Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - After 2 Years of Interviewing Health Experts, Here’s What I Actually Believe

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Nicotine, IVF, and... WikiFeet? Yea. I'm talking about it 🦶🏻It's been 2 years since the beginning of Culture Apothecary and a LOT has changed. MAHA made it in the White House, I got married to the love of my life, and I've been able to speak to SO MANY amazing guests (some of which have now become good friends). I've also changed my mind about a LOT of things... Let us know what you think about this solo format & if Lobotomy Hour needs a formal REVIVAL 🧠 Comment "SHOUTOUT DOM" if you want to see more UNHINGED content like this!Thank you to our sponsors!GEVITI: Use code "ALEX" to get 20% off of your first purchaseNATURAL SLOTH: Use code ALEX for 15% OFFTECH WELLNESS: Use code "ALEX" for 15% off EMF-Free Air Tube Headphones, Faraday Bags, and EMF Protection PacksJOOVV: Get an exclusive discount on your first red light therapy orderZEBRA: Use code "ALEX" for 10% off any orderPRIMA: Use code "ALEXCLARK20" for 20% off a one-time purchaseFOLLOW ALEX:Real Alex Clark InstagramCulture Apothecary's InstagramReal Alex Clark YouTubeAlex's FacebookAlex's XAlex's Apple Podcasts🌿 Subscribe to the Culture Apothecary WEBSITE/NEWSLETTERJoin the Cuteservatives Facebook group to connect with like minded friends who love America and all things health and wellness!New episodes drop 6pm PST/ 9pm EST every Monday and Thursday.DISCLAIMER: This content is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always talk to a qualified healthcare professional for any health-related questions or decisions.

I have now interviewed enough health experts and read enough books to confidently report that nobody agrees on anything. No readout yet if the air is breathable. And there seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere. Hello! Oh, yeah! Ah! Get morning sun, but also, the sun is aging you. Take supplements.

Actually, most supplements are expensive urine. Watch your cholesterol. Actually, cholesterol is essential. And the number your doctor is dramatically circling may not tell you, nearly as much as you think. Avoid toxins, but don't become so obsessed with toxins that you start hyperventilating because someone handed you a polyester napkin. Eat more plants. Plants are trying to kill you. Eat more meat. Meat's trying to kill you. Apparently breakfast is either the most important meal of the day or an elaborate sci-op invented by Kellogg's to keep you from beaten

off. And I could keep going. For the past two years, I have sat across from doctors, researchers, scientist, practitioners, authors, farmers, mothers, fathers, patients, and several people who have made me suspicious of objects that I previously considered completely innocent. My mattress, my sunscreen, my leggings, my receipt from Whole Foods, okay? Nothing is safe anymore, not even the paper proving that you bought the unsafe thing. There are things I believe two years ago that I no longer believe. There are things that I barely thought about two years ago that I now consider incredibly important. There are things that guests told me that sounded completely insane, and then three pub med rabbit holes later, I was whispering, oh no, to myself at one o'clock in the

morning. And then there are subjects where, you know, after multiple interviews, several books and dozens of hours of research, I am somehow more confused than what I started. That is why, today, for the first time, there is no expert sitting across for me. It's just me, a microphone, my stinky feet. Woo! Careful. Free feet. Don't give wiki feet.

Free feet. Have you ever seen a foot with four toes? And strongly held opinions as well as the lingering possibility that this episode ends with all of us needing a medically induced coma.

But before I tell you what all of these experts have changed my mind about, I need to tell you why this episode feels emotional for me. Over the life of this show, we have received thousands of messages from listeners describing what happened

after an episode gave them a new question to ask, a different doctor to seek out, a habit to reconsider, or just the courage to believe that feeling terrible did not have to become their permanent identity. I have heard from women who struggled with infertility for years and later wrote to tell me that they were pregnant. Families who completely changed the way that they ate and lived, people who lost 50, 100, even hundreds of pounds, listeners who were able to come off medications that they once assumed they would have to be on forever. And men who listen because their wives sent them one episode and said, you have to listen to this, only to become the most intense person in the family about ingredient labels. We got him, ladies. Ladies and gentlemen, we got

him. One minute, he's drinking blue Gatorade without a care in the world. The next, he's standing in Costco, holding a bag of granola like it contains classified documents. What is Maltejecturing, Jessica? Welcome to the resistance, sir. These messages never get old. All of us, reclaiming our health and freedom together. And I am profoundly humbled that something said in this room may have become one useful piece of someone's story. And none of that is because I possess some secret vault of health wisdom. You are about to hear ample evidence that I do not. Despite what hater comments on YouTube might say, it is because remarkable people have sat in this chair. Doctors, scientists, researchers, mothers, patients, farmers, authors and practitioners.

who were willing to share what they had learned, sometimes after decades of work and sometimes after surviving something that completely rearrange their lives. I ask the questions, they bring the wisdom, you carry what is useful into your homes, that is the chain. I think of myself as a conduit in that chain.

I have been given this strange, beautiful opportunity to sit between people who know something valuable and families who desperately need to hear it. And I never want to become casual about that. I never want to treat your trust like a, download number or your testimony like marketing copy. When you tell me this show, you know, whatever blank episode helped my family, I feel grateful and honestly a little terrified in the healthiest possible way because it reminds me that words spoken in this room travel into

real kitchens, real marriages, real doctor's offices, and real decisions. And that means that myself and this team, we've got a responsibility to stay curious and ask better questions, admit uncertainty, and correct ourselves when we get something wrong. That is what we are about here. We bring the voices together. We make complicated ideas understandable and we laugh because otherwise the state of American health will make us chew through drywall, which is probably healthier than 99% of what's in Walmart right now. And then we just carry what we learn back to the people we love. So to every guest who has trusted me to come on this show, thank you. To every listener who has trusted us with the story, thank you.

And to everyone inside this growing, curious, occasionally unhinged little apothecary, what we are building together really does matter. And I'm deeply humbled that I get to be a part of it with you. Now, I want to start dropping in occasionally with solo episodes like this one today because I have spent enough time listening to experts that, while I am still not an expert, by any stretch of the imagination, I do have opinions of my own. Yes, I have developed habits, routines, suspicions, convictions, and at least four new reasons to distrust overhead lighting.

