It's a Seed Oil. We'll Be Just Fine. (And Other Hot Takes)

Kacey adds sesame oil to her breakfast marinade and lives to tell the tale — and uses it to unpack her biggest hot take about the holistic and functional health world she's a proud part of.

The problem isn't that practitioners are bad. It's that too many of them take one thing — one protocol, one system, one villain food — and sell it like it's the whole answer. You do the aggressive gut protocol, you feel better for a while, and then you're told "that's the scope of what I do, go see someone else" for everything it didn't fix. Or you get a protocol with no foundation under it, feel great for six weeks, return to your real life, and end up right back where you started, blaming yourself.

In this one, Kacey makes the case that you don't have a gut problem or a hormone problem — you have a body, and it's one interconnected system that has to be prioritized, sequenced, and built on a foundation that holds after the protocol ends. Plus: a refreshingly honest moment about how she actually makes money in this field.

If you've ever done a protocol that half-worked and quietly wondered if you were the problem — you weren't. Listen in.

Loved it or want to argue with her? Find Kacey on Instagram. New episodes weekly.

• Follow on Instagram @simplyhealthywellness
• https://simplyhealthyintegrativewellness.com/

Transcript

[00:03] Kacey: This is simply Healthy Hormones, the podcast for women whose body stopped cooperating after 35 hormone help, minus the bullshit. I'm Casey Cain, integrative health practitioner, holistic nutritionist, and the person you call when your labs are normal but you're not.

[00:17] With multiple certifications in integrative health nutrition and a master's in psychology, I help high functioning women figure out what's actually going on in their bodies. And then I trust them to do something with it.

[00:27] No restrictive rules, no supplement spirals, no taking your coffee away.

[00:32] The real science of what's happening to you, explained like you're the smart, capable, grown ass woman you actually are. I'm glad you're here.

[00:43] The other day I was making dinner, I was marinating some tempeh, and I reached for the sesame oil and I had this little moment where I thought, you know what?

[00:50] I'm gonna post this on my stories.

[00:52] So I took a picture of the sesame oil going into the marinade and I put on my Instagram stories.

[00:57] I put the picture on my Instagram stories and the text on screens and something like, omg, it's a seed oil. And I'm about to put it in my tempeh marinade and guess what?

[01:07] We're going to be just fine. And I did a little winky kiss emoji. And you guys,

[01:12] the dms, the reactions, it lit up. I love, I love those of you who are following me on Instagram. You are my people and there's a reason why this happened.

[01:22] And there's a. I knew it was going to happen when I posted it. Because right now, in the wellness world, seed oils are public enemy number one. If you spend any time in this space online, you have been told that seed oils are inflammatory, that they're poisoning you, and that they're behind every modern disease possible,

[01:38] that you need to purge them from your kitchen immediately or you're basically asking for a chronic illness. And here I am, a hormone practitioner, an integrative health practitioner, someone who runs functional medicine labs for a living, casually adding sesame oil to my breakfast marinade for my tempeh and telling you,

[01:55] that will be fine.

[01:56] So today I want to talk about why I did that. Because that tiny little Instagram story is actually a perfect bite sized version of my biggest hot take about this entire industry.

[02:07] And it's a take that's going to ruffle some feathers, and it really shouldn't, but it's going to, including maybe some of the people I share a field with.

[02:16] And I have lots of other integrative health practitioners who I know and love, I've created friendships with over the years of attending conferences with them. And I respect their opinions as well.

[02:27] I know why they believe what they believe.

[02:30] I do believe, though, that I've dug just a little bit deeper in some ways than they have. And I hope maybe that I can be the one that helps change the space a bit.

[02:39] So let's get into it. Let's get into it. Here's the thing about the seed oil panic. Is there a real conversation to be had about industrial seed oils, about the quality of, of the fats in the standard American diet, about heavily ultra processed foods?

[02:54] Absolutely. Of course there is. But there's nuance there.

[02:58] There's a real discussion that needs to be had when we're talking about it. But what happened is what always happens in this space.

[03:05] Somebody took one thing, seed oils, and turned it into the thing, the villain, the single explanation, the one switch you flip to fix everything.

