Root Causing Health

Root Causing Health is a joint venture between Nick Andre (twitter) and Nathan Owens (twitter) to further the state of the art on chronic disease research and hypothesis refinement.

Our goal is to figure out what causes heart disease and other chronic disease.

What causes heart disease?

Here’s our intro talk from Houston this past October:

If you’re interested in learning more, our Podcast episodes go into more detail:

Foundations 1: Failures of Mainstream Atherosclerosis Research

Foundations 2: The Critical Observations of Atherosclerosis

Foundations 3: The Endotoxemia Hypothesis of Atherogenesis (coming soon!)

Also see our podcast with Dave Feldman (new episode with Dave coming soon!).

The original podcast we did with Carnivore Cast is here. Good hour long overview.

Support Us

  • Patreon – any help defraying the cost of our research would be much appreciated — we’ve spent over $5500 as of 12/19, all personally funded. Patreon supporters get access to early releases of our content.
  • PayPal can be sent to Nick and Venmo address is @Nicholas-Andre — please mention the payment is for Root Causing Health so we can keep track. We have a private announcement email list for those who donate outside of Patreon to receive early access to new content and news.

Connect with Us

Research

Insulin Experiment: we’re looking into the insulin response on an ad-lib zero carb diet. This includes calculating the periodicity of insulin in those on a zero carb diet, in a fasting/fed state and several experiments to measure postprandial response. Here’s our initial data for the trial run (we’re going to rerun the experiment with an improved protocol before doing a formal write up). Here’s a demo of Nick’s self high frequency blood sample collection method.

Inflammation Experiments: to test our hypothesis and to work towards a diagnostic test for heart disease progression via inflammatory markers and endotoxins. We’re working with a professional lab for research testing as well as running ELISAs in our kitchen (here’s a video of our running a high sensitivity human Insulin ELISA).

Some of our stuff:

About Nick

Nick is a software engineer at Google in Seattle, WA. He likes bacon and hates the pluricausality hypothesis of chronic disease. Other hobbies include walking the puppy, taking pictures of things, and drinking low carb-approved alcoholic beverages. In his own words:

To understand how I got here, you have to understand the experience of gaining weight as a child and having to reconcile this idea that weight gain stemmed from exclusively moral failings. Try as I might, I was never able to attain fitness using the conventional paradigm.

Trying the ketogenic diet was a life changing experience, and ever since I’ve attained fitness and health through it I’ve sought to spread the word and give back to the community.

My key area of focus has been a frustration with lack of good quality information and a cohesive hypothesis around heart disease, myocardial infarction, and atherogenesis which can explain all the observations.

I met Nathan at Low Carb Seattle in 2019 and he has been an invaluable partner in digging into this area.

–Nick, recently

About Nathan

Nathan is a site reliability engineer at Netflix and also lives in Seattle, WA. He majored in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

I counted calories for a long time without achieving any meaningful results, and eventually tried 16:8 intermittent fasting. I stumbled upon something saying that fasting puts the body into ketosis – I was thinking, “hey, I’ve heard of that Keto thing, I thought it was nonsense”. Hours of lectures on YouTube and many PubMed papers later, I was cutting down the carbs and going Keto. Eventually I had some labs done, and my LDL cholesterol was through the roof, luckily I was expecting this thanks to the work of Dave Feldman. I wasn’t very satisfied with the existing hypotheses about the cause of CVD.

I met Nick and Low Carb Seattle, and he had some crazy interesting things to say about heart disease and whatnot, and we’ve had a great time digging into this and setting up a small biochem lab in my kitchen.

–Nathan, recently

How did you get started?

Nick began with high quality pathology (Velican in particular) and has worked through the pathology bit by bit.

Nathan has helped a lot to make connections on the immune side of the equation to explain

Together we’re:

  1. Maintaining a list of the observations about heart disease that a cohesive hypothesis must explain
  2. Identifying and refining hypotheses that explain those observations