Maybe this will be a fruitful discussion, and maybe we will all leave needing a lobotomy. You let me know. But I want these solo episodes to become something bigger than me, handing you a list of health opinions from behind a microphone. This is our little corner of the internet. I want to hear from you. This is where we get curious together.

We ask the questions that make your pediatrician blink twice. We read the ingredient label. We follow the money. We listen to the turtles. Trust me, that will make sense later. And then this part is crucial. We go live joyful, abundant lives. Now, we are not trying to become the most anxious, chemically pure women in America.

Nobody receives a trophy at the end of her life for having the lowest lifetime polyester exposure. They don't! There is no angel at the gate, checking your Phaas levels. We are trying to become wiser, harder to manipulate, and more capable of making good decisions for ourselves than the people we love. I want culture apothecary to feel like the smartest group chat that you belong to. Somebody drops a study. Somebody asks whether Monsanto funded it. And a third person finds out that it was indeed funded by Big Chem.

We can learn without spiraling. We can do it. We can disagree without treating each other like pharmaceutical lobbyists. We can change our minds without pretending we were never wrong. We can hold paradoxical, complicated, contradictory thoughts. And when something truly deserves our anger, we can aim that anger somewhere useful. That is our culture here. It's curious, it's hopeful, it's slightly suspicious, occasionally unhinged, but never hopeless.

It never helpless. I believe. I believe. So pour something nourishing into a cute glass, bone broth, herbal tea, raw milk, whatever you need. Other than an aspartame-filled diet Coke, take a walk with me. Maybe it's a fart walk. Fold your laundry. Let's talk about what these conversations have changed for me. This is not the official health commandments according to Alex Clark. Jennifer, do not leave this episode and tell people that this is simply where I have landed for now. What changed my mind? What am I convinced of? What am I still skeptical about? And what have I actually changed in my own life? So things I've learned. I don't think healthy and unhealthy are as simple as I used to. One of the biggest changes over the last two years has actually been. than the way I think about health information itself.

I think I used to have much cleaner categories in my head. You know, this is healthy, this is unhealthy. This number is good. This number is bad. This food is bad. And then you start interviewing people who spend their entire career studying one tiny piece of human health and suddenly everything gets more complex. My conversation with Dr. Josh Axe really captured this perfectly.

So he kept returning to how intricately the body works, how no organ, nutrient hormone symptom or system exists in some sealed off studio apartment refusing to speak to the others, right? Does that make sense? Like the gut talks to the brain, the brain talks to the hormones, the liver processes what we eat, breathe, absorb, and put on our skin. Our metabolism affects our energy. Our stress affects our digestion. Our sleep affects practically everybody because when we are exhausted, we become emotionally violent over the dishwasher placement. Just putting the dishes in the dishwasher. It goes a long way. Fellas, you're welcome. Everything is connected.

Dr. Axe even talked about how the tongue is this sort of window into the body. It's color, it's coating, its moisture, its texture, and other changes can sometimes offer clues about what may be happening with hydration, oral health, digestion, nutrition, nutrition, or illness. Your tongue is not a licensed physician, so please do not cancel your annual physical and begin receiving medical guidance from the bathroom mirror. But, you know, I had barely considered that something so ordinary could reflect activity elsewhere in the the body. And so that conversation changed the way I think about symptoms. A symptom is real, but it may not tell us where the story began. You know, fatigue does not automatically mean that

we are deficient in the supplement currently trending on TikTok, right? A skin problem may involve more than the skin. Digestive trouble like your IBS may involve food, stress, sleep, medication, infection, or several factors interacting at once. The body is in a junk drawer. It's more like an orchestra. If the violins sound terrible, shout out my sexy husband vats. Perhaps the violinist needs sleep. Or perhaps the conductor is asleep. The sheet music is upside down and the trumpet section has been living on Diet Coke. This is why reductionist health advice increasingly frustrates me.

Modern medicine can be brilliant at identifying and treating individual problems, especially in emergencies. But human biology does not always respect the neat departmental lines we built around it. The cardiologist, gastroenterologist, dermatologist, endocrinologist, neurologist, neurologist, and all the ologists may all be looking at different chapters of the same person's story. Dr. Axe helped me appreciate that the body is constantly adapting, compensating, signaling, and then trying to maintain balance. So here in our apothecary, we are going to keep zooming in and then zooming back out. We zoom it, we zoom out, we zoom out, we zoom out, we zoom out.

We care about the lab value, but we also care about the person attached. to it. The symptom? Yeah, yeah, yeah, but also what surrounds it? We care about the individual ingredient, but we also care about the entire meal, the entire environment, and the entire life. Because the body is not simple. It is coordinated. It's responsive. I mean, this is like the coolest thing God created, us. And it's like offensively impressive. And once you understand that, the clean little categories really start falling apart. Take cholesterol. For most of my life, the message I absorbed was pretty straightforward, right? This is what I learned. in school. High cholesterol, bad. Low cholesterol, good. And then I learned that cholesterol is not

merely a villain. Our brains need cholesterol, actually. Our bodies use it to produce hormones. Our cell membranes need it. They crave it. You've been taking the yolk out of your eggs to fit your macros to get that high protein bikini life going. But here's the deal, ghouls and goblins. Did you know that you need that yolk? Because that's where all the best nutrients, including cholesterol, come from. Please stop drinking egg whites. It's sad and just not good. It's also making your farts rancid, Gary.

I should have started speaking my mind earlier. I could have saved a lot of emergency elevator evacuations. We are in such a health-conscious era right now. Cold plunges, red light, high-protein sleep trackers, all of it. And listen, I love a wellness habit. I do some of those. But none of that matters if you're missing the actual data on what your body needs. You cannot biohack your way out of blind spots.

