Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - “DO YOUR RESEARCH!!” and Other Dangerous Conspiracy Wellness Tropes are Destroying our Mental Health with Dr. Jonathan Stea

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

In today’s episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, I will be chatting with clinical psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Stea, author of the book “Mind the Science: Saving your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry”. We will be discussing the damage of mental health medication stigma (aka “pill shaming”) including my own experience being pill shamed online. We will chat about the risks of rejecting psychiatry in favor of grifty holistic wellness alternatives, especially when they feed into conspiracy theories. We will be debunking common anti science tropes and phrases “do your own research” or “find the root cause”. And I'm going to close off with some discussion on healthism and how it causes harm to all people, but especially those in less privileged positions.References:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317611181_The_effect_of_self-compassion_on_the_selfCheck in with today’s amazing guest: Dr. Jonathan Stea, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary and author of Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry.Follow @dr_jonathan_steawww.jonathanstea.comhttps://jonathanstea.substack.comBook: https://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Science-Saving-Wellness-Industry/dp/1039008232Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider.If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. 🥤 Check out my 2-in-1 Plant Based Probiotic Protein Powder, neue theory at www.neuetheory.com or @neuetheoryDon’t forget to Please subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review! It really helps us out. ✉️ SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTERS ⤵️Neue Theory newsletterAbbey's Kitchen newsletter 🥞 FREE HUNGER CRUSHING COMBO™ E-BOOK! 💪🏼 FREE PROTEIN 101 E-BOOK! 📱 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchenTikTok: @abbeyskitchenYouTube: @AbbeysKitchen My blog, Abbey’s Kitchen www.abbeyskitchen.comMy book, The Mindful Glow Cookbook affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NoHtvf If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review with your thoughts and let me know who you want me to discuss next!

But the phrase or the adage or the trope that food is medicine, it's become hijacked by the wellness industry and that all the medicine and mainstream mental health care is not medicine and it's wrong. That's really what it's become. Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. We're officially in the armpit of the calendar, aka February, at least for us Canadians because it is brutally cold and I just do not want to leave my house. But if you're in hibernation mode as well, today's episode definitely offers a lot of

amazing entertainment and education. My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Stea, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary. He's also the author of the new book, Mind the Science, Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry, which promises to provide a science-backed takedown of pseudoscience and to expose

the mental health misinformation that pervades healthcare, pop culture, social media, and you guessed it, the wellness industry. Today, Jonathan and I are gonna be talking about medication stigma, including my own experience being pill shamed online. We're going to be talking about holistic wellness alternatives and their risks, especially when it feeds into conspiracy against evidence-based care.

We're also going to be debunking common anti-science tropes and phrases like do your own research or find the root cause. And I'm going to be closing off with some discussion on Hellfism and how it causes harm. This is such a fascinating discussion you do not want to miss. A quick reminder that the information in this episode is for entertainment and educational purposes only and is never a replacement for personalized health care. Also, I would love if you would follow or subscribe to the podcast and leave me a review.

As a new podcast, it really, really does help Thank you for having me. I'm very excited. So, you know, you work in mental health. I'm a dietitian. I work in nutrition. We're obviously both committed to evidence-based practice and debunking misinformation online. And I feel like one of the areas that I see our professions overlap is in wellness culture's false narrative that health is a moral value. So can you speak to what this means and how it's baked into so much of the pseudoscience and quackery that has just become so pervasive online? Absolutely. I think that that moralization of health or treating health as a moral virtue is very detrimental. It's detrimental to people's health

and to their mental health. It actually has a long history too. It's been around in the wellness industry for over a century. It's this idea that if we just eat right and exercise well and just kind of take care of our body, then we are somehow morally virtuous in doing that. And the converse or the opposite of that is that people that don't do that for a variety of reasons,

it's a moral vice, so to speak, it's wrong, and that those people are to blame for their health conditions and their mental health conditions. And I think that's a very dangerous route because, it's a dangerous route and it's a dangerous rhetoric because people can internalize those beliefs when they hear those ideas baked in the wellness culture and that can result in a lot of internalized shame for people and then that just perpetuates an even worse cycle of worsening mental health and health conditions and the the the scientific reality is that obviously self-care behaviors like eating well

