Remember way back to the beginning of this podcast, shortly after “Plandemic” dropped, when wellness influencers immediately began selling supposed “immune supporting” supplements? That trend has only intensified in recent months, with grifters like Peter McCullough and Mikki Willis getting in on the supplement game. In part three of his trilogy on supplements, Derek talks with dietician Kevin Klatt about what supplements are actually good for—as well as how this unregulated industry is monetizing fears around future viruses. They also discuss the wild west of nootropics, supposed brain-enhancing substances that don’t scare you about pandemics, but instead make you believe that with just a little more optimization you’ll be the most perfect you possible…until another product drop, that is. To discuss the world of lack that other influencers capitalize on, we’ll discuss the annual A Fest, a TED-style wellness gathering for millionaires that banks on you never actually feeling content in your life, but instead chasing a promise of unachievable eternal betterment. Show NotesInside the Wellness Festival for Millionaires
Human Rights Watch: Jordan
Kevin Klatt on Instagram | Twitter
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
He is working on next week's episode, which will be a solo episode focused on Elon Musk's bedside table and other accoutrements.
So you should look forward to that.
As for us, we are on Instagram at Conspiripod.
I'm going to stop saying it's our backup account because right now that is our account.
So that's where you can find us and we'll see if that ever changes.
We're also All independently on Twitter, still at the moment.
We'll see.
I just saw that some of their code base is gone, so who knows how long that'll last.
I don't think you've jumped on Mastodon yet, have you, Julian?
I have not, but I'm interested to see what happens when Elon finds out about his episode.
So, Matthew and I over at Mastodon, I'm on Post News, which I'm actually quite enjoying, although it's small at this time.
Anyway, we are also on Patreon, of course, at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can support us and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
And we have other tiers where you can enjoy bonus videos and live streams as well.
We are also now on Apple Podcasts for Apple Podcast listeners.
If you just want our bonus episodes on Mondays, you can click a button there and get access to them for $5 a month.
And I also want to let you know that our book is available for pre-order.
It is coming out in June.
We're going to be doing some fun stuff and some episodes focused on that in the coming months.
There was a lot we had to cut from it, so we're going to use that material to talk about.
But, if you go to conspirituality.net, you can find the pre-order link and help the robots give us a boost in the algorithm as we lead up to the publication date.
Yeah, we'd really appreciate that.
♪♪ Conspiratuality 133,
Grifts That Keep On Taking, with Kevin Klatt.
Now, we're going to take you on a journey way, way back, listeners.
Cast your mind to the beginning of this podcast, shortly after something called Plandemic dropped, when wellness influencers immediately began selling supposed immune-supporting supplements.
That trend had only intensified in recent months, with grifters like Peter McCullough and Mickey Willis getting in on the supplement game.
In part 3 of his trilogy on supplements, Derek will talk today with dietician Kevin Klatt about what supplements are actually good for, as well as how this unregulated industry is monetizing fears around future viruses.
They also discuss the wild west of neurotropics, supposed brain-enhancing substances that don't scare you about pandemics, but instead make you believe that with just a little more optimization, you'll be the most perfect you possible.
Until another product drop, that is.
To discuss the world of lack that other influencers capitalize on, we'll discuss the annual A-Fest, a TED-style wellness gathering for millionaires that banks on you never actually feeling content in your life, but instead chasing a promise of unachievable, eternal betterment.
So, as you mentioned, Julian, this episode concludes a trilogy on supplements that I've been focusing on.
A few weeks ago, I looked at a JAMA study that found that of the top 30 supplements sold on Amazon, most don't contain what they claim to or include other ingredients not listed on the packaging.
That was a bonus episode.
Then, on the main feed, we had Mallory DeMille come on to discuss parasite cleanses during episode 131, which are actually sold as supplements.
In which we preempted by looking at supplement grifts on social media.
And in a little while, you'll hear my conversation with dietician Kevin Klatt, who often works with supplements in his work, but he also breaks down supplement pseudoscience on social media, and I highly suggest you follow him.
His links to Instagram and Twitter are in the show notes.
Now, considering this giant world of conspirituality that we cover, why am I so interested in supplements?
Well, to me, they represent everything I loathe about wellness grifters.
A sort of back-to-nature fallacy that they promote their inability to discuss the nuances of modern medicine and instead using the cloak of Western or allopathic medicine as a catch-all term that they never actually define, but which actually has a definition.
And then finally, they use that cloak to shield their lack of nuance and thrust you into their downline where they can monetarily capitalize on you thanks to this entirely unregulated market.
And it really is.
The FDA has no teeth.
They can send letters recommending that you drop products, but that's about it.
Can I just say right here that I'm still, still to this day, I talk to people that I've known for decades and we have the conversation where they say, you know, I don't think I'm going to get the booster because I mean, I just don't trust those companies.
Those, and I'm quoting literally from a conversation I had two days ago, and then immediately the pivot to, but I still take this, this and this supplement because I know which companies are the really good ones.
And I'm always just like, wow, this is, it's, it's not just a personal failure.
It's a, it's a subculture thing.
It's a demographic thing.
I feel like there's a lot of people, um, who, who've just been swimming in this water where, you know, quote unquote, natural supplements are the real deal, even though, you know, all of the facts that you just said obtain, uh, and, and you still have this conspiratorial mistrust of medical science.
And one thing I'm sure you've noticed this as well is, and actually Mallory has done a great job with her recent work on Healy, which isn't a supplement but kind of falls into that same category, where she shows these videos where you can just see the reps Reading the marketing copy without actually knowing what they're saying and then they try to justify it somehow and they fall back on terms like, it'll just boost your energy or whatever they fall back on and it's the same thing with supplements.
Why do you trust these companies?
Do you know the owners?
Do you know the products and where they're actually sourced, not the marketing copy?
That's a question I always have.
Yeah, those Healy videos are amazing because you so often will see these reps have that moment where they're like, oh, I don't actually know how to justify anything I just said and they kind of pause and then in come the buzzwords, the quantum and the cellular level and you know, the purification and the electrical force field of healing that's going to get activated.
I do feel a quantum biology episode forthcoming.
I know that's your specialty and I do really think we need to, because I read the Tao of Physics in college, right?
That kind of kicked it off.
Yes!
But Fritjof Capra, at least, was actually a physicist and he tried to make some connections, but that has been lost over the decades.
So I feel like we should definitely look at that.
A deep dive into the roots of this stuff.
Yeah, the Tao of Physics is definitely in the mix.
Yeah.
So, one example of what you were just saying, right?
So, let's look at Liver King, who we've covered before.
I'm actually working on a chapter on him in my forthcoming book on male body dysmorphia because he's such a perfect caricature besides his character of this whole industry.
And he made $100 million alongside Paul Saladino, who he runs one of his companies with, selling liver and testicle supplements with all sorts of unproven claims.
But then it comes out that he's spending $12,000 a month on steroids, and it's just evidence of how much money you can make with a good marketing scheme.
Of course, his scheme was that he says he never uses steroids, even after being called out by Rogan, which he just used as further marketing collateral to say he doesn't use them.
And then his latest pivot is just monstrous, to be honest, by pinning it on depression and suicide, that he's trying to help people.
I had to use steroids so as to save all the men from killing themselves.
Yeah, and if you haven't seen it, that's actually what he said.
It's legit.
And you know, he probably will lose some revenue, but I'm going to guess he's going to stay in business for some time.
And, you know, look, before we get into this, As you mentioned off the top, we are going to talk about the benefits of supplements with Kevin Klatt.
I'm not anti-supplements.
There are very legitimate uses for supplementation.
I take them myself.
