The Liz Moody Podcast - The REAL Science Of Hot Button Health Issues: Tylenol, Food Dyes, MAHA, Raw Milk, and More

Starting point is 00:00:00 Chronic disease rates have risen. People don't feel good. What are the reasons for that? In the United States, what you'll find is that there's various systems that impact our health. We have our food system. We have our built environment. We have our education systems. And all of these different kind of social determinants of health. What you'll find is that most of these systems were built for corporate profits at the expense of our health. It's not necessarily to make people unhealthy. It's just that that wasn't the primary value for. corporations. The primary value is profitability and growth. So in the simplest terms, what are the real root causes of chronic disease in this country? A lot of people will ask me, like, what's the number one thing you would do if you had a magic wand and you could just, like, improve the

Starting point is 00:00:43 health of Americans? And I always go to campaign finance, and I think that it throws a lot of people off. Hi, I'm Jessica Nurek. I have a PhD in nutrition science, and I'm a registered dietitian, and I've worked in chronic disease prevention for about a decade and a half. Chronic disease rates have risen people don't feel good. What are the reasons for that? You know, I got into this field a long time ago because of I wanted to study chronic disease and I wanted, there was a chronic disease. We had seen rising rates of chronic disease and I wanted to study why and how we could help to prevent that and reduce risk. And what I found when I was studying is that we actually had pretty good data on the lifestyle strategies to reduce risk of chronic disease. What was wrong was

Starting point is 00:01:26 that people weren't adopting those evidence-based strategies. And so that really got me thinking about like, oh, well, how could we kind of, you know, I started studying what we called like the minimum effective dose that we could have somebody do that would be kind of like something that could change and reduce their risk. Once you start thinking about that, like why aren't people adopting these behaviors, it becomes really difficult to not kind of look at the systems surrounding people. And so in the United States, what you'll find is that there's various systems. that impact our health, right? So we have our food system, and that impacts the nutritional

Starting point is 00:02:02 adequacy for people. We have our built environment, which is, do you have neighborhood sidewalks and parks to go to? America was very much built for cars. We have our education systems and all of these different kind of social determinants of health that directly impact people's health. And what you'll find is that most of these systems were built for corporate profits at the expense of our health. And that's not necessarily to make people unhealthy. It's just that wasn't the primary value for corporations. The primary value is profitability and growth. And what we're seeing now in the food environment is a perfect example, you'll see a system, a food system that's very much built for corporate profits at the expense of health. And so our health is suffering because of that.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Do you think that we narrow in on these like little tiny things because the big problems feel insurmountable? because the environment isn't built for us to get exercise, because the food system isn't built for us to get healthy food. Is that why you think we narrow in on these little tiny details that aren't going to move the needle as much? Yeah, I absolutely think so. It's kind of like the locus of control, right? It's like what can we control?

Starting point is 00:03:12 I think that it does feel really big when we talk about all of these systems. But I also think that kind of gaining a fundamental understanding of where the issue is actually coming from can be really empowering, because then you can make choices within those systems while kind of advocating for better systems. It's interesting because when I hear you talk about this stuff, I think, okay, that's what all of the people who are interested in the Maha movement want. They are like chronic diseases on the rise. I have this friend with these problems, this friend with these problems. I don't feel good in my body. Like something is happening here. And you're saying, yes, something is happening here.

Starting point is 00:03:50 So where do you think that you differ from what the Maha movement is? as the problems and the solutions are? Most of us see very similar problems. You know, over half of Americans are living with some sort of chronic health condition. Most of those are lifestyle-related chronic diseases. Many millions of Americans are living with three or more chronic health conditions. And so we have a food environment that, again, is built for profit and not for our health. And some estimates say that up to 70% of our food environment are these ultra-processed foods, right?

Starting point is 00:04:17 Shelf-stable, ultra-processed foods with lots of additives. And, you know, there's some variability. within that. But most, a lot of them are low nutrient ultra-processed foods, things that we should probably be consuming less of. And so I think most of us would look at that and I'll agree on kind of what the problem is. Where I differ and where most public health people and scientists differ is in the causes of those problems and then the subsequent solutions. And so kind of identifying what are the causes? Why, why is this happening? What are the causes of chronic disease? What are the causes? why is our food environment the way that it is?

Starting point is 00:04:53 And then once you identify the causes accurately, you're able to kind of put your energy into solutions that can actually make a big impact. Because when you misdiagnose the cause, you'll misdiagnose the solutions. And your solutions can either be benign or they might be even harmful. And they're not going to move the needle on the things we all want to see,

Starting point is 00:05:12 which is an improvement in the health of Americans. So in the simplest terms, what are the real root causes of chronic disease in this country? So let's talk about lifestyle-related crimes. chronic disease overall, I think the major underlying thing that kind of like underlies all of this is the idea that we build our systems for profitability at the expense of health. And so when I say that, that, you know, a lot of people will ask me like, what's the number one thing you would do if you had a magic wand and you could just like improve the health of Americans? And I always go to campaign

Starting point is 00:05:44 finance. And I think that that throws a lot of people off. I've heard you talk about Citizens United and it makes me so happy because it is my pet issue. I'm like, This is the root of every problem in our country. I'll talk about it. Like, give me one glass of champagne and I'll just talk your ear off of as Citizens United. Yeah. So I'm so happy to hear you talking about this. Can you explain Citizens United and how that impacted this for-profit system that we have?

Starting point is 00:06:08 Yeah. I mean, essentially at the end of the day, what it did was it enabled basically any kind of corporation to put just tons and tons of money into buying elections. like an individual people buying elections, right? And so, and when I say buying elections, I don't necessarily mean buying an election. I just mean fundamentally influencing politicians. And it was a Supreme Court ruling that essentially said that money was a form of free speech, correct? Correct.

Starting point is 00:06:37 Yeah, exactly. So like money was, yeah, money was like a person who had the rights of free speech. Which means that all of these corporations can then come in and donate money to candidates. And then the candidates kind of act in those corporations' interests when they, they are in Congress later and making decisions. So it basically like blew open like lobbying efforts to basically any person or corporation can put a lot of money into a particular political candidate. And so when that happens, those political candidates because of the way our campaign finances, which is why campaign finance reform is so necessary, you need money in order to get elected oftentimes,

Starting point is 00:07:15 right? And so that money, because of the way that we have structured it, you have to take a lot of corporate money. For the most part, we have some younger, like, Congresspeople who are trying to do it a different way. But for the most part, that's the system that we've built. And it's very difficult to overcome that system right now. So the goal would be to kind of like change the system, right? And change how we finance our like political candidates. And let me just explain why, fundamentally, it's because when you have corporations or you have people who are associated with special interests, funding our politicians and putting tons of money into their campaigns, they are going to be more likely to vote in favor of those corporations,

Starting point is 00:07:54 right, or of those individuals. And so that's a big problem for public health, because public health, there's not a lot of money to be made in public health. Public health is really for the public good. And so there's not a lot of special interest groups like fighting for public health programs and things like that. So we've created this system that is funding these politicians who are then

Starting point is 00:08:16 turning around and enacting policies, because policies are at the root of all of this, that are really beneficial for corporations for the most part, and again, at the expense of people's health. And so if we wanted to change those systems and you want to get to the true root cause, that would be the true root cause, is kind of overturning citizens united, but also just like overall campaign finance reform. So the thing I think I have a hard time wrapping my head around is that ostensibly the Maha people would agree with you about that. They're anti-big-farm. their anti-big agriculture. This would seem to me to be them saying, let's get corporate money out of politics.

Starting point is 00:08:53 I agree with you. So there was a Senate roundtable. It was before the election. So it was like last late summer, early fall. And Ron Johnson, Senator Ron Johnson, like ran it. And they brought in a bunch of Maha influencers. And it was like a second opinion of nutrition science. And they didn't bring in any nutrition scientists.

Starting point is 00:09:12 Gillian Michaels was there. And I think Ron Johnson asked her, like, what's the one thing that you would do to improve the health of Americans. And she said overturned Citizens United. And the room just kind of went quiet. They redirected the group. Yeah. No one's interested in the Republican Party of like overturning Citizens United or campaign finance reform. So what's the disconnect, though? I was reading everything that Maha like wanted to accomplish on their website. And I'm like, this all sounds great. Like this sounds exactly like what I am interested in happening and exactly what I think that America needs to be healthy. What's happening in terms of why are they focusing on all of these other things?

Starting point is 00:09:48 Why are they not actually doing what's on that list? The overall Maha movement will say a lot of things that I agree with. Many people agree with, but then they'll legislate in the exact opposite direction. And do they think we're just like not going to notice that? I think so. I mean, a lot of people aren't noticing. That's why I'm trying to like spread the word and be like, I know we want less environmental toxins. Here are all the policies that have been enacted that are doing the opposite of that. So yeah. I would like more people to kind of look at what they're doing instead of what they're saying. Right.

Starting point is 00:10:16 So, for example, even cleaning up the food supply, we are, you know, there's been no legislation to kind of get, quote unquote, toxins out of our food. Corporations will say, okay, we're swapping our, like, the color additive and our candy. And then, you know, they'll get some free PR from our government about how they're creating healthy candy, quote unquote, when it's just swapping a color and it's still candy at the end of the day. And so it's kind of like a win for the corporation. Every time one of these corporations is like swapping out their food dye, they're getting a lot of marketing for it. And so, you know, that's not the way to change the food system.

Starting point is 00:10:52 The way to change the food system is through policy and through many different pieces of action that can actually from the agricultural system from the food we grow all the way to the food we market and sell. And so, you know, that's where I'm saying like you have to think of like what is actually causing the issues. Is what's causing the issues, artificial food die? or is what's causing the issues the entire system that we've built for corporate profits at the expensive health and then how do we actually go about making change there? And there's policies being enacted right now that are actually making our food more toxic. If that's what you're interested in preventing our food and our water supplies are actually getting more toxic.