and exercising are foundational to evidence-based practice. The problem is that in the wellness industry, we're hearing it pitched as a cure-all for all health conditions at the neglect of other treatments and at the neglect of other reasons that people have health conditions. So they downplay the role of genetics, they downplay the role of social factors and just plain old bad luck in a lot of cases. Access to health care, environmental influences. Yeah, totally oversimplifies the complexity of health, which we know is like, doesn't really help anyone beyond, you know, those

who have, you know, so to speak, individual control over what their health outcomes may be. And even still, we know that that's, you know, that's just a falsehood. That's just this belief that we have control by eating clean, quote unquote, clean or exercising every day. You know, it gives people this this sense of control of something that may be very much uncontrollable, especially when we kind of factor in all of those those kind of factors there. But you're right, I think, you know, you know, I always often on my platform, I talk a lot about the dangers of very specific misinformed wellness advice like saying that celery juice is going to

cure psoriasis or the carnivore diet is going to cure IBS or whatever. But you're right, the danger is more in just that one little lie. It's the compounding of all of those lies and all the falsehoods that build this conspiracy around evidence-based care. And that's where the real danger lies. So I think that's, you know, it's a hard fight that we're fighting here. It really is. There's a fellow science communicator, she's a family physician in Canada,

her name is Michelle Cohen, and I just love how she puts it, and she's written about kind of the history of the wellness industry. She basically said there's a huge difference between lifestyle counseling and pitching lifestyle counseling as a cure-all. So the former makes you a healthcare professional, the latter makes you a grifter. And that's what we see in the wellness industry and that's what has the rich history.

It's pitching, eating well, exercise et cetera, as the cure-all. And it's more than that, as you said, because it's situated in a narrative or an ideology that basically pitches wellness against mainstream medicine. And that's where a lot of the harm derives. Of course, yeah. No, and on the topic of kind of health being a moral virtue and something that we are fully in control of, you know, I have this experience firsthand myself on my own mental health journey. You know, I have

been, folks who've been watching my channel know I've been very open about my mental health struggles and my diagnosis. I have ADHD and an anxiety disorder. I've had insomnia. I had an E-disorder in my younger years. And I've been very open about how medication has literally saved my life. And in response, there was a very big creator who was promoting an animal-based diet who came out in a video, essentially pill-shaming me and insinuating that I'm clearly not a very good dietitian because if I had just like quote unquote done the work and cured my disorders quote unquote naturally, then I wouldn't have to take the quote unquote easy way out with drugs.

So where did this whole pill shaming anti-psychiatry movement even start? Well first I'm sorry to hear that because you know your experience is not unique either unfortunately and that's the reality is that these pill shaming ideas and this sort of hostility to psychiatry and the mental health professions is again sort of it's baked into the wellness industry and it does have this kind of long history in the wellness industry and then also in the anti-psychiatry movement and yeah for people that are less familiar with the anti-psychiatry movement. And yeah, for people that are less familiar with the anti-psychiatry movement, I'll give them maybe a little brief background on it. I mean, it basically has its

origins in the 1960s or so. It was pioneered by disgruntled psychologists and psychiatrists at the time. Thomas Sasse was one of its pioneers. R.D. Lang was an intellectual pillar. David Cooper coined the term anti-psychiatry in 1967, which is after the movement already began. And initially the movement was actually warranted. It was a pushback against psychiatry's various missteps because psychiatry has a dark past and we need to be transparent and acknowledge that there is the inhumane treatment in asylum care with patients, there is inappropriate pathologizing of minority groups, and there was this sort of

perceived arbitrariness of mental disorder, so what does a mental illness mean, etc. And so essentially the anti-psychiatry movement was a pushback against that stuff. The good news is that it worked because by the time the 1980s rolled around, psychiatry got its act together so to speak and it became a more scientific discipline and a more humane discipline. It closed a lot of those asylum cares. It shifted patient care from those asylums to the community and regular hospitals.