That's why Jevity is so smart and why I use them to, take all the guesswork out of my health optimization. Jevity is a company that does your blood work for you. At your home, they'll send a phlebotomist to you. They'll test over 90 biomarkers. And then based on that testing, they will come up with a personalized health plan. You guys are like, what's the difference between Jevity and function health or any of these other biomarker testing companies? Well, they're not doing all the other stuff Jevity is with like the health coaches and actually going through your blood work, explaining what it means. Some of them you're on your own. You get the blood work done. And it's like, oh,

you're supposed to figure out. I don't know what any of this means. You know what I mean? I've got to have people helping me. So if you have low energy, poor sleep, hormonal changes, mood changes, metabolism is slowing down. Jevity is going to help connect the dots instead of just saying like, eat clean. Okay, well, thanks for nothing. It's ongoing. They monitor you. They refine your plan. They help you adjust over time. It's not just a one-time snapshot. It's like finally having a total health team evolving with you and strategizing. Go to gogevity.com, use code Alex for 20% off your first year. That's gogevity.com. Use code Alex for 20% off your first year. Have you ever read the picture of Doreen Gray? Well, you should because it's about this guy

who stays young and beautiful while hidden in a picture. And then that picture is slowly rotting in the attic. It's absorbing all the consequences of his lifestyle. That's kind of how most modern homes work. You've got this like perfect Instagram aesthetic, neutral couches, little throw blankets. Everything looks calm. But meanwhile, the air quality inside the house is basically the portrait in the attic of Dorian Gray. Synthetic fragrances, weird chemical cleaning products, candles that smell like frosted sugar poop but magoo. The vibe is cozy, but the ingredients are what nightmares are made of. That's why I love natural sloth beeswax candles. They're made safe certified, which means they're rigorously tested to make sure they're free from harmful

chemicals. They're made with pure beeswax and wooden wicks, so when you light them, you get this really soothing little crackling sound, and they burn clean and long. They're also handmade in Texas, small batch from a veteran-owned company that's obsessed with transparency and everything is scented with pure essential oils. No synthetic fragrances, no toxic ingredients, no weird hormone disruptors floating around your living room. Natural sloth also makes soaps and room sprays, all with organic ingredients for safer homes. Go to natural sloth.com, use code Alex for 15% off. That's natural sloth.com code Alex for 15% off. When I was interviewing cardiologist Dr. Jack Wolfson, he exposed that the entire system we know

that hates cholesterol is essentially a scam that was fabricated by the seed oil industry. We've been eating saturated fats in cholesterol-rich foods for literally ever, with no heart disease, by the way. But then all of a sudden we decide to blame those ancient foods for modern diseases. Make sense. No, it doesn't, Megan. It means cholesterol was the scapegoat for the crimes of big seed oils. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Doesn't this feel like we just unmasked the villain in Scooby-Doo. By the way, I've told the story before, but in case you don't remember it, when I was six years old, I wrote an email to Cartoon Network, and I said, can you please make an episode where Daphne kisses Fred and they get married? Thank you. Love Alex. I'm six years old,

and I live in Tennessee. Interesting. So does it matter in your blood work, whether you have high or low cholesterol? Of course. But the total number is not the entire story. So particle number, particle size, triglycerides, HDL, inflammation, blood pressure, metabolic health, all add content. Text. Small, dense LDL cholesterol are the troublemakers, whereas large, buoyant particles are great and actually anti-inflammatory. So, for example, my ripped husband has high cholesterol. But it's the good big particles. His small particles are very low. He's incredibly healthy. He's got very low inflammation. But based on how we currently measure cholesterol, he has high cholesterol, technically. Okay.

Now, does that mean he's going to have a heart attack? No, because he's not an idiot, moron loser who got the vaccine. It means our understanding of cholesterol is completely broken. Entities like the American Heart Association who shape the protocols doctors practice from don't distinguish between big and small particles. They just read the overall volume. They don't tell doctors to evaluate the quality of cholesterol, just the quantity. So, for example, my hot, ripped husband has high cholesterol. But his broader testing provides important context that the total number alone does not capture. Now, does that mean he gets to ignore it forever? No, but it means one number should not be treated like a complete medical biography. Does that make sense? No? Then why are you listening to me? I'm not a doctor.

Don't touch me. I'm sterile. This is just one small anecdote illustrating what I've learned, okay? Health is not a simple good versus evil black and white picture. It's like this very nuanced, multicolored frame that differs from person to person. And that's not being a relativist. It's just me being a realist. Realize. Realize. Realize.

I think that was a quote I saw on Tumblr once. Truth is, we're all made completely unique and different. Is this news to anyone each made up with a unique biochemistry? Come on, people. Modern nutrition and health does not account for this. It treats everybody the same. That's also not to say that there are objectively good things. that we should all be doing for our health, right?

We need to call balls and strikes. The strikeout for your health would be seed oils, artificial sweeteners, synthetic fragrances, to name a few. But back to the individual nature of health and medicine, I think this is why some of you lose your minds when there's paradoxical information on this show. Not everyone responds the same way. An all-meat diet from Paul Saladino

can make one woman feel like a million bucks, while Sue Becker's bread might become another family's favorite health intervention. failing to understand that health information is highly individualistic, frankly, is low IQ, and I don't have the patients for it. We have people that are stupid. Believing that there's one remedy to heal a sick culture and getting pissed off when every guest has a different one is the reason why America is so sick. This idea that, like, there's one remedy for everybody in America, that has been the prescription that we've accepted for the last 100 years, and we have never been more chronically ill.

Health is nuanced, which brings me to one of the biggest mind-blowing things I've learned here on the show. And nuance is going to be one of our house rules here at culture apothecary. We do not have to turn every guest into a profit or a heretic. We can take what is useful, question what is shaky, and we can keep learning together. That may be less exciting than joining a dietary cult by sunset, but it is considerably better for our relationships. So things I've changed my mind on, or there's been nuance. In the last few years, I changed my mind about IVF. This is another thing that people get really emotional over, okay? My conversation, with Napro Technology physician Dr. Gavin putoff forced me to confront two problems with IVF.

Now, the first is moral. Human life begins at conception, which means embryos are not extras to be graded, frozen, selected, or discarded. This is such controversial information to share on a health and wellness podcast. I guarantee you, please find me another health and wellness podcast that would dare to tell you that. They will not be honest with you about it. And if we're talking about health, physically, emotionally, spiritually, which every health and wellness influencer should be doing, and they're leaving this part out of the equation.

They're frauds. They shouldn't be trusted. You shouldn't listen to them. Every child conceived through IVF is completely gloriously valuable. The child is never the moral problem. The procedure is. Now, Katie Faust taught me this part of the IVF conversation several years ago. But what surprised me just as much as the moral side of things was this medical problem that

you have with IBF. because IVF bypasses infertility without ever determining why the body is struggling in the first place. Now, I didn't even realize how terrible most IVF clinics treat women struggling with infertility. If a woman has endometriosis, blocked or damaged fallopian tubes, abnormal ovulation, inadequate hormone production, polycystic ovarian syndrome, pelvic adhesions, or some other underlying condition, retrieving her eggs, and fertilizing them in a lab may route around the obstacle of infertility, but routing around a disease is not the same thing as diagnosing and treating it.

