Fad Diets, Pills, and What Really Heals Autoimmune Disease

[TLDR: Health isn’t found in pills or fads. Instead, it's rooted in three key principles: holism, ecology, and anthropology. Understanding these can lead to real recovery, especially from chronic conditions. To learn more, book a free call.]

Looking at the latest data on Ozempic, Wegovy and other drugs, I have a question: Why do people always fall for the snake oil? For some people, these drugs might be a miracle, but they certainly have side effects.

As someone who reads a lot of medical literature, I can tell you that most pills just don’t have the data to back up their use in the long term. Some of them may be helpful in the short term, some of them may play a role in an individual’s treatment plan, but at the population level, the vast majority of them are simply not indicated.

And of course it's not just the pills. Fad diets come and go, as do fad supplements, fad exercise routines and so on. Many people will try these things; most will find that they don't get the desired results (or the side effects are unbearable) and go on to the next thing. 

So if we don’t have magic pills, what do we have? Having spent hours and hours looking through the mechanism of action for many of these "magic pills" I have come to the conclusion that thinking through all that is not only time consuming but also ineffective. I can understand every little detail about how GLP-1 agonists or SGLT-2 inhibitors work and it will make very little difference for 99% of people who simply won't benefit from those particular drugs. 

Instead of understanding the drugs and the "magic", I have become convinced that we should all spend more time understanding the principles of how to achieve and maintain optimal health.

What are those principles? There might be many, but for me there are three fundamental principles that we should all understand and try to use as the basis for the strategies we use to improve our health.

1. Humans are more than the sum of our parts. Neither the human experience nor human health can be reduced to a series of systems (eg. circulatory systems, skeletal system, etc.) In the context of biological systems (and especially biological systems in an ecosystem), 1 + 1 doesn't always equal 2. We are more than the sum of our parts. This is the principle of holism.
2. What we experience is "self" is not just our human-ness. Each of us is home to an ecosystem, sometimes called the microbiome. We are actually more "non-self" than "self", when it comes to our DNA. The health of the micro-organisms that are part of us is in part related to our own health, but also related to the things we get from our environments - food, soil, sunlight, pollution and so on.  This the principle of ecology. To be human is to be part of an ecosystem.
3. Humans did evolve in a particular context, as part of the genus homo on the African continent. We are unique among animal systems in that we've been able to use culture - that is things that are passed down through generations rather than inherited as DNA from our parents - to adapt to various environments, be they scorching deserts or the freezing cold. There is wisdom in all of these traditions, but much of that wisdom is under threat as we move towards more industrialised and urbanised ways of living that may be in conflict with the ways of living that have helped humans thrive for millenia. This is the principle of anthropology.

Understanding these three principles and understanding how they relate to a given health problem is key to recovery from any disease, I would argue, but especially when it comes to recovery from chronic diseases including autoimmune disease. Even when it comes to things like the use of pharmaceuticals, we will be more able to use pharmaceuticals effectively when we understand these principles.

Let’s consider that in a bit more detail. If I’m considering going on a statin for the purposes of lowering my cholesterol, for example, it might be worthwhile to think holistically. Certain statins can cross the blood-brain barrier. Those drugs will therefore not just act in my blood (where I want it to act) but also in my brain. And I really don’t want to be lowering cholesterol in the brain given that cholesterol is so key to brain function. I may decide to take another class of drugs or at least find a statin that doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier (not all do).

On the flip side, if I take a broad-spectrum antibiotic because I have a stomach infection, I should be aware of the fact that this medication will kill the “good” bacteria in my gut as well as the “bad” bacteria that are giving me the infection. Considering the ecological principle will remind me that killing off the good bacteria could be dangerous. But that’s a tradeoff that I’m probably going to be ok with depending on how severe the infection is. I might choose to take the antibiotic and put in place a plan to “reseed” my gut with the good stuff after the antibiotics have run their course.

The more I work with people with chronic illness, the deeper my understanding of these principles grows. What I’m beginning to understand is that health is something that looks similar in just about everyone, but illnesses are unique. Two people can have the same diagnosis but very different experiences on treatment protocols. The nutrition that one person requires for healing may look different to the nutrition that the other person needs.

What that means is that the “magic pills” might exist but they’re not universal. Someone can have a great experience with Ozempic, another can have a great experience with red light therapy, a third can have a great experience with magnesium supplementation. That’s great for them, but it means very little for anyone else.