And the science of psychopathology or mental disorders and mental illness became a much more broader focus on the psychological contributions to mental illness, the social contributions and the biology, which is what we call now our biopsychosocial model. So that's a really great, a great thing. The problem, though, is that the while the anti-psychiatry movement diminished by the 1980s, it didn't die. It just kind of transformed and outlived its cause, so to speak.

And now the way that we see it is kind of like, you know, like the the story that you kind of shared. We see it tropes, which are repeated themes and ideas baked into our culture. We see it online and social media. We see it with guys like Andrew Tate, who are parroting some of these tropes by saying to hundreds and millions of followers that something like depression doesn't exist and that only lazy people experience depression. We see it with people like Elon Musk tweeting to hundreds and millions of people

that SSRIs, which are antidepressant medications, are more harmful than helpful. And the problem with that is that when you're tweeting such misinformation to so many people and it's amplified and recycled, it capitalizes on one of the psychological phenomenons that kind of speaks to how our brains work, which is called the illusory truth effect, which just means the more times that we hear and we see false information, the more likely we are to believe that information because our brains aren't very good at differentiating the truth from familiarity. And so yeah, there's a long history to this anti-psychiatry stuff

and super, super unfortunate that it shows up in pill shaming because the ultimate result is that it can deter treatment seeking and compromise patient care. And that's what we're trying to rally against. Absolutely. I mean, it definitely held me back for many years from from getting the care that I actually needed and now of course looking back I'm like oh my gosh like my life could have been so much better had I just you know not listened to those charlatans and listened to the the grifters who were pushing this nature's fallacy and that's actually's actually something that's come up a lot

in the podcast, which is clearly so central to a lot of the lies told by wellness culture. And it seems to be central to this kind of pill shaming situation as well, where people are saying medication is synthetic, must be bad, food is natural. And so the form is bad, the latter is good. You're lazier lacking willpower if you just pop pills and take the easy way out. But doing things the quote, unquote natural

way is just so morally charged and we see it literally everywhere. We just have to think about how natural birth advocates talk about epidurals or inductions. And the message is always that you're a morally, you know, inferior mom if you, you know, if you take the epidural, but you're superior as a mom if you go through a 30 hour labor without any drugs. But you know, these pressures do real harms for a lot of people, especially women. Absolutely. And that appeal to nature fallacy is, you're right, it's sort of, it's baked into the wellness industry and it's, and that's why we see alternative medicine kind of grifters parrot anti-psychiatry tropes and then kind of pitch alternative medicine ideology because that's how they're able to sell their pseudo-scientific treatments or their diet detoxes, et cetera. The fact of the matter is, is that argument, the appeal to nature fallacy is a fallacy. It basically argues what is natural is good,

which is when you take just three seconds to think about that, it's absurd because, you know, arsenic is natural. Like there's lots of bad things, poison ivy. Like, so the problem is the way in which those messages are marketed and sold to us. And it does capitalize on again, sort of a heuristic, you know, it's appealing to us. We think that things are natural, are therefore better, but it's quite literally a fallacy.

It just doesn't work. Totally. And actually this reminds me of the very popular adage, food is medicine, which I'm sure you hear and I hear it so much. And I often will push back and I will tell people, I don't like that phrase. And I, and I get a lot of like, hate for that because people are saying, what kind of dietician doesn't believe in the power of food to heal? But I would love to hear why you think that phrase can be so problematic. I agree with you. and most of the the vast

majority of the registered dietitians that I speak to also hate that phrase, the ones who are actually practicing evidence-based care. The reason for that is that it's not the words themselves that are inherently wrong because obviously as we've talked about eating well, sleeping well, exercising, those basic self-care behaviors are foundational to evidence-based practice. But the phrase or the adage or the trope that of food is medicine is more than just its words. It's a symbol. It's become hijacked by the wellness industry to signal not only is food medicine, but that our food is medicine

and that all the medicine in mainstream mental healthcare is not medicine and it's wrong. That's really what it's become to symbolize because that's where you're gonna hear it. You're gonna hear it parroted on the Instagram reels of wellness influencers or alternative medicine practitioners that are essentially selling you some sort of diet that is likely unsupported for the treatment of a health condition.

