undeather

Add this and it will be perfect

Yes, the archetypical "hardcore intellectual"/debunker-skeptic kind of individual can be an immense pain in the ass. Yet in stark contrast to that, you will encounter the exact opposite, anti-intellectual sentiment polluting this forum and similar themed platforms. People talking about infinite intellgence, their insane insights under 5-MeO or mushrooms and how they are now enlightened - but then go and share absolute garbage information without a shred of rational examination or epistemic framework. It's really shocking when you just step back and observe the insane amount of gullibility driving most minds. I have been one of the longest active members and seen it all, trust me. I guess both groups need to somehow integrate those seemingly opposite notions into a more integral framework. In fact, the sages I admire the most seem to combine transcended truths with an immensly sharp and clear mind. I would even go as far and say Leo does that pretty well (sometimes)

Do you experience any symptoms related to a malnutrition/malabsorption-issue? Any GI stuff at all? Or is there a abnormal lab test showing defficiencies? The thing is, once you just start randomly testing for potential functional inconsistencies, you can get lost very fast. I am all for going beyond the ordinary in medicine, but there needs to be a clinical basis for that to be reasonable.

Everyone can! That's the beautiful thing on the interet, isn't it. Once you get a general grasp on the topic of nutrition, it becomes abundently clear who is using solid evidence/argumentation and who just makes shit up

"Dr" Eric Berg is a con artist.

Very low iron levels can screw with T4->T3 conversion (thyroid peroxidase needs iron to function properly) - which could potentially lead to higher TSH through loweerd feedback mechanism. but... Low thyroid function can also impair iron absorption. Chicken/egg problem right there! Good call - man I am just not used to those stupid mU/L units

That's good enough for a screeing test. It's a non-anaemic iron deficiency, which means that that blood markers are still upheld despite really low ferritin. Either go for iron supplementation asap - like ferrous salts or whatever is readily available in your country. Best combine it with Vitamin C to increase absorption. Or If you dont want to go for the supplement route: Fastest absorbed Iron is heme-iron from animal meats. If she wants to stay vegan, go for high iron plant foods (dark leafy greens, beans, peas, lentils...) and make them part of her daily intake. Also, avoid coffee,tee or wine after or before meals. It usually takes at least 1-3 months to see improved blood levels. Especially if you go for the non-supplement path, dont expect rapid changes. However, it's very important to follow up with a new blood-work to control for success.

How low is very low? What's her hemoglobin, MCV, Ferritin, TIBC, Transferrin, Transferirin saturation Is she bleeding a lot (period)? All are important to tell about the severity and cause of the problem. A lot of younger women experience low iron issues, independent of their diet.

Ever thought about that your are giving yourself a placebo/nocebo effect? If you dont think that's possible - how would you know that? People used to ingest toxic amounts of arsenic because it "made them feel better" in the short run but of course is highly carcinogenic. Ever taken an NSAID (Aspirin/Iburprofen)/Paracetamol or Cortison? You will feel noticabely better/healtier after taking those. Of course none of those meds are "healthy" per se in the long run. You know what, fair point! Maybe he does take some supplement that causes harm on its own or in combination - but what if thats not the case? Why would that even matter? All he knows that his measurements improved and show exceptional health. Every organ is working perfectly fine, plus he feels incredibly healthy in his skin (he literally says that he never felt better physically/mentally). So his approach includes your paradigm, which is "listening to your body" PLUS the objective, third person measurement of markers and imaging. If there really is some damage occuring somewhere, then it's hiding really well. I dont see the problem there man.

What is a "good practice" and what constitutes a "bad practice" in your mind? What do you mean by directly alter? Please show us 1 supplement from his list and how it directly influences one of the measured biomarkers. It cant be difficult to do if you make a statement with such level of confidence, right?

To be fair, at this low percentage of body fat plus pastry white skin - you kinda expect to look somewhat alien-like. Oh look, its Integral PhD again. Please provide evidence for your claims - because as usual, you have none and it's a product of your anti-medicine bias And dont even come at me with:"I took fishoil and felt dizzy - therefore fishoil bad"

His biomarkers and organ function are actually insane for his age. Definitely an interesting experiment

I think it needs more refried beans

Hyman is not the worst grifter in the lifestyle-medicine bubble, but still a very limtied source of information. I used to be a big believer but once you realise that every youtube expert and MD influencer is telling a different story, while providing zero evidence for their claims, you start sniffing the bullshit. Feel free to try out the ultramind-diet. It's certainly a pretty healthy one and you will definitely experience some benefits. Take the over the top promises with a grain of salt and you wont get disappointed either. If you are looking for someone to help you out, I can recommend @Michael569 - someone who knows his shit and a voice of reason on this platform.

