The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Truth About the MAHA Movement — with Dr. Jessica Knurick

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Scott speaks with Dr. Jessica Knurick, nutrition scientist and registered dietitian, about the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement. They discuss why MAHA resonates with so many Americans, what it gets wrong about health and wellness, and how systems built for profit – from food to healthcare – are failing us. Jessica also explains the role of social media in spreading health misinformation, the promise of new science like mRNA technology, and why she believes “health is bipartisan.” Follow Jessica, @drjessicaknurick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Thank you. Episode 364. 364 is the area code covering Western Kentucky. In 1964, Keanu Reeves, Stephen Colbert, Jeff Bezos, and that's right. The dog, we're all born. True story.

We're starting a boy band, and before each concert, we're going to give everyone a Viagra, and we're calling the band One Erection. That's good. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 364th episode of the Proff G-Pod. I am officially back from Scott Free August. I know. You're welcome. You've been deprived. You needed a little Scott in your life. You need a little rhythm. You need a little no mercy, no malice content. And here we are to deliver. Back in London, it's absolutely beautiful here. It feels sort of alien. You're supposed to get

sunshine. You're supposed to go out. And by the way, I think we need to do something to convince young people that life is messy, difficult, and really wonderful when it's experienced offline. In my no mercy no malice column last week, we did a post called Lonely Fans. I really like that title. Lonely Fans. Anyways, the Lonely Fans economy is booming. There's just some crazy stats about only fans. It has a customer base, the population of the United States, about 350 million people. About 80, 85 percent of the creators are females, as you might imagine. I did the math, and if you take out college grads and people in big cities, essentially if you're in a smaller town or a smaller city and you pass an attractive woman between the ages of 18 and 25, there's like somewhere between a one and three and a one and five chance that she's on only fans. And I don't think you can tell people they should have bodily autonomy around family planning and not tell them or not let them have bodily autonomy around how they decide to make money or not make money. So I don't have a moral issue or problem with it. I just wonder if it's essentially creating a new species of as social, asexual, male, and that we're kind of planning our own extinction here, that

people aren't finding places to connect, spend time, and demonstrate greatness or demonstrate excellence. And if you talk to married couples who've been together longer than 30 years, 80% of them will say that one was more interested than the other in the beginning, and it was usually the man that was more interested in the woman. But over time, you know, we went to temple together, and unlike the way he treated his parents. I hung out with him and found out he was really funny. We worked together, and I was impressed by how goody was what he did, and men have a chance to demonstrate excellence, and hopefully the woman decides to let that person into her much finer filter, if you will. But the problem is now, where do men demonstrate excellence? Or

where do people get together to demonstrate excellence to one another? They're not going to work or into work. They're not going to religious institutions. That attendance is off 20 to 40% in the last 20 years. They're not going to third spaces. It's too expensive to go out and go to bars. It's just we don't have an apprenticeship culture. It's where are young people supposed to meet, especially when they've decided, okay, it's just much easier to go home and watch Netflix

or scroll on my phone and engage in sort of this bedrock. Anyways, I worry that we're turning into like an orca and an isolation tank. And what happens to orcas in isolation tanks, they go fucking crazy. And if you look at the natural state of being for dogs, and I am equating humans to dogs because they're mammals. They want to lie on top of each other. They want to be around each other.

Even if they're not romantic partners, they want to be in packs. We are pack animals. Where am I going with all of this? I think public policy needs to provide tax subsidies for third places, sports leagues, parks, Christ, even bars. To a certain extent, London does that. There's certain retail establishments or spaces. They're only zoned for pubs.

You can buy a nice pub and a good part of town in London. and for a lot less than you could buy that real estate because it is zoned strictly for pubs. And I think pub culture and the chance for people to get together is a real key component of our society. I'm wondering if we could do the same thing, mandatory national service, figuring out something I'm really encouraged by is that Tinder and dating apps are collapsing and in-person meetups and are starting to take off, run clubs, sports leagues, dining clubs. And I think that's wonderful. I think we have to figure out a way to convince our kids and our species, if you will, once again, that life is hard, people are hard, people are messy, and that's what makes them so incredibly wonderful, that trying to develop a relationship with an online character AI that is frictionless and easy,

you end up in a frictionless, seamless, slippery slope towards loneliness and depression, that all of us need to bump off of each other in person, and you'll get bruises, but you heal and it's stronger, and that full-body contact interaction with people is kind of what makes us human. Okay, moving on. In today's episode, we'd speak with Dr. Jessica Nurek, a nutrition scientist, registered, dietitian,

and nationally recognized science communicator, who works spans nutrition, public health, and food policy. We discussed with Jessica, the state of public health in America, how misinformation and the MAHA movement are reshaping conversations about wellness and what real policy solutions could actually improve our health. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Dr. Jessica Nurek. Dr. Nurek, where does this podcast find you?

Denver, Colorado. Let's bust into our first question, and it's a big one. What in your view is the state of public health in America? I would say the state of public health in America. So I think And this is, I'm sure we'll talk about, you know, the Maha movements and how that's kind of like defined the conversation around public health right now. I got into this field about 15 years ago and my main goal and my research focus was really chronic disease prevention because even at that time, we, we could look around and look at the data and it was very clear that we, you know, we had done a really wonderful job at tackling infectious disease and getting a point. public health infrastructure in place that undoubtedly impacted our health in wonderful ways, right? We saw a huge increase in life expectancy because of a lot of our public health infrastructure. But as we were living longer, we were also seeing higher rates of chronic disease. And so we were particularly lifestyle-related chronic diseases, which is what I started my research

focus in. And so what I would say is right now what we're looking at is a situation where about half of Americans are living with at least one chronic health condition, and many Americans, 30% of Americans, are living with, you know, more than one. So many, many different health chronic or chronic health conditions. And a lot of those are lifestyle related chronic diseases, right? And what that means is our diet, our physical activity, our behaviors are impacting our disease risk. And so I think that what a lot of people in public health right now are, or in this Maha movement right now are really getting right. is that we do have a big issue with these lifestyle-related chronic diseases. And so what I would say is when we're thinking about public health, public health are really these systems that are looking at the health of all Americans. And when you're looking at the health of all Americans, the health of Americans is struggling. It's not struggling evenly across the board. What we see are pretty large health disparities in America. And we can kind of talk about that, but a lot of our health issues are really disproportionately affecting

particular groups in America. But we are seeing these big health, these big health issues in our country that I think that people are rightfully concerned about. You've said that behaviors are important, but behaviors basically influence outcomes within the system. Talk about some of those systems in the U.S. that make bad behaviors even worse in terms of their outcomes. Yeah, what I would say is individual behaviors. So we make individual choices within systems. And so those systems can either be set up for the most people to succeed or for the most people to fail. And what we have done in our country is really built systems for the most people to fail from a health perspective. And there's a reason for that because we have really built our systems for profitability.

