[00:00:00] Kara: Sick of the fatigue and fog? Fed up with the unpredictable flares? Hangry from the super restrictive diets?
Hello, and welcome to the Crunchy Allergist Podcast, a podcast empowering those who like me, appreciate both a naturally minded and scientifically grounded approach to health and healing.
Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Kara Wada, quadruple board certified pediatric and adult allergy immunology and lifestyle medicine, physician Sjogren's patient and life coach. My recipe for success combines, the anti-inflammatory lifestyle, trusting therapeutic relationships, modern medicine, and mindset to harness our body's ability to heal.
Now although I might be a physician I'm not your physician And this podcast is for educational purposes only.
Thank you everyone for joining us this week on the Crunchy Allergists Podcast. I am super excited to welcome Dr. Adrian Chavez. He is the host of the Nutrition Science Podcast and founder of the Dr. Chavez School of Nutrition. He holds a PhD in nutrition and health promotion from Arizona State University.
Whereas research was focused on translating the scientific principles of nutrition into real world practice for chronic disease prevention. He has a strong passion for fighting against misinformation and helping people get access to practical high quality evidence-based nutrition guidance. You can find him on Instagram ,@dr.adrian.chavez, which we'll link in the show notes where he's highly active in dispelling myths and teaching basic nutrition concepts in his practical and entertaining ways. And that is how we connected because I was really entertained and felt like we had a fair bit in common, which we'll talk more about, but Dr. Adrian, would you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to do what you do?
[00:01:57] Adrian: Yeah I think you did a pretty good job of kind of outlining the background, my education, what I'm doing now. I came into this though from a personal experience. Like a lot of people do for me, I was so that studying for exercise science.
I was getting my master's degree in exercise science. I was highly interested in nutrition because that kind of fits within the performance, but I was looking more at, high protein diets and how to gain muscle and performance and all that. And then I developed some GI issues, went to a doctor, they put me on medication.
It didn't do anything like it made it worse, went to another GI specialist, like he referred me out. So would you guys specialists the GI specialist didn't really have any good answers for me, except for, I could get an endoscopy that would be like three grand out of pocket on top of my insurance costs or on top of my insurance like what the insurance would pay.
And I was like, 20, I think I was 21 years old, 22 years old at the time. I'm like this, there has to be something else. There's because even if I get the endoscopy, the doctor told me like we, we can identify if something's wrong, but we don't have a course of action after that.
And I'm like, there's no way that this is. My only approach, the only thing that I can do. So at that point, I went online and use my scientific experience, but also went on a bunch of fringe sites at that point in time. And just started trying everything. My diet at the time was like a really high protein, not a lot of fruits and vegetables, just not overall high quality nutrition.
It was good for, gaining muscle and performance, but not necessarily for overall long-term health. So I completely shifted like my nutritional approach and started eating more plant based diet, started eating a more, a diet that I felt was more supportive of my overall health and then paying attention to the things that I thought that I had read might be helpful for my specific condition.
And within two months, like I, my symptoms were pretty much gone. And I was like, feeling great. I couldn't believe like how much better. I felt by changing my diet and the fact that it like, quote unquote healed the issue that I had going on. That opened my eyes. Like I was like, okay, nutrition is a lot more powerful than just gaining muscle and performance.
So that caused me to change my entire career trajectory. Like at that point, I started taking graduate classes in nutrition. Like I, I started looking for any graduate classes like that. They would let me take at that point and then started looking for PhD programs that would, that I could possibly get into.
And just that's what led me to this point. So I applied for one PhD program. Like the one that I knew I wanted to go to, I'm like, I'm going to this one or I'm going to figure it out. So I applied to one PhD program, got in, studied for years, like in a really rigorous 80 hours a week for four years, learning nutrition and, finish that.
