Dr. Jason Allen, NMD.

05/30/2026

How interesting. I’m not a big fan of labels. I feel that once you label something you minimize it.
Nuance is lost. It becomes - Oh, it’s just xyz. Other possibilities are eliminated.

In 1973, eight perfectly healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals across the United States.
None of them were ill.
No one inside realized it. 🧠
This was not an accident.
It was an experiment designed by psychologist David Rosenhan to answer a disturbing question.
Can professionals reliably tell the difference between mental health and mental illness?
To find out, Rosenhan recruited eight ordinary people. A painter. A housewife. A pediatrician. A graduate student.
They lied about only one thing. They said they heard voices. Just three words. “Empty.” “Hollow.” “Thud.”
That was enough.
All eight were admitted.
The moment they entered the hospitals, they stopped pretending. They behaved normally. They cooperated. They asked to be discharged. 🚪
It never worked.
Every normal action was reinterpreted as a symptom.
Writing notes became obsessive behavior.
Waiting quietly became pathological attention seeking.
Politeness became controlled behavior consistent with illness.
Seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
One with manic depression.
Not a single staff member identified them as healthy.
But the patients did.
Real patients approached them and whispered, “You’re not like the others. You don’t belong here.”
Those considered ill saw what trained professionals could not.
The average stay was 19 days.
One person remained hospitalized for 52 days. ⏳
Each day reinforced the same truth. Once labeled, reality stopped mattering.
When Rosenhan published On Being Sane in Insane Places, the psychiatric world erupted. One hospital challenged him to send new pseudopatients, confident they would catch them.
Rosenhan agreed.
Over the next months, that hospital identified 41 supposed impostors.
Rosenhan had sent no one. Not a single person.
The conclusion was unavoidable.
Diagnosis was not always based on facts. It was shaped by context and expectation.
This experiment shattered blind trust in clinical labels and forced major changes in how mental illness is diagnosed and treated. But its deeper lesson still unsettles today.
Perception can distort reality more than madness itself.
And sometimes, the most dangerous illusion belongs to those who believe they cannot be wrong.

05/25/2026

05/23/2026

Some very interesting information about tissue formation and repair.
Super important to long term tendon health in our kids.
Repair for adults.

05/21/2026

Vitamin C for the win with your bacon or hot dogs

If you eat bacon, ham, salami, or hot dogs, this is for you.

A new paper published last week in the Journal of Theoretical Biology mapped out what actually happens in your stomach when you eat processed meat, and offers something practical you can do about it.

Cured meats contain sodium nitrite, added as a preservative and to fix the pink color. In your stomach, that nitrite meets stomach acid and turns into a reactive form. That reactive form attacks proteins from the meal and produces a class of compounds called nitrosamines. NDMA, NDEA, and NMBA are the most studied. They are the same compounds that triggered the FDA recalls of valsartan, ranitidine, and metformin in recent years. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies them as probable human carcinogens, and they are a leading hypothesis for why processed meat consumption tracks with elevated risk of stomach and colorectal cancer in large epidemiologic studies.

Vitamin C disarms this reaction. It converts the reactive nitrite compound back into nitric oxide, which is harmless and diffuses away. This chemistry has been known since the 1970s, which is why the meat industry already adds ascorbic acid during processing. The question is whether you can do anything on your end, after the meat is already in your gut. That is what the new model addressed.

McNicol, Basu, and Layton at the University of Waterloo built a mathematical model that tracks how nitrite, vitamin C, and the resulting chemistry move through saliva, stomach, and intestine over the hours after a meal. They ran simulations across realistic dietary patterns and found two things.

First, when vitamin C is naturally present in the meal, as it is in leafy greens and most fruits and vegetables, the protective effect is substantial. The vitamin C is right there when the chemistry happens. This is likely why dietary nitrate from vegetables does not track with cancer risk the way nitrite from processed meats does.

Second, for meals where vitamin C is not naturally present, like a bacon sandwich or a charcuterie board, taking vitamin C after the meal produced a moderate predicted reduction in nitrosamine formation. Not transformative. Measurable.

