs then some people are consuming more than they need but you have a 97.5% probability that 97.5% of people are getting their needs met where you have no basis for that.

I take the nutrients of concern with a grain of salt because of everything I described. It’s possible that things that are listed as not a nutrient of concern are nutrients of concern for most people but there’s a bigger thing which is it depends on what population you’re in. That’s based on the standard American diet. As soon as you take someone who decides to not eat white bread, that person is in a different state of nutritional profile because now they are, first of all, not eating the synthetic folic acid that’s added to that, which is not the ideal form of folic acid but does prevent folate deficiency. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about this. Folic acid is added to white bread because it successfully has reduced the incidence of neural tube defects in pregnant mothers.

There are numerous things that you can replace it with. You can replace white bread with whole-grain bread. You’re going to be less deficient in magnesium because there’s no magnesium added to white bread but there is magnesium present in whole wheat bread. You’re probably going to be deficient in folate because you remove the synthetic folic acid but if you didn’t replace it with green vegetables and liver then you’re probably going to be deficient in folate. Vitamin D is a concern for most people who aren’t supplementing but as soon as you take someone who is taking 4,000 IUs of vitamin D every day, now I’m concerned that they’re getting so much vitamin D that they’re increasing their needs for other fat-soluble vitamins. Each one of these behavioral perspectives put someone in a different situation.

Also, I do have a consulting practice but when I do consulting, I generally get people who are trying to solve problems that they can’t solve. I don’t generally get the people with the obvious problems. Quite often, I’m dealing with people who have, if it’s a nutritional problem, it might be some enzymatic problem where they have particularly high needs for something. I’m getting the odd cases. I don’t think there’s an answer to that. It’s a very case-by-case basis. I could list out 30 different behavioral patterns that would lead people to have different nutrients of concern based on those behavioral patterns.

I see what you’re saying. These nutrients of concern may not be for some people and they may be for other people. There are these big generalizations and assumptions that the government’s recommendations are based on these recommended daily allowances that don’t allow for the differences of the bio-individuality. I might be having a lot of food with iron and not realizing I’m overdoing the iron. That might be another problem altogether.

I’ll throw out one more example. Magnesium is not a nutrient of concern for someone who is eating a broad base of whole plant foods. Magnesium is a nutrient of concern for the general population because people are eating a whole ton of white flour and sugar, neither of which have any magnesium. As soon as you’re eating a mix of protein foods and lots of whole plant foods, most people eating that type of diet are getting enough magnesium. Although if you’re eating a low-plant, high-fat carnivore diet, you could be deficient in magnesium that way too. I want to make one more point. I’m not anti-carnivore. The carnivore diet is probably the easiest way that you could become straight-up deficient in folate because that’s the diet where you’re not eating vegetables or white flour.

I’ve wondered what my carnivore friends are missing. Some people say it’s polyphenols.

I have a whole free PDF called Doing Carnivore Right.

I wanted to ask you a couple of more questions before we wrap up. One is synthetic versus a food supplement. Can you speak to that? What’s the difference? Are we getting into trouble if we get vitamins that we don’t know where they’re coming from exactly?

That’s a case-by-case basis. There are some vitamins that are substantially different than you would get in food when it’s synthetic. You can pay more money for the one that approximates what’s in food but the cheap stuff is different. There are some vitamins where it’s basically the same. A great example of where it’s straight-up fundamentally different would be pantothenic acid or vitamin B5. When you eat food, you’re mostly getting Coenzyme A and phosphopantetheine, which are the things that you need to use in the body. When you’re taking a supplement, you’re getting pantothenic acid which is a building block of that. Pantothenic acid is good enough to cure the pantothenic deficiency but there are a lot of things including even alcohol intake that can interfere with building it up into the form you need.

It’s not as if pantothenic acid is toxic. In fact, you can take thousands of times the requirement for it and it doesn’t cause any problems. There are good reasons to believe that it is generally better possibly for everyone and some people to get the forms of the well-developed and built-up forms of that nutrient that’s found in food. You cannot get Coenzyme A or phosphopantetheine supplements anywhere. Your only choice is to get it from food. There’s something with vitamin B6 where the cheap stuff that’s in most multivitamins and supplements that you would get at the drug store is pyridoxine hydrochloride. That is more or less the form that you would find in plants but not the form you would find in animal products and then pyridoxal 5 phosphate or P5P, which is more or less the main form you find in animal products. P5P costs more money but you can get P5P and it’s going to be the same as eating P5P in animal foods.

There’s something like vitamin C where there’s almost like an etiology around believing that vitamin C is different in supplements as in foods but it’s not. The vitamin C that’s in ascorbic acid supplements is more or less identical to what is in foods. You can make choices like you can get it synthesized from non-GMO corn if you’re worried about contaminants. I would still be biased towards getting my vitamin C from food for what I’ll explain. The reality is that vitamin C from ascorbic acid fulfills all the biological functions attributable to vitamin C. Should you get your vitamin C from the ascorbic acid supplement or real food supplement?

