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Alyssa Luck

Alyssa Luck

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About Alyssa: Background, Biases, and Philosophy on Health and Disease

Alyssa Luck · Apr 21, 2022 · Leave a Comment

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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Hi! I’m Alyssa. I like thunderstorms and cats, hate wearing shoes, and enjoy devising extensive research projects for myself in my free time. This is me in Bali with a monkey on my shoulder. And this is my blog, where I muse about health-related topics and document my relentless self-guinea pigging. If you want to know more about me, click here!

alyssa.luck

alyssa.luck
If you've seen "vagus nerve exercises" that have y If you've seen "vagus nerve exercises" that have you moving your eyes or tilting your head, you've probably encountered the work of Stanley Rosenberg. The exercises he created and introduced in his 2017 book now appear in instructional videos all over the internet. 
 
The book itself has much to recommend it: it's accessible, it's practical, it's inspiring. But it has one major flaw: the solid practical and informational content regarding the cranial nerves is framed in terms of the scientifically dubious polyvagal theory. 
 
I particularly enjoyed the book as an introduction to the therapeutic arena of bodywork, of which Rosenberg is a skilled practitioner. His book is full of case reports that demonstrate how immensely powerful extremely subtle movements and physical manipulations can be. These do need to be kept in perspective: it's a small sample size of the most remarkable cases, and the results were achieved within the supportive clinical environment of a skilled practitioner. You can tell from his descriptions how refined his technique is. But nevertheless, it was a paradigm-shifting read for me, and the exercises give you something concrete to play around with. 
 
The book also brought the cranial nerves and the concept of “social engagement” to the fore as arbiters of health. Rosenberg has a solid background in cranial nerve anatomy and shares many interesting tidbits and considerations that you don’t typically hear; for instance, the potential impact of dental and orthodontic work on cranial nerve function.
 
So, is it worth reading? If any of the above piques your interest, go for it! Just read my post on polyvagal theory first – you can use the book to practice separating the wheat (solid informational content) from the chaff (pseudoscientific framing). If nothing else, the book is a nice reminder that genuine healers who get lasting results for their patients do exist.

But if you just want to try the exercises, you can easily find them all on YouTube. 

“You learn techniques to understand principles. When you understand the principles, you will create your own techniques.” -Stanley Rosenberg
I first stumbled upon polyvagal theory during the I first stumbled upon polyvagal theory during the course of my heart rate variability research. I was surprised to encounter it again "in the wild" shortly after, in the book "Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve." Before long, I saw it popping up everywhere, (Baader-Meinhof, anyone?) 
 
Digging deeper, I discovered scientific controversy bubbling just beneath the smooth surface of polyvagal theory's popular presentation. Three months later, I posted a 13k word analysis of the topic. 
 
The technical details are far below the level of practicality for the average person, but the way polyvagal theory has propagated outside of academia has some important ramifications for clinical and scientific progress. 
 
In the wake of a wave of health complaints that our current medical model is poorly equipped to treat, it's clearer than ever that a new paradigm is needed. The grassroots push to emphasize diet and lifestyle factors has been a huge step in the right direction, but it's becoming more and more common to see people who have done everything "right" and are still struggling with persistent health complaints that could range anywhere from mildly annoying to debilitating. 
 
What we need is a genuine integration of mind and body in medicine – not the weak lip service that our current paradigm pays to "stress reduction," like the vague suggestion to relax more and maybe try meditation. And if we're going to develop a sophisticated mind-body medicine, we need a sophisticated mind-body science. And if we want a sophisticated mind-body science, we must subject such topics to the same standards of inquiry as we expect from molecular biomedicine. And that means rejecting pseudoscience like polyvagal theory. 
 
Full analysis and references at alyssaluck.com/polyvagal-theory-a-critical-appraisal
To continue my recounting of the health things I'm To continue my recounting of the health things I'm experimenting with, let me tell you about DNRS: the slightly cheesy, arguably outdated “brain rewiring” program that has changed my life. 

I found it because I was looking for ways to “retrain” my nervous system. I watched some success stories. None of the “target” health conditions matched mine, but I went for it anyway. Probably the best decision I’ve ever made for my health. 

The core of DNRS is built on the principles of neuroplasticity. They call it "brain rewiring" because you intentionally take triggers that would normally stimulate a negative response in your body or mind, and associate them repeatedly with neural signals of safety. If that sounds pseudosciencey, I hear ya – one of my goals with future posts is to bring some concreteness and specificity to the topic. I imagine there are lots of people who could benefit from this type of thing who are turned off by the overly abstract or touchy-feely language. 

There are tons of "brain rewiring" programs like DNRS, but they're all built on similar ideas. Most bring in elements of other popular approaches, ranging from the scientifically validated (cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy) to the type of new-agey stuff I always scoffed at (shadow work, inner child work, parts work). 

For me, DNRS has provided the perfect framework to finally achieve what meditation experts and therapists and mystics alike are always advocating – the ability to step into the role of “curious observer.” It's given me everything therapy and meditation promised but could never deliver, helping me recognize my own patterns of thought and behavior and consciously redirect unhelpful ones. If this sounds vague, that's because there isn't a single area of my life that hasn't been improved by using this framework. 

I spend far more time in states of joy and peace and gratitude, and less time in states of anxiety or depression or frenzy. Many chronic worries that used to occupy my mind or keep me up at night – whether related to health, relationships, or my future – have disappeared, and the others are on their way out. (Cont. in comments)
Isn’t it crazy how something can be so easy and Isn’t it crazy how something can be so easy and natural for one person, but so hard for another? 

