Channel Introduction and House Rules

Details

We are getting a great community together - thank you for joining me as I maneuver through this crazy path of managing food sensitivities. I wanted to make a proper channel welcome and set a few house rules, just so we're all on the same page. This also covers a finance plan - which I think is important for understanding motives and what a person might be selling (or not selling) you. I'm looking at a sustainable way to continue to fund the mission without any conflicts of interest.

 

 

Topics covered:

  • Welcome to the channel! 0:00
  • Who am I, what are my credentials? 1:43
  • Channel Purpose: 4:56
  • Channel Rules: 7:47
    • Be nice and courteous to others
    • No black and white mentality
    • No foods are evil
      • I'm a big fan of the proverb "everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial". Sometimes, the low-sal and food sensitivities diet wears you down to the point of only finding what is permissible. It's ok to be there for a while. It's part of the journey, and as you come out of this hole, you will start to be able to finesse your diet and find out what is actually beneficial. Using fear tactics in the community saying everything is going to cause cancer, is not ok.
    • Assume that everyone probably has a different tolerance level than you, and they may have a different sensitivity profile than you
    • Assume we're united by symptoms not cause. Symptom= salicylate sensitivity (not the reactions)
    • We cannot assume one "cure" will work for all
    • I will rarely provide information for cures or treatments, besides reducing or avoiding salicylates (unless backed by medical associations or peer-reviewed research)
  • How the mission is funded and conflicts of interest (or lack of): 19:44
    • My channel will always remain not sponsored, if I choose to feature a product, it's because I've used it and probably like it - OR someone recommended it.
    • Once approved for YouTube monetization, I hope to make some money off the ads. YouTube doesn't promote channels that aren't monetized. In my situation, I am not monetized (Dec 2021) and they are still playing ads on my videos anyway.
    • You can support me through a contribution through Buy me a Decaf Coffee (processed PayPal or Stripe)
    • Buying through the Amazon Affiliate links on videos and through the directory, supports me (about 1% of total purchases, US only) and costs you nothing.
    • Funds coming in, go to support the basic functioning of the site like hosting, plugins, paid-projects, and then for my time to film and manage this project.
      • After bills are paid, half will go toward more development on the site or maybe food testing someday!! I'm still looking for a lab to do testing.
      • The other half will go to pay off that shiny Biology degree's student loans.

Thanks for watching and being apart of the channel community!

 

 

Transcript

Provided for visual learners, improved accessibility, and for translating the page

00:00

Hi, everyone, welcome to low-sal-life. My name is Sarah Verlinde-Azofeifa. And on this channel we talk about salicylate sensitivity and basically the research and also how to manage or live with salicylate sensitivity. So it’s a little bit of a weird thing. And there's not a lot of information on it. And so that's why I'm here to help you through your journey. And also, you helped me through my journey too which is so wonderful to know other people that are in the same boat as you. So in today's video, I'm just going to introduce four concepts of what is basically, who I am, and why I am a subject matter expert, and why you should believe me. The second thing that we'll talk about is what is the purpose of the channel? Third thing we'll talk about is what are the channel rules? Yes, when you get, you know, 1000 people or more gathered together, you can always expect a little bit of chaos. So we've got some rules. And then the fourth thing we're going to talk about is how, if, and why I make money through this platform and how those expenses are done. So every year, I plan on doing like a monetization fiscal transparency thing. Just like everything, any good projects, you have to have a business plan, whether you're nonprofit or for profit. And so we're going to talk about that just so that you guys can understand what my purpose is. And that also should support the reason why you can believe or trust the information that I'm putting out. So it's kind of the whole package. I feel like it's very important. Let's start off with number one who I am. My name is Sarah, I live in Washington state in the United States. And I have probably had salicylate sensitivity my entire life. If you look through my health, history, it is pretty spotty in a lot of different places. I've got a couple of videos, there is one my journey. Something about “my journey, why I stopped eating fruits and vegetables”, it's kind of lengthy, I call it my public service announcement somehow is one of my most popular videos, I don't even know. But that kind of gives you an idea of everything that I've been through. So you can watch that video, it'll be linked in the description, not in the comments in the description. So you can check that out. I had been diagnosed I guess my journey really is everything that I’m not diagnosed with and then I came across salicylate sensitivity on my own and have therefore confirmed it also with my doctor and so we're all good between the two of us. So that's - I'll say I've been diagnosed with salicylate sensitivity now for four or five years, which has been amazing, best thing ever. The second best thing for food and things ever -making me sick is, I also am really sensitive to folic acid. So it was something I discovered a few years ago too, before salicylate sensitivity. Yeah, during that process. I've always been really interested in biology. I did get a biology degree, graduated in 2015 and a Bachelor of Science. I focus mostly in botany. And oddly enough, I'm researching willows, Salicaceae, which happened to be, you know, salicylates. Salicaceae. Well, salicylates are named from willow. Anyway, it's a long story. But what do you do? You know, people study Ebola, I'm just studying plants. Okay. So with that, I do have a really good understanding of how to study and read research. I am not currently working on a Masters or PhD or anything like that, and not doing any active research besides my botany projects, so with that I know how to read original research articles. I think that there's a really big distinction between research as in reading other people's research and actually doing experiments. We can talk about that some