And then second, my focus is not on people who take supplements.
Because as you mentioned about the disenchantment with our for-profit medical system in America, a lot of people are, and that's a very legitimate reason for looking elsewhere.
I don't always agree with the ways that they do it, but my focus here is really on people who monetize supplements through dishonest, hype, and bogus health claims.
Right, so the whole idea that I've been saying since the beginning of this podcast, watch what they say, then watch what they sell, that came into my head after watching anti-vaxxers decry a COVID-19 vaccine that hadn't even been developed yet, but then on the other hand were selling you bottles of vitamin C or quercetin, neither of which have been shown to help with COVID, but they're still actually selling the same ingredients.
And this all gets to the heart of the supplement myth.
I watch these influencers promote natural living through organic, wholesome diets, which they deem to be medicine, yet they turn around and try to sell you these supplements.
So, if a healthy diet is the only medicine you need, your body wouldn't actually require supplementation.
But, and this is where the problem lies, It's that something extra that bothers me.
Your immune system will be extra protected from the next pandemic, as Mickey Willis claims in the marketing copy for his forthcoming supplement line.
Your brain will work extra better with this nootropic.
We live in a time of so much excess, yet we still always feel a little bit behind, and that unregulated, untested supplements market, which predominantly relies on anecdotal hearsay, is currently a $151 billion industry, and it's predicted to grow at nearly 9% per year over the next decade.
So I'm going to guess that most of that is not for the clinically tested supplementation as someone like Kevin Klatt prescribes.
You know, just in terms of all of the themes that we cover on this podcast, it's like this is nothing new.
The appeal of snake oil claims, the appeal of the charismatic influencer who's willing to get up on the ramshackle stage
and say, ah, gather around, I've got the thing, the cure for what ails you, this is going to make you
more better in all of these different ways, that's not new.
It's like we come into the world vulnerable to these kinds of schticks,
these kinds of scams, and this is the latest incarnation, but it's nothing new.
Yeah, the loneliness of this seems to be, and we might have to ask Maloy to do this,
is the TikTok Reiki healers.
You know, there's something about Reiki, you know, people, I can imagine people getting benefit, you're in a massage therapy room, you're with someone else, they're playing soothing music, you can kind of feel them touching you at certain times, like I can get that that might be healing.
But then to translate that through your phone and pretend that that's doing anything for you is one of the saddest examples of what you just mentioned.
And I feel similarly when I watch some of these people trying to sell supplements in kind of the same way.
Yeah, on that Reiki thing, just really quickly, you know, There is something entirely natural and even beautiful happening in the interpersonal connection of that space.
That's the magic.
The magic is not that you've been attuned in a course that you probably paid too much for to being a channel for the Reiki energy that now you're a Master Level 1, 2, or 3 at.
That's actually not it.
That's the bait and switch.
There is something very real that's happening.
And so if you've made that mistake of where you put the magic, then the idea that that magic energy can come through your phone is plausible.
But you're already far away from any real benefit, and that is sad.
Yeah.
Well, we're going to talk about something now that has to do with actual in-person camaraderie that's being developed.
It really hinges on this idea of something extra always being on the way.
And that's what came to mind when I was watching a recent Vice documentary.
And I shared it with you, Julian.
It's entitled, Inside the Wellness Festival for Millionaires.
And I'm not gonna lie, I thought going in it would be a takedown of this annual invite-only A-Fest.
What a name.
But the video actually ended up being more of a promo.
There was some criticism, but I was actually a little Depressed by the overall tone of the video.
I'm going to highlight one particular moment in a clip soon, but I was wondering what your overall thoughts were on that video.
I mean, it's a big mess.
There's so much going on, right?
There's so many different claims being made.
There's this smorgasbord of everything from like, here's how to walk and present yourself more confidently so that you'll have success in the world, to like, here's how you can gain all the knowledge in the world by just putting your hand on different books.
And then you have the presenter who's doing the kind of wide-eyed, babe-in-the-woods, like, I thought I would go and find out if I could become, and it's kind of tongue-in-cheek, if I could become more successful and beautiful and wealthy or something.
But yeah, it's sort of all over the place, and they probably leaned a little bit more into entertainment value than actual critique and analysis.
Yeah, there's no critiquing going on here, include in the video or it seems in this company.
Here's a little history for you.
A-Fest is produced by an online educational platform called Mindvalley, which probably deserves its own episode.
They're basically what happens if Ted meets Hay House sponsored by Onnit Nootropics.
Here's a brief synopsis.
Mindvalley was co-founded by Kuala Lumpur native Vishen Lakhani in 2002.
So, he was actually pretty early promoting online meditation and personal growth.
In 2010, he co-founded an e-commerce platform called Dealmates, which offered discounts on fashion and beauty products in collaboration with Mindvalley.
So, there's definitely a big marketing edge here to the company.
Then he started up a site actually called BlinkList, which still exists, and it summarizes books in 15 minutes or less.
You don't touch them, you can actually listen to them, but they're kind of like cliff notes, basically.
For the less enlightened.
So, reducing complex knowledge into soundbites seems to be consistent in Vishen's overall business model.
Just for an example, here are a few courses that are currently on Mindvalley.
The M-Word, or Meditation, with Emily Fletcher.
This course promises to awaken incredible peak performance, boundless energy and vitality, and even superhuman creativity and intuition.
Yeah, because it's not, it's not learning to meditate and be quiet with your own thoughts and pay attention to your own sort of psychological patterns and reactions.
That's not the real magic.
It's something extra.
You're going to be superhuman and have all of this vitality and peak performance.
Oh, these people are going to be disappointed.
Yeah, it has to be.
You couldn't just say meditation with Emily Fletcher.
It wouldn't sell.
So it has to be that something extra at this point.
You have the Longevity Blueprint with Ben Greenfield, who I recently covered.
I'm told that it will completely transform how I perceive and experience aging on this online program.
There's Life Visioning Mastery with Michael Beckwith, who I know you've covered.
You're going to learn.
I know you're going to sign up for this now.
That the universe is constantly on your side and it's always working for you to realize your unique purpose.
True.
There's courses by Sadhguru, Ken Wilber, Alan Watts, his son.
Credit to his son, Mark.
Mark has done a great job with his estate overall.
I will question moving into Mayan Valley.
I've loved a lot of what Mark has done over the decades now.
I used to talk to him almost 20 years ago.
So, he's really taking the archives somewhere, which I appreciate.
But, you know, Mindvalley.
There's even Som Isadora, which is still up, even though she's no longer with us.
Oh, wow.
So, that's up there now.
In each case, practices that we regularly broker in like yoga, meditation, and breathwork
are being marketed as being completely accessible now thanks to Mindvalley and the best that
you can possibly find on the internet thanks to that extra you're being promised.
So it's like, hey, this is for everyone, but we're going to give you more than anyone else.
There's a lot of pseudoscience sprinkled in in the courses and this mostly has to do with
millionaires preaching vision exercises to make you rich and successful.
There's a whole bunch of that on the site.
Vishen himself leads mental focusing and breathwork courses.
He's also written two Tim Ferriss-style self-help books.
One is called The Buddha and the Badass, and I bring that up because in the Vice documentary, he says that the Buddha would be a CEO today, which very much fits into his worldview.
The Buddha is the archetype of the spiritual master, the person who can live in this world but also move with an ease and grace and flow that comes from inner awareness and alignment.
The badass is the archetype of the change maker.
This is the person who's out there creating change, building, coding, writing, inventing, leading.
The badass represents the benevolent disruptor, the person challenging the norms so we can be better as a species.
Yeah, I'll get to a little about Buddhism in the end here, but let's look at Mindvalley.
