Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 402: Health Misinformation, "MAHA, How to Stay informed + Q and A (creatine, focus on aesthetics)

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. As always, I'm your host Danny Matrenga. And in this episode, we're going to be going over misinformation, the hell space, all the crazy different things you've been seeing on the internet that seem to proliferate the just general rise of garbage. What's happening in science and what the science tells us really does work, how the government is changing and how our health is changing in response to, you know, public health changes and policy changes.

We're going to talk a lot about those things as well as just how to kind of stay informed in a world of a ton of junk and misinformation. I'll get to some Q and A questions as well. Should be a good kind of zoomed out lens to look at health and fitness, as well as kind of some policy stuff. I hope you guys enjoy the episode. This podcast has some awesome partners.

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two products contain a ton of high quality vitamins and minerals, they also contain unique adaptogens like KSM 66, ashwagandha and reishi mushroom, which I like to take each and every day to promote my health. If you want to cover all your bases with a high quality protein, creatine, post-workout, or the ancillary micronutrient health stuff like greens, powders, and multivitamin, I encourage you to go over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny. That'll save you 20% on your first order and you'll rack up points that you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be supporting the show. Okay folks,

so getting into our episode today and just starting with a general tone, I don't ever want things to feel like overtly political or overtly about politics, but they will come up as we talk about health and fitness and the ways in which our world is changing, especially as it pertains to things like health and ingredient and regulatory stuff. But this is always a cool place. No matter how it is, you generally tend to vote or party lines. I'll try to keep it as much on the facts as I can. But it's become increasingly prevalent that I'm becoming,

I've been getting asked questions about some of the recent policy changes at the federal level, specifically from the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy, and the general political polarity and contrast that exists in the US. Everything's always turned up to like level 10. There's a generally adversarial tone, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, a lot of ridicule,

hard to tell what's right, who's wrong, lots of changes, dynamic personalities, all that. I think it's given way to a big time rise of health misinformation. You know, the internet has really become a double edged sword for health education. You can go to a platform like a TikTok, like an Instagram, like a YouTube,

and get tremendous helpful short form content that packages concepts about health and wellness and distills them into a digestible, very educational, helpful tool. And you can also find, like for every one piece of content like that, 10 highly inflammatory, you know, borderline pseudoscience fake misinformation posts that are going to spread like wildfire too, because they often, you know,

just provide a non-scientific answer to a, maybe even made a problem. We see this stuff all the time. Like for example Parasite cleanses are huge right now People are panicked about red dye people are panicked about seed oil Most marketing is fear-based a lot of policy actually seems fear-based In fact if we're being honest about like what are the primary changes that the United States Health and Human Services

Department has made to our food supply. The kind of first and only one that really stands out is food dye. And food dye is an interesting one because the principal issue we see with food dye is, you know, maybe it has a negative effect on behavior in kids to be overloading the diet with certain artificial food dyes. Now this has been known for quite some time, so many people, many companies have attempted to change these dyes out for biological dyes, non-artificial dyes, sometimes these are made from insects, plants, who knows right? But these are not entirely innocuous or harmless, they also

sometimes bring with them their own unique kind of shitty problems and that sucks because ultimately, our food supply is going to be dictated by our taste, our pleasure, our dopamine pursuit. You know, if people do want to be healthy, they do want to be thin, but when they go to the grocery store in a stressed, hungry state with tons of agitation factors from their life spiking, it's hard to make great decisions, and we're surrounded by all this ultra-processed food. If you switch neutral to negative artificial food dyes from neutral to negative natural food dyes, I don't think that addresses the totality of human problems.

I also think, I'm a little skeptical about how much these dyes are the trigger of behavioral issues with kids. You know, I think one thing that you'll hear a lot of people talk about is, you know, these sky-high rates of autism. And a lot of this I think could be in a way what happens when you screen more, screen better, screen more effectively over decades of better understanding of the disease. More people with autism having children who also have autism. Autism presents in many different ways.