 

04:06

other day, all of that to say is I've got a pretty good understanding of how to read and understand research and think about it. But I am not a researcher on salicylates. And I'm also not a doctor nor a dietician, or nutritionist, or anybody in the health medical profession. And ultimately, the only reason why I could be considered an expert is that this is just me and my life. And I have to deal with this and what are the things that I learned that make my life easier so that I can eat food and go places without you know getting really sick from other people's fragrances and things like that? So that is that that is my credentials.

So the next thing we're going to talk about is what is the purpose of the channel so my biggest reason for building this channel is so that other people can learn about salicylate sensitivity that there can be a following that people can be like, Oh, I also heard about this as a food intolerance. So maybe you can try that, since everything else you've tried hasn't worked. So really my thing is I want people to understand and be educated about salicylates sensitivity. And that is for a couple of people want is for the sick people that need to learn about it to, you know, for the people that know that they have it, how they can manage and also understand it, and what can they learn about it from, you know, tiering up, you know, you learn about what list works for you. And then you learn about, like, what are the pathways? And what is it all? And is there salicylates in wildfire smoke or in trees or things like that. So, for the people, also having really good resources for doctors and researchers so that if there's ever a time that they want to kind of bone up and see like a full, you know, close to dissertation of information, they can go to my site and find all that information. And also, I try and write comments about why I like an article or I didn't like an article. And so I can start helping others with that process.

The second reason for this channel and group and website is I want to build a community, it's been great already just kind of getting to know some of the people who are constantly on social media or publishing content, whether it's in a Facebook group, or their Instagram, I really enjoy learning beside you and trying to figure out problems and trying to make things better to explain. And you guys send me research articles, so I can put them on the website. And you guys tell me about what products work or don't work for you. And other people can come and read those comments, like, it's a really great idea. If we have a bigger community, you know, like some of the, the Facebook groups have like 7000- 8000 people, a lot of them are watchers, right? And just kind of learning about this, the whole system, right? But, you know, if we can get a big community, then we could, you know, essentially, have a good pool of people that if a researcher wants to, you know, start some clinical trials, or if a nonprofit starts, that there's a community for an audience or community. So that is one other reason to have this group here and be really great to be able to make those connections a lot faster than, you know, sending out a random email to dozens of doctors everywhere, all over the world. You know, like, it's just crazy. So trying to build up a community. 

Alright, and so now we're talking about the rules of the channel. So I've got a couple of things that you're going to learn about me. And that is, and I think a lot of this just has to do with how I was trained as a biologist, even in taxonomy, we say, you know, this, these animals have eyes, generally, but and there's always an exception for every category, like every exam, you can be like, Okay, this is the rule, except for in these cases. I am not a black and white person, I understand things as more like gradations. Right? So, it's really, really the way that I think about things. Okay, so with that, one of obviously, my first rule is, you know, be nice to other people, and you know, me and, you know, just be courteous and polite. Alright, moving on. Number two, number two is that I am never going to call a food evil, you might have your reasons for thinking that a food is off limits. But if everybody comes into contact with food or an ingredient, for different reasons, so all you folks that think that seed oils are evil, and there shouldn't be even on my list, because they're gonna cause heart disease or something else in the future.