So if you think about, you know, if I'm working with you one-on-one on your health, some of the things that we're going to discuss. We're going to talk about your diet, right? What foods are you eating? Your physical activity. Are you moving around? Your health care access. Your stress levels, your sleep levels. Those are all things we would work or work on an individual level. Where public health plays a role is there's systems that are impacting each of those kind of individual choices you're making. So just from the food system, for example, which is kind of my bread butter. The food system in our country, by some estimates, is about 70% ultra-processed food right now. And so we are heavily reliance in the United States on these pre-packaged ultra-processed foods.

And the reason for that is, well, there's a lot of reasons for that. But it's really because our food system has been built over the course of several decades for profitability. So from our agricultural system, which is where the food system starts, what we grow, to what we end up marketing, putting on shelves and marketing to people, has all been kind of designed for maximum profitability, profitability and growth. So, you know, in the 70s, we kind of changed our agricultural policies to start really focusing in on these commodity crops. And so Secretary of Agriculture at that time, he had this go big or go home kind of like model. And the idea was we wanted to start growing in mass on these commodity crops, mostly corn, wheat, and soy,

because we grow corn, wheat, and soy very well in this country. And they're really good exports for us. And so we make a lot of money from them. And so that's what started happening. And so we started coming away from small local farms, small family-owned farms, to large agribusiness. And that really dominates our agricultural system now. And so we subsidize that as a government, too. So we really incentivized farmers to be growing these commodity crops. And that's kind of decimated local food systems. And so when we did that, you know, then we kind of came into the 1980s and the era of deregulation under Reagan and then, you know, Clinton as well. And the idea was, you know, we're going to, you have the shareholder value movement, which was

kind of like let's maximize profitability and growth at the expense of all of their values. And so one of those values is the health of the food that you're creating, right? And so when you do that, when you have all these like confluence of factors, you create a food system that is really built for corporate profits. So you are heavily reliant on these prepackaged ultra-processed food. that can travel far because you don't have good local food systems. You know, you said my husband's from Romania, so I'm very familiar. We go back most summers. I'm very familiar with kind of like the food systems in a lot of countries in Europe. And it's just very different than what we have here.

You know, I'll walk down the street with my mother-in-law and go to the local farmers market, which is not what we consider farmers markets in the United States. It's just the market, which is like where everybody goes for their produce from like local farms that are around there. I mean, it's much cheaper, actually, than to go to the United States. It's just the market, which is like, go to the actual grocery store, which is very different than here. I live in Denver, so we have farmers markets, but they're incredibly expensive. And they kind of, you know, they sell like goods and things like that. So we kind of did away from these local food systems. And so when you do that, you are heavily reliance on these prefackaged foods, which require, by the way, food additives to keep

them shelf stable. And for corporations, food corporations that are trying to maximize profit under this kind of system, they're going to swap and use cheap ingredients. So, You know, for example, we subsidize corn in this country. Now, a lot of that corn doesn't actually end up in our food system. A lot of it goes towards animal agriculture and then fuel. But because we subsidize corn, high fructose corn syrup is quite cheap for us as a sugar source. This is just one example versus cane sugar. So what these food corporations did was they started using high fructose corn syrup as their sugar source.

The only reason for that was because it was cheaper, not because of any other reason, but they were trying to maximize profits. And so you do that by cutting cost of ingredients. And so what we have designed kind of intentionally with policy has been this food system that is not really conducive for our health, but it's conducive for corporate profits. And then you can go across the board, Scott, and you can look at physical activity,

you can look at stress, you can look at sleep. And all of the systems that have been designed, you know, just thinking of like physical activity, If you think of the built environment, I mean, in our country, we really designed roads and systems for the profitability of the automobile industry. And so we don't have, we have lots of towns and cities that aren't walkable and bikeable, which is very different than a lot of European countries, for example. And so that's kind of, through a public health lens, is looking at those systems that are really impacting our individual choices. I want to put forward a couple of theses that beg potential solutions and just have you respond to them. And I'm very comfortable with pushback, recognizing.

that you're the expert here, and I do think that we need to bring expertise back in vogue. One, this is really just about money. China's run for control. Chinese companies are run for control, U.S. companies are run for profits. European companies, sort of a hybrid between profits and what they think is potentially good for people. And there's downsides. We grow faster. We grow shareholder value faster.

There's real benefits to having a robust economy. But at the end of the day, isn't the primary, if you were to look at people's health outcomes. Doesn't it mostly, if you were to try and find something it's correlated to, doesn't it mostly come down to money? And because I'm wealthy, am I not going to live 10 years longer than someone who is in the lowest desile, which begs the question? It's not romantic. It's not sexy. It's expensive. But would we move the needle a lot more than say, maha or subsidies if we said $25 an hour minimum wage. If we just gave poor people who have the worst health outcomes, the money sets they didn't have to have to have to find the cheapest calories available, which is usually

at a, you know, a Wendy's or a McDonald's. Doesn't at the end of the day like everything else this come down to money? Yeah, the main predictor of health in this country as well. So you're absolutely spot on. There's evidence to show there's research to show that, you know, there's a 15-year life expectancy age gap for men and a 10-year life expectancy age gap for women between the high and lowest income brackets. And you can look at sometimes more than 15 if you look at some of the research that looks at zip codes in the same state, and you'll see an even bigger disparity in terms of life expectancy. And so, yeah, 100% when we're thinking of like how can we help the people who are struggling most, I mean, not just life expectancy. If you think of all of the

lifestyle-related chronic diseases, they are disproportionately impacting the lowest income people in this country. You know, diabetes rates are over twice as high. five times more likely to report poor or fair health than higher income groups. And so, you know, if you're trying to design systems to help improve the health of all Americans, you look at the people who are struggling most, and it's lowing some people in this country who don't have good access to, you know, fruits, vegetables, healthful foods, who don't have access to walkable towns, parks for their children to run around and play, educational access, those things.