[03:16] And an entire content economy sprang up about being afraid of it, because that's what sells, because that's what works. And people who are shirtless in the grocery store get attention and millions of followers.

[03:29] And meanwhile, the woman panicking about the half teaspoon of sesame oil in her restaurant meal is not sleeping, she's chronically undereating, hasn't had a real period in eight months, is white knuckling her way through perimenopause, possibly, and is drinking three glasses of wine a night to come down from her job.

[03:46] But sure, the sesame oil is the problem. That,

[03:49] that right there is my hot take. It's the whole thing.

[03:53] So let me say it plainly. Let's, let's zoom out from the seed oils for a second.

[03:57] The biggest problem in the holistic and functional health space, alternative health space, whatever you want to call it, is not that the practitioners are bad. I think most of them are trying to do something good.

[04:09] We got into this space for a reason, because we were failed by the conventional space, or someone we love was failed by the conventional space in some way. It's that too many of us, though, take one thing,

[04:21] one protocol, one system, one villain, one fix, and sell it as if it's the whole freaking answer, as if it fixes everything.

[04:31] And it never is.

[04:33] Literally never. I feel confident saying never. I almost never say never because there's always nuance. But like, it is never just one thing because you don't have a gut problem, you don't have a hormone problem, you don't have an adrenal problem, you have a body.

[04:50] And a body is a whole network of systems. It has to be treated like one. Okay, now before anyone comes for me,

[04:59] and I know some of you might,

[05:01] because I'm about to critique my own field, let me be really clear about something. I mean, I have been critiquing my own field already, right? Let me be really clear.

[05:10] I am a proud member of the holistic and functional health world. I think this space on the whole is doing a hell of a lot better than conventional western medicine when it comes to chronic conditions.

[05:21] If you've got an acute emergency, you're in a car accident, you've got appendicitis, you break your leg, Western medicine will save your life. And I will be first in line singing its praises in those situations.

[05:32] It is a miracle of human achievement for acute care, but for the slow grinding multi system dysfunction that most of the women listening to this show, all of my clients that have ever come to me are dealing with the your labs are normal, but you feel like garbage situation.

[05:52] Conventional medicine is frankly not built for it. And it shows.

[05:57] The functional and holistic world stepped into that gap and has genuinely helped a lot of people that the conventional system completely failed.

[06:05] So I'm not here to trash my own field. Absolutely not. I'm here as someone inside it saying,

[06:10] we also have our own version of the problem and if we're honest about it, then we can get better.

[06:16] So let's be honest about it. Right? Let's be honest about it. So problem number one, here's the first piece of it.

[06:21] A lot of practitioners in this space have one specialty, one lens, one protocol that they're really good at, and that's fine. I'm, I'm not, I'm not mad about that. That's actually a good thing.

[06:32] I think specialists are a good thing. Depth is good. I'd rather someone be excellent at one thing than mediocre at 10. Right? The problem isn't the specialty. The problem is that when the specialty gets sold as the whole solution, when the gut person acts like the gut is the master key to every single symptom,

[06:53] when the hormone person only ever looks at sex hormones, when the adrenal person sees every problem as a cortisol problem,

[07:00] they're not wrong that their thing matters. They all do. It all does.

[07:05] They're wrong that their thing is the only thing. And here's the part that really, really gets me. A lot of the time the client doesn't know that the scope is narrow.

[07:17] Nobody told her up front. She came in with a whole List of symptoms. Fatigue, bloating, irregular cycles, anxiety, weight that won't move, brain fog. And the practitioner looked at that list and said, great,

[07:29] here's what I do. Go through this protocol and you're going to feel amazing. And she trusted that. Why wouldn't she?

[07:35] She assumed that if she walked in with 10 symptoms, the plan she was handed was meant to address the picture that she presented.

[07:43] Let me give you a real example. I've had more than one client come to me now after this exact scenario. So I'm going to blend them together for you to protect everyone's privacy.

[07:51] But I'm seeing it more and more.

