Are Seed Oils Harmful? What the Evidence Really Says
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
The Metabolic Roadmap: Seed oils may be the most polarized topic in nutrition. One side calls them a primary driver of inflammation, obesity, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic disease. The other points to lower LDL and observational data linking higher linoleic acid levels to better cardiovascular outcomes. So are they harmful? Are they safe? Or is the answer more nuanced than either side wants to admit? Truth is, both sides are wrong. Let's dive in.
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10 Principles That Make Every Diet Argument Irrelevant
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
Take the free Metabolic Capacity Assessment: Work with me: Food is more than calories and macros. It supplies the signals and raw materials your body needs to function, repair, and recover. Here are 10 practical nutrition principles for better metabolic health, body composition, and long-term resilience.
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I Stopped Doing Cardio and Lost 50lbs (Do This Instead)
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
Free Metabolic Capacity Assessment 👉 Body Composition Workshop 👉 I stopped doing cardio and lost 50 pounds. It turned out cardio was never necessary to lose fat or change my body composition. In this podcast, I break down why you don't need cardio for fat loss, and the two things you should focus on instead to lose fat and build muscle.
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Years of metabolic research in 20 minutes (we’ve been wrong)
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
Pro bono mitochondrial disease health coaching: Free metabolic capacity assessment: We've been looking at chronic disease all wrong. In this video, I distill years of metabolic research into 20 minutes. You'll learn why conditions that look unrelated often share the same root, why your labs can read "normal" while you still don't feel well, and why so many treatments move a marker without actually restoring the person.
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Your Water Fast Is Eating Your Muscle (Do This Instead)
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
Free metabolic capacity assessment: Waitlist to work with me: A water-only fast can quietly burn through your own muscle. The fix is a hybrid between the fasting mimicking diet and a protein-sparing modified fast (PSMF). In this podcast I walk through the exact protocol plus the results from my own bloodwork. Most people think fasting is only about cutting calories and dropping weight, but the science says it's doing far more. When researchers tracked a 7-day fast and measured thousands of blood proteins every day, they found the body crosses a threshold around day 3, where more than a...
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The reason GLP-1s, keto, and calorie restriction aren't working (do this instead)
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
Learn more about working with me and join the waitlist: You're probably already doing more than you need. You eat clean. You try to exercise or at least move throughout the day. You try to get good sleep. Maybe you've even tried tracking your food, tried fasting, tried keto, or even tried a GLP-1. But here's what almost nobody tells you. The answer isn't more restriction, more intensity, another diet, another protocol, or another supplement stack. Doing all of this at the wrong time can not only keep you stuck but also set you back. This...
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The Real Reason You Get Tired
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
Free metabolic capacity assessment: Waitlist to work with me: Why do we get tired? The afternoon crash usually isn't sleep, age, or laziness. It comes down to your metabolic capacity: your body's ability to produce energy, manage it, and recover from the demands placed on you. In this video, I break down the real biology of fatigue, from mitochondria and metabolic flexibility to insulin and why caffeine stops working, and how you can actually change it. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why your mitochondria set your energy ceiling, not your willpower How you can carry thousands of calories of fuel...
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My Cardiologist Said I Was Perfectly Healthy. He Was Wrong.
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
My cardiologist ran a full cardiac workup (MRI, stress test, ambulatory ECG, labs) and told me I was perfectly healthy. I was 40 lbs overweight, insulin-resistant, nutritionally deficient, and running on 2–4 hours of sleep. Everything was "normal." Nothing was fine. ▶ FREE email course: the exact steps I used to go from dysfunction toward resilient health (no cost, straight to your inbox): If you're a clinician, this one's for you. You read labs all day, but nobody is reading yours. And "normal" labs can hide a metabolism that's quietly drifting years before any diagnosis shows up. In...
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ProLon vs. Sardine Fast: Why I Was Wrong
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
I tested ProLon, the fasting-mimicking diet, against a 5-day sardine fast, ran my own bloodwork, and got the opposite result I expected. ProLon is the best-known version of the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD), a 5-day, low-calorie, plant-based protocol developed from Dr. Valter Longo's research at USC. The sardine fast is the cheap, unbranded version people keep hyping online. Free course (resilient health): I ran both on myself about a month apart, kept calories low on each, and tracked the same markers throughout: IGF-1, fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, glucose, ketones, and glucose ketone index. I...
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My Daughter Saw 9 Specialists. They All Missed It.
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
When my daughter was six months old, her platelet count dropped to 2,000. Over the next two years she was diagnosed with a mitochondrial disease (MELAS), lupus, and immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), and was seen by nine different specialists. Not one of them connected those findings to each other. Free course (resilient health): This is the story of what almost losing her taught me about chronic disease, why our current model of medicine keeps failing complex and chronically ill clients, and why I am back on the podcast after almost a decade away. I am Andrew Reid, founder of Medgeeks. I trained...
info_outlineI tested ProLon, the fasting-mimicking diet, against a 5-day sardine fast, ran my own bloodwork, and got the opposite result I expected. ProLon is the best-known version of the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD), a 5-day, low-calorie, plant-based protocol developed from Dr. Valter Longo's research at USC. The sardine fast is the cheap, unbranded version people keep hyping online.
Free course (resilient health): https://medgeeks.co/get-started/metabolic-health/
I ran both on myself about a month apart, kept calories low on each, and tracked the same markers throughout: IGF-1, fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, glucose, ketones, and glucose ketone index.
I was sure the premium protocol would win. I had spent years studying these pathways and expected the plant-based, low-protein design to be the real driver. A few cans of fish gave me the opposite answer. What you'll see in this podcast:
- The exact lab data that flipped my prediction
- IGF-1 side by side: the FMD dropped mine 55 points, the sardine fast dropped it 88
- How the sardine fast drove me into a deeper ketotic state than the $200 kit
- Where my fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, glucose, ketones, and GKI landed on each protocol
- A clearer way to understand mTOR and autophagy
- Why autophagy is not the on-off switch the internet claims
- Why a little of the right protein may help protect lean muscle during a deficit
- What this means for clinicians who want metabolic interventions patients can actually afford
About:
I'm Andrew Reid. I founded Medgeeks in 2013, and for the last five years, I've been rebuilding how I think about chronic disease from the cell up. My goal is to treat nutrition as a real therapeutic intervention, held to the same standard of rigor we expect from pharmaceuticals.
Subscribe for nutrition held to a higher standard, with real data and honest answers even when they're inconvenient.
Disclaimer:
This is an N of 1 experiment on my own physiology, shared for educational purposes only. It is not medical advice. A protocol like this is not right for everyone, especially if you are lean, managing a chronic condition, or taking medication. Talk with your healthcare provider before attempting any form of fasting or significant dietary change.