ketosis
Case Study: The Man Who Came Home — Metabolic Syndrome, Vietnamese Cultural Wisdom, and the 12-Month Reversal
Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case
Case Study: The Body That Kept the Score — PCOS, Insulin Resistance, and Childhood Emotional Neglect
Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case
Cancer: Supportive and Integrative Care
Cancer remains the second leading cause of death globally, responsible for approximately 10 million deaths annually. While conventional oncology — surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, and targeted therapies — has achieved remarkable advances in certain cancer types, the overall war...
Diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome: Pathways to Reversal
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) and metabolic syndrome represent the defining health crisis of modern civilization. Over 537 million adults worldwide live with diabetes, and metabolic syndrome — a cluster of insulin resistance, visceral obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and hyperglycemia — affects an...
Neurodegenerative Disease Prevention: Metabolic, Inflammatory, and Gut-Brain Approaches
Neurodegenerative diseases — Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, Huntington's, and multiple sclerosis — represent one of the most devastating and rapidly growing categories of chronic illness. Alzheimer's disease alone affects over 55 million people worldwide, a number projected to triple by 2050.
Neuroplasticity is Physical Brain Rewiring
Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are, we're really tearing apart this idea of personal
One Spirit Medicine, Grow a New Body, and the Neuroscience of Shamanic Transformation
Alberto Villoldo's trajectory from directing the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory at San Francisco State University to training with Q'ero shamans in the Peruvian Andes is not a story of abandoning science for mysticism. It is a story of following the data wherever it leads, even when it...
Hormesis: How Controlled Stress Builds Consciousness Resilience at the Cellular Level
There is a paradox at the heart of biology that most health advice ignores: some stress makes you stronger. Not all stress.
Autophagy and Consciousness: How Fasting Triggers the Brain's Cellular Cleanup System
In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, for his discoveries of the mechanisms of autophagy. The word "autophagy" comes from the Greek auto (self) and phagein (to eat) — self-eating.
Dry Fasting: The Most Extreme Fasting Practice — What the Science Says and What It Does Not
In the landscape of fasting practices, dry fasting occupies the extreme edge — the territory where the boldest claims are made, the least research exists, and the potential for both benefit and harm is greatest. Dry fasting means abstaining from both food and water for a defined period.
Fasting and Brain Chemistry: How Ketones Rewire Your Consciousness
Approximately 12 to 16 hours after your last meal, a metabolic switch flips in your liver. Glycogen stores — the body's readily accessible glucose reserves — have been depleted.
The Fasting-Mimicking Diet: Valter Longo's Innovation for Getting Fasting Benefits Without Fully Fasting
Valter Longo has spent the better part of three decades studying the biology of fasting at the Longevity Institute of the University of Southern California. His research has produced some of the most significant findings in the field: the discovery that extended fasting triggers stem cell...
Intermittent Fasting and Cognitive Enhancement: What Monks Knew and Silicon Valley Rediscovered
Somewhere in San Francisco, a software engineer is skipping breakfast. Not because he forgot, not because he is running late, but because he has read the research — or at least the blog posts about the research — and he has decided that eating his first meal at noon will make him a better...
Ramadan Fasting Research: What the World's Largest Natural Fasting Experiment Reveals About Consciousness
Every year, approximately 1.8 billion Muslims around the world abstain from all food and drink from dawn (fajr) to sunset (maghrib) for 29 or 30 consecutive days during the month of Ramadan. No water.
The Vision Quest and Fasting Across Traditions: Why Every Spiritual Culture Uses Hunger as a Consciousness Amplifier
There is a practice that appears in virtually every spiritual tradition on Earth, across every continent, in every historical period, in cultures that had no contact with one another. The practice is this: go to a remote place, stop eating, and wait.
Extended Water Fasting: The Progression From Hunger to Clarity to Transformation
Intermittent fasting is a daily practice. Extended water fasting is an expedition.
Therapeutic Fasting and Time-Restricted Eating: The Medicine of Not Eating
In a world obsessed with what to eat, the question of when to eat — and when not to eat — may be equally transformative. Therapeutic fasting and time-restricted eating (TRE) represent some of the most ancient and most scientifically validated health interventions, bridging the gap between...
The Metabolic Approach to Cancer: Terrain Over Tumor
Standard oncology draws its battle maps around the tumor. The tumor's mutations, its receptor status, its staging — these define the treatment plan.
Comprehensive Blood Work Interpretation — Functional vs Standard Ranges
Blood work is the foundation of clinical assessment. But the way most practitioners read labs leaves enormous blind spots.
