Evan Transue: All right, folks, hello and welcome back to Beyond Autoimmunity or the Beyond Autoimmunity podcast by the Autoimmune Recovery Lab. I'm one of your hosts, Evan Trantz, who I have with me, our other host, Ryan Monahan, all the way out in Colorado. So this is episode number nine and today we're gonna be talking about yet another topic that I think actually applies to things. even beyond autoimmunity, no lame pun intended. But if you happen to chuckle at that, you're our type of people. Because I know I'm not even staring at him right now because my camera's in a different spot in the video. I'm positive Ryan, knowing his humor, would have at least grinned at that. So if you like those things, you're our type of people. But the information we're actually gonna share today, of course, we'll have things to do around those with autoimmune conditions. But this is even a bigger topic where it was actually Ryan who was inspired to talk about this one in particular, but we've both been affected by it. It's this idea of how the heck do you navigate the information in this functional health world and it's a developing world, right? So there's a lot of amazing stories, ⁓ transformations, and you read this book and this person did this diet or took these supplements and they seem to be doing well. And then you read another book and you find that this person seems to be doing amazing, but they did the exact opposite of what this other person did. And then here's a fair question and it is a fair one if you have it. Who the heck are these two guys, Ryan and Ev? ⁓ To tell me what I might be benefiting from for my autoimmune condition or would benefit from with my autoimmune condition So we're gonna sort through all of that today excited to get into it But of course, I want to say a direct hello to Ryan. How you doing, man?
Ryan: Doing great, glad to be here. This is gonna be a really fun topic. think a lot of people are gonna get a lot of value out of this, because as you said, there's so much confusion around uncertainty. And that extends to both clients and practitioners alike, right? We even know behind the scenes, there's fist fights, so to speak, not literally, of course, but about certain topics that there's a lot of disagreement about. And with that being true, The question we're trying to answer today is how do we navigate this?
Evan Transue: Yes. Well, since you were the one who definitely like kind of pushed this ⁓ further for our podcast, I would love to start with you. I don't know if there's a specific route you want to take or a particular idea that really drives you crazy. I got so many in my head, so I don't want to go off yet. ⁓ But I would love to throw it to you first, just in terms of like, why is this even something that you think is worth talking about? What have you experienced that led you to believe that, hey, this is something that we should do in our first 10 podcasts here?
Ryan: think it's something that I encounter more or less daily, whether that's working with clients where they're coming to me and saying, well, hey, you're recommending this protocol A, or C, but I have it on some other council or advice or I heard this on a podcast, wherever the source might be that this supplement is a bad idea, right? Or this protocol, ⁓ I have H. pylori on my stool test. And one doctor says that I should leave it alone. And another says I should address it and do a self-treatment protocol. ⁓ So I encounter this nearly every day with clients navigating that confusion of they're taking in information from multiple sources and they're not exactly certain of the path forward. And then at the same time, and I'm sure Evan, you've seen this thousands of times in different practitioner groups that we're a part of, is you know, these different debates about, we talked about just a couple of weeks ago on the podcast about an autoimmune diet versus a vegan diet versus a carnivore diet, right? There's all these different dietary approaches and that can be really, really confusing. So we're dealing with this from all angles. And I thought it would be helpful here to set the record straight and just It's kind of more of like a meta conversation in a sense, right? Because we're thinking about how to think and we're thinking about how to kind of structure or prioritize the information we're taking in to the environment, being good conscious consumers, knowing when something passes through a certain filter, what we're looking at as being either quality information or one we should look at something with a bit more skepticism or suspicion. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Mm-hmm. Sure. I have two things here, and I think the second one is gonna lead us perfectly into, I know one of the things you wanted to make sure we hit on today is the different types of studies, and they matter. And here's the good news, you don't have to be a PhD to understand the differences and even kind of interpret some of this stuff to some degree. Now you probably do need to be a PhD to go conduct the study properly, we're not arguing that at all, but you'd be surprised. how accessible this can be to the public in the age of the internet and chat GBT and all this kind of stuff. You just have to know ⁓ a few parameters and definitions and what type of study is what and what does it actually mean. So I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but you'll see where I'm getting at in a moment here. So two things, one is kind of unrelated, ⁓ at least to that part. One of the things that I saw all the time when my wife and I owned a business in person, it was a physical business called Bucks County Light Therapy. We had red light therapy and we had infrared sauna. We had vitamin D lamps, all this fun stuff. It was like a science experiment of a business. With that said, this was the funniest part to me. I had family members, including one that I like very much. Like he did not mean this rudely at all, but I will remember him. I'll never forget him saying, you know, how's that light therapy business going? We're like, ⁓ it's going good. Like, you know, doing our thing. Like people are actually very receptive to it, which is interesting. He's like, that's cool. Like I just. I don't know if I believe in that red light stuff. And I thought this was, like to me to have such a live example, I know that might not mean much to anyone else, but to me this was so fascinating, because I thought about that for a second and I said, what does he mean when he says I don't really believe in that stuff? And again, he didn't mean it offensively, he just meant it seriously. We can talk openly to each other. I'm like, so I didn't ask him this as a follow up necessarily, but I'm like, when he says he doesn't believe it, it's like I didn't make a specific claim, right? So I would assume that when he says he doesn't believe he means that it doesn't really have any effect. Now the irony is red light therapy has been studied since the 1960s and some of the benefits are extremely clear as to what it does. For example, just some ones off the top of my head. It does increase hypertrophy it seems. So muscle growth after strength training or hypertrophy focused sessions. So it seems to increase that. It does seem to decrease recovery. It does seem to improve energy production. seems to improve melatonin production at night, depending on the time of day that you got the exposure to the red light therapy, okay? So there's some things that it does very well that have been studied for years. So it's like, you don't believe in it. What does that mean? And the best conclusion I could come to, Ryan, is when someone, the average consumer says they don't believe in something, I don't think that they know that they mean it this way, but I think what they're actually saying is the TV or my doctor, has not told me this yet, so I don't believe in it. Because they're not sitting, they have another job. They're not sitting there like us, as nerds all day, looking up actual studies and being interested in this stuff ourselves, even though we're not doctors ourselves. So that was always interesting to me to see that. But the other one that was very sad actually was there must be this thing on either Google or some forum or whatever that implies, and I am not saying this, gotta keep myself extra safe on YouTube.
Ryan: Mmm.
Evan Transue: that implies that fibromyalgia can somehow be like cured by using an infrared sauna. And so I'd have these people that came in and they would think that infrared sauna did this. Now, not everyone did this next thing, but some of them would kind of be surprised by my response when they said, ⁓ you know, I know that, you know, my fibromyalgia is gonna go away if I use the infrared sauna enough. So I want that membership. And I said, just so you know, I don't, if it helps you, that's great. I do not believe for a second that this is going to. resolve your fibromyalgia. And a fraction of them would think that was kind of like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing. So they'd be like almost like playing with me and laughing thinking that I am not disclosing it to keep myself out of liability. And I'd have to sit down with them for a second, especially before they spent money at my business, right? I don't mind making money, but I'd like to do it within integrity. like, no, no, no, Mr. and So-and-so, I do not have any evidence at all, even anecdotal, that that does that whatsoever. The best thing that I've seen is that people that come in with fibromyalgia seem to feel a little bit better after the infrared sauna sessions. That is nowhere near the same as resolving a condition and there's no evidence that it does anything like that. So if you wanna buy the membership is it helps you subjectively feel better, I'm all for that. I think that's still a win in many ways. But if you're coming in under the idea that this is somehow going to resolve a very serious autoimmune condition, I can't get behind that in any way. That's ridiculous. ⁓
Ryan: All right. Yeah.
Evan Transue: So I'm tempted to pause there, but the one I admit I was gonna bring up the second one that would help us differentiate the studies, I'll keep it quick, is the seed oil thing. So, and I don't want you to get mad at me for this, because I know you probably don't like the seed oils either. I do not go out of my way to eat seed oils, okay? That is because I do not believe they provide any benefit to my life. I think there are risks that we don't know about yet, and I don't want to be the guinea pig. I do not need to eat.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: anything with seed oils on a daily basis, a regular basis to feel better or be properly nourished. Obviously, these people lived for years without those things. Now, with that said, Ryan, this is not just a consumer thing. If anything, it's more of the practitioners that are out there saying like, ⁓ seed oils do this with inflammation or seed oils do this with dementia or whatever. And I'm like, you know I can never find in those posts? The studies that they're referencing with humans over a long period of time, right?
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: Because guys those don't really seem to exist yet now depending on when you're listening to this. Maybe I'm wrong Maybe something just came out yesterday, but as far as I know and Ryan's a very sharp guy So I'm sure you'll correct me here if I am incorrect I know of nothing that shows of the effects of seed oils on human beings over decades and what specific diseases that might lead to so a lot of the times these people are referencing studies that are not necessarily one human-based or with large sample sizes or over a long period of time and that can help us kind of differentiate some of the studies as well. But thank you for letting me go into all that. That's about the main thing I have today. So I promise I'll stop there, but yeah.
