Firstly make sure to follow Analyze & Optimize on all of his socials:

• Twitter (@Outdoctrination)

• Youtube (Analyze & Optimize)

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Interview with Analyze & Optimize pt. 1

• Intro

• Research Process

• Methylene Blue

Intro:

Analyze & Optimize (@Outdoctrination), your platform has become a beacon for those looking to understand health and wellness beyond the hype. What sparked your passion to dive into this field and subsequently dispel medical myths?

Well first off, thank you. I hope we can be a good source of information and maybe offer a different perspective than what people normally hear.

Personally, I’ve sort of always been infatuated with science (and math), it was the only subjects in school I ever really enjoyed, and I was really good at it. I also grew up an athlete, so I guess it was pretty natural for me to try to start to figure things out a little bit deeper, combining my two passions. When I went to college to do my engineering degree, my freshmen year I pretty much lived the prototypical college kid lifestyle: lots of partying, drinking, and other things of that nature. Needless to say, my health deteriorated pretty quickly and I gained a bunch of weight in the process. Then that summer (2018), I first heard about keto and fasting, and it worked great. I lost a ton of weight and gained energy and confidence back. We started A&O in July 2019, as I thought I pretty much knew it all at that point. Classic Dunning-Kruger.

I ended up on a similar trajectory to most: needing to constantly restrict more to feel better, ending up as carnivore, eating less and less. I think I developed some pretty bad body image issues and a flat out eating disorder, as my “fasting” clearly was not about health at that point, and my meals were absolute binges. It’s pretty scary looking back. I was very delusional. I lost my girlfriend at the time who I had loved very deeply, simply because I was checked out of reality, and I ignored and dismissed her concerns. Around that time I developed absolutely debilitating GI issues, just after a 6 day fast, 3 of which were without any water. Of course, no sickness is in isolation, and by that point I suppose that was just the thing that I actually noticed. But I was sick in many ways. Symptoms of all kinds, many of which I had my entire life, but sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to realize that something is deeply wrong and needs to change. But the GI symptoms were the sign I just could not ignore, paining me at every moment of my life.

Went to all of the GI docs and they predictably did nothing except take my time, money and hope. Told me there was nothing I could do about it, that it just happened. One thing I am thankful for with the keto/carnivore community is that they really do believe all disease is reversible, and that you don’t have to live with whatever your issue is. By this point, you know since keto and carnivore is the complete opposite of what the food pyramid is, I already thought mainstream dogma about nutrition was crap, and that most doctors were pretty clueless. So I didn’t really listen to them when they told me I was pretty much up shits creek without a paddle. I knew I could heal, it was just an extremely tough uphill battle.

Of course, the so-called pandemic hits in early 2020, the world goes into lockdown, and is never the same. I think that whole thing really opened up a lot of people’s eyes, not only to the power that media, Pharma, and government have, but to the lengths that people will go to defend them. All for control and money, they were able to create a different reality that many people still live in. If they could do that now, what else have they done, or will they do going forward?

I eventually went to some other docs who I knew at least would have some semblance of an idea to help me. You know, functional medicine kind of doctors. I was extremely bought in, especially since they predictably also were low carb advocates. So I worked with them for a while, and actually finally did see some improvement.

In late 2020 I first got introduced to Ray Peat and Danny Roddy’s YouTube channel. Of course, these nut jobs saying that sugar is good, I’m not gonna listen to them…

Well, the functional medicine thing pretty much ran its course, and the little improvement I had made seemed to be slipping away. That was true misery.

I finally said, you know, screw all this. Nobody can help me but myself. To give myself a little credit, for how stupid I was, I at least had a foundation of knowledge in biology / biochem and nutrition. Enough to make the leap of faith and try to do it my own way. So I pretty much went all in on the bioenergetic principles, but this time it was different. I wasn’t just listening and doing, I felt like I was doing things that made sense, and actually piecing things together about myself, my past and the world around me. Slowly.

There were a lot of struggles along the way, but I’ve been healing ever since. I don’t want to say that I’m like 100% cured, because I look at health on a gradient, not as a binary. But I can say with confidence that I am healthier and more in control of my health and life than I ever could have dreamed of. I really do live a beautiful life now. And there were many points when I didn’t think that was possible. I could not be more grateful, even for my suffering.

So now the cat is out of the bag, I’m skeptical of everything because everything I was supposed to do only made things worse, the people who were supposed to help me didn’t. Only what is perceived as insane and crazy by the establishment actually worked. I went from the lowest low imaginable with no end in sight. I don’t want anyone to have to live through what I went through. I want people to know that they have been misled, and I want to know where else I have been misled. I want people to know that there is a way out, even if it’s not “my” way.

