Chris Masterjohn

In general, you are going to have higher cholesterol if you're eating less fiber, right?

Yeah, I think I mean, this this is a great tie back to the things we were talking about before, because.

The clearance of cholesterol from your blood is driven by the mitochondrial energy production that gives your brain the signal that you are in a state of abundance and should put that cholesterol toward good things.

And you have a bunch of hormones that communicate that.

Leptin, insulin, thyroid hormone are all involved.

What is ultimately driving this is your brain, especially in the hypothalamus, is taking information in that says, are you getting enough food for me to consider this a state of abundance where I ramp up your digestion, I ramp up your libido, I ramp up all these things.

And we tend in nutrition science to think that this is about calories or it's about carbs, and it is about those things.

But if you are half as good at mitochondrial conversion of food to ATP as the next guy over, you know, is your hypothalamus going to give you full credit for the food you ate in terms of calculating your state of abundance?

It's not.

It's going to dock you by half.

And this is because the hypothalamus takes all these signals and then it looks at inside the hypothalamic cells, it looks at, okay, how well do I convert

that those food molecules into ATP using my mitochondria.

And if it's 50% dropped, it's gonna dock you in your state of abundance.

And it's gonna say, you know, actually you ate all the food, but you didn't get all the energy.

And so we're just gonna let things stagnate

And the cholesterol is going to go up in the blood, your sex hormones are going to go down.

And, you know, you can get you can look at that and say, well, there's an age you're going through andropause, there's an age dependent decline in testosterone and adrenal hormones and stuff like that.

and then you can do hormone supplementation therapy, but what you're not actually fixing, but that can also be kind of a negative feedback loop.

Like if you're supplementing everything that your body would turn cholesterol into, that also is going to slow cholesterol turnover because your body's like, oh, I don't need to turn that into testosterone if I'm supplementing with it.

So I think that what we're missing in the whole discussion