And so getting those people just kind of like baseline access, right, housing access for safe housing. So I don't know exactly if a $25 minimum wage would do it. I'd have to see data on that, but it's definitely getting resources to people so that they can at least have a baseline kind of, they can have baseline health insurance, they can have baseline food access, they can have baseline safe housing so that they can experience health as well. It strikes me, though. I've read somewhere that we spent a trillion and a half dollars on obesity-related illnesses or obesity-related conditions. This is just, I used to think we're an addiction economy or we're in attention economy.

Now I'm convinced we're an addiction economy, and one of those addictions is to food because there's so much money in it. But what do you think of the idea or like, well, first off, thoughts on public policy to address it and a simple idea that probably doesn't work. What if we just massively increase the availability and penetration of GLP1 drugs? I think, first of all, let me address just like the food environment aspect in terms of policy. I think that if we're looking at why we have this abundance of food, I mean, we have way more calories available to us than, then, you know, our ancestors did, even like a generation ago, two generations

ago. We've about 4,000 calories available for each person that is alive today in the U.S. And that's, you know, that's a lot of calories per person. We don't need that many calories. And the reasons for that are these food corporations are, you know, they're trying to stand out in a system that where we already have too many calories available per person, right? And so they do that by innovating and coming up with, you know, a different color product or a different, you know, whatever it is. And so, you know, you go into one of these supermarkets and there's just thousands of products. I mean, it's really unnecessary, right? We don't need that many food products on our shelves. But they're doing it because they're trying to maximize

profits. And so, you know, some of the ways that you can counteract some of that is through regulation, which is funny enough. Like right now we're going through, again, we have an administration that's quite deregulatory in their approach, which is interesting for people who want a better food environment. But, you know, you would regulate marketing, particularly to children and low-income populations who are most impacted by some of this stuff, but just in general, you would regulate marketing. And, you know, one of the reasons we also have it is, is because we have very few corporations that own the majority of the food supply. And so they kind of get to, and that was because, you know, kind of this deregulatory era where there were a lot of

mergers and acquisitions. And now, you know, you think that you're getting a product that's a different brand, but it's a brand that's owned by the same company and you wouldn't even know it. Right. So I think that some of the, some of the ways we do this is kind of we regulate marketing. We regulate, you know, the amount of food that are the types of foods that are allowed to be, put on the shelves or those types of things. But it's also just like deeper. You have to change the entire food system. Because again, we have a food environment that's about 70% ultra-processed foods. You have to incentivize it starting agricultural policies, incentivizing smaller farmers, incentivizing, you know, through we have the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,

which helps low-income people get access to foods. And we have some really cool programs with that that are called like double up bucks, which a lot of states have, which is basically like if you spend your money on fruits and vegetables, you get twice as much. So you basically like double the amount of money that you have. And so we have these cool incentive programs that kind of incentivize people to eat more like, you know, nutrient dense health-promoting foods. So those are some of the strategies to be able to expand access. You know, you have to address food deserts to expand access to kind of low-income populations. And then on the other side of it. If you're just thinking of the obesity side and increasing GLP1 drugs, I think that GLP1

drugs, you know, I think they are amazing in terms of what they have been able to do and what the potential that they can have in terms of improving people's health. I don't, I am somebody who likes to think of more like root cause and fix the underlying systems before thinking of treating with a pharmaceutical med. I think there's definitely a place for pharmaceutical meds, but I would like to spend more of my time focused on like how can we fix the systems that are putting people in these positions versus just treating on the back end. You said the Make America Healthy Again movement gets the problems right, but the solution's wrong. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so when I talk about the Make America Healthy Again Movement, I mean, we sound, like, I sound very similar to them when I'll speak about kind of the problem. You know, they get, they do get those problems largely correct, right? We do have a lifestyle-related chronic disease issue in this country. We do have a food environment that's built for profitability and not people's health. and, you know, we have systems in this country that are not designed for us to succeed, where we kind of diverge is in the causes of those problems. So their causes largely kind of play into this rhetoric of it's a very conspiratorial,

anti-science, anti-regulatory agency rhetoric, which is you can't trust, you know, our regulatory agencies, you can't trust scientists because apparently scientists are the ones who have gotten us here. And they kind of like distract from all of the issues that I'm talking about right now. They distract from, you know, the idea that all of the reason that we're here is kind of the logical conclusion of the system that we've built, which is are these systems that have been designed, again, for profitability at the expense of people's health. And I think there, when you do that, when you kind of just focus on like the problem is toxins in our food supply and you just choose random ones that don't have, like, it's not as if. we have strong evidence behind some of these that they're choosing, you know, you get solutions like swapping the color of fruit loops, right? Or swapping high fructose corn syrup for cane sugar

and Coca-Cola. And those just aren't going to move the needle on health. And so they're very distracting from the policies that actually could be moving the needle on health, right? If you swap red dye 40 out of skittles and you add in carmine or beet juice instead, like a natural food color additive, and it's still skittles, right? It's still a very low-nutrient, high-sugar, ultra-processed food that we should probably be consuming less of, not necessarily none of, but less of. Same with Coca-Cola. Same with swapping beef tallow out and putting in, you know, seed oils in fast food french fries. Like, none of these things are going to actually change our food environment and actually make a meaningful difference on public health. And so it's very much a distraction.

