Howdy everyone! My name is Shawn. I'm nobody of great importance (YET!!!!), so I want to start by saying thank you for even giving this little slice of the interwebs a sniff of your attention.
So why am I doing this blog at all? Well in short, curiosity. I'm going to school for a Bachelor's of Science in human nutrition and with each passing semester, I walk away with more questions than answers. That fact is not due to a lack of knowledgeable professors, in fact it is quite the opposite. There is simply so much to learn about the human body and how everything we consume breaks down to essentially turn into a new version of ourself. And it is absolutely for better or for worse.
I plan to create posts on here that begin to answer or at least dig into some of those questions I have come up with. I absolutely have to stress that I'm no expert and all I'm trying to do with this blog is share the insight I gain from doing research. It will be primarily analytical in nature but what sort of scientist would I be without some hands on experimentation. So along the way I'll present some good ol fashioned n=1 testing. This will be done primarily to refute or to confirm the analytical findings.
I'm certain that you like most people, myself included, feel lost in the sauce when it come to the good and bad of human nutrition. Hopefully after I dig into a bit of the science and chew on it for awhile I'll be able to digest it and create a shareable recipe of understanding to help you to grasp a bit more about how food interacts with everything you do.
Now, fad diets come along several times a year and major ones come out every few years. We've all seem them, heard about them, had friends talk about them relentlessly (bacon, anyone!?!?!) and so on. 9 times out of 10 there is some half baked science that the diet is centered around. And more often than not, the nutritional protocol involves making whatever "expert" that is promoting it very wealthy by having to buy certain foods, supplements or books and other products. Some of these plans work, some work only in the short term, while others fail all together and can cause serious health problems. So..... the million dollar question is - how can we know when to jump on the "gravy train" or when to pump the breaks and say, "Nah, I'll skip the all mashed potatoes and gravy diet fad!"?
The answer is not simple because as I mentioned, most of these fad diets have some semblance of science to back them up. And so to the lay person with no background in biochemistry and human nutrition, no time to become intimately familiar with these advanced science topics and just simply want that ultimate missing link to regaining their health, it is easy to be persuaded and overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles of that mashed potatoes and gravy (MPG) diet.
If the purveyors of the MPG fad wheeled out a truckload of obscure research with at best, fringe results, but promised you'd finally be able to lose all that stubborn tummy fat and they had the "science" to prove it and then they put out long tedious articles with all sorts of big fancy doctory sounding words, then hell, give me a plate of them taters!! But wait!!!!! How could that same average person from above know the data was obscure and fringe or if it had been properly vetted by a group of scientific peers to give it any type of credibility?
Luckily, for you, there are nerds like me! I, without question, do not have all the answers and it could even be argued that I don't have ANY of the answers. But what I do have is a thirst for learning about all this whacky stuff and I am lucky there are forums like this blog space that afford me a place to babble on and share what I find.
So that is what I'm going to do. I hope to keep the articles fun and engaging but to justify the hours I will spend doing research for each post, I have to have some boring science parts too. I'll do my best to keep those to a minimum and for those that are as nerdy as I am and want to dig into what I find, I will always have a citations section at the end of each article with all of the sources I used to get my info from.
I hope you come along with me on this nerdy journey and always feel free to reach out with comments, questions and differing opinions on here or my other social media platforms that you may follow me on.
Cheers, homies and homiettes!
Shawn
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