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‘MTHFR Coffee’ with Eggs and Kale for Breakfast

A quick post this morning to recommend a good podcast to anyone looking into MTHFR variants.  Chris Masterjohn put out a well-balanced and well-researched podcast a few weeks ago titled Living with MTHFR. For those of you who don’t have two hours to listen to it, there is a transcript of the show, which is a much faster read.

The podcast goes in-depth on the methylation cycle and includes quite a bit of information on the need for creatine, glycine, and choline. It is a good summation of the big picture of the methylation cycle, and it does a good job of pointing out the food sources of all of the nutrients involved.

While I’m joking a bit about “MTHFR coffee”, I actually do drink my coffee with gelatin in it each morning. Gelatin is an amino acid and an excellent source of glycine. It often gets short-changed in our modern diet. Bone broth is another great source of glycine. I tend to get histamine reactions from bone broth if it is cooked for a long time. (Yes, I can and do make a quicker cooked bone broth in the pressure cooker sometimes, but it is not an everyday thing for me.)

To get gelatin (glycine) in my diet on a more regular basis, I add a spoonful of grass-fed, pasture-raised beef gelatin to my morning coffee. The trick to getting it to dissolve well is to put the gelatin in the cup first, along with a little cold water. Make sure the gelatin and cold water combine well before adding in the hot water. If you add sugar to your coffee, it works great to stir the sugar and gelatin together first before adding water.

If you aren’t getting enough creatine in your diet, it is also an easy supplement to add. It doesn’t really have any flavor and easily mixes into coffee or other drinks. I’ve read several places that it does degrade in liquid over time, so it may be better to add it to something that you are going to drink somewhat quickly rather than a drink that you sip on for hours at a time. If you add it to your coffee with gelatin in it, you are pretty much guaranteed not to be sipping on it all day since your coffee/gelatin mixture will set up like Jello when it gets cold!

Eggs from my happy backyard chickens plus some kale from my mom’s garden round out an ‘MTHFR breakfast’. I get some choline from the egg yolks and folate from the kale. A good start to the day!

Start with your genetics:

If you are just starting to look into how your genes play a role in your nutrition, you could start with these pages:

One final note to leave you with is a headline from a couple of days ago: Higher coffee consumption associated with a lower risk of early death.


About the Author:
Debbie Moon is the founder of Genetic Lifehacks. Fascinated by the connections between genes, diet, and health, her goal is to help you understand how to apply genetics to your diet and lifestyle decisions. Debbie has a BS in engineering from Colorado School of Mines and an MSc in biological sciences from Clemson University. Debbie combines an engineering mindset with a biological systems approach to help you understand how genetic differences impact your optimal health.