09:08

You know, that's fine. I think that there should be education around that. But there if a person can't consume anything, except for seed oils, they should consume seed oils, like they're going to die of malnutrition, or lack of calories before they're going to ever get to heart disease. Right? So I'm just saying anything, seed oils, soy, dairy, gluten, everybody has their own thing. So, you know, the most important thing and some people are so sick from this [salicylate] condition is, first of all, get your calories. Second of all, stop the reactions. Third, then you can kind of finesse and decide what works in your diet or what doesn't. Like I, I prefer to eat mostly animal products, I could be vegan and do low-sal, I think it would be really hard and I don't encourage it. But if that aligns with your ethics - do that. But I know that if I eat too many carbs in a day, that you know, I have too much fiber that I don't feel very good with that, but that doesn't mean in my mind that carbs are evil, because some people do really well with them. So again, gradation, I can assume that, you know, people that there's going to be variation. And also with the seed oils, ah, I like to use canola oil for my massage oil, if ever go and get a massage. So it's like the best one, right, I'm not going to put coconut oil on my skin, obviously. But let's say I do think ingesting seed oils is still bad for me, that doesn't mean that you can't use it in your cosmetics or, you know, to clean a pair of rubber boots or to put oil on your skin, there's still uses for those ingredients, even though it might not be ideal to eat it. So just a couple of things. No food is evil on my list. Unless it's a carcinogen, like pretty high up there and banned, then I'm going to probably say no, I want to go back to the not black and white thing. So this is also a biology idea, there is an idea of populations, like histograms. So you know, you have variation in population where, you know, average heights for humans can range from like 4’10” to 6’6” or whatever. And then you're gonna have like a peak in the middle where like the majority of people sit, and then you have people on the edges, right? You're not going to come across a lot of seven foot people, but they exist. So just because you've got people on the fringes, you know, that's something to think about. So

12:05

just want you to kind of think about that, even though things might seem black and white to you, that doesn't mean that it is on the back-end for systems, for example, blue eyes, you know, people call it a mutation, it's just a variation, right, essentially. But basically, on the front end, it looks like a black and white on and off switch, do you have blue eyes or dark eyes, right. So in reality, the back end like it has to do with how much protein you actually have. And you can have a varying amount of protein. And once you hit a threshold, then you can have dark eyes. So on the back end, there's actually this gradation of pigment, in order to turn on the thing. So from our point of view, it looks like an on off system. But from the back end, it's actually a gradation. So just something to think about. And you know, how systems work in biology and black and white and good or evil and all that stuff. Okay, this is another rule number three, everybody has different conditions that may contribute to salicylate sensitivity. So this is a two part set of rules. One is, I have a really hard time because like, for me, I am mostly only salicylate sensitive. I don't have a problem with amines, I don't have any other intolerances that I know of, besides the folic acid B vitamin issue, and then also a set list of allergies, which include dust mites and feathers, grasses, things like that. So when I come to the table, I say I'm so sensitive with these other conditions and I have my dystonia too, which is kind of a big deal. So other people will say, Well, I can't eat that. And you know, and it's okay, but do you have amine sensitivity? You know, that's really helpful if you write in the comments like I have amine sensitivity AND salicylate sensitivity, so I'm going to so and I can't consume this that way. If somebody only has salicylate sensitivity, they can be like “I think that might have an amine in it so I'm going to try it out anyway”. So something to think about caffeine is a good example of that. So the combination is interesting because so closely and amines you know you have certain restrictions associated with allergies, salicylates with fragrance sensitivity. Like my husband's really fragrant sensitive, chemicals sensitive, like there are times when I'm like, “Oh that doesn't bother me” like acetone and paint fragrances, exhaust from a car. He doesn't have any salicylate problems, but he has these interesting fragrance sensitivities, or chemical sensitivities, but I don't have them. So, you know, imagine if I had both of those, like, I'm going to be even more sensitive, right? So that's just something to think about that. You know, we're humans, we got a lot of different problems going on. So that's another reason why saying like this is evil or like, I can't use that. That's not very helpful. It'd be more helpful if you said, “I can't use that and I have salicylate sensitivity and fragrance sensitivity” or something like that. So number four is assume that we are united by symptom. I'm gonna say that again, assume that we're united by symptom, not by cause. We don't know what causes it. I can't even say it's salicylate sensitivity. We don't know what causes it. Right? We have theories, ideas, pathways, all that stuff. But really, until the American Medical Association says, Yeah, this is the condition. And this is what the cause is, like we don't know what causes it. I think that, and this is what I've observed from having muscular dystonia. It's really hard to get a condition diagnosis for something that can be