And what I'll say is that if you get the problems wrong, you're going to get the solution. wrong. And so some of those solutions I just highlighted, which is what Maha is really talking about, some of the other solutions that you'll do is say things like, you know, fluoride and the water is the problem. And that's causing all of our chronic disease issues. And so we're going to remove fluoride. Well, at the same time, dental cavities or dental caries are the number one chronic disease in children. So if you're trying to improve chronic disease in children and you remove fluoride, which is directly going to increase the number of dental carries, that is a solution. that is going to actually cause more harm than good

in terms of what our evidence actually shows. And so that's the danger in kind of misdiagnosing the problem and then your solutions that follow are going to be problematic. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Sacks Fifth Avenue. Sacks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style. Follow us here and you can invest in some new arrivals

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Go to betterment.com to learn more. investing involves risk performance not guaranteed 40% of American households have some form of medical or dental debt and I can't imagine the amount of stress that puts on households that and shame quite frankly I'm you know me and my partner are working really hard and we can't afford to get our 19-year-old the root canal she needs and we have to take on debt and that amount of stress, which I imagine leads to worse health outcomes, and then you have kind of a downward spiral. Do you believe that we should nationalize medicine?

Yeah, I mean, medical debt is also the number one reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States. Yeah, I'm a big advocate for some kind of universal health care system, some kind of system that gets everybody basic access to health care. And then we can have private insurance on top of that. If we, you know, like companies can offer private insurance on top of that, but everybody should have basic access to health care, which is what every other industrialized country in the world does. And let me explain the reason for that, Scott. It's not just because I'm altruistic and just want everybody to have free things. If you give people access to health care, they're going to go to preventive visits. And when that happens, they're going to

be able to catch things early on. And so access to health care is one of our main determinants of health. There's an incredible amount of data on this. You give people access to health care. they get healthier. Not everybody, but on a mass scale when you look at kind of the population as a whole, because they're going to go to preventive visits, they're going to go to screenings, and they're going to catch things before they get to down the line. When people don't have health care, what happens is, or they have health care that doesn't cover, you know, these types of visits, or they have really high deductibles. And so maybe they have health care, but they would have to pay out of pocket anyway for some of these visits. They're not going to go to the doctor. But the problem

is that they're still going to get sick. It's not as if they're just not going to get sick because they don't have health care. And when they get sick, they're still going to go to the hospital. They're going to end up in the emergency room. And what we have is a lot of Americans using the emergency room as their primary care physician. And so they're ending up with the emergency room. And if you're in front of an emergency room having a heart attack, that hospital is going to accept you and they're going to give you care. And when you can't pay those medical bills, that that cost is going to come on to us as taxpayers. So it's not like that cost just goes away. And it comes on to us with increased premiums and our health insurance, with increased hospital costs, with increased uncompensated care.

So our tax dollars go to something called uncompensated care, which goes directly to these hospitals to compensate them for this uncompensated care. And so, you know, not only is it problematic from a, you know, money standpoint, but it's also problematic from a health standpoint. So if we can get more people access to health care, we're going to improve the health of those Americans and also decrease costs because there's some good evidence to show that, you know, I mean, in this country, we pay twice as much for health care and we have worse health outcomes. You know, we've created a health care system that's very profitable for health care corporations at the expense of, again, people's health and people getting access to health care. And so you're going to improve people's health and you're going to lower costs. So that's obviously a big solution, universal healthcare that may, you know, if everyone else has done it, I'd like to think we could do it, but most people will say it's, it would be very difficult to accomplish. Are there two or three policy solutions or private sector solutions that you think would move the needle? Yeah, I think if you think of the main determinants of health, they are health care access, food access, income inequality, right?

and probably income inequality is even above the other two. And so, you know, when you think of policies that could actually help improve health, you have to look at, well, what are the main determinants of health? And then what are policies that can impact those? And so if you're thinking of income inequality, it's some kind of solution that decreases income inequality, right? Which is the exact opposite that we're seeing right now, obviously, with the big beautiful bill. You know, the big beautiful bill, I'm going to like tangentially talk about this,

because it kind of counteracts everything I just said. If you think about income inequality and decreasing income inequality, it's exacerbating income inequality. If you think about expanding health care access, it's cutting nearly a trillion dollars from health care access, from Medicaid specifically, which, you know, the Congressional Budget Office estimates 10 million people are going to lose access to health care. Now, they will argue that those people that are losing access to health care are, you know, able-bodied people who should be working. There's just no evidence that 10 million people are able-bodied people who should be working. The vast majority of people on Medicaid who can work and don't have an exemption are working. And, you know,

we, again, I just kind of explained why we want to get more people access to health care regardless. And the last one is food accessibility. And so, you know, getting people more access to food, is a big social determinant of health. And this cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from SNAP and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. So that's really problematic right now. what we're seeing is kind of like the, it's antithetical to what we would want to see in public health. What I will say in terms of like policy-based solutions, it starts with overturning citizens united and getting money out of politics because that, and a lot of people don't kind of like put that together with the policies that are impacting their health. But the reason

that we can't pass a lot of policy that are health promoting policies is because of as kind of corporate capture of some of these politicians. And, you know, there's not a lot of money on the front end in public health. And so in order to get something like universal health care passed or expanding access to some of these programs, the infrastructure bill that, you know, Biden passed was really a great thing because it was looking at kind of the built environment and improving some of those systems. But it would be a lot easier if we could decrease the amount of corporate lobbying that was allowed at our political level. What role do you think that social media has played specifically around the Maha movement?

Why do you think it's resonating so much? I keep getting served. I'm very into health, but I keep getting served a reel or a TikTok that's something along the lines of, look at this horrible thing that's in your food. You can also, it's also used in anti-free. You know, they scare the shit out of you. And then it always ends with, oh, and by the way, the way you solve this problem and have better licking skin and longer erections is if you buy my supplement.