Starting point is 00:11:28 They're rolling back lots of environmental regulations that are going to, many of them are going to increase the amount of heavy metals in our soil and water, which obviously will ultimately end up in our food. So if you want like fewer heavy metals, you know, there'll be these write-ups that come out about heavy metals and specific baby food or something like that. And they're kind of saying it's on the individual to sort through the heavy metals and the baby food. And what I'd like us to focus on is like how do we go to the root of that and actually like reduce the heavy metals, the heavy metal exposure in our soil and water? So we have fewer heavy metals in our food. And do you think that they're not cleaning up the air, they're not clean up the water, they're rolling back all of

Starting point is 00:12:08 these legislations because they've taken money from corporations? Do you know why they're continuing to act kind of in the interest of corporations instead of in the interest of people? I think that a lot of what the Maha movement wants to do probably comes from a genuine place. I don't think that they would ever be able to do most of what they want to do under the current administration because it's pretty antithetical to how the current administration was in the first administration. And I mean, we just have to look at their policies in, you know, their first administration to understand. understand what they would do in the second administration. So, for example, I mean, nothing is, nothing is surprising in terms of what they're doing with the environmental regulations, for

Starting point is 00:12:47 example. Nothing surprising with the fact that they have put in, you know, at the EPA, someone with ties to the oil industry, or a person regulating the chemical industry who has ties to the pesticide industry and the chemical industry. So those things aren't surprising because they were done before. Or they just voted a couple of months ago on shielding pesticide companies from lawsuits. And that's not what Maha wants. Maha wants more, you know, more regulation. I mean, it's very interesting because what they want is what would require more regulation. And yet there's kind of like a deregulatory approach to the Maha messaging too, which is tough for me to like square that circle. Yeah, a lot of it is hard for me to square

Starting point is 00:13:30 circle-wise. Like, it's just hard for me to understand like, are they intentionally trying to distract people, do they really think they're doing good with the policies they're enacting, even with these other policies that are very clearly against the interest of making us healthier again? Like, I want to be in those rooms and hear what they're thinking. So you asked me before, like, what are the main drivers of chronic disease? And in this country, the number one predictor of health is wealth. I mean, by far. And that goes to the social determinants of health, which are these non-medical factors that directly impact your health. And so if you're trying to improve the health of Americans, and you're looking at chronic disease rates. We are not all affected by

Starting point is 00:14:09 chronic disease the same way. So when you look across America, there are groups of people who are disproportionately impacted by negative health outcomes. And you look at low income populations, you look at minority populations, those are the groups that are disproportionately impacted. I mean, if you look at the highest, between the highest and lowest income brackets, some studies show a 10-year life expectancy age gap for women and a 15-year life expectancy age gap for men. And you look at chronic disease rates and they're twice as high twice the rate of diabetes and low income populations. And so if you're trying to say, okay, how do I improve the health of Americans? You have to look at the groups most impact in, and that's low income populations in this country.

Starting point is 00:14:47 And so what are some of the best ways to help them in order to improve their health, in order to increase life expectancy and improve health outcomes in the United States of America for all Americans? And it would be programs that directly reduce food insecurity, for example. So something like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps get more nutrient-dense foods to people. It would be something like Medicaid and healthcare services that can help low-income populations get access to health care, which is a major social determinant of health. And what we're seeing right now happen, which is exactly to this point, like if we want to make America healthy, but we're on the flip side cutting over a trillion dollars from health care, almost a trillion from Medicaid itself, and then, you know, a couple billion. from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, almost $2 billion from SNAP, I mean, those are antithetical to making America healthy again. Those are two of the most

Starting point is 00:15:39 important public health programs we have to improve the people, the health of people who are most impacted by chronic disease. What would you say to the people who say, I don't want to pay for somebody else's health care? I don't want to pay for somebody else's free lunch. I'd say if you have health insurance, you're always paying for someone else's health care. So I think there's a misunderstanding of how health insurance works in this country. So when you have health insurance, you're paying into a pool. And those of us who are healthier and younger are subsidizing people who are more risky in that health insurance pool. So, for example, my family, we pay a lot of money in health insurance, and we knock on wood, thankfully, don't use it very often, right? Like,

Starting point is 00:16:17 I take my kids to the pediatrician once a year. I go for a checkup once a year. My husband's, same thing, right? And we're paying thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a year in health insurance premiums. We're not using it. Other people are. And so that's the first thing I would say. The second thing would be if we want a healthier population, if millions of people don't have health insurance, what that means is that they're not going to preventive visits. They're not going to checkups. Not just if they don't have health insurance or if they have like, if they do have health insurance, but their deductible is like five grand, six grand. Like they would never be able to kind of like meet the deductible so it's coming out of their pocket. They're just not going to go

Starting point is 00:16:59 to these medical visits. And so if they're sick, they're going to wait until they're sicker. And they're going to end up at the ER. And what we have a lot of people doing is using the ER as a primary care physician. Right. And so they show up at the ER and they're far more sick than they would have been had they had health insurance. And that's far more costly. And then when they can't pay that health insurance or that medical bill, that gets passed on to all of us. So it increases costs at hospitals. It increases our premium costs. And then we also pay into something called uncompensated care, which is our tax dollars go into something that basically like pays back these hospitals for some of their uncompensated care because they're not getting money for it.

Starting point is 00:17:39 So at the end of the day, it's good fiscally, and it's good for the health of America to get people access to health care. So you're going to pay for it kind of either way. But it's a lot more sustainable. I mean, there's studies that have looked at like a universal health care model. And if everybody had like basic access to health care and then there's ways to structure it, you can have, you know, other private insurance on top of that if you want to like pay for that for yourself. But if everyone just had kind of like a basic fundamental access, there's studies to show that it would save us money on the back end and it would improve health outcomes. And then you also mentioned SNAP. The big critiques of SNAP that I've heard from the Maha side is that people are using it to buy

Starting point is 00:18:21 sodas. They're using it to buy ultra-process food and companies like Coca-Cola are making millions and billions of dollars off of these SNAP benefits that are coming from the government. What are your thoughts on that? I think they're valid critiques. I think that, you know, SNAP, the way that it is set up is it's to help people afford groceries, right? So it's different than WIC, which is very specific for a specific demographic. So it's really just like access to groceries and with very few restrictions. So right now I think there's just you can't buy alcohol and you can't buy prepared food. And so when we've looked at studies, the nutrient profile of the diets that people who are on SNAP buy versus like similar groups that aren't on SNAP are very similar. There might be

Starting point is 00:19:06 slightly higher in terms of nutrient density, people who aren't on SNAP, but it's very, very close, like not very different, which means that they're buying groceries just like everyone else is buying, right? So you go into a grocery store, we've created a food environment that, again, nearly 70% ultra-processed food, and then we're like shaming individual people for making the choices that we are offering them, right? Like America has built and sustained this food environment, and now we're upset that people are eating the food, the food environment built. And so I think it's, I think it's an interesting idea. We've talked about it in public health for a very long time in terms of soda restrictions in particular on SNAP. You know, in 2023, there was

Starting point is 00:19:45 bipartisan legislation with Cory Booker and Marco Rubio, and they wanted to just test it to see, you know, if we put sort of restrictions on SNAP, would that actually meaningfully impact health outcomes? Or would they just swap it and like buy, you know, juice or Gatorade or something else? So would it even be worth it? And, you know, and how would we implement it? It was a really thoughtful way to go about it. And I was supportive of that. I thought that would be great to do, at least study it and see if it would actually meaningfully impact anything. that legislation never really made it anywhere. But now what we're doing is just kind of saying, well, you know, it's kind of like arbitrary. It's like, okay, we're just going to cut soda and we don't

Starting point is 00:20:24 know if it's going to improve health outcomes. Hopefully it does. Right now we just have kind of like modeling to show it might. And I think that that can be really dangerous to just like break, like just blanketly say kind of like shame the individual rather than looking at the overall system. And like, why are people having all of this access to soda, right? Because we're providing it. Which, again, comes back to corporations needing to respond to their shareholders, trying to maximize profits, and thus creating tons and tons of products to inflate their profits. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like the illusion of choice, but we really feel like we want choice, right?

Starting point is 00:21:00 You go into a grocery store, there's thousands of options in there. I get overwhelmed myself. First of all, the food environment, there's way too many calories per person in our food environments already. And so food corporations have to figure out, like, how to innovate and how to, make things, you know, how to market themselves, like, to, for more people to buy. And so they, like, create these different choices for all of these different ultra-process foods. And that's the system that we build. And we, you know, we continue to vote for, too. Like, we have, we are building this through the policies we support. What do you mean vote for? Because I think a lot of people would say,

Starting point is 00:21:34 well, I didn't vote for there to be 17 varieties of fruit loops. I mean, we continue to vote for politicians who are, who work for corporations, essentially, who have very strong ties to corporations and who enact policies that, you know, support corporations and the profitability of them. And I just want to drill in on that a little bit because I think a lot of people feel that they are not doing that. Like a lot of people who believe in Maha believe in it because they want to keep corporations out of politics. So how can we know if the people that we're voting for are the people who are going to not be at the beck and call of these corporations? Well, I think that you can see how someone is funded. You can see their campaign finance and you can see how they're funded. You can see

Starting point is 00:22:18 how they voted in the past. So you can look at policies and how they voted for those policies. For example, right now with the food environment, the farm bill comes out every five years and right now they're trying to pass another farm bill. And are those politicians voting for a farm bill that is reinforcing the exact same agricultural system that we already, that we have right now, which is the vast majority of our tax dollars and the support their tax dollars provide farmers are going to these commodity crops, which are corn, wheat, and soy, which very much are not even built really for us to eat them. Like it's, we really build an agricultural system that is built on, you know, exports, so the profitability of exports, fuel. So 40% of corn goes towards fuel and 40% of corn goes

Starting point is 00:23:02 towards animal agriculture. 20% goes to us, and the vast majority of that goes to these low, low nutrient ultra-processed foods. I was just at an event with a lot of small farmers kind of trying to farm in a different way. And there's programs that we can create for those small farmers who are trying to have more of a diverse, like, crop and diverse fruits and vegetables and legumes and grow lots of different things. Right now, they don't have those same supports. So they don't have subsidies and they don't have insurance. And what we've done is we've really created a food system that's very reliant on these commodity crops that we grow. And, you know, at the expense of these like smaller farmers and local farmers. And so, you know, are our politicians kind of