Let me put it this way. If the bridge is collapsing and somebody offers you a helicopter, yeah, you cross the river. Congratulations on the helicopter. Woohoo! The bridge, though, is still collapsing. And women deserve better than being told, so sorry. It's just unexplainable. We do not know why your body is doing this.

But for the price of a small starter home, we can attempt to bypass it. No. This is where Dr. Putoff introduced us to Napro technology on the show. Natural Procreative technology, Napro for short, and I genuinely could not believe more women had never heard of it. And this is not theoretical for me. So two of my friends went to Dr. Putoff after struggling with infertility. And rather than immediately bypassing the problem, he investigated what was going wrong, addressed those underlying causes. And today, both women are pregnant. Two women who had been struggling to conceive for years. Two root causes identified and treated and now two babies, healthy, beautiful babies on the way. That is what can happen when medicine refuses to accept

unexplained infertility as the end of the investigation. Napro works with a women cycle rather than suppressing it or replacing conception with a laboratory procedure. So basically, women that go to like a Napro doctor, right, you're going to learn how to chart your biomarkers. You're going to have a trained physician who uses those observations, along with cycle time blood work, imaging, and other testing to investigate what is actually happening with you. And this stuff is crazy. It's like you go to an IVF clinic and they'll say, I don't know, I think your tube is blocked. We should just get rid of it.

Let's just like throw the tube out the window. You go to a napro surgeon's like, oh, we unclogged. It's working perfectly fine. You're good to go. Or maybe your seize action scar from your first child is preventing you from getting pregnant again. let me just clean that up. Bada boom, bada bing, you can get pregnant. And it costs like a fraction of what IVF costs.

That's what's even crazier. You know, there's so many things about our cycles that are data. You know, the timing of ovulation, the bleeding patterns, hormonal changes. This is all data, cervical mucous. Apparently cervical mucous has been trying to submit a full quarterly report, and then mainstream women's health care keeps marking the email of spam. That's what's happening to us. And based on what they find, NAPRO physicians can use targeted hormone support,

medications, specialized surgery when appropriate. In our conversation, Dr. Putoff described work involving endometriosis, tubal blockages, and other physical problems that can interfere with fertility. You know, the goal is not simply to just manufacture a pregnancy outside of a body. The goal is to restore function wherever possible so that conception can occur through sex. The shockingly vintage, reproductive technology that God designed in the first place. What a radical concept. Identify the disease, treat the woman, respect the marriage, and protect every life involved. And can we talk about unexplained infertility for one second? That phrase should actually mean we need to investigate more. Instead, women hear it as your body is a haunted Victorian

mansion. Nobody knows what is happening here. You should stay away. It should be condemned. Here's the IVF brochure. No. If you hear that phrase, keep looking. Painful periods are not a personality trait. Repeated miscarriage is not something that a woman should be expected to just indoor without deeper investigation. Irregular periods, unusual bleeding, low progesterone, years of unexplained pain or not inconveniences, right? They're signals. The body is saying something and medicine should have the humility to listen. The IVF industry turns a woman into a source of eggs, a man into a source of sperm, embryos into inventory, and then pregnancy into this product sold through packages and add-ons and testing menus and financial plans and marketing.

We are told that IVF is empowerment, and it's more like desperation that's being monetized. Sick. Then if you are struggling with infertility, you should ask about restorative reproductive medicine. You should look for a physician trained in Napro technology. You should learn what your cycle may be communicating to you. Ask about endometriosis, which the majority of women have and don't know. It's completely silent.

Zero symptoms or signs. PMOS, thyroid and metabolic health, hormonal patterns, tubal factors, infections, inflammation, male factor infertility. because, you know, that's a big big one too. Do not let an industry convince you that your only choices are IVF or hopelessness. We can demand better medicine and we can insist that infertility care begins with the most obvious question of medicine. What is wrong? Can we actually treat it? I had this realization recently that some of us put wireless earbuds in our ears at 7 a.m.

And basically do not remove them until bedtime, especially people 25 and younger. You know, you're working out, AirPods. They're driving. They've got their AirPods in. They're at their desk at the office. They've got AirPods, grocery store, phone calls, walking around the house, listening to a podcast, hopefully this one. We have got to reduce Bluetooth exposure through a device that is literally inside your skull. This is why I recommend and wear tech wellness's anti-radiation air tube headphones. They're wired headphones. Instead of transmitting the phone electronically all the way up to your ears, the final portion travels through hollow air tubes,

helping you create more distance between the electronic components in your head. And if you're like, okay, cool, I'm going to buy these. I'm sold on the headphones, but I'm also interested in EMFs entirely, like, throughout my whole house and I don't know where to start. My friend August from Tech Wellness created EMF protection starter packs with those headphones that I love, plus essentials like a Wi-Fi kill switch. You know, you can just click one button and all your Wi-Fi will turn off at night while you guys go to sleep.

And you can get a stylus and an EMF meter so that when you're traveling, you're out and about, you can see how bad the EMFs are. And Tech Wellness even makes a Faraday bag that blocks wire. wireless signals when your phone is inside the shielded compartment. Go to Techwellness.com. Use code Alex Clark for 15% off the headphones, Faraday Bag, and EMF protection pack. Techwellness.com, code Alex Clark for 15% off. You guys know I'm obsessive about the foundations of health,

and one thing most people completely overlook, especially in the dark winter months, is light exposure. Humans evolved with sunlight, okay? When winter hits, days get shorter, we spend more time indoors, and we lose exposure not just to visible light, but red and your infrared light, which play a real biological role in how our cells function. Red and near infrared light have been studied for their ability to support mitochondrial function, which helps drive cellular energy production.

That matters for muscle recovery, inflammation, skin health, circulation, sleep quality, and overall daily energy. When your cells function better, everything works better. That is why red light therapy is a non-negotiable in my routine and why I use my juve. I also, by the way, just got my mom a juve. This was really important because she's experiencing, a lot of arthritic types of complications. What sets Juve apart is that it actually works.