Also you see people also look at other autism spectrum disorders like maybe an ADHD. And I think that to say these expressions are in a way from either vaccinations or food dyes like a little bit much. I think it's kind of a stretch because people have been consuming things and getting vaccinated for quite some time. In this fear of these largely safe and proven things like the dyes would not be in the food supply in general if they did not check a considerable number of boxes for their food safety. Does that mean they're safe? No. But it means they've been shown to be mostly safe multiple times, I think. And now we're pulling them because we're like, look, the more we study, we're seeing they stand out in this one area of behavior as being particularly problematic. And that is

like the most meaningful change we've seen so far at the federal level. And I just don't think that's good enough. I think what's happening is we're playing into a belief about these dyes that they're more harmful than they are. We're doing the same thing with vaccination, which I don't care what you think about vaccines. I want you to pull up ChatGPD or Google and just ask it like questions like

is my child or am i more likely to have complications from the vaccination for disease x or the disease itself. Don't trust um you know the government on this if you don't want to. Don't trust a website if you don't want to. You can ask an artificially intelligent entity basically for free that will give you a pretty good answer you can say hey give me all the pros and cons give me only the cons give me only the pros don't take my word for it though I notice anytime I talk about this people get very sensitive because there is a belief around these compounds that they're inherently nefarious and I just don't see that I have not seen that and I think that what,

if the changes we're making are related to the coloring agents of our food and our vaccine confidence, those will be net negative on our health. I frankly believe real reform at the federal level looks like taxing junk food companies. Something like excess taxes, like what are used on cigarettes.

If we could use something like that on sugar sweetened beverages and junk food, if we could make calorie labeling much simpler, if we could put warning labels on extremely hyper palatable energy dense foods, that could be helpful. There's a lot of things I think that would be more helpful than this, even at the food supply level.

For example, we look at red, oh, we can pull out the dye. A lot of people are like, why don't we pull out the seed oils? Another thing that I think could be possible, like what if we pulled out some of the sugar? What if we said, hey, you cannot make a product in the United States that has this many calories coming exclusively from added sugar? Or if you do, it has to have a special label. Because we want to pull calories out

of the average person's diet more than we even do certain ingredients. Because our principal issues are diabetes and obesity, which are ultimately mostly driven by overintake of food, some genetic factors, some lifestyle factors, of course. But how can we get people to eat less calories? That would be my main focus. I want kids eating healthier food.

I want kids to have every fighting chance. Maybe that does mean less food die. But really what I would be primarily focused on is how can we affect policy change that drives people to eat more healthy food, less unhealthy food. And I think that probably looks like subsidizing healthy foods, lean proteins, fresh fruits and vegetables, and not subsidizing crops that ultimately become ultra-processed grain driven foods like cookies, candies, chips, etc.

Sugary foods. But then another thing that comes up a lot is a discussion about SNAP, which is food stamps, for those of you who don't know. And it's been kind of sad to see some of the changes that have happened, like WIC, women's, infants, and children. It's a program inside of SNAP that gives specific foods and particularly delivers assistance to people who need it, mothers and kids. We cut that by 70% specifically for the benefit for fruits and vegetables.

What the hell kind of government does that? If you want to live healthier, that is actually the kind of program I would argue we should invest more in. And I get it. Look, why you have kids? I get it. Why do you want to have kids? You can't afford to feed them. It's not necessarily that they can't afford to feed them.

It's that maybe they can only afford to feed them junk because of the way we subsidize the food supply. And I think we could potentially fix that by reworking those subsidies, but definitely not cutting from poor people's ability to use food assistance to buy healthy foods. I am actually very open to the idea of having certain foods that are not SNAP eligible. I really think like sugar

sweetened beverages, even Gatorade, even Body Armor, you know, things that aren't directly soda but they're consumed like soda. I don't think those provide any positive benefit. Like of course they're a sports drink but they're usually consumed just as a beverage. I think if we could just be like, hey, I'm sorry, your snap works for everything but soda. That could be a huge step in the right direction, or it only works for diet soda. Things that are not sugar sweetened, because those have the greatest vanishing caloric density. You can pound a ton of calories and not even feel it. That's important. I think that those are the kinds of things we should be focused on.