Ryan: I love that. Yeah, no, that's great. There's a lot to talk about and unpack there. And I think what you were speaking to there, by the way, I'm more or less in agreement with you, about the seed oil thing. I think a lot of the evidence is dubious. I think there's a lot of fear mongering online and you want to really see some fear mongering, go on like Twitter X and see some of the conversations. It's almost like quasi-religious, ⁓ which is really interesting in and of itself where That's one instance where I think we should be especially really cautious or careful when we're seeing this degree of like religiousness around an argument where it gets so heated that it's like tribal and that if you believe you should be eating any degree of seed oils in your diet or if they're even marginally okay, you're like an idiot, you're a moron. It's like kind of this us or them sort of debate that's created around it, which is crazy, right? One thing we have to think about when we're looking at some of these quote unquote studies is the quality of the study itself. Right? So is it an observational study? Is it an epidemiological study? Where they're just looking at large populations using what are essentially like dietary questionnaires, which are problematic for so many reasons. One being that it's really difficult to force people to eat a certain way people can lie on a survey also looking at that one variable like they're eating consuming seed oils or they're not in their diet assuming they're being perfectly truthful and they have a good recollection about you know what they're eating and what they're not eating you know what about their level of movement and exercise their sleep habits to the smoke cigarettes so they drink alcohol so they have a very stressful job to the work night shifts there's so many other. confounding variables. So generally speaking, unfortunately, probably the vast majority of nutritional research is observational. We're looking at cohort studies, epidemiological evidence. Those should always be looked at with a healthy degree of skepticism versus something that's more gold standard, like a randomized controlled trial. or they're randomly assigning people to either receive the treatment or to ⁓ receive a placebo, right? ⁓ Even better if it's double-blinded placebo-controlled, randomized controlled trial. It's a lot of words, but that is like the triple platinum, right, gold standard, whatever you would call it for ⁓ scientific evidence. And like you said earlier, we don't have to be a PhD to understand these things. If we... are looking at a study on PubMed, it'll tell you at the very top of the study, this was observational, this was an RCT, which is randomized controlled trial. So we do need to create a little bit of a hierarchy of the evidence that we're actually looking at. And before we adopt a claim, ⁓ just because we like some kind of health influencer and we think they're a cool person, and they're telling us that seed oils are killing us, we might wanna look at some of that evidence for ourselves before we decide to implement that into our actual health routine. ⁓ So I think it's also important to understand the incentives as well, especially where a lot of us are now getting information not from directly from the source from these studies, but from people on social media, on Instagram, TikTok, where we're identifying with their personality rather than digging into the information ourselves, which I understand because Like you said, like we have lives, we're busy. Like not everyone's gonna geek out and be reading these studies ⁓ or have the time to do so, but at least stop to consider the incentive, right? If someone is going back to the carnivore thing again, if they're selling meat sticks on their platform and that's a big source of their income and they're pushing a carnivore diet, It doesn't mean that they're wrong automatically, but we have to understand that there's an incentive for them to be pushing their meat sticks. And, you know, I'm a carnivore guy or whatever, right? And that also doesn't mean that their other health advice about other topics is automatically wrong or not legitimate. But we just need to be intelligent about how we ⁓ parse these things out, right? I it's really, really important. Yeah.
Evan Transue: It doesn't even mean that they're inherently bad, right? A lot of those people that are selling the meat-based products are probably carnivore themselves. You know, so and I do believe in like with the seed oil thing I a hundred percent believe that the people that are sharing that information are also not eating seed oils. So fair enough. It's like their information or their ideas are consistent with their behaviors. So I can understand that and say, at least you're a good person. That means well, that's already a huge step above a lot of stuff. But that doesn't cut it.
Ryan: That's right. Yeah. Right.
Evan Transue: in real life with a lot of things. And I think that C2O1, even though, like you said, the debates get insane, and it's so funny, because it's like, for me, it's the easiest debate in the world, right? I'll be like, ⁓ I don't choose to eat them. They're like, ⁓ so you're saying that they're bad. I'm saying, no, I'm skeptical. I'm like, but please show me the study where any of the claims that you just made in this conversation are shown in humans, and they never ever, I have not had one person in probably, I've probably been playing this game for like four or five years, and I've not had one person be able to come back and actually show me a human-based study yet.
Ryan: right. Well...
Evan Transue: Now you could say the reason that those human studies are not prioritized is because there's so much influence in that industry to keep profiting off people. That's a fair claim as well. Again, I don't eat them. Ryan, I know you well enough to know you probably don't eat them at all, correct?
Ryan: Don't eat what at all? ⁓ seed oils. No, we don't buy or purchase seed oils in our home, right? I'm fully aware that when we go out to eat at a restaurant or get some hot bar food at Whole Foods or something like that, yeah, I'm probably gonna get exposed to some seed oils. But if that's like a drop in the bucket and less than, I don't know, 5 % of my fatty acid intake is from seed oils, I'm not gonna sweat it because I'm doing...
Evan Transue: Enjoy the fitness.
Ryan: so many other things within my diet and lifestyle to keep things in check that I don't think a little bit of ⁓ exposure here and there is something I'm going to lose sleep around. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Sure. But yeah, that's the bottom line though is like you can make a personal decision based off probably a logical thought process, but that is different than going online and making a specific claim. And I think that's where our industry gets in a lot of trouble. And guys, we're not going to be perfect either. If we speak long enough, unfortunately, since we're human, we will say something incorrect. I'm still kicking myself. I actually remember this one because it bothered me that bad, Ryan. It was in the beginning of the pandemic. So was almost six years ago, probably to the day.
Ryan: Right.
Evan Transue: And I shared something about ⁓ drinking water near the time of eating food lowered stomach acid. And I had not fully fact-checked myself on that at the time. And I was wrong. Like the evidence was not clear. That was not ⁓ definitive by any means. And you can totally drink water at the same time that you are eating a heavy protein-based type of meal, right? But like that bothers me when I do that. I wish more people, especially the practitioner side had more. I wish they were bothered more when they did make those mistakes. It's not that we're never going to make the mistakes that might happen, but at least own up to it. Be bothered by it to some degree. Cause there's people out there, even if I don't want it to be this way, I still have to be realistic enough to know that there are people that even follow this podcast that are going to just kind of follow some things blindly. We do not recommend that. You should always go to your doctor first and you should probably read the stuff yourself, but people are busy. So they try to find a nice personality that they resonate with. And then they're making decisions on that. ⁓ I would be very careful with things that I remove ⁓ as a result of the advice I'm getting online. I would be extraordinarily careful with things that I'm adding in as a result of things I'm hearing online. And the first thing that comes to mind with that one is the whole peptide thing, right Ryan? So I know that wasn't necessarily a specific thing we talk about today per se, but the peptides in general, in general, have such limited human research and yet they're being pushed everywhere and everyone's using them.
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: So I'm more worried, like what do I think's a bigger risk? Not eating seed oils, even though I don't have a lot of evidence to prove why it's a good idea for me not to, or taking peptides, even though I don't have a lot of great evidence as to why I maybe should do that. I personally think it's more risky to see what's gonna happen with taking a peptide long-term versus not eating a seed oil. So that's why I said be very careful about what you remove from your life based on what you just hear online without fact checking it. and be extraordinarily careful about what you add into your life without fact checking it. that make sense?
Ryan: Yeah, of course. Evan, question for you. Are you familiar with the Lindy effect? Lindy effect, it's a real term.
Evan Transue: The Lindy Effect? Okay, no, I'm only laughing because for those who don't know, ⁓ Ryan Carter's name is Lindy, so that's funny. I didn't know if this was an effect just in your household and your life or a real one.
Ryan: That's right. You thought I was about ⁓ to crack open a joke. Yeah, so, okay, I'm not a mathematician or a statistician or anything like that, but I do know that the Lindy effect does come from that world that's sometimes used in the investing world as well. yeah, again, for the kind of statistics people that...
Evan Transue: I don't know either of them, so no, please tell us.
Ryan: by chance or listening to this, please don't come after me for getting this completely wrong. But my understanding of the Lindy effect is the longer something has been around, the more like that in and of itself is evidence of its effectiveness and that it will be proven to continue to be beneficial in the future. So for example, we would say that foundational dietary and lifestyle principles are Lindy. That's the way that expression would be used. Meaning things like getting sunlight. That's been around for a pretty darn long time. If the universe is 13 billion years, homo sapiens have been around for two or 300,000 years. We've been getting exposed to the sun and have co-evolved with it for a very, very long time. Eating real food. getting optimal sleep and optimizing our circadian rhythm, moving our body, moving our bodies very Lindy. It's almost like you don't even need to seek out evidence, right? Like it's just kind of inherent in the fact that this is part of our biological functioning and how ⁓ humans have lived for however long we've been around, right? So I bring that up to say, I love your point about the peptides, okay, because the peptides are like the complete opposite of something that's Lindy. ⁓ I think it's Brett Weinstein that I learned this term from. He would say something like peptides are hyper novel, right? Meaning that they haven't been around long enough to prove that we have no idea what the long-term benefit, despite them being promoted and touted as being miracle drugs, right? It's like... I don't think I've ever seen anything in my lifetime explode that quickly. It's pretty mind blowing actually that there's something to be said about that in and of itself from a marketing perspective, from just, it's really hitting on pain points for people. ⁓ And I have no doubt of, I've seen it firsthand myself, I'm sure you have, of people that are using these peptides, incorporating it into their diet and lifestyle. Now, this might be a little off topic, but on the one hand, I don't really feel like that's addressing whatever was the root cause of the issue to begin with. But that aside, there's this question of like, where are the long-term trials? There literally can't be because we haven't been using them long enough at scale. So that's kind of the opposite ends of the spectrum of something that's Lindy versus the complete opposite of being not Lindy. And in terms of this conversation, what am I going to prioritize in my own life? It's always going to be the things that are time tested, that are just foundational, just like a plant needs water and sunlight and healthy soil. Those are just not even up for debate. ⁓ And so that's always kind of directionally what I'm trying to move towards and trying to not overcomplicate things. So yeah, I'm curious to know if you have anything to add to that.
Evan Transue: Thank Well, I just had a quick question. So does the Lindy effect apply to things that are not just, I because we're using it with health, but it sounds like it's a broader thing. So we don't have to spend 20 minutes on this part, but I was just curious if this would be an example. So I'm a Christian, I have many Christian friends and a lot of them, what's funny is like none of us go to the same church together, almost at all. Like all of us have very different things and that we're exploring, whatever. And I have one friend that goes to the Greek Orthodox Church.
Ryan: Yes, it is.
