Well with Arielle Lorre - 130: Nutrition Science, The Dark Side of Wellness and How to Navigate the B.S with Dr. Kevin C. Klatt, PhD, RD

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

In this episode I’m talking to Kevin C. Klatt, PhD, RD, a registered dietitian and postdoctoral fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine. We discuss nutrition science, research and the dark side of wellness that is oftentimes overlooked. Dr. Klatt explains how those of us without scientific backgrounds can navigate all of the information out there and discern what is legitimate and what is not, and we explore why so many turn to food as a “cause and a cure.” We also discuss the most egregious claims he has seen on the internet; how to become your own researcher; tips for eating to reduce risk of chronic disease; why we tend to make causal links between what we eat and how we feel, and so much more.   Dr. Klatt received his PhD in Molecular Nutrition from Cornell University and completed his dietetic internship at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. He is the Inaugural Dennis M. Bier Young Career Editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and is an active member of the executive committee of the Research Dietetics Practice Group of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.    www.Sakara.com/BLONDEFILES for 20% off your first order. www.Dipseastories.com/BLONDE for your extended 30 day free trial. www.Getcanopy.co with code BLONDE10 at checkout for an additional 10% off your purchase. www.Helloned.com/BLONDE for 15% off your first one-time purchase or 20% off your first subscription plus free shipping.   Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The following podcast is a dear media production. Hey, welcome to the Blond Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits. I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all and live your best life. Thanks for listening.

Let's get into it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. have such an amazing episode for you today. As I was recording this, I remember just thinking, oh yeah, this is definitely one of my top five, maybe even top three. I just had this feeling when I was recording it that what my guest was saying was going to reach so many people. And I'm not going to take up too much time on the intro because I really want you guys to hear it. I want you to listen to the whole thing. It's such an important discussion. And we really

just scratched the surface of everything that we were talking about. So if you like this episode, make sure to leave a review or send a DM and let us know if you would like to hear a follow-up. But I'm talking to Kevin C. Clatt. He is a registered dietitian and a postdoctoral fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine. He received his PhD in molecular nutrition from Cornell University and completed his dietetic internship at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. is the inaugural Dennis M. Beer Young career editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and is an active member of the executive committee of the Research Dietetics Practice Group of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. And his research aims to merge traditional

biochemical and modern molecular approaches with controlled feeding interventions using both animal model and human intervention studies to better understand nutrient metabolism, signaling and requirements, just having trouble reading this bio. But basically, he is an expert. He's a scientist. He's a researcher. And he really knows his stuff. And we talk about how difficult it is to be in that position and also see a lot of the trends and the claims and some of the pseudoscience and the dark side of the wellness world and how harmful it can. can really be. And so we get into that a lot in this episode. We talk about the wellness world and the issues with it. And we talk about research and nutrition science. And we also talk about how to navigate

that just being your average everyday social media user. You know, I asked him, how can somebody navigate that if we're not sitting there reading PubMed? How can we know what's legitimate and what's not and how can we be our own researchers and find out what really works for us and kind of tune out a lot of the noise and the outside influences. And we just get into so much in this episode. It's so fascinating. So I am going to leave it there and just let you guys enjoy. And as always, if you like the episode, leave a review, share it, tag me. I will always repost it over on the podcast, Instagram. And I appreciate you guys. Okay, enjoy the episode. Okay, welcome, Kevin. I'm so excited to chat with you today.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to chat too. I have been following you for a while. I found you through Dr. Danielle Ballardo, and you're one of my favorite science-y meme accounts to follow. I think you and Dr. Nodalski kind of have that corner covered. Oh, I'm flattered to be in that echelon with Dr. Nandalski. Yeah, I didn't used to me. meme and then the pandemic hit and I was working from home and I was like, I have all these pent up really like witty nutrition science dad jokes that I need to get out of me and nobody's around. So we'll start making memes. It's very niche and like half of it I don't even understand, but it's very entertaining. Yeah, my real friends like outside of nutrition who followed me before and then when I transformed into a meme account, they're like what is what is happening?

is this some sort of breakdown? Amazing. Well, to start, why don't you just introduce yourself to the audience and let them know about who you are and what you do besides me? I'm the ultimate mamer. Yeah. My name is Kevin Klatte. I am a research scientist and a registered dietitian. And I did my doctorate work at Cornell and the Division of Nutritional Sciences there in

molecular nutrition and then I did my dietetics clinical training at the National Institutes of Health in their clinical center. And I work across both human intervention studies, collaborate with an epidemiologist as well, and then also in sort of what we call preclinical sciences. So I'm sort of your animal models and your cell culture models. And I guess I'm just sort of a nutrition nerd. I kind of I set out to get a PhD because I was like, I want to know how we know everything. I got interested in nutrition towards the end of high school. And I was actually really religious in high school and then kind of went into a phase of like exploring different religions. And then I found nutrition.