Me doing food: I can totally cook everything I eat from scratch, no prob

Me doing mental health: just doing my hour of daily mindful cognitive gratitudinal journalization

Me doing physical therapy: I can’t do it I don’t have that muscle

I’ve done many hard things in the name of health, but I think they’ve all been the types of hard things that come naturally to me. And frankly, that hasn’t gotten me where I want to be. 

So I’ve decided to finally tackle something that feels very unnatural: developing a real relationship with my muscles and bones, and learning - through experience, not from a book - how they coordinate with each other and how to use them. 

I never really considered my musculoskeletal system a key player in autoimmune or digestive woes, but now I realize it’s naïve to think dysfunction in one part of the body doesn’t affect another. And since this is so obviously my weakest link, it’s high time to make it a priority!

Even though I’ve done strength training in the past, I never dedicated the time and focus to figure out what my body actually needed to function better, and workouts often felt awkward or led to injury. 

I’ve always dreaded PT-type exercises because they felt simultaneously like “not enough” and also SO HARD, especially when there’s no way to confirm whether I’m doing them “right” (my nightmare). 

But I’m pretty sure the fact that targeted “mind-muscle” work is so hard for me means it’s what I need the most. (That’s how that works, right?)

Anyway, I’m happy to report that I’m finally through both the initial phase of being a giant baby because I have to do something I’m bad at, AND the second phase of neurotically worrying about doing it “wrong.” And hopefully I’m on my way to better posture, improved breathing, and greater strength! 

Super thankful to have people in my life who remind me to have fun and stay curious, when my natural disposition is to write a 27-step plan to “fixing” everything “wrong” with me. And to remind me that it is, in fact, a JOY to be a novice at something (as @_john_the_savage_ would say).
"If your nervous system is balanced, your heart is "If your nervous system is balanced, your heart is constantly being told to beat slower by your parasympathetic system, and beat faster by your sympathetic system. This causes a fluctuation in your heart rate: HRV." (whoop.com) 
 
This statement is a formidable example of one of the biggest misconceptions about heart rate variability (HRV). 
 
HRV is highest during rest or sleep, when sympathetic input is lowest. If HRV was the result of an autonomic “tug-of-war,” why would it be greatest when one of the contenders has entirely dropped the rope? 
 
Part of the misunderstanding may stem from failure to recognize that the heart has an intrinsic rate, well above the resting heart rate maintained by the vagus nerve. Varying vagal impulses create HRV without any sympathetic input at all. 
 
There are many other common misconceptions, such as the notion that HRV metrics measure autonomic tone, or that HRV itself is a metric with one interpretation. 
 
Such misconceptions aren’t only found in layscience – they also pervade academic and clinical literature. For instance, you’ll see LF used as a measurement of “sympathetic tone” and LF/HF as a measurement of “sympathovagal balance,” even though it’s been clear for decades that those interpretations are not physiologically accurate.
 
This post (and the associated article at alyssaluck.com/hrv101) can be thought of as “foundations for understanding HRV research.” And it provides a good example not only of the insufficiency of “sound-byte” science, but also of real science in action. 
 
The unfortunate reality is that we can’t always take researchers’ conclusions at face value. Few have the time to adequately assess a field before adopting one of their metrics, and once a misinterpretation has taken root it can easily become an accepted fact that propagates through repetition, becoming more entrenched with each published paper.
 
Thankfully the ramifications in this case are not very serious - misdirection of experimental design and analysis, and many false statements, but no dire consequences. Nevertheless, it’s a good reminder that science is a human institution, and it never hurts to question oft-repeated “facts.”
My latest diet experiment: the bean protocol! This My latest diet experiment: the bean protocol! This was one of the changes I made immediately prior to my drastic increase in HRV. 

Brief background: the bean protocol entails eating lots of soluble fiber (particularly beans) as a way to support detox. It rests on the assumption that most chronic health issues are the result of fat-soluble environmental toxins, excess hormones, and other fat-soluble things being recirculated in the body rather than eliminated. 

There is some scientific merit to this: the liver does eliminate many toxins and other compounds through the bile, these things can be subject to reabsorption via enterohepatic recirculation, and certain types of fibers do interrupt this process by binding bile, preventing reabsorption and allowing excretion in the feces.

That said, there are many unanswered questions that would need to be answered for me to be on board with that as the sole or even primary explanation for the anecdotal success of those on the protocol. I think there are almost certainly other mechanisms at play, and I doubt things work exactly as proponents of the protocol describe. 

But at the end of the day, what matters is not mechanisms, but practical outcome. And whatever the reason, it works for many! It seems especially popular and effective for hormonal issues and acne, but the preeminent bean spokesperson @uniquehammond cured her severe Crohn’s with it. 

For me, I experienced better digestion and clearer skin, among other benefits (like not having to wear deodorant). On the less-good side, I lost weight I didn't need to lose, had cold hands and feet, and developed some dry patches on my skin. 

(The dry patches [and perhaps weight loss] were probably because I kept fat too low – mostly because their favored fat source, nuts, is a no-go for me.)

I'm continuing to experiment, hoping to find a balance that lets me reclaim the benefits (which I lost after returning to my normal eating pattern) while avoiding the pitfalls. I’ll share any exciting developments, and will eventually dig into the science behind it too. 

For info about what the protocol entails, you can visit alyssaluck.com/the-bean-protocol-for-ibd!
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