And after, since then I wasn't academia still. I still continue to do research for a year after that. But I realized that nutrition from the academic standpoint, just wasn't having the impact that I wanted to have I ran a study during my PhD. We got some funding and we spent years on it, published a paper on it, and we only reached like 40 people.
And that was the point where I was like, I got into this for the impact and I want to really reach people and it's not going to happen through this avenue. That's what led me to branch out into, coming online. I was living in San Diego at the time and I met multiple people who were running some of the biggest nutrition podcasts in the country.
And they didn't understand nutrition. Like I had a conversation like in, in the conversations that I had, I'm like, these people don't even know this topic and there are some of the most impactful influencers in the entire world right now in this topic. And they don't understand it. Like they don't even have a bachelor's degree in it.
And so that, like I met one guy, particularly I met him, we had a conversation. I was like, I have to do I have to figure out like how to put myself in that place. So I can reach people with actual evidence-based information.
[00:06:10] Kara: And people are craving it. I think that's that's so funny that you mentioned in the nutrition space because I see that the same thing happened in the immune system space to the big names that are out there have their names on immune system supplements and all of these different things.
I even got on a few of their mailing lists at some point. And one, their background in this is not to discredit, like going to medical school. You learn immunology. But you have maybe like a week or two on it versus, two to three years of 60 to 80, 60 to 80 hours a week, focused on reading the literature, like you have explained with your nutrition background and these people are, reaching millions of people.
And so that was also my emphasis or my what pushed me to get the word out there too, because when I was diagnosed with Sjogren's, I was looking at those, the stuff that those people were putting out, trying some of their different protocols and different things. And it just, it didn't make sense when I dug into it.
[00:07:19] Adrian: Yeah. And that's the thing when you dig into it, it doesn't make sense, but the challenge is that. marketing is powerful. And what I realized very early on from going into, coming online and I signed up for a marketing program like early on. And I realized that these people are using some really misleading manipulative tactics to get people to believe certain things.
And I don't feel comfortable using them. But I was taught some methodology that made it very clear to me how some of these people blow up. And that's one of the reasons that I really on my social media. I really try to help people to understand and identify some of these tactics because it's human nature there.
They're basically using human psychology against us. They're causing us to be afraid of certain things they're using testimonials that may be fake, may not be fully the entire story that and there's just so many misleading ways to create a narrative online. To make people believe certain things that aren't reality, that aren't actually based in any evidence.
They're not science-based they seem so believable because oftentimes there's individuals who have a bit of a science background who can speak to some of the bio biochemistry in biology, behind what's going on. But then they make claims that really aren't supported by any science. And that leads people down, rabbit holes of trying things that don't actually work and don't do anything.
And it's just misplaced effort that, that leads to a worsening of a condition sometimes over the longterm. Because if you're spending a lot of energy and you're not getting any benefit and you feel like you're doing something wrong, a lot of times they place the blame. They'll say I've seen this with some of these influencers where they'll say, oh, you're not getting better.
You must be cheating. Or, you must be like the whole carnival or, the very, part of our movement
But that whole movement, I see this all the time where individuals who follow this diet and are experiencing the consequences of this diet, which is going to end up harming your health over time. I'm in a, I'm in a group like a private Facebook group of carnival individuals fall in corner.
I just, out of curiosity, every single day, every day they are they're individuals posting side effects of the diet every single day. And these people are, so they've been manipulated so strongly by, by the individuals who promote these dietary approaches, that the comment section is always.
Oh, you're doing something wrong. You're cheating. You're eating vegetable oils. You're not eating enough butter or whatever the case may be in the reality is you're not eating plants like your gonna, that's going to lead to poor health. But these the individuals who put out these messages are, they're very intelligent in the way.
Oftentimes when you see someone who's very popular, usually it's a marketing company. That's helping create their content. It's not just them saying what they want to say. It's a marketing company. The saying," Hey, let's do this because it's going to get attention. Let's get you into a grocery store and tell people that this specific food or ingredient is toxic."