And I was like, ah, science. And then it was just like the same thing where you're like, everybody has an opinion about everything and claims to know the way, the truth and the light. And then I kind of just got onto this path where I was like, well, why do people have these diversion opinions about all these different topics? Can't science tell us something? and kind of went on this path. From very early on, I knew I wanted to do both a PhD and the RD to kind of have the scientific training and then also the clinical training. And then, yeah, I just sort of started using social media and whatnot to talk about it. And I'm just very interested in how we know what we think we know in nutrition,

what that can mean for patients and for the public. And probably I become more interested in really how do we communicate uncertainty in nutrition, because I think that's largely what we see from Netflix documentaries to social media influencers. Everybody just knows the answer. And the longer I've spent time in nutrition science and continue to work in labs, and I'm just more entranced by how little we know and the limitations on the things that we know and how do we communicate the really important context that sort of qualifies a lot of our facts that often gets left out. I would imagine that from the time that you started doing this to where you are now, the landscape has changed a little bit because there is, I would imagine more access with social media and with like you said Netflix documentaries, more access to a lot of misinformation. And I'm always curious how it feels being an actual scientist, an actual expert. You know, I'm really interested in how it is for like a doctor or a registered dietitian, a researcher.

seeing all of this online and seeing how, you know, especially in the wellness industry, you can have a following and be an expert with really no training and qualifications. And so I'm curious how that is for you kind of just seeing it all play out digitally. Traumatic. No. It's not that bad. I think I'm kind of numb to it at this point. I think early on I kind of hit a point with nutrition and maybe we can get into this for, I was just like, wow, we don't even have the research infrastructure set up or put the funding into nutrition to really confidently answer a lot of the questions that people are out there, both asking. And then sort of as you alluded to the sort of non-experts are just answering very confidently. And I think early on kind of coming to that conclusion and being like, wow, we don't fund this stuff like very seriously at all.

And then going on to Instagram every day and watching new Netflix documentaries where people to say things, and they're just broad sweeps. It used to drive me crazy and I was like, this is unethical. And because it's not just, you know, quote unquote Instagram experts, but I mean, there's even physicians and things like that who wake up overnight and become nutrition influencers because it's sexy or whatever. And they have no real training in nutrition necessarily. Yeah, I just, I'm kind of numb to it now at this point.

I'm like, oh, well, this is just like the market forces that are present sort of promote this kind of stuff. And there's really no check on sort of the evidence behind the statements people are making. And then, you know, in this, you know, sort of capitalist wellness marketplace, people are competing with one another. And sort of just the natural end of it is just a little bit more, a little bit less truth, a little bit more exaggeration. And all these sort of themes that we see repeating throughout history of like, this diet is the best or this sort approach and this food's bad and I think that's also kind of helps me be a little numb to it too as I've kind of studied the history of nutrition and wellness trends and social media has

exacerbated it but I mean you can go back hundreds and even thousands of years and find that people have always turned to food which is something you know we have control over to be a cure all for everything and even going back to Kellogg like the guy who started the brand of Kellogg just sort of had some puritanical ideas about food and morality and purity. And so it's not all that different. I think snake oil has always been there and always will be there. And knowing the limitations of the data that we have, it's kind of, and how much food means to people culturally and the fact that it feels like we all have control over it. I just sort of am like, ah, people are going to do whatever they want, spend money on whatever they want. I just hope that, you know, we can limit the

negative side effects to some of our wellness culture, which we get into as well. When it comes to eating a balanced diet, I have found preparation is key. And when life gets super busy, it is hard to prepare food and ensure that I'm getting lots of micronutrients and variety. So Sakara is so good for this. And it's such a great way to ensure you're getting delicious, healthy food for all your meals and snacks. Sakara is a nutrition company that focuses on overall wellness, starting with what we eat. And they have organic ready to eat meals. Made with powerful plant-based ingredients, and the menu is crafted by chefs weekly, so you will never get bored. They have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all made with ingredients designed to boost your energy, improve your digestion, and get your skin glowing.

They have chia pumpkin bread. They have cherry vanilla parfaits, cinnamon cider donuts. They have some amazing salads. They have this loaded miso noodle soup that has tons of veggies. They have vegan bolognese and so much more. So definitely go check out the menu. in your area, you will be drooling. Along with delicious meals, Sakara has daily wellness essentials and herbal teas to support your nutrition. To boost results, try the best-selling metabolism super powder. It's an all-natural remedy for bloating, weight gain, and fatigue.

And they also have really good bars, so I recommend trying those. They are one of my favorite snacks. Sakara is delivered fresh nationwide, and they are offering my listeners 20% off their first order if they go to sakara.com. Blonde Files, that's S-A-R-A-R-A-com slash blondefiles, B-L-O-N-D-E, F-I-L-E-S, or enter Blond F-I-E-S, or enter Blond F-E-E-E-S, or SACARAs, for 20% off your first order. I tend to be a little bit wary when it comes to supplements, as we're discussing in this episode, but something that really has made such a difference in my life is CBD.

There is only one brand that I use and trust, and that is Ned. I just recorded an episode with one of the founders. And in that episode, when it comes out, you'll hear why I love their products and just their ethos so much. But the short version is that they are so committed to delivering the absolute highest quality product with the best interest of the customer as their driving force. And they are also committed to transparency, which is really important when you're using any kind of supplement. So I like Ned's full spectrum hemp oil. It is so amazing. It really helps my anxiety and.