Juve uses clinically proven wavelengths, delivers a safe and effective dose of light, and offers true medical grade panels that are independently tested and safety certified. That is critical, because there are a lot of fake devices out there using the wrong wavelengths with zero testing. Oh my gosh, please be careful when you're ordering online.

I personally have used Juve daily for, oh my gosh, it was like during the pandemic, I got my first juve, maybe 2021. So it's been like five years, all right? I use it in the morning about 10 minutes and sometimes I'll do it at night to wind down literally 10 minutes. There's a timer on there. I can read my Bible. I can do my devotions. I can also sit in silence. You can sit, close your eyes, listen to a podcast. It's become one of the easiest, most consistent tools in my wellness routine. Also, put it on and have it on you and your baby as you are breastfeeding. I also love that juve offers a wide range of options, whether you want targeted treatment or a full

body set up in your house. If you want to support your health at the cellular level, especially during winter, juve makes it simple. Go to juve.com slash Alex. It's J-O-O-O-V-V-V-com slash Alex to get a exclusive offer in your checkout. Juve.com, J-O-O-V-V-com slash Alex. Some exclusions apply. Another thing I learned, nicotine is not the same thing as a cigarette. For most of my life, nicotine and cigarettes basically occupied the same box in my brain. Nicotine was bad. Cigarettes equal cancer. Next question, right?

And obviously, smoking cigarettes is enormously harmful, you know, but also kind of hot if you're dressed like the Pink Panther in a back alley. But one thing that I hadn't really separated in my mind before doing these interviews was nicotine as a substance from everything else you're exposed to when you burn an inhale tobacco. Then I interviewed Dr. Brian artists. And this became, I think it's my most listened to episode of all time. And when I tell you, his take on nicotine was the complete opposite of everything I'd ever heard. I mean it.

His basic argument was nicotine itself is not the villain that we've been taught it is. He believes that we've taken the dangers of smoking and essentially assigned all of them to nicotine when nicotine is only one component of a cigarette. He pointed out that nicotine also naturally occurs in tiny amounts in foods in the nightshade family like tomatoes or eggplants or peppers and potatoes. But then he went way beyond that. So he described nicotine as a neotropic, something that can affect attention and cognitive performance and argued that some of the most interesting research on nicotine has involved the brain. I say it appears my cranium has doubled in size.

So he talked about research involving nicotine in neurological conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And he believes that nicotine has potential benefits for inflammation, cognition, memory, focus, and other neurological symptoms. he argued that nicotine could have applications for everything from chronic inflammatory conditions in migraines to multiple sclerosis, viral illnesses, long COVID, some cancer even. And that being true, I mean, evidence that nicotine affects a biological pathway or shows promise in a study is not the same thing as proving that nicotine cures a disease.

But what fascinated me was learning that nicotine is actually being studied outside the context of smoking at all. Dr. Artist told me that he personally wears a nicotine patch every single day. And at the time of our interview, he said that he was using about three and a half milligrams per day, and he had been doing that for years. And his preferred delivery method was a patch because instead of getting a large amount of nicotine quickly, the patch releases it really, really slowly over the course of many hours. And for somebody experimenting with nicotine for the first time, you know, he basically just

said start very slow, go low. he talked about starting around one milligram and then gradually increasing rather than putting on a high dose patch immediately because if you take too much nicotine, you're going to like throw up. Okay, it's going to make you feel absolutely horrible. Ew. And I remember telling him during that interview that that was exactly why I had been scared to try a patch because I've heard people say like, oh my gosh, you're going to feel so sick the first time. And he basically said, well, then you'd be taking too much. But my husband Vance is pretty anti-nicotine. This is something that we disagree on. I'm more open-minded. I have had hundreds and hundreds of friends and listeners DM me saying that small doses of nicotine via a patch has completely eradicated joint or back pain, brought back smell lost by COVID, slowed Parkinson's symptoms and so much more. Vance, on the other hand, has spoken with multiple doctors who said it's caused their patients to experience weird nervous system breakdowns and wreak havoc on the gut and the oral microbiome. But I do want to point out that the doctors who spoke to Vance were dealing with patients who had volunteers. use pouches and not patches. And I do, I think that that's an important distinction. Now,

that does not mean that I'm sitting here telling everybody to go use nicotine. Nicotine is addictive. It isn't appropriate for everyone. And this compound is more interesting than I realized is very different from, you know, everyone should take it. But it was a perfect example of something that the show keeps kind of doing to me, which is forcing me to separate things that I had mentally lumped together. And that is something I want us to practice together. When we hear a surprising claim we do not have to swallow it whole or spit it out immediately. We can hold it up to the light. We can ask what the evidence actually shows who funded it, what form and dose were studied, and whether a benefit in one context becomes a disaster to another. And that is what we're all

about here, right? Curiosity with guardrails. Open minds with working breaks. I guess I'm open mind it as hell. And then there are things that I now think matter way more than I used to. Starting with your environment is your health. If there is one overarching. belief that has become much stronger for me, it's this. Health isn't just what you eat and how often you exercise. It's also what you're surrounded by all day. What you're living in, the air you're breathing, the building you're sleeping in, the products you're putting on your body. Potentially, the material's touching your skin. The light hitting your eyes. What's in your water and what's on your food. And this, I know will generate comments from Heather's and Ashley's about how

everything is going to kill us. I'm supposed to say to that group of women I say, how many sick people do you know. People who have chronic headaches are overweight. People who can't get out of bed in the morning, clear-headed, have an autoimmune condition, bad allergies. Agsima, you probably have an uncle who died too soon of heart disease or an aunt who may have been exposed to something in her life and gotten breast cancer, right? The truth is, most of us are sick. Because, yeah, most of what's in our environment, thousands of new chemicals that alter our bodies is making us sick. Whether you realize it or not, your hormones are being harmed by the windex under the sink in the kitchen and the bath and body works candles on your coffee table. It is. You have every right to buy those things and say, you know, we're all going to die anyway, but I think you're smarter than that. And the slow accumulation of decades of exposure to thousands of foreign chemicals and food, skincare, makeup, clothes, lawns, etc., starts to add up. Hence, why diseases like Parkinson's and dementia are skyrocketing. Now, I don't think drinking from a single plastic water bottle, or drinking, a cup of hot coffee and a paper cup will make you infertile, but we're not having