And so it's really just a shorthand phrase to package an ideology and a message. And in short, it's propaganda. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, from my perspective as a dietitian, I also see that this can create a lot of shame and a lot of guilt around food, which will in turn increase the risk of eating disorders like orthorexia, right? When you know, this obsession with clean eating, righteous eating, if you're thinking about

food in medicinal terms, that every single bite has to have some kind of healing property, it really does set you up for a disordered relationship with food. But there's another one that really irks me that I hear a lot, which is do your own research. What's the deal on that? Good God. So that phrase we've really seen, you know, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's

essentially the same thing with the food is medicine. It's a propaganda piece or it's a trope, which is a repeated idea or theme or a meme. So basically, there's nothing wrong with the words do your own research because we want people to actually obviously do their own research. The problem is that the phrase has come to symbolize much more than do your own research. The problem is that it implies that that someone needs to do their own research because mainstream medicine doesn't know what they're doing and that mainstream public health doesn't know what they're doing and that if you do your own research on what is quite often fringe websites or fringe sources that are dodging scientific critique, then you will

find the truth that they don't want you to know. And so it's sort of a gateway into kind of conspiracy theory thinking and just pseudo scientific ideas. So that's what it's really come to symbolize. Yeah, no. And you know, one thing I often point out when I hear, you know, content creators use that phrase is that like, the lay person is not equipped to understand or break down research, not to mention if you

want to find quote unquote evidence that say like, I don't know, like dairy causes depression or whatever, I'm sure you could find it on a fringe blog making that claim. Like you could find quote unquote evidence of anything as, as outlandish as it may be. So I think oftentimes when I see that response in the comment section or in some of these videos, I think it's a cop-out on their part for creators posting misinformation. But it's a very dangerous cop-out at that. But also you're right, it's a signaling,

it really is that kind of gateway into that conspiracy rabbit hole that it really kind of leads people down the wrong path. It is. It's that, and I agree with you totally. It's sort of an invitation to confirmation bias. It basically starts with a conclusion. It wants us to reason backwards from that just to confirm whatever preconceived notions

we already have. Right, totally. Okay, one more anti-science trope because this one's never going to die to me. But talk to me about this pervasive idea that, quote, mainstream health care doesn't get to the root cause or, you know, we don't treat the whole person, whole system, etc. That one probably drives me the most bonkers out of all of these because it's the one that I happen to see the most. I think that if anyone Googles sort of a local alternative medicine clinic website, they will see that trope or that idea repeated or on your wellness grifters website or Instagram page.

The reason, and that's just one of many alternative medicine tropes that are used to kind of cajole or dupe audiences and as part of that narrative, the reason that it's so infuriating, so to speak, is that again, there's nothing wrong with the idea that we want to treat root causes to help health conditions. Mainstream medicine and evidence-based care does that all the time. That's what scientists are trying to figure out. That's what we're trying to do. The implication in that trope is that mainstream medicine doesn't do that. We only mask the symptoms and that your alternative medicine practitioner actually addresses

the root cause. But when you dig deeper, what you see is that the root cause that they're purporting to treat is often a false root cause or it's a pseudoscientific root cause. For example, you need to unblock your energy blockages to treat depression because the root cause is that your energy is blocked or you need to address the root cause of a particular diet deficiency that you didn't know that you had and that is unsupported in the literature. So by our diet protocol and that will actually treat the root cause. Again, a pseudoscientific approach.

