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If any system doesn’t thrive in the face of the unexpected, the system is by definition fragile. To use digitalhealth for resilience, performance & healthy lifespan:
- First, there needs to be a personal goal to achieve e.g. weight loss or improved sleep, performance, resilience, healthy lifespan
- Then the fundamentals of nutrition and lifestyle need to be in place e.g. whole foods, low carb, fasting, exercise & yoga, sleep & light hygiene, dental, toxins, alcohol, stress etc. For help with the fundamentals, try What the Fat? and a neuro-psycho-physiology service like Patricia GreenHough
- Next analyze symptom and real-time presentation data for supplement priorities to plug biochemical holes
- Upgrade health by making informed choices for the right brands of the right supplements, and know dosages, and how to use, and what not to use together
- Thereafter, measure effectiveness through matching Heart Rate Variability results to events on the timeline and iterate analyzing and upgrading
Health interventions
Effective health interventions may range from pharmaceuticals to supplements and lifestyle changes.
The respective effectiveness of certified supplements versus pharmaceuticals is becoming a shade of grey, however pharmaceutical grade supplements are available with minimal regulatory barriers and overheads via digitalhealth.
As an example, NAD+ applied appropriately is likely to be very effective, whereas the common cholesterol drug routinely applied by the mainstream medicine guidelines has less than a 1/50 chance of showing any positive effects. As a side note, a recent www.a4m.com conference stated that more than 12 supplements were necessary to mitigate the major side-effects of this cholesterol drug.
The idea of certified supplements is to address bio-chemical imbalances undermining resilience, healthy lifespan and performance. Cindy is a functional MD with decades of experience in the use of certified supplements to plug biochemical holes. Cindy uses certified supplements either to address deficiencies and/or for therapy.
While once it may have been possible to get all necessary nutrition from food, deficiencies might arise from:
- Specific farming practices producing less nutritious food
- Specific food processing practices destroying nutrients
- Geographic considerations e.g. New Zealand soils are low in Selenium
- Poor digestive health decreases absorption of nutrients
- Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) were set for prevention of overt diseases, such as full blown rickets and scurvy. RDAs do not reflect optimal or individual requirements.
- Anti-nutrients found in some foods (such as Phytates and Lectins) may affect nutrient sufficiency
- Poor dietary choices
Certified supplements not only help with treating the underlying causes of symptoms, but may also have positive downstream side-benefits, as opposed to pharmaceutical side-effects.
The intent of Omic is to provide personalized information for the effective use of certified supplements in combination with appropriate exercise.
Depending upon Omic profile setting for supplements, more or fewer supplements may be recommended initially e.g. those averagely familiar with supplements may get 3 recommended to begin, prioritized by percentage importance and omitting anything already being taken, contra-indication aware. There’s usually 2-3 supplements that have a much higher priority and the rest are of lower importance. Discretion should be applied as to what you want to do for your individual circumstances. There will then be no further supplement recommendations until the initial supplements are finalized (or put on maintenance). If you want to try more supplements before you have finished the initial ones, put them onto maintenance and the analysis will show 3 more e.g. Zinc and Magnesium might become maintenance supplements that you take long term and you might start to look at more advanced supplements like NAD+ for performance and longevity next.
While a 3-4 week duration is common for noticeable effect, some supplements like Acetyl-Carnitine, L-Theanine or NAD+ may have an immediate impact, while the effect of others takes longer and only becomes apparent when they are stopped. As per the information provided with a supplement recommendation, some supplements should be used for long term maintenance and others will work more effectively when pulsed.
Some supplements like Vitamin B3 might initially feel a bit weird e.g. slightly uncomfortable flushing of the face for a few minutes, which is perfectly OK. But everyone is different and sometimes reactions might be sustained and suggestive of a wider problem e.g. Magnesium needs to be in balance with other minerals or there may be adverse reaction. In the event a new supplement causes problems, stop it and see whether the problem goes away, then it may be worth trying again in case the initial reaction was unrelated to the supplement. If things are’t working out the way you want, it may be time for a full personalized medicine workup to investigate further what’s going on e.g. perhaps the underlying issue for why Magnesium is causing adverse reaction needs to be resolved.
Recommended supplements are carefully chosen for quality and effectiveness from a number of suppliers and alternatives will provide unknown results; there’s a very wide range in quality of supplements depending upon brand. Some supplements are practitioner-only and will only be available to paid users of the Omic service, reflecting the compliance aspect for more advanced supplements from certain suppliers. Researching each supplement involves days of work, so Cindy isn’t able to research different brands for different people. However if you find there isn’t enough information available to do your own research for alternatives, message us and we’ll see what we can do about it.
If you’ve tried supplements before and they didn’t work, you may wish to give them another go. Supplements marketed indiscriminately as magic bullets and/or sold through the supermarket are not the same as certified supplements. Each individual has different bio-chemical imbalances and some supplements work adversely with others. Choosing the right supplement approach for individual nature and nurture is quite different to a drawer of supplements that don’t work.
Intervention recommendations are inherently conservative, with more interventions available with wearable monitoring data. It’s important to update the questionnaire in the event circumstances change to avoid inaccurate recommendations.
How unique is the medical research content underlying Omic recommendations?
With all the medical disinformation supplied by Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, the Wellness and Pharmaceutical marketing industries, informed self-experimentation for performance, resilience & healthy lifespan is tricky. Many wellness sites link research that ends up being circular, with the original source unclear. Some surprisingly well known sources provide links to research in support of their arguments which clearly don’t stack up. On the other side of the coin, the somewhat vacuous truth that “more research is required and results are unproven” isn’t that useful or helpful.
For Omic, we wanted materials treating clients as adults capable of making their own informed decisions and usefully looking at the risk-reward ratio. Where a herbal compound has been used for hundreds of years and the risk is low but a double blind placebo controlled trial is unavailable, the compound may still be usefully recommended subject to personal circumstances. Furthermore, new research showing promise and matched to negligible risk is indeed of interest to those investigating informed self-experimentation. Cindy uniquely with this service takes a risk-reward ratio approach to collating & applying medical research papers sourced from Pubmed, the Natural Medicines Database, The Trip Medical Database and other specialized sources of information.
Further reading
For background, try reading David Sinclair’s “Lifespan: Why we Age – And Why We Don’t Have To” and Dave Asprey’s “Super Human” to explore the gulf between what is generally accepted as healthy and what’s medically possible. For further reading, refer to the materials available online from Dave Feldman, Mike Mutzel, Dr Peter Attia, Dr Jason Fung, Dr Tim Noakes, Dr Stephen Phinney.