Conspirituality - 288: Conspirituality Live with Dr Jessica Knurick

Dec. 18, 2025 - Conspirituality

01:05:51

288: Conspirituality Live with Dr Jessica Knurick

Derek sits down with Dr Jessica Knurick at the Eudemonia Summit for this special live recording. They discuss combating health misinformation online, what MAHA gets right and wrong, whether or not "nutritionist" should be a protected term, and Jessica's possible political ambitions. Show Notes Dr Jessica Knurick on Substack | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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	I'm Derek Barris.
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	Conspirituality 288, Conspirituality Live with Dr. Jessica Nurick.
	In mid-November, I traveled to the Unimonia Summit in Palm Beach to present on misinformation and health.
	Besides my solo talk, I got to debate Dave Asprey about seed oils and the biological dentist Dominic Nishwitz about fluoride.
	Those were all really fun and interesting, but perhaps the highlight for me was sitting down with Dr. Jessica Neurick for a live podcast recording.
	And I know I'm calling this Conspiratuality Live because it's actually the first live podcast recording any of us have ever done, but it was just me there.
	Unfortunately, Julian and Matthew were not there.
	I've been following Jessica for a while now and she's hands down one of the best science communicators on social media.
	She's able to break down complex topics into very digestible videos and she's always advocating for public health and regularly talks about one of my favorite topics, the social determinants of health, which is something as longtime listeners have known, wellness influencers never bring up.
	Now Jessica and I have chatted on DMs throughout this year, so it was really nice getting to sit down with her in person to have a conversation in front of a live audience.
	You'll want to keep listening for segment three today, which is a Q ⁇ A with the people who are in the room.
	And someone asks her if she'll ever consider running for office, and I'll just say she does not say no.
	One note on the recording.
	It was recorded from multiple angles for really sharp video.
	I've dropped some segments into our social media feeds, but I only received the audio on one track.
	So the quality is solid, but remember it is a live situation.
	It'll sound like you're in a live room.
	If you're not familiar with Dr. Jessica Nurek, she is a registered dietitian with a PhD in nutrition science who educates on nutrition, public health, and food policy.
	She helps people navigate complex information with clear evidence-based guidance.
	Exactly the type of communicator I love following.
	I've included links to her Instagram and Substack in the show notes if you are not following her already, but you really should be.
	All right, let's get into the conversation.
	Hi, Jessica.
	You're a real person.
	I am.
	Thanks for having me.
	Many, many months or years now, following and occasionally chatting online, we do similar work.
	Jessica has really done something very special, which is breakthrough to be an effective science communicator, which I think is one of the hardest things to do.
	I've run a podcast with two other co-hosts called Conspirituality for five and a half years.
	I've interviewed hundreds of doctors and researchers over the course of my career.
	And one thing they all talk about is how hard it is to effectively communicate science online, especially in social media spaces.
	And I think you have done one of the best jobs of anyone I've seen.
	Thank you so much.
	I want to start with a definition in terms of your own career.
	So during all of my years, I come from the yoga world in the wellness world.
	I taught yoga for 17 years at a place called Equinox Fitness and other movement modalities too, but I've been in the broader wellness spaces for a long time.
	And one thing that's been frustrating is depending on what state you live in, you can just call yourself a nutritionist.
	I can just say I'm a nutritionist.
	I don't need any schooling.
	Some states are slightly more legislated, but not very much.
	And then you get to this conversation of protected terms.
	Now you're a registered dietitian, which is a protected federal term.
	But for the average consumer, it's very hard to tell when you're getting nutrition advice from a nutritionist who may not have any actual training whatsoever.
	How do you feel about that?
	Like, do you think nutritionists should be a protected term?
	Do you think there should be some guardrails around who can give that sort of advice online?
	Yeah, I think it's really confusing for most people because most people don't even know what a dietitian is, right?
	Or that there's a difference between a dietitian and nutritionist.