Right. And usually they're selling some kind of intolerance test, which we have ample evidence is bullshit and it doesn't actually tell you what you are intolerant to. So it all feeds into the same issue. And at the end of the day, people are not actually getting evidence based care. They're typically, they're actually getting pushed farther away from getting, you know, evidence based care. So it's definitely toxic. It's scary. It's very scary, you know, and I see it all the time. And what's so scary is when I get messages from young, you know, 13, 14 year old girls who are buying into these kinds of this

kind of rhetoric and pseudoscience. And I think, oh my God, and this is what social media has done. Without social media, of course, young people wouldn't be exposed to this kind of problematic content so early. But because it is so easy to, through virality, through content virality, to make a sensationalized extreme statement, get it to go viral, and everybody just kind of accepts it as truth. It's like an echo chamber. And the more you see it, like you said, like the more you see it, the more you believe that it can be nothing but the truth. It's dangerous.

Exactly. It so is. And I can speak to that a bit because there's a small research literature on that. There was a relatively recent study that came out that looked at the most viral videos about ADHD on TikTok. And what this study did is it analyzed the content of those viral videos. And it basically found that about half of the content of these videos that offered advice or information was misleading. That's half. But worrisome is that these videos were viewed over a million times. So it has a lot of reach. Similarly, I'm really grateful to a fantastic research team who invited me onto one of their studies. And we did a similar study where we looked at the top viral videos or the top, um, 1000 videos on Tik TOK with the hashtag mental health.

So if you just had a hashtag mental health, top 1000 in a specific timeframe, it was October, 2021, and we analyze the content of those videos. And we found that about a third of those videos were misleading. But what blows my mind about that is that these videos were viewed over a billion times. A billion, like I can't even wrap my head around that number. So that just shows again how pervasive and rampant this misinformation can spread.

And again, when you go back to this illusory truth effect idea where if we see and hear repeated false information, we're more likely to believe it. That's very concerning. Oh yeah. And you know, that whole kind of mainstream healthcare doesn't get to the root cause thing. I feel like that, you know, like we've mentioned, very easily teeters into conspiracy theory territory. And you know, I often see in comment sections in my videos things like, oh, dieticians and doctors just want to keep you sick and fat by suppressing the real research and evidence that they can keep their job

and make more money off prescriptions and these drugs give you side effects so that they can give you more drugs and you can make more money. What is your response to this growing, you know, pervasive narrative that like we're all just trying to game everybody to make more money by making them more sick. It's terrible. It's another one of those tropes or ideas that have become part of the alternative medicine or wellness narrative.

And the concerning part is that it needs that narrative. It needs to be polarizing and divisive because that's how it sells its products and services. It needs to say, it needs to create an us versus them narrative, mainstream medicine is bad, we're good, and we have the solutions and it's very dangerous. And of course, again, when anyone actually tries to critically think about these tropes,

you can dismantle them easily. I mean, you know, yeah, the idea that mainstream medicine is all about profit, obviously big pharma is a problem that we, you know, that has a history of conflicts of interest and corrupt research, etc. But they take that kernel of truth and again, blow it up to say that they somehow have the solution. The solution to big pharma is more transparency, more competent science and just kind of holding people accountable. But if you actually want to follow the money, so to speak, which is another one of the tropes

that they have, no one follows their money, which is the wellness industry, which is a 5.6 trillion dollar industry. And so in the same breath, when someone is saying, don't trust doctors and dietitians who are selling you products, they're selling you a product, but their product has no evidence behind it. It's often pseudoscientific. For sure. For sure. Yeah, no, it is the wild, wild west. And, you know, like I also try to like hold some empathy for folks who feel like so strongly

against traditional healthcare that they can get themselves to buy into these conspiracy theories for whatever reason. But, you know, it is very, very hard to try to convince folks out of that. I don't know if you've had much success when they've gone to that point, but it's hard. It's really hard. And again, there's a small literature on misinformation and how to correct it. We know that debunking misinformation, which is what you and I try to do and other wonderful science communicators try to do, we know that it can work on a population level, so when when the general, the audience of a science communicator is the general