just one. We wake up, take a shower, use endocrine disrupting shampoo and body wash, drench our lips and road lip gloss, essentially eating microplastics. And that's just in the morning. Then we drink a Diet Coke or we get a sugary coffee from a plastic cup on our way to a windowless office removed from nature. And you're walking in, the company's landscape team is out front spraying the weeds with glyphosate. For lunch, you get Chick-fil-A, which is silly putty chicken cooked in seed oils. Then you go home and you scroll on your phone for three hours and eat, what, probably door dash or something, and then you scroll some more until you fall asleep. And then you do it again, and then you do it again, and you do it again. And then you get married

and you wonder, why am I struggling to conceive? Listen, I'm not belittling you. This was me just a few years ago. I'm trying to rally you to have the same sense of righteous anger that I have. Because if we all get pissed enough, we can take back our health and our freedom. USA! USA! USA! I'm trying to say is that all of these compounds, which are harmful on an individual level, begin to make your environment a toxic soup, and therefore your body is incapable of thriving. Now, I told you that the turtle thing in the very beginning was going to make sense. Okay. You know how we're always worried about saving?

the turtles because they're dying from a toxic environment. The same is true for us. Ladies, the turtles are the aquatic canaries in the coal mine. They're telling us, Britney, don't pour microplastics on your skin. Drink it for breakfast and then eat it for lunch. Listen to the turtles. The turtles. Where are the turtles?

Come on, guys. Get out of here. Where are the turtles? Appreciate the turtles. At this point, listen to the turtles is officially, culture, apothecary. Doctrine. Put it on the family crest. If anyone asks what it means, look mysteriously towards the horizon and say, you had to be there. I like turtles. Another major factor redefining our environment is pesticides. I'm talking about you, glyphosate. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in

Roundup. Its entire job is to kill weeds, which it does with the enthusiasm of a suburban dad who just discovered the pressure washer. And yeah, exposure has been connected to some very serious health concerns. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans, citing evidence involving non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, particularly among farmers' gardeners and others who are regularly exposed to it. But you don't have to spend your weekends crop-dusting Iowa to encounter glyphosate. No, residues are in everyday foods, especially wheat, oats, and other grains. So if your bread and oatmeal aren't organic, your breakfast may come with a complementary agricultural chemical.

How thoughtful. You do care. I don't remember ordering a side of herbicide, but apparently it comes with the continental breakfast. Bayer and many government regulators insist that glyphosate is safe when used as directed and that the amounts found in food are too small to harm us. Their argument basically is relax. It's only a teeny tiny amount. Oh, wonderful. My favorite amount of possible carcinogen, teeny tiny.

But human beings are not identical little laboratory hamsters wearing matching Lulu Lemon sets. We have different genetics, microbiomes, nutritional statuses, exposure histories, and levels of susceptibility. The dose matters, the timing matters, the frequency matters, and the person matters. Yet we're expected to believe that there's one magical safe number that applies equally to a 220-pound farmer, a pregnant woman and a four-year-old whose primary food group is beige? And do you know what makes me mad? Like mad is all get out. Bean soup mad.

Bayer. The German company that owns Monsanto and sells Roundup. They have been lobbying lawmakers for protections that could make certain glyphosate-related lawsuits much harder to bring, which raises a fairly obvious question. Bayer, if glyphosate is as safe as you insist it is, why are you working so hard to protect yourself from the people who say it makes them sick? It's like a restaurant saying our sushi is perfectly safe and completely unrelated. We would like legal immunity from everyone who ate it.

Nothing suspicious there. I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course, I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? There's no... There's no reason for me to do that. Please ignore the attorneys crawling through the air vents.

This is why culture apothecary is committed to following the money. If politicians receive support from pesticide interests and then they vote for liability protections, Americans deserve to know. I don't care if you have an R next to your name. We will publish the receipts. We will examine the votes. We will make traitorless. We will name the lawmakers, and you can decide whether your representatives are protecting you or Bayer's balance sheet. Because if you take money from a foreign chemical company and then make it harder for sick Americans to have their day in court,

I do not care how many American flag lapel pins you own. This past spring, I was invited to the White House to discuss this issue with the president and senior members of his team. They appeared interested, but since then, the administration has taken actions that benefit glyphosate production, including declaring an adequate domestic supply of glyphosate-based herbicides, to national security. National security! Apparently America was one dandelion away from collapse. Can you believe it? Somebody get Pete Heggseth on the phone. There's crabgrass in Ohio. This battle is especially frustrating because I believe the president genuinely cares about American's health. But Washington is crawling with these lobbyists, trade groups, lawyers, and swamp creatures whose job titles sound harmless while their expense accounts smell faintly of Roundup. And those people are very good at controlling which information reaches the president's desk. They show up with white papers and polling data and powerpoints titled something like preserving American agricultural excellence. We love farmers. Boo, boo-boo-bah. And then slide 27 is basically, please don't let the cancer patients sue us. So we will keep scrutinizing the money, the lobbying,

and the legislation. And I don't care who pisses off in the White House. And we will keep reminding our government of its most basic responsibility, protecting the American people. Because right now, on this issue, our government is failing. But here's the good news. Our voices actually work. Public pressure has helped stall or defeat pesticide immunity proposals in multiple states and even helped strip liability shield language from legislation in Washington, D.C. So when they tell you that calling and emailing and posting and speaking up accomplishes nothing, do not believe them because I've seen firsthand that it does work. Lawmakers may pretend that they cannot hear us, but somehow when enough voters start yelling or I start tweeting, they can't. They can

a little nervous, a little sweaty, betty, and their hearing returns miraculously. It's a medical marvel. We've already helped stop legal immunity before, and we can do it again. So keep calling, keep asking who is funding whom, and keep demanding answers. Keep making it politically uncomfortable to put a foreign chemical company ahead of American families. I think we have this bizarre relationship with oral care products where we say, well, I'm not swallowing it, so it's probably fine. No, you're putting it in your mouth twice a day. For your entire, life. Now, maybe the mouth is not the place where we should just suddenly abandon our interest in ingredients, right? And then there's floss, which is really crazy because you're literally

sliding something in between your teeth right along the gum line, getting into your bloodstream, and many flosses use synthetic materials. So this is why I recommend zebra for toothpaste and floss. They also have deodorant, which is fantastic. But zebra's floss is made with silk, beeswax, peppermint oil, and xylitol instead of polyester plastic. And here's what's cool about Zebra. They have their floss independently tested for P-Fas, you know, forever chemicals, and the result is non-detect. This is the level of neuroticism that I want from companies claiming to be non-toxic.