Evan Transue: and another that goes to a Russian Serbian Orthodox church. Now, again, we don't have to into a whole religious thing, but the whole idea with the Orthodox thing is that this is the tradition that the original church did. It's been maintained. It hasn't been changed or manipulated. There's not a rock band with the preacher on the movie screen teaching you the gospel. So their idea is that because it's original, it is not only ⁓ good, it is correct.
Ryan: Yep, yep, sure.
Evan Transue: So would that be an example of the Lindy effect as well?
Ryan: Yeah, that's interesting to bring in the ⁓ religious equation. I would say, at least in theory. But I think, though, within these various different religious sects or different sects of Christianity, there's debate even about interpretation of, ⁓ gosh, I'm out of my depth here. But I think you kind of generally know what I mean, right? Even if I'm saying this is the correct way because it's how it was always done, well, then I might say, well, yeah, according to your interpretation of that, right? ⁓ But just for fun, I brought up the ⁓ Google Gemini AI definition of the Lindy effect. It's a theory. I think I was pretty
Evan Transue: Sure,
Ryan: close to my description of it. It's a theory suggesting that the future life expectancy of non-perishable items such as technologies, ideas, or books is proportional to their current age. So the future life expectancy is proportional to their current age. I said essentially the same idea. The longer something has been around, the longer it will continue to be kind of ⁓ a bit more bulletproof, so to speak, in the future.
Evan Transue: ⁓ so this is a little different. Gotcha. The way I interpret it though is, so it would be more fair to say that Orthodox churches are probably not going anywhere because they have truly maintained for the last, you know, 200-2000 years. Yes. Okay. Got it.
Ryan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would say so, right? Yeah. They've been following time-tested principles. And I think this is what attracts a lot of people to different world religions, because there's a lot of these timeless ideas about how to live our lives and how to conduct ourselves ethically, how to not make stupid decisions. So there's a lot of practicality, I think, even, within religion.
Evan Transue: Got it. Yeah. And then just to be a religious about it, I guess an even further step would be the idea that all humans, I mean, obviously there is a huge sector of atheists. get that. But I'm talking from native Americans to Mayans to traditional Chinese to the Europeans to the Africans. Everyone kind of seemed to have some history of believing in something more. So in this Lindy effect idea, it would be more the idea that the idea of a higher power is probably not going. anywhere as long as humans are around.
Ryan: I would say according to the Lindy effect definition, God is the most Lindy thing in human history that you can, if there was any idea, because within that definition, it said ideas were included in that, not just physical things, right? Yeah. So really interesting stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Sure, sure. Well there you go folks. You come for health stuff, get the, this is what happens in our interpersonal conversations by the way. So much of what we do on this podcast is just clicking record for a conversation ride that I might have anyway. That's why we're friends and business partners. I digress. So in terms of then what someone can actually do, because I think, you know, we could spend another five hours talking about the problem. But the reality is I think people have already probably accepted that to some degree.
Ryan: That's right. Yeah.
Evan Transue: and they're in it. So this is something when they hear it, what we said today, I think that they know it exists. They understand that there is confusion, right? So it's a lot of the confusion that you and I would have had when we got into this space over 10 years ago. And I know this doesn't seem like that long in the grand scheme of things guys, but I cannot tell you how far, for better or for worse, things have come with again, the internet and social media influencers. Like when I talk, I have a lot of guys ⁓ in my building that are younger than me. The amount of them that like, wear blue light blocking glasses, Ryan, even though they have no health issues is stunning or like they know that you probably shouldn't be eating XYZ thing or like they know that you're not supposed to hold receipts like for paper receipts from the store because they release chemicals I'm like but you're not into health at all they're like ⁓ yeah but everyone knows this like that's their interpretation because of the health influencers is that everyone knows some of these things at least so when you and I were getting started though that did not exist and we had to do this thing called like
Ryan: Mmm, the BPA exposure.
Evan Transue: Sometimes it's crazy, but you went to a library and you'd actually check out a book. Now I feel really old, but like that's truly one of the best ways to have gotten natural health information back then. And I remember it just being cripplingly ⁓ confusing to read about someone who did a vegan diet. And I know in my heart they were telling the truth and that they really were trying to share their story with the world. They were only selling the book. They're not even making great money. And they're selling this book and they're showing you their transformation of their health. And you're like, wow, that's crazy.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: But then the same week I can go read someone, the paleo thing was huge back then, huge, huge. You'd read someone that did paleo and they're eating a ton of meat. And then they had very similar health outcomes, at least so it seems. And you're like, well, what on earth am I missing here? Like, what was the difference? What was the variable? So my question for you is, how do we solve for this? Or maybe solve's not even the right word. How the heck do we navigate the confusion? Because what we really want, we don't care about the information per se. Maybe you and I do.
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: The consumer and certainly our clients at Autoimmune Recovery Lab, they don't care. They want to get better. So they'd be wondering, well, how can I navigate this sea of information? So what are some of your suggestions for that?
Ryan: Yeah, great question. So using that anecdote right there about these various different dietary approaches, let's say vegan or paleo, carnivore, you're going to go online. You're going to be exposed to all these different influencers with different anecdotes. And that's a really key term to understand, is that you're going to see people that said, tried diet A, B, or C, and it cured or you know, put my autoimmune disease into remission at least, right? And so the key thing to understand there is an anecdote is not the same thing. We can't generalize that to an entire population. That's just one person's experience and it might very well be true, right? Like a paleo diet was a huge part of my healing journey and transformation, right? When I first went on a vegan ⁓ diet,
Evan Transue: .
Ryan: in my 20s. Initially, I felt amazing. And I say initially because I do believe there was a bit of a honeymoon period. I no longer follow a vegan diet. don't, I can't really say I advocate for it. ⁓ But it, you know, what was true, let's try to be fair here and say, what was true about both of those approaches, even though they might seem like they have no overlap whatsoever, paleo or vegan, right? Well, It's both moving in the direction of eating real food. I truly think eating a vegan diet is 100 times better than eating a standard American diet of ultra-processed foods. And so directionally, that's kind of what I was getting at earlier with these foundational principles. Eating real food is very Lindy. So I think the paleo folks would agree too. I've even seen Dave Asprey, who was also a former vegan.
Evan Transue: Yes.
Ryan: say that, hey, you know, it's like a gateway drug going vegan, because it's getting you towards eating, you know, some real food, some fruits and vegetables and beans and lentils and nuts and seeds, you're eating real food, right? So we don't want to lose the forest for the trees, I think, directionally, eating real food and really thinking about incorporating foundational healing principles is really, really profoundly important. Of course, at the same time, yeah, we don't want to confuse anecdotes with scientific evidence. They're just, they're just anecdotes. They should be absorbed and taken in. And we go, ⁓ interesting, right? Especially when we start to see a lot of anecdotes like this popping up. But there should be a bit of like a certain scaffolding or hierarchy that we want to structure in our mind, which in my mind, it's going to start with looking at some of these higher quality studies with the randomized controlled trials as being a higher level of evidence to actually consider versus the observational stuff. And then one thing we haven't talked about yet, we've kind of alluded to it or danced around it, is the idea of N equals one. This is a term you'll hear a lot in the functional health space. What does that mean? N equals one means you are an experiment of one. So after we've taken in some of the randomized controlled studies, we've ⁓ looked at understanding certain mechanisms too. think within, for example, you mentioned red light, right? Red lights, a mechanism of red light is that it has been shown to stimulate the mitochondria to make ATP more efficiently. Like that's a scientific mechanism. That's like a foundational biological truth. Does that mean that...
Evan Transue: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: red light heals fibromyalgia or Hashimoto's or lupus? No, but mechanistically there's something there that it can help improve function and improve our health. Therefore, we might incorporate those adjunct therapies into our overall strategy as a part of managing our symptoms, getting to a place where we're closer to being healthy. And so, back to the n equals one idea, basically means this idea of ⁓ you are this experiment of one. That even though we might see a study that might, let's say, what's a good example? We've seen studies, many studies around the benefits of fasting. And you might know this a little bit better than me. Most of them have been conducted on men and not women, correct? Or is it?
Evan Transue: Well, and as they've been done more on women, it's showing that they seem to not respond as well to his extreme of a window. But yes, especially when the movement first started, you're absolutely right, it was mostly men and rats.
Ryan: Right. And rats, right? Yeah, so not so much women, unfortunately. But if I were a female and I was interested in fasting, I might look at that mechanistically and say, OK, maybe there's something there, even though most of the studies have been conducted on men. And maybe I try it, right? Because the only way to really gain like true, let's let's let's call it wisdom about our own body is to try out some of these strategies, giving it enough time. to see maybe at least a month if we were doing the fasting thing to see, how do I feel? Do I see meaningful shifts in my energy, my sleep, my mood, my digestion? And really listening to that data, so to speak, from your body, I think can be really, really powerful. And in a way, there's no substitute for this. We know this about all the biohacking types, you and I, all the people, all of our functional friends in the FDN space.
Evan Transue: Thank
Ryan: Most of us have tried all of these different modalities and dietary approaches and fasting approaches and high fat, low fat, right? And then we learn something really, really at a very, very deep level about our bodies and what works well for us and what does not work well for us. And that might be very different for you, might be very different for me, right? So it gets to this idea that there's no one size fits all approach. And I think that's where people, that gets kind of to the heart of the argument where people get really confused because they're seeing conflicting evidence. Well, then actually one thing we might have to ask is, the evidence really conflicting or is it in reality that some things work better for other people? And so it was never conflicting in the first place.
Evan Transue: Right, well said.