public. It's not the ideologically possessed, so to speak, which is, which are the people that unfortunately fall down the rabbit holes and really, really buy into the conspiracies and at some point even start to incorporate those pseudoscientific beliefs or conspiracy theories into their identity, so they really buy into the conspiracies and at some point even start to incorporate those pseudoscientific beliefs or conspiracy theories into their identity. So they become active participants in the anti vaccine movement or the anti psychiatry movement or the wellness industry, etc. Those people can be much harder to reach. It's not impossible, but certainly much more difficult. And yeah, it's sad when those people are, unfortunately, given a mic, and they have the skills and the charisma to amplify their messaging and influence a lot of

people, because that's also what inevitably perpetuates these narratives. Totally. Yeah, and I want to quickly talk about, you know, your book for a second, Mind the Science, which I love, love, love, I've learned so much. It's fascinating. And you've got like great information in the back just to really kind of like give some people some helpful tools for navigating this wild world of misinformation. But in the book, you talk about how even smart people can easily be duped into these tropes and quackery because

the default setting of our brain is to like think in cognitive biases. And I've had to catch myself going down rabbit holes, especially at more vulnerable times in my life like pregnancy or like when I was really struggling with insomnia. Can you talk a little bit about that and those cognitive biases that we operate in, which is what makes it so easy for people to fall victim? Yeah, I appreciate your kind words by the way on the book, but you're right. I mean, and they're like, like we mentioned, we all have our brains that are kind of wired to

fall for misinformation. And quite honestly, it's a bit worse than that. And I don't want to be pessimistic about it. But there's good reasons why lots of people, smart people, myself, my family, you, people in your family, everyone is susceptible to misinformation. And there's lots of different factors that are interacting. Cognitive biases are certainly part of it, but there's more than that. There's personality traits that kind of lead people to fall for misinformation.

There's relying on different thinking styles, like when people think more intuitively or effortlessly and just kind of go with their gut and use their intuition while evaluating information, we know that that's more likely to result in people falling for misinformation. So there's lots of factors that are going on and it's not any one factor that does it. It's sort of the interaction of these things. That's just on the individual level where all of us are more or less likely to fall for misinformation due to internal reasons. Then there's also the social reasons which we've talked about the algorithms

of social media are biased meaning or our feeds just kind of target us with misinformation by going for sexy headlines and emotion-laden videos and things that are devoid of nuance and scientific complexity. So there's that's operating. And then of course we have the what I call the bad actors, so to speak, which are the grifters that are actually targeting people. So you're whether it's your individual Instagram influencer or larger body of organizations like the Children's Health Defense, which is RFK Junior's anti-vaccine vehicle. So all of these things are kind of

contributing. And yeah, our cognitive biases are certainly one aspect that play a role. And then we can imagine that that's situated in this social context and our personality context and our history of experiences, like mentioned with the health care system. So all of these things are kind of interacting and I think that as you kind of mentioned an important message that I try to make in the book and I think that you and I agree on is that we don't want to fault or blame people for falling for misinformation and for turning to alternative medicine because everyone experiences health problems and mental health problems at some point in their life or they're at least touched by it and so it's absurd

to blame people because well because we're all human on one level and the other reason is that mainstream medicine is imperfect we don't fully understand the nature of psychopathology and mental disorders we don't fully understand understand, you know, nutrition and mental illness. And there are gaps in our health care systems and not everyone has access to evidence-based care. Some people are mistreated in mainstream medicine and that is all very valid. Those are gaps in our health care system and the gaps in our knowledge and the gaps in our health care system signal a call to get our act together So to speak to have more competent care quality care ethical care and at the same time those gaps don't signal exploitation and emotional exploitation and financial exploitation