16:07

kind of categorized by symptoms, because we don't always know what are the causes. So it gets a little bit harder to unify it as one condition. So with dystonia, you can have the same symptoms sometimes in different places, sometimes with different like, spasm types. But ultimately, sometimes it's, you know, a DNA problem number one, sometimes it's a DNA problem number two, sometimes it's just from injury. Sometimes it's just because your body doesn't work that great. Sometimes, it's just in your head. Right. So there's five different reasons right there that causes dystonia, which is the symptom, right? We're just describing the problem. Salicylate sensitivity is the same way. It's really interesting when, you know, I've done a few like, meet and greets online. All the different people that come out, because some people only have muscular pain from salicylates, and some people have histamine reactions. Some people are using it for a treatment because they have some type of blood or anemia, and the thinning of their blood makes them bleed more. So there are all of these different reasons to both do a salicylate sensitive diet, or that could be causing it, I think, and so we should assume that we're not all 

coming to the community with the same cause. Okay, and that leads me to my next rule. Number five, I want to be really hesitant to offer any kind of cure or treatment for salicylates sensitivity, I am happy to recommend ideas or say people have said this, or this is the research article everybody's talking about, like eating Cayenne for, you know, reducing your reactions, because it worked in rats, okay, so I'm going to be really hesitant about offering any cure or treatment, which is another reason why you should really, you know, kind of listen to me, because I'm not here to sell you anything, I don't, I don't have anything to sell, I don't have a treatment, I don't have a pill, I don't, I'm not going to recommend, we'll talk about it. But I'm going to be really hesitant to recommend that you go and stock up on glycine or iron or vitamin B's or you know, whatever, cayenne pepper, whatever it is, I'm going to be hesitant to recommend. So the second part of that is remember, I am not a doctor, nor a dietitian or nutritionist

18:40

nor a biochem expert. And so with that, I'm going to be even more hesitant to offer treatments. I have a really big problem with this if you can't tell. But yeah, I'm not going to do that. And even if I were, let's say I am a doctor, let's say I go back to med school and you know, come back as a doctor, not going to happen. But let's just say, Even still, I'm not YOUR doctor, or YOUR nutritionist or YOUR dietician, you need to talk about treatments with your doctor who knows all of you. Again, because many of us have several different problems or maybe several different sensitivities. You really, you really need to talk to your doctor. I know it's really hard to find one who won't think you're crazy, who probably who won't think that's in your head. And that's the reason this website is getting built out. You can give them some references or send them a video link or something. And so that that's that's the goal.

Alright. The last part that we're talking about is monetization and fiscal transparency. Now I'm only including this because not for profit, hobby or business, you need a financial plan and my time is valuable. And so this is just a little portion I just I wanted to include somewhere. Because I think that it's important that we, as a community do fund the mission like, I can do this for free. And that's fine. And I am essentially doing that right now, but you know, we got it, we got to talk about some things. The first thing is, you can support the cause, by basically, watching the videos, subscribing on YouTube, it just tells YouTube that you like me by commenting in the bottom, you know, even if you just give a thumbs up, or just say, Hey, thanks, or I appreciate it or something like that, that's helpful. That tells YouTube, that people are finding value in this and that they should recommend it to others. So that's all good. Also, by commenting, you are also encouraging other people to learn more about the topic. So that's also really helpful. Speaking of YouTube, after, after you get to a certain amount of people 1000 subscribers, and then so many watched hours, you can actually monetize your videos. So what that means is that an ad will play before the video. If it's a really long one, maybe a couple in between, in between, that's nice, because then it compensates me for my time. You know, that will be really nice when I get there. I'm obviously a small channel now. But I do want to say that even if I turn that off, once I get to that point, YouTube actually won't share my videos anymore, because they're not interested in sharing videos that don't have ads on them. Right? So even if I wanted to be completely income free, revenue free from that, then I would get punished and fewer people would learn about salicylate sensitivity. So that's kind of a buzzkill. The second thing is that YouTube is already monetizing my videos, you probably got to watch an ad for this at least the more popular videos, every once in a while, I'll go back in just to see like, Oh, I wonder what I said here, or, you know, look for something, and my video will play and have to watch an ad. And that's really discouraging on my end. 

