Rethinking Protein Part 1: The Protein Mistake Most People Are Making

I don't believe that restricting methionine makes any sense. It's an essential amino acid. Those good quality proteins that it comes from, I think are very valuable.

And I frankly, most people eat less of them than they should, not more of than than should. But we do have a problem and this is the mistake that I thing most are making when it come to protein.

of eating too much just muscle meat as our protein source is the easiest way to get it. I would say it's the tastiest way get to it and it is a new traditional way of getting it over the last hundred years in America.

It's what we're used to, but we can't ignore the collagen, we cannot ignore gelatin, the bone broth, and the other parts of the animal. There are lots of ways to do that supplementally as well as with your diet.

Welcome to Vitality Radio, the podcast that helps you make sense of natural supplements and thrive without pharma drugs. I'm Jared St. Clair. The protein mistake almost everyone makes and how to fix it.

Now, this episode actually started out as me trying to deliver an episode about the amino acid methionine. I had a request for that actually from one of my team members, Josh, because he felt like it was an amino acid that gets overlooked and wanted to get some more information out there.

But I knew if I did a show like everything you need to know about methionine, like seven people had listened to that. And as we started digging into it, Jessica and I, we realized that there was a lot more to this than meets the eye.

But this little amino acid, which is an essential amino acids, one of the nine, is in the middle of some huge and important conversations when it comes to your health.

The greatest aspect of that conversation just being protein as a whole, of which of course amino-acids are the building blocks. So it has to do with protein, it as to with muscle, has do it with methylation, a word that gets thrown around a lots nowadays, MTHFR.

homocysteine, glutathione, detoxification, brain health, and even longevity. In fact, while researching this topic, I kept running into people recommending methionine restriction as a longevity strategy.

And that didn't make sense to me because how can an essential amino acid that our body has to get in order to function correctly and that we have to supplement, it's not made inside of the body.

We have get it from the food we eat or as supplement of some sort. How could that restricting that be a longevity strategy? It didn't make sense to me.

Eat less methionine, live longer. And the more I dug into it, that recommendation for real human beings made less sense. than maybe it does in some of the studies, which by the way, weren't done on human beings.

But there's real science behind the conversation. So I'm not going to dismiss it, but I think we can understand it a lot better than just a headline that says eat less methionine and live longer.

And those headlines do exist out there. I'd think by end of this episode, you're gonna see that the problem with this little amino acid that you may have never even heard of before, many people haven't, isn't a problem at all with methionine, but maybe more about balance.

And isn' that what health is? Isn't that holistic nutrition is, is the balance of all things? Not too much, not too little, that sort of thing. Protein is much more than muscle, right?

Most people think of protein and they think maybe supplementing protein. They think about taking it after their workout. You think what it does to maintain optimal muscle.

as we age, we talk about eating less protein or at least that happens in America that we eat less proteins as age for whatever reason and then we lose more muscle and so we think protein equals muscle but of course that's really not the case because every individual amino acid just like every vitamin and every mineral has its own unique role and aside from what it does as part of the greater conglomeration that makes up protein.

And amino acids are doing things everywhere because they're involved in enzymes, they are involved neurotransmitters, hormones, immune proteins, connective tissue, antioxidant systems, and thousands of structures throughout the entire body.

Protein is basically delivering these amino acid and nine of them are considered essential. Again, meaning we have to get them from an outside source, our body can't make them.

It doesn't necessarily mean they're extra important. It just means that we've got to get them from somewhere else and methionine is one of those nine.

So right from the start, like I said, a little skeptical when an essential amino acid becomes an amino that might that, we may be getting too much of and it's aging as prematurely or whatever.

The best question I think here is why does that research even exist? And what does it actually mean? Because frankly, before I started doing this show, I didn't even know that research was out there.

And as I've started digging in, as happens often when I do vitality radio episodes, learn a lot. is something that I think everybody needs to hear. I this is maybe one of the more important episodes that i've delivered in some time and maybe that's because a lot of it was news to me but i think if you stick around you're gonna really appreciate that you did and uh…

maybe it'll give you a little bit of a different insight on how to look at your diet as a whole. So methionine is one of the sulfur-containing essential amino acids.