I have tracked them over the last year because they've been popping up in my algorithm.
It's a very milquetoast, meaningless content machine overall.
I'm not against online educational platforms at all.
Some are very useful.
I use LinkedIn Learning, for example, to learn Figma courses and things like that.
I'm sure there's some personal development I might find interesting.
But let's look at a little bit of the promo material from Mindvalley's website.
At Mindvalley, learning is a lifelong adventure.
Our teachers and students tell us there's a certain magic in everything we do.
Mindvalley provides the education that regular schools forgot.
And most of those words are capitalized.
Being human, capital B, capital H, is more than just what our broken education system makes it out to be.
We teach the world the art of truly living extraordinary, fulfilling, happy lives.
Thank you for pointing out the title case.
I actually didn't tell you to, but you found that, and that's actually part of it, right?
It's the capital letter.
I'm surprised some of this isn't in all caps.
There we are.
But put a pin in one thing that you just read.
Our education system is broken, but here at Mindvalley, we're the solution.
And this sounds pretty on point for the allopathic hating supplement salesman that I was just talking about a few minutes ago.
They rush in to fill a gap where actual problems do exist.
The thing is, What they're selling isn't actually a solution.
For Vishen, that trend is boosted by his annual A-Fest, which is an expensive and exclusive festival hosted in Jordan.
I have to point out that it's pretty rich that Mindvalley pitches itself as teaching the world the art of truly living extraordinary, fulfilling, happy lives.
While hosting a conference in a country in which women need permission from a male guardian to marry for the first time, in which women are not allowed to travel abroad with their children, and in which, I kid you not, if a man kills his wife for committing adultery, an amended 2017 law gives them a reduced sentence from normal laws regarding murder.
So if they killed someone else in a bar fight, there would be one sentence.
But if they killed their wife who happened to be seen or done something to the other man, well, you'll get less of a sentence that way.
And you can also be jailed for being critical of the king, the government, Islam, Christianity, or anything deemed defamation by the authorities.
I mean, this could be an example of your blatant intolerance, Derek, that you find any of this problematic.
I mean, who knows?
Maybe from an enlightened perspective, this is the ideal way to live your best life, as long as you're not a woman.
There's actually, it's interesting because there's a moment in the Vice documentary early on where Vishen walks by who he calls a princess.
I don't know if it's a Jordanian princess or what, but it seems like that's included in there and he has a moment of thanking her and all of this.
And I'm just like, it's one of those bait and switches that just really frustrates me.
It's very fitting right now going on with the World Cup in Qatar, right?
Yeah, it's that old observation that the people who benefit the most from self-help products and services are the people offering them.
It's about the money they can make, and so I'm sure it's in Jordan because of the financial incentives that are there for him.
And finances are going to play into everything, as you're going to hear in the clip, because at the heart of the Mindvalley philosophy According to Vishen, the more money you make, the more value you contribute to the world.
I mean, seriously, this is it.
You're about to hear him talk in a bit of a tangent near the end of the video.
So this clip starts when the host, Sidney Lima, notes that Vishen seems to be a guru-type figure in this particular world, with so many attendees seeking his attention.
Firstly, I don't like that word, guru.
And out of 400 people over here, only 20 have asked me for a picture.
So it's not true that everyone wants to get a picture with me.
And it is absolutely not true that everybody wants a piece of me.
But what I create is a container where people want a piece of each other.
Normally in wellness, no one wants to talk about the money or the business side of things.
And I feel like here, those two worlds kind of come together.
People think self-improvement is just about being healthy or being happy.
It's not.
Self-improvement is the secret to making money.
Money should motivate us because money is a measure of the value that you're contributing to the world, right?
But money shouldn't be the only motivator.
Why is the wellness industry so popular right now?
I think it's because we're understanding that the world, in the way it's run, From the past generation, it's pretty messed up.
Millions of people work to produce crap-tastic products to induce other human beings to put these products in our body at the expense of our health and the health of our planet.
So at our next event, we are completely banning all American bullshit drinks, all crap-tastic products.
We're going to war against Coca-Cola if we can.
If you're talented and you work for Coca-Cola, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
You hate.
Or McDonald's.
No, no, no, I don't hate anyone.
But I have a righteous anger against the system.
And if you don't have a righteous anger, you don't create change.
Mindvalley people and atheists are called change makers, not wellness enthusiasts.
If the Buddha was alive today, the Buddha wouldn't just be meditating under a Bodhi tree.
The Buddha would be an activist.
The Buddha would be the CEO of a company creating change.
The Buddha would be a badass.
It's about bliss, but it's also about the fist.
It's about bliss, but it's also about the fist.
Oh my God.
And that very quick kind of seamless transition from the Buddha would be an activist, which, you know, we might be able to get on board with, To he would be a CEO, he would be a change maker, he would be doing all these things.
And I mean, to go back to what we said before, what you were referencing about the, you know, we create the problem or we tap into a problem that people do have generalized dissatisfaction with, like the education system, and then sell you something that's going to be extra.
And this is not new, right?
In the history of Fundamentalist religion and cultic organizations, there's always the sense of like the mainstream world is lying to you.
They're not telling you the whole story.
They've left out all of these important pieces that now we're going to fill you in on.
And that whole bit about education not really teaching people, I've heard that for years in new age circles, and I've heard that for years in circles of people who reject medical science, right?
The reason why all of these alternative approaches or these magical beliefs are being quote-unquote suppressed is that the mainstream world has a conspiracy against them and you can see how easily that then transitions into these unproven supplements are really like the natural cure for what ails you and you can see how that then Lays the foundation for what he's actually expressing in that really outrageous soundbite, a conspiratorial attitude that is rooted in, I'm the renegade.
I'm the truth teller.
I can say that you should be fucking ashamed of yourself if you work for Coca-Cola.
I can say that at our next one, we're not, at our next event, we're not going to have any of these American craptastic products.
Well, guess what?
We're going to have a bunch of other products that we've just signed a deal with someone for, right?
That we're going to be selling you.
That was one of the most disheartening things.
I'm looking here and there's over 80,000 Coca-Cola employees around the world.
Imagine if you are a delivery driver for them and you have a family to feed and you just come across this video and hear that.
Like, putting shame on people who are trying to do a job, and this is separate from the problems of the products they produce or the very real marketing issues, especially in underdeveloped countries that they've been accused of.
You're right, that is all very real, but to then just take it as one thing and like the hundred people that attend your event not drinking Coke for a few days is going to make an impact in their bottom line.
The cure does not match the ailment in this sense, but it's just everything that I look at.
And now, unfortunately, my Instagram feed is filled with Vishen videos because of the research I was doing.
So I stopped to listen to them, which of course means I'm going to hear more of them.
But everything he produces, it reminds me of Luke's story.
Yeah.
Right?
In the sense that, oh, this is the most amazing thing I use every day.
Like how many products do you use every day to optimize?
Who has time for all of this in your routine?
You know, just the fact that you said that, I did a lot of research on Gaia at some point, and so just about every YouTube video I open these days, I get a Gaia ad up front.
And the one that's running lately is of this guy sitting behind, you know, a cosmic background, and he says this practice that you're about to learn.
has never been taught outside of the inner circle of X.
You know, it's like, oh God, here we go.
You're going to teach me how to follow my breath or something,
or to visualize, but you're going to tell me that it's from some ancient esoteric secret source
that only now, through a contract with Gaia, can be revealed to the world.
I'm not going to lie.
Of all the subscription services that I pay for, the $15 a month to not have ads on YouTube
is the only best spent from my account every month because I already get fed the videos from the algorithm
when I'm doing research, but at least I don't have to sit through those videos.
