The Methylation Diet with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald

In this episode of Functional Medicine Research I interview Dr. Kara Fitzgerald about her book, "The Methylation Diet" and a preview of her upcoming study on The Methylation Diet.  We had a great discussion about topics like methylation and diet, MTHFR, COMT, SAMe, methylated folate and B12, homocysteine, epigenetics and much more.

The Methylation Diet with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald Interview Transcript

Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome everyone to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg, and I'm really looking forward today to my conversation with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. She's a naturopathic physician and a real thought leader in the functional medicine arena. She got her doctorate in naturopathic medicine from National College of Natural Medicine. And she did postdoctoral training with the Metametrix Laboratory, which is now in Genova. And she's also certified through the Institute for Functional Medicine, and she's on faculty at the Institute for Functional Medicine. So, she's been published in a lot of papers and she's been involved in various publications and peer review journals that she's written. She's contributed to functional medicine textbooks, and she recently wrote a chapter for the new "Integrative Gastroenterology" book. And that's Dr. Gerry Mullin's book on gastroenterology. And she's also co-authored an e-book, it's called the "Methylation Diet and Lifestyle." And we'll be talking about methylation today. So, Kara, welcome to the show.

Dr. Fitzgerald: Thanks, Nick. It's nice to reconnect with you. I was just dialoguing with you. I'll tell your audience that we knew each other way back when I was doing my post doc. I think you were one of our early folks to really become an expert in the specialty testing we were offering. So, anyway, it's nice to reconnect.

Dr. Hedberg: Yes, yes, it's great. So, some really interesting things to talk about today. And, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about methylation. And so, why don't we just start with some bedrock information for our laypeople and practitioners about, you know, what is methylation, and if you could just give us a basic overview of what it is and how it works.

Dr. Fitzgerald: Yeah, sure. Listen, if you've got any serious sort of biochemistry history geeks, it was actually...our ability to methylate compounds, to detoxify them was first discovered in 1887, if anybody needs a cocktail party factoid. But it was long after that before the methylation cycle was actually characterized and S-Adenosyl methionine was discovered. You know, it was in the 20th century when all of that was teased out. So, methylation is really quite simply, as you know, either we're putting a methyl group, which is a carbon and three hydrogens, either we're adding it to a compound, or we are removing it from a compound, or we are producing S-Adenosyl methionine, which is the co-factor that carries that methyl group that can be put on compounds.

So that's what methylation is. And it's everywhere. You know, an internet lord [SP] says, those folks talking a lot about methylation say it's happening in every cell all of the time. And I would argue that it's probably pretty close to that. I mean, it's interesting to me that we use this addition of a methyl group or the methylation cycle which interfaces, as you know, intimately with the folate-vitamer cycle and sulfuration. But, you know, it's interesting that we use these in such important fundamental processes, you know, body-wide.

Just to give you a couple of ideas, Nick, of its importance, you know, three of the four DNA bases require a functioning folate/methylation cycle for production. Three of the four bases. And that fourth base, which is cytosine, is the base that in DNA methylation gets methylated. So, for gene expression, fundamentally for gene expression, we have to have good methylation. And for DNA repair, we need good methylation. So just think about it. To make DNA, to regulate DNA expression,