Ryan Crossfield

Health & Performance Coach on a rebellious mission to help you get stronger, think deeper, and live healthier.

[Jedediah Bila @JedediahBila]

🚨@DrTomCowan TAKES ON Traditional & Functional Medicine Establishments. Episode 1 of my new "X" series, "Forbidden Questions w/ Jedediah Bila"

Watch the FULL episode here 👇

[William A. Wallace, Ph.D. @WilliamWallace]

For 50 years, eggs were treated like a cardiovascular threat. The 1960s dietary guidelines capped cholesterol intake at 300mg per day. Two eggs put you at the limit. The advice moved millions away from the food, and away from a nutrient profile we didn't fully appreciate at the time.

A new study from Loma Linda University followed 39,498 adults age 65 and older for 15.3 years. The team linked Adventist Health Study-2 dietary records with Medicare diagnoses. Over that window, 2,858 participants developed Alzheimer's disease.

The dose-response was clean.
Eating eggs 1 to 3 times a month: 17% lower incidence vs never-eaters.
2 to 4 per week: 20% lower.

5 or more per week, roughly one a day: 27% lower.
The mechanism story isn't new, but the cohort scale and 15-year follow-up are. Eggs are the densest natural source of choline in the American diet. One large egg supplies roughly 33% of the daily choline requirement. Choline is the substrate for acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that drops in Alzheimer's. Donepezil, the most prescribed Alzheimer's drug, works by blocking acetylcholine breakdown. The disease is partly defined by cholinergic neuron loss.

Egg yolk also delivers lutein and zeaxanthin. These are the only two carotenoids that cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate in cortical tissue. Higher tissue levels track with better processing speed and memory across multiple older-adult cohorts. Yolk also contains DHA, primarily in phospholipid form. Phospholipid DHA enters the brain more efficiently than DHA in triglyceride form, which is the dominant form in fish oil capsules.

Now the caveats, because they matter.
This is observational. Causation cannot be drawn from a cohort study. The Adventist Health Study-2 cohort skews heavily vegetarian and health-conscious, so people who eat eggs in this cohort do not look like the average American egg-eater. The "never eats eggs" comparison group is largely vegan, which is its own dietary pattern with its own complications. Reverse causation also has to be considered. People in early Alzheimer's often change eating patterns before diagnosis. Some of the apparent protection could be that healthier brains keep eating eggs, not the other way around.

The mechanism story I outlined above is supported by adjacent literature, not by this paper. The study did not measure choline status, lutein levels, or DHA in tissue. It measured eggs in, dementia out.

What we can say honestly: in a 40,000-person cohort followed for 15 years, egg intake tracked with substantially lower Alzheimer's incidence in a dose-response pattern. The mechanism is biochemically plausible, supported by other lines of evidence, and consistent with what we know about acetylcholine and brain carotenoid status. The randomized trial that would prove causation has not been run.

The practical version: if you are over 50 and not allergic, eating an egg most days has stronger evidence behind it for brain health than most products marketed for the same goal. Five days a week was the dose with the lowest risk in this cohort. Even 1 to 3 per month showed measurable benefit.

For 50 years the question was whether eggs were dangerous to your heart. The data behind that fear was always weaker than the guidelines made it sound, which is why the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans quietly removed the 300mg cap. The brain question got asked too late.

Oh et al., J Nutr, 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.tjnut.2026.101541)

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

You  will always think you suck.

That’s good.

It’s ok to suck compared to your standards. As you grow, so will your standards. It doesn’t mean you actually suck.