kind of takes the edge off when I'm feeling really overwhelmed with stress. It also helps with sleep. It helps with pain relief. I've been using it topically on my foot injury. It's helped with some nausea and so much more. It comes in three potencies. So I like the 750 milligram. It also comes in gel caps now, which is such a game changer because Ned doesn't add any additives or synthetic ingredients or flavors. So if you don't like the flavor of the pure hemp extract, the gel capsules are perfect. They also have a sleep blend, which is amazing. It blends CBN, a powerful cannabinoid that promotes sleep and 750 milligrams of that full spectrum CBD from the purest single source hemp flour extract with organic and wildcrafted botanicals used in traditional medicine. So this one

helps me stay asleep, which is always my problem like waking up in the middle of the night or waking up in the morning super early. And then finally, I love mellow, which is their CBD free magnesium blend. It's a proprietary blend of three forms of chelated magnesium, althenine, GABA, and over 70 trace minerals, specifically formulated for whole body and brain absorption. And it doesn't upset my stomach like other magnesium supplements. So that's a win. And they just restocked this. And it goes really fast. So definitely get it well you can. So if you want to check out Ned and try their CBD for yourself, go to www.com.glo.com slash blonde. Or enter the code blonde, that's B-L-O-N-D-E, at checkout for 15% off your first one-time order or 20% off

your first subscription order plus free shipping. So again, that's hello-nen.com, h-E-L-L-O-N-E-D.com slash blonde for 15% off your first one-time order or 20% off your first subscription order plus free shipping. Hi, I'm Kara Natterson. And I'm Vanessa Kroll Bennett. were the co-hosts of the Puberty podcast. Each week, we dive into the what and how of raising kids through puberty, that roller coaster of physical and emotional shifts for kids and parents alike.

Combining reliable science and relatable parenting strategies, we will all learn about, laugh about, and yes, maybe even cry about adolescents, ours and theirs. I'm curious if you have any advice for any of the listeners on how, how to navigate all of the information and discern what is evidence-based and scientific from what is just, like you said, snake oil, because I think a lot of people kind of seek answers because they want to feel better. And so they turn to their influencer or social media or whatever or whatever doctor has the latest sexiest book out. But how can somebody with no scientific

or research background, navigate that information and discern what is factual from what is not, if they're not going to, like, sit there and read PubMed. Reading PubMed is a great way to put yourself to sleep at night if you're having some issues there. But, yeah, I guess the biggest tip I always give to folks, and that's what I incur, I do some telehealth and see patients on the side and clients. And what I hope for them is, or trying to teach them, is just to be. be skeptical. I think one of the problems with the sort of modern wellness environment is that everything sounds plausible, everything sounds believable. And in many ways, the first thing that you're

exposed to is what you believe wholeheartedly, regardless of the evidence. And then the amount of evidence it takes to convince you that that maybe isn't totally true is just orders of magnitude higher. And that's, I think, because there's not skepticism at baseline. There's a wholehearted embrace, maybe something seemed to work for you. You fully believe it. And a little bit of skepticism, I think, goes a long way. I can't tell you, like, the number of patients and interactions on Pat, where people were like, yeah, I was a diehard gluten-free person for like a year, year and a half.

And then I kind of, you know, became a little skeptical of it. And I'm like, was this really helping? And I reintroduced gluten. And I had been like unnecessarily avoiding gluten for a year and a half. It really wasn't causing my symptoms. But I think sort of this mix of belief and feeling in control. of your health by manipulating this one thing that you have complete, mostly complete autonomy over whether it's in your diet or not,

makes people feel really good. But if you're actually interested in kind of what's real and what works for you and what the science actually says, skepticism goes a long way, I think the internet, it's a double-edged sword. There's so much information out there. But in all walks of life, including nutrition, I encourage people to say, you know, go intentionally seek out an opinion that is opposite, particularly if something sounds like so good to be true.

Like, you can literally type in that claim and type in debunked or myth. And then often find something like there's websites like science-based medicine and things like that that will sort of lay it out for you in a manner that is reasonably comprehensive, but also a typical, you know, you don't need a PhD to kind of understand what they're saying. And, you know, I think that is its own double-edged sword because with vaccines and everything commits the COVID pandemic. It's very easy to go and say, you know, why is the COVID vaccine bad? But if you really are interested in this stuff, I mean, I think part of this is basically what I was doing when I was 19 and what led me to go get a PhD is reading the different

viewpoints on things, being honest with myself about, well, I don't really understand what primary sources they're citing or the importance of the different quality of research that they're citing. And that sort of should hopefully be like a nice slice of humble pie about like, okay, what do I know? What do I really feel confident in? And that's, I think, overwhelmingly all this stuff of just sort of seeking out divergent viewpoints, being humble about what you know and being skeptical of the things you hear is sort of the opposite of the modern wellness environment, which is just overloading huge amounts of information, fantastical claims, limited skepticism. and sort of a culture that becomes, oh, just try it and see if it works. It's worked for all these people and insert a bunch of anecdotes here.

And then buy my product and that thing is very makes a lot of money for people, I think. I don't make as much money as I would like to. It reminds me of I cannot remember what the name of the graph is, but where like the peak of stupidity or arrogance is thinking that you know everything. And then I can't remember the name of it, but I learned about it in biology a long time ago. Yeah, I think that's something you learn while doing a PhD is you think, I did my PhD a little nutrient called Colleen. And I always like, you know, went in not knowing a ton about it, had a period of believing like,

oh, like nobody's eating enough chlorine. And then like kind of being like, oh, calling doesn't matter. And then you kind of settle on that. a much more level and even path of like, okay, there are certain populations that probably aren't eating enough, blah, blah, blah. And it just become more scientific and kind of numb to the hyperbolic and claims about things. Well, I like that advice about looking for, I don't know, whatever you said about debunking, because I think that a lot of us want to confirm our bias, right? So if you're looking for, if you search gluten-free for gut health, you're going to find all of the reasons why,

people say to go gluten-free for gut health. But if you put yourself in the kind of opposing view or look for a different opinion, you're going to find a lot of different information. And I always wondered about how much is placebo effect, because we know like the placebo effect is very real. And I've been one of those people where I went gluten-free, dairy-free, refined sugar-free, soy-free, corn-free, grain-free, lectin-free, I mean, everything. And I was like, yeah, I think I feel better. But it was like, did I just think that I was feeling better? Because I thought that I was doing the right thing at the time. And since then, obviously, I've like reintroduced all of that.