You're going to find it in mostly eggs, fish, beef, chicken, turkey, dairy. It is in other complete proteins too, but those are the big ones. One of methione's most important jobs is becoming something called SAMe, and SAME is 1 of body's major methyl donors.

And that takes us into methylation, which gets pretty scientific and pretty confusing sometimes, but I want to keep it really, really simple. As we talk about it, your body constantly moves tiny chemical groups called methyl groups from one molecule to another.

Think of a methyl group, almost like a little instruction tag. add this, change that, turn this process up, turned that process down. It's involved in DNA regulation, neurotransmitter metabolism, hormone metabolism cell membranes, creatine production.

Body knows how to do this. You don't have to micromanage every methyl group. Thank goodness, because it would never happen. There's too much going on here.

you just need to give the system the raw materials that it needs to it on its own. Methionine as an amino acid becomes SAMI and SAMi donates methyl groups.

And eventually the pathway gives us homocysteine. But that's enough chemistry for now. Homocystein has two roads. We usually think of homocistine as bad.

If you're familiar with the term, you've probably heard of it being related to heart disease and things like that. but homocysteine is normal. You are supposed to make it.

The question is where it goes next. Picture a fork in the road. Road one, recycle homocysteines back toward methionine. That process depends on nutrients, including folate, B12, B2, choline, and TMG, also known as betaine.

Road two, send homocysteine toward cystein. And cystein becomes extremely important because it's one of the three amino acids that your body uses to make glutathione, the master antioxidant of a body.

We're connecting here methionine, methylation, homocysteines and glutothione. That's why these two episodes I decided to do back to back. They're very interrelated, but kind of the part one and part two made more sense.

Methionine isn't only a raw material for SAMI. It also participates in your antioxidant defense system. methioninine includes proteins that can actually take some of oxidative hit.

So this I thought was really, really cool. And there's in its super geeky sciency stuff, but essentially methionine can take oxidative stress and essentially shield the rest of the body from that oxidant of stress to some degree.

So it's like this first line of defense amino acid, which is really, really cool. I never knew that until I started studying the show. The body has systems that can then recycle that damaged methioneine back again.

It takes the damage, gets recycled back to methineine, And that damage is kind of as if it never happened. Think of like DentPro. I don't know if you have Dentpro where you are, but that's a company we have here.

We just had a hailstorm in Utah and a lot of people got little dings in their car and they go in and just pop the ding out. That's, think of methionine that way as far as your oxidative stress.

Pretty freaking cool. Almost like a little sacrificial antioxidant system that is built into the proteins that you eat every day. And then there's the bigger connection.

Methionine can eventually feed sulfur into cysteine and cystein directly helps us make glutathione, which then of course has massively powerful antioxidant benefits.

So methionene is really tied into cellular protection in many ways. This matters in the brain too, because methione metabolism, glutothione and healthy methylation are all involved in a chemistry that researchers study when they're looking at neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and things like that.

It doesn't mean that methionine on its own prevents these things, but it is a major factor in the protection of the neurological system because of what it does with the antioxidant picture.

So what's with this methione restriction thing? You're going to live longer if you cut your methianine down. Well, methionine restriction is a real area of longevity research.

I don't think we should completely ignore it because I think there are some pearls of wisdom here. But I that the outcome of what is being said, it strikes me differently than what a lot of the researchers are actually trying to convince us of.

In animal models, that's the first thing. Animals, not humans. Dramatically restricting methionine can extend lifespan and change some of the signaling pathways associated with aging.

That all by itself, of course, very, interesting, right? And I'm glad, like I said, the researchers are studying this because we'll learn something from this.

But I'm not willing to buy restricting methionine in lab animals makes them live longer and therefore humans should do this too. We don't have evidence showing that aggressively restricting methione extends human lifespan at all.

That doesn't exist. And some of these experiments are using levels of methidine restriction that would be extremely difficult to duplicate in a normal human diet period.

So here's where I think I land right now. I have messed up the American diet in about a thousand different ways. You know that. And one of those ways is that we've focused on very specific parts of the animal that eat.