Ryan: Right. Thirdly is something we are very fond of saying, which is test don't guess, right? Using lab data from whether it's blood chemistry or, or PCR stool testing. There's a lot of different tools that we use in our toolkit to help actually understand at a deeper level. What are this person's nutrient deficiencies? How is stress impacting their hormones? What is the health of their microbiome looking like? We touched on that last time with the discussion around LPS. We tend to see more LPS issues in people that have low microbial diversity. So they've got a kind of a dysregulated terrain. And so if there's one thing I wish I had done years before I had become an FDN, and this is eventually why I became a functional practitioner, but I wish I had gone back and, you if I could go back in time five or 10 years sooner, I would have run all of these lab tests. to really gain a much deeper understanding as to what was holding my body back from healing, what hidden stressors were present, what deficiencies, what were the imbalances, put all this together in a cohesive plan, a roadmap to actually move the needle in the right direction, other than you don't get much more personalized than that. So I think data is kind of like the antidote to the information chaos. that we're all consuming on a daily basis. Then we could say, okay, well, that's nice and all, but this is actually what's going on in my body.
Evan Transue: And yeah, I know for myself, mean, it's a shameless plug for us, right, with the lab tests, but we are not lab test salespeople. These are third party tools. Ryan and I pay the same price to get them for ourselves and our family members as the clients pay when they work with us. What you guys are paying us for if you work with us at Autoimmune Recovery Lab is the understanding of what your unique results in history actually mean when combined and interpreted together. Because that's another thing, unfortunately, you gotta like piecemeal this stuff, right? That's what the lab tests mix. Those people are fantastic at figuring out what is in your body. They are, I wouldn't even say interested most of the time in figuring out, what is the rest of your health history that has maybe led to you coming up with this result, right? So that's where we come in the mix. But I went through, and I won't even say anything bad about it, because I liked it. It was an overall good program, but I went through a health coaching program. prior to learning about how to utilize these lab tests. And I left there with almost as many questions as when I started. They were just completely different questions. Cause I learned about these different dietary theories and I would hear these kind of amazing stories from people. Some again, did the paleo thing. Some did the vegan thing, but I had to ask at the end, what does that mean for Evan? So I'm sick right now at the time. What do I go do? to feel better, because that's why I went through this program is so that I could feel better and then hopefully help other people once I'm better, but this didn't help me feel better. When I got the labs involved, I presented with symptoms and conditions that other human beings in the past have had. Panic disorder, major depressive disorder, Meniere's disease, other human beings have had those things, right? So they have the same symptomology, same disease state, but I guarantee if our labs were side by side, They do not have the same things exactly at least or precisely that were triggering that specific disease state or those symptoms. That's where this gets interesting. So what happens is people, have like this survivor bias thing, I think in this health space, very unintentionally, but it does happen. You'll have the person that got diagnosed with cancer. You'll have the person that got diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and did a certain supplement protocol or a dietary change or whatever. And Thank God, because I am happy for them. They happen to be the small handful of people that that worked for enough that it resolved everything and now they go teach about it. But the problem is the reason that, like I actually had a good friend like this. ⁓ She did pass, she was older, but she ended up doing a raw vegan diet for almost 10 years before passing. I don't know if that had anything to do with why she's not here anymore. But what I do know is she had breast cancer, like, you know, measured, diagnosed, all that stuff. I'm not recommending this per se, but she- Purposely did not use any Western medicine treatment went to a healing institute in Florida the Hippocrates Healing Institute, which is a raw vegan based program ⁓ Didn't have the cancer after I think it was around seven months or maybe eight months It was something within under a year, but more than five months. I just remember that in my head I have these weird ways of memorizing the numbers. So That's great. That's great But why that worked in that time? She would never be able to answer that nor would I would it work the same way for another person, even with the same cancer? We don't know because we don't know what led to my friend's cancer specifically. So again, we have a lot of people nowadays with a world that's so sick that have identical diagnoses or even identical symptoms to some degree. But the way that they got these disease states is wildly different. That's how you got to use labs, right? Because if you're
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: using the same protocols for all of these people just because they have similar conditions, some are gonna think you are a miracle worker and some are gonna hate you because you got them 0 % better. And in the most extreme of cases, although thankfully this is generally a little bit more rare, practitioners that work like that, well-meaning practitioners, I'm not trying to bash them, sometimes you get the people worse and no one wants to be getting worse when they're already as enough to be coming to people like us. Let's put it that
Ryan: Right, right. I was just going to add quickly to who knows if there's something to about being in Florida and being in the sun more or even just the community aspect of being in a healing institute, being surrounded by like minded people, having that support where maybe she didn't feel like she had that prior. So they're they're getting back to that idea of looking at health through that holistic lens and thinking about all these all these different factors. So we're thinking critically about, ⁓ you know, our own health journey and how to think about these things through the right lens. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Yeah, I like that you brought that up. Just even the belief. What if she, before she went to that institute, was thoroughly convinced that everyone that goes there resolves their disease? Well, guys, placebo does matter. And you're like, it can't matter for cancer, it? It can. That's how medicines come to market. No one ever words it this way, right? Except like, I think you and I have done this in private conversation, but it's like, how does a medicine come to market? It's like, well, it basically has to pass the power of the human mind first. Like that's literally what we're saying.
Ryan: That's right. Yeah, I'll see if it does matter.
Evan Transue: when it's like it has to pass placebo. It has to pass the power of the human mind first, ⁓ which if you think about it is a direct recognition by even the pharmaceutical industry that the human mind must have some potential for healing because we literally have that as the standard that it needs to beat before it can come to market. Pretty cool.
Ryan: You know what blew my mind? I read a book years ago. I wish I could remember the title off the top of my head, but it was all about the placebo effect. And in that book, the author described these patients with debilitating, I think it was knee pain, that actually underwent fake surgery. So they were put under the premise that they were going under anesthesia to have some kind of surgical. intervention. And when they woke up from the anesthesia, even though nothing was done, just having that mental expectation, their chronic knee pain, they completely went away. Just totally, totally mind blowing. So we always come up with other podcasts ideas while we're recording the podcast. That could be an interesting one. Just talking about the power of the mind. We didn't want on mindset, but that's almost like a little bit different. right, kind of mind over matter sort of idea is really pretty powerful stuff.
Evan Transue: Any final words of wisdom on this topic specifically,
Ryan: Any words of wisdom? would say, you one thing that I think would be a good ⁓ point to wrap up, which we didn't bring up yet, is these kind of two opposite ends of a spectrum that I've seen in my clients, where on the one hand, and I've been guilty of this myself, there's the sort of paralysis by analysis personality or approach to health, where we do so much analysis that we effectively do nothing, right? It's, this is going to be the weirdest reference I've ever brought up in any conversation. I don't know. So on Sesame Street, there was the owl that played the saxophone. I forgot the character's name, but he would sing the song. He would say, you've got to, you got to put down the ducky. He was talking to Bert and Ernie that had the little rubber ducky in the, in the bathtub. And they were asking him, how do we play saxophone? Like really great, like you do.
Evan Transue: No, but that's... Okay.
Ryan: And he sang the song, he said, you have to put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone. Okay, so I'm bringing in, I also just wanted to see if I could get you to laugh. So it's the funniest thing because it's this like child like thing you would never look to as a source of wisdom. But it's like actually this timeless lesson. It's that you can't half-ass two different things if you want, if you're really looking to accomplish something in life, to achieve mastery, you have to focus, right? And so,
Evan Transue: Look.
Ryan: Yeah, we don't want to just be perpetual researchers to the point where we're not actually taking action, right? We want to bias towards actually implementation and not a bias towards information. And as someone who's very brainy myself and gets stuck in my head a lot, that's something I still have to remind myself of, right? Now the opposite end of the spectrum is the perpetual tinkerer, right? Who's, who's has so much of a bias towards action that they're not really thinking through mechanistically anything they're doing. And it's just like throwing a dart at the board and hoping it sticks. Now, sometimes you might get lucky. There's no doubt. Right. But I think the main thing to consider there is we don't want to be chasing the next protocol. We don't want to be chasing the next shiny object. Like we talked about peptides today. ⁓ I've been very busy working on some pretty big projects, so I haven't really had the time.
Evan Transue: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: to like go really deep into the peptide conversation. Admittedly, I'm not an expert there, but also at the same time, I've been in the space long enough over 10 years. There's certainly people that have been around longer, but that's a good enough chunk of time where I've seen certain things rise and fall that seemed like, I remember CBD, maybe around like 2020-ish, 2019, 2020. It just seemed like it was... Suddenly everywhere, every podcast was talking about it. It seemed like it was like the cure for everything. ⁓ Every functional practitioner I knew was partnering with CBD companies to sell CBD products. And now I barely hear about it anymore. I don't know about you, but I mean, I live in Colorado and I barely ever, ever. Yeah. And there's many more examples. mean, keto is still somewhat popular, but like there was a time where it was really popular. mean, like
Evan Transue: know what you mean. I do know what you mean. I remember that.
Ryan: Mark Sisson and Dr. Mercola, he came out with a book on fat for fuel, I think it was called on ketogenic diet. And for a time it seemed like this is the right way to eat. And if you're not doing ketogenic diet, you're not gonna be healthy and you're doing it wrong, right? That was almost like the subtext. And again, now it's like, yeah, it still pops up, but I just don't feel it like it's dominating the conversation. like it used to. So when a new kind of shiny object emerges, I kind of pause and take a breath. And I try to always remember to come back to the basics, the foundations of diet, optimizing sleep, stress reduction, community movement. These are the things that really matter, that meaningfully move the target in the right direction. And I also think At least from all of the social media I take in on a weekly basis, I'm not seeing a lot of these grounded conversations anymore. I think that the algorithms are tending to prefer hyperbole. it's almost as though the more extreme the argument or the approach or methodology, the more likely you're going to get eyeballs. And yeah, I hope to be. for both of us to be a bit of a voice of reason. And yeah, at least that's been my style for a long, long time is not to be preaching anything extreme and to always be reminding people of the middle ground and the basics. So there you go.