Do you suffer from any diagnosed psychiatric disorders?

In general mechanical (i.e high blood pressure) and chemical (i.e high blood sugar-> glycation) stressors, As you can imagine, it's an incredibly complex mechanism that over time wears down the structural and functional integrity of your blood vessles. This then leads to up-regulation of adhesion molecules, increased chemokine secretion and leukocyte adherence, increased cell permeability, enhanced low-density lipoprotein oxidation, platelet activation, cytokine elaboration, and vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation and migration. Basically all that shit you dont want It's nature & nurture. Nature being genetics - meaning your individual tissue specific resistance which is mainly defined by your genetics. Then of course nurture - which are all the risk factors that are invoved in atherogenesis. Blood flow in arteries is not laminar, but pulsatory. Your left ventricle pumping creates a "puls wave" and your blood moves accordingly. The strength of that pulse wave (pulse pressure) and the total pressures (general blood pressure) will define the mechanical tear on your artieries. Damage occurs over time of course. Just like your stomach musculature is not perfectly consistent -> which might create hernias ..some parts of your arteries might not be consistently vested with the same amount of protective fibers! This is HUGELY speculative though and only based on some histological studies I read I have no idea how antioxidant status and collagen repair could play a role in that. Particle size comes in later in the process of atherogenesis itself. A huge topic in itself. OH boy, histamine and endothelial permeability is very complex and we need would need whole thread for that topic alone. There seems to be a strong correlation with histamine, endothelial permeability and your general cardiovascular diesase risk. It makes sense mechanistacally ( kind of ) but we need more data to act clincially. I have my own heuristic for that, maybe I can go deeper into that in the future - but it would exhaust my time window for now

I dont think coronary heart diesease starts in one particular area. In fact, one of the most surprising facts about heart catheter or ultrasound examinations is how unintuitively scattered plaque-formations can be in certain patients. You see someone with a completely fucked up left main coronary artery (multiple high grade blockages) but an almost juvenile right coronary artery with zero signs of atherosclerosis. Patients whose aorta looks like a corroded ruber tube, but whose coronary arteries are seemingly untouched. Others who show zero sign of plaque formation in their carotids, but completely end stage atherogenesis in their heart. There are of course clusters, for example in bifurcation types - where you clearly see one kind of plaque formation much more often than others: Also, in general - if you find atherosclerosis in one place, the chance is high that you have it somewhere else as well (its a systemic occurance). That said, there is a big individual component which makes it really difficult to predict where it might cause serious problems down the line. My heuristic is that our individual vascular anatomy is the main predictor where plaques might gain a foothold faster. Differences in flow dynamics which make the endothelium in one specific place more susceptible to dysfunction - where it's almost prone to create an inflammatory response and ApoB emplacement. Besides that, there seem to be "structural" weak spots, which could stem from saltatory downregulations of protective fibers (like elastin) in our arterial tissues. All this and much more will at the end decide where damage occurs fastest. But then again, this is somewhat speculative

Bro, I asked if YOU understand it - not if the video covered it. So again, since you obviously know everything, please explain to me the simple connection between follow up period, age distribution and absolute/relative risk. It can't be that difficult to explain, right? Any medical student who passed his basic statistic course can answer that question. Either you know the answer - then you need to explain to me why you would ignore it in your argument. Or you dont - in which case, let me at least explain it to you. Funnily enough, the tabacco industry used the same AR/RR-game to "prove" that smoking isn't really that bad. But you didn't know that, did you? Statin AR/RR-reduction arguments have been around since the 90's - but of course, you dont know that either. Nor what the most likely explanation for that is. You posted the video - you just posted the bar chart. Now back it up with some knowledge how to interpret the data. Without knowing that, you are just running on a 24/7 confirmation bias. Iam not closed off to most perspectives. In fact, I have been highly critical of our medical system before - publically with my colleagues and also here on the forum. I have had debates about alternative healing paradigms and defended even stuff like homeopathy and energy healing. The big difference is that you need to have those discussions on eye level. You know way less than my the medical students I teach, yet you act like can show some sort of expertise, which is not the case. It's pseudo-knowledge based on youtube videos you just referred to. If you want to criticise statins and the pharma-drug complex in general, I am all on your side. But AT LEAST do the work to know what the fuck you are talking about.