A few important things to know. This is a modeling study, not a clinical trial. The model is calibrated against decades of published chemistry, but no trial has yet measured nitrosamine biomarkers in people randomized to take vitamin C after meals versus placebo. Treat the predicted effect as a reasonable hypothesis backed by mechanism, not as proven outcome.

Practical version. If you regularly eat vegetables with your meals, the vitamin C is already there and you are doing most of the work. If you eat cured meats without vegetables in the same sitting, taking 200 to 500 mg of vitamin C with water 30 to 60 minutes after the meal has a defensible mechanistic basis and a modest predicted effect. The dose matters less than the timing. Above about 200 mg in a single oral dose, absorption efficiency drops sharply, so megadoses are not the answer.

The bigger idea is that a meal is a chemical environment you can shape. The same food can be a problem or a non-event depending on what else is in the gut at the same time, and when.

McNicol et al., J Theor Biol, 2026
Tannenbaum & Wishnok, Am J Clin Nutr, 1991
Hord, Tang & Bryan, Am J Clin Nutr, 2009

05/14/2026

Fish oil absorption ranges from 20% to 90% depending on two variables most people never check: the chemical form of the supplement and how much fat is in the meal you take it with.

Lawson and Hughes published two studies in 1988 (Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications) that measured EPA and DHA absorption from fish oil in different forms and with different meals. The data is straightforward but almost nobody in the supplement industry talks about it clearly.

With a low-fat meal (8g of fat), EPA from ethyl ester fish oil was absorbed at roughly 20% relative to free fatty acid absorption. With a high-fat meal (44g of fat), absorption of both EPA and DHA from ethyl esters tripled to approximately 60%. Same capsule. Same dose. The only variable was the meal.

For triglyceride-form fish oil, the picture is different. EPA absorption was already 69% with a low-fat meal and improved to 90% with a high-fat meal. DHA absorption from triglycerides was not significantly affected by meal fat content. The triglyceride form works reasonably well regardless of what you eat with it.

The reason is biochemical. Ethyl esters lack a glycerol backbone. To be absorbed, they must be hydrolyzed by pancreatic lipase and then reassembled into triglycerides inside the enterocyte using a glycerol backbone from another dietary fat source. Without enough fat in the meal, there is not enough glycerol available and the process stalls. Triglycerides already have the backbone. They are hydrolyzed and reassembled more efficiently because the structure the body needs is already partially present.

This is not an obscure distinction. Most inexpensive fish oil supplements are ethyl esters. The concentration process that produces high-potency capsules (1,000mg EPA/DHA per softgel) typically converts the natural triglyceride form into ethyl esters. Unless the label specifically says "triglyceride," "TG," or "rTG" (re-esterified triglyceride), you are likely taking ethyl esters.

The Dyerberg et al. study (2010, Prostaglandins Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids) confirmed the form hierarchy in 72 volunteers over two weeks: re-esterified triglycerides showed 124% bioavailability relative to natural fish oil. Ethyl esters showed 73%. Free fatty acids were roughly equivalent to natural triglycerides at 91%.

Two practical points.

First, check the form. If your label says triglyceride or rTG, you are getting better absorption and the meal matters less. If it says ethyl ester or does not specify the form at all, take it with a meal that contains meaningful fat. A few eggs, avocado, olive oil, nuts. Not a piece of toast.

Second, understand that many fish oil trials that reported no clinical benefit did not control for chemical form or meal fat content. Schuchardt and Hahn (2013, Prostaglandins Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids) noted that bioavailability has been largely disregarded in omega-3 research, which may have contributed to neutral or negative trial results. It is difficult to demonstrate a clinical effect from a nutrient that was never adequately absorbed.

Lawson & Hughes, Biochem Biophys Res Commun, 1988
Dyerberg et al., Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids, 2010
Schuchardt & Hahn, Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids, 2013

04/05/2026

More on the importance of vitamin C!!

Most people think of vitamin C as an immune nutrient. But your body tells a different story with where it concentrates it.

Neurons accumulate vitamin C to approximately 10 mM intracellularly, roughly 200 times the concentration found in plasma. This gradient is maintained by SVCT2, a sodium-dependent transporter expressed almost exclusively in neurons in vivo. The brain is also the last organ to be depleted during deficiency. In guinea pigs (which, like humans, cannot synthesize vitamin C), the brain retained 24% of its vitamin C stores after 14 days of zero intake, while the adrenal glands dropped to 4% and the spleen to 3%. The body prioritizes the brain above everything else.