Because when we hear that. Alarm bells go off in our head. That's a really powerful, psychological tactic is to tell us that something's toxic or something is bad for our immune system or something is inflammatory. When you use those terms, you get people's attention. If I, instead of, just providing educational material on my page, when I do talk about nutrition, if instead I started the video off with wait for the five, most toxic things that you shouldn't eat, people are immediately going to tune it.
And the reality is that when you hear that you should immediately tune out because that person is not providing nuance and they're doing. For marketing and to scare you. And that just seeing, because in that marketing program, that was like 150 other people, a lot of them were popular, functional medicine, doctors, naturopath, like really popular people.
And I, and that's what that means to the program. It's oh wow. They've helped these people, created their platforms. And then I saw how, and I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. You're just, you're it's they basically say, identify people's pain points. For example, for me, I worked with a lot of people with GI issues.
Yeah. People with IBS irritable bowel syndrome, they're bloated a lot. They're uncomfortable. Sometimes they're scared to eat. So I know all their pain points because I work with those people. So what these marketing programs will do is say, Hey, identify their pain points. Scratch them and make them worse.
Make these people feel even worse about them. Tell them that it's going to get even worse if they don't do something about it. And then, so your magic solution. And once you've scared the crap out of somebody, like it's you have their attention. And then it's oh, and one of the other tactics is tell them that they've been lied to by whoever they've been taking advice from.
So most of the time, exactly. Most of the time it's conventional medicine or the government or commissional nutritionist. And so when you tell people that and they think, oh yeah, I had a bad experience with my doctor, which, which happens. The system is. System is messed up. The system definitely needs improvements.
There, there's just broken pieces of this system, for sure. But when you do that, you cause someone to lose trust in established institutions. And that's the point? It's a psychological mind game. Let's tell you this so that all the things you believe before you now don't know what you're not sure about and who's going to come save you.
I am to come take you to the promise land with all my solutions. And it's it's such a misleading tactic like that. That is how they taught us to set up a webinar and they would, they did it for us. Like they helped us like put that all together. And I started like running a webinar like that.
And I headed up for a couple of weeks and I was like, I cannot do this. Like the clients that I was getting I would get on the phone with people and I'm like, wow, like you have been sold a bill of goods left and right. And you're falling for this one because I'm doing the same stuff. And it was heartbreaking to me to speak to these people because with that webinar, I had run ning. It was profitable. Like I could I know for a fact I could have taken my business to a completely different level if I would have just kept it going. I was getting lots of phone calls. People were willing to spend the money. But those conversations just broke my heart. I would speak to people that are like doing coffee, enemas and detoxes and parasite protocols.
And they think they have mold and Lyme disease and leaky gut and I speak to them and sometimes they had nothing wrong with them. Sometimes I would just think back and I'm like, you were just a little bloated, like you just had a little bit of bloating. That's normal like that, that you didn't have a medical condition.
These people like the marketing has convinced you that you do something wrong.
Yeah. So that, that is. A big reason why I have shifted significantly over the last few years, my messaging to really help pull people out of that hole because I didn't realize that it was so prevalent. And I didn't realize that, innocent marketing sometimes can fuel that fire. Like me talking about a supplement on my page can sometimes feel that fire because there's a lot of people just who have been programmed by that marketing to, to be looking for the next supplement and looking for the next magical tactic and supplements can be incredibly helpful.
And you don't see me talking about them on my page at all. And when people do ask me about them, I redirect them to habits pretty much every time, because I know that if I say. In this study, magnesium showed an improvement in inflammation and help people sleep. There's going to be 500 people going out and purchasing magnesium.
And most of them probably don't need to, most of them need to do other things instead. And so for me, I've tried to be a lot more mindful of the way that I communicate on social media to a larger audience for that reason, because I know that there is there is a large group of individuals in, most of them truly do have chronic illnesses.