Starting point is 00:23:48 reinforcing that agricultural system? How are they voting in terms of like advertising, right? Like, should we be advertising pharmaceutical medications? Maybe one other country in the entire world allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients. Like, don't you find it odd that it's like, we'll be watching a show and just like an ad for a pharmaceutical medication comes on and they're like frolicking through a meadow while they're like saying all of the like side effects of the med. And it's like, ask your doctor about whatever pharmaceutical med it is. And it's like, should we be asking our doctor about a pharmaceutical medication we saw on TV

Starting point is 00:24:23 or should we go to our doctor with like an ailment and then they like, they recognize. recommend something because they know like what we need. And so I just find those that, that particular thing to be very, very odd that we do that. And I didn't actually realize how odd it was until I realized how no one else kind of allows it in the world. But those types of things, like how are our politicians voting for those types of things? There are two threads I want to follow there. One is you seem to be saying like there is a really big difference between what people are saying and then what people are actually doing. Because if you just listen to what people are saying, Again, it feels very aligned with almost every single thing that you want to happen in this country

Starting point is 00:25:02 and that I want to happen that I think most people listening would want to happen. But then you're saying, well, look at what people are actually doing. Is that correct? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And then the second thing is I think I didn't understand this until way too late in life. But talking about how foods end up costing what they cost, I didn't have an understanding of the whole subsidy system. And essentially, we're artificially making ultra-processed foods much, much change. cheaper and we're making things like fruits and vegetables from small farmers much more expensive. Can you

Starting point is 00:25:30 explain that a little bit? Yeah. So a really good example of this is like high fructose corn syrup. So high fructose corn syrup is a sugar source that a lot of food corporations use rather than using like sugar beet or sugar cane. So they they derive the sugar from corn. And you know, there's kind of a narrative out there that it's like intentional and we're like intentionally poisoning people in the United States. And that's not it at all. It's just a sugar. source from corn and it protects our farmers because most of our, a lot of our farmers grow, you know, you drive through the Midwest, you're going to see corn fields. And so the reason for that is because through subsidies, we have basically like subsidized the production of corn. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:26:11 in the 70s and also 80s, we really started moving agriculture to this like go big or go home model, which is like you have to be a huge farm and grow a mono crop. So you either you grow corn or you grow wheat or you grow soy. And it really changed from like these diverse farms. And it was because it's much more efficient and much more profitable to grow a single crop, you know, over and over. And so what we did was we started subsidizing those particular commodity crops, is what they're called. And that reduced the price of them, right? And so, so we subsidize them. They're a bit cheaper. Also with high fructose corn syrup, we put quotas on the amount of sugar we would import. So like sugar from beet, for example, or cane sugar in particular.

Starting point is 00:26:59 And so we put quotas on that in order to protect our corn farmers. And because of those things and a couple of other things, the price of high fructose corn syrup went really low. And the price relative to the price of like cane sugar. And so our food corporations started putting high fructose corn syrup in lots of these ultra-processed foods because their goal is to maximize profits. So they're going to look for the cheapest ingredient that they can do that. And the cheapest ingredient was high fructose corn syrup.

Starting point is 00:27:28 And that's the same with, I mean, so that helped our farmers. It helped them produce more corn. It helped and it helped food corporations. What it didn't really help was, you know, us as Americans when we're actually eating the food because now we have these food products that have lots of sugar in them. And it's not necessarily like high fructose corn syrup is not uniquely like bad compared to other sugars. But we have lots of food products that have a lot of sugar and we over 50 percent, over, 50% of us overconsume these added sugars now. And the reason is because, you know, we were using

Starting point is 00:27:59 a lot of high fructose corn syrup. It helps with hyper palitability, which is what food corporations want so that you eat more of it. And that was at the expense of our health. So that's kind of an example where it's economic policy, really, not like nutrition science or anything like that. That is the reason we use more high fructose corn syrup. It's just economically more beneficial and that's That's how it's cheaper. If you have headaches, allergies, brain fog, skin irritation, or you've been dealing with hormone issues, you are especially going to want to listen to this ad. Every single thing that I just listed has been linked to chemicals and household cleaners.

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Starting point is 00:34:28 with code Liz Moody. That's Bullen Branch, B-O-L-L-B-L-B-Ranch.com slash Liz Moody. Use code Liz Moody to unlock 15% off. Exclusions apply. This movement is called Make America Healthy Again. Is there a time that you think America was healthy? No, I don't know where the again comes from. I have no idea.

Starting point is 00:34:50 I would like somebody to define that for me and tell me where the again is coming from. Well, it's interesting hearing you even talk about like this shift in farming. That was what in the 70s and the 80s. So do you think there was a time in like the 60s, 50s? Were we eating more fruits and vegetables? Were we having less chronic disease? We were having less lifestyle related chronic disease and chronic disease in general. Our life expectancy was much lower than it is right now.

Starting point is 00:35:15 and we had far more infectious diseases. So when you talk about healthy, there's like tradeoffs, right? And so as we have gone through the decades, infectious disease, like deaths from infectious disease and just infectious disease in general has kind of dropped and chronic disease has increased. And so at the same time, we've had all of this incredible, you know, medical advancement. People can live with diseases they could not live with 50 years ago. And now, you know, and they can live longer because of medications and things like that. and treatments so they can live longer with these chronic health conditions. And also as a

Starting point is 00:35:51 function of an aging population, you're going to see more chronic disease because chronic disease is a function of age generally. Now, we're seeing these lifestyle-related chronic diseases younger and younger, which is concerning. And that doesn't mean there's no issue there. But it does mean that the idea that we were like in the 50s, it was like this health pedestal and everyone was healthy, it's just not true. We have it a lot better today in a lot of areas of health. But in this one, in lifestyle-related chronic disease, it is, we are dealing with that far more than we were. And that's for many of the reasons we're discussing right now. So then you can see how people would think like, oh, okay, if stuff is better in the 50s, and there wasn't food dies in my food,

Starting point is 00:36:33 and the milk was raw, and they were frying things in beef tallow. Like, we should go back to that because then we'll get the benefits that science has given us in terms of infectious diseases, but we'll start to get these chronic disease rates down. What is the problem with that type of thinking? We were pasteurizing milk in the 50s. I'll give you space to talk about wrong milk in a second. So the problem with that is it's conflating correlation and causation, right? So different things have changed over time. And one of the best ways to spread propaganda is to pretend that two things that changed at the same time were causal, right? So one of those things caused the other. And that's where we run into problems, because that's where you start designing solutions that are actually

Starting point is 00:37:17 quite detrimental. If we're looking at, like, what has actually changed over that time, it's not that, you know, we're using food dye now or we're, you know, not drinking raw milk anymore. It's that it's many other things, right? It's that our food system has completely changed. It's that Americans aren't really moving anymore. The average American walks about three to four thousand steps a day. We don't have the community that we used to have. All of these things are determinants of health, major determinants of health. That kind of go into this.

Starting point is 00:37:51 So we've built kind of post-World War II. We started working more. People were more reliance on convenience foods and just convenience in general. The amount of time we spent together with family, friends, decreased. And all of these things kind of, play a role in health. So it's identifying and looking at like epidemiological data and saying, okay, what are the trends we've seen? And then what, where do we actually have causal evidence for the for the impact? And that's where like chronic disease research is really important.

Starting point is 00:38:22 Instead of just kind of like choosing these random things that there's not good data for in terms of causal that have changed because a lot's changed since the 50s. And so you can kind of choose, I mean, pick your choice, right, out of all the things correlated that have changed since the 50s. the goal is to identify, well, what are the major causal factors and not just conflate correlation? And you would say the major causal factors are the shift in our food system, us working more so thus moving less, and loss of community? Would you say those are the main ones? I would say those are some big ones, yeah, particularly for lifestyle-related chronic disease. Living longer is also one.

Starting point is 00:39:00 Right, because then it just gives us more time to acquire said disease. But you said they're also occurring at earlier and earlier ages. So there's also things we're going to want to look at and we're going to want to address. Yeah. Raw milk. Great. Okay. First of all, I mean, I do think it's really interesting.

Starting point is 00:39:16 Do you know how these things become the thing of interest? Because you can find a study to support anything. You can find, like, why raw milk, why food dies? Why zeroing on these things particularly when you could kind of pick and choose almost anything? I mean, this is going to be a big topic. But I think it plays into this idea of corruption and scientific. corruption and regulatory agency corruption, which I think is a hallmark of the Maha movement. If you don't, it's fundamental to the Maha movement is this idea that science and public health

Starting point is 00:39:46 is corrupt. And so that's a huge difference, obviously, with scientists and public health experts. But science and public health being corrupt feels really different than corruption in regulation. Regulation corruption feels like it would go back to, again, that corporate interest that is influencing politicians. Well, it depends on if you're talking about the scientists or what you're referring to. This has been like an interesting shift. Wellness used to have a political home on the left. And we've kind of seen this shift on the right. And, you know, I've done a lot of thinking about this. And there's a kind of idea of corruption in both of them, although I would argue that it's not necessarily corruption. It's the logical conclusion of the system that we've built,

Starting point is 00:40:28 which is our campaign finance and the way that we have kind of incentivized the shareholder value movement where the primary goal of corporations is profit and growth versus kind of this idea of like scientific corruption and regulatory corruption. Is there any truth to the idea that scientists have been bought off by corporations? I think that in the past you can point to examples where scientists have been bought off by corporations. But I don't think it is nearly as big of an issue as what we're looking at in front of us, which are corporations are acting in the best interest of corporations. And when you have individual examples of scientists kind of working for corporations, scientists are going to look at that and be like, hey, because you have to disclose that.