And they're really elegant. They're well-produced. from someone who is articulate and attractive. And you kind of, you know, you can see how these are big businesses. And on the one hand, I love entrepreneurship. I love people having access to consumers to come up with ideas. On the whole, I think it's mostly a negative. And I'm curious, you put out a lot of interesting,

I love it when you do these stitches where you listen to someone rant about something and then you come in and go, well, actually, no, there's no scientific proof whatsoever. Why do you think the Maha movement is resonating? What role do you think online platforms play? Yeah, I think the Maha movement took the wellness influencer playbook that's that they've been using for, you know, at least the last 10 years. A lot of my colleagues in a science communication space have been, you know, combating some of this misinformation that's been on social media for years now. And, you know, the Maha movement, I think, saw the success of some of these influencers, particularly some of the ones that are high up in this Maha movement. and really like honed in on those. I think that social media algorithms play, you know, they really play into conspiratorial fear-based information. That's what sells and that's what spreads

fast. So, you know, I've done some videos where I stitch people who are like, are you poisoning your kids? And then they go into kind of like a single ingredient in a food item that's also found in like a cleaning agent at Home Depot or something. And that's supposed to be very scary. And I think they're relying on people's lack of kind of like chemistry knowledge, right? And scientific knowledge because we have, you know, I mean, just think of baking soda, right? Baking soda is an ingredient that can be in chocolate chip cookies or it can be used in some sort of cleaning agents, right? Baking soda is really great. Or it can be sitting in your refrigerator in order to air it out, right? In order to make it cleaner. So it's got lots of different functions. And a lot of ingredients are like that. And so,

you know, if you rely on people to not really understand that, you can kind of manipulate their lack of understanding in order to then on the back end, as you mentioned, most of the time sell you some sort of product, right? So I'm going to scare you, and then I'm going to sell you a product. And I think it just, unfortunately, the way that social media algorithms are is that that's what plays really well on social media. I mean, even myself, I, if I went online and I just started educating, you know, I think that some people would watch it. But what I found is that it works a lot better when I show the video, and then I, like, reply to the video. And, you know, that's me kind of playing into social media algorithms because that's what works.

When somebody sees the misinformation, and then I correct the misinformation. And so, unfortunately, social media, I think social media takes most of the blame, to be honest. And then what happens is you get into an algorithm, you watch one or two of those videos, and you get into an algorithm, and then that's all you see. And you don't have a chance. can't tell you how many people, when I, you know, started making content really, like, targeted, really, like, combating some of the narratives coming out of this Maha movement, because I just saw how manipulative some of the narratives were. How many people reached out to me in my DMs and said, you know, I just never had the opportunity to hear another side to this. Like, this is literally,

I've just seen kind of, like, what they're saying about all these, like, toxins and all this. And I've never heard, like, a scientist or anyone else talk about that. And, you know, social media is great at that. It's great at dividing us and kind of putting us in our camps and then you never really see the other side. So I think it takes a ton of blame. What are your thoughts on how COVID changed the landscape? I think COVID completely changed the landscape. And so what's interesting about my field is wellness was really always kind of like a left-leaning idea, you know, like hippies in San Francisco kind of like started there. And then, you know, people who really cared about the food supply and, you know, small farmers and that sort of thing. And we've seen over the last five years,

like this shift in kind of like wellness discourse that has really kind of moved from left to right. And so, again, like wellness is a bipartisan thing. Most of us want wellness. But I think the underlying shift that's happened is this distrust in regulatory agencies and distrust in science. And I think most of that, I think maybe there was a little of that before, but most of that in terms of like our everyday discourse, it really came from COVID. And I think it was kind of a confluence of COVID was, you know, a novel virus that, you know, we were dealing with a global pandemic. And so science was changing because that's what it does as new information was coming in.

And I think there's a bit of a lack of, you know, we don't, a lot of us want certainty. And COVID did not give us certainty, particularly in the early days. And so I think as things shifted, it really just opens the door for a lot of kind of manipulative or conspiratorial narratives to kind of enter the fray. And then at that same time, you know, social media was even getting bigger. Tick-Tac was released like right before that and it was huge at that time. And I think, you know, those types of algorithms just started getting people into camps. I don't know that we would have seen the same kind of distrust and the same kind of like response that we saw during COVID if we didn't have social media, right? Because we've had, you know,

know, not to the same extent, but we've had kind of like these public health crises before and we haven't necessarily seen the same thing. And, you know, I think a little bit of some of that definitely like we as scientists, public health experts, communicators, need to take some blame because I think there were mistakes made in terms of like communication at that time and, you know, what was happening and really just communicating that like this is what we know now, it could change because of when we get more information, you know, but because that may perhaps wasn't communicated as best as we could now looking back and seeing kind of like what we could have done. I think that it just really left gaping holes open for people to step in and just create

conspiratorial narratives around it all. And that's why we've seen kind of this huge surge of people who just have complete distrust in our regulatory agencies, which, you know, Maha really plays on. It seems as if a vessel for some of this distrust or rejection of science is focused on vaccines right now, What's happening in terms of the MRNA research cancellations and why do you think vaccines have become such a hotbed for controversy? Well, RFK Jr. as the head of HHS is certainly part of that, right? RFK Jr., he's for the last, you know, at least two decades, he's kind of been in this anti-vax space. You know, he started up the children's health defense, which kind of meant this anti-vax group. And he, that's, that's his main coalition.

It's really interesting, this Maha movement. they kind of have two sides, two facets of the coalition. It's the hardcore anti-vaxxers who have been with RFK Jr. for years who made up kind of his, when he was running for president as an independent, kind of like made up his coalition. And then they brought in kind of this more like the maha moms who are really worried about like the food additives and the toxins in our food supply and those types of things. And so they kind of like brought them together. And there's kind of been some, there's been some infighting there, which is interesting. But I think on the anti-VACs side, you know, we, COVID obviously is part of that.