Those ads.
So there's so much to unpack in this clip.
It was a sort of mashup of a longer interview that they put together.
And as I said, it was mostly a promo video of the conference, but they were a little more critical of Vishen for good reason right after this clip.
They show you how he kind of treats his handler, which is not flattering in any way.
So, they do kind of stick it to him a little, but then they also promote Mindvalley, which is weird.
And to be honest, I'm not even mad at his little fire festival for the wealthy.
They happen all the time in many different guises.
But it's this guise that he's presenting, that your spiritual worth is dependent on the amount of money you have and can contribute to the world.
That's so kind of boring and yet continually troublesome.
You know, and I know we tried to say, you know, it's not just about money after saying the number one thing is money.
So that's another technique that they use.
But related to this topic, the name of my substack is Trickle Down Wellness for this exact reason.
It's this persistent notion that spirituality is a top-down endeavor.
And that in traditional cult speak, it's this idea that the guru has something extra that they can bestow to the peons in exchange for your faith, or your service, or most often for your money.
Or we can look at the pseudo-spiritual Silicon Valley culture that Vishen has been a part of for decades.
There's this spiritual exchange between the amount of money you bring to the table and the elevated rank you deserve because of your bank account.
Sam Bankman-Fried, right?
We're looking at that right now.
And it's this idea that you can just tithe to the world, even if the charitable deductions you market are really just tax write-offs that ultimately benefit you.
And I get that feeling watching this.
Overall, I'm not going to try to out-Buddha you, Vishen, because we all have our translations of old philosophies.
We can probably both agree that Buddha was, in fact, a deaf political leader that had to constantly deal with authority figures to be able to run his growing communes in Deer Park and elsewhere.
He certainly wasn't only a solitary man meditating under a bow tree.
But let's also remember that his monks were required to beg for alms on a daily basis, and that his communities weren't really operating on a surplus, and we know this from many history books from that period.
Would he be CEO today?
Maybe.
I mean, I take no issue with people making money to use money to benefit others, and that does actually exist in our world.
What I take issue with is pretending that making tons of money automatically leads to altruism, or that you're using Buddhist imagery on one hand while everything your platform produces ultimately relies on people believing they're not enough and need more to become enough, which only means that when they reach that stage, more still is going to be required.
Because if I remember correctly, Buddhism isn't about constantly grasping for more, but about finding contentment wherever you are.
Dude, Buddhism is the antidote to the very thing that makes people want what this guy is selling.
Exactly, exactly.
And you know, sometimes when I say that, people say, then you're not going to be motivated to do things.
And that's also not true.
But I understand Buddhism as a practice for not being so caught up in constantly striving that you forget to pause and look around and recall that sometimes a tree is just a tree, or a mountain is just a mountain, or a grifter is just a grifter.
Yeah, exactly, and it's about paying attention to this underlying mechanism that is always seeking to grasp or to push away or to be caught up in this exact activity.
It's really peeling back the curtain and saying, hey, notice how we have this tendency in our minds to always feel dissatisfied and to always be chasing what we think is going to make us feel safe.
or perfectly gratified or special.
And that let's actually work with that in this very intimate, messy, bittersweet sort of way.
The actual path of Buddhism is the antithesis to all of this.
Yeah.
So how do you assess actual benefits from marketing hype?
It's a question that will persist as long as we do this podcast and it's not easy.
I'm sure there are some Mindvalley courses that I would enjoy and learn from, as I said earlier.
Just as I opened this segment with, there are supplements that I take that benefit the condition that I use them for.
What I will say is that you should be wary when someone identifies a problem that they can't possibly grasp the totality of, be it Big Pharma or the educational system, and propose that they found the ultimate solution and they're selling it to you.
You can see the red flags all over the Mindvalley site.
So, let's listen to Kevin Klatt discuss other red flags you should watch out for
that attempt to open your wallet while delivering little to no benefit.
Kevin Klatt is a nutrition researcher and registered dietitian who provides
individualized medical nutrition therapy and health coaching to patients and clients.
As a registered dietitian focused on teledietetics, We'll define that during our conversation.
Dr. Klatt's clinical expertise lies primarily in medical nutrition management of cardiometabolic diseases and nutrition for a healthy pregnancy, taking a client-centered approach that focuses on empowering individuals to better understand the evidence in nutrition and set goals that are science-backed and enjoyable.
So, in addition to his clinical and counseling work, Dr. Klatt actively engages in molecular and human nutrition research, as well as maintaining editorial roles at top nutrition journalists and being an active member of professional nutrition societies.
Dr. Klatt completed his doctoral work in nutrition at Cornell University and his dietetic training at the National Institutes of Health and now currently is a researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine.
And he does not have any Mindvalley courses that I'm aware of.
So, shout out to Dr. Daniel Bilardo for introducing me to Kevin and his work.
As I mentioned, you should follow him on social media, you'll find his links in the show notes, because he does such a good job at dispelling nutrition and supplement myths.
Unfortunately, he didn't have a microphone to record with, so the audio isn't the best in this conversation, but I think what he says outweighs any minor audio issues.
Kevin, thank you for taking some time out to talk to Conspiratuality today.
Thanks for having me on.
It's a privilege.
You were introduced to me by our mutual friend, Danielle Bilardo.
I wanted to do more work on supplements, and she said you have to talk to Kevin Klatt, so that's how I found you.
And we've been going back and forth on Twitter DMs and then preparing for this interview, we talked on email and you had mentioned up front that you had some disclosures about your industry ties.
So I'd love to just get those out of the way so we can dive into the actual heart of the conversation.
So just I mean so listeners now and I mean this isn't anything I feel like it's hiding but just more transparent.
I've worked with supplement companies both in the context of research and I'd like to think that I work with folks that I think are good players in the field or at least have good intentions and are funding scientific questions that are of interest.
But part of my dissertation thesis related to studying choline requirements during pregnancy And some of the makers of choline, so I don't really work with direct sellers of supplements, but more the manufacturers of them.
So they funded, there's the people who make choline for both the animal agriculture feed industry and then also the choline that would eventually make it into a supplement that you buy, funded some of our work on choline during pregnancy.
And I've done some consulting just like a one-off job things here and there just a specific scientific question that a company wanted a literature review on and sort of might take both on the basic sciences but on the clinical literature that is present and then also needed and then kind of turning over just to review and truly have no idea what they do with it after that sort of a Relatively independent not like not really marketing or selling any specific supplement All right, thank you for that.
And the goal of a lot of the work is to be critical of things, but I take supplements for chronic canker sores, for example, and I've never said that supplements are bad, but my personal feeling is that they are a subject of grift in the wellness industry.
So, let's start there.
Let's start with a big picture on that question.
So, you're a registered dietitian.
When you're on social media and you use social media very well, what do you feel like when you see people who call themselves nutritionists or they provide nutrition advice who are not registered dietitians or they have not gone to school for nutrition?
Yeah, I have pretty mixed feelings about that.
I think you'll see a lot of dieticians have a bit of a knee jerk like, oh, if they're not an RD, then they're not an expert.
And I think, so this is specific to the US, so there's like registered dieticians, but then there's also registered nutritionists in other places like the UK.
And we really have a chasm between there's registered dietician or there's next to nothing.
There are a few state laws for some certified nutrition specialists, but It's something that you don't really know somebody's credential or what their clinical training is like if they call themselves a nutritionist.
You have to kind of do a deep dive and see what their background is and it's up to the consumer to figure out.
And I don't really like the broad brushstroke of if they're not an RD, they're not qualified.