Starting point is 00:41:11 So you always have to disclose your funding. You always have to disclose conflicts of interest. And scientists are some of the biggest critics of other scientists. And so when that happens, when you see that, scientists are going to assess and evaluate that study with that in mind, and they're going to look at it in the context of all other studies. So that's very different than what the narrative might be on social media, where it's, oh, this scientist was funded by this, and so therefore, this study, you know, nothing matters. Whereas maybe that's one study, or maybe they'll find a study that says, you know, something that they want to say and use that study, but that's not how a scientist does it. They'll look at the 50 studies that have been done in

Starting point is 00:41:52 this area and the 47 that say one thing and the three that say the other and kind of make a scientific judgment from that. Yeah, I think there's this idea of science. scientific consensus that's very much been lost because you can find a study for anything. The journalists of the world contribute to this because we need to write articles, we need headlines, et cetera, et cetera. So we're like, okay, there's about this. We'll put that as the headline today. Yeah. We've lost on a societal level the idea that there are studies saying almost anything you could ever want to study to say, but there's consensus around certain subjects, which means there's a lot of studies. There's been a lot of peer review and a lot of scientists have worked on this and reached the same conclusion. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:30 Okay. Yeah. And if a study comes out and it says something different, that's very interesting, right? And you have to assess that and you have to look at the quality of the study and the study design and then how it adds to the current body of literature and then assess the entire current body of literature. How can the layman understand what there's consensus around when they're like scrolling on social media and somebody is like, a study says this, a study says this and they often

Starting point is 00:42:53 feel contradictory? I think it's hard. That's part of the problem that we found ourselves in. And I think that scientists in general have been really bad communicating. over a long period of time. So, and not only, you know, scientists, you don't really get into science most people because you're a great communicator. Like that's, you know, it's not like you're a journalist.

Starting point is 00:43:12 You get in because you have an inquisitive mind and you want to answer questions, like thoughtful questions. And so I think that we have kind of not recognized the importance of science communication as a profession. And I think that we're starting to and that it's starting to be more understood. But for a very long time, it was quite frowned upon in the academic world to go on social media. And I've told this story before, but I was a new tenure track professor in 2016. And there was this new app that was out that my brother convinced me to go on.

Starting point is 00:43:45 And just I was teaching nutrition courses. And so I went on and started teaching on this app. And I was reaching a lot. I got like, 20,000 followers on this app. And I was like, this is so cool. I'm reaching so many more people than in my classroom. And I got a lot of pushback from colleagues and, and former colleagues. And, you know, I was a brand new, again, tenure track professor. And I didn't

Starting point is 00:44:04 want to jeopardize my career. So I got off after a couple of months and didn't go back on social media for years. And I think that that was the prevailing kind of idea. I've spoken to lots of academics and scientists about this and medical professionals. And it was kind of the prevailing wisdom that we don't go to those spaces. And I think what happened was we lost a ton of traction. And we kind of allowed these narratives to be owned by people who were just trying to build businesses on social media and maybe didn't have kind of the accurate data that they were putting out. I think there's a recognition now that we need better science communicators out there because how do people sort through this stuff? And science communication can really take a role

Starting point is 00:44:43 in that and kind of explain, okay, here's actually what all the data says. There is some nuance here, right? Because there's always nuance in science. And it's like, yeah, this new study does say this. That's super interesting. We should keep following that. But also we have all of this data showing the opposite of that. And so it's just unknown at this point. And I think, I think like the average person doesn't love that, right? They don't love that, oh, we don't know. I don't think our psychology is wired to love. I don't know. We like certainty. It's comforting for our brain. And I think often we will go for certainty at the expense of accuracy because it just feels better. I think so too. And I think people know that and they take advantage of that. A lot of people on the Maha side, and just on

Starting point is 00:45:27 social media in general will say, we'll do your own research. If somebody wanted to do their own research, is there a way that they can kind of put on their science hat and interpret things accurately? Research is a skill set. And I don't try to say that to, I haven't found a beautiful way to answer this question yet, but it took me years to be able to read a research article accurately, right? And understand how to read the research article and not misinterpret it. And there were times throughout my like graduate career that I would go and think that I had interpreted the article correctly and I completely misinterpreted it. And my, you know, advisor would be like, no, that's not the outcome that you found. I do think that there's something to be said for the fact that, you know, I'll have people be like,

Starting point is 00:46:09 oh, even me now, if I read a research article in a field that's not my own, it's very difficult to get through. And so again, I think that there's a place for science communication there to distill kind of what a study might say. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but be able to kind of translate what a study says because that's a big problem. We write in a language that's not really accessible to people. And we publish our work, you know, and I don't publish anymore, but scientists publish their work in journals that aren't usually accessible to people. And they're behind pay walls that you have to pay $88 to read a single article if it's not open access. And so I think it's difficult. I think the idea that you can do your own research is,

Starting point is 00:46:53 oftentimes much more so like Googling to confirm your own biases. And I think we all have to be careful about that rather than actually doing research like a scientist would be doing. And we have an episode about this, but I think people are really unaware of how much the search engines and exactly what we put into them is biased. The answers that we're getting are bias, whether it's from chaty BT, whether it's from Google, the way that you phrase the question, it wants to please you with its response, much more than it wants to give you. unbiased, accurate information. And so oftentimes when we think we're doing our own research, we're really just confirming our own biases. I think especially with OpenAI, with things like

Starting point is 00:47:32 Chachupit, I think that they're making that problem a lot worse. Yeah, I agree with that. There's probably like good that's coming from it, but there's a lot of not good. Does raw milk have any benefits that you can't derive from other foods or from pasteurized milk? This time in the data, there's nothing to indicate that it does. So there's very, very little, very little. nutritional difference between the two in terms of actual nutrients. You know, pasteurization, just to define it really quick, because I realized that a lot of people, like, thought it was a chemical process. Pasterization is just this wonderful invention that Louis Pasteur came up with. I think he was looking at an alcohol that you can just heat milk for 15 seconds at 165 degrees Fahrenheit,

Starting point is 00:48:15 and it kills off these pathogens that were causing a lot of sickness. So if you're making hot chocolate at home, you're pretty much pasteurizing your milk. Pretty much. Yeah. If you're boiling your milk, because pasteurization is not even to the level of boiling. So yeah, it's just heating milk for a very short amount of time, right? And then rapidly cooling it.

Starting point is 00:48:34 And so you're not really losing a lot of nutrients, particularly you're not losing nutrients. Sometimes you'll see like these nutrient losses, and there'll be like these minuscule nutrients that milk is not even a source of, really, like vitamin C, for example. Milk's just not a source of vitamin C. And so very little nutrient difference. And in terms of like any other kinds of differences, we just don't have any good data to suggest

Starting point is 00:48:56 there is, despite the narrative on social media. When you hear people say, my skin is glowing, my stomach never felt better since I started drinking raw milk. What do you think is happening there? I think it's an interesting research question, right? And so more so what I'll hear is somebody saying like they're lactose intolerant, but they can tolerate raw milk. That I think is an interesting research question because maybe there is something there

Starting point is 00:49:21 We don't have any data to suggest it is, so we shouldn't pretend that there is something there. But it might be an interesting research question to figure out why people who are lactose intolerant or believe themselves to be lactose intolerant feel like they can tolerate raw milk. I will say that there is certainly a placebo effect. And I always say a placebo effect is still an effect. So I think that that plays into it sometimes. And if you believe something to be true and then you do it, like you're more likely to believe that that's the case. So I'm not sure. Again, I would want to do those research studies, right, and ask those research questions. If we're seeing kind of a trend of like, oh, so many people are saying that their skin is glowing,

Starting point is 00:50:03 like, is there a plausible biological mechanism for that? And then like, let's design some studies to actually test it. Every decision we make is kind of a cost benefit decision. So you have to weigh any benefits you feel that there are. And there's no evidence-based benefits of it. But if you have anecdotal benefits, You have to weigh that with the actual evidence-based risks. And what are the risks? Because I've heard proponents of raw milk say that you're much more likely to get sick from eating something like spinach than you are from drinking raw milk. Yeah, so they're looking at absolute numbers.

Starting point is 00:50:33 So way more people eat spinach than drink raw milk. There's very few people in this country that drink raw milk. And so if you have to look at like relative risk. And if you look at relative risk, the relative risk of raw milk is way higher than the relative risk of like regular milk. And I would have to look at like relative risk with spinach and things like that. But certainly produce, there's foodborne illness risk there. Raw milk has unique risk in terms of some of the pathogens that it carries that can be much more

Starting point is 00:51:01 harmful than even like Listeria in something like spinach. But yeah, I think that overall kind of we would have to look at relative risk. If more and more people start drinking raw milk, you're going to see more and more foodborne illness come from raw milk. And can you explain relative risk in the... the simplest terms. If you're looking at absolute risk, you're looking at like everyone in the country, like how many people total get sick from raw milk versus how many people total get sick from cantaloupe, right? Because cantaloupe is actually a big one. And that would be absolute risk.

Starting point is 00:51:32 Relative risk would be how many people drink raw milk versus how many people get sick from raw milk. And then how many people are eating, you know, fruits and vegetables or whatever we're comparing it to versus how many people are getting sick. Because that's, that's in relation to how many people are actually consuming it. Why do you think that raw milk has become this social media topic, this podcast conversation topic, this topic, that even government officials are sitting around and discussing whether we should be consuming raw milk or not? And it feels so myopic compared to the greater issues at hand. Yeah, it's a good distraction from the greater issues at hand. And I think that's a lot of what the highest people up in Maha are doing is using these very

Starting point is 00:52:12 simple things that we can kind of grasp onto and in using them as distractions. I think raw milk in particular is kind of this idea. It kind of plays into a lot of ideas. Like, we're going back in time, right? Kind of this nostalgic idea of like, make America healthy again. Yeah. So that's one. I also think that it's kind of like an anti-government thing because we pasteurize milk, as if, as if, by the way, milk producers want to pasteurize the milk. Like, that's just an extra step and an extra cost for them, right? They have to buy these, like, big pasteurization vats and, like, pasteurize them. They would, don't. They just prefer to, like, get it from the cow and send it you, right? But that's quite risky. I think that it's kind of that. It's the anti-government thing.