The adrenal glands are the other major site of accumulation. Vitamin C is a required cofactor for two enzymes central to the stress response: 11β-hydroxylase, which catalyzes the final step of cortisol synthesis in the adrenal cortex, and dopamine β-hydroxylase, which converts dopamine to norepinephrine in the adrenal medulla.

Padayatty et al. (2007) measured this directly in 26 human patients. After ACTH administration, adrenal vein vitamin C concentration surged from 39 to 162 μmol/L within 2 minutes, while cortisol did not peak until 15 minutes. The adrenals released vitamin C before they released cortisol.
This sequence suggests ascorbate must be mobilized for steroidogenesis to proceed.

This doesn't mean mega-dosing vitamin C will improve your stress response. Most of this work describes what happens during deficiency or acute demand, not supplementation above adequate intake. But it does reframe what vitamin C actually does in your body: it's not primarily an antioxidant or immune molecule. It's a required manufacturing input for cortisol and catecholamines, concentrated exactly where those hormones are made.

Harrison & May, Free Radic Biol Med, 2009. Padayatty et al., Am J Clin Nutr, 2007.
Bornstein et al., Endocrine Research, 2004.

04/02/2026

I always recommend vitamin C with collagen. Well, I recommend taking vitamin C even if you aren’t taking collagen

Your body makes collagen constantly. But the version it assembles first isn't finished. Before collagen can hold its shape, an enzyme has to modify specific amino acids in the chain. That enzyme needs vitamin C to work.

Here's what vitamin C actually does: it enables the chemical modification (hydroxylation) that allows three collagen chains to lock together into a stable triple helix. Without that modification, the collagen structure is so weak it falls apart below body temperature. Literally. Unhydroxylated collagen melts at about 24°C. Your body runs at 37°C. The only thing keeping your collagen intact at body temperature is the modification that vitamin C makes possible.

This is why scurvy causes bleeding gums, loose teeth, poor wound healing, and joint pain. Your body is still making collagen. It just can't hold together.

Vitamin C isn't recycled in this process. It's consumed each time. Your supply has to be continuously replenished.

Most collagen supplement studies co-administer vitamin C. The ones that don't rarely account for baseline vitamin C status. If you're taking collagen without adequate C, you're supplying the raw material without the tool that finishes it.

Sources: Peterkofsky, Am J Clin Nutr, 1991. Shoulders & Raines, Annu Rev Biochem, 2009.

02/16/2026

This is a great picture. Sometimes when your neck hurts, the source is the low back. And vice versa.

🔹 LearnMuscles.com 🔹
Excellence-in-education

✨ Iliocostalis

-The Iliocostalis is a member of the Erector Spinae (Paraspinal*) group, composed of:
-Iliocostalis
-Longissimus
-Spinalis

*The term paraspinal usually denotes the muscles of the erector spinae group as well as the muscles of the transversospinalis group.

-The Iliocostalis has three parts: Iliocostalis Lumborum, Iliocostalis Thoracis, Iliocostalis Cervicis.

ATTACHMENTS:
-Sacrum and iliac crest to ribs to C4.
Sacrum, iliac crest, and ribs #3-12 to ribs #1-12 and transverse processes of C4-C7.

ACTIONS:
-Extends the neck and trunk at the spinal joints.
-Laterally flexes the neck and trunk at the spinal joints.
-Ipsilaterally rotates the neck and trunk at the spinal joints.
-Anteriorly tilts the pelvis at the lumbosacral joint.
-Ipsilaterally elevates the pelvis at the lumbosacral joint.

NOTES:
-The iliocostalis is the most lateral of the three subgroups of the erector spinae group.
-The name iliocostalis tells us that this muscle group attaches from the ilium to the ribs (cost means ribs).
-Some sources call the iliocostalis the iliocostocervicalis, indicating that this muscle group extends up into the cervical spine.
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🚨Please note that the use of this artwork requires proper credit to be given (Permission: Dr. Joe Muscolino. www.learnmuscles.com – art work Giovanni Rimasti)

01/18/2026

This one’s tough. If you try it, go easy.