Those are the kinds of changes we should be making at a policy level. Now environmentally speaking, a few other things that have kind of jumped out at me as being problematic is we continue to let companies that pollute our environment with forever chemicals get away with it. We are always reworking the guidelines. Oh, you know, the EPA is gonna make it more difficult on corporations to pollute. Oh, now we're gonna relax the guidelines

because it's hard on the corporation. Another, you know, it might sound like a crazy climate, woohoo person, but our environment, the air we breathe, the chemicals in our food supply, these things do matter. And I worry more about, you know, hey, another four years of corporations getting away with unfettered pollution, that might do more damage to our health than food die. And nobody in American politics has done a good job of holding corporations to account

for the way that they damage our health. And a lot of the reason that Robert Kennedy is the Health and Human Services Secretary and frankly, he wouldn't be if Donald Trump wasn't president is because people trusted these two men with their health in a world where their health is clearly deteriorating in front of them and their family's health. And that's worrisome. Everybody in America has somebody that's affected by obesity, chronic disease, cancer. It's horrible and developmental stuff. You know, it's hard. It's really hard. But with that, you know challenge,

we need to really be proactive and we can't regress on science. And one of the things I'm challenged by is and we can't regress on science. And one of the things I'm challenged by is just how much money we have ripped out of the sciences, pulling away funding for some of our best universities, for some of our best research institutions, for diseases research like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Like seeing us cutting funding there sucks because I'll be honest,

there's nothing but upside when you fund this research. There's literally no downside. I understand people go it's wasteful. We didn't find a cure. What's going on guys? Coach Danny here taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method, and more specifically, our one-on-one fully tailored online coaching

program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for Core Coaching Method for a while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based programming. But if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified,

somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person online, somebody who has licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years, whether that be a VV a phone call, email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching program is really designed to give you all the support you need with custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home, the gym around your limitations and your goals. Nothing cookie cutter here, as well as easy to follow macro nutrition programs that are non-restrictive.

You'll get customized support directly from your coach's email or they'll text you or their WhatsApp. You will find the communication medium that best supports your goals as well as provides you with accountability and the expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked-in accountability support, and all of the stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support possible. But you can apply today by going over to corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online

coaching option. And if we have spots available, we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today. You're giving people jobs, you're advancing the body of research in general. You might not find a cure, but you're getting close to a cure. Being at the leading edge and pushing stuff forward

is great because the economic benefit you can stand to gain with therapies, pharmaceuticals, or cures is unbelievable. Look what the US was able to do during COVID. I know people hate the COVID shot because it was relatively ineffective, but because we had such a good existing infrastructure inside of like a year, we were able to run a full clinical trial on a vaccine,

running like every part simultaneously in a way that had never been done before. By the way, that was President Trump's idea. Nothing wrong with that. I think the COVID vaccine's not like, you know, the most effective vaccine anybody's ever taken, but it's not trash and it's largely pretty healthy. Or I shouldn't say it's largely pretty healthy, but it's not going to kill you. Like a lot of insaneos on the internet are super worried about. But I think that just

goes to show you why was it America that was able to produce a vaccine and a therapeutic faster than anybody because we have these amazing systems in place. We've been cutting money and investment there like crazy so that we can fund more military spending and increasing the tax savings for the richest people in America for longer, creating unpaid for spending by letting people transfer tons of money to their heirs. And I don't know who that is good for. I hate to think if I was a billionaire one day and I wanted to leave some money to my kids,

I'd have to pay a lot of taxes on it. I guess I'd get over it. But cutting these food programs, cutting these food programs, cutting the science programs, that is if I don't know how that ends up not harming our health considerably and I do think that those are investments to be made not money to be saved. So I remain a little bit skeptical. I get questions about this all the time. I do hope that Secretary Kennedy can make progress while in office on these things that are very

pressing without getting caught up. And I think some of the challenges that come with working adjacent to President Trump, most cabinet members from Trump 1.0 did not make it to the end of his first term. And I think it's because he can be difficult to work with. And if what you're working on is making him unpopular or you are of particular frustration to him, you might not last. And I know a lot of people voted for President Trump because they liked Robert Kennedy.