	And you know, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, they kind of tried to take back the term nutritionist.
	This was like maybe 10 years ago at this point.
	I don't remember exactly, but because it used to, our credential used to just be RD, and now it's RDN.
	So it's registered dietitian nutritionist.
	It didn't work.
	So yeah, nutritionists, it's a tricky thing because there are, you know, you can have a PhD in nutrition science and not be a registered dietitian and call yourself a nutritionist.
	There's lots of people who do that.
	We also have certifications that are like legitimate certifications, like a CNS, that they're nutritionists.
	They're not dieticians.
	They work in hospitals and they work with patients.
	But then also, you know, you can be just my next door neighbor who watched a YouTube video and never took any kind of formal education and call themselves a nutritionist.
	And so it's pretty tough to kind of navigate that space.
	So I think one of the problems is we don't do a great job of kind of explaining that because it does open the door for people to just kind of like muddy the waters and like pretend everybody's kind of on an even playing field.
	So you know it's a little bit kind of incumbent upon us as professionals to explain like, oh, well, this is actually, you know, my background.
	And also to explain like you should look, if somebody's calling themselves a nutritionist, again, they could be very well versed in nutrition.
	They could have a PhD in nutrition, a master's degree.
	But you should follow up because that term alone isn't enough to understand something about someone versus like a dietitian is enough to understand their schooling.
	So can you explain a little bit about what your training entailed?
	As a dietitian?
	Yes, correct.
	Sure.
	Yeah, so I went through a little bit of a different kind of avenue.
	I'm not a traditionally trained dietitian, so which means that usually dietitians go to undergrad, an undergraduate nutrition program for nutrition and dietetics.
	I went through like an individualized program throughout my graduate school, but I'll just kind of give you like traditionally trained dietitians.
	They need a four-year degree.
	Now they always did need a four-year degree.
	Now they need a master's degree as well.
	So you have to go through undergrad and then get a master's degree in nutrition and dietetics.
	And then you do a nine-month internship where you do rotations.
	So you work in a hospital, you work in a clinical set, or like an outpatient setting, maybe that's in the community.
	And then you could work for something like WIC in that.
	And then I worked in school nutrition, so you can work in all these different kinds of like areas of nutrition.
	You kind of get to choose your preceptors and who you are doing this with.
	But you go through nine months of an internship, and then you sit for a credentialing exam.
	So it's this big exam based on everything you've learned over the last five, six years.
	One of the things that America has long had an anti-intellectual strain, this is going back anti-intellectualism in America in the 1950s.
	It has really picked up in recent years, and especially I'd argue since COVID, this idea, especially in wellness, that don't trust the experts.
	That's something that people like Callie Means actually say and will post.
	How do you feel about this sort of mindset that experts are either all compromised or they don't know what they're doing?
	And along with that, as a registered dietitian, have you ever gotten that sort of criticism?
	I feel poorly about it.
	You know, what I like to do is kind of like open it up.
	And I think it's easy in our space to do that right now because we talk about we all eat food and we talk about this on social media so often.
	But like just think about any other area.
	You're going to want an expert doing it.
	You want an expert flying your airplane.
	You don't want somebody who like learned how aviation on YouTube, right?
	Like you want an expert for sure doing like cardiothoracic surgery, right?
	If you're going in for heart surgery, I want an expert doing that surgery.
	I don't want like Uncle Bob doing the surgery.
	You know what I mean?
	So it's interesting that we kind of like pick and choose when we want our experts.
	Even people who are like anti-medical establishment and anti-doctors and experts, if they have some sort of medical emergency, they are, I guarantee you, going to want an expert to step in and kind of like take care of that.
	And so I think it's just this unique thing with like science.
	And I will say we should take some of the blame as scientists in the sense that we haven't always been available as good communicators explaining the science.
	And so because of that, it makes it really easy to kind of like demonize or kind of have these conspiratorial ideas of who scientists actually are.