Most of them truly do have issues that conventional medicine doesn't do a good job with and they do need, and they can benefit from proper nutrition guidance from supplements that are well tailored to their needs. Those individuals first need to. Unlearn a lot of these things and get rid of a lot of these habits or thoughts that may have been implanted into their mind about food and about what's inflammatory and what's, going to harm them.
And that's where, I've really I try my best to help these groups through my messaging because I know that it's a dark place to be in. And I was there for a bit in my twenties too, because after I read about this after I like, felt better, I started, I was on all these websites and stuff as well.
And I was fascinating and I tried detoxes and I tried all that stuff in my twenties and it wasn't until. I got deeper into the science during my PhD that I was like, what is this stuff? There's really not a lot of science to back this up. And then it wasn't until I learned about marketing that I really realized like, oh, wow there's almost no science to back this up.
These are just really clever marketers who have done a really good job of convincing me of certain things.
[00:18:13] Kara: Yeah. Let's hop into specifically. I know you also have a lot of clients that deal with autoimmune disease and talking about a condition, an area that conventional medicine does not do well with.
I think we can easily agree on that. It's just not set up for chronic illness. And these poor patients play this game of hot potato from specialist to specialist spending, 10 or 15 minutes with each one on their, on one focused areas that have seen the whole really rarely getting any instruction on what to do nutrition, from a nutrition standpoint.
And so even myself included when I found myself really sick actually probably due to a superfood supplement I dove into the auto immune protocol because it's, what's out there. It's you Google and that's all that you see. And I saw, a few physicians like promoting it and thought, okay, this is great.
And I actually felt pretty good. Like when I first switched over until I started getting so stressed out about what I was eating and what I wasn't eating, and all of my mind energy was focused on. What are, what was in our fridge, what was on my plate, all these things. Yeah.
And for me having dealt with, I, haven't never officially had a diagnosis of, of disordered eating, but have had, as I think, many elder millennial women lots of body image issues, diet, culture, shenanigans. And so it just fed into this whole like restriction, misery. And I realized it wasn't sustainable.
Long-term the other thing that didn't go over so well, Rice is a pretty big staple food in our house as a half Asian household. And so the cauliflower rice did not go well.
[00:20:13] Adrian: Oh man. I said that when you mentioned the cauliflower rice that yeah, definitely. So let's talk about auto-immune protocol where that came from.
I think that's the important thing for people to understand, because if you listen to and this is going to be the case with most people who promote diets, if you listen to their story, they're promoting what worked for them. Nothing else, like in the story of the autoimmune protocol, I've listened to her on a podcast before.
And she said, she started removing all the food. She felt. And then she tried to figure out why and try to make a justification for it. And then she wrote an entire book telling people that these foods were bad. Those foods don't work for her. Every one of us is different. And when you talk about autoimmune disease, this is what kind of really blows my mind is autoimmune disease.
There's 80 different autoimmune conditions. And to say it, and there's millions of people who all have individual in genetics, microbiome, a body size, nutrient needs to tell all these people that they need to go on. This one restrictive diet that worked for this person is a little, it's a lot like this woman, she was convinced that she found an answer and I get it.
I don't think she had the wrong intentions. Like I think she, that worked for her. She was convinced that she found an answer and decided to promote this far and wide. And the issue with that is there's no scientific basis behind a lot of what she's promoting. Many people with autoimmune disease.
There's a higher percentage of individual autoimmune disease who are going to be more sensitive to gluten or dairy or who are going to have GI based symptoms. And in response to eating high FODMAP foods and FODMAPs are fermentable. Carbohydrates are classic carbohydrates that are found in a lot of healthy foods.
They're found in a lot of the stuff that the autoimmune protocol has you removed. Grains, beans, nuts, and seeds. I'm pretty confident that she would have been better off just following a low FODMAP diet. If she understood. But when you don't understand nutrition and you just start taking things away and then you try to make up a reason for it.