And I'm, you know, fine. I'm sitting here functioning. So that's really interesting. You just described why in research we focus a lot on blinding and why nutrition research is really hard to do. It's, you know, hard to blind someone. But the aspect of blinding is intended to remove all of that psychosocial and psychosom somatic perceptions of being in control of your diet and changing all these things and your

expectations of baseline to want it. If you were to take a lot of people who swear that gluten is just amazing, or gluten-free diet is just amazing, and then blindly give them a smoothie with a little bit of gluten in one and not the other, but totally otherwise unrecognizable and you can't tell, I'm not all that confident that the people who say gluten-free is amazing and that they have these immediate reactions, the gluten would do all that well. We see this pretty regularly, you know, if you blind people to aspartame, for example, they report just as many headaches from the placebo control relative to the aspartame. And then there's also some instances, even lactose

intolerance, like you can blind people to whether there's lactose in the milk. And in a small serving like a six to eight ounce cup, most people report the same GI symptoms. So it's, it's I think when you dive into this literature, as a practitioner, it can be really hard trying to be like, okay, well, I want to be empathetic, I want to be sympathetic. I know and understand the psychosomatic things that are happening here in the brain when you think you're in control of something. But I also want to provide recommendations that are very likely to influence objective measures of someone's health.

And I think that's something I guess I encourage patients to do as well, is how do we set up, you know, if we're going to try something, even if it's not like tons of evidence to base around it, how do we set up a way to try it that limits bias as much as possible and take away all that priming that often happens in our diet and wellness culture that says, this is going to be magical. And then you confirm that it is magical and it takes a long time to realize maybe it wasn't that magical. But how do we set this up in a way where we can maybe truly identify trigger foods or do sort of removal and replacement and removal and replacement and blind ourselves for possible and actually repeatedly see symptoms if they truly exist, not just happen once.

I think as humans, we are really inclined to make causal links between things. So, well, I ate this and something bad happened later. And probably throughout all of human evolution and mammalian evolution, that was a beneficial thing of, hey, lions eat people. You don't want to test that twice or that berry killed people and that's probably a poisonous berry. But in modern times, that can be a bit maladaptive in some sense and lead to, you know, there's nothing wrong with cutting out gluten or anything. I don't want to like bashle people without, you don't need gluten to survive by any means. But what I think we see in clinics sometimes is that people come in with tons and tons of food allergies and these hyper-restrictive

diets that have them focus so much their life on eating or spend so much money on eating and disrupts their social interactions. And even end of life care, people will be spending their last dollars on supplements. They're hoping will work. And that's where it gets really sad. And some of, I think a lot of clinical dieticians see the really dark side of wellness where it's like the things of the just try it culture. It couldn't do any harm. You see the hyper results of that and people who are just doing kind of, I'll never forget there was a mom who I saw in a clinic who was buying a separate set of groceries for her son for two years because an alternative practitioner swore that the kid who had a very rare genetic kind of thing going on that he needed this type of diet. And she just like collapsed crying when she was when I was like, you don't, there is no evidence that you need to be doing this. And it was just like had exerted a ridiculous amount of effort and time and money.

to do this thing that she thought was helping her child because somebody with the doctor title had told them to do it. And that's sort of the thing we don't get a lot in our wellness culture, unfortunately. We just see the autonomy and choice and this could help. So even though there's no evidence for it, it could help. So just try it. And then when you have an entire culture of that coupled with miraculous things, it often can lead to harm and sort of protected subpopulations like patients with cancer and things like that. I heard somebody say that people want food to be the cause and they want food to be the cure.

And I think that that really simplifies it in a really articulate way. And you see that so much. And I've, like I said, I've been in that position as well. And I'm curious if back to what you were saying about doing like blind studies on, you know, if you were to put gluten in a smoothie or aspartame and people wouldn't notice it, if you told them that there was gluten or aspartame and there wasn't if they would have a physical reaction to that because of what they thought. I think there's a little bit of evidence there about that. Just from the way institutional review boards, which are our ethical boards,

they very much don't like you to deceive individuals. That study design. It happens in social psychology work. And folks will do that sort of work to a degree. And it's very easy to kind of find some of this evidence. I'm not quite as aware of it in aspartame context, for example, but people's beliefs that baseline often produce responses that are in line with their beliefs, regardless of whether there's actually the gluten in the smoothie or not. And yeah, it's whether we call it a placebo

effect or just more of sort of that some sort of psychosocial bias that actually produces a physiological effect. I don't think there's a perfect word for it. But I think, I think, that the mind is definitely a major influencer of the body. Sexuality is as mental as it is physical and 90% of women report using their imaginations to get turned on. Dipsy helps to unlock that imagination and tap into those feelings whenever you want. So Dipsy is an audio app full of short, sexy stories designed to turn you on. The stories are relatable, inclusive, feminist, and celebratory. They ground fantasy and reality and show all kinds of preferences and interests because they believe the most exciting, immersive stories

are the ones that you can relate to. And they release new content every week. So there's always more to explore no matter who you're into or what turns you on. And this is so important because sexuality is part of wellness, but it's often overlooked. And it's part of life. And feeling turned on is more than just to wind up to sex. It's a way to feel more alive, to understand yourself, unlock confidence, enhance intimacy in your own life or with a partner. And Dipsy makes exploring that comfortable and convenient and fun. And if you need to wind down, Dipsy also has wellness sessions. They have sensual bedtime stories and soundscapes to help you relax before you drift off.