— Gabe Helguera

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

Silence doesn’t erase what you gave — it reveals what the other person can receive.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

If someone cannot acknowledge your truth, they cannot be your partner in repair.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

The problem with trying to answer the question of how we determine whether something is the truth comes from the fact that we must answer how we determine our definition of truth itself is true. This is why there are about 2,600 ways to parse the verb know, and by the time you finish a degree in philosophy, you can’t help but see a chair as more of a collection of beliefs and ideas than an arrangement of wood and upholstery.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

Marketing is just a way to suppress your will to discover the potential you possess to heal and/or thrive, making most of the things you're being sold unnecessary.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

Addiction has long been viewed as a war between our dopamine-mediated reward pathways and the executive inhibitory control circuits of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This theory can be traced all the way back to Plato’s comparison, in Phaedrus, of the soul to a winged chariot pulled by two horses—one noble, representing our intellect and reason, the other ignoble, representing our base impulses and appetites.
A better model for viewing addiction, however, is one that incorporates the notion that the most emotionally impactful stimulus in our environment at any given time is what will prevail in terms of our behavior. This stimulus, be it a slice of pizza or a tray of cookies, leads to an infinite regress of feedforward loops and neuronal firings across networks that capture our attention and ultimately create addictive behavior.
Salient stimuli can work in the other direction, too. That is, I might be ready to give in and buy that soft-serve ice cream cone I’ve been thinking about from the moment I saw the neighborhood truck, but when my grandchild breaks free from my hand and runs into the busy street, my attention shifts, because there is nothing else around me that will reach that level of emotional salience.
Ultimately, with addiction, unless we’re able to change the salience, or draw, of the emotionally impactful stimulus that is ultraformulated food, treatment is bound to fail.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Frankl was the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he writes of how the striving for meaning is the most motivating force in humans. What does that have to do with positive regard? Frankl draws parallels between our ability to feel love and find meaning in life.

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality,” Frankl writes. To comprehend the essence of others, we must love them, and by doing so we are enabled to understand their traits and features, and, most important, their potential. We gain the ability to make them aware of what they can become, and they may do the same for us. It is mutually beneficial and, according to Frankl, the key to unlocking human potential.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

@FitFounder Poliquin Principles.

Not necessarily for the content but for the path I went down after reading it.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

https://t.co/oQu8fanxFd

[Yungkingmito @yungkingmito]

Everyone says grounding “fills you with electrons.” It doesn’t.

In a living body, free electrons don’t sit and “charge you.” They react instantly. Biology isn’t a bucket for spare charge, it’s a precision voltage system running ion gradients, membrane potentials, and proton flow.

Grounding doesn’t power you up. It returns you to Earth’s electrical reference so your signaling stays clean.

When you’re insulated, your voltage drifts. Touch the ground → a tiny discharge spike equalizes you, then flow stops. No stream. No drip-feed. No electron buffet.

This isn’t mystical. It’s physics:
Not energy in. Noise out. Neutral = accuracy.

Grounding stabilizes the baseline so your nervous system isn’t guessing. The Earth isn’t a charger its home base.

So where did the myth come from? People confused a spark with a system.

A TV tube or grounding strap collects electrons because it has:
• vacuum
• metal target
• high voltage pushing a beam

Living tissue is none of those things. It’s warm ion-rich water running controlled gradients. Different universe, different rules.

They imported electronics metaphors into biology and built a fairy tale. Correct the metaphor, the truth snaps into place.

Neutral isn’t empty. Neutral is precision. Grounding is calibration, not fuel.

[William A. Wallace, Ph.D. @WilliamWallace]

Top DHA foods for brain + body 🧠💪

Wild salmon (1,000+ mg)

Sardines (low mercury, high Ca)

Caviar/trout

DHA eggs

Cod liver oil

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

With all our medical and technological advances, it is striking that we need to tell people to focus on diet quality. The food industry has been regrettably successful at separating calories from nutrition. I always thought phrases like “empty calories” and “junk food” applied to a side segment of our food supply. Unfortunately, those terms have come to represent an increasing portion of our food intake. The food industry has figured out how to, in the words of Dr. Lydia Alexander of Kaiser Permanente, decouple energy intake from nutrition.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

Unfortunately, there is no reliable guidance on dietary supplementation for GLP-1 patients. The supplement industry has seized on this information vacuum by marketing products claiming to fill GLP-1 nutrient gaps. Whether these supplements are safe or efficacious is anyone’s guess. In the United States, the industry operates with little government oversight. The absence of evidence-based recommendations and consumer protections is particularly troubling given that most candidates for GLP-1 therapy have micronutrient deficiencies before they even start the drugs. People with obesity are more likely to be nutrient deficient than the population at large.

