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Meat, Organs, Bones, and Skin: Nutrition for Mental Health
Chris Masterjohn, PhD

Weston Price documented the ability of nutrient-dense diets to promote not only vibrant physical health, but vibrant mental health as well. Many of the nutrient-dense foods Price emphasized were animal foods, such as organs, bone broths, liver, and cod liver oil. Numerous studies in the modern era have associated vegetarianism with an increased risk of mental disorders, suggesting that animal foods may support mental health. This talk will review the importance of key amino acids and vitamins in supporting mental health, with special attention to the paradoxical roles of dopamine in promoting future- and goal-oriented behavior in some parts of the brain, and to promoting rigidity of thoughts in other parts of the brain. Special attention will also be given to the key nutrients needed to coordinate dopamine signaling to maximize mental health.

Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is creator and maintainer of Cholesterol-And-Health.Com, a web site dedicated to extolling the benefits of traditional, nutrient-dense, cholesterol-rich foods and to elucidating the many fascinating roles that cholesterol plays within the body. Cholesterol-And-Health.Com is home to his blog, The Daily Lipid. Chris is a frequent contributor to Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, is a perennial speaker at the annual Wise Traditions conference, and writes a second blog on the foundation's web site, Mother Nature Obeyed. He has authored five peer-reviewed publications including a hypothesis on the molecular mechanism of vitamin D toxicity published in Medical Hypotheses, a letter to the editor published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology challenging the conclusions of a widely publicized study claiming to show adverse effects of eating coconut oil, and a letter to the editor published in The American Heart Journal arguing that drugs used to raise HDL-cholesterol should not be considered safe until their potential adverse effects on vitamin E metabolism have been studied, a human study on the effects of vitamin E on sugar metabolism published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, and a review on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease published in Nutrition Reviews. He has authored two additional experimental papers that are presently under review. Chris has a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois where he is studying interactions between vitamins A, D, and K. His presentations at this conference represent his independent work and do not represent the positions of the University of Illinois.