Evan Transue: Sure. Awesome, Ryan, thank you. Guys, you can find the show notes for this at autoimmunerecoverylab.com slash podcast nine. We do have some exciting stuff, just an update on this. ⁓ I feel like Ryan and I within the next month or so can probably start working out some live lab reviews for you guys, which would be very, very exciting. And we mean you get an extra podcast. We have a lot to talk about there, but that is not an idea that's been forgotten about or just dismissed. It's just figuring out. the how of making it work. we will keep you guys updated on that. If you could take a second, if you like the information, and if you've listened this far, you probably do, if you could take a second to leave a review on whatever platform you are listening on, that does help. Actually, those reviews help show other people that it is important. And so they end up listening as well. And I knew that we started to make a breakthrough around episode seven or eight because I got my first person outreaching to our email asking to have a guest on the show. And out of all the podcasts I've done, that's always like the first sign that you're getting noticed somewhere is that people are reaching out to you. So we would really appreciate that. And we are looking forward to seeing you guys in the next episode. Thanks.
Ryan: See you then.
Ryan: Doing great, glad to be here. This is gonna be a really fun topic. think a lot of people are gonna get a lot of value out of this, because as you said, there's so much confusion around uncertainty. And that extends to both clients and practitioners alike, right? We even know behind the scenes, there's fist fights, so to speak, not literally, of course, but about certain topics that there's a lot of disagreement about. And with that being true, The question we're trying to answer today is how do we navigate this?
Evan Transue: Yes. Well, since you were the one who definitely like kind of pushed this ⁓ further for our podcast, I would love to start with you. I don't know if there's a specific route you want to take or a particular idea that really drives you crazy. I got so many in my head, so I don't want to go off yet. ⁓ But I would love to throw it to you first, just in terms of like, why is this even something that you think is worth talking about? What have you experienced that led you to believe that, hey, this is something that we should do in our first 10 podcasts here?
Ryan: think it's something that I encounter more or less daily, whether that's working with clients where they're coming to me and saying, well, hey, you're recommending this protocol A, or C, but I have it on some other council or advice or I heard this on a podcast, wherever the source might be that this supplement is a bad idea, right? Or this protocol, ⁓ I have H. pylori on my stool test. And one doctor says that I should leave it alone. And another says I should address it and do a self-treatment protocol. ⁓ So I encounter this nearly every day with clients navigating that confusion of they're taking in information from multiple sources and they're not exactly certain of the path forward. And then at the same time, and I'm sure Evan, you've seen this thousands of times in different practitioner groups that we're a part of, is you know, these different debates about, we talked about just a couple of weeks ago on the podcast about an autoimmune diet versus a vegan diet versus a carnivore diet, right? There's all these different dietary approaches and that can be really, really confusing. So we're dealing with this from all angles. And I thought it would be helpful here to set the record straight and just It's kind of more of like a meta conversation in a sense, right? Because we're thinking about how to think and we're thinking about how to kind of structure or prioritize the information we're taking in to the environment, being good conscious consumers, knowing when something passes through a certain filter, what we're looking at as being either quality information or one we should look at something with a bit more skepticism or suspicion. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Mm-hmm. Sure. I have two things here, and I think the second one is gonna lead us perfectly into, I know one of the things you wanted to make sure we hit on today is the different types of studies, and they matter. And here's the good news, you don't have to be a PhD to understand the differences and even kind of interpret some of this stuff to some degree. Now you probably do need to be a PhD to go conduct the study properly, we're not arguing that at all, but you'd be surprised. how accessible this can be to the public in the age of the internet and chat GBT and all this kind of stuff. You just have to know ⁓ a few parameters and definitions and what type of study is what and what does it actually mean. So I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but you'll see where I'm getting at in a moment here. So two things, one is kind of unrelated, ⁓ at least to that part. One of the things that I saw all the time when my wife and I owned a business in person, it was a physical business called Bucks County Light Therapy. We had red light therapy and we had infrared sauna. We had vitamin D lamps, all this fun stuff. It was like a science experiment of a business. With that said, this was the funniest part to me. I had family members, including one that I like very much. Like he did not mean this rudely at all, but I will remember him. I'll never forget him saying, you know, how's that light therapy business going? We're like, ⁓ it's going good. Like, you know, doing our thing. Like people are actually very receptive to it, which is interesting. He's like, that's cool. Like I just. I don't know if I believe in that red light stuff. And I thought this was, like to me to have such a live example, I know that might not mean much to anyone else, but to me this was so fascinating, because I thought about that for a second and I said, what does he mean when he says I don't really believe in that stuff? And again, he didn't mean it offensively, he just meant it seriously. We can talk openly to each other. I'm like, so I didn't ask him this as a follow up necessarily, but I'm like, when he says he doesn't believe it, it's like I didn't make a specific claim, right? So I would assume that when he says he doesn't believe he means that it doesn't really have any effect. Now the irony is red light therapy has been studied since the 1960s and some of the benefits are extremely clear as to what it does. For example, just some ones off the top of my head. It does increase hypertrophy it seems. So muscle growth after strength training or hypertrophy focused sessions. So it seems to increase that. It does seem to decrease recovery. It does seem to improve energy production. seems to improve melatonin production at night, depending on the time of day that you got the exposure to the red light therapy, okay? So there's some things that it does very well that have been studied for years. So it's like, you don't believe in it. What does that mean? And the best conclusion I could come to, Ryan, is when someone, the average consumer says they don't believe in something, I don't think that they know that they mean it this way, but I think what they're actually saying is the TV or my doctor, has not told me this yet, so I don't believe in it. Because they're not sitting, they have another job. They're not sitting there like us, as nerds all day, looking up actual studies and being interested in this stuff ourselves, even though we're not doctors ourselves. So that was always interesting to me to see that. But the other one that was very sad actually was there must be this thing on either Google or some forum or whatever that implies, and I am not saying this, gotta keep myself extra safe on YouTube.
Ryan: Mmm.
Evan Transue: that implies that fibromyalgia can somehow be like cured by using an infrared sauna. And so I'd have these people that came in and they would think that infrared sauna did this. Now, not everyone did this next thing, but some of them would kind of be surprised by my response when they said, ⁓ you know, I know that, you know, my fibromyalgia is gonna go away if I use the infrared sauna enough. So I want that membership. And I said, just so you know, I don't, if it helps you, that's great. I do not believe for a second that this is going to. resolve your fibromyalgia. And a fraction of them would think that was kind of like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing. So they'd be like almost like playing with me and laughing thinking that I am not disclosing it to keep myself out of liability. And I'd have to sit down with them for a second, especially before they spent money at my business, right? I don't mind making money, but I'd like to do it within integrity. like, no, no, no, Mr. and So-and-so, I do not have any evidence at all, even anecdotal, that that does that whatsoever. The best thing that I've seen is that people that come in with fibromyalgia seem to feel a little bit better after the infrared sauna sessions. That is nowhere near the same as resolving a condition and there's no evidence that it does anything like that. So if you wanna buy the membership is it helps you subjectively feel better, I'm all for that. I think that's still a win in many ways. But if you're coming in under the idea that this is somehow going to resolve a very serious autoimmune condition, I can't get behind that in any way. That's ridiculous. ⁓
Ryan: All right. Yeah.
Evan Transue: So I'm tempted to pause there, but the one I admit I was gonna bring up the second one that would help us differentiate the studies, I'll keep it quick, is the seed oil thing. So, and I don't want you to get mad at me for this, because I know you probably don't like the seed oils either. I do not go out of my way to eat seed oils, okay? That is because I do not believe they provide any benefit to my life. I think there are risks that we don't know about yet, and I don't want to be the guinea pig. I do not need to eat.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: anything with seed oils on a daily basis, a regular basis to feel better or be properly nourished. Obviously, these people lived for years without those things. Now, with that said, Ryan, this is not just a consumer thing. If anything, it's more of the practitioners that are out there saying like, ⁓ seed oils do this with inflammation or seed oils do this with dementia or whatever. And I'm like, you know I can never find in those posts? The studies that they're referencing with humans over a long period of time, right?
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: Because guys those don't really seem to exist yet now depending on when you're listening to this. Maybe I'm wrong Maybe something just came out yesterday, but as far as I know and Ryan's a very sharp guy So I'm sure you'll correct me here if I am incorrect I know of nothing that shows of the effects of seed oils on human beings over decades and what specific diseases that might lead to so a lot of the times these people are referencing studies that are not necessarily one human-based or with large sample sizes or over a long period of time and that can help us kind of differentiate some of the studies as well. But thank you for letting me go into all that. That's about the main thing I have today. So I promise I'll stop there, but yeah.