As someone who's pretty cynical and not a huge fan of either, I will be honest, I like that we are talking about health, but I would like to see more progress being made at the policy level on things that go beyond food die, and I'm really disappointed in our spending stuff. So just kind of expanding on science and what science does say and what actually works. And like, again, we started this on misinformation. There is so much crap to buy. And that space, the fitness retail space, is never going to never not be the Wild West.

But what actually works for getting healthy is pretty darn simple. First, let's start with our diet. A healthy diet based on the largest, most abundant bodies of evidence is probably a diet that is first and foremost pretty low in ultra-processed junk food, right? Ultra-processed junk food, yet has sugar, yet has food diet, yet has seed oils. It also has a ton of calories and very little nutrition and it doesn't make you full.

And I think that's the principle issue. Too many calories entering the human body, never a good thing. If you want to live healthy, the evidence definitely points to eating the right amount of calories, not chronically under eating, but definitely not overeating, and getting most of your calories

when possible from whole foods, not the grocery store, whole foods, but foods in their whole form that have not been processed, minimally processed whole foods. Second thing is like you need a diet that is rich in micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. That shouldn't surprise anybody,

but a lot of people are nutrient deficient because they do not eat from a variety of categories. And the evidence is also pretty clear on that. Variety of food is good, especially a variety of fruits and vegetables, which provide a ton of micronutrition. Now, when it comes to training, it's always the battle of should I do cardio

or should I do resistance? And again, the research is super clear. They're both amazing. However, if you could only do one, resistance might have a little more upside because it does have some cardiovascular benefits. But nobody should be choosing between the two. That's something the literature to me makes abundantly clear. We should all do both. Other things that are very clearly connected to our health. Other things that are very evidence-based. Sleep is massively important. We need to do everything we can

to get deep restorative sleep. The kind of sleep that you wake up hopefully feeling recovered from. Not the kind of sleep you wake up feeling like, God, I could sleep forever after this. That's very much suboptimal. We want deep restorative sleep. We also want to manage our stress. We want to manage our stress.

We know stress is bad. The evidence is clear on this. Stress is terrible for humans. It increases and accelerates the rate at which we age, the rate at which we kind of just generally lose steam. I don't think it's good to be chronically stressed all the time. Other things to consider, we talked about environmental factors like chemicals and pollutants and pesticides and all of that, but we also need to consider external carcinogens like tons and tons of sunlight or tons and tons of alcohol, tons and tons of cigarettes. These things are clearly not good for us. There is a massive amount of evidence that makes it super duper clear

we should avoid a few things. And that will keep you out of like the biohacking, NAD, red light, cold plunge, beef tallow, all of the recesses and cracks and crannies of health where you're like, does this matter? I can't even tell, is this important? Is this just trendy? If you're hitting on the basics, if you are doing resistance training,

if you're doing aerobic training, if you have a diet rich in fiber, fermented foods, plants, lean proteins, very little processed foods processed foods you get good sleep your stress is managed All that extra shit matters like so little and that's what's so damn funny about this whole thing is we get so caught up in shit That really does not matter. It's in fact, I think part of the industry's Structure it's confusion by design in a way when no one knows what, the fitness industry wins because there's more to sell to more people. Okay, so how can you stay informed in like a super partisan, super crazy chaotic environment? I think the way to do it is to find people that you trust, to find sources that you trust,

to bounce around, to fact check, to use artificial intelligence, to use the research capabilities at your fingertips. There is a difference between data and facts and spin. And this is very true when it comes to things like studies and polls. And I think it's really valuable to actually develop scientific literacy, the ability to look at a study and read it on your own, the ability to kind of parse out how the study was structured. Is this a good example of research or not? Has this been replicated? That is not easy, but it is doable.

