Skribans Strength, Performance and Nutrition

Sunlight advice is usually reduced to one of two extremes.

Avoid it completely.
Or treat more sun as medicine.

The research supports neither.

A Swedish cohort followed 29,518 women for around 20 years.

Women who reported avoiding the sun had roughly twice the all-cause mortality rate of those with the most active sun-exposure habits.

That is a meaningful association.

But it does not prove that avoiding sunlight directly caused earlier death.

The study was observational and measured reported habits, not a controlled amount of daily sunlight.

Study: PMID: 24697969

A separate 2025 systematic review examined vitamin D and cancer outcomes.

Across the research reviewed, higher vitamin D levels were often associated with lower cancer incidence, less spread, or lower mortality in several cancers, including colon, re**al, breast, bladder, pancreatic, and kidney cancers.

The review also described possible biological pathways involving inflammation, immune activity, cell growth, cell signalling, cell differentiation, and programmed cell death.

That makes vitamin D biologically interesting.

It still does not prove that higher vitamin D prevents or treats cancer.

Study: PMID: 40732958

The honest conclusion is narrower than the viral claim.

These studies do not say:

More sun = less cancer.

They suggest that complete sun avoidance may not automatically be the healthiest position, and that vitamin D status may be relevant to cancer outcomes.

Sun exposure, vitamin D, and cancer are connected.

They are not the same thing.

That distinction is where the useful conversation begins.

Training hard was never the standard.
Training well was.

Before powerlifting, I was coached by one of the best track and field coaches around me. That set the first benchmark - not just for performance, but for how fit, athletic and capable I wanted to remain throughout my life, not just for one season.

Then I moved into powerlifting and was fortunate enough to work with a highly experienced, internationally recognised champion coach.

That raised the standard again.

It was never about who could push me hardest. Anyone can make someone suffer.

What mattered was intelligence, precision, understanding the individual, and having a proven ability to produce results across different people.

That approach helped me become a powerlifting champion early.

Later, I carried the same standard into bodybuilding and became a champion there too.

Since then, every mentor I have chosen has been judged the same way.

Not by how brutal they can make training look.

By how well they think, how well they adapt, and how consistently their methods produce results.

Hard training can make you tired.
Intelligent training makes you better.

Before your next session, ask yourself one question:
What exactly am I trying to improve today?

If you cannot answer that clearly, you are probably just exercising.

If you can, your training immediately becomes more intelligent.

The food going in is not the food coming out.

That sounds obvious until someone treats fermentation as nothing more than a way to stop cabbage from going rotten.

Microorganisms do not just preserve food.

They change it.

During fermentation, they can create or increase bioactive peptides, phytochemicals and compounds such as GABA in certain foods. They may also change nutrient availability and influence antioxidant or anti-inflammatory activity.

A review brought together 45 studies covering fermented dairy, soy, rice, kimchi, papaya, ginseng and medicinal fungi.

Across the research, the same signals kept appearing:
• better performance in memory tasks
• lower oxidative stress and inflammation
• changes in BDNF and other brain-signalling pathways
• less amyloid accumulation in some Alzheimer’s animal models
• fewer stress-related symptoms in one fermented-milk trial

That sounds impressive.

And this is usually where the internet removes all context and announces that yoghurt prevents dementia.

It does not.

Most of the work involved cultured cells, mice, rats and experimentally induced memory impairment. The foods, extracts and doses varied. Human research was limited, and the authors could not perform a meta-analysis.

So this is not proof that kimchi protects you from Alzheimer’s disease.

It does show something worth paying attention to:
Fermentation is not simply preservation.

It changes the chemistry of food and may create biological effects that the raw version does not produce in the same way.

Interesting biology.

Not a miracle.
Not a treatment.
Not an excuse to turn one review into a medical promise.

Stay tuned for more studies where the interesting result and the inconvenient limitations are kept in the same conversation.

Study: DOI: 10.3746/pnf.2016.21.4.297.

My superpower? Remaining the same. Whilst constantly changing.

We are constantly sold the idea that health and fitness is seasonal.

A six-week challenge. A crash diet. A transformation followed by a return to “normal life.”

I took that personally.

When I was a teenager, I did well at school and loved learning, yet once I started training seriously, some teachers told me I was wasting my time.

“Those muscles are only useful for digging holes. You could be a doctor.”

It never bothered me.

My dad had already taught me something more important:
“You only fail when you decide to quit.”

So in 2003, I made a commitment.

Not to “try.”
Not to see what happened.
Not to get in shape for summer.

I wanted to remain strong, fit and capable for as long as humanly possible.

More than two decades later, I am still strong, lean, active, learning daily, doing work I love, moving without chronic joint problems and maintaining excellent health markers.

But remaining the same does not mean doing the same things.
That is the part people miss.

Life changes. Your body changes. Responsibilities change.

So you adapt the training, nutrition, workload and priorities while staying loyal to the outcome.

You reassess.
You adjust.
You reset the course.

What you do not do is abandon the goal every time life gets complicated or another shiny strategy appears.

And when you stop trying to impress everyone else, it becomes much easier to decide what actually matters to you.

Then keep people around you who are wiser than you.

I have done that my entire life, from my parents to mentors I still learn from today.

What would you do differently if your goal was to stay at your best for the rest of your life?

Your next level will demand more from you. More strength, discipline, responsibility and effort. I do not work with people searching for shortcuts or effortless transformation. I work with people ready to stop protecting their weaknesses and become capable of a bigger life. Message me when you are ready to leave your current identity behind.

With "Dr" Fraudci dominating headlines about the extensive lies that were pushed to make the biggest experiment in the world even possible, let's have a look at why a study can be real, while the conclusion built around it is still wrong.