Ryan: I love that. Yeah, no, that's great. There's a lot to talk about and unpack there. And I think what you were speaking to there, by the way, I'm more or less in agreement with you, about the seed oil thing. I think a lot of the evidence is dubious. I think there's a lot of fear mongering online and you want to really see some fear mongering, go on like Twitter X and see some of the conversations. It's almost like quasi-religious, ⁓ which is really interesting in and of itself where That's one instance where I think we should be especially really cautious or careful when we're seeing this degree of like religiousness around an argument where it gets so heated that it's like tribal and that if you believe you should be eating any degree of seed oils in your diet or if they're even marginally okay, you're like an idiot, you're a moron. It's like kind of this us or them sort of debate that's created around it, which is crazy, right? One thing we have to think about when we're looking at some of these quote unquote studies is the quality of the study itself. Right? So is it an observational study? Is it an epidemiological study? Where they're just looking at large populations using what are essentially like dietary questionnaires, which are problematic for so many reasons. One being that it's really difficult to force people to eat a certain way people can lie on a survey also looking at that one variable like they're eating consuming seed oils or they're not in their diet assuming they're being perfectly truthful and they have a good recollection about you know what they're eating and what they're not eating you know what about their level of movement and exercise their sleep habits to the smoke cigarettes so they drink alcohol so they have a very stressful job to the work night shifts there's so many other. confounding variables. So generally speaking, unfortunately, probably the vast majority of nutritional research is observational. We're looking at cohort studies, epidemiological evidence. Those should always be looked at with a healthy degree of skepticism versus something that's more gold standard, like a randomized controlled trial. or they're randomly assigning people to either receive the treatment or to ⁓ receive a placebo, right? ⁓ Even better if it's double-blinded placebo-controlled, randomized controlled trial. It's a lot of words, but that is like the triple platinum, right, gold standard, whatever you would call it for ⁓ scientific evidence. And like you said earlier, we don't have to be a PhD to understand these things. If we... are looking at a study on PubMed, it'll tell you at the very top of the study, this was observational, this was an RCT, which is randomized controlled trial. So we do need to create a little bit of a hierarchy of the evidence that we're actually looking at. And before we adopt a claim, ⁓ just because we like some kind of health influencer and we think they're a cool person, and they're telling us that seed oils are killing us, we might wanna look at some of that evidence for ourselves before we decide to implement that into our actual health routine. ⁓ So I think it's also important to understand the incentives as well, especially where a lot of us are now getting information not from directly from the source from these studies, but from people on social media, on Instagram, TikTok, where we're identifying with their personality rather than digging into the information ourselves, which I understand because Like you said, like we have lives, we're busy. Like not everyone's gonna geek out and be reading these studies ⁓ or have the time to do so, but at least stop to consider the incentive, right? If someone is going back to the carnivore thing again, if they're selling meat sticks on their platform and that's a big source of their income and they're pushing a carnivore diet, It doesn't mean that they're wrong automatically, but we have to understand that there's an incentive for them to be pushing their meat sticks. And, you know, I'm a carnivore guy or whatever, right? And that also doesn't mean that their other health advice about other topics is automatically wrong or not legitimate. But we just need to be intelligent about how we ⁓ parse these things out, right? I it's really, really important. Yeah.
Evan Transue: It doesn't even mean that they're inherently bad, right? A lot of those people that are selling the meat-based products are probably carnivore themselves. You know, so and I do believe in like with the seed oil thing I a hundred percent believe that the people that are sharing that information are also not eating seed oils. So fair enough. It's like their information or their ideas are consistent with their behaviors. So I can understand that and say, at least you're a good person. That means well, that's already a huge step above a lot of stuff. But that doesn't cut it.
Ryan: That's right. Yeah. Right.
Evan Transue: in real life with a lot of things. And I think that C2O1, even though, like you said, the debates get insane, and it's so funny, because it's like, for me, it's the easiest debate in the world, right? I'll be like, ⁓ I don't choose to eat them. They're like, ⁓ so you're saying that they're bad. I'm saying, no, I'm skeptical. I'm like, but please show me the study where any of the claims that you just made in this conversation are shown in humans, and they never ever, I have not had one person in probably, I've probably been playing this game for like four or five years, and I've not had one person be able to come back and actually show me a human-based study yet.
Ryan: right. Well...
Evan Transue: Now you could say the reason that those human studies are not prioritized is because there's so much influence in that industry to keep profiting off people. That's a fair claim as well. Again, I don't eat them. Ryan, I know you well enough to know you probably don't eat them at all, correct?
Ryan: Don't eat what at all? ⁓ seed oils. No, we don't buy or purchase seed oils in our home, right? I'm fully aware that when we go out to eat at a restaurant or get some hot bar food at Whole Foods or something like that, yeah, I'm probably gonna get exposed to some seed oils. But if that's like a drop in the bucket and less than, I don't know, 5 % of my fatty acid intake is from seed oils, I'm not gonna sweat it because I'm doing...
Evan Transue: Enjoy the fitness.
Ryan: so many other things within my diet and lifestyle to keep things in check that I don't think a little bit of ⁓ exposure here and there is something I'm going to lose sleep around. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Sure. But yeah, that's the bottom line though is like you can make a personal decision based off probably a logical thought process, but that is different than going online and making a specific claim. And I think that's where our industry gets in a lot of trouble. And guys, we're not going to be perfect either. If we speak long enough, unfortunately, since we're human, we will say something incorrect. I'm still kicking myself. I actually remember this one because it bothered me that bad, Ryan. It was in the beginning of the pandemic. So was almost six years ago, probably to the day.
Ryan: Right.
Evan Transue: And I shared something about ⁓ drinking water near the time of eating food lowered stomach acid. And I had not fully fact-checked myself on that at the time. And I was wrong. Like the evidence was not clear. That was not ⁓ definitive by any means. And you can totally drink water at the same time that you are eating a heavy protein-based type of meal, right? But like that bothers me when I do that. I wish more people, especially the practitioner side had more. I wish they were bothered more when they did make those mistakes. It's not that we're never going to make the mistakes that might happen, but at least own up to it. Be bothered by it to some degree. Cause there's people out there, even if I don't want it to be this way, I still have to be realistic enough to know that there are people that even follow this podcast that are going to just kind of follow some things blindly. We do not recommend that. You should always go to your doctor first and you should probably read the stuff yourself, but people are busy. So they try to find a nice personality that they resonate with. And then they're making decisions on that. ⁓ I would be very careful with things that I remove ⁓ as a result of the advice I'm getting online. I would be extraordinarily careful with things that I'm adding in as a result of things I'm hearing online. And the first thing that comes to mind with that one is the whole peptide thing, right Ryan? So I know that wasn't necessarily a specific thing we talk about today per se, but the peptides in general, in general, have such limited human research and yet they're being pushed everywhere and everyone's using them.
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: So I'm more worried, like what do I think's a bigger risk? Not eating seed oils, even though I don't have a lot of evidence to prove why it's a good idea for me not to, or taking peptides, even though I don't have a lot of great evidence as to why I maybe should do that. I personally think it's more risky to see what's gonna happen with taking a peptide long-term versus not eating a seed oil. So that's why I said be very careful about what you remove from your life based on what you just hear online without fact checking it. and be extraordinarily careful about what you add into your life without fact checking it. that make sense?
Ryan: Yeah, of course. Evan, question for you. Are you familiar with the Lindy effect? Lindy effect, it's a real term.
Evan Transue: The Lindy Effect? Okay, no, I'm only laughing because for those who don't know, ⁓ Ryan Carter's name is Lindy, so that's funny. I didn't know if this was an effect just in your household and your life or a real one.
Ryan: That's right. You thought I was about ⁓ to crack open a joke. Yeah, so, okay, I'm not a mathematician or a statistician or anything like that, but I do know that the Lindy effect does come from that world that's sometimes used in the investing world as well. yeah, again, for the kind of statistics people that...
Evan Transue: I don't know either of them, so no, please tell us.
Ryan: by chance or listening to this, please don't come after me for getting this completely wrong. But my understanding of the Lindy effect is the longer something has been around, the more like that in and of itself is evidence of its effectiveness and that it will be proven to continue to be beneficial in the future. So for example, we would say that foundational dietary and lifestyle principles are Lindy. That's the way that expression would be used. Meaning things like getting sunlight. That's been around for a pretty darn long time. If the universe is 13 billion years, homo sapiens have been around for two or 300,000 years. We've been getting exposed to the sun and have co-evolved with it for a very, very long time. Eating real food. getting optimal sleep and optimizing our circadian rhythm, moving our body, moving our bodies very Lindy. It's almost like you don't even need to seek out evidence, right? Like it's just kind of inherent in the fact that this is part of our biological functioning and how ⁓ humans have lived for however long we've been around, right? So I bring that up to say, I love your point about the peptides, okay, because the peptides are like the complete opposite of something that's Lindy. ⁓ I think it's Brett Weinstein that I learned this term from. He would say something like peptides are hyper novel, right? Meaning that they haven't been around long enough to prove that we have no idea what the long-term benefit, despite them being promoted and touted as being miracle drugs, right? It's like... I don't think I've ever seen anything in my lifetime explode that quickly. It's pretty mind blowing actually that there's something to be said about that in and of itself from a marketing perspective, from just, it's really hitting on pain points for people. ⁓ And I have no doubt of, I've seen it firsthand myself, I'm sure you have, of people that are using these peptides, incorporating it into their diet and lifestyle. Now, this might be a little off topic, but on the one hand, I don't really feel like that's addressing whatever was the root cause of the issue to begin with. But that aside, there's this question of like, where are the long-term trials? There literally can't be because we haven't been using them long enough at scale. So that's kind of the opposite ends of the spectrum of something that's Lindy versus the complete opposite of being not Lindy. And in terms of this conversation, what am I going to prioritize in my own life? It's always going to be the things that are time tested, that are just foundational, just like a plant needs water and sunlight and healthy soil. Those are just not even up for debate. ⁓ And so that's always kind of directionally what I'm trying to move towards and trying to not overcomplicate things. So yeah, I'm curious to know if you have anything to add to that.
Evan Transue: Thank Well, I just had a quick question. So does the Lindy effect apply to things that are not just, I because we're using it with health, but it sounds like it's a broader thing. So we don't have to spend 20 minutes on this part, but I was just curious if this would be an example. So I'm a Christian, I have many Christian friends and a lot of them, what's funny is like none of us go to the same church together, almost at all. Like all of us have very different things and that we're exploring, whatever. And I have one friend that goes to the Greek Orthodox Church.
Ryan: Yes, it is.
Evan Transue: and another that goes to a Russian Serbian Orthodox church. Now, again, we don't have to into a whole religious thing, but the whole idea with the Orthodox thing is that this is the tradition that the original church did. It's been maintained. It hasn't been changed or manipulated. There's not a rock band with the preacher on the movie screen teaching you the gospel. So their idea is that because it's original, it is not only ⁓ good, it is correct.
Ryan: Yep, yep, sure.
Evan Transue: So would that be an example of the Lindy effect as well?