We tend to eat almost nothing but muscle meat. When I say muscle meat, I'm talking about chicken breast as opposed to chicken thighs, chicken wings, Chicken skin, things like that.

Turkey breast, steak, ground beef, pork loin, Pork chops, lean cuts of meat. Whey protein. None of these are bad foods. I eat these foods, recommend these food.

Not so much on the pork, but the other ones. And they're great sources of complete protein, But they are only part of the animal. Historically, people ate the skin.

The connective tissue, the cartilage, The tendons, even the bone marrow. and the organs. I've recently been doing this series on organ supplementation and talking about how historically that's how it's always been.

Sometimes there's or in the past much more than now people were slow cooking roasts and tougher cuts of meat which could turn into a combination of bone broth and a much more, well, frankly delicious way to eat these roasts and get a lot more of the connective tissue stuff, which means the amino acid ratios change a lots between those types of protein.

They didn't waste half the animal and nutritionally that gave them something that we've largely lost, Which is balance. Because when they say restrict methionine, the researchers aren't saying, Instead, maybe we just need to add more glycine, but we need talk about this as a possible reason why restricting methionine actually can potentially be helpful.

I like to think of them the way I think about vitamin D3 and K2, zinc and copper. It's a balancing act, not because there's some perfect ratio that we know of with glycanine and methianine.

And there really aren't perfect ratios on those other things either, there are recommended ratios. I think it's less about perfect ratio and more about just having plenty of both because these nutrients, these amino acids don't work on islands any more than these vitamins or these minerals do.

Glycine helps your body manage methyl groups. Well, think about that. Methionine turns into SAMI, which creates methyl groups. Glycine is needed to make glutathione, as is cysteine, Which can come from methionene, right?

Glicene is heavily used in collagen and glycene rich foods are exactly what disappeared when we decided that meat meant boneless, skinless chicken breast and steak.

So instead of saying methione is bad, my response is maybe we should restore some balance. Maybe instead eating only muscle protein, We should remember that the rest of the animal matters too.

And this isn't about abandoning muscle meat. Like I say, I eat these things and I love these thing. There's nothing wrong with these. That's kind of a whole point because we have this push that we've all experienced over the last little while.

I relate to this. Similarly to how we had this pushed back in the seventies and eighties. and even 60s away from saturated fat and now everybody's saying, wait, that was probably a mistake, right?

Well, this push towards plant protein and plant-based, it's been like cultural and it has been, I'll say, pseudo-scientific And everybody gets to make their own choice.

You want to be vegan? I don't have a problem with that. Vegetarian? Sure. Carnivore? Whatever. Keto? Fine. I'm not interested in turning diet into religion, which I think is happening a lot right now.

But my personal philosophy is just much simpler. And balance and moderation usually make a lot of sense, at least to me. I don't see a compelling reason to demonize high quality animal protein because it contains an essential amino acid called methionine.

Protein quality matters. Amino acid balance matters, age matters muscle matters exercise matters and all of those things are supported by those types of proteins.

So when we go away from complete proteins, which I think there are a lot of people with a lotta power in this world trying to convince us that we should be eating crickets instead of a steak or a chicken breast, then I always think, ah, there's an agenda here.

And the science, they've got a little bit of science to support some of what they're saying, but it's not done in humans. And it doesn't make that much sense to me.

So for me, the mistake is that complete protein still comes first, not restriction of certain kinds of protein. Great, then what do we do? Because do want to eat three servings of liver a week?

Do we want be making bone broth on a regular basis? Can we? Yes. Should we, I think so. But is it realistic for a lot of us? I don't like liver. I'll always remember the time that my grandpa shared his liver and onions with me.

And I have a memory of that really turns me away from liver since then I bought desecrated liver in a powder form to throw it in my protein shakes. It wrecks a protein shake.

Don't care how much you put in there. Thankfully it comes in capsules as well. My point is in our modern society, this is what's happened. And you've seen it.

We've gone away from tradition, we've got away, from how it once was and how our ancestors did it, and I'm not talking about our ancestor's, you know, before the time of Jesus, I am talking, about ancestors like 200 years ago, all right?

