What’s Inside This Episode?

• When Health Advice Becomes Harmful – The quiet shift happening online that’s leaving even well-intentioned practitioners misinformed.
  
• The Food Fear Epidemic – What’s really behind the sudden paranoia around spinach, kale, and cruciferous veggies?
  
• The Truth Behind the Studies – How published research might be leading your clients—and you—down the wrong path.
  
• The Protein Most People Trust… But Shouldn’t – A common “health food” that may be silently spiking insulin and blocking progress.
  
• Why 80% Success Might Be Your Downfall – The small percentage of clients who don’t get better… and why they matter more than you think.
  
• What Influencers Can’t Teach You – The deep functional insight that separates clinical success from viral sound bites.
  
• How to Spot the Hidden Imbalance – The overlooked red flags that reveal when a client’s root cause is being completely missed.

Resources and Links:

• See the Full Transcript here
• Get our Free Guide: The Functional Food Guide
• Join the Practitioner Community: Next-Level Health Practitioner Facebook Group
• Advanced Practitioner Training: Visit INEMethod.com for certifications and clinical tools.
• Explore More Episodes on ReInvent Healthcare and Functional Food here

 

---

Transcript

DrRitamarie 

As functional and holistic health practitioners, we have a message for the world. And right now, the world is ready for it more than ever before.

 

I’ve been watching online. I’ve been watching YouTube. I’ve been watching Instagram and Reels and all this stuff. And what I will say is there are a lot of holistic people out there, a lot of people who are quote unquote influencers. 

 

What’s happening is everybody has a very distinct, very dramatic stance on things. “The “Everything.” The only foods you need, the best foods you need, the foods you need to avoid, the colorings you need to avoid, et cetera. 

 

And they’re trying to get your attention, right? Because you’re not going to get people’s attention by a soft message. But once you get their attention, you have an obligation to give them good information, information that’s going to change their lives. 

 

Whether you are a doctor, a nurse, a health coach, an aspiring health coach, a practitioner in training, or just someone who’s out there who loves getting healthier and healthier and is there to help your own families, we have an obligation to give people the best information we can. And I’ve said this over and over and over again, and I’ll say it over and over and over again in the future. There’s no one size fits all when it comes to health. There are no special solutions. There’s no magic bullet. 

 

DrRitamarie (01:54)

If I were to say, I have this magic weight loss solution. First of all, you as a science-based, truth-based person is going to have to question that first of all, right? There is no magic, you know that. But the general public doesn’t know that or get that. They’re used to listening to Dr. Oz with his weight loss magic to Dr. Gundry with his just get rid of lectins, and everything’s going to be okay, and all the others out there trying to get people to be afraid of food. 

 

Fear is a motivator. People are afraid to eat certain foods, because it’s going to kill them. I can’t tell you how many people have come to me and said, well, I don’t eat kale anymore, because I heard that it’s high in lithium from the soils, and it’s high in oxalates, and it may hurt me. It’s possible that it could, but this is not a general statement that you can make about everybody in the world. Everybody should avoid kale, because some kale has been found to be high in lithium. And the truth of the matter is, well, oxalates, same thing. People are now afraid to eat spinach. Spinach isn’t something to be afraid of. It’s something to be cautious with to not overdo, but that’s true of just about every food on the planet. So we owe it to people. We owe it to our constituents, our followers, our family members, our patients, our clients. We owe it to them to give them good science-backed information. 

 

But here’s the deal.

 

There are others out there who I respect and admire greatly for what they’re putting out there but are going to the opposite extreme. And unless something has a science-backed study, a double-blind placebo-controlled or a meta-analysis or something, then things may not be wrong. So I think that what we need to do is use common sense, science, not just science in the form of studies, because studies can be jerry-rigged to prove what we want, not to say that studies aren’t valid. They are. There’s a lot of very good studies that are valid. But we can construct a study to give us the answers. 

 

DrRitamarie (03:59)

So the things that are going to be more valuable are things like meta-analyses that are looking at many, many, many, many studies and putting together a conclusion. But here’s where I have a problem with that, you cannot make a conclusion based on tens of thousands of people and say that it’s true for the one person sitting in front of you. 

 

Maybe in the general population and across many analyses, we can find that oxalates are not a problem. But for the person who’s sensitive, who gets sick from eating oxalates, it is a problem. The same thing with gluten. 

 

Gluten is a very common allergen, but not everybody has a problem with it. So you can construct a study that shows that gluten is not a problem. Gluten is not a problem for everyone. Gluten can be a problem for many, many, many people. And I’ve been doing this for over 33 years. And I know that many people get well when they remove gluten from their diet. Not just remove gluten from their diet and go and eat gluten-free biscuits and whatever. 

 

We need to be the voice of reason that doesn’t just go by studies, that doesn’t just go by somebody claiming that their product has helped thousands of people, but we look at the person in front of us. And we don’t just look at their food. You know that there are lots of podcast episodes about other things, emotional trauma, mindset, sleep, the lack of ability to have fun, and people who are really much more sensitive to the fear-mongering that’s out there. We need to be the voice of reason. 

 

You need to study not just the studies. If you just look at the studies, you can come up with all kinds of conclusions, and a lot of uneducated people who read the studies come to conclusions and then they put sensational headlines out there. 

 

You need to understand how this works, how this body works. I can look at something and say, based on the biochemistry, we would expect that somebody with insulin resistance should not have whey protein. I say this one, because it’s been a popular one lately. Because whey protein causes an increase in insulin, just like eating cereal causes an increase in insulin, eating sugar.