In fact, Dipsy has been called the Headspace for sexuality, which is just so perfect. So for you guys, listeners of the show, Dipsy is offering an extended 30-day free trial when you go to dipsy stories.com slash blonde. That's 30 days of full access for free when you go to D-I-P-S-E-A-S-E-A-Sories.com slash B-L-O-N-D-E. Again, dipsystories.com slash blonde for an extended 30-day free trial. If you feel like you're doing everything right for your skin, but you're still experiencing dryness or breakouts or your skin is just looking really dull, it might not be your skincare products and might be the air that you're in. In fact, having dry air in your environment can begin wreaking havoc on your skin in as little as 30 minutes. And skincare experts

and dermatologists have long touted the benefits of increased indoor humidity for healthy, glowing skin. So I have been using the canopy humidifier for a while now. It is a completely reimagined humidifier that elevates your home for the ultimate in skincare and wellness benefits. And it's clean moisture combats dryness, sensitivity, dullness, and fine lines and wrinkles. And it helps to promote a healthy skin barrier and increases the efficacy of your topical skincare products. So all that money that you're spending on your skin care is not going to waste. So canopy humidifier has an antimicrobial filter that catches irritating minerals, bacteria, and other nasty stuff from the water before it's evaporated into your environment. And you will never have to worry about mold. It utilizes

a unique technology that keeps the humidifier running until there's no water left inside the unit. So no water left inside means no mold. And the easiest part is that canopy goes right into the dishwasher. Also, canopy humidifier has a built-in aroma diffuser. So it uses the simple, healthy process of evaporation to fill your room with scented moisture. So it's not only good for your skin, but it's also so nice in your home. And it's cute and compact. Definitely way more cute and compact than anything else on the market. So most people think you only need a humidifier in the wintertime, that that is just not true. It is so important to have optimal humidity in the home year round. So you can save $25 on your canopy humidifier purchase today with

Canopies filter subscription and you will receive a free aroma kit to be used with Canopies built-in aroma diffuser. All you have to do is go to getcanopy.co. That's G-E-T-C-A-N-O-P-E-E-E-E-C-A-N-O-P-E. and use the code blonde 10 at checkout to save an additional 10% off your canopy purchase. Again, that's $25 on your canopy humidifier purchase with Canopies filter subscription, plus a free aroma kit, plus an additional 10% off with the code Blonde 10.10. That's B-L-O-N-D-E-10 at get canopy.com. So I'm curious, what are some of the most egregious trends or claims that you have seen circulating on the internet.

Oh, man. I'm so numb to it. I'm like, what's the most egregious? I mean, egregious for me is all about context for the most part. And when things are targeted towards cancer patients or parents of kids with autism, for example, like there was something about like giving autistic kids bleach that was going around for a while and still pops up.

and just like, you know, fantastical claims about things that are either benign or maybe even harmful in and of themselves to treat a condition that is really dire in some sense. Those are always the most egregious to me. And it could be something simple as like, I've seen stuff like, oh, magnesium for kids with autism, produces all these amazing things and autism is just a lack of mineral in the diet. it's just like that's so there are parents out there who are doing everything they can to provide the best life for their kid. And there's nothing wrong with them trying out magnesium what they want. But for me as a clinician, ethically to actually talk with a patient, I often lead with, we really don't know if it's a work. And here is something you could try if you want.

There's anecdotal evidence. I'm happy to help you do it well. But setting the expectation at baseline that there's probably an expectation. expect zero benefit from this. If you want to try it, go for it. And if you see benefits, amazing. But anything in cancer clinic, you would see things in oncology clinics, you'd see things like green juices and the phytonutrients or cancer, you know,

anti-cancer properties of the phytonutrients and go on these green juice diet, that kind of stuff you'd hear about patients who just totally went off their chemotherapy or medically directed oncological care to go for a green juice smoothie. and there's plenty of problems with the evidence of oncology and the standards required for the FDA to actually approve drugs. But there's even less and worse evidence that green juice smoothies are going to have any magnanimous benefit for most folks. And in many instances, like you've seen patients who stop their medical care go on these crazy diets that don't have a lot of examples. And there are a lot of data to really support that they're beneficial.

And then they come back and they've wasted away additional muscle mass. or quality of life is ruined. So anything that kind of targets protected populations is just something for me where I'm like, it might have had good intention. It might have been intended for the just general public, but often the way things are worded and the magnanimous claims that come with them, it preys upon really protected populations, whether it intends to or not. And that's just the commonality of the current wellness environment.

That's awful. Well, since this is kind of a wellness podcast, for lack of a better word, I would guess that a lot of my listeners are either gluten-free or, you know, something free. I'm sure a lot of us have done food sensitivity tests. I'm sure we're all wary of aspartame. I'm sure a lot of people have, you know, tried to do the celery juice thing. So I'd love to go through some of these really common trends that are pretty, you know, trendy and big. universally in the wellness world. And since we were talking about green juice, maybe we can talk about celery juice for a minute. Yeah, celery juice. That one kind of came out of nowhere. For a lot of these things,

I guess my bias and what I hope for people to get out of it is to kind of understand nutrition research because I think you can go topic by topic on things. But that's just sort of is, you know, giving somebody to fish, not teaching them the fish sort of situation. And so I like to encourage people with patients who work with me longer over time, for example,

be like, eventually empower them to get to the point where they don't have to ask me the question. They kind of know, like, this is a little bit BS. So celery juice is a good example of like, okay, all these amagnous claims are amazing. And it's often based around it contains all these chemicals and then they cite some mechanism in the body where, you know, does this physiologically. and therefore it's amazing for wellness, detox, cancer, et cetera. I mean, the amount of claims for celery juice is just long-lasting. But if you kind of think like a nutrition researcher for a second,

okay, how would you actually show all those things? Like, sure, you can isolate those compounds from celery juice and put them on cancer cells or something and measure its proliferation. But if you're actually a, you know, that's just a petri-dose situation, maybe you could feed it to an animal model like a mouse, you're not giving a juice diet to a mouse. We really don't have that many sort of what we call preclinical investigations there, but maybe you could do a celery-enrich diet.