	And for a long time, it was very frowned upon in the scientific disciplines to go to where people were going for information, which for better or worse is social media.
	And I've told this story many times, but in 2016, I was a brand new tenure track professor.
	And there was this new app.
	It was called Periscope.
	It was attached to Twitter.
	Anyone remember it?
	So it was, I think it was only around for like a year or something, but my little brother was like, you should go on this app and teach nutrition classes.
	And I was like, well, I'm teaching nutrition classes every day.
	So yeah, I'll just do the same thing.
	So I would go, it was like all live too.
	So I would go, even in my office, I would just like pull it up and then teach the same thing on this app.
	I got a little following.
	It was like a pretty good following, like 20,000 people in a few months.
	And I was like, this is so cool.
	I can reach thousands of people, whereas I'm reaching 200 in my classroom.
	And I got a lot of pushback.
	And colleagues, former colleagues, made fun of me, were like, how's your vlog doing?
	And it just was, I was a brand new tenure track professor.
	I didn't want to put my career in jeopardy.
	And so I got off social media and didn't go back on for years and years.
	And I think that was the prevailing wisdom at the time.
	And so academics, medical doctors, scientists, we've all kind of stayed away from these spaces, which opened this huge gap for people who, you know, had supplement businesses or wellness businesses to kind of step in and fill the void of kind of explaining what science is.
	And so that has been the prevailing, dominant narrative on social media for years.
	And so now when scientists kind of come on, it's really easy to paint them as like, you shouldn't trust them.
	It's so wild.
	I don't know if you're familiar with Natalia Petrozella.
	She is a professor at NYU, but she was also a colleague of mine in Equinox.
	And we used to talk about that.
	I'm a journalist.
	She's a professor, an academic.
	She writes books about fitness history throughout the 20th century.
	And we would have to talk about how we have to bucket what we do because as a serious journalist, I couldn't teach yoga.
	And as a serious academic, she couldn't teach dance as well.
	So that was your periscope experience.
	When did you kick back in and start taking it seriously to communicate on social media?
	2022.
	I was pregnant with my daughter.
	So I had my son at the end of 2019 and then my daughter in 2022.
	And between those two, you know, those three years, I just saw this huge change in social media.
	And I don't know if it was just me and like my algorithm, and TikTok had come out.
	And so I think that was a big part of it as well.
	But when you're pregnant, for those of you who have been pregnant, you start getting targeted with all of this incredible misinformation and kind of like fear-based information.
	And you're at this very vulnerable time where you just, first of all, you're absorbing so much information because you're like, I need to learn all this.
	I'm going to have a baby.
	But also, you're, I mean, I had a lot of anxiety through my pregnancy and I had pretty bad postpartum anxiety.
	So you're at a really vulnerable time where like you start to internalize that messaging.
	And even me, with my background and my understanding, I started being like, oh my gosh, is that actually detrimental to my baby?
	So that's what brought me back was 2022.
	I decided, you know, I'm just going to start combating some of this pregnancy misinformation and this postpartum misinformation.
	And so for, you know, about a year-ish, maybe a little more, that's kind of the space I was operating in.
	So it was still nutrition and health misinformation, but it was because I was in that life stage and that's what brought me to it.
	But my background is chronic disease prevention, and that's really like my bread and butter and the nutrition focus in that.
	And so when I saw the Maha movement kind of starting, starting up, I saw that Congress, they had that congressional panel.
	Oh, yeah.
	When was that?
	That was like September of 2024.
	Yeah, and so they brought all these the same wellness influencers that me and many of my scientist colleagues had been combating their misinformation for a long time.
	And they were like now all in Congress, like having this like another, it was like another, what was it called?
	It was like a second opinion on nutrition.
	Right, a second opinion.
	But they didn't bring any like nutrition scientists or like public health experts.
	They just brought wellness influencers.
	And so that was really what turned me on to being like, oh, this is a movement that like we have to be aware of.