Starting point is 00:52:52 And then it's like this personal responsibility. Like you can you can take control over like drinking raw milk and like making yourself healthier. And it's like the secret thing that you can do that like nobody else does. And it's a distraction while what happens? Like while the high up government officials are doing what? Why do they want to distract us? It's a distraction because then we're not focused on the policies that we would have to be focused on in order to actually improve. the food environments in public health. And the reason that they're doing that is because that's quite profitable for the industries that they're beholden to. Do you think they like got into politics, though, with better ideals? Like, how did we end up in this place? I don't think that people

Starting point is 00:53:33 run for office thinking, I want to be able to make more money so that I can stay in office and I'll go ahead and fool the American people and distract them so I can stay here. Like, do you think they go into it with good interests and then they realize this is how the system works and they have to play the game or like what's going on? I don't know. I think it's a very, you know, everybody's different and they're probably all getting into it for different reasons. And I think that once you get into it and you, there's just a way that it is played right now in terms of like how you have to raise money in order to, you know, stay elected. And you see, you know, you see this with politicians quite often when they will say one thing and then vote a separate way. And you know that they're voting against

Starting point is 00:54:17 what they actually think. So why would they be doing that? I wouldn't profess to completely understand, but there's certainly obviously incentives for them to be voting a different way than what they actually believe to be true. I want to talk to you about a few other sort of hot button issues right now. A big story right now is the link between Tylenol and autism. So there are things that I've been seen on both sides. A lot of people are saying there's Harvard research that proves that there's this link here, but then other people are saying the Harvard School of Public Health Dean received $150,000 to testify about the connection. Then there's also a Swedish study, I believe, that seems to eliminate the connection that was made in the Harvard study. I'm also seeing people say that Tylenol depletes glutathione levels and depleted glutathione is what leads to these negative health effects.

Starting point is 00:55:03 I would love for you to unpack the link between Tylenol and autism. So the Harvard study, it's just so funny that we're calling it a Harvard study, because it's, I mean, it's just a study that a single author was from Harvard. So now we're like calling it a Harvard study. But it was like one of like, I don't know, four or five authors. And that just happened to be from Harvard. They were paid $150,000 for testifying, which is a conflict of interest, for sure. The testimony was basically thrown out, like, because they said that it wasn't trustworthy.

Starting point is 00:55:34 So if you go back and you actually look at that testimony of the link between Tylenol and autism, the judge said that like the testimony was not valid. Like it wasn't trustworthy. So the dean of Harvard was an author on that study. So that's the Harvard link. Okay. Yeah. And so that study came out, I think, a couple months ago.

Starting point is 00:55:58 And it was essentially a review article. So there was no new data. This wasn't these weren't new findings. It was a review of the existing research. So there's, I mean, lots of autism researchers. out there who kind of like dedicate their lives to this particular topic, who are aware of all of the research that currently exist. This review article basically like compiled all of that. It was published in a mid-tier journal and it came out a couple months ago. This administration took that as if it was like

Starting point is 00:56:25 a smoking gun and enacted as if like we found this evidence. And it would, there was no new evidence. All of that evidence was published. It was available. Again, autism researchers knew about all of it. And basically what it did is it showed several studies that some of them showed a correlation between autism and Tylenol, and some of them didn't show a correlation between autism and Tylenol. And the most well-done study, which was a study that basically controlled for familial factors, so for genetics, it showed no correlation. So it showed a slight correlation. And then when they controlled, and you have to control for factors when you're looking at correlational data, when they controlled for genetics, that correlation disappeared.

Starting point is 00:57:08 And so the state of the research for autism and Tylenol is essentially interesting. We should continue studying it. There is mixed correlational data and no causal data. And so there's no data to suggest a causal link here. And there's a lot of things. We have to drive on this point. There's a lot of things associated with autism. because autism rates have increased, you know, autism diagnoses, I should say, not necessarily

Starting point is 00:57:35 autism rates, but autism diagnoses have increased a lot over the last decade or so in a couple decades, and so have a lot of other things, right? And so there's correlations there with a lot of them. And there's correlation between autism and Viagra. My friend, who's a data scientist, just did a graph that kind of showed the same thing. There's lots of these correlations. And so with the autism link, mixed correlation data, no causal data. And so I think, it's really important to kind of understand where the state of that research is. Now, when you brought up the glutathione thing, that would be what we would call like a biological,

Starting point is 00:58:10 a potential biological mechanism. So in order to kind of like, you go from correlation, which is observational research, and then you move into like causal research, and you need a plausible biological mechanism. Like, how is it causing this? And so the idea that a lot of people are taking is a hypothesis, which would be that it depletes glutathione,

Starting point is 00:58:30 but the way that social. media works is they take a hypothesis, which is kind of like an educated guess or a question, and, well, it's an educated guess. And it's, they take the hypothesis and then they run with it, like, that's the truth. By skipping the entire scientific process of actually identifying whether or not that is the truth. And the thing about glutathion depletion is when it's given, and the evidence is pretty clear on this, you have to give really high doses for it to deplete glutathion in a way that would be clinically meaningful. If you're taking it at a normal dose, the evidence suggests that it's not depleting glutathion in a way that's clinically meaningful. Again, all of that nuance gets lost

Starting point is 00:59:07 in these kind of social media conversations. I mean, it's why I love podcasting so much, because I do think it creates space for very necessary nuance. Yeah. What would you say to people who are like, well, yes, maybe Tylenol is only depleting your glutathion levels a little bit, but also these other environmental factors, maybe you have the MTHFR gene, maybe your B vitamin deficient. efficient. We have all these confluensive factors in the modern world. They're depleting our glutothion levels. Then Tylenol comes in and that's the straw that broke the camel's back and then that increases our rates of autism. I would say we just don't have data to support that. It's a good research question. And we should fund the research. So we should, you know, you should support more NIH

Starting point is 00:59:48 funding to research like this. That's a really important point. I do want to talk about that in a second. But for a mother or for somebody who is pregnant, who's listening, and they're just like, well, ibuprofen has its own risks in pregnancy that are pretty well established at this point. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah. But Tylenol, like, should I be taking it? Should I not be taking it? I don't want to harm my baby.

Starting point is 01:00:12 Like, how are they meant to be thinking about these things when you're like, well, it's kind of muddy and like we need to do more research and there's nuance. Yeah, no. Thank you for following up because it's not necessarily muddy. The idea that there's not research showing that doesn't mean that it's. it's muddy because the vast majority of things that you study don't end up turning out to be true, right? The vast majority of hypotheses don't end up turning out to be confirmed. And that means that we have a lot of hypotheses. We have a lot of these educated guesses that aren't actually the true. Like,

Starting point is 01:00:39 they don't actually end up panning out. And this is very likely one of those. I mean, we have pretty good data. I mean, the data that we do have in terms of like correlational data is mixed at this point. It's not even strong correlational data. There's no causal data. There's millions of people who have taken Tylenol in pregnancy across the world, right? And, and, and we, and they study those health outcomes of, of these women. And so I think, I think the idea is that you should talk to your doctor and you guys can make decisions together about, about your, your own needs. So there's always, like, risk benefits when it comes to this kind of stuff. And that's why your doctor's there is to be like, you know, because the other thing is, is that Tylenol is often

Starting point is 01:01:20 taken in pregnancy to reduce fever. And, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and fever comes with a lot of different health, like, health issues. So if you have a high maternal fever, I mean, that can cause birth defects. That can cause a lot of causal links to some of that. And so, you know, taking Tylenol would be probably, I mean, again, you would want to talk to your doctor, but your doctor would likely say that that would be the appropriate kind of like thing to do moving forward. I think people don't trust their doctors to have the most accurate or up-to-date information. And I think that comes from a pretty real place. I think there's a lot of really phenomenal doctors out there. And there's a lot of doctors who are rushing through appointments because

Starting point is 01:01:58 of, again, the system that we've created. There's a lot of doctors who got very little nutrition training. There's a lot of doctors who aren't running full blood panels. So when you tell people to talk to their doctor, I think there's a suspicion that often comes from lived experience that their doctor isn't going to be able to help them in the way that they would want to be helped. I completely agree with you. I think in this particular case, your doctor will absolutely be able to help you in that way. I think that there is absolutely something to be said about the fact that our medical system is kind of built for doctors to fail themselves right now with patients, but also just leaving a lot of patients behind. And that is creating this vacuum for people to step in with maybe not so good intended information. And so I think that we have to kind of think about what the root of that is. though. And again, every profession is going to have bad actors. There may be a small handful that really just they don't have good bedside manner. They're not great. But most medical doctors are really operating within a system that is designed for them to not be successful too. So, you know,

Starting point is 01:03:04 they have to basically like work for these, this a for-profit health care industry, a for-profit health insurance industry, for-profit like insurance hospital systems. And, you know, they'll get 10 to 15 minutes with a patient. Like, you can't do a proper nutrition consult in 10 to 15 minutes, even if they have the proper training. Even if they know a lot about nutrition, you know, that's just not a plausible thing. Like, you have to get through a whole health history and you have to ask lots of other questions and people are a lot of times going to the doctor because they have some sort of issue. So you have to discuss their issue. And then by the time you've done all that, you have a few minutes left and they're supposed to do like a dietary history and like run through like nutrition as

Starting point is 01:03:43 well. We have this idea that if we're just, if we put medical doctors into one nutrition course in school, that's going to solve our problems. Again, that's not the root cause of it, right? So, yeah, I think that it would be beneficial for our medical doctors. A lot of them do already have some sort of nutrition training. All of them have the fundamentals of what, like, what underlies nutrition, which is like biochemistry and physiology and those types of courses. And it would be probably behoove them to have maybe like just coarse in the basics. Again, many of them already do. But that's not going to fix the fact that they're operating in a system where they don't have any time with their patients to actually discuss these things. So what I would like to see in terms

Starting point is 01:04:23 of nutrition more so in the medical setting is more referrals to nutrition professionals. Right. And so right now, you have to have like type two diabetes in order to get a referral to a registered dietitian. Like we should be able to refer out to registered dietitians for preventive visits, right? And if somebody is like, I'm struggling with my diet, like, let's fund that so that we can actually, like, get them with somebody who can follow up with them, too. Because, again, even if you have, like, a single, you know, call with a dietitian or a single appointment, like, that's not that helpful, right? It might help a little bit, but you need, like, the follow-up. And so it's our whole system that's just not built for that. And I think that's

Starting point is 01:05:01 why other models of healthcare are succeeding because they have more time with their patient to kind of build trust and really like have this follow-up. And it's why social media succeeds too. A lot of these, you know, people on social media who are talking about wellness, I mean, you get to see them every single day. And so you build trust with them. And it's like, oh, I trust you more than my doctor because I don't see my doctor every single day. I see my doctor for 15 minutes and they don't even talk to me about nutrition. But they just don't have the time. I mean, I would put this podcast in that category too. This podcast, if everybody felt happy, healthy, great every single day, podcast probably would not exist. And it's in absence of being able to feel that way in their