But even for a mouse, you have to ask compared to what? If you're putting a substantial amount of celery into their diet, that takes up physical mass in the diet, and you have to kind of replace that mass with something else. And so it could be some sort of inert compound, but celery comes with calories. So it's like often going to be like a start. like a multidextrin, which is rapidly digesting carbohydrate,

that will be the replacement for some of these calorie-containing things that we add to diets. And, you know, is it the multidactrine was bad or the celery was good? And, you know, why celery? You'd probably want to say, well, is celery better than spinach, cucumber? Like, there's an infinite number of kind of comparators. It's a little bizarre to me how we got to, like, celery. When you look at the nutritional profile of celery and the phyton nutrient profile, it doesn't really stick out as being like all that amazing relative to other green vegetables.

It's not even the darkest of the green vegetables. I guess it tastes good. So maybe that's why people like it. But if I as like coming to like the human trial world where you could actually test some things, you know, if I gave somebody three celery juices a day, you know, I probably just added a couple hundred calories to their diet. And so I'm either going to be overfeeding them and they'll gain a little bit of weight. I'm going to be, or they'll be weight neutral and then they've stopped eating something else.

And that's, and ideally we'd like to have this compared to some control group and probably multiple control groups to really say celery is magical. And you'd come up with this experimental design. If people randomized to cell reuse to some isochloric comparator like apple or something like that and maybe a spinach. and then follow them and measure outcomes in their blood related to whatever these amazing processes that people think are happening. I mean, detox, which doesn't really have an easily measurable thing in the blood, but maybe like oxidative stress. There's some biomarkers for that in the blood.

And then you could compare across those groups. And again, it's if you design a diet where people are eating three cups of celery juice a day, they're probably very likely going to be replacing other food sources with that. And this is what happens in the real world is that folks start doing celery juice and then they cut out something else in the diet. And that is that swap, which happens in almost all nutrition, that replacement is really important and is part of the intervention. It's not just I fed celery juice. It's either I fed celery juice and ate extra calories or I fed celery juice and I cut calories from somewhere else. It's an inherent see-saw.

It's not like a drug where you actually have a true placebo, like a capsule with nothing in it versus a capsule with a drug. You are feeding a quantitatively large amount of something that contains calories and kind of contributes to the energetic state of the body. So often we want to compare it to some sort of isicholoric thing or keep things what we call eukolaric where the body weight stays the same and we cut calories from somewhere else. And I've had people who tell me their juice classes were just cleanses were amazing. and it's either often a sort of what we call a confounded design where people are just eating 700 calories of juice. And it's like, well, is it the caloric restriction that you like? Did you know it was juice?

Did you do a 700 calorie Greek yogurt fast and a 700 calorie whole grain fast to know that the juice fast was the best? And if they're not fasting at the same time, it's often like they cut out some junk food or things like that, some hyper-processed hyper-palatable things without much nutrition. at the same time. And it's, you know, if you really want to be a true scientist about it, you go, how do you isolate that it's causally the juice?

And so you can imagine my opinion then. That's my very long answer to say that I don't know of any evidence to say celery juice is very special. It's a little bit lower sugar than, you know, if you concentrate the juices, you still get some of the sugars out of it. But it's lower than like an apple juice per se. I like the occasional juice and some celery in it is fine. but to really claim that it's going to be uniquely magical, it's tough. And I kind of just want to be like, why not spinach juice?

And why not just the vegetables where you're getting the fiber and some other micronutrients in addition to that? So it's not something that ends up being part of my recommendations for really. Most people, unless they have some issue with kind of GI stuff and they're limiting fiber in residue to drink a whole lot of celery juice. It's tasty, though. So yeah, it sounds like that process could apply to things like gluten and dairy and how would you recommend people kind of become their own scientist and figure out what's working for them and what's not? Because I think, you know, back to what we were talking about before, a lot of people

turn to food because they want to control how they feel. They want to feel better and they think that that's going to change because it's something that they can easily manipulate. But I think then one of the next steps that people often take is, okay, I'm going to do like a food sensitivity test. And I know you've talked about those before and we could get into that. But how can people kind of navigate that on their own again without having the scientific background? Yeah. Well, I think it takes usually, I have patients, food sensitivity is a really good one where, you know, I've had a patient who had spent tens of thousands of dollars on food sensitivity, everything from test alternative practitioners and whatnot.