	And so that's when I kind of started transitioning my content towards more like, hey, this messaging is coming out there.
	Like seven of these wellness influencers are all saying the same thing.
	Like this is a concerted effort to spread this particular type of misinformation and this is how it's misleading.
	And just kind of starting to explain that.
	Like this is where they're taking the narrative and why it's so misleading.
	So yeah, that was a long answer to your question.
	It's 2022.
	Our book came out, A Conspirituality, in June 2023, and Time Magazine excerpted the chapter on RFK Jr.
	So this is just when he was starting to announce his presidential run.
	So we were trying to warn people for a long time.
	I think I started writing about him in 2017 actually.
	So it does.
	This stuff has been bubbling under the surface for a long time if you're not familiar with the Maha movement.
	And I do have some questions about that movement.
	But before I get there, what in your opinion is, as a registered dietitian, when you see this nutrition advice online by influencers, what really boils your blood?
	I think it's the fact that my DMs are filled every single day with people terrified to eat and scared about what there's the amount of health anxiety right now that I'm seeing with people who, you know, it's just unnecessary.
	We can advocate for better food systems, which I do, and I'm a huge advocate of, right?
	But we also don't need to unnecessarily scare people in thinking that if they eat a cracker that has some seed oil, it's going to be toxic for them.
	Because that's just not the reality.
	And so I think the amount of health anxiety that it's putting people in is probably the biggest thing for me.
	About two hours ago, I had a conversation with Dave Asprey about seed oils out there.
	I've been very critical of him for years, and I'm glad it happened, but it was when things you say are based in fear to turn people away from something.
	So he has literal posts that say, don't eat seed oils, and then it leads to a sales funnel into the things he wants to sell you, his butter or whatever it happens to be.
	That is my personal gripe.
	So that is just me airing out that particular angle of that.
	Unfortunately, I was speaking at the same time that you were talking to Will Cole.
	Jeff Krasno moderated, who is an old friend of mine, but I've also been extremely critical of Will for many of the same reasons as Dave.
	Big picture, how do you think that session went in your conversation?
	We'll frame it around Maha.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a frustrating conversation to have because I see a good intent with so many supporters of the Maha movement.
	And I think that most of them, with the exception of some at the top who are intentionally manipulating everybody, I think that most of them want very similar things to what many of us would want, or especially myself, right?
	Like people and public health experts and people who have been pushing for systems change and healthier public health systems.
	But they refuse to actually engage with experts and they refuse to actually engage with the people who have been doing a lot of this work.
	And they conflate science with policy all the time.
	And Will did it in our conversation.
	And I think that's the main issue with the Maha movement.
	And I don't think it's intentional by them, but what it intentionally does is it erodes trust and expertise in science so that it makes it really easy for the Trump administration to come in and cut the NIH funding by 50% next year, right?
	Or cut the FDA or cut the CDC.
	And I made this point in the conversation with him: you know, our public HHS and our public health agencies, it's like the only aspect of government that's actually looking out for us.
	So all of these other aspects of government are like very much for profit and like helping out industry.
	And like we have these public health systems that have been chronically underfunded.
	And Will made this point.
	He's like, well, look, we're so unhealthy.
	And we've been spending more than we ever have on public health systems.
	And that's just not the, I mean, that could be the case, but that's not, that's a correlation and not causation, right?
	So I kind of pushed back on that.
	I'm like, we're also spending the most we've ever spent on supplements and functional medicine, but we're also as unhealthy as we've ever been.
	So I think trying to help people understand that like, you know, we were talking about agricultural subsidies and considering pizza a vegetable.
	And he was saying that that's because the science has said that pizza is a vegetable or that and that's why we have those policies.
	So the policies are based on bad science.
	And I was like, the science has never said that pizza is a vegetable.
	That's just not the case.
	The corporations have lobbied Congress to then say, okay, pasta sauce can be considered a vegetable, but that's not because the science has said, you know, we should consider pizza a vegetable.