[07:53] She came to me after already having worked with a holistic practitioner, naturopath before me, and she did a gut protocol with that person. Now, she didn't go in asking for a gut protocol.

[08:04] She went in with a whole list of complaints. But the practitioner's thing was gut. So the plan was gut aggressive, gut protocol, kill the pathogens, clear it out, the whole thing.

[08:15] And here's the kicker. She started to feel better. In some ways, genuinely, the gut work helped, because, of course, it did. Gut health matters enormously. I'm never going to say that.

[08:24] I work on gut health all the time with my clients, and it is often a first step. So she's thinking, okay, we're onto something. This is working.

[08:31] Then the protocol ends, and she's better in some ways, but still not in others. She's still tired, she's still not sleeping that well, her cycle is still a mess,

[08:41] and she goes back to the naturopath like, okay, what's next? What about all this other stuff? And the practitioner basically says, well, that's the scope of what I do. Like, that's.

[08:50] If. If this didn't work for you, then you didn't do it right. You're. You're the problem.

[08:56] And she's left standing there like, wait, I came to you with all of this. I thought we were fixing all of this. I spent months and thousands of dollars and a lot of hope,

[09:06] and now you're telling me your part is done and the rest isn't your problem? The clients who come to me after that experience, I feel terrible for them.

[09:15] And what they say they appreciate most when they talk with me is that I tell them up front,

[09:22] I'm going to walk you through all of this because I have the capability and the training to. I don't do one protocol and call it a day. I love being a generalist, honestly.

[09:32] And I am not mediocre at 10 things I am very good at being a generalist and being able to target exactly what you need in the order that you need it.

[09:41] I don't think the gut fixes everything or that hormones fix everything or that any single thing fixes everything.

[09:48] And I think that's a really powerful way for me to practice. It's not, though. Everybody does not have to practice that way.

[09:53] But you need to be clear about that. And I don't think we're doing a good job of that. I don't think every practitioner is doing a good job of that in the holistic health space.

[10:02] Problem number two, here's the second piece. And honestly, it might be the bigger one. Out of all these pieces, even when a protocol is the right protocol, even when the practitioner nailed the root cause,

[10:14] so many of them are handed over with no foundation underneath and no plan for what happens after that. Here's what I mean. So in this case,

[10:22] with this particular client I'm thinking of, she did the aggressive protocol, right? She felt better while she was on it, and then she finished it and went right back into her actual life.

[10:32] Very same, similar way of eating, same stress load, same lack of sleep, same inconsistency with exercise, same everything that contributed potentially to the problem in the first place.

[10:43] And surprise, a few months later, like, you're right back where you started, same symptoms creeping back in, and now you think, well, it didn't work.

[10:52] Or worse, you think, I'm the problem.

[10:55] I can't even maintain the results.

[10:57] And that's really hard for me as a practitioner when I'm on a call with you and trying to talk to you about how I'm going to be different.

[11:04] And it's hard for you to build trust in me when all I really have is my words and my proof from my client stories of how I do it differently.

[11:13] Like, it's a hard place to be. And I feel for the women that come to me in that situation. I feel for my clients when they are just looking for a solution and they've already been told that they might be the problem.

[11:26] You're not the problem.

[11:28] The protocol was built like a sprint. When your life is a marathon. Nobody built you a foundation. Nobody helped you change the daily patterns that might have gotten you here in the first place or perpetuated what got you here in the first place.

[11:41] Nobody taught you how to maintain the win.

[11:45] A protocol without a foundation is a vacation, not a new home. Right? You feel great while you're there, and then you fly back to your real life.

[11:53] This is the Piece that I am almost militant about with my clients and not almost. I am a militant about this with my clients. I am not interested in making you feel better for six weeks.

[12:03] And I don't have short programs because of that. My programs are all several months long. For that reason,

[12:10] I am interested in you building a foundation. The nutrition, the lifestyle, the stress piece, the sleep, the movement, the mental health piece that holds after the protocol ends so that we fix the thing and then you get to go live your actual life and keep the results.

[12:27] Because if I fix you and you relapse in four months. I didn't actually fix anything. I just rented you a feeling. So let's go back to the core of this.