We have gone, away a lot from so many of those traditions, those nourishing traditions as the Weston A. Price people talk about it though the raw milk, the whole animal, All of that kind of stuff and yet, As with AI, as with the internet, and as just about everything else in life, we've made these advances that have really taken us backwards and yet can also take us forwards as two sides of the same coin.

I'm not not using AI, I use it fairly regularly. Do I think it's going to take over the world someday? I don't know. It might. I wish I was smart enough to see that future.

But I Think it is kind of silly not to use that at all because there it can help a lot with productivity. There are some really useful tools there. The internet's the same way, right?

I mean, you can find anything you want on the internet, some really nasty, awful, dark stuff, and some beautiful, helpful stuff. Podcasts like this one.

Some, I hope, mine, are very, very useful. Others might just contain things that are stressing you out or taking you further away from where you wanted to be.

Right? On the one hand, we've gone away from these traditions, but on the other hand there's now technology that makes it much, much easier to do. We have a bone broth protein in our line that's not all of a sudden one of our top selling products called Rebuild Plus that tastes delicious and it contains all that stuff that we're not getting for the most part in the muscle meats that I was talking about.

And so I've been using that since last November or almost a year since it was released. I use it every single day. as a kind of a cheat code to get these other proteins in.

And the organ supplements that I've recently been talking about, if you think that the benefits of beef liver are awesome and you really wanna get it in your life, but you know realistically you're not gonna eat beef, liver, well, you can get in a capsule form now.

So all of this stuff is available to us and it's easy to in different formats than what our ancestors had, but we can get all of those benefits if we just recognize there was probably a reason beyond scarcity that no part of the animal was ever wasted back in the day.

But let's talk about these amino acids a little bit more because collagen is not a replacement for complete protein. Bone broth is a not replacement of complete proteins.

And you've heard me talk Elucine and you certainly heard others talk it. Lucine is an important signal for muscle protein synthesis but Lucene by itself can't build muscle by it self.

Think about a construction site. Lucene may say, hey, start building. Great, but you still need lumber and nails, and you need the other essential amino acids in the same way.

So I want complete protein first, eggs, meat, fish, poultry, quality raw, if possible, dairy, a good protein powder when appropriate, like a whey protein.

But then I also want the collagenous proteins like a good collagen supplement or a bone broth, which is rich in collagen. And I. Also want some organ stuff.

So these are things where we can now say, okay, we. Can balance this out and that's probably the fix. I think it's the fixed. Just think logically, it makes sense.

and I'm not a longevity researcher. Frankly, I don't want to be a Longevity researcher, I don't think I have the scientific brain for that necessarily, but I do think agendas are being pushed.

So I say this, you don t have to start cooking like it's 1850. You just eat your steak, your chicken, But you also eat your pot roast, your chuck roast your shanks, chicken with skin perhaps, a slow cooked meats with connective tissue, bone broth, gelatin, collagen.

And if you enjoy organ meats, please by all means do it. I'm probably not going to. If you want to supplement, the Rebuild Plus is a great option for that as well and covers those bases.

Now, Jen and I did an episode on MTHFR a while back and we started working on follow-up episodes. And it is so complex and it's so varied from person to person.

And we're still digging in and trying to understand MTHFR better. Even trying come up with some sort of partnership with someone where if you want to get your genetics tested, you have that opportunity.

I think we'll be able to do that soon. As I was studying methionine, what I realized was this is a story about MTHFR to some degree. So let's get into that side too.

If you've got Mthfr a variant or combination of variants, SNPs as they call them, or you think you might, or you know that about half the world does, I think this next part's gonna be pretty useful.

MTHRFR is an enzyme involved in folate metabolism. I Think most people at this point know one. You may have genetic variants that make the enzyme less efficient or very inefficient, And that matters, but it doesn't mean that your methylation is broken.

It definitely doesn' automatically mean. That you need a huge dose of methylfolate that's happening a lot in the functional medicine world. And I think oftentimes too much talk about that a little bit.

This is where I. Functional medicine though can go too far. because somebody gets the MTHFR results and suddenly they're taking five milligrams, 10 milligrams 15 milligrams.

That's 15,000 micrograms of methylfolate and huge doses of B12. And maybe they are also taking SAMI and TMG, everything methylated. Why? Well, because methylation is good, right?