They really have a lot of expertise in medical nutrition therapies and providing dietary recommendations and also providing like feeding recommendations and full meal plans and also managing tube feeding and carnitoreal nutrition for individuals with
disease. I don't think that only a registered dietitian is qualified to give just
general nutrition advice and unfortunately there's not a protected title for a well-trained nutritionist
that meets some sort of certifications.
And this is especially touchy when you consider that becoming a dietitian is like, it's an
overwhelmingly white female field. It's a pretty privileged position to be in if you
can afford to become a dietitian because it is not cheap to become one. Currently there's
still a...
Pre-internship year, and or you have to pay tuition to do an extra year beyond your undergrad to get the clinical hours done.
It can be anywhere from like six months to ten months, or six months to a year, but it is not easy to become an RD, and so I really don't like saying like, if you're not an RD, don't listen to them.
But for the consumer, I think you really just have to, the discretion is up to you, and you really have to do a deep dive and figure out whether somebody is really trained to be talking about what they're talking about.
Now your focus is on teledietetics.
Can you explain what that is?
Yeah, so I finished my RD credential in 2019 and got settled on a postdoc afterwards to do research, tried to do some more inpatient stuff, and a pandemic hit the world.
And so fortunately, I, after I finished my RD credential, just started seeing patients via telehealth, which was a very small thing when I started, and that blew up in the context of the pandemic.
And so, and it's still quite active.
And so I see patients, primarily folks with cardiometabolic disease, also some GI, gastrointestinal conditions.
via the internet and so a lot of nutrition counseling and nutrition assessment, not all
of it, but a lot of it can be done by telehealth and so it's sort of just set up an hour long
visit or so with 30 minutes to an hour long visit with people.
Do what you would do otherwise in an office setting as a registered dietitian but over
the internet.
There's a lot of state laws to navigate and understanding who you have a license to see
It's sort of a patchwork.
There's not a lot of federal regulation of the dietician credential and practice, so it's very state-based.
It opens up your ability to see a good number more patients, but there's about 14 states without formal licensure that I could technically see patients through.
I consult for a couple different practices, but the main one is where Dr. Bilardo works.
So I still go into a medical chart and write notes and read other providers notes and see their meds and all their anthropometrics and things like that.
So a lot of what we would do in an inpatient or outpatient setting more attached to a big traditional hospital center, we can do at a private practice and provide services to a larger number of people besides who's just nearby locally that can travel to you.
You said gastrointestinal issues.
Is leaky gut a real thing?
Because that's something I've seen often on social media.
The academic word for this is intestinal permeability.
And it's no, you can use some sugars that have differential permeability to the intestinal wall and study them across different disease states and at least within a study comparing people with and without some sort of gastrointestinal or other condition.
you can see changes in the permeability, like the rate at which these sugars
pass the gastrointestinal lining, which is really supposed to be a barrier
and pretty effective at cutting some of them out.
And so you can argue from that there's changes in the permeability,
but a lot of times we have no idea is the intestinal permeability
a consequence of a disease state?
Because somebody has a really inflamed intestinal barrier that becomes quote unquote leaky or more permeable.
It's like likely secondary to the disease, but it may affect progression.
There's all sorts of debates about what it's causal, but the sort of like very simple version you see
on the internet of like you eat gluten and your intestine becomes permeable
and then you get all the autoimmune diseases is like obviously quite overselling things.
And right now we don't have a therapy that specifically reverses that intestinal permeability
that we can see that that explicitly is the cause of XYZ symptoms.
So until we have something that can like target it and reverse that uniquely,
We have a hard time saying it, like the intestinal permeability itself is driving a disease.
So there's misinformation on the internet.
Okay, got it.
So 101 level, what is the purpose of supplementation?
I think it's actually helpful to think about this in the context of the history of humanity.
supplementation in the US, like when you start thinking about like it being regulated and
just having the chemical knowledge or the chemistry knowledge to isolate and or synthesize
individual compounds and then put them in a pill and claim that they're going to treat
some sort of disease only goes back like just over a hundred years or so. And so as we discovered
the vitamins, unsurprisingly American culture, somebody was trying to sell it immediately
and claim that it has all these sorts of benefits. And there's this, I'll just send you a paper
by John Swan, who's a historian, but he has a nice piece on detailing from like before
the development of the FDA through the development of the FDA, how like the science, the government,
industry groups, medical groups, the public all have this sort of interestingly intertwined
history of as science progressed, consumers wanted to buy things, industries wanted to
sell things, medical authorities wanted to regulate them.
And it kind of is a large dance Up until 1996 when we get Dishay, which we can talk about a bit more.
Yeah, supplementation really, it can be anything.
We have a current, its goal really is to supplement.
So, you know, as it says, it's usually referring to supplementing the diet or supplementing oral intake.
And it's intended typically to fill a gap, or at least that's how it really started.
So you'd ideally have a deficiency in something or an inadequacy of a intake of a nutrient
or compound in the diet that you would then supplement back.
And that's still a very, I think, legitimate form of medicine.
I mean, there's supplements are used all the time.
It can be after a bariatric surgery, there's bariatric multivitamins.
And for individuals with gastrointestinal conditions and impaired absorption,
we often supplement with larger doses than you might get in the diet.
It spirals downhill pretty quickly.
downhill pretty quickly, a lot of what you see on the internet, you can supplement, and
A lot of what you see on the internet, it's like you can supplement,
and this is reflected in modern definitions of what supplements are.
this is reflected in modern definitions of what supplements are. It can be vitamins,
It can be vitamins, it can be minerals, it can be botanical extracts, it can be herbs.
it can be minerals, it can be botanical extracts, it can be herbs. If you go back into the early
If you go back into the early 1900s, some kind of quacky weight loss cures
1900s, some kind of quacky weight loss cures were desiccated thyroid to give people a form
of pilled thyroid hormone that they claimed would help with weight loss. So it can be
amino acids, anything really, and it's not supposed to be with the intention of curing
disease or preventing disease apart from deficiency syndromes.
But that, obviously, industry and marketers toe up to that line and kind of put a toe over
quite often. And the insinuation that supplements are a cure-all for all sorts of things are
definitely there. But in its original form, it's meant to just fill a gap, basically.
So what are some of the more egregious insults that you've seen from wellness influencers
peddling supplements?
Oh, man.
I think the most egregious things come from when anything is targeted, even if it's not intentionally, and you know, you can argue whether influencers would even know this kind of stuff, but if it unintentionally targets a really protected population.
So if you ever work with cancer patients, I mean I've seen cancer patients come in with more than 40 supplements that they're currently on and it's
just sort of a shotgun approach because all of them have been claimed at some point in the
internet to address, prevent, cure whatever for cancer and those are the really desperate
situations. So I find a lot of it I guess just equally egregious because my clinical
training was at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center where people tend to really only
get there if they're on some sort of experimental therapy. So it's folks who are kind of,
there's a lot of hope I guess that something's going to finally pan out after a lot of
disappointment. When I look at all of these ads, even stuff that seems really inconsequential
like claiming something's anti-inflammatory, you know that people with actual
conditions of like severe inflammation run out, they spend tons of money on all of this stuff and
so man, I'm avoiding the original question because it all, my brain runs off to the most nefarious
way it could be interpreted for most of the things I see and I know a lot of it's
intended to be harmless and people don't really care that there's not strong randomized
controlled trial data for it but you think people, I get a lot of pushback when I say like
oh, these food sensitivity tests are really hawking a lot of BS and people will be
like, well, I don't know, I don't Well, what's the harm? It just helps people to like change
up their diet a bit and they eat more fruits and vegetables sometimes and it's like,
yeah, well, until you've had a mom who has a kid with a rare condition
who was sold one of these things by an alternative practitioner and has been buying a second set of groceries
for two years that's stressing her the eff out, then collapses in your arms crying because you've
told her this is not medically indicated because she thought she would harm her child if she did anything
different than what she was told.