[12:36] You have a body, right? I said that earlier in the episode. Not a collection of separate, isolated problems. A single interconnected system.

[12:44] Your gut affects your hormones. Your hormones affect your gut. Your stress physiology affects both. Your blood sugar affects your hormones, your sleep, your mood, your cravings, your energy,

[12:54] your minerals affect your thyroid affects your metabolism affects your weight affects your self image affects your stress affects your minerals.

[13:02] Are you seeing the point here?

[13:04] Are you getting it? It's all one loop. These systems do not operate in isolation. They are talking to each other constantly.

[13:12] And sometimes a lot of the time, it's genuinely a chicken or the egg situation.

[13:17] Did the gut dysfunction throw off the hormones? Or did the hormone shifts mess up the gut? Did the stress tank the minerals? Or did the mineral deficiency make you less resilient to stress?

[13:28] Sometimes you cannot fully untangle it. Sometimes my clients come to me and they have an aha moment. There is a situation, they're like, nope. I know that after this situation,

[13:37] my health dramatically changed. Right? Some clients come to me and, and, and they're describing what their first period was like as a teenager.

[13:45] And they have had some kind of dysfunction going on since day one.

[13:51] Sometimes you cannot fully untangle it, which is exactly why you have to look at the whole picture instead of betting everything on one piece.

[14:00] Now, and this is important so that I don't get misunderstood here on this episode.

[14:05] Looking at the whole picture does not mean doing everything at once. Hear me again, I'm going to say it a second time. Looking at the whole picture does not mean doing everything at once.

[14:18] That would be overwhelming.

[14:20] And I've seen clients get in those situations as well with other practitioners. And honestly, extremely counterproductive.

[14:25] There is an order of operations. There's a sequence. For example, generally speaking, you address live gut pathogens before you go after heavy metals because of how the body Handles each of those things.

[14:38] There are reasons you do things in a certain order. That's the clinical skill. That's my job, knowing the sequence. What I actually do from there is. Is help clients prioritize.

[14:48] I look at the whole system, I figure out what's driving what. I identify the order things need to happen in. And then I build the plan in phases. Because sometimes you can't start with the ideal order of operations, either because of what's going on in your life or because of how depleted your body is in that given moment.

[15:10] Right. So I build your plan out in phases. Phase one, phase two, phase three.

[15:15] So at no point are you drowning in 17 things,

[15:18] but over the course of our work together,

[15:20] we address all the pieces that matter in the right order for you,

[15:25] with a foundation underneath the whole thing. That is the difference. It's not I do everything and overwhelm you. It's not I do one thing and I abandon you. It's I see everything.

[15:36] I prioritize ruthlessly. And we build it in phases on a foundation that lasts. Now, I want to address something head on. Because if I'm going to sit here and critique my own industry,

[15:49] I'd be a hypocrite not to be transparent about my own. And I am a big believer in transparency. If you have followed me on Instagram, you know this. If you've been here since the beginning, you know this.

[15:58] I share things about my personal life as well. Not everything, but I share many things because I want to be transparent about what is going on and because they matter for you.

[16:07] Actually trusting me as a practitioner that can help you if I'm the right person for you. So, yes,

[16:13] I make money on the lab tests I run, and yes, I make money on some of the supplements I recommend because I've partnered with a supplement company and they incentivize me when I recognize their products.

[16:24] I'm telling you that directly because I think you deserve to know it and because the thing this industry does worst is pretend the economics don't exist.

[16:33] But here's the honest version. I partnered with that company because I was already using their formula.

[16:38] I tested them out before I partnered with them. And I've done this with many companies over the years. And there are other great companies, too.

[16:46] I really like this one because of the ease that it has built into their protocols. I really like their formulations, and their formulations really worked a lot better than I had seen.

[16:55] Even some of the other great companies,

[16:57] I trusted them before they ever paid me a cent.

[17:00] I didn't go shopping for a kickback and then convince myself the products were good.

[17:05] And that's where we can get into a lot of trouble with influencers these days, where they just get approached by companies and they start using something that maybe does make them feel a little bit better.