Ryan: Yeah, that's interesting to bring in the ⁓ religious equation. I would say, at least in theory. But I think, though, within these various different religious sects or different sects of Christianity, there's debate even about interpretation of, ⁓ gosh, I'm out of my depth here. But I think you kind of generally know what I mean, right? Even if I'm saying this is the correct way because it's how it was always done, well, then I might say, well, yeah, according to your interpretation of that, right? ⁓ But just for fun, I brought up the ⁓ Google Gemini AI definition of the Lindy effect. It's a theory. I think I was pretty
Evan Transue: Sure,
Ryan: close to my description of it. It's a theory suggesting that the future life expectancy of non-perishable items such as technologies, ideas, or books is proportional to their current age. So the future life expectancy is proportional to their current age. I said essentially the same idea. The longer something has been around, the longer it will continue to be kind of ⁓ a bit more bulletproof, so to speak, in the future.
Evan Transue: ⁓ so this is a little different. Gotcha. The way I interpret it though is, so it would be more fair to say that Orthodox churches are probably not going anywhere because they have truly maintained for the last, you know, 200-2000 years. Yes. Okay. Got it.
Ryan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would say so, right? Yeah. They've been following time-tested principles. And I think this is what attracts a lot of people to different world religions, because there's a lot of these timeless ideas about how to live our lives and how to conduct ourselves ethically, how to not make stupid decisions. So there's a lot of practicality, I think, even, within religion.
Evan Transue: Got it. Yeah. And then just to be a religious about it, I guess an even further step would be the idea that all humans, I mean, obviously there is a huge sector of atheists. get that. But I'm talking from native Americans to Mayans to traditional Chinese to the Europeans to the Africans. Everyone kind of seemed to have some history of believing in something more. So in this Lindy effect idea, it would be more the idea that the idea of a higher power is probably not going. anywhere as long as humans are around.
Ryan: I would say according to the Lindy effect definition, God is the most Lindy thing in human history that you can, if there was any idea, because within that definition, it said ideas were included in that, not just physical things, right? Yeah. So really interesting stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Sure, sure. Well there you go folks. You come for health stuff, get the, this is what happens in our interpersonal conversations by the way. So much of what we do on this podcast is just clicking record for a conversation ride that I might have anyway. That's why we're friends and business partners. I digress. So in terms of then what someone can actually do, because I think, you know, we could spend another five hours talking about the problem. But the reality is I think people have already probably accepted that to some degree.
Ryan: That's right. Yeah.
Evan Transue: and they're in it. So this is something when they hear it, what we said today, I think that they know it exists. They understand that there is confusion, right? So it's a lot of the confusion that you and I would have had when we got into this space over 10 years ago. And I know this doesn't seem like that long in the grand scheme of things guys, but I cannot tell you how far, for better or for worse, things have come with again, the internet and social media influencers. Like when I talk, I have a lot of guys ⁓ in my building that are younger than me. The amount of them that like, wear blue light blocking glasses, Ryan, even though they have no health issues is stunning or like they know that you probably shouldn't be eating XYZ thing or like they know that you're not supposed to hold receipts like for paper receipts from the store because they release chemicals I'm like but you're not into health at all they're like ⁓ yeah but everyone knows this like that's their interpretation because of the health influencers is that everyone knows some of these things at least so when you and I were getting started though that did not exist and we had to do this thing called like
Ryan: Mmm, the BPA exposure.
Evan Transue: Sometimes it's crazy, but you went to a library and you'd actually check out a book. Now I feel really old, but like that's truly one of the best ways to have gotten natural health information back then. And I remember it just being cripplingly ⁓ confusing to read about someone who did a vegan diet. And I know in my heart they were telling the truth and that they really were trying to share their story with the world. They were only selling the book. They're not even making great money. And they're selling this book and they're showing you their transformation of their health. And you're like, wow, that's crazy.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: But then the same week I can go read someone, the paleo thing was huge back then, huge, huge. You'd read someone that did paleo and they're eating a ton of meat. And then they had very similar health outcomes, at least so it seems. And you're like, well, what on earth am I missing here? Like, what was the difference? What was the variable? So my question for you is, how do we solve for this? Or maybe solve's not even the right word. How the heck do we navigate the confusion? Because what we really want, we don't care about the information per se. Maybe you and I do.
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: The consumer and certainly our clients at Autoimmune Recovery Lab, they don't care. They want to get better. So they'd be wondering, well, how can I navigate this sea of information? So what are some of your suggestions for that?
Ryan: Yeah, great question. So using that anecdote right there about these various different dietary approaches, let's say vegan or paleo, carnivore, you're going to go online. You're going to be exposed to all these different influencers with different anecdotes. And that's a really key term to understand, is that you're going to see people that said, tried diet A, B, or C, and it cured or you know, put my autoimmune disease into remission at least, right? And so the key thing to understand there is an anecdote is not the same thing. We can't generalize that to an entire population. That's just one person's experience and it might very well be true, right? Like a paleo diet was a huge part of my healing journey and transformation, right? When I first went on a vegan ⁓ diet,
Evan Transue: .
Ryan: in my 20s. Initially, I felt amazing. And I say initially because I do believe there was a bit of a honeymoon period. I no longer follow a vegan diet. don't, I can't really say I advocate for it. ⁓ But it, you know, what was true, let's try to be fair here and say, what was true about both of those approaches, even though they might seem like they have no overlap whatsoever, paleo or vegan, right? Well, It's both moving in the direction of eating real food. I truly think eating a vegan diet is 100 times better than eating a standard American diet of ultra-processed foods. And so directionally, that's kind of what I was getting at earlier with these foundational principles. Eating real food is very Lindy. So I think the paleo folks would agree too. I've even seen Dave Asprey, who was also a former vegan.
Evan Transue: Yes.
Ryan: say that, hey, you know, it's like a gateway drug going vegan, because it's getting you towards eating, you know, some real food, some fruits and vegetables and beans and lentils and nuts and seeds, you're eating real food, right? So we don't want to lose the forest for the trees, I think, directionally, eating real food and really thinking about incorporating foundational healing principles is really, really profoundly important. Of course, at the same time, yeah, we don't want to confuse anecdotes with scientific evidence. They're just, they're just anecdotes. They should be absorbed and taken in. And we go, ⁓ interesting, right? Especially when we start to see a lot of anecdotes like this popping up. But there should be a bit of like a certain scaffolding or hierarchy that we want to structure in our mind, which in my mind, it's going to start with looking at some of these higher quality studies with the randomized controlled trials as being a higher level of evidence to actually consider versus the observational stuff. And then one thing we haven't talked about yet, we've kind of alluded to it or danced around it, is the idea of N equals one. This is a term you'll hear a lot in the functional health space. What does that mean? N equals one means you are an experiment of one. So after we've taken in some of the randomized controlled studies, we've ⁓ looked at understanding certain mechanisms too. think within, for example, you mentioned red light, right? Red lights, a mechanism of red light is that it has been shown to stimulate the mitochondria to make ATP more efficiently. Like that's a scientific mechanism. That's like a foundational biological truth. Does that mean that...
Evan Transue: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: red light heals fibromyalgia or Hashimoto's or lupus? No, but mechanistically there's something there that it can help improve function and improve our health. Therefore, we might incorporate those adjunct therapies into our overall strategy as a part of managing our symptoms, getting to a place where we're closer to being healthy. And so, back to the n equals one idea, basically means this idea of ⁓ you are this experiment of one. That even though we might see a study that might, let's say, what's a good example? We've seen studies, many studies around the benefits of fasting. And you might know this a little bit better than me. Most of them have been conducted on men and not women, correct? Or is it?
Evan Transue: Well, and as they've been done more on women, it's showing that they seem to not respond as well to his extreme of a window. But yes, especially when the movement first started, you're absolutely right, it was mostly men and rats.
Ryan: Right. And rats, right? Yeah, so not so much women, unfortunately. But if I were a female and I was interested in fasting, I might look at that mechanistically and say, OK, maybe there's something there, even though most of the studies have been conducted on men. And maybe I try it, right? Because the only way to really gain like true, let's let's let's call it wisdom about our own body is to try out some of these strategies, giving it enough time. to see maybe at least a month if we were doing the fasting thing to see, how do I feel? Do I see meaningful shifts in my energy, my sleep, my mood, my digestion? And really listening to that data, so to speak, from your body, I think can be really, really powerful. And in a way, there's no substitute for this. We know this about all the biohacking types, you and I, all the people, all of our functional friends in the FDN space.
Evan Transue: Thank
Ryan: Most of us have tried all of these different modalities and dietary approaches and fasting approaches and high fat, low fat, right? And then we learn something really, really at a very, very deep level about our bodies and what works well for us and what does not work well for us. And that might be very different for you, might be very different for me, right? So it gets to this idea that there's no one size fits all approach. And I think that's where people, that gets kind of to the heart of the argument where people get really confused because they're seeing conflicting evidence. Well, then actually one thing we might have to ask is, the evidence really conflicting or is it in reality that some things work better for other people? And so it was never conflicting in the first place.
Evan Transue: Right, well said.
Ryan: Right. Thirdly is something we are very fond of saying, which is test don't guess, right? Using lab data from whether it's blood chemistry or, or PCR stool testing. There's a lot of different tools that we use in our toolkit to help actually understand at a deeper level. What are this person's nutrient deficiencies? How is stress impacting their hormones? What is the health of their microbiome looking like? We touched on that last time with the discussion around LPS. We tend to see more LPS issues in people that have low microbial diversity. So they've got a kind of a dysregulated terrain. And so if there's one thing I wish I had done years before I had become an FDN, and this is eventually why I became a functional practitioner, but I wish I had gone back and, you if I could go back in time five or 10 years sooner, I would have run all of these lab tests. to really gain a much deeper understanding as to what was holding my body back from healing, what hidden stressors were present, what deficiencies, what were the imbalances, put all this together in a cohesive plan, a roadmap to actually move the needle in the right direction, other than you don't get much more personalized than that. So I think data is kind of like the antidote to the information chaos. that we're all consuming on a daily basis. Then we could say, okay, well, that's nice and all, but this is actually what's going on in my body.