And I just talked with them about everything that they had done. And I was like just, it was just really sad to hear. I'm like, there was nothing that eliminated bias or even attempted to at any step. And it was always sold in a sense of this is going to be amazing. And this is where I was like, well, I'm not going to tell you any of that at baseline. And I'm going to say, let's be super skeptical and assume nothing's going to work. and then set up ways. And so for this person, they had like a lot of sensitivities to kind of just seemingly

random foods. And I was like, well, let's create a list of the things that you've never had a reaction to and do our best to make a complete diet out of that. And then let's start adding in foods and see if you have reactions to them. And I want to see, like, we need to agree on the number of reactions you have to have just because you had a reaction. because it wasn't even clear to me that it was always food causing it. I started to have some conversation about, okay, what other psychosocial things are happening

around these times? How many times have you seen a reaction to a food? Because often it was that food was getting cut out immediately after a first reaction. And it's like, well, was it like a stress level that day too that seemed to, there was like a headache component to it and a GI component to it. And so it was like, well, let's say at least you have to have the reaction twice. So don't take it out after the first reaction. I know the inclination is to do it, but if you can sand it, don't.

And let's journal these events. So we actually have as best we can, objective notes on things. And then take it out if it does produce the reaction twice. And then still, at a later point, let's add it back in to see if you continue to have reactions and repeat that test. And that, to me, is a much more a removal. and then a challenge and then a removal and a challenge. You know, it would be great. There was no way to do this in a blinded way per se because it was just kind of random foods.

You know, sometimes it's possible to be like, well, let's have somebody add some aspartame to your green smoothie and blind away and see if they add it. And a lot of this takes work. It sounds like a lot of work. It's not the magical quick fix answer that a lot of wellness tells us. But I guess I encourage everybody to kind of think of these sorts of ways. where you can sort of be systematic and rigorous. And if it sounds like a lot of work,

then it's sort of like, well, you know, it sounds a little harsh, maybe like, do you want to know the answer? Or do you just want to like quickly remove something and then assume that that was the cause of all the good things you think you're feeling afterwards? So I guess, you know, making it as objective as possible and trying,

you know, working with a dietitian, particularly if your insurance covers it. And just, I think a lot of dietitians are pretty cool. I think they get a bad rap, but like most of them I have heard so much of the stuff. They're like, if you go to them and say, yeah, I want to try a bunch of these things, but I know that like I need some help in actually structuring it, deciding and trying to figure out,

like, how do I know this is going to work? I don't want to just remove food out of my diet once. Let's set up a plan to avoid gluten for a little while and then retest it. And what symptoms should I be monitoring for, et cetera, et cetera. most dietitians will help you out with that kind of thing. Like that's our job. That's what we're here for. We've all,

you know, I think we all appreciate that the evidence can't tell us everything and that people are individualized. And, you know, most dietitians are not like, die hard. Like, you must eat gluten.

And if you seem to have consistent reactions of gluten, then like, we'll help you design a diet plan that is free of gluten. But I think we're also like, we don't want people to be unnecessarily avoiding and restricting. and interfering with their social lives and every time you've got to eat. I've been like vegan in the past.

I just, I got tired of being the social pariah for a while just like the person needs to be catered to and all we have to go to a vegan restaurant and whatnot. And I think that that sort of approach to things where you can ask yourself critically, how do I do social experiments? And what we, in science, what we call these are N of one experiments, where we really do our best to identify in an objective or as objective way as possible,

whether somebody's having a reaction to these sorts of things. So I'm sure people ask you all the time, what is the best diet? And I've had other dietitians, and I can't, maybe it was the food science, babe, who I know you're familiar with also, who said, like, don't ask me that. I'm nutrition agnostic. I think that was what she said. So do you consider yourself kind of nutrition agnostic? and it just depends on the person, or are there things universally that you think people should

make sure to incorporate into their diets or universally try to avoid? I definitely wouldn't say universal. Because, I mean, there are, dietitians are working with people with rare genetic defects that called like inborn errors in metabolism, where you're lacking an enzyme where you have to, like, hyper-restrict a single amino acid. And so all the way from that, up to just general. wellness, people worried about kind of nutritional adequacy of their diet and the, and the potential for the diet to reduce chronic disease risk. So I think, you know, within,

I think probably most listeners of the podcast are more thinking about, well, how do I reduce my risk of chronic disease while not causing like a nutrient deficiency? And I think the evidence kind of consistently points to there being a lot of different dietary patterns that work. There's the dietary approaches to stop hypertension or dash diet. There's Mediterranean diets. I don't personally love to like recommend a name per se. And I like to individualize a lot more because I think also nutrition research has a still coming up and trying to handle with how do we be diverse, equitable, inclusive and accepting of ethnic cuisines and culture and how do we work that in? And most of the dietary patterns we have research on and derived from predominantly

Caucasian European descent populations. And then we slap a name on the diet. And a lot of ethnic foods are not represented in our research tools like food frequency questionnaires and whatnot. So I don't love going around and being like, everyone should eat a Mediterranean diet because one, everybody has a different idea of what a Mediterranean diet is. And I think a lot of people will be like, well, that sounds like white people food. and is just not really going to land on everyone's ears in the way that you might

intend it to necessarily. And you can certainly adapt many cultural, ethnic ways of eating to the kind of different patterns and at least have an adequate nutrition diet and some of the components of diet that we think are influencing chronic disease risk. You can tailor the diet in that way as well. You know, the term plant-based is really common. And I think like, you know, most nutritionally adequate diets are like have a high amount of plants and them in general. And that's sort of like more natural, unprocessed plant foods like a diet rich and legumes and whole grains and nuts and seeds and fruits and vegetables tends to consistently across like every cohort study around the world be associated with reduced risk of chronic disease.