And she started just blamed it on lectins. There's no evidence that lectins cause issues for individuals with auto immune disease blaming it on different things just to try to make a justification on why it worked for you. That's the opposite of what science is. Science is the question that you start with the question, and then you figure out what the answer is.
So we started with a question what's the best diet for auto immune disease. Okay let's look at the different factors that may be important now, but we have to narrow this down. Autoimmune what type one diabetes, the best diet for type one, diabetes is going to be way different than the best I have for someone with Hashimoto's.
So we have to look at those individual characteristics for, one the autoimmune condition, but then also. The individual what are your nutrient needs? What do you digest? Sarah Ballantine didn't digest beans. But that doesn't mean you're not going to, and to remove a food that provides calcium, B vitamins, fiber, protein, and helps to improve the health of our microbiome.
There's no evidence that shows that eating beans has any negative effect on our health. And any study to say that it's actually, that has positive all of the studies, nuts and seeds, nuts, and seeds to nuts and seeds are some of the most health promoting foods that we can eat. But it's removing the autoimmune protocol.
Like these restrictions. Ended up leading to, like you mentioned the food fears to where now you're restricting all these foods and you're taking, you took away beans and rice. There's absolutely no reason to take away rice. Like almost nobody does it. Doesn't tolerate rice. Like rice is one of the easiest.
Like I work with some really serious health and digestive issues. Rice is one of the foods that like pretty much everybody across the board tolerate white rice.
[00:24:32] Kara: Rarely a trigger for FPIES. That's it.
[00:24:36] Adrian: But everything like rarely a trigger for anything, for any other condition. And, but then we have people were moving rice and then you're removing nuts and seeds and you're missing out on the healthy fats.
You're missing out on the zinc. You're missing out on the magnesium that you get from those foods as well. And what happens is, yes, it's great because what a lot of people, why a lot of people feel better is if you're just eating whatever, or even if you're trying to eat healthy, but you're not really sticking to it that if this person convinces you, that this is going to heal everything, the way that they mentioned it, like the way that they talk about it.
If you follow this diet, like strictly everything's going to get better. And if you believe that, because they say it with such confidence, because they never actually worked with people, they just wrote about it and theorized about it. And they worked with themselves, but they've never actually seen how this works in other people.
That can convince you to really stay strict with your nutrition. And the reason that so many people feel better is because they're just eating a higher quality diet. Like I've worked with many clients who they come to me either on that really restrictive diet or not on one. And if they're not on one, if we just focus on improving nutrient quality, Hey let's get a smoothie in the morning so that you can get some antiques and some berries that are going to provide polyphenols and anti-inflammatory nutrients.
We can put some flags seat in there. We can get some protein and make sure that you're having your amino acids. And, if you focus instead on improving the quality of the foods that you're eating and not having to be scared of all these individual ingredients, that's going to improve your health.
And that's where people are improving their health. They're scared of all these other things. So then the only things that they're not scared of, they are nutrient dense foods. Then you eat more of those, but then you're avoiding all these things for no reason. And that's the challenge, and that's the piece that takes people down this rabbit hole of now the diet becomes your life.
And can't tell you this is 50% of the clients that I work with right now, no GI issues like and I don't know, immune disease or like I work with primarily GI issues. And my one-on-one clients. And I only take on a small percentage of a small amount of clients because I work really intensely with a small amount of clients.
And then I do teaching and other stuff as well. With those individuals, 50% of the people come to me on a really restrictive diet and they don't know what to do. They feel 10% better than they did before, or they felt 30% better at first. And then, because they're restricting all these healthy fiber sources and all these other nutrient sources, and they're eating such a high meat diet because that's all they can really like that it's easier to just eat a bunch of meat because you don't want to have to think about okay, does this have this?
Or does this, is this, does this fit in this category? Or this category? Like the huddle, I protocols 20, it looks like 24 things that you have to avoid. And again, most of them don't make sense. And so then people go on to this diet that, over time that they're restricting the variety of foods that they're including in their diet.
