Nourish Balance Thrive

Catherine Crofts is a New Zealand community-based clinical pharmacist who firmly believes in using the lowest dose of the least number of medications to treat disease. After 17 years of practice, she feels more like a "disease management specialist" than a health professional. Together with Caryn Zinn, Mark Wheldon, and Grant Schofield, Catherine is the author of Hyperinsulinemia: A unifying theor...

I couldn't help laughing when former UFC fighter Kyle Kingsbury described the trouble he was having deadlifting 525 lb when 495 came so easily. 180 is a problem for me! The ketogenic diet has removed Kyle's "low gear", but the sacrifice is worth it because, in the ketogenic state, Kyle enjoys an enormous cognitive benefit and less systemic inflammation. Having suffered two orbital fractures that u...

Imagine your name is Bob. You're 47 years old, you have a beautiful wife, two wonderful kids, a lovely dog and a career you enjoy. Life is great is except for the nagging pain in your right pinky finger. It started as a minor irritation but now has gotten to the point where it's affecting your work and your sleep. As you lay tossing and turning one night, all you can think about is the pain. Then...

The Information Age brought with it's ugly stepsister named Confusion. Never was this more true than for the information and misinformation surrounding vitamin D, sunscreen, and cancer. Not getting burned makes intuitive sense, but will slathering on the sunscreen cause vitamin D deficiency? Could vitamin D deficiency be causing the cancer that the sunscreen is supposed to be protecting against? H...

I asked David Aiello, President BioAdvantex Pharma Inc.: of all the molecules, why study and productise N-acetylcysteine? "That makes me think of another question, why did you marry that woman? You become fascinated with something, and your mind sees forward. I saw this as a huge business and scientific project with such a broad scope to help people. We didn't even understand the scope way back th...

I sit too much. When I'm not sitting at my desk, I'm sitting on my bike. As a mountain biker, I stand more than some cyclists, but still. The ways in which I move my body are predictable and very repetitive. I almost never move from side to side, and I expend vast amounts of energy spinning small circles with my feet. Have humans evolved to move like this? I doubt it. I know that if I'm not carefu...

Could you afford to spend $250,000 on an education? No, neither could I. How lucky are we then that people like Drs. Mike T. Nelson Ph. D. and Dr. Brad Dieter Ph. D are willing to distill what they've learned into a $250 training course ? Over the past two years, I've done all kinds of biology, biochemistry, physiology, functional medicine, nutrition and fitness massively open online training cour...

"I'll sleep when I'm dead," so the lyric goes. If you don't sleep you will be dead sooner is more true to life: Sleep improves everything. I mean, literally everything. I've not found a single thing that I can't tie to sleep being a major component of. And if you aren't sleeping well, you're just at risk for more of anything bad. Anything bad. --Dr. Kirk Parsley, MD, sleep expert and advisor to th...

Ketogenic junk food is coming, and it threatens to send the second low-carbohydrate revolution to the same place the first one ended up. That would be a terrible shame because high-fat, low-carb, moderate protein diets have so much to offer for weight loss, metabolic syndrome, athletic and cognitive performance, possibly even cancer . What can we do? Learn to cook. Prioritise food preparation. Jus...

In my early twenties, I tore a carotid artery out of my neck in a motorcycle accident. The emergency procedure that followed undoubtedly saved my life and from that point forward I had no time to listen to people complaining about the limitations of the nationalised health care that exists in the UK. In my thirties, the same system of evidence-based medicine let me down badly, and in the end, it w...

Imagine you're in the pub and you've just bumped into your friend Mario Roxas. Mario happens to be a naturopathic doctor and the director of research and development at Thorne, the Rolls Royce of supplement companies. Wouldn't you want to know what supplements Mario takes? Me too, and so I couldn't resist making that my first question. But what is it that makes Thorne Research different? Why not b...

Three years ago I went through round after round of blood testing until eventually I realised that the doctor was following a procedure laid out in a flow chart. Heck, he even showed me the flow chart. Two months and thousands of dollars of insurance deductibles later I was no closer to understanding the underlying cause of my fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and other symptoms. My doctor seemed somew...

Run a blood test, find low levels of a hormone. Prescribe synthetic version of said hormone. Two weeks later your patient is back with a slightly different set of symptoms. Run another blood test, prescribe another hormone. If there's too much, block it, if there isn't enough, just add more. Rinse and repeat for hypothalamic pituitary adrenal, thyroid and gonadal axes. Refer out to a gastroenterol...