But yes, methyulation is Good, but we want optimal methylation. Again, balance, not maximum methyilation. Personally, when someone has meaningful MTHFR issues, I prefer folate from food and a little bit of methylfolate in a supplement, starting small and working our way up.

That's my preference, but even then the dose should be individualized because my wife, Jen, is a perfect example of this and we shared this on that Mthfr episode, which we'll link in the show description here.

She does really well with a little bit of methylfolate. She eats a very whole food diet and gets folate from other sources as well. More is not better for her.

In fact, more equals snippy, interestingly enough, because of MTHFR being a snip. Jen. Edgy Jen, not very tolerant Jen which is interesting because that is not the Jen that I know.

Well, I still love her when she's like that, but that's that not normal her. That's her on too much methylfolate or too methyl B12. When she gets too many methyl donors, She doesn't do well with it, with her mood.

It makes her feel worse and it makes feel much more unstable and uncomfortable in her own skin, we'll say. That's gin. I'm not saying that everyone will respond exactly like she does, but that's the whole point.

You've got to look at the person, not just the genetic report. B2, homocysteine, and look at how they actually feel because genetics give us useful information.

They don't dictate the entire protocol because your body is still your and is going to respond differently than many other people's bodies, right? Now, TMG is something I want to talk about just briefly here is trimethylglycine.

We already talked about glycines. These are related. It gives the body another route to help recycle homocysteine back towards methionine, folate and B12 aren't the only tools that your body has.

And this is one ingredient you almost never see in a multivitamin. But when I was developing Ultimate Vitality Multi, I added a couple hundred milligrams of TMJ.

just to make sure that everybody's getting a little bit of this stuff, because all of us need support with methylation, even if we don't have MTHFR. Mthfr people generally need a lot more support, with methylation.

It's not a giant therapeutic dose, it's just a daily dose to ensure that people are getting it on a regular basis. And I added that, along with a bit a methylfolate and a B12, to make sure from of course the methylated form that they're in useful forms at useful doses that is not going to overdose anybody.

And I learned that lesson with Jen firsthand as we've seen her experiment with higher and lower doses of methylated B vitamins, specifically folate and B12 and not do well at those higher doses.

Then I want to just diverge a little bit here because I couldn't let this one go as were talking about methionine. But hopefully, let me put a cap on what we've talked about so far.

I don't believe that restricting methionine makes any sense. It's an essential amino acid. Those good quality proteins that it comes from I think are very valuable.

And I frankly think most people eat less of them than they should, not more of than than should. But we do have a problem and this is the mistake that I do think that most are making when it come to protein.

of eating too much just muscle meat as our protein source is the easiest way to get it. I would say it's the tastiest way get to it, and it is a new traditional way of getting it over the last hundred years in America.

It's what we're used to. But we can't ignore the collagen, we cannot ignore gelatin, the bone broth, or the other parts of the animal. As I've stated already, there are lots of ways to do that supplementally as well as with your diet.

But when we get to methionine, there is a condition that people struggle with, that medicine doesn't have a great answer for and natural medicine oftentimes does not have great answers for, but methioneine might be an answer, for a lot of people and that's warts.

Like I say, I'm diverting a little bit because I just had to fit this into the show. I've recommended for methionine for us for a long time because, have been told by dozens of my customers over the years that it works great for them.

When people first started coming in asking for Methionene, didn't know what they were asking it for. Didn't understand it very well back then. And even what I did understand about it did not apply to wards until I started asking people, why are you using Methione?

And they told me. And the story is usually the same. It's slow. it isn't like I take methionine and by the weekend, my warts are gone. People use it consistently and then over weeks and usually months, the wart gradually shrinks and just disappears.

And I've always paid attention to these anecdotes because I don't care if there is science to back this stuff up yet. I look forward to the science that comes down the road, which oftentimes comes following the anecdopes.

But when you hear the same thing over and over again from a bunch of people not trying to sell you anything, you have to perk up and listen, especially with something that is a pretty tough one to get rid of for so many people.