 

DrRitamarie (06:17)

Having bad sleep causes an increase in insulin. An increase in insulin creates lack of sensitivity of the cells over an abundance of insulin in your blood. It can be a problem now. People listening that only know about type 1 diabetes go, wait, insulin is good. Insulin isn’t good or bad. .

 

Well, insulin is good in that it’s one of the hormones the body creates to protect itself, to keep the blood sugar from rising so high that it creates peripheral neuropathy, retinopathy, nephropathy, a whole host of other things, stiffening of the arteries. 

So to say that a hormone is good or bad is kind of nonsense, because the body produces the hormones for a reason. But overproduction or underproduction of those hormones is a problem.

 

Do you see? So we have to be able to look at people individually. Now, a lot of folks say, we need to be able to give general advice, because not everybody has a practitioner who will be able to look at things, who will be able to test them, et cetera. And that’s true. So we can make general guidelines for sure.  

 

People should eat more fruits and vegetables. People should eat whole grains, not processed grains. People should avoid pesticides and additives and food colorings. But, once we get beyond the basics, those basics don’t hold true for everyone. 

 

Some people get sicker when they eat more green vegetables because of a current state of imbalance, like an oxalate sensitivity. Or something like that. So we need to understand these broad concepts. 

 

We need to be able to talk to people about general guidelines, because that’s where people start. It’s when those general guidelines fall apart for an individual person that we don’t throw the guidelines out, we investigate further to see something different, something unusual going on in their biochemistry. And I believe that to be a good practitioner, you have to go back to basics. 

 

You have to understand how the body works. You have to understand the Krebs cycle, and you have to understand methylation cycles and how all these things work, because people are out there with fear of general things that are not to be feared unless they have a problem with it.

 

DrRitamarie (08:36)

And fear creates stress in the body. Elevations of cortisol, elevations of adrenaline, decreases in vital hormones that get interfered with by the stress response. 

 

We need to understand how these things work. You need to be equipped to understand when a person comes to us with problems, and they’ve been to other practitioners before, and they’ve tried this or that, and they’ve been on a whole foods plant-based diet for the last 30 years and don’t know why they’re not getting well. 

 

Those on the carnivore diet would say it’s because a plant-based diet doesn’t work. It’s not true. It doesn’t work for everybody in every stage of their life, and we have to be able to customize that diet.

 

Probably 80% of the population would be good to go with general diet guidelines. So we can be out there, and we can be teaching, and we can be making videos, getting people off the processed foods, getting people to eat lower on the glycemic scale, getting them off of food colorings and additives, and getting them to sleep and exercise. All those things work, but not everybody responds the way we expect them to respond.

 

And that’s when we need to understand how the body works. And yes, looking at double-blind placebo controlled studies can be helpful. Meta-analyses can be helpful to give us the broad, general guidelines, but not to help us make specific recommendations for specific people.

 

Okay? So this was brought up by just me out there on the internet getting frustrated by hearing about the latest and the greatest. This exercise, this one exercise will build your glutes and build your bones, et cetera. 

 

There’s no one size fits all. There’s no one size fits all. I’ll say that one more time. There’s no one size fits all. 

 

And you, as the practitioner, need to use your knowledge base. What you learned in medical school, not what you learned about how to treat diseases in medical school. Unless you’re an ER doc in some situation where that’s all you do, take what you learned in medical school about how this works, the biochemistry, the physiology, the pathophysiology, how toxins work, how the liver works, and now newer understanding of genetics and how certain gene tendencies lead people to need a different approach. 

 

You need to understand that as a practitioner, because if you don’t, you cannot help people. You can only give general broad recommendations. It’s going to help a percentage of the people.

 

I’ll tell you, I’ve been in practice for over 33 years, and before that, five years or six years of exploring for my own health and turning my own health around. I am in better health now that I am 69 than I was when I was 29. 

 

I am in better shape, better health now. And I know more now. And it’s more confusing. The more I hear these influencers out there with 300,000 followers making it simple. It’s not simple. It’s not easy. We need to let people know that. The changes are simple. 

 

Don’t eat crap. Move your body. Sleep. Be in kind and caring relationships. These are simple things. Not so easy for people to implement after lifetimes of doing things differently.

 

DrRitamarie (12:00)

So I hope this is helpful to you. You need to keep up on the latest science. The recommendations you give people do need to be science-backed, although there’s a lot of things that science hasn’t caught up with yet. 

 

The whole concept of energy healing. There are good, scientific research places that you can look to find that, but there is validity in that. The ancient healing arts of acupuncture and things like that that have been around for millennia.

So I want you to understand that we are the future of healthcare. 

 

The people who are watching this podcast are interested in being more of a functional practitioner. You’re interested in nutrition and endocrinology based on nutrition, and you’re interested in truly helping people, and you’re interested in heart-centered healthcare. That’s a big part of it, the relationships. And there’s science behind that, right? Oxytocin, right? The love hormone. There’s so much there.

 

Our emotions affect our physiology. Our physiology affects how we feel. And our physiology and our emotions affect how our brain functions. We need to be on top of this. 

 

So we have tons of resources here at the ReInvent Health podcast. Please go back. We have over 150 episodes, and there are some with experts outside of me, some with just me, some with a lot of our graduates from our nutritional endocrinology practitioner training, who are amazing at integrating all of this and not just believing a study, and expecting to apply it to everyone, but using the studies to give us general guidelines. 

 

So I hope this is helpful. I’m Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo. I am the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology and the creator of the Nutritional Endocrinology Practitioner Training. You can find out more about us on INEMETHOD.com. 

 

All of this will be in the show notes. And I encourage you to be the best practitioner you can to come from your heart and your brain, put it all together, and help people to make the best decisions for them. So until next time, shine on.