That's the nefarious side of a lot of the things that you don't ever see presented on the internet that clinical dieticians will tell you and other practitioners will tell you tons and tons of stories about.
So what makes an influencer a quick buck on the internet often ends up being in our clinics and it's a big problem and a very sad story.
Yeah.
Well, you can curse on this podcast, by the way, so don't hold back.
So you brought up harm.
Can you go through some of the actual dangers with over-the-counter supplements, maybe some that you've seen or that you know of?
I would say the harms have changed over the years and this is something to always appreciate.
A lot of people immediately think of Like some of the most common harms out there from herbal extracts, green tea, you see there's a turmeric sometimes that they are hepatotoxic so you'll have some, they're linked in like medical record databases to acute liver injury and you see this, there's probably once a year at least, so and so herbal extract is linked to this, to some sort of bad outcome for the liver.
And that's like really linked to, we think, the intended component in the supplement.
But you can find, there's a lot of the attempts to regulate supplements have come on the heels of manufacturing issues.
So there was like a tryptophan-induced syndrome, like a myalgia, and then some sort of inflammatory condition coming from it.
And it turned out to be because of good, this is back in the late 80s, there was a Good manufacturing protocols at the time weren't really up to where they needed to be, and it seemed like a new type of bacteria was specifically growing on tryptophan and thrived on it, and then when it was isolated and put into supplements, people were taking a big dose of bacteria with it.
And so there's lots of ways that supplements could cause harm and have caused harm.
I think there were several deaths and like thousands of cases related to that tryptophan-induced syndrome.
And then a lot of supplements you can get a bad rap because they often will
have unintended ingredients in there. I mean when you look sometimes at
like consumer labs and all will run third-party testing. It's often on like
smaller more obscure brands but they'll find like oh this has steroids in it
like what the heck.
And so you can, it's kind of a mixed bag because when you hear about harm from supplements, it's like, well, you'd need to submit it for kind of chemistry testing.
And this is one of the critiques of regulations of supplements is they don't really need to be proven safe and effective before they're put on the marketplace.
They're supposed to be like accepted as safe.
And a lot of supplements are just kind of grandfathered in if they're not a novel dietary ingredient, but the specific formulation, You don't need to have phase 1, 2, 3 trials with the early phase being safety testing.
Some of the bigger companies can afford to do some third party independent testing, but then a lot of them don't.
And so you have really no idea what ends up in that bottle at the end of the day.
Yeah, that always kills me when I see the influencers who are
criticizing pharmaceutical companies who should be criticized
for a lot of things, but testing is not one of them.
Although they fudge the data as well and there are a lot of problems over there,
but then they will sell these supplements that have never been tested.
The word supplement has almost become unhelpful sometimes because it's like You know, a vitamin B12 supplement, I'm not sure that every formulation of it needs to be tested.
There's been enough tests of the cyanocobalamin that are pretty bioavailable.
We know a lot about it, but when you get into the herbal, botanical extracts, anti-inflammatory, gut health claims, all this kind of stuff that comes with it, where it's really crossing the line and edging on, like, am I a drug or am I a supplement?
Because it's pretty clearly intended to be taken to at least manage some sort of chronic condition.
I definitely think that sort of thing needs to be studied a whole lot more than it is.
And that's not to give a free pass to vitamins and minerals, but there just tends to be a
much more robust evidence base on calcium carbonate anyway.
We know a whole lot more about it than we know about, you know, even things like turmeric.
And that's the other thing I guess that comes with a lot of this.
You don't really know, like turmeric contains a lot of, it's not just like one single thing.
There's a lot of curcuminoid compounds that could technically end up in that.
And so even supplements have like, tend to have a lot of batch to batch or lot to lot
variability in what bioactives actually end up in there.
One of the things I think you'll see, this is a good example of one that always kills
me is when people are like statins are evil and the devil, and then they're selling like
red rice yeast extracts, which just have statin in them.
But it's like, you know, the variability from lot to lot is incredible.
and you're not really sure that you're getting We've really so far been talking about actual supplementation, but then there's the other side of it in the biohacking circles, right?
Because they're sold as supplements, but the whole thing is to make you better than in some way.
So there's almost this other enhancement industry which goes against supplementation and yet I think because they can sell it under the guise of supplementation that they take advantage of it that way.
Yeah, biohacking, some people also, you know, the word nutraceutical kind of covers this kind of space as well, where they like tow this line of like, I want to be perceived as a medicine but regulated as a supplement.
Plant sterols and stanols, there's a big industry around this to lower cholesterol levels, but they want to stay in that nutraceutical space, which is this very convenient, I'm in the middle, I don't have to do phase 1, 2, 3 testing and be regulated as a drug, because I want to be sold over the counter.
And then I also want to be able to claim high efficacy for reducing chronic disease risk factors with the clear implication I'm trying to prevent disease.
Not that I don't think there should be some sort of in-the-middle space, but it definitely has to have some regulation around it, in my opinion, to make sure that you're getting what you think you're getting.
I want to ask you about some supplements.
I sent you a list of a few that are popular, but before that, what are some clinically proven supplements for targeted nutritional purposes?
And obviously this is not medical advice, but what are some that you've come across that actually do work as intended?
The plant serols and stanols are one where like they definitely do lower cholesterol.
Most of your, like a USP certified, it's a United States Pharmacopeia certified vitamin or mineral that's sold, they tend to be pretty good and pretty, particularly larger brands that are more medically reputable.
Are they intended to, you know, fulfill some sort of deficiency or inadequacy?
I mean, if you have, you know, are on a vegan diet, it's recommended you get a vitamin B12 supplement.
That's a totally valid thing here.
It's not really recommended anymore, but you also do get supplements that sort of, they're nutrients, but they act like drugs.
And so like niacin, which is vitamin B3, very large doses of it were used for a while for triglyceride lowering.
I think it's kind of fallen out of favor now just due to other drugs being better and also some questionable whether it actually lowered cardiovascular
events. It did lower triglycerides, but whether it lowered cardiovascular events is pretty questionable. So
you'll find supplements that have been recommended for that purpose. You have bariatric
multivitamins after a bariatric surgery. There's just many different disease states, I
guess you could say, where nutritional requirements might be a little higher, often because of
increased losses of the nutrient or a greater requirement to absorb the same amount that a
person without that disease state would absorb.
You need like a higher dose or a different formulation.
Prenatal vitamins would be a great example of all this.
But this is all stuff where it's like medically very sanctioned.
I think supplements come into a pretty gray period where like fish oil and turmeric have like Okay, evidence, maybe evidence for like helping a little bit with pain with somebody with rheumatoid arthritis.
And it's one of those things that is, it's not really in medical guidelines yet, you know, you can PubMed Warrior away and find a couple of trials, it's really small trials that suggest Modest improvements and I don't want to like discount the potential.
I think they deserve more research, but there's a lot of stuff that sits in this space that is not greenlit by any guidelines panels because there are not large double blind randomized controlled trials.
That actually show meaningful changes and meaningful endpoints and really work out the optimal dosing for these sorts of things.
But I think we've increasingly seen at least discussion of supplements across guideline panels and you know at least arguments for providers to talk about them sensitively with their patients while also noting that like there's nowhere near the level of evidence to support them like there is drugs.