My sister called me looking for help with her son's science project. "William has some questions about the paleo diet and how it affects the health of cells." It soon emerged that he had a particular list of questions that he wanted answering, and initially I thought I should do some research and answer them to the best of my ability just as I would with any list sent to me. The longer I thought a...

Something wonderful is happening in Iceland, and it has nothing to do with geysers, volcanoes or even Björk. A group of medical doctors led by Dr. Guðmundur Jóhannsson are actively engaging in a discussion of the utility of high-fat, low-carb, moderate-protein diets for treating some of the chronic health complaints they see in practice. Imagine for a moment you're a doctor working in emergency ca...

Cancer is like a computer program gone wrong, the kernel panic of the human body. Unfortunately, we have no reboot button, and so cancer is the most serious of diseases. This year, almost six hundred thousand Americans will die from cancer. Despite the fact that cancer receives more NIH funding than any other illness, the death rates remain the same as in the 1950s. Tripping Over the Truth: The Re...

Cortisol: the emergency responder hormone that when chronically elevated, makes you fat, stupid and unsexy . Nobody wants an excess of cortisol, but like all things in physiology there's a sweet spot; low cortisol doesn't feel right either. Which you have? Symptoms of high cortisol Symptoms of low cortisol Fatigue Extreme fatigue Muscle weakness Muscle or joint pains Depression, anxiety and irrita...

Have you ever been trapped in a small meeting room with a guy in a grey shirt with sweat marks under the arms? The meeting has a clear agenda, but all you can think about is that smell. Yikes, just thinking about this is enough to make me want to take a shower, scrub my armpits and apply some deodorant. Is the problem an antiperspirant deodorant deficiency? Why have humans evolved to a strong revu...

The monotone of an EKG machine detecting flatline. It doesn't get any worse than that. For realtor Douglas Hilbert, the list of low points doesn't end there. Doug filed bankruptcy at the age of 28, had his home foreclosed on, had two vehicles repossessed, lost multiple businesses, lost 130 "investment" properties and ended up in drug rehabilitation numerous times. Each day was a rollercoaster ride...

Apple Frudel. Banana Chocolate Chip Bread. Cinnamon French Toast Bread. Blueberry Snack'N Waffle. Cocoa Puffs Cereal Bar. Cheerios Cereal Bar. Cinnamon Pop Tart. Strawberry Splash Pancake. Super Donut. All these "food" items were taken from the breakfast menu for my nephew's school. Presumably an expert designed this menu because it bares the logo of ChooseMyPlate.gov . If you can't trust the expe...

If you'd have asked me six months ago what insulin did, I would have answered, "it stuffs energy into cells". I think most people would say something similar. My answer isn't wrong, but facilitating the uptake of energy into cells is not the most first or most important thing that insulin does. Last week I completed the first few modules of an introductory physiology course from Duke University ,...

Your performance on a mountain bike has four pillars of support: cardio, mobility, skills and strength. Most riders only worry about one or maybe two. Could you be a good rider with just one pillar? Maybe, but why limit yourself? This week it's been raining pretty solidly here in northern California, and honestly, I couldn't care less. In years gone by, I'd have been donning rain gear and even spe...

Standing on the shoulders of giants is what I do at Nourish Balance Thrive, and none more giant (figuratively!) than strength and conditioning coach, author and speaker Jason Seib. I've been listening to Jason and Sarah Fragoso's Everyday Paleo podcast (now renamed JASSAFIT ) since my earliest days eating a paleo diet, and I still find their wisdom and practical advice helpful both personally and...

Gas, bloating, diarrhoea, constipation, reflux. Modern allopathic medicine still does more harm than good for these common and chronic health complaints. I often think about what my life might be like now if I'd listened to my gastroenterologist and written off diet, lifestyle and infections as a potential cause of my gut issues. I wonder if by now I'd still be taking anti-inflammatory steroids or...

So small, so abstract, it's very hard to get your head around the idea that mitochondria are important. For me, knowing that these tiny organelles make up 10% of our total body weight (25% of the heart) helps put things into perspective. Mitochondria allow us respire with oxygen and produce vast amounts of an energy molecule called ATP. In fact, each one of us produces our body weight in ATP every...