So that, that has a negative effect on your microbiome. Sometimes they're avoiding certain foods that might provide various nutrients and then they might start to become deficient in those nutrients. And so I see so many people who. 30% better over the first couple of months and then three to nine months or the next nine months, it's like a slow decline.
And then, year and a half later, here's that they're stuck on the diet because they're scared to get off of it. And they feel no better than before. And now you're dealing with an autoimmune condition. You don't feel better than before, but you're following is really restrictive. Diet is putting stress on you, this making it worse.
And in that piece is I just saw so many of those cases that it just broke my heart to see you like, and that's why I'm I'm on social media. And I get people that kind of pushed back on me. Cause I always say don't do a restrictive diet and then I'll see people say oh, I felt better on a restrictive diet.
They can be helpful. But if you don't have proper guidance, you're most likely going to be chasing this. You're going to fall into a rabbit hole in most cases. And yeah, go ahead.
[00:28:51] Kara: Oh, no, I was going to say it. I see this across the eight spectrum to, of course I see more adults, but my colleagues that see more kids in the office, these poor moms are taking out all of these foods from their own diet or their children's diet because of eczema.
And in that, in those cases, we're actually like, we know that causes harm and the data, at least please correct me if I'm wrong. It's looking like that is probably the case in adults, too. It just in a different way.
[00:29:21] Adrian: Oh yeah, of course. And the reality is that. The, these parents who are doing it to kids like you, you please, don't like you have to get guidance if you're going to be doing this because and I know it's hard.
I know I say this from a place of making, I know a lot of people are listening, but oh, it's hard to find the right guidance. It is. I agree. It truly is. And so I'm not discounting that, but over falling into this rabbit hole, it would be much more helpful to really vet out someone who's a specialist in your area who understands nutrition, because there are certain things, like I mentioned earlier, like the gluten, for example, there's a lot of autoimmune patients who really do need to avoid it.
And but not everyone does. And if you don't need to avoid it, you shouldn't because if you are avoiding it. And it's not causing any issues for you. That's just one more food that you have to worry about. You have to pull out of your diet, you have to try to avoid at all times. And that, that leads to more of a psychological stress on people.
And that, that's where all my social, I always promote against the restrictive diets. And I know that people are like, oh I felt better. I wanted, I'm like, I get it. Like when I work with a client we're going through and removing some things like we're doing that, but we're doing it one thing at a time, or adding it back in or seeing how you feel.
And it's very it's very systematic. We're doing things purposefully. Yeah. You're not going to remove vegetable oil. Because there's no reason to like there's no evidence behind removing any nuts or seeds, unless you have a digestive issue that, gets aggravated when you consume more nuts and seeds, which is something that is, not uncommon with individuals like with IBS and other digestive issues.
But if you don't and you're not reacting to those at all, and you have no GI issues and there's no response to it, you should be eating lots of them in, in, in exactly. There's every study that's ever been done on nuts and seeds have shown positive benefits for multiple outcomes, reducing inflammation improving blood sugar control, improving LDL cholesterol, like there's multiple positive outcomes that have been shown for nuts and seeds, cancer, risk reduction in the association like prospective studies, We should not be avoiding this, but when you get advice from individuals for example, the autoimmune paleo protocol the woman who did that, she wasn't, she has no nutrition background.
So she hasn't read these things. She doesn't know that nuts and seeds are very health promoting for her. They just didn't feel well. So she found out she. Said, remove them for everyone else. And it's really it's irresponsible to be honest to be jumping into these these things.
And I think a lot of people don't realize the impact of that type of messaging because they don't work in this field. That's exactly why, because it's a biochemist. I think you're biophysicists and she's in the lab and she comes to this idea and it works for her. And then when you start promoting something like this, and this is another, so testimonials are really like this, one of the most, one of the ways that we can be influenced more than anything.
