10 wellness myths that even the experts believe

1) The deadlift strengthens your low back

If you want to protect your low back and prevent low back pain, your priority should be to strengthen your hamstrings and particularly your glutes. When you deadlift with proper form — rotating back into the lifter’s wedge, pushing your knees into your elbows, and blasting up with the powerful muscles at the back of your leg — you’ll perform the deadlift in the way it was intended, as a weighted hip hinge. Your glutes and hamstrings perform the work and get stronger, while your spinal erectors are there just to stabilize your torso and go along for the ride.

Which brings us to #2 …

2) You rehab low back pain and weakness by working your spinal erectors

Low back pain is often an indication of glute weakness. The core physical therapy program for low back pain is building up your glutes, hamstrings, and abs. You want to master the hip hinge, learn Romanian deadlift variations, perform walking lunges, do hyperextensions, and progress through levels of the bug march. None of this involves targeting the low back muscles directly.   

3) You must pre-fuel for top strength and performance

I am the strongest exercising on an empty stomach, between 12-16 hours fasted. My experience makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint: first you hunt, then you eat. There was no such thing as pre-fueling before wandering out to the savannah to chase down your next meal.

4) Pickles are a fermented food

Wellness experts are right that probiotics are responsible for a healthy gut biome, and therefore, systemic health. They’re wrong, however, when they encourage folks to eat pickles as a fermented food source filled with good bacteria.

Pickles are not fermented unless they are prepared by the same process all fermented foods undergo. Fermentation of vegetables works by sprinkling them with salt and allowing them to sit at room temperature in an anerobic (sealed/submerged) environment. Fermentation occurs when lactic acid-producing bacteria change the sugars in the food into acid. Food is preserved because the lactic acid produced by the bacteria destroys all spoilage organisms.

The typical pickles you find on grocery store shelves have not been prepared this way. Instead, they are pickled: a vegetable is submerged in hot vinegary brine and heat processed to be shelf stable. If you see vinegar listed as an ingredient on your pickle jar, it’s not fermented.

Which brings us to #5 …

5) Any fermented food is great for your gut biome

Fermented foods, with their probiotic organisms, should be part of a high performance, high health diet. BUT, you’ll only get the benefits of fermented foods if the vegetables (or milk used to make kefir) are organic. If a farm hoses down the cabbage in your sauerkraut with glyphosate, this broad spectrum herbicide will kill off the good bacteria in your gut as fast as you add them back in.

6) You have to inject your healing peptide close to the site of injury

BPC-157 and TB-500 can work miracles on tendons, healing an injury in weeks that would otherwise take a year. These peptides also work systemically. If you inject the solution near your sore elbow or shoulder, you’ll get the peptide to the site of injury faster, but it won’t work any better than injecting it more comfortably into your abdomen or inner thigh.   

Peptides are natural, unpatentable, and a threat to Big Medicine. As a result, government agencies are trying to discourage their use via regulations and forcing up costs. Speaking of which …

7) There is no cure for the herpes virus

The natural supplement BHT, available on Amazon, stops the replication of any lipid-coated virus: cold sores, genital herpes, chicken pox, and shingles. Despite its approval as a food additive by the FDA, BHT is ignored by the medical field as a herpes treatment. BHT is inexpensive, unpatentable, and therefore invisible to Big Pharma and white-coat drug pushers. Research from over 25 years ago shows that BHT can inactivate herpes simplex and other lipid-coated viruses by disrupting their lipid membranes, rendering them vulnerable to the immune system.

8) Ice promotes healing

The doctor who invented the practice of icing injuries, Dr. Gabe Mirkin, later repudiated his own creation because inflammation is a critical part of the body’s healing process. Regardless, coaches, athletes, and moms still rush to apply ice to every strain and sprain. Like masks and margarine, ice is another zombie intervention we’ll be stuck with for 100 years.

Which brings us to #9 …

9) Dietary cholesterol is related to serum cholesterol

Your liver makes cholesterol if your body needs more, it shuts off cholesterol production if you don’t. As a result, the amount of cholesterol you stuff into your piehole is separate from the amount of cholesterol in your blood.

The truth about cholesterol is quietly leaking out. Even government agencies can no longer deny reality: “In 2016, the secretaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture eliminated the cholesterol limit in the diet. This came about because of what dietary advisory committees said. They stated that the research hasn’t shown that dietary cholesterol, which can be found in foods like eggs, is bad for the heart or increases the amount of cholesterol in the body.”

Please pass the steak, shrimp, butter, cheese, and grass-fed organs. Cholesterol issues are in fact tied to sugar, which interferes with the liver’s signaling mechanism to stop producing cholesterol.

Which brings us to #10 …

10) Complex carbs are healthier than simple carbs

The most visited article on my blog is titled: How does a bowl of cereal compare to a bowl of ice cream? I am delighted there is a constituency thinking about this issue. No studies show that “complex carbs” have a less dramatic effect on blood glucose than “simple carbs.” Long chain carbs have already split into glucose molecules by the time they arrive in the small intestine and therefore have exactly the same effect on the body as simple sugar.

And here are the results of my own study: A serving of Cheerios clocks in at 35g net carbs (which includes 8g of total sugar — the added sugar plus the lactose in milk). A serving of Grape Nuts supplies 46g net carbs (including 11g of total sugar). A serving of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough contains 42g of net carbs (which includes 33g of total sugar). Since your body treats “complex” carbs from grains the same as added sugar, cereal vs. ice cream is a nutritional tie.