And RFK Jr. and his anti-VACs, like, colleagues are certainly part of it. And now, I mean, he's the head of HHS. HHS is the biggest public health agency in the entire world. And he's leading that charge. And so I think that that's why it's so front and center in public discourse, clearly. And what we're seeing right now, I mean, he canceled half a million, half a billion dollars in MRNA vaccine research. MRNA is a technology that, you know, the inventors of MRNA just won a Nobel Prize

for it in 2023. If you talk to experts in this field about who are experts in MRNA, they will say that they believe it's going to revolutionize medicine. They believe it's going to do for the 21st century, what antibiotics did for the 20th century. You know, it's a very elegant technology where it speeds things up. And so maybe some people don't understand, but the. reason that we were able to get the COVID vaccines out so quickly was because they had spent,

you know, a decade plus two decades working on this MRNA technology. And so a ton of research had gone into it. And so when they were, when they identified the SARS-CoV-2, they were able to come out with a vaccine quite quickly for it, whereas, you know, it would have taken years prior to that. And so, you know, it's, and it's not just vaccines. It's, it's not just, you know, infectious diseases. It's also that they think it's going to revolutionize cancer and potentially be incredible for cancer, like cancer treatments and other like unknown diseases or not well-known diseases. And so I think that it's really problematic when he just canceled half a billion dollars in the research. I mean, the research is the part that like let's make things safer. Let's make,

like let's improve upon what we have. Let's see what else it can impact. And, you know, this is research being done globally, and he canceled half a billion dollars here in the United States, which, you know, is, there's an economic cost to that, too. So we're basically giving up, we're, we're the leaders in this research right now, and we're giving up kind of that leadership by canceling this research into MRNA vaccine technology. And so, you know, and that's not all we're seeing with vaccines. We're seeing, we're seeing the entire CDC essentially being dismantled. You know, RFK Jr. just fired the head of the CDC, several leadership positions. These are career scientists. some who have been at the CDC for decades, have resigned saying that, you know,

RFK Jr. is not even listening to them at the CDC. It's really concerning that when you're, when you have an HHS secretary who is literally just not listening to career scientists and instead is kind of listening to his own group of people. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Sacks Fifth Avenue. Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style. Follow us here, and you can invest in some new arrivals that you'll want to wear again and again, like a relaxed Prada Blazer and Gucci loafers, which can take you from work to the weekend. Shopping from Sacks feels totally customized

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Where is that going to start to bubble up in terms of outcomes? Science is, it's an interesting thing because it's what has enabled us. You know, the scientific method, it's just basically science is a way of understanding the world around us, right? It's not a set of facts that we say are like never going to change. It's a way of understanding the world around us. And the scientific method has enabled incredible advances in the last 150 years. an over doubling of global life expectancy in just the last 150 years. You know, I just saw a clip from a few weeks ago of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about this. And he put it beautifully. He said,

you know, for thousands and thousands of years, life expectancy was 30 to 35, up until about 150, 200 years ago when all of a sudden it went up to, you know, in the United States, about 78 right now, right? And so, and that was because we have been able to create this really beautiful way to understand the world around us. It's not perfect. It has issues. It has issues. it's not foolproof and things change and we learn more. But it's a way that we are able to identify viruses, identify germ, like germ theory has enabled us to identify germs. And so if we disregard the scientific method, we don't really have to look far to see what would happen, right? Because we lived that for thousands of years when we had people who kind of, you know,

treated through ideology, treated through, treated people through like what they believed to be true without necessarily having evidence. And, you know, outcomes weren't great. Again, 30 to 35 was life expectancy. That was certainly disproportionately, like, young people were dying of infectious diseases or lack of sanitation and those types of things. And so when we disregard science, what we're going to see are people dying because of it, like, to put it bluntly, we're going to see, you know, if we have another pandemic,

if we have, we're going to see a resurgence of some of these infectious diseases that haven't been around. I mean, we see it with measles right now in the measles outbreak. And, you know, as vaccination status decreases, we'll see these diseases that used to take a lot of lives and don't anymore research. And, you know, that that's kind of the fear is that if we stop investing in science, we will see consequences of not investing in science. And that will be, that we'll see, you know, diseases that we could have had progress on. We won't have progress on, right? And so those are all really, like, strong concerns for us in the scientific community.

And then there's an economic aspect to it as well, because, you know, we in the United States, we've always, in a bipartisan way, really supported scientific research, you know, and NIH research. And that's kind of been a bipartisan thing. Right now we're looking at Trump's 2026 budget. He wants to cut NIH funding by 40%. And, you know, if you do that, you are essentially, like, giving up your standing in terms of, you know, scientific innovation in our country that obviously has problematic impacts for the economy. What trends or technologies are you keeping an eye on right now? Is there anything

that you think we're missing to the downside of the upside? In terms of just public health? What are you watching right now? What do you think has been underreported in terms of the impact it might have? Also, to the upside, is there anything you're really excited about? I think what's being underreported and under maybe like people aren't realizing how detrimental it might be, are these attacks to science and what it's doing to young scientists. So PhD students, young career scientists, people in the medical field, you know, medical doctors. We're seeing, you know, I talk to every single day, like young stage career scientists who are looking to leave the country. We're seeing PhD programs that are not being funded. And so there are no

spots for PhD students. And so they're having to look outside of the country. we're seeing like some of our best researchers in some of our fields leave the country. I know, I mean, like very excellent nutrition researchers that I know are moving to Canada and just accepted positions in Canada. And so, and we see some of these countries that are creating pathways for scientists. They're kind of capitalizing on this, on this brain drain that we're experiencing right now and opening pathways to allow them to move to their countries. We see France doing it. We see Canada doing it. I think there's a couple of other countries that are doing it as well. And so that is very concerning to me in terms of we may lose because of funding because of just like the overall feeling of how people are, you know, first of all, there's a loss of funding. Second of all, there's this idea that, you know, a lot of our medical doctors, people are coming in and just yelling at them or or not listening to what their advice is or saying that they're paid off by big pharma and these types of things when you know they get into this field to really try to help people and i know of a lot of medical doctors who are thinking about leaving the profession and

so i'm concerned about kind of the downstream effects of that in let's say 10 years when we have far fewer scientists and medical professionals in the field that's kind of one of the things that i think is being underreported and i'm talking to people every single day who are who are talking about this who are in these fields who are who are thinking of leaving either leaving science altogether or trying to leave the country and to go someplace else to do their work. As a parent, what advice would you give to other parents in terms of where we get it wrong in terms of our own kids' nutrition? I think right now one of the things that I dislike so much about the social media aspect of all

of this and how these algorithms really play into this conspiratorial fear-based nature is I'm seeing a huge exacerbation of like just food anxiety, right? And like fear about like, what can my kids eat? What can I eat? And, you know, young parents are especially vulnerable targets. And so I feel like especially protective over them because we just want to do what's best for our young kids, right? We just ourselves, but also our young kids. And so when I'm when I'm talking to them, if I were to give a piece of advice, it would be that the basics of what it are like from a health perspective. The basics that may go into somebody's health are, you know, they've been longstanding for decades and they haven't changed a whole lot. So, you know, try to emphasize like whole foods as