And the way that these online programs are like people who promote stuff online and blow up online work is if I tell you for example, let's say, I said cause I've worked with, I've worked with multiple kids with eczema and I've had multiple kids with eczema who I've worked with completely. And so I could put together an eczema protocol with some of these testimonials and I could say, Hey, everyone, do these things.
If your kid has eczema and for percentage of people, it would go away. And so if I, but if I said it with extreme confidence, Hey guys, I have the solution for eczema. Here it is. Everyone go do it, share it with your friends. This is going to help everybody. A lot of people would do it hundreds. If I did that right now, hundreds of people would go do that.
20 of them would get better. The other 80 would be on a restrictive diet and taking these supplements for no reason. They would probably eventually like some of those people would keep trying for you. Some of them will stop and give up on the protocol. But those 20 who got a benefit would reach back out to me and be like, oh my God, this helped.
So I take their testimonials, share them and ignore the rest. And no matter what, if you're putting out a protocol and you're saying it this way, and you're saying this is going to be helpful and you get people to try it. Somebody is going to benefit from it. If I made a protocol that said, Hey, I have a solution for autoimmune disease.
Just only eat on Wednesday and Thursday or not Wednesday and Sunday, let's say two days out of the week, you don't eat the other days, but you don't Wednesday and Thursday. Some people like it, which is like maybe one out of a hundred might get better in my experience, a massive benefit from that the other 99 would be but the way social media works, you just block all those people.
When they comment and say, oh my God, this was horrible. I passed out and almost died and had to go to the hospital. You just mock them over, you block them and it's over. And then you share the testimonials. This is exactly what medical medium did. That is why medical medium is so popular because that's exactly what he did.
I have the solution to everything. You just have to follow this extreme protocol and then continue to just share it. That's exactly how medical medium got popular. And it's frustrating to me because it allows people who have no integrity to. No, wait to the bank, make a lot of money, misleading people.
And I have the formula. I could do that if I really wanted to. And I had no integrity. I know for a fact that can do that. Cause I could have a IBS solution and I could give people advice that 80% of them, we are 30 or 70% or 60% we get better. If it was very generic, but it does harm to the pressed to everyone else.
And anytime I talk about medical, medium people get so mad on my page about it. Because he has such a like level of evangelists because of this because he does this better than anyone. In terms of the tactic that I mentioned, because go look go leave. Any comment on his page that isn't positive and you will get blocked immediately, like immediately.
And they it's a medical media. It's not him. It's a marketing team that does this and they filter their comments and they create an echo chamber. And if you step into it and oh, my friend started doing celery juice and told me about medical medium. If you step into that echo chamber, it's going to be hard to believe anything else, because as soon as you step into his world on social media, It looks like he used, it looks like he is who he says he is.
[00:36:55] Kara: Yeah. The sky is pink. It is no longer blue. It is pink or the color of celery juice perhaps.
[00:37:04] Adrian: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean that, that's the piece that that's the challenge from a consumer standpoint for, in, from from patient who's struggling with health issues. Nutrition matters.
Nutrition definitely plays a role in our health, but food is not medicine. Food is the term that I like to use. Food is a form of medicine. Food is not medicines because people say food is medicine, and then they think they're going to heal everything with food. And that's not going to happen in many cases, like most cases of autoimmune disease.
You're not going to heal. Yep. You're not going to heal with food. You can improve your health traumatically with nutrition, with lifestyle, with stress management, with proper sleep, with movement, you can improve your health dramatically to the point where your symptoms may be maybe gone and you could put it into remission that does happen in a percentage of individuals, but that's not the norm.
Social media would have you believe it is. And I used to believe it was until I started working with people because when I first finished my PhD and I never even attended to work with individuals with GI issues and autoimmune conditions. But I was running group programs like just health and wellness programs.