They also make toothpaste and tablets without fluoride or hydroxyapotite, plus clean deodorant for men and women that is aluminum-free, paraben-free, and fragrance-free. Go to yayzebra.com, use code Alex for 10% off. That's yayzebra.com, code Alex for 10% off. Every office has one guy who believes the communal workspace is his personal food court. It's 1047 in the morning. Now, everyone is answering emails, and then there's Greg arriving with a steaming bag of hot, fast food that smells like onions, seed oils, and divorce. He sits down in the cubicle next to you and opens it, and immediately the entire floor knows that Greg ordered number seven. Listen, I support eating.

Obviously, I just don't think that your lunch should require building evacuation procedures or be filled with absolute sledge crap. And then you're like wondering why you get so tired in the middle of the workday. This is why I recommend keeping Prima protein bars around your desk. cookie dough, cacao, salted caramel, mocha, and their newest mint chip, 21 grams of grass-fed protein per bar. Prima protein bars focus on clean, simple ingredients, and they test their bars for glyphosate, which is amazing. You need this kind of transparency from a food company. So keep them at your desk, in your purse, in your, I don't know, baby knapsack or whatever. Go to eatprima.com. Use code Alex Clark 20 for 20% off. That's eatprima.com. Code Alex Clark 20 for 20% off your first purchase.

Greg, eat a prima bar. The office has suffered enough. Now, I'll tell you what, I never expected to care this much about clothing. Another fascinating conversation I had this year was with Hannah Dunning, otherwise known as the clean clothing chick. I think I wore the shirt on that episode. Actually, that's kind of embarrassing. Or as I prefer, the clean clothing princess. Now, clean clothing. You're like, what? You mean we have to wear healthy clothes too? I know it can feel overwhelming. First, they come for our food, then our cookware, then our candles. And now they want me to stand in my closet interrogating a sports bra. Don't panic. Okay, let's learn to hear information without immediately having an emotional breakdown. As though a team of Stanford researchers is personally plotting to

destroy the American mom's happiness. They're not sitting in a laboratory saying, how can we take away her leggings? At least, I don't think they are. If we can't encounter new scientific information without becoming defensive, then we've lost the plot. Information is not a court order. You can learn something today without throwing your entire wardrobe into a bonfire tonight. Anyway, back to Hannah. She is a crazy story about to discovering what may be hiding in the clothes that we wear, and I know it sounds dramatic, but two years ago I would have said absolutely not. You can pry these Eritzia leggings for my cold BPA covered body. And truthfully, I'm still working through the clean clothing exchange myself.

I'm a lot better, though. I'm buying more organic cotton and natural materials, but this is not like an overnight. I'm demanding you go scorched earth, everybody out of the pool, lifestyle resets, okay? Hannah, now she is like me. We're pretty do-or-die type of personalities. So she did go scorched earth. And after learning about the chemicals used in clothing, she sat in front of her closet and sorted through every item. The discard pile was enormous. The keep pile was two shirts.

Two. Imagine researching your wardrobe so thoroughly that you accidentally become a cartoon character who wears the same outfit every day. But Hannah's investigation began for deeply personal reasons. Her grandmother died from estrogen-sensitive breast cancer. And then during both of Hannah's pregnancy, she developed colostasis. It's like a serious condition involving impaired bile flow from the liver. And so after her second delivery, the disposable postpartum underwear she was

given caused her to break out on hives actually. So she noticed this really strong chemical smell on them. And she started asking a question that I think most moms I've never considered is even at the hospital. You know, what is in our clothing? And so one of the first things that she shared on that episode, which was completely bananas, was that clothing labels generally tell us the fiber content, but they don't have to list all the chemicals used to manufacture or dye, finish, and waterproof, or stretch or make the item stain resistant. Your granola bar has to provide an ingredient list, but your leggings, which may be suction directly

to your reproductive organs for 14 hours, can essentially plead the fifth. Hannah explained that clothing can contain substances like formaldehyde, phthalates, bisphenols, lead, and Phaas, depending on the material and manufacturing process. Words like waterproof, stain-resistant, wrinkle-free, odor-resistant,

even sweat-wicking can signal that some type of chemical finish was used. One study Hannah discussed tested 132 pairs of women's underwear and reportedly detected BPA in every single pair sampled, every single one. Now, nothing says feminine wellness, like an endocrine-disrupting chemical, having reserved seating directly over your ovaries.

Tests have also reportedly found BPA in baby socks, a product whose only responsibility is to be tiny, adorable, and then disappear mysteriously inside the dryer, right? Now, why is BPA involved in that? Hannah talked about why polyester deserves really special attention, and that's because it's plastic. So, so is nylon, acrylic, elastane, and lycra. Those materials are worn, and when they are washed and heated and dried, they can shed increasingly

small plastic particles. And washing does not necessarily solve everything. So some chemicals like formaldehyde may diminish with repeated washing, but plastic fibers continue degrading over time. So clothing with Phaas can create. an entirely different set of concerns. Your seven-year-old leggings are not broken in. They may be entering their villain era.

And heat and sweat also matter in your clothes, which is unfortunate because active wear is specifically designed to be worn while you are hot and sweating. So we created tight plastic clothing, added chemical finishes to make it perform like even more impressive plastic, pressed it directly against our skin,

and then took it into hot yoga or the sauna. Human ingenuity is breathtaking. Really. Do not ever wear synthetic active wear into a sauna. natural underwear and a towel are better options to just be naked. So if you see me wearing a cotton bed sheet at the gym, mind your business. I'm optimizing.