Starting point is 01:05:43 lives with the tools that most people have that people need to rely on outside resources. Yeah. And then it's really hard to evaluate is like we work very, very hard on this podcast to present people with accurate, nuanced, up-to-date information that they can action in their real life. But there's no credibility stamp that you can get for a podcast or a social media site to know that somebody's checking that information that you're getting, you know? So I do think it's this tricky situation where people feel really bad. They don't feel good. They know they want to feel better. They're going to their doctor and they say, I don't feel good. Their doctor is not helping them feel better. And so then they're like, well, what am I supposed to do? Yeah. And we have not really built a system,

Starting point is 01:06:23 like a medical system that's built on prevention. It's very much a reactive treatment-based system. And that's, you know, that gets a lot of criticism, but it's also, I mean, it's a really necessary system. And we also need that side of medicine. But we also need to build up kind of the more prevention side, which is what a lot of people are looking for. I'm genuinely confused how masterclass gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly, like the cooking class from Thomas Keller

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Starting point is 01:13:15 And if we were meeting the fundamentals, we would be much better off. So a lot of us spend 90% of our time thinking about the small 10% at the top. where we should be focusing 90% of our time on the bottom 90% of those fundamentals, but those can be quite boring and not fun for social media, right? It's pretty, it's pretty boring if we come on every single day and say, meet your fiber needs and get your vegetables, make half your plate fruits and vegetables, and get a variety of protein from both animal and plant sources. I mean, I've lost half your audience right now, right? Like, it's just is, it's just not as like fancy, but it's that those are the fundamentals that are going to get us there. So kind of making sure, you know, I started talking a lot on my channel about fiber recently because that's a

Starting point is 01:13:56 very important thing to me. And I just, I've seen a lot of people improve their health quite drastically by just meeting fiber needs. And right now, best estimates are over 90% of Americans don't meet their fiber needs. And that's, you know, generally, I mean, this is kind of a rough estimate. It's like 25 grams per day for women and 38 grams per day for men. And 90% of us aren't meeting those. And so, you know, if that's like, you could just focus on that and like, how do you meet your fiber needs? What foods have fiber, you know, beans and vegetables and other legumes and whole grains and just trying like kind of like a game, gamify it and just try to meet it and see how you feel. See if it improves and go slowly because it's fiber.

Starting point is 01:14:38 But, you know, that's something that you can try to do. And then physical activity over 80% of us aren't meeting physical activity guidelines. So just walking more. Like let's walk more. The average American walks again, three to four thousand steps a day. So let's try walking more. Get a handle on our nutrition. Let's make sure we're sleeping seven to eight hours a night.

Starting point is 01:14:56 I need to take that advice myself, you know, two young kids. It's not always easy. And then stress reduction, finding ways to decrease stress, whether that's exercise for you or it's painting or whatever it is. Like those are really the pillars of health, like from a personal perspective. And so if you can focus the vast majority of your energy on that, and then maybe a little bit of your energy on like the fun. stuff like, oh, is, you know, the things in the margins that are going to make a marginal difference.

Starting point is 01:15:22 Like, I'm going to use honey instead of cane sugar, like whatever it is, right? But that kind of stuff we focus way too much on. And I think that we lose, when we do that, we lose kind of the fundamentals. I understand from a messaging perspective why those things aren't sexy. But from a behavior perspective, we all kind of know these things. We know what is healthy. We know what would make us feel good. But we don't do them. Why don't don't we do them? I mean, that's a big question. I always will bring it back to systems. And so we all make individual choices within systems, and you can design those systems for the most people to succeed or for the most people to fail. And right now, our systems are set up for the most people to fail. So we

Starting point is 01:16:02 overwork people. We're overstressed. Lots of people out there are working multiple jobs. They don't have a lot of time. They rely on convenience foods. We've built a food environment that's, again, 70% ultra-processed foods by some estimates. We have 13.5% of our country are living in food and secure households where they don't always have the nutrients they need to meet their food, to meet their nutrient needs. A lot of people are living in food deserts, which are these areas in the country that are essentially very difficult to have access to fresh foods, right, like fruits and vegetables. So a lot of these areas, they don't have grocery stores in them within miles. Or if you're in an urban area within, I think it's, I don't exactly remember, it's like a mile and a half, I think,

Starting point is 01:16:47 or a little over a mile. And so you have to take a bus and you have to take like sometimes multiple buses to get there. And so people just aren't going to do that because it's not a convenient thing to do. And so what are in those areas are things like gas stations or dollar stores. And so that's where people will go for their food. And the majority of things there are these ultra-processed foods. And so, you know, I think it's these systems that we've kind of built for, set a lot of people up to fail within the system. And so we need to, you know, design systems to make more people succeed. Which, again, I can see, like, where the maha of it all steps in because you're like, well, the system's against me. So it's up to me as the individual to influence my

Starting point is 01:17:29 health outcomes. It can feel like the system is insurmountable. We're not going to rebuild our cities. We're not going to make over our government. So, like, maybe it has to be on us. Do you disagree with that? Yeah. Okay. Tell me why. Yeah, I think that, so I don't 100% disagree. I think that individual choice and systemic, like, systemic choices are both very important. So certainly on an individual level, we should be doing everything that we can. For example, if we, you know, are in a position that we, you know, can afford a bit more, and we can support our local farmers, right?

Starting point is 01:18:03 And we can purchase a CSA from them. And that's something that we can do on an individual level to help support kind of local and bring more local food to our area. But we can at the same time push for systemic change because the only way that things will change is if enough people kind of come together and force things to change and vote for things to change.

Starting point is 01:18:26 I love the fact that the Mahan movement has really captured the interest of so many people because people who have maybe never thought about these systems before, they've never thought about our food environment. They've never thought about how corporations control so much. And I think what my goal is is to kind of like redirect that energy. So is the solution if you want a quote unquote cleaner food supply to defund the FDA, which is the regulatory agency that regulates our food and drug?

Starting point is 01:18:58 Or is the solution to recognize that the FDA has always been running on a shoestring budget and been chronically underfunded? and if we want things like the grass loophole to close, we have to fund the FDA and put more scientists and regulatory scientists into the FDA so then they can be regulating the food additives and actually doing all of that oversight and then pushing for change for our food system.

Starting point is 01:19:24 That's where I say like when you misdiagnose the cause, you're going to get the solution wrong. And so when I'm seeing it, and I'm somebody who wants our food supply to be, you know, I want us to have more regulation over our food supply. I want us to create healthful food for people. And so what you need for that is to, you know, have regulatory scientists there who are actually regulating all the foods, all the additives in our foods. And when I see it being defunded and I see the new human food division

Starting point is 01:19:52 essentially being gutted and the head of the new human food division resigning because he said he effectively couldn't do his job, like that's the exact opposite of what Maha wants. And that's what I mean by the distraction. So, you know, if we're distracted by food dyes, we're not realizing that this agency is being gutted, which is the exact agency we need to be funding in order to get what we all want. And what would you say to people who are like, we can't trust the FDA because it's funded by big ag, it's funded by big pharma? Well, it's not funded by big egg. And the FDA, I think what I would say is explain why, right? So the FDA, you can, we can trust the FDA. The biggest issues with the FDA is it's been chronically underfunded. So it hasn't been able to do the job that we all want it to do

Starting point is 01:20:35 effectively. Right. And that that's the reason that, for example, the grass loophole even exists. What's the grass loophole? We had a designation essentially for like regulation. So you have food additives, you have food dyes, which are fully regulated by the FDA. They have to go through like preclinical trials in order to kind of, they have to show safety before they're allowed to be in the food supply. And then you have this designation called grass, which is generally recognized as safe. And back in the 50s, they started looking at these grass substances. And it was, I mean, it was well intended. It's essentially like things that we already know are generally recognized as safe, like vinegar and butter and things that have just been used forever. Right. And so they didn't have to go through

Starting point is 01:21:17 these like trials, these like clinical trials to prove their, or show their safety because they were generally recognized as safe. So that's the designation. What happened is is that over time, all of these new food additives started being introduced to the market at a really high rate because food corporations were growing and they were producing more and more of these convenience and ultra-processed foods. And the FDA couldn't keep up with all of the new food additives and basically go through all of the process to kind of oversee them all. And so in the 90s, we kind of were coming out of this deregulatory era of the 80s and even

Starting point is 01:21:54 into the 90s, Clinton was kind of like a centrist, kind of a deregulatory system. centrist. And in the 90s, a couple of things happened with the FDA. One is that we started accepting user fees for pharma, which I can come back to. And the second one was we started saying, okay, the FDA can't handle all of this. So what we're going to do is basically put it on the corporation to self-regulate. And so they hire their own scientists and basically deem an ingredient generally recognize it safe. Obviously, there's issues with self-regulation, right? The idea was that it's in the company's best interest to not introduce like ingredients that are potentially harmful because that will put the company under. So why would

Starting point is 01:22:38 they do that? But there's obviously issues and most public health people have been pushing for more funding at the FDA so that they could take back kind of regulatory oversight over all of these ingredients. And so what's happened is is that there's thousands of ingredients that are under this designation of generally recognized as safe. And the FDA doesn't even. 100% know of all of them because they didn't necessarily have to tell the FDA that they were deeming them generally recognized as safe. This is like where Maha would also want the grass loophole closed. RFK Jr. has talked about closing the grass loophole. Where the disconnect comes in is that if you want to close the grass loophole, you need regulatory scientists to be able to go over that and be able

Starting point is 01:23:20 to assess safety of these additives. How does he think he's going to close the grass loophole? I have no idea because he's cut a lot of scientists from the FDA. So to be clear, if you genuinely thought food dies, for instance, were a problem in our food, you would want to fund the FDA more. So, or is it the NIH? Who would approve the food diet situation? This is the FDA that regulates food additives. Yeah. So you would want to fund the FDA more so that they could do the studies on the food dyes. And if they found that they were dangerous, they would get them out of our food. Yeah. And to be even more clear, food dyes are not grass. So those are not in the grass loophole. Those are not generally recognized as safe. Food dyes do have to go through regulatory oversight before they're actually like introduced to the food

Starting point is 01:24:02 supply. Where we would like more oversight is like post market analysis of all of these. Maybe doing like every five years, they're reassessing these additives. Right now we basically don't have a good post market analysis of many of these additives. And so so that's what that's what an issue is. So we would like more scientists to actually be able to do more post-market analysis. So that's essentially, that means like, you know, yellow five has been in the food supply. Let's do an updated post-market analysis of all of the evidence out there that has looked at yellow five and any health outcomes and just ensure and reassess the safety of it. And we don't do that well in this country. So again, in absence of funding, things like the FDA were essentially

Starting point is 01:24:46 what relying on corporations to self-regulate and to take stuff. or put stuff in as they see fit? For grass substances. Okay. Yeah. I just want to be so clear on this. If people are worried about quote-unquote toxins in their food, they're going to want more money to go into things like the FDA so that they can do the research and get the toxins

Starting point is 01:25:06 out of their food. Yeah, particularly the foods division of the FDA. So the FDA has a pharmaceutical division and then they have a foods division. The foods division has been chronically underfunded, and I'll tell you why. The pharmaceutical industry was also chronically underfunded. And so pharmaceutical companies were waiting to basically, like, get approvals. And they had to wait, you know, there was a huge backlog. And so what Congress did is they said, okay, instead of allocating more funding to you,

Starting point is 01:25:33 what we're going to do is we're going to allow you to accept user fees from pharmaceutical companies. So when you review the paperwork, the pharmaceutical companies will pay a user fee. And this isn't that odd. Like most regulated industries actually pay user fees. It's like the airline industry. They pay a user fee when they're going through regulation. But what this did was it funded the FDA adequately, right? And so they were able to go through all of those regulatory approvals or not.