Because I'm not making money off of that, YouTube to making money off of my effort! So that's really annoying. So just let you know, if you see ads on videos, it doesn't mean that the contributor is actually getting paid. And even if I hit the 1000 person-mark, I've done so few videos this year that I I got to work on my watch time hours, so you'll be seeing more content from me in the future. Okay, so there are two ways to directly support me, monetarily. And that is one shopping from my directory, I have a directory of products. So if you're in the United States, you can, let's say you need to go buy toothpaste, and you know, it's on my website. Or if you're shopping for toothpaste, you want to see like what the options are, you can go and click on you know, find, find the item and then click on the Amazon link. And that will take you to Amazon, it doesn't cost you anything. But I do get like a 1% commission on it for recruiting people to buy off of Amazon. Right now, I don't have any other affiliate marketing setup someday I might do Etsy, or eBay, like some of those might seem reasonable. But right now I don't have that setup.  Another way -

23:31

anything that you order off of Amazon still supports me. So if you're going to buy some Christmas shopping or you know, do some back to school shopping, or vacation shopping or something like that, and you know, you're going to spend like, you know, $300 or whatever, go and click on that toothpaste link, go and go do your Amazon shopping after that. And you know, that will still support me. So that's, that's really nice. Another way that you can help contribute to my channel is off my website, there's a link for Buy Me a Coffee. And I think maybe off the YouTube link, I mean decaf coffee, and that I have set up PayPal and Stripe on there and off of there, you can make a direct contribution to me, and I greatly appreciate it. So thank you, if you've already done this, I do appreciate it. And it always makes my day. The other thing about monetization. And this is another thing about the ethics of my channel. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I really don't have anything to sell, like I don't have any supplements for you to buy. I won't do sponsorships. So you don't have to worry about that. I'm not going to advertise to you other products, everything is free of monetization that way. I don't have anything to sell. I'm not a dietician or nutritionist, traditionalist or holistic doctor or anything that's trying to get recruit new patients and do consultations or anything like that. Like it's just it's really free to-you-content. And I just want that to be very clear, so that you know where I'm coming from, and then also that you consider what other people or how other people are providing information to you. And if that information is truly free, just throwing that out there.

Okay. And then I do want to talk about when money comes in and how that is kind of split up. So one is, the cost covers website costs, so that, you know, website website maintenance, hosting a couple hundred dollars. Second goes to my time, so I tend to update the website, and then also make the YouTube videos generally, it's about 8 to 12 hours a week job if you're seeing me post content regularly. So I'm trying to figure out ways that I can, you know, reduce the amount of time I do video editing, or figuring out how I could increase Instagram posts, things like that. So it's kind of a hard balance when I work full time, and also cover the cost of products reviewed. So if there's a new toothpaste, well, I'm fine using my chocolate fluoride toothpaste, every single day, maybe my viewers might be interested, there's another toothpaste available. So I will go and buy that, of course, that's a little bit different, because I need toothpaste anyway. So that's a bad example. But let's say I want to review maple candy, I don't need maple candy, or you know, some kind of gum or something. So if I buy those products, where I wouldn't normally buy it for myself, so that I can say yes is a good product.

No, it's not a good product. That's what those types of costs recover. Okay, and then basically, after that, all those, all those bills recovered, then basically, it's going to be a 50/50 split between saving for activities to do as a community. I have contacted several labs, I have yet to have an answer. But I would love to pay as a community pay for food testing, private food testing, cosmetic testing, anything like that, send it in, verify that Cleure shampoo really is salicylate, free, right? How did they - How did they do that? Like, I want to know which lab they're using. So I can call them and ask them as well to independently verify, right? That would be amazing. So 50% of any proceeds will go toward that. And then the other 50% will go toward my student loans to pay off that beautiful shiny biology degree that yeah, I'm currently not really using for my daytime job. But at least it's useful here. So Oh, yeah, and I also out of that chunk of back into low-sal-life also pay for web developers or content editors to help beef up new programs on the website, like the recipe section is a little bit on the skimpy side. It's about as big as my food list is available foods to eat. So that is another type of project I would like to reinvest in, I don't have time to do it, but maybe somebody I can pay somebody to do it. So all that welcome to my channel. Thanks for hanging out until the end. Sorry, it's so long. I don't know how to do it any other way. If only I could pay an editor to you know, condense these down. I hope you enjoyed it.

28:24

And I hope that this kind of gives you an idea of like the ethics and how and why I'm running this channel. So with that, I'm going to publish this and then I'm going to do an informative video right after this. You'll see this shirt again because I am double dipping on this holiday weekend. Alright, that's all for now. If you like this, give it a thumbs up. You know what to do? Find me on Instagram or Facebook Instagram is way easier for me to manage and also go check out the website low-sal-life.com I will see you later. Go binge watch a whole bunch of videos. If you haven't watched any. Leave some comments down below. You know the drill!