One of the wildest real-world examples involved flight attendants from major airlines who said newly issued uniforms made them sick. Workers reported symptoms after wearing the clothing and litigation against uniform manufacturers resulted in multimillion dollar verdicts in settlements. Natural does not automatically mean chemically clean. A shirt can be made from 100% cotton instead. be treated with dyes and finishes or stain-resistant chemicals. Now, organic cotton is a better starting point, but credible textile certifications and

transparency from the manufacturer also really matter. So you don't need to bankrupt yourself or destroy your mental health trying to replace every single item in your closet immediately. Start with the clothing worn closest to the skin. So your bras and underwear, pajamas, sheets, baby clothes, and active wear. Prioritized natural fibers like cotton, linen, wool, silk, and hemp, even if it's not organic. avoid unnecessary performance finishes

and then wash new clothing before wearing it and then just slowly replace synthetic items as they wear out and as your budget permits. This is where I'm at right now. You know, I'm learning, I'm replacing things gradually and I'm attempting not to become emotionally destabilizing every time I discover that another beloved household item is made from petroleum.

I am not perfect. Hannah was not asking you to be perfect. Your closet does not need to achieve moral purity by Thursday. Great news, Beavis. The most powerful health tools are, free. After everything we've talked about, the cholesterol panels, nicotine patches, glyphosate lobbyists, endocrine disruptors and leggings, apparently engineered by Lockheed Martin. I want to end somewhere surprisingly simple. The health industry loves convincing us that the next breakthrough will arrive

in a $700 refrigerated vial from a concierge doctor named Brock. But some of our most powerful health tools have been available forever. Sunlight, clean water, movement, real food sleep, relationships purpose. Now, they are not sexy because nobody can patent the sunrise, although someone in Los Angeles is definitely developing an app called Outside Plus. Now, these are the foundations. And here in our little apothecary, we are going to keep returning to them. Sunlight is information. For years, I thought of sunlight almost entirely in terms of vitamin D and skin damage. Either you were heroically sunning your perennium at dawn or hiding beneath SPF 900 at a portable gazebo. But my conversation with circadian health researcher Thaddeus Owen taught me that light is information. Morning light helps set

the internal clock that coordinates alertness and sleep. His philosophy is very simple. Bright days, dark nights. Stop confusing our biology. Go outside near sunrise for at least 10 minutes. 10 minutes. We spend longer reading reviews for throw pillows. Walk the dog, drink coffee outside, let the neighbors wonder why you are facing east in a bathrobe like the high priestess of a breakfast cult. Don't stare directly into the sun like a mystic. Maintain ownership of your retinas, okay? Many of us block natural daylight

because we sit beneath this weak artificial light all day like I have been today. And then we blast our eyes with overhead LEDs and three screens at night. And our bodies are like, ha, ma'am, is it noon or midnight? Get outside early. Dim the house at night.

Stop bringing the emotional intensity of a Best Buy Showroom into your bedroom at 11.30 p.m. And yeah, you do want to avoid sun, burn. We can appreciate sunlight without pretending melanoma is a sciop, but total avoidance of the light source around which life developed makes very little sense, right? And don't even get me started on skin cancer and the connection to sunscreen, which is filled with cancer-causing chemicals if you're not using clean sunscreen like my favorite one from Primely Pure. Okay, the last thing. Real food does not need a publicist. After interviewing nearly every nutritional

denomination. I am convinced that we make food harder than it needs to be. Chris Master John helped me see that our mitochondria need nutrients to turn food into energy. Someone can eat enough while still being poorly nourished. We reduce food to macros and points as though the body is an excel spreadsheet with anxiety. Chris brought me back to nutrient density, protein quality, and identifying real deficiencies instead of playing supplement whack-a-mole. The counter looks like a GNC hit by a tornado, but we still haven't eaten lunch. After watching his mother develop dementia, Max Lugavir reminded me that food, movement, sleep, and metabolic health can shape the brain decades before disease appears. And somehow, every path on this show returns to eggs.

Eggs provide protein, coline, and other nutrients involved in brain function. And many are concentrated in the yolk. The yolk are recurring heroin. Our bread debates could cause a constitutional crisis inside culture apothecary. But the fundamentals remain undefeated. Eat foods that resemble something God made. Eggs with the yolks, meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, potatoes, fermented foods. real bread, butter, obviously.

Real food does not demand expensive perfection. Regular ground beef is still more recognizable than gummy worms. Frozen vegetables count. Dinner does not lose health points because it was not photographed on reclaimed pottery. We are building a culture in which nourishment is just normal again. Sleep people. Also, sleep is the closest thing we have to a nightly repair cycle. We treat it like an optional software update.

We dooms crawl, we wake exhausted, we drink enough caffeine to frighten a horse. somehow wonder which supplement will support adrenal health. Well, perhaps the supplement is bedtime, okay? Babies, hormones, apnea, pain, illness, they're all real, but many of us can still defend sleep with a morning light, a dark cool room, and a phone that does not sleep beside us like a tiny toxic boyfriend. No company can put friendship into a capsule, but we need people who bring a soup, right, and tell us that we're ridiculous or pray for us and laugh with us.

That's what I want culture apothecary to become, not just like this audience that's trained to agree, but a community learning how to live fully. We will share useful information with each other. We read past frightening headlines. We publish the receipts. We laugh loudly enough to remain sane. Health cannot be life's purpose. We pursue it, though, so that we can love people, raise families, serve God, carry out whatever his will is for our life, build things, worship, and carry somebody else's burden. Health isn't a destination, but it is capacity. If health makes us terrified of restaurants, travel and a candle at Christmas, we may have protected our bodies while shrinking our lives. And that is not what we are building here. So where have I landed after all these different episodes?

Our bodies are individual, our environment matters, industries with enormous incentives deserve scrutiny. We should reduce chemical exposure without being consumed by fear. And the foundations remain sunlight, clean water, clean air, movement, real food, sleep, relationships, purpose. God, most are free or inexpensive. None require an insurance. turns companies permission. We can begin before every scientific controversy on Earth has been settled. This is what we're all about. We're building healthier homes, stronger families, wiser consumers in a community that knows that it has a voice. And I'm going to change my mind again, by the way. Look, interview me in another two years. A future guest may dismantle something that I said today so

thoroughly that I have to enter witness protection. Good. That means we're still learning. So tomorrow morning before ordering another supplement, go outside, drink clean water, move your body, something recognizable, read your Bible, call someone you love, and then come back to our strange little family here, and we'll keep figuring it out together. Because the culture may be sick, but we are not helpless. New episodes of culture apothecary, where typically I interview somebody else and I don't talk this much, are Mondays and Thursdays. They come out at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern, wherever you get your podcast or YouTube, real Alex Clark on there. You can subscribe. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.

Thank you.