Metabolic alterations, oxidative stress in fat tissue, and other biochemical changes that occur during major weight loss can increase the body’s demand for micronutrients even further. So can interaction with other medications such as metformin, which is sometimes prescribed with GLP-1 drugs. German nutrition researcher Dr. Antje Damms-Machado and her colleagues studied thirty-two people who followed an 800-calorie-a-day liquid diet for three months and lost, on average, forty-three pounds. The participants were deficient in various vitamins and minerals before they began the regimen and showed no improvement from the diet, even though their meal-replacement formula was suffused with micronutrients at amounts often higher than recommended for the general population. In fact, even more people had low levels of vitamin C, zinc, lycopene, and calcium at the end of the diet.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

Don’t expect to lose significant weight through exercise alone; if you were to put on ten pounds of muscle, a significant increase, that would increase your daily caloric needs by only about 60 calories.
The primary benefits of exercise are improved overall health, including reduced stress and inflammation, and increased metabolic flexibility, the ability to switch readily between burning fats and carbohydrates in response to the body’s demands.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

At a certain point, our bodies are designed to fight against weight loss. And yet no one ever says that. The mantra is simply: eat less, exercise more. Nobody ever offers the more accurate axiom: eat less, exercise more, and your body’s counterregulatory systems will work against your efforts.

It follows then that if I continue to eat fewer calories than I burn, my weight will eventually plateau; the body becomes a smaller furnace and burns fewer calories. Put simply, as I eat less, my body will burn less. “Basically what we have is a pair of negative feedback loops such that changes in body weight give rise to compensatory changes in calorie expenditure and appetite that resist changes in body weight,” Dr. Kevin Hall of the NIH explains. “It’s almost like the system is trying to maintain whatever the baseline body weight is before you intervene.”

Dr. Hall’s research lab—where he also studied how environment influences people’s eating habits—has built mathematical models to quantify the strength of these feedback loops. He has shown that for every kilogram of body weight loss, our bodies, on average, decrease the amount we burn by 25 calories a day. So, for instance, if a person loses 22 pounds, they will burn 250 fewer calories daily than they burned before that weight loss. And the feedback loop that controls appetite is even stronger. For every kilogram of body weight loss, appetite increases by 95 extra calories per day. As Hall sums it up: “That is a huge feedback control that is resisting maintaining those lifestyle interventions.”

This harkens back to Dr. Rosenbaum’s seminal study, in which patients with obesity lost between 10 and 50% of their weight and, as a result, slowed their metabolism, reducing their energy expenditure by 300 to 400 calories a day. At the same time, their appetites increased.

The combination of reduced metabolism and increased hunger makes it very easy to regain weight. Consequently, treating the counterregulatory forces—the homeostatic system, our addictive circuitry, and an increase in appetite hormones as well as a decrease in satiety hormones—is our only hope to support sustained weight loss. The telltale signs of these forces winning out include excess hunger and decreased fullness. Any approach to weight loss that does not reduce those two key symptoms will not be effective in the long run. As Dr. Carel le Roux has said, you can always tell if a treatment will be successful if the person who is losing or has lost weight says, “I don’t feel hungry, I feel fuller, and I am not thinking about food all the time.” In addition to a reduced appetite and increased fullness, a shift in food preferences, including a desire for smaller portions and fewer high-fat, high-sugar foods, benefits weight-loss efforts.

Therefore, to unlock weight loss and sustain it, we must affect not only the addictive circuits, but also the body’s underlying energy biology.

... from Diet, Drugs, & Dopamine

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

When you're born you look like your parents, but when you die you look like your decisions.

[Scholarship for PhD @ScholarshipfPhd]

You're not depressed, you just need a quest.

[Ryan Crossfield @RyanCrossfield]

This is probably the best way to describe the current state of everything...

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."

— Marcus Aurelius