It's really a textbook example of what's wrong with online health culture and how it leads people with superficial knowledge towards certain "truths". When you are not equipped to deal with the complexity of research and basic human pathophysiology, this is exactly where you will end up at. Do you really think a 10 minute video from a fringe online MD (who spouts all kind of nonsense on his channel) will give you an adequate representation of statin evidence we have gathered in the last 50 years? Also, cherry picking - who just picked the one ambivalent meta analysis out of dozens to support his own bias? That's YOU, my friend! Did you even read the analysis and the inclusion citeria/statistical analysis that lead to such outcome? My guess would be that you watched the video and read that blog post. As if this has anything to do with doing the real work. Why not go through all the data ever released on statins? Wouldn't that be the real integral thing to do? But, right - that requires work, knowledge and time - things you are not willing to invest I guess. Ugh, I have seen this JAMA-study being discussed all over the internet when it came out. I am happy to help you through that analysis and why it "did nto change my mind on statins". It's not even that complicated to understand ... Let me first check where we have to start: 1) Do you know the difference between absolute/relative risk and how follow up periods tend to influence both? 2) Do you know how age and health conditions influence effect sizes in statin trials? 3) Have you looked at the studies included/inclusion criteria?

Sure.

It depends on the severity and duration of the underlying condition. We regularly observe low levels of B12 in patients with all kinds of chronic GI-disorders. In fact, I would argue that most patients who visit us come with some form of vitamin/mineral defficiency - it's part of our general screening procedure but we tend to be conservative with long term supplementation since most of it will normalize under a adequate diet when der underlying issue is solved. Late stage manifestations like pernicious anaemia or neurological disorders are very rare. It's especially prevalent in small intestine centered Crohn's or celiac disease. However, outside the edge cases - the most common cause is a fucked up diet or drug induced side effect (metformin for example) Personally? Puhh, difficult to say - I have worked with many patients + study populations over the years. The great thing about deficiencies is that once you give the body what it needs, people tend to get better rapidly. How do I know if they are healthier? Well, patients tell me that they feel better. Their biomarkers improve. They act and move differently. It's in concordance with scientific evidence. I dont know what you want me to say. I guess all of those reasons and more. Yes, doctors are humans too and sometimes they deceive themselves. Yet years of training and experiences treating patients are not worth nothing. It's laughable when people on the internet somehow think they know "more" - when in reality, their whole knowledge is based on fringe online personalities and youtube university.

I did not assume anything. You said "once a week" and I calculated the requirement accordingly. It takes a long time to deplete the B12-reservoir, but intake needs to happen periodically and withthe right circumstances. Part of my job as a gastroentrologist is to treat people with malabsorption issues. B12 is particularly tricky because some GI-patients just lack so called "intrinsic factor", which is produced in your stomach. Intrinsic factor is the key to B12-absorption in the terminal Ileum (small intestines). Besides that, there are functional B12-issues, which can be even more tricky to pin down. I have co-authored papers and give lectures to students about this topic. I am pretty confident I got the basics down.

Please tell me how "eating an egg and drinking milk once a week" is beating out B12 supplementation for example. Even if you use the commonly used RDA of 2,4 micograms B12 a day (which is the low end) - you need to eat at least 25 eggs or drink 3+ litres of cow milk to get to meet your weekly B12-requirement. I am not even accounting for absorption dynamics if you do this in one day, which would make the calculation even more ridicolous. Either supplement B12 as a vegan or include animal prodcuts as a whole food group in your diet. Again, you are giving advice without knowing what you are talking about. Potentially harming people.

You are kidding, right?

Interesting! Have you read Christopher Bache's "LSD and the mind of the universe"? In that book he describes his experiences after 72 well-orchestrated, super high dose LSD-sessions. He talks about this annihilation aspect a lot, which he experienced as well - yet for him, this "death of body and psyche" was the mechanism to gain access to deeper parts of the mind, deeper aspects of the non-dual nature - almost like layers. I love his map because it combines both obvious insides like ego-death and no-self with seemingly true aspects like reincarnation and purpose. If you are interested, I can link you a very good podcast episode: Besides that, are you aware of something called "past life regression therapy"? I am very skeptical about it because the mechanism of action could be manifold and it doesn't prove anything by itself. Also, most people practicing this kind of stuff are spiritual weirdos! But I also know some very sober people with insane stories - so who knows!