Obviously the industry, the influencer marketplace doesn't want to target it to like the very few people that would benefit from this in the grand scheme of society with the also one of the biggest problems I think on the internet is that magnanimous claims of benefits are attached to it and they'll be like an anecdote stating that and then you look at the actual data and you're like, oh, this is like a one point
improvement on a pain scale. And you know, there's some variation on that. Patients can try it
out if they want, as long as it's kind of safe and medically guided. But the way that we talk
about the benefits of it are just so at odds with what the data actually shows. So a
lot of what I feel like I do with being a dietician and doing counseling is like reorienting
both priorities, but also the expectations of, yeah, you can go for that if you want,
but like that post you saw that said, you know, this thing is amazing.
It's like, it's actually like when you explain the data to people, people grasp it really well.
And I think it's unfortunate to have the time to, Yeah, that's the challenge, right?
I know a lot of providers out there probably have five to ten minutes at most with a patient
to talk about all the things they need to talk to and often I think that leads people
to be a little bit dismissive of supplements and whether they work or not.
But when you have time to dig into the data and then time to talk about it with folks,
I think you can reorient expectations pretty well.
Yeah, that's the challenge, right?
You can make headway with a lot of people one on one, but when you're talking about
the scale of the internet, it just seems impossible.
I want to ask you about, as I said, specific supplements, but let's start with your feelings
on juice cleanses because this is one that just has persisted for decades.
Yeah, and persisted for different reasons.
I mean, juices are like a concentrated form of fruits or vegetables, and so they contain more of the bioactives, and people will attach amazing claims to those.
you know, attach claims to the more fasting element where you're only eating 300 calories a day.
And I mean, as a somebody who does research and trials, my immediate thought of is like,
how would I design a trial to show that juice is like, a juice fast is uniquely beneficial?
I'm not even sure, like, what would the comparator even be?
There's not, like, somebody just eating normally, because then it's just caloric restriction.
I could probably do it with just sugar water, too, and see most of the same benefits.
So there's not, like, a targeted hypothesis that comes out from most of the claims that is readily testable.
I'm not sure an IRB would really even approve it, because it's like, what, you're going to have people drink juice for three days?
go into like a negative nitrogen balance and mobilize some lean body mass, what's the point?
Yeah, I don't see a lot of benefit from it personally. I mean if people want to trial
like intermittent fasting and juice is satiates them for whatever and helps them get through
that. I mean as long as they don't have some sort of glucoregulatory issue like type 2
diabetes or they're at risk of hypoglycemia like our bodies are relatively robust. Some
people prefer fasting as approach and I would definitely if it was a patient of mine I'd
like to put like a scoop of whey protein powder or something into that juice so that you don't
get zero protein for three days which is what most of those things kind of advocate for.
I tried the master cleanse almost two decades ago, and I suffer from a condition called hangry.
And on day four of that cleanse, it ended.
It was not pretty.
I think the skill of many of these influencers is just learning a number of multi-syllabic words that they throw at people, and just to sound intelligent.
That's really sometimes the heart of what I see them getting at.
Oh yeah.
I do transgenic animal experiments and a lot of diet stuff and other compounds.
My whole point is to tease out whether some sort of exposure influences some sort of outcome and the cellular and molecular mediators of those processes.
And I'm like, man, I should just give up and go become an Instagram influencer because they already did all the experiments apparently and know the answer.
Well, I'll look forward to your new career.
But for this career, I want to talk about Herbalife because on our immediate wellness circle, yoga spaces, that's not really something that comes into it.
That's very much a different target community.
But they are huge.
They're a huge company.
They have a range of quote-unquote weight loss enhancers.
I found the marketing copy for their trademark Prolesa and I love this because it says the key benefits are conjugated linoleic acid helps decrease body fat.
It's not FDA approved.
A unique emulsion of palm and oat oils help to reduce calorie intake and provide a feeling of fullness.
Not FDA approved.
And then clinically tested ingredients and stimulant free.
They list under benefits when those aren't actually benefits.
They're just talking about what is in the product.
But all of that stuff I just threw at you, when you see something like this, what's your reaction?
It's sort of like I would, I'm almost glad that they don't want to partner with researchers because I would hate running that trial being like Herbalife product versus whatever else.
It's intentionally decontextualizing the data, what the efficacy of all those products are to sell and relying on people's everything from internalized fat phobia to just like concerns about adiposity and chronic disease to sell a product that has no clinical data showing that it's going to meaningfully in the long run reduce your adiposity. And so, you know, you mentioned
conjugated linoleic acid, which is just a bacterial product of linoleic acid that we eat in our diet
normally. And so you can get really small amounts of it from eating like dairy fat, for example,
because the foregut fermentation creates a lot of these conjugated acids that end up into
the milk, but the amounts are so low, but we can synthesize these or purify them and put them
into pills. And then we've done supplement trials. People have done supplement trials with
conjugated linoleic acids and like, you know, I think the meta-analysis show that you lose
about two pounds.
And a good bit of that is adiposity.
But like, I don't think anybody's buying these products thinking like, yeah, I'm trying to lose two more pounds.
Like, you can step on the scale in the morning and in the afternoon if you want to lose two pounds.
But like, Again, the clinical efficacy of these things is not really, the FDA is not going to approve that for any sort of fantastical weight loss claim anytime soon, and the European Food Safety Authority is much more rigorous about these things, and they take a lot of industry proposals for health claims, and so the CLA has failed consistently to have an approved health claim by EFSA, largely because the weight loss is underwhelming, it's really heterogeneous,
And then it's also there's some, some of the inflammatory markers in the blood go up in some of the studies.
So we're not even sure if it's like a good thing overall, but the weight loss from it in general, it's like, I don't
know.
It's not, it's not that cheap.
I've looked at like, you know, getting a three month supply of it is an extra 40 bucks or something you're going to
spend.
And you don't really know, again, the quality of what you're getting.
So I've never recommended it to a patient who wants to lose weight.
Okay.
How about activated charcoal?
That's one of my favorites.
Yeah, this is another one where like charcoal is like a legit medical thing and like acute poisoning.
I think this goes back to the detox thing a little bit too.
It's like, well, if it works on acute poisonings, and if you truly believe that we just live in an environment full
of like so many toxins, toxins that nobody ever really seems to be able to name, you know, that we are, or if they
do, there's definitely no evidence that like charcoal inhibits their absorption or affects their clearance in the body.
But it just kind of became trendy.
Rena Raphael, I don't know if you know her, she recently had a book.
Oh, she was on our podcast a few weeks ago.
Oh, right!
I have listened to that.
I don't know, I shouldn't know this.
She has the gospel promise and I love her analogy that if you look at all of these things
the way we look at fashion trends, it all makes so much more sense.
And so there's no rigorous evidence all of a sudden that everybody needs to be putting charcoal on everything.
And it's everywhere now.
It's beyond the dietetic sphere.
It's in toothpaste.
And I've seen lots of dentist people, science-based dentistry people being like,
please don't put these micro particles and grind them up against your teeth.
And the same with derm people being like, there's no evidence that charcoal
is really doing a whole bunch of anything for your skin.
Like I think of it mainly as a distraction.
And so like, you know, we could make a meaningful dietary change.
A lot of the food industry, I can tell you from, you know, I'm not gonna name companies,
but I have friends who work in the industry and like they're sitting in a room being like,
let's reduce our sodium profile of our entire food blend.
And the marketing team is like, let's add charcoal.
And like, it is a battle of the arties internally from the marketing bros.
And often the marketing folks went out because you don't really get a big commercial boost from silently reducing your sodium content in your soup for five But if you add charcoal to whatever your product is, you're likely to at least have a short-term gain where those sales explode.
I have a personal vendetta against Bulletproof.
Out of all the grifts, it's just one of the worst and it's such nonsense.