By pitching wellness and pseudoscience as the solution to the gaps in our healthcare system And that's I think what we are rally system. And that's, I think, what we are rallying against. And that's what I try to do in my book is to just try to help people be more skeptical so that they can protect themselves from that wellness grift, so to speak. Totally. Yeah, no. And I think your book does an amazing job at setting people up for success on being skeptical, being critical, asking questions. It's really great. How do we, as evidence-based healthcare providers providers steer people away from misinformation without

losing them to that trope that we are just suppressing the real evidence or worse, that we can't be trusted because we're puppets for big food or big pharma or government, et cetera. I mean, I think what you just said about acknowledging that the current healthcare system is flawed and we hold empathy for folks who have been burned by by their health care providers who have not gone adequate care who have not gone timely care. Is there anything else that that you recommend to kind of steer people away from that misinformation? Yeah it's

a super complex topic I mean in part that was the impetus or reason I tried to write my book is because it was hard to do that in the role of clinician, which is my day job. And so I did try to, you know, do it in another avenue by trying to teach people the language of pseudoscientific griff, so to speak. But at the level of the individual healthcare practitioner, I think what you said kind of nails it. It's the solution to gaps in our healthcare system is to offer quality care and to be transparent and to be honest during informed consent procedures and to give good quality care and to hear people and to validate their experiences and to co-explore people's treatment plans together.

That's our best bet because that in part is why people turn to alternative medicine because part of our gaps in our healthcare systems is that they don't get enough time and they don't feel seen and heard by mainstream healthcare professionals and that is a flaw of our system and we can all do better in that and so it's no wonder someone would you know turn away they don't feel heard at a five to 10 minute family physician appointment. Instead, you can go see a, you know, an energy healer and spend an hour talking about your problems. And it doesn't really matter whether the energy healing treatment works or not. Those people are actually feeling seen and heard. So we can do a better job at doing that.

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true and absolutely should be a greater emphasis in education and training for healthcare providers as well across the board. One thing I try to do as a science communicator is not just to immediately dismiss a claim that we see online as bullshit and just move on because, and trust me, it's very hard not to just do that sometimes when I see something so outlandish. I'm just like, fuck no, that's BS. Don't even think about that again. But rather, I try to understand the kernel of truth and kind of that I'm acknowledging why it may make sense that there is some kind of belief system around this, but the evidence says

A, B, and C, or the dose makes the poison, or the actual clinical effect would be insignificant, etc. And I do think that kind of acknowledging the kernel of truth rather than just dismissing it, it does help communicate that we're on the same truth-seeking team here. And I'm just kind of adding to that conversation rather than just like shutting it down. I think that's brilliant. I mean, that's an excellent strategy. It's in part the opposite of what the wellness industry does

because what the wellness industry does is it sets up what we call straw man fallacies, which basically is the weakest form of an argument that you can make for something and then so that it becomes easily defeated. So for example, big pharma is corrupt. Yes, there's a kernel of truth in that, but then they create a straw man fallacy and say all of mainstream medicine is corrupt and bad and every healthcare practitioner is bad. We have the solutions. That is a very powerful strategy because it gets people to buy into their products and services But it's not the honest one and so the approach that you're offering is the opposite which is the steel man approach

Which is to present the other side so to speak and its most in its strongest way to acknowledge that sliver or that kernel of truth and then to provide the evidence of why their argument fails I love that steel man. I'm gonna just their argument fails. I love that, steel man. I'm gonna just start using that. I'm a steel man. Exactly. My kids will think that's really cool, like a robot. Good guess.

Well, thank you so much for joining me, Jonathan. This was so enlightening. And the book, Mind the Science, is phenomenal. So congratulations. I thoroughly enjoyed it, learned so much. And obviously I'm gonna be linking to it in the show notes below. So thank. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Learned so much. And obviously I'm going to be linking to it in the show notes below. So thank you again for joining me. That means so much to me. This is so much fun. Thank you. I loved this conversation and I saw so many overlaps in the discussions that Dr. Stea and I seem to be consistently having online.