That is what is happening with the “post-jab stack” of nattokinase, curcumin, and bromelain.

A South Korean study (PMID: 41013858) of 8.4 million people reported higher one-year rates of several cancer diagnoses after COVID-19 vaccination.

That raised a question. It did not prove causation, test these supplements, or show that taking them changed the outcome.

Nattokinase was placed directly onto SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in cultured cells. Higher concentrations and longer exposure produced more breakdown.

Interesting laboratory biology.

But nobody swallowed it. No vaccinated participants were treated. No symptoms or health outcomes were measured.
PMID: 36080170

Curcumin reached a small human trial.

Thirty-one adults who had recovered from COVID and were later vaccinated received either 500 mg twice daily or a placebo for four weeks.

IL-6 and MCP-1 were lower in the curcumin group.

That supports a possible anti-inflammatory effect. It does not prove “detox,” spike removal, recovery, or protection from cancer, clots, or heart disease.
PMID: 37049389

Bromelain acted on spike protein, ACE2, and TMPRSS2 in cultured cells. Infection was also reduced under those laboratory conditions.

Again, an interesting mechanism.

Not a human post-vaccine treatment trial.

PMID: 33635001

The gap is simple:
These studies examined separate mechanisms.
They did not test all three supplements together.
They did not test a complete post-jab protocol.
They did not show that vaccinated people recovered better.

A long reference list does not rescue a conclusion that the studies never tested.
Keep this breakdown for the next time a protocol arrives already labelled “proven.”

Educational content only. Not personal medical advice.

不屈 - Fukutsu.

Indomitable.

Being underestimated, refusing to yield, and eventually becoming stronger than anyone expected.

Essentially, the story of my life.

When my friends and I first started training, I was the smallest and weakest in the group. That did not bother me - it excited me. I saw the gap between us not as a disadvantage, but as potential. A couple of years later, I was dominating powerlifting competitions.

That mindset did not stay in the gym.

I was not handed much easily. I worked long days, studied, helped at home, and did what needed to be done. There was no running water, and I remember tending cattle in winter under oil lamps at -30°C, wearing rabbit-skin boots that were, surprisingly, incredibly warm. We had to raise and take care of our own livestock that we needed for survival, and lived by the seasons. You learned to be useful because you had to. Life did not pause for discomfort.

None of it felt tragic. It was simply life.

And that is the point.

Now, I sometimes look at how comfortable life has become and wonder if we have lost perspective. We have instant food, warm homes, electricity, transport, information, and endless convenience, yet many people are overwhelmed by relatively small discomforts. Every craving needs a name, every low mood an explanation, every inconvenience a reason to stop.

Of course, real mental health issues exist. That is not the point. The point is the growing inability to distinguish suffering from discomfort.

There is freedom in remembering you do not need to feel perfect to act. You can be tired and still keep your word. Unmotivated and still train. Hungry and still make good decisions. Wanting something and still choose not to take it.

The story of Adam and Eve reflects this well: even in abundance, we fixate on what we lack. That is human nature. There will always be temptation, comparison, and excuse. The question is whether you control them, or they control you.

Life is not as harsh as we sometimes believe. For most of us, it is remarkably good - we have simply become poor at appreciating it.

不屈.

Not because life is suffering.

Because life is good, and you should be strong enough to live it.

Your attention span did not disappear overnight.

It adapted to what you repeatedly asked it to do.

Short-form feeds train a specific pattern:
Novelty.
Reward.
Swipe.
Repeat.

That is very different from reading, solving a problem, holding a conversation, or staying with one difficult task long enough to understand it.

A systematic review and meta-analysis combined 71 studies involving 98,299 participants.
Greater short-form video use was associated with poorer cognitive performance.

The strongest links involved attention and inhibitory control, which is your ability to stop impulses and resist distraction.

Mental health associations were weaker, but stress and anxiety showed the clearest links.

Study reference:
DOI: 10.1037/bul0000498

This does not prove that TikTok, Reels, or Shorts directly caused cognitive decline.

Most of the included research was cross-sectional. People already struggling with attention, anxiety, or self-control may also be more likely to use these platforms heavily.

But the pattern is consistent enough to deserve attention.

Treat information like food.
You can occasionally eat processed food without building your entire diet around it.
The same principle applies to content.

A better mental diet includes:
• Long-form reading
• Uninterrupted work
• Boredom without immediately reaching for a screen
• Sport, art, conversation, and real-world effort
• Creating before consuming

You do not need to reject technology.
You need to stop using it without rules.

The next time one short video turns into an hour, return to this and choose something that asks your brain to stay.

MSc in Sport and Exercise Nutrition (and a baby face from 2018).

I did not do this degree because I wanted another line in a bio.
I did it because I wanted to understand nutrition properly.

Not through Instagram posts.
Not through bodybuilding folklore.
Not through “this worked for me, so it must work for everyone.”

Through physiology, biochemistry, research, data, and actual critical thinking.

The useful part was never the certificate.

The useful part was learning how to read a study without getting carried away by the headline, how to question conclusions, and how to separate what is interesting from what is actually useful in practice.

That matters when you coach real people.
Because real people are not controlled studies.

They have jobs, children, stress, travel, poor sleep, injuries, deadlines, social lives, inconsistent motivation, and sometimes years of bad habits behind them.

The science gives you the framework.
Experience teaches you how to apply it without being an idiot.

That combination has shaped the way I coach ever since and why I don’t fall for “the next best thing”.

Study the subject properly.
Test what holds up in the real world.
Keep what works.
Drop what does not.
And never stop updating your understanding.