And then I love it when the research actually comes out because there was actually a study done. It's a very small study. it was done on kids, but 14 out of 25 had complete or almost complete improvement within four months using methionine to knock out warts.

Small study, no placebo, and the product wasn't pure methione. Actually had a couple of other vitamins in it, in addition to the amino acid, But methine was the main ingredient.

But it's really interesting because within 4 months, 14 out of 25 warts were gone in these kids and all of these wards had been around for at least 18 months prior to that.

That in and of itself is enough for me to atleast say, hmm, maybe there's something to this, right? And the thing is, many of the wart treatments can hurt, irritate skin, require repeated procedures.

And sometimes they don't work, right? So my go-to has been now for years, a little bit of nano silver gel under a Band-Aid with a drop of oregano oil mixed into it.

and then Thuja as a homeopathic pellet. That's kind of been my main go-to for a long, long time. And then methionine as the supplement at 500 milligrams a day for kids, about 1500 milligrams today for adults, not forever, just until the warts are gone.

I've had a lot of success and I have found that it takes a lots less than four months with the silver and the oregano and Thuja, and not just the methione.

So that's a really, really good way to go. All right. On methionine, I mentioned those doses. If you're using the finding for a specific purpose, like warts, 500 milligrams for kids, is about right.

1,500 milligrams of adults. I don't like it as a daily supplement, just ongoing all the time. Maybe I would do that if chronic wards were an issue and then I'd look into why that's happening because it's not a methione deficiency, But that's typically what I'm going to recommend.

And then if you've got kids who've gotten warts and you're trying to figure out, can I give methionine to a kid? Yes, safely, definitely. But the question is, how do you give it to the kid if they can't swallow the capsule?

I'm just going to tell you, methionine doesn't taste great. It is a sulfur containing amino acid. best away from other proteins. So with carbohydrates is fine, but without proteins and you've got to try and figure out if you can get it into your kid from a taste standpoint, disguising it in one of those ways.

If not, I will say those other three things, very easy to use on kids and still very effective without the methionine. Okay. Now, Let's talk about food methionine versus supplemental methonine.

Why would you want to get it as a supplement? I think basically my take on it is if you're eating plenty of protein, don't supplement methione unless you have a very specific reason for doing it.

If you do have MTHFR, I actually think SAMe itself as opposed to methone can make more sense, making sure you are getting your methylated B vitamins and things like that.

So I mostly reserve it for recommending it to warts. personally, but there are other people that use it for other reasons. I think you can mostly get enough of it from protein if you're eating good sources of animal protein, specifically muscle meats, like we talked about that most of us are eating plenty of.

So the takeaways are as follows. Methionine is involved in cellular antioxidant protection. You do need this amino acid. Its metabolism can ultimately contribute to cysteine and glutathione production.

It takes an antioxidate hit for us in a really positive way. Methione is not bad. And it certainly doesn't mean that this research that they're squawking about saying that we, you know, we need to restrict methionine, I think there's an agenda behind it.

I personally just don't trust it, that's the best way I can put it and the way to get it is in those muscle meats. But if you're eating a lot of muscle meat, which I most Americans are, maybe not enough and maybe, not clean enough forms.

We'll talk about that on another episode, but if your eating, a lotta muscle me, let's also then make sure that were also getting some bone broth. some connective tissue in some way from the animal, slow cooked meats, collagenous protein.

Those are how you diversify and then clean things up to tighten up the combination of things that we need to make all of the stuff that need. To detoxify our systems because optimal methylation is the key, not Maximum methylation balance and moderation is where this is out.

And on the next episode, that is the part two of this episode. I'm going to talk about all on detox side of. Methylation and methionine and how all that works on.

The next, well, it won't be the. Next episode there'll be one in between them, I think, but part. Two of, this, episode I. Think that between the two, you'll learn a lot and frankly, most of what I am going.

To be teaching is just about. kind of tightening up the diet side of things more so than the supplemental side. So I hope this has been helpful. I really hope it's shed a light on things for you.

It really did for me. And I will see you again on the next episode of Vitality Radio. My name is Jared St. Clair. Thank you for joining me here on Vitaly Radio!

you Hello, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Vitality Radio. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast has not been evaluated by the FDA.

Thank you.