And I was running into individuals who when I would recommend things like eat more fiber, they would say, Hey, when I eat more fiber, I feel worse. And. I was confused and that was the point where I was like there's something that I don't know. And I'm the type of person that like, I'm always reading and looking for new knowledge.
So to me, that opened up a window of there's a whole gap in your knowledge right now. And that was about six years ago. I've been completely focused on GI issues since then, in terms of like most of my research and I read 10, 15 hours a week still is still GI focused because it's just a Pandora's box, like GI and auto immune conditions or they're so complicated and there's so much going on in, they often don't fit within the conventional rules of nutrition. And so that, that was that's what open kind of opened my eyes to like, oh, wow, I need to learn some of this new information that I may not have been taught in the truth is that a lot of this science has been published in the last 15 years.
So it wasn't the, my conventional education, which some people say like your conventional education just was skewed. That stuff wasn't published, because we didn't really understand it that well, we couldn't measure the microbiome itself. 17 years ago or something somewhere around there.
So that's the piece that a lot of people don't understand too, is it's not that conventional nutrition is ignoring you or conventional nutrition is like skewed to what the government tells it's, that science is evolving and it takes time. And we did nobody in 9, 19 95 was thinking, oh yeah, nutrition is really important for auto-immune conditions that, that, some people were, but it wasn't.
It wasn't something that scientists were actively studying the way that they are now. And now papers are being published weekly on autoimmune disease, on GI issues on the relationship between them, the microbiome and how that works and nutrient deficiencies and all the different nuances that, that That can really help someone with auto immune disease.
This information is now starting to become more available and become more accessible. And now starting to just be published in the body of evidence in this topic is developing. I think 10 years from now we'll be able to really provide a little bit more like a bit more guidance than we can now.
But even now I think that compared to 10, 15 years ago, it's the science has evolved dramatically. Like we, we now understand like certain nutrients, if you don't have enough vitamin D your likelihood of having an autoimmune condition is significantly higher. We didn't really know that 10, 15 years ago facial hill can potentially be beneficial in some cases.
Zinc deficiencies can put someone at higher risk in some, like there's things that we now know that we've been able to now piece together. They just really weren't available then. And when that information isn't available, it leads, it leaves it open market for people to just come in and make claims.
And even when the information is available the challenge now is like marketing science, because that's what we really have to do is for individuals who were in the, who are trying to promote evidence-based practices, who were trying to help people really help people and not just out there to take people's money, but really say Hey, I want to help people breaking through the noise is challenging because we have to employ some of those same tactics in order to Get people's attention in some cases.
[00:42:01] Kara: So much to dig into, we're going to have to do this again soon.
[00:42:06] Adrian: I did not expect that he was talking about things that I didn't even, I hadn't even thought about prior to the..
[00:42:10] Kara: That's okay. We might break this into two part or it was awesome. Thank you so much for your time, for your expertise, for your entertaining posts.
Again, if you missed it at the beginning, make sure to follow Dr. Adrian, @dr.adrian.chavez, on Instagram and and his podcast as well, which is the Nutrition Science Podcast. And I don't wanna assume, but that's on all the different podcasting apps or cool. So they can, you can find it where you listen to this one.
Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
[00:42:45] Adrian: Thank you so much for having me take care. Bye.
[00:42:48] Kara: Thanks for listening to the Crunchy Allergist Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Kara Wada and our guest this week, Dr. Adrian Chavez. We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into anti-inflammatory nutrition.
Stay tuned because next week, Dr. Chavez and I are going to continue our conversation and talk all about food, sensitivity testing, and so much more.
[00:43:12] Adrian: If you're keen to learn more about how to manage your misbehaving immune system with a naturally minded and scientifically grounded approach you can head over to www .crunchyallergist. com. There you can find my five foods you don't need to fear if you have sjogren's, join our email newsletter list, as well as checking out links and resources available in the show notes. That's all for this episode folks see you again this time next week take care...