And I would strongly recommend all of you do that. It will give you so much to work with in a very challenging media environment. Just don't forget how important nuance is, right? Like at Barry, if you think truly are black and white, nuance is important. Having the ability to slow down and have thoughtful discussion on these topics is more important than the often viral

hot-takey kind of stuff we find on the internet. And you have to build a filter okay? Bullshit thrives when people are exhausted and overwhelmed and the antidote is just more clarity, more context, more communication. You do not need to spend more money to make yourself healthier. Almost never. It's almost always lifestyle. Supplements can be helpful, but it really is a limited list. And I do think as we move forward as a society and we continue to try to live healthier,

we need to ask ourselves, okay, what are the principle drivers of disease in humans? Not moving enough, eating too many calories, eating too much junk, drinking too much alcohol, being lonely, financial stress, all of that. If we don't build a world that kind of solves for some of that or improves some of that, we will continue to struggle. Okay, getting into some of your questions,

this one comes from Matty C215. He asks, does taking creatine pre or post make any difference? And the answer to this is mostly no. I always like to caveat with creatine. There may be a potential to get to a place where you're taking in a lot at once and it gives you some GI distress. Like let's just say you just ran a ton, like drank a ton of creatine and water and like 10 grams right after a run.

That might sit funky in your tummy, but like if you have creatine with a food, which is known as co-ingestion, absorption, it might be a little better. So I tend to just say like, never take it during a time that causes discomfort. If you can take it with food, it might be good. If you take it around a workout, it might be good. The literature says consistency is key. But I always think about these situations

where maybe people have taken it at a time that sucks for them. I think a lot of times, pounding a ton of it at once can be not so optimal. Especially if you take it with a ton of fluids, like right around training. So I like to have it post training typically, but again, co ingestion with food is a good way to do it. Okay, this comes from Bry Downey. Do you think the social media focus on aesthetics?

Is the net positive or negative for the world. I think in general, anything with, I think in general, anything with, this is gonna be tough. So anything that has to do with status, how you look, how you present yourself, it has an occasional tendency to be a little bit shallow. And if we obsess over it, oftentimes I found it's emblematic of a deep seated insecurity, right? Like maybe bodybuilding is so popular and changing our body is so popular because so many of us struggle with being okay

with how we look, we struggle to accept it. We're always trying to change it. And I don't think bodybuilding is the answer to changing that perception. So many bodybuilders struggle with body dysmorphia because it's a really unique sport. You're only in perfect shape when you're at, you know, on show day. And then the rest of the time maybe you struggle with that. And I don't know if like extending that

to everybody is a good thing. I don't know if obsessing over how we look and our muscles and our leanness is good. You know, I really pay attention to that stuff as a fitness professional. And for me, I wonder sometimes how good it is for me. If we could all be healthy and not worry as much about how we look, and we all still were a healthy way it looked good, all that, that'd be the dream scenario. So I do sometimes wonder that if we overemphasize aesthetics and over-promote aesthetics, we might not only lose track of what matters, but we could also dig ourselves

into a little bit of a hole. Okay, Healthy Life Mind Body wants to know how to handle opposing information on social media. You know, this whole podcast kind of might be opposing information for a lot of you because we're talking about policy stuff. We're talking about, you know, the most evidence-based stuff. Just kick the crap out of my chair. But I really do think the best way to combat misinformation is to use the new tools we have. I use AI a lot to ask questions.

I do a ton of research in real time using high speed internet to cross check stuff. Like we have so many tools. And also just practice a little cynicism and skepticism when you hear something. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. And remember when I said build that filter? Totally build that filter. Kate Q's YWS, what are you reading right now? I'll close with this.

So I'm reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I'm also reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. Great books. All right guys, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode. Be sure to leave the show a five star rating review on Apple Podcasts as well as Spotify, and I'll catch you on the next one.