Evan Transue: And yeah, I know for myself, mean, it's a shameless plug for us, right, with the lab tests, but we are not lab test salespeople. These are third party tools. Ryan and I pay the same price to get them for ourselves and our family members as the clients pay when they work with us. What you guys are paying us for if you work with us at Autoimmune Recovery Lab is the understanding of what your unique results in history actually mean when combined and interpreted together. Because that's another thing, unfortunately, you gotta like piecemeal this stuff, right? That's what the lab tests mix. Those people are fantastic at figuring out what is in your body. They are, I wouldn't even say interested most of the time in figuring out, what is the rest of your health history that has maybe led to you coming up with this result, right? So that's where we come in the mix. But I went through, and I won't even say anything bad about it, because I liked it. It was an overall good program, but I went through a health coaching program. prior to learning about how to utilize these lab tests. And I left there with almost as many questions as when I started. They were just completely different questions. Cause I learned about these different dietary theories and I would hear these kind of amazing stories from people. Some again, did the paleo thing. Some did the vegan thing, but I had to ask at the end, what does that mean for Evan? So I'm sick right now at the time. What do I go do? to feel better, because that's why I went through this program is so that I could feel better and then hopefully help other people once I'm better, but this didn't help me feel better. When I got the labs involved, I presented with symptoms and conditions that other human beings in the past have had. Panic disorder, major depressive disorder, Meniere's disease, other human beings have had those things, right? So they have the same symptomology, same disease state, but I guarantee if our labs were side by side, They do not have the same things exactly at least or precisely that were triggering that specific disease state or those symptoms. That's where this gets interesting. So what happens is people, have like this survivor bias thing, I think in this health space, very unintentionally, but it does happen. You'll have the person that got diagnosed with cancer. You'll have the person that got diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and did a certain supplement protocol or a dietary change or whatever. And Thank God, because I am happy for them. They happen to be the small handful of people that that worked for enough that it resolved everything and now they go teach about it. But the problem is the reason that, like I actually had a good friend like this. ⁓ She did pass, she was older, but she ended up doing a raw vegan diet for almost 10 years before passing. I don't know if that had anything to do with why she's not here anymore. But what I do know is she had breast cancer, like, you know, measured, diagnosed, all that stuff. I'm not recommending this per se, but she- Purposely did not use any Western medicine treatment went to a healing institute in Florida the Hippocrates Healing Institute, which is a raw vegan based program ⁓ Didn't have the cancer after I think it was around seven months or maybe eight months It was something within under a year, but more than five months. I just remember that in my head I have these weird ways of memorizing the numbers. So That's great. That's great But why that worked in that time? She would never be able to answer that nor would I would it work the same way for another person, even with the same cancer? We don't know because we don't know what led to my friend's cancer specifically. So again, we have a lot of people nowadays with a world that's so sick that have identical diagnoses or even identical symptoms to some degree. But the way that they got these disease states is wildly different. That's how you got to use labs, right? Because if you're
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: using the same protocols for all of these people just because they have similar conditions, some are gonna think you are a miracle worker and some are gonna hate you because you got them 0 % better. And in the most extreme of cases, although thankfully this is generally a little bit more rare, practitioners that work like that, well-meaning practitioners, I'm not trying to bash them, sometimes you get the people worse and no one wants to be getting worse when they're already as enough to be coming to people like us. Let's put it that
Ryan: Right, right. I was just going to add quickly to who knows if there's something to about being in Florida and being in the sun more or even just the community aspect of being in a healing institute, being surrounded by like minded people, having that support where maybe she didn't feel like she had that prior. So they're they're getting back to that idea of looking at health through that holistic lens and thinking about all these all these different factors. So we're thinking critically about, ⁓ you know, our own health journey and how to think about these things through the right lens. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Yeah, I like that you brought that up. Just even the belief. What if she, before she went to that institute, was thoroughly convinced that everyone that goes there resolves their disease? Well, guys, placebo does matter. And you're like, it can't matter for cancer, it? It can. That's how medicines come to market. No one ever words it this way, right? Except like, I think you and I have done this in private conversation, but it's like, how does a medicine come to market? It's like, well, it basically has to pass the power of the human mind first. Like that's literally what we're saying.
Ryan: That's right. Yeah, I'll see if it does matter.
Evan Transue: when it's like it has to pass placebo. It has to pass the power of the human mind first, ⁓ which if you think about it is a direct recognition by even the pharmaceutical industry that the human mind must have some potential for healing because we literally have that as the standard that it needs to beat before it can come to market. Pretty cool.
Ryan: You know what blew my mind? I read a book years ago. I wish I could remember the title off the top of my head, but it was all about the placebo effect. And in that book, the author described these patients with debilitating, I think it was knee pain, that actually underwent fake surgery. So they were put under the premise that they were going under anesthesia to have some kind of surgical. intervention. And when they woke up from the anesthesia, even though nothing was done, just having that mental expectation, their chronic knee pain, they completely went away. Just totally, totally mind blowing. So we always come up with other podcasts ideas while we're recording the podcast. That could be an interesting one. Just talking about the power of the mind. We didn't want on mindset, but that's almost like a little bit different. right, kind of mind over matter sort of idea is really pretty powerful stuff.
Evan Transue: Any final words of wisdom on this topic specifically,
Ryan: Any words of wisdom? would say, you one thing that I think would be a good ⁓ point to wrap up, which we didn't bring up yet, is these kind of two opposite ends of a spectrum that I've seen in my clients, where on the one hand, and I've been guilty of this myself, there's the sort of paralysis by analysis personality or approach to health, where we do so much analysis that we effectively do nothing, right? It's, this is going to be the weirdest reference I've ever brought up in any conversation. I don't know. So on Sesame Street, there was the owl that played the saxophone. I forgot the character's name, but he would sing the song. He would say, you've got to, you got to put down the ducky. He was talking to Bert and Ernie that had the little rubber ducky in the, in the bathtub. And they were asking him, how do we play saxophone? Like really great, like you do.
Evan Transue: No, but that's... Okay.
Ryan: And he sang the song, he said, you have to put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone. Okay, so I'm bringing in, I also just wanted to see if I could get you to laugh. So it's the funniest thing because it's this like child like thing you would never look to as a source of wisdom. But it's like actually this timeless lesson. It's that you can't half-ass two different things if you want, if you're really looking to accomplish something in life, to achieve mastery, you have to focus, right? And so,
Evan Transue: Look.
Ryan: Yeah, we don't want to just be perpetual researchers to the point where we're not actually taking action, right? We want to bias towards actually implementation and not a bias towards information. And as someone who's very brainy myself and gets stuck in my head a lot, that's something I still have to remind myself of, right? Now the opposite end of the spectrum is the perpetual tinkerer, right? Who's, who's has so much of a bias towards action that they're not really thinking through mechanistically anything they're doing. And it's just like throwing a dart at the board and hoping it sticks. Now, sometimes you might get lucky. There's no doubt. Right. But I think the main thing to consider there is we don't want to be chasing the next protocol. We don't want to be chasing the next shiny object. Like we talked about peptides today. ⁓ I've been very busy working on some pretty big projects, so I haven't really had the time.
Evan Transue: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: to like go really deep into the peptide conversation. Admittedly, I'm not an expert there, but also at the same time, I've been in the space long enough over 10 years. There's certainly people that have been around longer, but that's a good enough chunk of time where I've seen certain things rise and fall that seemed like, I remember CBD, maybe around like 2020-ish, 2019, 2020. It just seemed like it was... Suddenly everywhere, every podcast was talking about it. It seemed like it was like the cure for everything. ⁓ Every functional practitioner I knew was partnering with CBD companies to sell CBD products. And now I barely hear about it anymore. I don't know about you, but I mean, I live in Colorado and I barely ever, ever. Yeah. And there's many more examples. mean, keto is still somewhat popular, but like there was a time where it was really popular. mean, like
Evan Transue: know what you mean. I do know what you mean. I remember that.
Ryan: Mark Sisson and Dr. Mercola, he came out with a book on fat for fuel, I think it was called on ketogenic diet. And for a time it seemed like this is the right way to eat. And if you're not doing ketogenic diet, you're not gonna be healthy and you're doing it wrong, right? That was almost like the subtext. And again, now it's like, yeah, it still pops up, but I just don't feel it like it's dominating the conversation. like it used to. So when a new kind of shiny object emerges, I kind of pause and take a breath. And I try to always remember to come back to the basics, the foundations of diet, optimizing sleep, stress reduction, community movement. These are the things that really matter, that meaningfully move the target in the right direction. And I also think At least from all of the social media I take in on a weekly basis, I'm not seeing a lot of these grounded conversations anymore. I think that the algorithms are tending to prefer hyperbole. it's almost as though the more extreme the argument or the approach or methodology, the more likely you're going to get eyeballs. And yeah, I hope to be. for both of us to be a bit of a voice of reason. And yeah, at least that's been my style for a long, long time is not to be preaching anything extreme and to always be reminding people of the middle ground and the basics. So there you go.
Evan Transue: Sure. Awesome, Ryan, thank you. Guys, you can find the show notes for this at autoimmunerecoverylab.com slash podcast nine. We do have some exciting stuff, just an update on this. ⁓ I feel like Ryan and I within the next month or so can probably start working out some live lab reviews for you guys, which would be very, very exciting. And we mean you get an extra podcast. We have a lot to talk about there, but that is not an idea that's been forgotten about or just dismissed. It's just figuring out. the how of making it work. we will keep you guys updated on that. If you could take a second, if you like the information, and if you've listened this far, you probably do, if you could take a second to leave a review on whatever platform you are listening on, that does help. Actually, those reviews help show other people that it is important. And so they end up listening as well. And I knew that we started to make a breakthrough around episode seven or eight because I got my first person outreaching to our email asking to have a guest on the show. And out of all the podcasts I've done, that's always like the first sign that you're getting noticed somewhere is that people are reaching out to you. So we would really appreciate that. And we are looking forward to seeing you guys in the next episode. Thanks.
Ryan: See you then.