[17:15] I don't think they're lying about their experience, but they don't understand why and they don't know how long that's actually going to last. Right?

[17:23] So I didn't go shopping for a kickback and then convince myself the products were good. It was the other way around.

[17:28] And that partnership is part of how I'm able to keep my prices reasonable and offer a lot of free resources, like this entire podcast that I'm doing now without going broke doing it.

[17:37] And there will be more free resources coming out soon.

[17:41] So I'm not standing up here pretending I'm above the economics of this space. I'm in it. I make a living doing this. What I'm telling you is that there's a difference between recommending things you believe in and building your entire model around keeping someone dependent.

[17:55] And I'd rather just be honest with you about where the money comes from than pretend I'm some kind of saint floating above it. Right? Because, like, let's be real, I'm not.

[18:04] I'm absolutely not. And you're a grown ass adult. You can handle knowing how this works. It's not like you don't know how this works anyway, right? So, like, let's just be honest about where we stand with things.

[18:13] So if you're listening to this and you're recognizing your own story, the gut protocol that half worked, the supplement regimen, that didn't hold the practitioner whose one thing wasn't actually the whole thing for you.

[18:25] I want you to hear this part. You were not the problem. You did not fail those protocols. I will say this very often in these episodes, as many times as you need to hear it, until you believe it.

[18:34] You were handed a piece and told it was the whole thing. You were handed a sprint. When you needed a strategy, you were sold one room and told it was the whole house.

[18:44] Of course it didn't fully work. It was never built to. It's not a knock on you, and honestly, it's not even entirely a knock on those practitioners.

[18:52] Most of them mean well and most of them are genuinely good at their one thing. It's a knock on a pattern. A pattern of narrow scope sold as complete and protocols without foundation that runs through way too much of this space.

[19:06] As well, as the conventional space, honestly. And once you can see the pattern, you can stop blaming yourself and you can start looking for someone who sees the whole picture, prioritizes it intelligently, and builds you something that lasts.

[19:19] I want that for all of you. So here's what I want you to take from this episode. The next time someone in this space tells you that one thing is the answer to everything.

[19:28] One villain, food, one magic protocol, one system that fixes it all, I want a little alarm to go off in your head. I want you to think of me, I want you to hear my voice, and I want a little alarm to go off in your head.

[19:40] Not because they're a bad person.

[19:42] I don't think everyone is being malicious. I think some people know better. But I don't think everybody is a bad person.

[19:48] But because you have a body, and a body is a whole system. And anybody who tells you the whole system comes down to one thing is at best oversimplifying and at worst, about to sell you a sprint when you need a foundation.

[20:02] You don't have a gut problem. You don't have a hormone problem. You have a body that is speaking to you through these problems. And it deserves to be treated like the interconnected, complex, kind of miraculous system that it is by someone who will look at all of it, prioritize it,

[20:17] and build you something that holds after the protocol ends. And as for the sesame oil, it's going in the dang marinade. We're just gonna. We're gonna be just fine. We are gonna be just fine.

[20:27] If this one fired you up, I hope it did. I hope you did. You are my people. If it did, whether you're nodding along or maybe you're a little mad at me, it's okay.

[20:34] Stick around. I wanna hear about it. Come find me on Instagram and tell me genuinely. The ones who disagree are sometimes my favorite conversations, to be honest. If you're willing to be open and not just be a jerk about it,

[20:45] and if it gave you that exhale that oh, thank God it wasn't me feeling, send it to a friend. Send it to a friend, please, who needs to stop blaming herself for a protocol that was never going to fix everything or send it to a friend who is deathly afraid of some kind of food right now,

[21:00] this was a really fun one. I hope you enjoyed it, too.

[21:05] Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. If this episode did something for. For you, because let's be honest, it definitely did. The best thing you can do is follow the show so you never miss one and send it to a woman in your life who needs to hear this information.

[21:17] If you've got a minute, a review helps more women find this in a sea of wellness noise and come find me on Instagram. That's where I hang out between episodes and where you can tell me what you want me to nerd out about next.

[21:28] Until then, eat first, drink your coffee, and take care of yourself. I'll see you next time.