But MCT oil is one that I come across often.
How do you feel about that?
We use MCT oil clinically quite a bit.
So MCTs are, you know, most of the fat you're eating in the diet is 12 carbons or longer.
And so MCTs, the clinical versions of them are typically a purified eight carbon and 10 carbon saturated fat.
And so they don't require that they're absorbed, they're pretty, they're water-soluble.
And so they're absorbed much more like, a water-soluble thing is where it goes
through the portal vein and hits the liver immediately.
And they get oxidized really quickly and there's heat generated in the process.
But it's still a source of calories.
I mean, we literally use them for people who struggle to gain weight
that have some sort of fat malabsorption, that this is a way to provide some additional calories in
without just giving like a massive carbohydrate load, which at some point there becomes,
that becomes a stress on the pancreas.
So there's a very legit medical uses, but there are studies where if you compare an MCT oil
to a longer chain fat, there is a more of that thermogenic heat response
in the MCT oil.
And so if you overfeed it, you won't gain as much weight as the longer chain ones.
But of course, influencers have turned that into, it's fat burning, you can't gain weight eating it.
And that has turned into 500 calorie coffees are now somehow fat burning tools, which is just.
I'm mystifying to everybody in academic nutrition and some of the folks who have done this work have like, I think Marie-Pierre Saint-Ong is on Twitter and has been like kind of, I've seen a couple tweets of sort of like, this is not what my trial was intended to show, but it's been, if you do, this gets back again to like everything from internalized fat phobia to just like concerns about adiposity and chronic disease.
If you say fat burning, It just immediately sells and people assume it's anti-diabetogenic and all these sorts of things and just a magical cure-all for all chronic cardiometabolic illnesses and like that's not what fat burning means to a scientist and maybe this is a way for scientists to learn to choose our terminology a little bit more but you'll have greater fat oxidation if you have a greater percentage of your diet coming from those MCTs likely depending on what the comparator group is.
To lose adipose you need to have like a net fat, net negative fat balance.
So the amount of fat you're burning is less than the fat that's coming in and that's how we infer that fat is lost.
Even then we don't know like what depot it's coming from.
It could be coming from all sorts of different adipose depots or the lipid droplets and muscle and so we have these like blunt force tools to say more fat has been burned and the research nuance of it gets left out and it gets turned into Oh, like you're just blasting through pounds and pounds of pure adipose tissue that you can visually see on your stomach, and you're going to have a beach body tomorrow.
And that's unfortunately not what MCT oil is doing for folks.
By the time this episode with you runs, we'll have featured Aubrey Gordon from Maintenance Phase Podcast on, and fat phobia will be a big topic then, but in your own practice, how much of that do you see?
I tried to now screen patients to reduce the likelihood that I take very few patients who want to lose weight.
Dietary, medical nutrition therapy, really intensive lifestyle interventions tends to produce on average about five to ten percent weight loss per year.
You know there's a new lines like GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs that help to really dramatically increase that weight loss and so I work with a few patients that are willing to take those that have a legitimate medical need where like their medical medically supervised weight loss is indicated.
But I have had the like, I just went through menopause, I have slightly more fat I can see around my stomach
and I'm trying to go on a crash diet at age 62 to bust through this and I just,
it's a very disappointing call for everybody when you do telehealth where you're like,
yeah, diet really isn't gonna affect that and it's gonna compromise your bone
and your lean body mass and just, I really, I guess, try to avoid aesthetic-based medical,
or nutrition counseling, because it's not medical nutrition.
And I think those conversations are intensely hard to have.
I feel bad charging somebody money for something when they show up like clearly,
like looking for aesthetic-based weight loss advice and.
Yeah, it's just not what I'm there to provide and so I think unfortunately fatphobia is everywhere in and out of medicine and it's been very well documented and in the public it's still aesthetics and fatphobia are major drivers of what everybody thinks about when it comes to nutrition.
When you talk to most dietitians, like a lot of us, a huge proportion of dietitians are employed inpatient where malnutrition, even somebody with a lot of adipose tissue is still our primary concern in that short term setting.
So there's a huge disconnect between often what actual nutrition professionals are really trying to address and then what the public thinks is, you know, what dietitians do on a daily basis.
We really don't run around doing like, you know, medical fasting all the time and we really don't enjoy it.
We recently featured a ripped influencer named Ben Greenfield, who has a range of supplements that he pimps, and he's a very anti-donut-eat-my-protein-bar-and-you'll-never-be-addicted-again guy.
He was promoting one called Thermal Factor, which I sent you.
Did you get a chance to look at that one?
Lots of claims here of balancing blood sugar and reducing appetite and increasing energy.
And so there it looks like they are adding in L-tyrosine to increase the appetite suppressing abilities of Advantra Z, which I genuinely have no idea what that is.
I don't see, like a lot of these things are challenging because they, there's some proprietary blend.
So it's claiming it's a thermogenic formula.
Again, this is leading to the assumption that you're actually going to lose weight from it because it uses the word thermogenic and they specifically claim it's going to successfully address major issues associated with weight gain.
But I didn't see a lot of Like the ingredients actually listed other than this citrus arantium extract from the dried immature fruit of the bitter orange.
than you've seen almost all these things. It's a fancy exotic sounding thing and this
often will it's sold to Americans and made to seem like oh the secrets of the Amazon
or whatever and that's always been a shtick which is kind of problematic on its own. And
you can often find like a mouse study where if you put this stuff in it like 5% of the
weight of the mouse chow like they don't gain as much reason weight for reasons we don't
know or they have better blood glucose tolerance. A huge proportion of those things never pan
out in humans and there's a lot of reasons why mice and humans don't translate all that
I don't, there's not like rigorous data to support any of the things here.
Thermogenic formulas, they're often stimulants.
And so this is claiming without the dangerous use of stimulants.
And it's typically the non-stimulant versions of weight loss stuff.
It's like green tea extract.
which has been studied to death and has like, depending on the study and the meta-analysis
that you look at and what their inclusion criteria is, there's like a maybe small increase in energy expenditure
that doesn't really, going along with that thermogenic thing,
but it doesn't really translate to much meaningful weight loss at the end of the day.
And, you know, being extremely kind, it might be like the best study says
maybe you'll lose five pounds and most of the data doesn't even say that.
So, the stimulant weight loss is like, they usually tend to have tons of caffeine in it, or I think the old school version everybody knows of is Ephedra, but the FDA banned that for the cardiovascular, and they pulled it from the market for some rare cardiovascular side effects.
Almost everything commercial that is sold aimed at weight loss is on its own, not magical.
You know, they can be used in combination with like a more intensive lifestyle program.
And there's some meal replacement products and things like that, that at least have data in the short term can help to reduce weight.
But again, it's very marginal.
It's like anywhere from 2 to 10% sort of thing with depending on the intensity of the intervention
and how long it goes for.
And the moment you kind of stop doing any of these things very intensely, there's just
a natural kind of return to body weight, maybe not be the entirety of what you lost, but
quite often it's a large portion of it.
I think we all have heard of these like crash dieting cycles where people lose five pounds
and then gain it back over the next few years and then lose 10 pounds.
And then it's unfortunate this is where I'm glad to see with like the GLP-1 receptor agonist
drug class and whatnot that we're taking adiposity related chronic diseases a bit more seriously.
We've been in like a very scammy and extremely moralized take on this for decades now of products that don't work but are attached to magnanimous claims and then sort of even from the medical side just you gotta try harder.
Like I meet some old school dieticians and the way they talk about weight loss I'm like oh this is so 1990s purity culture.
Thank you so much for listening to Conspirituality Podcast.