Starting point is 01:26:01 And that was how the pharmaceutical industry or the pharmaceutical side of the FDA was able to kind of go through all of that and get adequate funding. The Foods Division has never had kind of a comparable alternative to that. So when people say like the FDA is corrupt because they take money from the pharmaceutical industry, They take money in the form of user fees. That's not people buying off the FDA. That's essentially the funding mechanism that Congress passed a law in order to kind of create. And so that's basically the system we've built. And if we don't want that to happen, what we're saying is we don't want the pharmaceutical

Starting point is 01:26:36 companies to pay these user fees. We want to use our tax dollars and fund the FDA in order to kind of go through these regulatory approvals for pharmaceutical companies. Because right now, pharma pays those user fees. but what people who are saying that that's corrupt are saying is that they want us to pay those user fees essentially as tax dollars. I think there's there's arguments to be made on both sides, but I think it's very important to understand kind of where that comes from. It's not, again, it's not corruption. It's the industry paying user fees to then go through this regulatory

Starting point is 01:27:09 approval. And whatever it is, it's solved by more government funding, not less. Yes, it's solved by more government funding, not less. Why are artificial food dyes used in the U.S.? And is there any evidence that they cause harmful health effects? Yeah, artificial food dyes are used because predominantly in these processed foods, like ultra-processed foods, because when you go through processing, color is removed from the food generally. There's a whole psychology of color. I mean, there's a reason that they add color sometimes to salmon that's sitting there, right?

Starting point is 01:27:40 Because if you salmon looks a little brown, you're like, oh, that's bad. Versus like a bright orange salmon. And you're like, that looks really good. with like fruit, like the brighter the fruit. I mean, there's, there's really interesting data about this, just like the psychology of color. And, you know, food corporations know that. And so they use these dyes in order to kind of add that back into their food. That's why they're used. You can get them, there's synthetic food dyes, and then there's kind of like naturally derived food dyes. And we synthetic, we've been using synthetic food dyes for many, many decades. And the

Starting point is 01:28:13 reason is, is because the color consistency, it's quite consistent. consistent. So natural food dyes kind of, it can vary in terms of like the batch. Consumers don't love that. They don't love when their food color like varies and you open the bag and it's a bit different than it was like before. And so it's for consistency. It's for shelf life because it lasts a long time where there's some, again, variability with natural dyes. So that's why these food corporations use artificial food dyes. I think some of the things with artificial food dyes that are interesting is that, again, the psychology thing. So there's a debate, I think, and an argument to be made that if we kind of dilute the color

Starting point is 01:28:53 of food, particularly, I mean, a lot of them are in these children's food and they love, like, the bright colors, that it could lead kids to, like, eat less of these, like, candies and things. And I think there's an interesting argument to be made there that's quite evidence-based that's, let's look at if it does decrease their intake of, like, sugar and that can actually improve their health. Now, with the artificial food dyes themselves in terms of what the evidence shows, there is some correlational data, and it's not strong, but that some of the dyes, not all of them, but a few of

Starting point is 01:29:23 them, with children who have ADHD, they may exacerbate symptoms of ADHD in those children. Again, that's correlational data. We would need better research on it. One of the biggest things with food dyes and to know is that there's this narrative out there that only the United States approved these artificial food dyes. And that is just not the case. They're approved for use and deemed safe all across the world. The EU has approved them for use, deemed them safe.

Starting point is 01:29:55 Australia has approved them for you, steam them safe. And when I'm talking about the food dyes, I'm really talking about the five major synthetic food dyes that we use in the vast majority of our food. Like if you go look at candies and ultra-processed foods, you're predominantly only going to see five. And that's red 40, yellow five, yellow six, blue one and blue. to. So those are the five synthetic food dyes. Those five are approved for use, Australia, New Zealand, the EU, Canada, everywhere. Now, we use them way more in the United States, but it's not because they're not allowed elsewhere. It's more because of consumer demand. So corporations are going to make

Starting point is 01:30:30 what people want and what Americans seem to want is brightly colored food. And so it's more of a demand thing. And, you know, a food corporations, if we stopped purchasing them, food corporations would stop making them. You know, that's kind of like the way that supply and demand works. And so, you know, I think that one of the things that I really want to just like set the record straight on is that there's no regulatory difference, right? It's not that other countries have deemed these things unsafe and the FDA is just asleep at the wheel and allowing them in our food supply. They're deemed safe and approved for use across the world, we just our food corporations use them more. So to be clear on this, it's not that you're like, yes, put food dyes in all of our foods.

Starting point is 01:31:15 It's that you think it's sort of a red herring to the actual health problems happening in this country. So I think that if you take skittles, not to like call out skittles, but if you take skittles and you remove red 40 and you put in a natural food dye, right? Whether that's carmine from bugs or it's beet juice, it's still skittles. it's still Skittles. It's still going to be a high-sugar, low-nutrient candy that we should be consuming less of. I think that if you make a list of 20 things that are impacting your health, like food dyes in terms of what the data shows, we'll be on the very bottom of that list. And so we're spending all of our energy. It's not that I love food dye.

Starting point is 01:31:54 Like I would actually recommend that we eat fewer foods that contain these artificial food dyes because they're mostly low-nutrient ultra-processed foods like candy. And so it's, again, not that I like food dyes. I actually think there's something to be said for the fact that if we swapped them out, it may make kids eat less of that food. And I think that's actually quite interesting. And that would be an interesting thing to look at. What I have an issue with is pretending that we allow them in other countries don't, that we're poisoning our children and our kids and our citizens with these like food dyes, as if they're

Starting point is 01:32:27 anything other than what they are, which is just another additive that doesn't have strong research that they're harmful. And do you think that the reason that the Maha movement has glummed on to this is to intentionally so distrust in institutions? I think it's a very easy narrative to show that if we can get food dyes out of food, we're winning. And even the approach that they're taking with it is very interesting. So it's, you know, I mean, they galvanized an entire group of people on social media around food dies. Right? It's a galvanizing factor.

Starting point is 01:32:59 You focus on something very kind of like concrete and simple to think about. And about the children, which I think is very galvanizing. And about the children, which is very fearmongering. And it's a, you know, it's really targeting like a very vulnerable group of people, which is young moms with young kids or parents with young kids. And so I think that they used that kind of as a as a mainstay in their narrative in order to kind of distract from a lot of these things, but also play into this conspiratorial narrative about how our food agents or our regulatory agencies, you know, are corrupt and not working for the people. It was kind of one of the most effective strategies that they had in terms of messaging.

Starting point is 01:33:38 What's going on when we see ingredient lists from Europe that are really, really short, and then ingredient lists in the U.S. that are really, really long? Just differences in terms of culture. So I don't know if it's like ingredient lists that are short and long. I know that they, like, we use different ingredients. So let's just take food dyes, for example. A lot of their products and kind of we've seen this with a lot of stuff on social media, we'll use synthetic food dyes and they'll use natural food dyes.

Starting point is 01:34:01 And I think what it comes down to is just what people are purchasing. It comes down to kind of like what is culturally acceptable, like what they have always been used to and what they're purchasing. You know, in the U.S., we had this big push in the 70s, 80s and 90s of all of these like food corporations and these fun foods and all the foods had mascots. And it really shaped our culture, those foods. And so, you know, I think if we want to change that, we have to push back and we have to change culture. and we also have to change, you know, the systems surrounding the culture. I mean, European countries also have a completely different food system than we have here. So it's not just kind of ingredient lists.

Starting point is 01:34:41 But, yeah, it's just corporations are making what people are purchasing. Is Europe actually healthier than the U.S.? And if so, what do you think is the reason for that? I think there's aspects when we look at like lifestyle-related chronic disease where you can point to them being healthier. They have a greater life expectancy. They have lower rates of, you know, things like cardiometabolic disease. and I think you can attribute it to a lot of things.

Starting point is 01:35:04 They really fund public health infrastructure differently than we do. Every high-income country in the world, except for the United States, has some form of universal health care where everyone has access to health care. I'm like, why didn't that become the fight? Like, I'm like, it is so crazy to me that we're holding up these two cereal boxes and we're not saying, well, like, they all have free health care. Like, why can't we get that? I know.

Starting point is 01:35:27 It just feels like if you were looking for the one most obvious difference, I would. would say it's that there's universal health care in basically every European country. I think every single European country. Also, there's walkable cities. There's also much more accessible. I'd say fresh produce and it is much more accessible both from a location standpoint and a price standpoint. I'm like, these are the very clear differences to me, but we're going and hunting for these little teeny tiny differences or we're acting like, oh my gosh, it's a big mystery. What's going on in Europe? And I'm like, these are very, this is what's going on. European countries are not healthier because their, you know, candy has natural food dyes and their Coca-Cola has

Starting point is 01:36:03 cane sugar or beet sugar. Like, that's just not why they're healthier. That's what we're focusing all our energy on. But why they're healthier is just their entire infrastructure is different, just what you were just talking about, right? They have a universal health care system where everyone has access to health care. And studies show that that leads to far better health outcomes for people for reasons that I already kind of mentioned. They have a different food environment. So they have much stronger local food systems. My husband is from Romania, and so we go back most summers. And I'll just go with my mother-in-law, and we just walk quarter mile to the neighborhood market. And it's just this huge street market with all of these fresh fruits and vegetables.

