Last updated on April 21, 2022.
Most of us decide whether a bit of information is trustworthy in large part on the basis of who has conveyed it to us. You shouldn’t trust everything people say on the internet, and I’m no exception. This post is meant to give you a sense of who I am as a person, what my biases are, and the perspective I’m writing from, so that you can figure out whether you’ll be taking the information I provide with a grain of salt (or several).
Table of Contents
What qualifies you to talk about health and disease?
Why do you bother writing and sharing this stuff? Do you make money from it?
How do you do research for and write your articles?
Are you one of those anti-Western medicine types?
Are you one of those woo-woo New Age-y energy medicine types?
What’s your perspective on the causes of and solutions for chronic illness?
Are you anti-vegan? Anti-low-carb?
What does your own diet look like?
What are your current research interests and personal goals?
What qualifies you to talk about health and disease?
First of all, I’m not a doctor or other healthcare practitioner, and everything on this website is intended for educational and informational purposes only, and should not be taken as medical advice nor replace advice from a medical professional.
I have a BSPH (Bachelor of Science in Public Health) degree in Nutrition from UNC Chapel Hill. My background in the basics of chemistry, biology, and nutritional biochemistry is pretty solid.
I’ve also been independently researching (aka reading papers that I find on Google Scholar or Pubmed) and writing about health and nutrition for over a decade. I worked for Chris Kresser for a while as a research assistant.
I also have my own experiences with health experimentation to draw from, although I try not to let that bias my non-personal writing.
Why do you bother writing and sharing this stuff? Do you make money from it?
Sure don’t! In fact, it costs me money. Web hosting ain’t free, folks.
I do this for several reasons. One, I enjoy it. It’s fun for me to learn, and I’m the type of person who doesn’t feel like she fully understands something until she can explain it to others. So, I write.
But perhaps more importantly, I had the experience of losing an organ due to lack of information. The information existed – I just didn’t have it. And neither did my doctors, or anyone else around me. I’ve said that I don’t regret that this happened, and I don’t – but I wouldn’t wish it on someone else.
So I feel a very deep compulsion to share everything I can, in as organized a way as possible, such that anyone with IBD who is facing surgery isn’t missing an option that they didn’t know existed.
How do you do research for and write your articles?
Google Scholar, baby! (The Pubmed search function is garbage.)
I’ve gotten better and better over the years at navigating the scientific literature; there’s definitely an art to it. Pro tip: hopping between related papers using the reference list and “cited by” features is often more fruitful than a simple keyword search.
For a complicated topic (which, who am I kidding, is most of them), I’ll often spend days reading before I write anything. Usually I’ll start with a couple recent review articles, but I typically read primary research too, depending on my goals. I’ve often been surprised by researchers missing things, or misrepresenting things. Remember, they’re human too.
Are you one of those anti-Western medicine types?
I suppose it depends on how you define it! I have my biases – Western medicine phenomenally let me down in my time of need. And I know my story is not unique. The fact that we often must resort to removing parts of the digestive systems of IBD patients goes to show how inadequate treatment options currently are.
I also tend towards the belief that a lifetime of drug dependency – even if the drugs work – is setting the bar too low, and isn’t getting at the real causes. That idea rubbed me the wrong way when I was diagnosed at 14, and it still does now. Call it “natural” bias if you’d like.
I do also feel some resentment towards those in the medical profession who denigrate “alternative medicine.” That position seems rather uncalled for, knowing how few answers they themselves hold. I totally understand (and support) the desire to call out “unscientific” practices if there’s risk to the patient, but what I usually see instead is an almost religious disparagement of anything that isn’t a pharmaceutical, regardless of potential risks or benefits.
That said, I believe that most medical professionals have good intentions, and truly want to help people. They, like us, are victims of a dysfunctional system.
I try to give Western medicine the respect it deserves. In some diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, that’s a great deal. In IBD, it’s less. Many IBD patients do well on drugs, and even with surgeries, but many don’t. So however I feel about Western medicine, one thing is clear: it’s not enough.
Are you one of those woo-woo New Age-y energy medicine types?
Again, depends how you define it! I think the “new age” scene is chock full of nonsense, but that there are many valuable nuggets of truth to be found in it. A lot of people see the nonsense and proceed to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which I think is a real shame.
One of my favorite books is The Body Electric by Robert Becker, and it gives a fascinating glimpse into some of the seemingly-fantastical healing powers of the human mind and body, as well as the institutional forces that tend to prevent such research from entering the mainstream.
There’s a lot we don’t yet understand about the world, and the history of science is the history of people and institutions being wrong, repeatedly. Many things that seemed fantastical and heretical in the past seem commonplace now. As such, I’m extraordinarily open-minded to discovering that things I think are nonsense now (astrology??) actually have some truth in them.
And as far as health goes, “energy medicine” and all that encompasses is currently a primary research interest of mine. I think it’s fascinating, and holds a lot of hope for a new era of healthcare that is perhaps – dare I say it – more effective and less harmful than our current one.
What’s your perspective on the causes of and solutions for chronic illness?
Fascinating question, I’m glad you asked!
The causes, in a word? Mismatch.
The concept of evolutionary mismatch is old news, especially in ancestral health/Paleo communities. It’s most commonly applied to diet: eating foods that are mismatched with what we’ve evolved for causes disease.
But I think the mismatch goes much, much deeper than that. Not only things like exercise, circadian rhythm, light exposure, microbial environment, stress, and technology, but also things like societal structure and cultural framework.
The human is a remarkably adaptive creature, but with modern Western society we have clearly encountered the limits of what we can adapt to.
I think the solution to chronic illness – of any sort – lies in creating a healthy environment for oneself, and then adapting to it.
Are you anti-vegan? Anti-low-carb?
Surprisingly, not really! I mean, I don’t really think a vegan diet is generally appropriate for humans, nor do I think that a very-low-carb diet should be adhered to long term, but there’s a time and a place for everything.
What I AM against is people with significant followings who create dogmatic, quasi-religious trappings around food that ensnare people in diets that end up harming them. It’s irresponsible, and it destroys people’s health, because they’re encouraged to ignore the signals of distress their body is sending them.
What does your own diet look like?
Currently, my diet is fairly bean protocol-esque: mostly eggs, fish, lean meats, beans, white rice, oats, gluten-free sourdough bread, potatoes, and veggies. I think this high-soluble-fiber eating style has contributed to some recent health breakthroughs, and seems to make my gut happier than anything else I’ve tried, but by no means do I think it’s optimally healthy or a “model” diet. Ideally I’d like to be eating more nutrient-dense fatty animal foods, like dairy and red meat, but my body doesn’t love those right now.
What are your current research interests and personal goals?
I talked about this a little at the end of my post chronicling my IBD experience. I have several lingering health issues, and my current strategy for addressing them is primarily nervous-system focused: meditation, vagus nerve exercises, and DNRS, to name some of the approaches I’m experimenting with.
Unsurprisingly, my current research interests dovetail with those strategies: I’ve been learning a lot about heart rate variability, and what it can tell us about sympathetic/parasympathetic balance in the nervous system. I’m also currently fascinated by the mechanisms behind meditation, and programs such as DNRS, as well as the broad category of “energy medicine” in general (as I mentioned earlier).
But I also have some fun gut-focused topics up my sleeve, including a deep dive into the multifactorial nature of bloating (it will be cooler than it sounds, promise), and an investigation of the risks and benefits of iron supplementation in the context of digestive disease.
If you want to keep up with the latest, you can follow me on Instagram, where I plan to share snippets of research and other interesting things I’m working on!
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