Vitality Radio Podcast with Jared St. Clair
Oct 21, 2026 · 33 min · 14 segments
On this episode of Vitality Radio, Jared looks at one of the biggest mistakes in the modern diet: eating plenty of protein without eating a truly balanced variety of animal foods. Muscle meat—things…
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 would listen 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 acid, 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 has to do with muscle, it has to do with methylation, a word that gets thrown around a lot 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 to get it from the food we eat or as a 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 that 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.
So I think by the 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't that what health is? Isn't that what 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 of maybe supplementing protein.
As we age, we talk about eating less protein, or at least that happens in America, that we eat less protein as we 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're involved in neurotransmitters, hormones, immune proteins, connective tissue, antioxidant systems, and thousands of structures throughout the entire body.
Protein is basically delivering these amino acids, and nine of them are considered essential, again, meaning we have to get them from an outside source.
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 acid that might, that we may be getting too much of and it's aging us prematurely or whatever.
So 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 started digging in, as happens often when I do Vitality Radio episodes, I learn a lot.
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 would listen 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 acid, 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 has to do with muscle, it has to do with methylation, a word that gets thrown around a lot 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 to get it from the food we eat or as a 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 that 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.
So I think by the 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't that what health is? Isn't that what 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 of maybe supplementing protein.
As we age, we talk about eating less protein, or at least that happens in America, that we eat less protein as we 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're involved in neurotransmitters, hormones, immune proteins, connective tissue, antioxidant systems, and thousands of structures throughout the entire body.
Protein is basically delivering these amino acids, and nine of them are considered essential, again, meaning we have to get them from an outside source.
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 acid that might, that we may be getting too much of and it's aging us prematurely or whatever.
So 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 started digging in, as happens often when I do Vitality Radio episodes, I learn a lot.
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