Starting point is 01:36:43 And it's like cheap. Like the fruits and vegetables are so cheap. And like here, you go to a farmer's market. They're like three times the price. And that's not the fault of the farmers. Like, they're just trying to compete. It's about the subsidies that we talked about. earlier. It's in this environment that we've created. So different food environment, health care system, walkable and bikeable cities and towns. You know, they have paid parental leave. They have all of these like social safety nets. They have better vacation policies and paid leave policies and sick policies. And when I say better, I mean, I mean designed for the health of its citizens versus, versus, you know, and they still have a capitalist economy, like many of these

Starting point is 01:37:22 countries over there, all of them, still have capitalist economies. It's just they have, it's like capitalism with a conscience, right? They also like bring in kind of the social support for their citizens. And it's really interesting when you look at some of the tax brackets in the United States. We have this idea that like they pay way higher taxes than us and we we pay really low taxes when it's not at all true. Like they may pay a little bit higher taxes. I mean, you know, Scandinavia is going to be higher than some other countries. But if you kind of look on average, they may pay a little bit higher taxes, but what they get for those taxes, they can tangibly feel. And that's the problem in the U.S. We pay a lot in taxes and we're like, where,

Starting point is 01:38:03 where's my health care? Which makes us not want to pay more taxes. I think that's a huge thing. The government needs to show results with the money that we're giving them for us to want to give them more money. Yeah. And then, you know, when like the Democratic Party comes out and is like, we need to, you know, increase taxes, it's like, okay, but we already are paying so much in taxes and we're not really getting anything to show for it. And so I think that's a big problem. What are some of the likely future outcomes that you see as the result of the Maha stuff that's being done right now? Like, where do you see all of this going in five or ten or twenty years? I think more short term than that, I'm concerned with what's going on with science right now because there's a lot of defunding of

Starting point is 01:38:40 science happening. And I think it's a social media narrative kind of sometimes about the distrust of science more so than when you actually go into the real world because I just saw polling that looked at kind of like the careers that people trust the most. And scientists and medical doctors are still at the top of the list, which might be surprising because of kind of like, you know, I live in the social media world a lot and it doesn't seem that way. But for the vast majority of Americans, they're still pretty trusting of their, especially their medical doctor and of scientists. But what we're seeing in terms of like defunding science, like science funding right now in terms of research and programs and PhD programs, I talk to young.

Starting point is 01:39:20 Young's like early career scientists all the time and PhD students. And many of them are looking abroad and to go abroad. And so I'm really concerned about like a brain drain in the country short term. What I'm hopeful about, and this is like best case scenario, what I think could happen, is we could harness all of this energy that people have right now and and who want to see kind of the systems working better for us as the American people versus just a few people at the top. and harness that energy into the right focus so that we can push for the change that would kind of like help all Americans instead of getting distracted and the divisiveness that I'm seeing so much that, you know, I think we should always like think about like who is benefiting from us all being so divided. With the Maha movement and like scientists and public health experts, for example, there's far more overlap there in terms of what we all want.

Starting point is 01:40:16 I mean, almost all of it is overlap. Again, like we talked about at the beginning, if you look at the things that they are purportedly wanting to accomplish, it is straight down the list of what I think you want to be accomplished, what I want to be accomplished. But then if you look at the actions of the politicians who are saying they're acting on the behalf of Maha, they do not align with those stated goals. Yes, exactly. And so we have to think, like, who's benefiting from all of us being so divided? And even though we all want the same thing. Right. And so what in my, in my like, perfect scenario, we are going to harness all. of this energy to push for real change that's going to help all of us. Are you actually hopeful for that, like happening? Yeah, like that's my perfect scenario. I mean, I'm not super hopeful right now. Like, I'm actually quite concerned in terms of like what we're seeing happen. I mean, I talk to people inside of public health just because the following I've built is a lot of

Starting point is 01:41:06 public health people follow me and they work within our public health agencies. And we should like, I should define like public health. The problem with public health really is that when it's successful, no one really knows it's doing anything because public health is really the water that you're drinking that's clean and like free of toxins and, you know, additives and pollutants, I should say. And it's like clean air and it's the infection that didn't become an outbreak that you didn't even know kind of like was on the surface and could have become an outbreak and spread. And so, you know, when public health is working, it's kind of like working in the shadows and you don't know.

Starting point is 01:41:47 And I think right now what we're seeing is like defunding so much of our public health agency is that it's very concerning in terms of just what the future is going to hold for our air, for our water, for our food supply, for infectious disease here and abroad. And if you think about abroad, like when you're talking about infectious disease, it doesn't know borders. And so that's why we have, you know, people working on, there's an Ebola outbreak right now across the world. And we had people at the CDC working on that. to make sure that it didn't spread. And they cut all of those people last weekend.

Starting point is 01:42:22 And then they came back the next day and said it was a mistake. And they brought those people back, some of those people, not all of them. But I think that that's the concern is like, because we haven't done a good job of explaining the importance of public health, it's very easy for people to discard how important it is and to be like, we should, you know, defund all of these programs that, like, what are they even doing? And so I think that's kind of on us to do a better job of explaining it. that. But yeah, I think I'm more concerned than hopeful overall.

Starting point is 01:42:51 And what is RFK gain by defunding public health and by increasing distrust of scientists? And I'm speculating on people's kind of motives. What I would say is that he certainly gains power. He's head of HHS, which is one of the biggest public health agencies in the entire world, if not the biggest one. And he's running several different public health agencies. And he's in, he's pretty high up in administration. So certainly power from that, certainly influence. I couldn't tell you how much there's been pieces written about like financial ties and any money that he's getting. And so I think, I think that a lot of people will do a lot of things for power and influence and money. So whether or not it's just that, I'm not sure. But I think that those

Starting point is 01:43:38 three things are certainly part of it. Outside of voting, what can the average citizen do to create a healthier America. Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on who you are. So if you are in a place where you can kind of vote with your dollar, right, then vote with your dollar. So that would look like supporting your local farms. And I kind of mentioned this, but like joining a CSA, that's like the best way to support your local farmers is through a CSA, which is community supported agriculture, because you're just going directly to the farm and there's no like middleman. You know, you can, you can buy your milk at a local farm. So trying to do that, voting with like the type of food that you want to see, right? And so purchasing the type of food that you would like to see supported.

Starting point is 01:44:19 Those are a couple of things. If you have the means, you can do on a personal level. Other than that, you can, you know, push for change so you can call your representatives. We think that our voices are powerless. They're not. And our representatives really do listen. And so, you know, I've talked to several of them. There's so many things that they're dealing with all the time that maybe like this is not their central issue. And so, you know, when I'll talk to them will be like, this should be more your central issue because like it underlies all of like all of our issues in terms of our, the health of a, you want a country to be healthy to see improvements. So I think definitely like calling representatives, obviously voting. And then from a

Starting point is 01:44:59 personal perspective, you know, just talking to, I think we, we've kind of come away from the importance of just local influence. And so you can talk to your friends and your family and, you know, share the work of science communicators, for example. But if, if, you know, somebody is concerned about something, kind of bridge that gap, be like, I understand your concern. And then maybe like insert some of the knowledge that you have in that particular area and help somebody to feel better about a situation or feel differently about a situation. And I think, you know, you have to trust somebody before you'll believe what they say. And I think that we have a lot more influence over people in our everyday life that already trust us, than just kind of like talking to the void sometimes.

Starting point is 01:45:43 Can you speak directly to somebody listening who's really been taken by the Maha movement? They're like, look, it might not be perfect, but at least they're having these conversations, at least they're interested in the health of our children, the health of our future generations. What would you say to somebody who's like, a lot of this really does make sense to me and at least they're doing something? I would say that what they're talking about doing is not what they're actually doing. So I think what they're talking about doing and bringing attention to it is extremely beneficial. As I said, like it's one of, it's the greatest aspect of this movement is bringing more awareness to these issues.

Starting point is 01:46:19 The problem is is that what many people in the Maha movement want to see done is the exact opposite of what's being done from a policy position. So I would say please just look at the actions and what's actually happening versus kind of what's being discussed. It really helps this movement and particularly this administration, who this movement partnered with. And a lot of people in the Maha movement will say to me, you know, the Maha movement is not this administration. And what I'll say to them is you can't have one without the other. And the reason that they partnered together was because the Maha movement brought votes to this administration in order to enact their policies and agenda. And their policies are oftentimes, and if you actually look at the way they're legislating, in direct opposition to what you want to see. from the environment to the food system to science funding. Like if you want to understand these research questions that we have, we have to study them.

Starting point is 01:47:11 And we need science funding for that at the NIH. And so I think understanding that scientists and public health experts, like look at how much we all want in common. And we are not the like enemy here. We need to do, we need to take some accountability for the lack of communication that we've had in all of this. And we need to be better communicators. but we all want very similar things and just kind of to understand that and think like, again, who benefits from getting us all divided? Thank you so much. Can you tell people where they can find you online if they want to hear more?

Starting point is 01:47:43 I guess the best two places are really my substack. I try to publish their weekly. That's like more in-depth stuff than what my little social media videos do. And then Instagram is kind of my main place. Amazing. This was a really phenomenal conversation and I really appreciate all of the work that you're doing. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, go ahead and follow on Apple or Spotify or subscribe on YouTube and hit that notification bell so you never miss a new episode.

Starting point is 01:48:12 And if there's somebody in your life you think would benefit from this episode, send them a quick link. It is the best way to support the podcast and it is so, so appreciated. And if you're watching this, drop me a comment. I would love to hear your thoughts and what resonated most with you. Thanks again for being here. I feel so lucky that I get to grow and learn and share with you. And I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast.

Starting point is 01:48:35 Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.

The Liz Moody Podcast - The REAL Science Of Hot Button Health Issues: Tylenol, Food Dyes, MAHA, Raw Milk, and More

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