Ankylosing Spondylitis: The Functional Approach
There is a particular cruelty to ankylosing spondylitis. It attacks the spine — the central column of the body, the axis around which all movement organizes.
Eye Health & Macular Degeneration: The Functional Approach
Your retina is brain tissue that happens to sit behind a lens. It is the only part of the central nervous system you can examine directly — and it consumes more oxygen per gram than any other tissue in the body.
Skin Aging & Beauty From Within: The Functional Approach
Your skin is a 22-square-foot organ that replaces itself every 28 days. It is your interface with the world — simultaneously a barrier, a sensor, a thermostat, an endocrine organ, and a window into systemic health.
Type 2 Diabetes Reversal: The Functional Medicine Protocol
For decades, patients with type 2 diabetes have been told their disease is progressive and irreversible. Manage it, they are told.
The Carnivore Diet: When Elimination Goes All the Way
The carnivore diet is the most extreme elimination diet in existence. All animal foods, zero plant foods.
Fasting Protocols: From Time-Restricted Eating to Extended Fasts
All fasting is not equal. A 12-hour overnight fast and a 5-day water fast activate fundamentally different metabolic pathways at different magnitudes.
The Therapeutic Ketogenic Diet: Beyond Weight Loss
Strip away the Instagram hype and get to the biochemistry. Ketosis is the metabolic state where your body stops running primarily on glucose and switches to burning fatty acids.
The Wahls Protocol: Nutrition for Autoimmune and Neurological Conditions
Dr. Terry Wahls is a clinical professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa.
Genetic Testing & SNP Interpretation for Functional Medicine
Your genes are not your destiny. They are your blueprint — a set of tendencies, vulnerabilities, and strengths that interact with everything you eat, breathe, think, and do.
The Master Anti-Inflammation Protocol
Inflammation is fire. And like fire, it has two faces.
Preventing Cognitive Decline: The Bredesen Protocol & Beyond
Dale Bredesen — neurologist, former professor at UCLA, and author of The End of Alzheimer's — uses a metaphor that reframes everything we think about cognitive decline. Imagine you have a roof with thirty-six holes in it.
Mitochondrial Optimization Protocol
Two billion years ago, a primitive cell swallowed a bacterium. Instead of digesting it, the two formed an alliance.
Macronutrient Biochemistry: Clinical Applications
Imagine the body's metabolism as three great rivers flowing into a single reservoir — the mitochondria. Protein, carbohydrate, and fat each enter through different tributaries, pass through different terrain, and carry different cargo.
The Mediterranean Diet: The Most Evidence-Based Diet in Medicine
In the villages of Crete, Sardinia, and Ikaria, the elderly outlive their counterparts in the industrialized world by decades. They don't take statins.
Building a Functional Medicine Practice
Here is the tension nobody in functional medicine training talks about enough: you can be the most brilliant diagnostician, the most empathetic listener, the most thorough investigator of root causes — and still fail as a practice if you don't understand the economics. Patients don't benefit...
Autophagy: The Cell's Garbage Collection System and the Clarity of Consciousness
In 2016, Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the mechanisms of autophagy — the process by which cells digest and recycle their own damaged components. It was a Nobel Prize for...
Caloric Restriction: The Most Ancient Longevity Mechanism and Its Consciousness Connection
Long before rapamycin was extracted from Easter Island soil, long before NAD+ was identified as a coenzyme, long before anyone knew what a telomere was, one intervention had already been shown to extend lifespan more consistently than any other: eating less.
Clinical Medicine — Diagnosis & Treatment
A: Most likely diagnosis is Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.
Ketogenic and Low-Carbohydrate Diets: Evidence, Mechanisms, and Clinical Applications
The ketogenic diet — a very low-carbohydrate, high-fat dietary pattern that shifts the body's primary fuel source from glucose to ketone bodies — has transitioned from an obscure epilepsy treatment to a mainstream dietary phenomenon. Originally developed at the Mayo Clinic in the 1920s to treat...
Fasting and Vision Quest: Spiritual Technology of Emptying
Every spiritual tradition has discovered the same counterintuitive truth: to be filled, first become empty. To see clearly, first go into darkness.
Processed Food and Brain Inflammation: The Standard American Diet as Consciousness Suppression
Consider this experiment: take a biological system exquisitely calibrated by three million years of evolution to run on wild game, fish, tubers, leafy greens, nuts, seeds, berries, and seasonal fruits — and replace that fuel supply with refined sugar, industrial seed oils, synthetic additives,...