With a plethora of information available online, how do you discern what's factual and what's not? What's your research process like?

I don’t think there’s really any hard rule for this. I just think it is important to try to take everything into account, even information that doesn’t really fit with your current worldview. Everyone has an implicit bias to reject those ideas, but they’re the ideas that get you learning more. I’m far from perfect in that regard, but I always remind myself that “it has to all make sense.” I’ve never been one to believe in paradoxes, or believe that the so-called data or science can contradict what I observe in the real world. The two should complement each other. Far too often I hear the excuse, from both sides of “the science was wrong about this so I dont trust it,” or “the facts don’t care about your anecdote,” that kind of rhetoric. I just think it is unhelpful in trying to piece things together in a meaningful way.

I would say most of my learning is done just from thinking in my own time. I think of it similarly to working out. You go to the gym to stimulate the muscles, but you don’t actually grow until you leave the gym and recover. I will have sessions where I read for hours, but I will also have days where I don’t read at all and I just try to think about how things fit together in the world. Many of my “a-ha” moments come just on walks outside or driving. There’s something to the idea of “shower thoughts.” Information is one thing, but wisdom is really being able to make something of it. Not that I claim to have any wisdom, but at least I think that puts me in that direction.

I think it’s easy to get caught up in binary thoughts, i.e this good this bad, do this do that, etc., but I try to think of everything in the world as having some kind of purpose. Even things that we consider “bad” or that are likely contributors to problems for people, I try to theorize why it exists and how it could be beneficial in a certain instance.

I also think there’s a bit of a spiritual aspect. When you zoom out, many of our beliefs when it comes to science or health ultimately intersect a lot with philosophy, politics, and religion. Personally, I am a man of God, and I don’t believe that things just happen randomly, or that you should need to punish yourself to reap some kind of reward. I also don’t believe in these social media driven ideas of hierarchies. There’s God, and then there’s us. And I think having that belief system guides my thoughts on health and science, and vice versa.

Methylene Blue:

Methylene blue has been gaining attention in various health communities. For those unfamiliar, could you provide an overview of what it is and its primary uses?

It’s a fish tank cleaner. Lol. Joking aside, it was originally used as a clothing dye or stain for laboratories. It was pretty quickly found to have some potent anti-malaria effects, and some doctors in the late 1800s would inject grams of it into tumors of cancer patients with some pretty astonishing results. Since then, it’s been realized that its main action is by being redox active. That’s a bit of a hard term to understand, but essentially you can think of our energy production in the cells similarly to a wire or a bolt of lightning: they are simply flows of electrons. Methylene blue can be thought of somewhat analogous to a conductor in that sense, it can accept and pass on these electrons to keep the flow going. And I think in that sense it can be used for just about anything, since energy production is the fundamental living principle. It also has some key antimicrobial and hormonal effects, mainly inhibiting the signaling of nitric oxide.

There's a myriad of claims surrounding the benefits of methylene blue. From your research, what are the most evidence-backed uses of this compound?

I think it’s been best studied for low blood pressure, mainly in cases of infection or shock when nitric oxide gets very high. Malaria as well of course, and its direct antimicrobial effects. There’s also a condition called methemoglobinemia, basically when the iron in your blood needs an extra electron to carry oxygen properly, and methylene blue’s redox properties can reverse that. That said, the most study generally is just on its effects on cell respiration, or energy production using oxygen (the good kind, I would argue, lol).

On the flip side, are there any misconceptions or myths associated with methylene blue that you'd like to address?

Mainly the whole “it’s a dye” “it’s a fish tank cleaner” thing. It’s just silly. It’s a substance that has some clear therapeutic value. Any substance has multiple uses. I’ve never heard anyone say to not consume baking soda because it’s a baking ingredient. Or not to use vinegar to clean because it is food. And if people knew that things used in plastic, for cleaning, in paint products, in vaccines, in cosmetics, etc. just so happen to find their way into most of the things they eat on a daily basis, they probably wouldn’t have such a rudimentary criticism about something like methylene blue.

Chris Masterjohn also released an article, which is pay to see (so I haven’t read it quite yet). At least how he has marketed it, I was a bit disappointed with some of the scare/shock tactics he was using, even if his technical arguments have some validity. I’ve been a huge fan of his work for years now, and will always hear what he has to say. But maybe I took some personal offense to it, knowing the role we have played in making it a so-called fad.