Chris Kresser: Well, let me stop there and just see if I can answer that. I’d be happy to answer any basic questions you have. There is a book. It’s kind of an older book. It’s called Methyl Magic: Maximum Health through Methylation. It was published in the late ’90s. It’s been a while since I read it. I seem to recall it had a kind of decent basic summary on methylation and what the role of methylation is in the body, so you could consider that. There’s also The Methylation Miracle, which was published also in 1999, that I have not read, but it’s a consumer-oriented book, and given that these books are both for consumers, I would assume that they would have a simpler-to-understand explanation.
Justine’s question goes on, “Anyway, what I did notice about methylation was too much or too little could be good or bad, depending on different things being tested upregulated or downregulated to genes influencing methylation, and this was sometimes good and sometimes bad. I understand this year we’re not doing it, per se, but so often in your lectures and articles you mention a variety of situations that methylation can play a role, and it would be a good to have a basic understanding of what that might mean.” I’m just reading the rest of the question here.
Yeah, it is a big topic. There’s a lot of information out there about it, some of which I don’t think is very good, some of which I think is pretty good, and it’s something that I’m still kind of reaching for a clearer understanding of myself. I mean, I’ve been doing methylation protocols and testing for methylation for several years now, and I’ve seen improvements in people on methylation protocols, but I have some reservations about the way that methylation is being approached right now, and it’s something I want to continue to look at and investigate myself before I start teaching it in any significant detail. I mean, in general, methylation is something that happens a million times a second in the body. It refers to the addition of a methyl donor to a compound, a methyl group to a compound, and it’s involved in anything from neurotransmitter production to hormone metabolism to energy production. It impacts virtually every aspect of physiological function, and everyone is methylating all the time. The question is, are they methylating well, and if not, why? That can come down to deficiencies of nutrients that are important in the methylation cycle. It can come down to gastrointestinal function, which affects methylation, and it can come down to some single-nucleotide polymorphisms that may affect methylation. But it mostly comes down to environmental factors, and this is something that Ben Lynch and I agree on and discussed on the podcast interview that I did with him. If you dial in all of your diet and lifestyle factors, in many cases that’s all the focus that you’ll need to do on methylation. Of course, in some situations, that’s not enough, and that’s where we start to think about testing for functional methylation and doing functional methylation protocols.