much as possible. Try to get movement every single day. Try to have a good sleep schedule, those types of things. And those, try to play with your kids. And those things are going to do a lot more than kind of looking at individual ingredients on a label or being scared to eat anything. And so that's what I want to really drive home in terms of messaging is just, you know, and that kind of goes to everyone in the country, like not just children. You know, 90% of Americans don't meet fiber intake guidelines. Over 90% of Americans don't meet vegetable intake guidelines. 80% of Americans don't meet physical activity guidelines. If we can just focus on the basics, try to get more fiber-rich foods, try to get a

vegetable on your plate at most meals, try to move your body. The average American walks three to 4,000 steps per day, try to get moving a bit more. That's going to have a way more measurable impact on your health than any of the things that we're spending 90% of our time on social media thinking about. We've seen those studies where in China, the number one aspirational job for kids is astronaut. In the U.S., it's influencer. I think of you as an influencer, and I mean that in a positive way. And I think a lot of people see your social media footprint, as I did, think that's the right type of influencer. She's bringing substance, important topic, expertise, measure thoughtful, and you're very compelling the way you articulate these things. How did you get

here? I just want to know what is your backstory? What led to where you are right now? Yeah, I am. So I have a PhD in nutrition science, and I'm a registered dietitian, and I got into this field really, it was, I mean, it was a long process. But my goal was really to, look at chronic disease prevention. My grandpa died when he was in his 60s. He had type two diabetes, and he died of a heart attack while snowblowing in Michigan. And so that always had me thinking, like, how could we have helped him better? Because what we heard from, you know, and I was a child, I was a kid at this time, so a teenager. But what we knew to be the case was that he just shouldn't eat sugar. And so what we would do is we would just find like sugar-free

alternatives for him. And we would get so excited we would find sugar-free brownies or sugar-free candy and we would bring it to him and think that we were helping and not realizing that that wasn't helpful at all. But, you know, we thought that what we were doing was the right thing. And so that just had me always interested in the kind of this idea of chronic disease prevention. And so when I went from my PhD program, I went into a program that was really interdisciplinary. So, I mean, the title of it is physical activity, nutrition, and wellness. And I really focused on the nutrition science side of that. But it was cool because we were able to kind of all work together and look at all of these factors that impacted health and how to decrease health. And so when I was looking at it,

I was really focused on the individual. But when you get into the research, you think you kind of see, oh, we have really good data on what can prevent chronic disease, at least lifestyle-related chronic disease. But what we're missing is like behavior change. The behavior change data, it's very difficult to change people's behavior. And so when you kind of start looking at that data, it's impossible to not look at the systems that are impacting people's behavior. And so That's where my research led me was just kind of looking at these public health systems that are really influencing us. And so I was a professor at the University of Nevada for a couple of years. And then my husband was in San Francisco at the time and I was in Vegas and we lived separately and the only way for us to really get together. It was a personal choice. I left academia to join him in San Francisco. And, you know, when I was a professor, though, I told this story. I tried to go on social media. So this was 2016 and there was a

new app out. And my brother, my little brother, convinced me to go on and just start teaching nutrition. He was like, you're teaching in class. Just go teach what you teach on this app. And so I did. And, you know, I talk about this a lot. It was very frowned upon at that time for academics to go on social media. Like, that just was not what you did. And you probably can speak to this as well. It was, you know, and I was a brand new tenure track professor. And so I did not want to, you know, I didn't want to negatively impact my career trajectory, and I would get, I got comments from some of the professors in my department and some previous colleagues, basically making fun of me and asking, like, what are you doing on social media and saying, like, how's your blog doing? I still relate to this. In a department

meeting, I had a colleague, say in front of all of my colleagues, that Scott is a Kim Kardashian of academia, and he wasn't being kind. It outed you as someone who wasn't serious, which wasn't the case. Anyways, I'm sorry, I didn't me interrupt you. No, I mean, that was exactly my experience. And so I get off after a few months. I was like, well, I'm not going to do this. I'm a brand new professor. I want to like, I want a career in academia. But I say that story to say that like I think we lost a lot of brown for years and years, particularly in the sciences, it was frowned upon for us to go to spaces where people were going for information. And so we started allowing kind of these narratives to be owned by people who didn't necessarily have the background to be talking about these topics. And so I think that that did us a big disservice. I think that's changing now. It's not 100% changed, but it's changing now to be more accepted. And so anyway, I went into the startup world, and that's where I started working in science

communication and working kind of between PhD researchers and business people. And so I would act as kind of a translator. And so I honed some communication skills doing that, I think. And I came on social media in 2022 originally. I was pregnant with my daughter and started. you know, I just saw a lot of misinformation targeting pregnant people and I was protective of them because I was one. And so I started kind of combating some of that misinformation. And then it was last summer that I started when the Maha movement kind of started, you know, coming of age, I started to see. And I think it was just because it was my exact area of expertise. I was able to see, whereas maybe I'm not in other areas of politics, exactly like how manipulative the narrative really was. And so, So I shifted my content focus to talk really about my area of expertise, which was nutrition science and public health.

