Nowadays, there is a lot of health information out there.

A lot of it is very useful and a lot of it is not.

It is hard to know if a certain piece of health information will be truly helpful at first glance.

You have to actually experiment to see if your body will resonate with it and be able to actually improve.

You also have to do some research into whether this has good ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE - does this work for people in REAL life and not just for researchers in the lab?

I worked at MD Anderson Cancer Centre doing cancer research for a couple of years as well as did biochemistry research at UT Austin and I have seen VERY closely how people do research, how they analyze the data, how they write papers and how scientific papers with studies get published.

And one thing I can tell you for sure, is that just because you hear of some study that was done and got certain results, this does not mean those numbers are necessarily credible.

You know, there is A LOT that goes on in the science research lab.

Before you blindly accept the results and conclusion of a certain study you have to take into BIG ACCOUNT who conducted it and what the process was of conducting that experiment.

Of course, you would not be able to know this very well from just reading a peer reviewed science paper, but there are clues. That’s why sometimes, and I am sure you’ve seen this, a paper comes out and everyone gets excited and then one of the health gurus out there dissects the paper and says: “well, the researcher didn’t take this and that into consideration (in the lab or in the analysis).”

If the researcher was careless in ANY step of that experiment, the results could have been affected.

Did they wash the cell culture cells properly?

Did they leave the cultures in there for too long?

Did the protein denature partly before the assay was done??

Is the professor of the lab in which the experiment was conducted famous and well connected and can get peer reviewed journals published no matter what? (Yup, I have seen this first hand)

Oh yeah, I’ve seen it all.

The sexy health thing

The sexy thing to talk about, read about, and do nowadays when it comes to creating optimal health/longevity/healthspan is ‘EVIDENCE BASED this and that.’

When people say this term they feel advanced and like they are doing their health duty.

And even when functional, integrative and normal doctors say this term - they don’t REALLY understand what they are talking about and they especially DON’T KNOW how to use it to help people improve their health.

They throw this term around to sound knowledgeable and fancy and for people who don’t know better to think that these practitioners know what they are talking about.

But, ultimately, they’re just making their ego happy by mentioning those words day in and day out - they are NOT HELPING PEOPLE TRULY.

People are fixated on studies and scientific evidence because they think that focusing on these is the way to go to get healthier - it’s not.

Science is great and it does help the advancement of our world and mankind, but it DOES NOT supersede our daily real life, our daily life experience, what our bodies need, what our bodies want, what actually works for you and your body in the grand scheme of YOUR life and YOUR goals.

This obsession with ‘evidence based’ prevents your expansion into optimal health.

If you sit around waiting for science to give you ‘good evidence’ of something before you try it, you will be in a health prison of major frustration for a very long time, if not forever.

In a world of so much good health information, people are more frustrated than EVER before. Mostly because they try to ‘be healthy’ time and again but are not able to do it.

Well, blindly following ‘EVIDENCE BASED’ random pieces of health information and incorporating those in your life without respect to your own take in your own health is disaster and annoyance and frustration waiting to happen.

I have experienced this first hand HUNDREDS OF TIMES with clients over the last few years.

Whatever the integrative doctor says - usually random and not connected to that person’s REAL DAILY LIFE minute and most important details - people will 100% believe and do.

For example, they pay to go see an integrative doctor and doctor says, “take this NAD supplement because it will help you have more energy - the research says so.” People do it and then come back to say “I took this supplement for 3 months and energy didn’t improve, I actually got more tired!” (This actually happened a lot with this specific popular longevity supplement).

Well, yeah, of course, adding lavender spray to a landfill is not going to make it better, in fact, it will make it worse.

Taking NAD to give your mitochondria help in making energy in the body will do you NO GOOD AT ALL if you are drinking alcohol every night (oh, yeah, this is ok says the doctor) and if you are blasting your retina with blue light wavelengths at night and sucking your mitochondria dry of any energy is has made - you see what I mean?

IT MAKES NO SENSE.

Common sense and simple rock solid health foundations come WAY WAY AHEAD of ‘evidence based’ anything in health.(and in life, for that matter).

Optimal health requires, first and foremost, your common sense.

You probably already know in your mind and heart what you need to do to get on that road to real vitality. Then, you just have to do those things day in and day out and find pleasure and be present in the process of doing those things

……this is when you will see magic.

This is where the real ‘optimal health’ work is.

The work is not in chasing evidence based pieces of health information, trying them out randomly and then hoping that you will wake up feeling magical and have your vitality back.

Science doesn’t PROVE things, it gives us good evidence for things. And EVEN WHEN the evidence seems good, you don’t know if it REALLY is, as you were not there in that laboratory when experiments were conducted and the data analyzed.

AND this good evidence could all of a sudden be taken away by some new study that gives birth to a new paradigm and things could change enormously.

I am sure you remember how many times in your life you heard the yo-yo of: eggs are bad, eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good. Coffee is bad, coffee is good. And SO many other things.

Science is useful for sure and we can use it as a credible health piece of information to maybe add to our health work and pass it through the screen of: does this fit into my rock solid health foundation and where I am in my health journey right now?

Thanks for reading Health Minis: Simplifying Health, Amplifying Life! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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