Now, I mean, him defending the existence of a legitimate condition like ADHD or depression is arguably even more critical than me debunking the use of like celery juice for a healthy metal detox, but a lot of these arguments centre on this pervasive belief that our health outcomes are 100% within our control. We are solely responsible for our health. This is what we call healthism, or a belief system

that places an overemphasis on individual health and lifestyle choices as markers of moral worth, success, or value. It assumes that poor health is entirely the result of poor choices, completely dismissing the role of other important factors like genetics, poverty, stress, access to healthcare, trauma, discrimination, and so much more. If we fall sick, it is because something that we have done wrong. And now, not only is our body bad, but we as people are bad. Sick and fat people are often seen as lazy, undisciplined, or irresponsible. And that's in juxtaposition with quote unquote healthy people who are seen as virtuous, disciplined,

or morally superior. Healthism also disproportionately harms and excludes marginalized groups. So yes, of course, it is not financially accessible for folks with lower socioeconomic status who don't have the time or money to go to like a Barry's boot camp or hop on that clean carnivore diet. But in my experience as a dietitian, I actually hear and see it most aggressively directed at larger-bodied folks.

You just have to look at the comment section of any larger body person who's eating something as banal as like a sandwich to see the vitriol this narrative spreads. Comments like quote-unquote you're killing yourself or quote do you want to die are unfortunately all too common. Now I want to be clear that I'm not saying that obese people are helpless or lack free will to buy a head of kale instead of a cheeseburger. But the quote-unquote choices that healthism often promotes cost money. They require health literacy, time off work, or physical access in close proximity to nutritious food. And it's these barriers that can potentially contribute to what is often called an

obesogenic environment that makes gaining weight easy and losing weight hard. Especially when we bake in the 40 to 70% genetic component of obesity. Even if you're not operating in the extremes of the healthiest movement, like making TikToks, shaming and blaming women for their mental health disorders, you probably do or at least have participated in its spread. Healthism is so pervasive that we likely don't even notice all of the teeny tiny inconspicuous ways that we perpetuate it. But when we know better, we can help to shift the narrative. And I wanna give you guys some ways

that it might be sneaking into your vernacular and some ideas to start that shift. Number one, instead of saying quote unquote, I'm so bad when you order an ice cream or skip a workout, offer yourself some kindness and compassion and acknowledge the self-care inherent in your choice. Maybe your body needed a rest day to recover from yesterday's workout, or maybe you ordered the ice cream because it brought you joy.

Eating ice cream just makes you human, like not morally inept. Number two, instead of demonizing specific foods or groups of foods as bad or junk or toxins, consider that unless you're eating something that you're like legit allergic to, or as rotten, or as actual poison, food is just food. And foods might not be nutritionally equal, but we can make them morally equal. At the end of the day, all foods possess some kind of perk, even if it's just sparking joy. Three, instead of dichotomizing meals or foods as quote cheats versus quote clean,

where both of these words carry heavy, heavy moralizing weight, think about them as foods that you choose to nourish your body and foods that you choose to nourish your soul and foods that you choose to nourish your soul and bring you pleasure. Stop comparing like having pizza with infidelity. Like it is literally just a little dough, sauce and cheese.

Finally, stop talking about having to quote earn a meal or forbidden food by restricting, exercise or doing something that you otherwise see as punishing. This is obviously a very disordered way of thinking about how you nourish yourself. I mean, at the end of the day, food is a human right. So treating your body like a slave or prisoner is never going to be an act of self-care. Bottom line, if you wouldn't chastise yourself

as lazy or incompetent or unmotivated for being born in a specific town or to specific parents, try to be a bit more compassionate with yourself about the health hurdles that you might face, whether that is depression or diabetes. Exercising body kindness and self-compassion doesn't mean not making efforts to change or improve your circumstances.

In fact, according to a review at the literature, self-compassion interventions can have a profound effect on changing physical health behaviours like physical activity, smoking and overeating while also supporting emotional and psychological wellbeing. Sure, you might be able to like, bully yourself into reaching a goal with punitive tactics, but at what cost? And for how long could you possibly keep that up? We as humans don't like to be punished.

So I cannot imagine that that would last very long. Approaching your goals with a kind mindset is really the win-win. And that is all for today's episode. A big thank you again to Dr. Jonathan Staya for joining me to bite back against anti-science rhetoric online. And again, I highly recommend his book, Mind the Science, which again, I will leave a link to in the show notes below. If you enjoyed the show, I would love love love love love if you would leave me a review and share it with your friends. It really really helps to get the word out. But signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thank you so much for listening.