So I'm like amenable, not like favorable necessarily that terminology because like plant-based things are also really like sugar is plant-based and refined grains is plant-based and palm oil is plant-based. So I don't, I think anytime you just try and people are like, well, what's good and what's bad and trying to slap labels on things? And it's hard for labels to kind of universally cover all the bases and exceptions. And, you know, my goal of first and foremost is for people to kind of enjoy the food that they're. eating and find pleasure in food and social interactions with food and it fit into their lifestyle and then do what we can to kind of tailor it where we think we have the best evidence to produce chronic disease risk. But it's sort of one of the things. I think people are constantly seeking a prescription from nutrition and it's not a prescription of guidance.

Even when it becomes hyperprescriptive in these like rare medical instances are still, we're always aiming for flexibility. And, you know, it's prescriptive about. like in people with phenocudinuria, which they lack an enzyme called phenolamine hydroxylase, and they basically build up too much phenolene and don't make enough tyrosine. So their diets have to be lower in phenolalal anine and higher in tyrosine. They're often on formula diets and everything. We try and like, you know, fit things in as we can to have some low phenolalel an foods as well. And so that's one area where nutrition gets hyper-prescriptive where it's like medical life

for death or quality of life, extremely dependent on quality or impacting quality of life that I think of nutrition being prescriptive. So often when it becomes prescriptive, I'm like, oh, this is not the medically more a dire situation. And when it comes to crying disease, prevention, and whatnot, there's so much flexibility. You know, there's some general guidelines like producing saturated fat and keeping sodium relatively low and eating a higher fiber diet, but that can be adapted in so many ways. I like that reminder to enjoy it because I think even in the wellness world among people who do not have to have super restrictive diets, it has become prescriptive.

And it's become something that a lot of people really control and don't enjoy. And it seems like that probably comes with its own set of side effects, I guess. Yeah, I think diet, because we have control over it, people kind of latch onto it. and it can be detrimental to people's mental health, whether it's obsessing about like a number, either on the scale or amount of a nutrient in the diet, you know, how many carbs you're eating a day or fasting within certain windows

and people have become like, you know, really hyper-prescriptive about like, oh, God, I cannot eat. If at 7.59 a.m., I can't eat yet. I have to wait until 8 a.m. And, you know, I, I, basically they're looking for a prescription where I'm like, man, the signal the noise ratio in the instruments we have to even measure these things. It's like, I mean, you know, we can't tell you the difference between 2,200 calories and 2,300 calories really all that well because there's a lot of variation. And then there's our

instruments from measuring these things are not all that precise. And then even on a food label, things can pre-packaged food can be like up to 20% by law, like higher or lower on calories. And so people would be like, no, I know I ate 50 more calories than I needed to eat today. And I'm like, you don't know that. Like, well, I don't know that. You don't know that. You can't know it unless you have a bomb calorimiter and prepare everything in duplicate like we do in the research lab where you're blowing it up, blowing up the one time you eat the food.

And then you're preparing the food twice and blowing up one of them and eating the other. So it's prescriptive staff ends up, I think, people get into phases in the sort of diet cycling that we hear about, people doing where they try something and they fall off there and then they feel guilty and then they try it again. It's just a shame cycle that I don't think is really all that helpful. But I mean, again, I think I look at it in the sense of for many people, it serves a purpose of feeling like they're in control of something. And often this is why I try and make sure I always encourage dietetic students like liaise with other healthcare practitioners and social workers and psychotherapists and psychologists and just make sure that like you're not there. No,

when your scope of practices, a dietitian ends, and when other things might be needed and how to recommend that, because you'll often see folks where you're like, you interact with them, you're like, diet is probably not maybe the coping mechanism here, but it is not the actual cause or a real treatment here that needs to be focused on, even though the person might come to you for that. So interesting. I think that this conversation and your expertise is going to help so many people

who might be feeling kind of constrained and feeling like they need to control their diet. And maybe like you're saying, that isn't the main issue there. And I just really appreciate the work that you're doing. So where can everybody find you and find your amazing memes and all of your information? Well, one, thank you for, I think this is the first podcast I've done where I didn't talk about deep aspects of nutrient metabolism or randomized controlled trials and what else. So it's always fun to just kind of where the dietetics and wellness had a little bit. But you can find me on Instagram and Twitter. Twitter, I'm way more like a science-oriented.

And then Instagram's kind of where I just go to just make memes and look at memes. And they're both at K-K-K-L-A-T-T-T. So just my first name, middle initial, and then last name. Yeah, and I'm always happy to chat. And I occasionally interrupt memes with articles I publish and things like that. and with a little bit more of the hard of science stuff. But happy to answer any questions and point people towards resources. And, you know, I think one of the pitches I guess I'll make is that particularly with telehealth,

it's more easy than ever to get in touch with bioticians and therapists and all sorts of healthcare practitioners. And so for folks that are thinking a lot about diet and finding themselves confused, and if you're fortunate enough to have health insurance, you can usually get reimbursement for a dietitian visit typically about three per year, depending on insurance providers and all. So hop on a call with somebody just chat and hear about evidence and, you know, just be skeptical out there, I guess is my kind of always final note. I love that. Well, thank you again. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it, and if you like the show in general,

please take a second to rate, review and subscribe. It goes a long way and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there or over on my personal page at Ariel Laurie. Auto-hure with Sunny Cars feels as if the children not be with. Diesel strangle.

Zandvore. Act is Verquire Verdwined Vacantz Can chaotis But who Sorgalose

An auto Huurt Says No stress No stress No idea No everwomen Noverwashed

Always always Forlete Sovue Sondor Sondor Go to Your Reisadviseor

Orsonicars combe Goe Thank you.