And, yeah, my account has grown from there, and it's been quite the ride. And just any, if you were to sort of communicate, if there was one thing as we go into, you know, well, the 26th election is way off. But if there's anything you would want to remind people, or if you wanted to distill your message down to one basic message, you really hope that resonates with people that they really contemplate on. What would that one message be? I think it would be that self is bipartisan, right? And wanting a healthier food environment, wanting healthier systems is really bipartisan. And so we have to understand that problem and how we got here in order to understand the solution. And so I

understand kind of the desire to kind of just latch on to some of these like very simple, easy kind of conspiratorial narratives in terms of the toxins in our food. And so I understand, environment or this or that or, you know, our regulatory agencies. But, but you have to understand why we got here and then, like, let's solve the root cause of why we got here. And so one of the great things about the Mahal movement is it's gotten people who have never really thought about these systems and really never thought about public health before to be very interested in it. And I think that's a real opportunity for us as professionals to be able to, maybe for the first time, meet people where they are and explain these things and talk to them about how we could

improve upon our systems to make an environment that puts the most people in success, in a position of success in terms of their health. And so that's what, I guess, looking forward, what I'm hopeful about is that, you know, I do think that there's a real opportunity here for us to change some things in terms of improving the systems in our country that on both sides of the aisle, many of us want to see and changing those for the better for all of Americans. It feels as if in our government we over-index, or at least our elected officials, we over-index on lawyers and business people and under-index on health professionals. Dr. Nirk, would you ever

consider running for office? You know, people ask me that all the time, Scott. I have two young kids in their five and two, and so I'm not considering running for office anytime soon. I think that I am in a position right now where I am able to potentially do more help or be more helpful in terms of just a communication role, then I would be kind of in a government office role, maybe in the future, but I don't even know what that would look like or even how you do that. So probably not. Not anytime soon. Well, health is bipartisan as a fantastic bumper sticker. Dr. Jessica Nurek is a nutrition scientist, registered dietitian, and nationally recognized science communicator whose work spans nutrition, public health, and food policy. She's best known for

breaking down health misinformation and making science clear and accessible. She joins us from her home in Denver. Dr. Norik, in a world where expertise has been eroded or that science denial seems to be hip and cool, there needs to be a resistance of thoughtful people that continues to bring science, data-driven solutions to a society, I think you are a gift. You combine substance. You are incredibly compelling. You have weaponized these mediums for good.

and I'm just so, we're sincere about this. We want to be a weapon and a platform for spreading your accurate information. You really are, I think, a huge force of positive information that's really needed right now. Very much appreciate your work and appreciate your time today. Really appreciate that. Thank you for having me, Scott. Algebra of happiness. This episode is being released on the 24th anniversary of 9-11.

And as you know, I never missed an opportunity to talk about myself. I was in New York on September the 11th, and it was a pretty meaningful and impactful day. got a call from my ex-wife. She and I had split up about 12 months before that, but we were still, we were still good friends. And she was staying in an apartment that had this view of all of Lower Manhattan. And she said, can you come over? Something's wrong. I said, of course there can. And she said, the World Trade Center's on fire. And she was rattled by it. And she thought at the point it was a fire and she said, come over here. And I went over there and I got on her deck. And a friend of ours, my buddy Greg Schoe was there. And he came. And he came

over and all three of us and then we saw another plane a second plane disappear behind the second tower and then come out the other end and at that moment we knew that it was a terrorist attack and uh i saw both buildings come down and although we were a couple miles or a mile and a half north i remember feeling a couple things um one you could feel the heat from the implosion of the buildings and thinking that it reminded me of a star wars episode and that I would never see anything like that again in my life live. It looked otherworldly and like some sort of episode out of a sci-fi film, seeing these buildings implode and come down. And then a river of people flowing up 6th Avenue. All the cell phones immediately didn't work.

My sister trying to track me down, couldn't find me, got very upset. And then they came over the radio and said that there were like 22 planes unaccounted for and that thought of fear, irrational fear that are there going to be another 22 planes slamming into tall buildings? How tall is this plane should I go down to the ground? Or how tall is this building? Should I go down to the ground? A couple other observations. It was the first time in New York where it was totally silent. For the next few days, there was no honking. There was just no sound. And you would walk down the street and you would see someone on a cell phone. I'm not exaggerating every few hundred feet, speaking into a cell phone, crying hysterically. And everybody knew someone or not.

knew someone who knew someone who was lost that day in one of those buildings or on one of the planes. And the moment that will register with me for the rest of my life is I went to Union Square where they were having a memorial and this old Ukrainian couple, I think they were Ukrainian, wearing cheap clothing and they were just tiny. They looked like they were like four foot eight or four foot ten came up to me. And they were handing out flyers the way you hand it. out flyers for a lost pet. And this had a picture of this, you know, this handsome young man in a waiter's uniform. And he was a waiter at Windows of the World Trade Center, and saying, have you seen me? And it wasn't bad. Like, have seen me. They obviously just be very good English. And they were

passing it out like they were looking for a lost dog. And you just knew immediately what was going on, that they were never going to find their son. And the thing about the death that day is people either escaped unscathed or they were killed like they immediately set up San Bacente was it called San Bacente Hospital it was called it's closed now for um injury from the attacks and they didn't have any at mid-east because everyone either died and was taken to a morgue or survive but i remember thinking you know it was so obvious what was what had happened to their son and they couldn't acknowledge it and it just struck me that people will hold on to like any shrubes read of hope. And there were all these stories about people who are wandering around Manhattan

trying to find their loved ones refusing to believe that they died. The other thing that struck me was I thought one of the finest moments in recent history for America was when, after spending several years, CIA analysts who had doggedly tried to find Osama bin Laden and then found him and took huge risks and deployed a SEAL team into hostile territory. And, put a bullet in that motherfucker's eye. And I love the notion that this guy, that the last thing that ran through his head other than a bullet, was they had found me. And I think it really spoke to not only America's expertise and skills and the fact that we have so many outstanding analysts in the intelligence community and brave men who are willing to risk their own lives

to go to hostile territory and we have the technology and the infrastructure, but that our memory is long and our reach is far. I thought that was a really proud moment. And it also strikes me that was the last time that felt like America came together around everything. And you really never know when is the last time you're going to see anybody. So my, what I do now, and it's not a function of 9-11, but every time I sign off with my sons, I say I love you. Also, one of the things that really struck me is listening to the calls from the planes that knew they were doomed or calls from the passengers of the planes that knew they were doomed. These were people, they used to have those phones on planes who knew that this was

bad. They had gotten news reports from people they talked to that these planes were slamming into buildings. The plane had been hijacked and they knew that probably their time was, their time was coming to an end. And all of the phone calls, all of the voicemails were along the lines of I love you. All of them. None of them were do this or find my wills here or or I'm angry about this, or this was what my life meant. It was all just very simple, I love you. That when faced with the end, that is the last thing that runs. That is the last thing that people want to communicate to each other.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Jenaire. Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop GPod from Prop. media.