In The Case for Food chapter in my book, I’m going to lay out the case for why I think you should try to get a food-first approach, even if you knew exactly what you needed and can get the exact synthetic forms of everything. The big reason for this is that while ascorbic acid fulfills all the functions of vitamin C, the other things that are in the vitamin C supplement are still of value and have many complex interactions that we only understand a fraction of. One of the things I do in my chapter is outline the history of what it would look like at any point in history if you took what you thought was important in foods and put them together in an isolated diet. We know what that would look like because we have examples of infant formula and total parenteral nutrition. Suffice it to say that in both cases, we made a lot of screw-ups that took decades to fix.

Total parenteral nutrition started many years ago. It was not until the 1990s and 2000s that they realized that the reason that everyone was getting fatty liver on it and that half the people who died on TPN almost were dying of liver problems. That was because there was no choline in the TPN. Also, one of the things I do is go back and look at what they did to rodent diets. They started adding alfalfa to rodent diets because they realized that it was deficient in vitamin A. If you look at the writings from that time like Sir Elmer McCollum, he was one of the key discoverers of vitamin A. If you look at his writings, he was convinced that there was one fat-soluble vitamin and one water-soluble vitamin. You needed minerals and maybe certain fats. If they acted on that and put what McCollum thought was necessary, they would have had deficiency diseases that would have taken them 30 years to discover that there was vitamin K in the alfalfa and they had to add that but then it would have taken another 30 years to realize that there are polyphenols in the alfalfa that promote hepatic detoxification.

If you just add the vitamins, you’re going to have low levels of detoxification in the liver. You’re not going to get rid of the toxins. It was another 30 years before they started realizing that if you pick the one compound that you thought promoted detoxification in 1970, it would take you through the current time to realize that there are other compounds that have synergistic interactions that you can only get when they’re found together, where you get the maximum promotion of liver detoxification or the maximum prevention of cancer. The reason that you should offer the whole food over the synthetic vitamin C isn’t because of this mythology that the synthetic vitamin C is fundamentally different. It’s because there are thousands of other things in that thing that have health-promoting properties. If you try to put everything together with just synthetic stuff, it’s going to take you decades of accidental health problems to figure out what was missing from the food.

This makes so much sense to me because Dr. Price recognized vitamin A and vitamin D and I knew there were some other fat-soluble activator but he didn’t know what it was. I’m thinking he is not the only one. There are many combinations of synergistic vitamins and minerals working in concert with one another that we still might not completely understand. Let me ask you a couple of more things. Since you’re saying food-first, are there foods that are your go-tos that you say, “Almost everybody I see should be eating more liver?” Is there anything else that you’re like, “This is another food people should make an effort to include in their diet?”

If you wanted to construct a whole food multivitamin then the best way to do that would be with 1 or 2 ounces of liver, 1 or 2 oysters, 1 or 2 clams, a tablespoon of unfortified nutritional yeast and some kind of whole food vitamin C supplement or half of a bell pepper. That is a little complicated and there are lots of ways to design a diet. If you selected from among those superfoods or put them into some kind of rotation that acquainted to a daily average of those things then those would be the top things that would get you all the nutrients you need.

I want to pose to you the question I often pose at the end here. If the reader could do just one thing to improve their health, it may be related to the vitamins and minerals or a discussion that we’ve had, what would you recommend that they do?

In 2021, get outside, get lots of fresh air and go do something fun. That would have the highest impact on the most number of people’s health.

Thank you for your time. I hope everybody reading gets outside and goes and has some fun. That’s wonderful advice.

Hug the people in your family.

Thank you, Chris.

Take care.

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Our guest was Chris Masterjohn. Visit his website ChrisMasterjohnPhD.com to sign up for his newsletter and more resources. For a review from Apple Podcasts, “Love this Podcast,” from Pete in Plymouth. “This is the first podcast I started listening to on my health transformation journey. It has provided me such good advice on eating more nutritious foods and lifestyle changes that have helped me feel better, both physically and mentally. One does feed the other so it makes sense. Thanks for all the great information.” Pete, you’re so welcome. It is our pleasure. You also may review our show on Apple Podcasts. Go to Apple Podcasts and click on the ratings and reviews. Thank you so much for reading. Stay well, my friend. Hasta pronto.

About Chris Masterjohn

Chris earned his PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut in 2012. For a number of years, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois and later served as Assistant Professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York.

Today, Chris is an entrepreneur conducting independent research, consulting, collaborating on information and technology products—all to help people gain better health.