	So just helping to understand, I think that's like the, I was thankful for the conversation to do that, to try to like kind of open that door, but it's certainly a frustrating conversation to have.
	One of the things I had to laugh because I was in your session yesterday and then I gave a presentation later and we use some of the same slides.
	And it's just this.
	You can look at in America where is the lowest median income, meaning where are people poorest, where are the highest obesity rates, where are the most food deserts, and where is the worst health care access, and where is the highest chronic disease prevalence.
	All five of those are the same red hot spots for the most part.
	They all correlate.
	They come there.
	And I've always felt that Maha weaponizes the data from those populations who are the most vulnerable.
	And then they're selling products at places like this, but on social media all the time.
	They're not selling to that population.
	And they're also, from my perspective, never offering any solutions to combat something you talk about often, which I'm very happy about because your platform is much larger and I think this needs to get out, which is the social determinants of health.
	So when did you start to become interested in talking about that angle?
	Yeah, so my research focus was cardiometabolic disease, so type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, trying to figure out how we can reduce risk.
	I started out very much on the individual spectrum.
	I was like, how can I get this one human to reduce their risk of cardiometabolic disease?
	And what I found very quickly is we have very good data on that.
	We have, I mean, it's been pretty consistent for decades, the good data on that, right?
	Nutrition recommendations haven't really changed.
	No one follows them.
	Physical activity recommendations, move your body more, right?
	The average American walks three to four thousand steps per day.
	We have good recommendations or good evidence-based recommendations for that.
	No one follows them.
	So I started to realize, you know, no one's following the evidence-based recommendations that we have.
	Why is that?
	And initially, we had this cohort, and there were like behavior change researchers in that cohort, and I just did not care about behavioral charge.
	I was like, I could not work on behavior change with the individual because I don't come from a psychology background, so that was not really where I went.
	I went more towards, oh, what are all of these like systemic issues that are preventing us from meeting these evidence-based recommendations?
	And it becomes impossible to not look at it from a public health and social determinants of health perspective because for the last four decades, we have good data that that's the vast majority of the factor that impacts health the most.
	You know, anywhere from, depending on the research you look at, it's anywhere from 55 to 70 percent of the major determinant of health.
	And you know, then you have a small percentage that's your health care, the actual health care that you receive.
	Small percentage of like your genetics and your personal factors, motivation, and personality type.
	But the biggest are these social determinants of health, which are these non-medical factors that directly impact health, like poverty, like education access, like healthcare access, like community support, and those types of things.
	I started my career as a local news reporter in New Jersey in 1997 after I graduated college.
	And what I had to do in these small towns that I worked in was go to zoning board meetings and school board meetings and council meetings.
	And there would be fewer people than is in here right now.
	There'd be a handful of people that would come to these, yet all of the important decisions about that town were made in these meetings.
	It's a bureaucracy, but it's where you have a voice, and most people don't even know they exist, right?
	Especially like zoning board stuff, which seems super boring.
	Public health falls into that in terms of the environment we're playing in in social media.
	How do you think, do you think it's possible to make public health accessible and to galvanize people to actually care about that against the backdrop of this very individual health-focused wellness industry?
	Yeah, this is similar to the question you asked me yesterday.
	And it's like it's a hard sell.
	Public health is a hard sell because you don't think about it ever.
	When it's working, you don't really have to think about it.
	We don't think about the outbreaks that never happen because our public health workers are in there, you know, mapping them and tracking them.
	You don't think about the food.
	I mean, we have, we rank close to highest in the world for food safety.
	I think we're third in the world for foods, the safety and quality of our food supply.
	And that doesn't mean it's a healthful food supply.
	That just means it's a safe food supply.
	It's not going to cause a bunch of foodborne illness all the time.
	That's because of our public health workers.
	And so we, and you just, you don't think about the clean water that you're drinking and the air that you can breathe in when you're out for a run.
	And so all of those things are public health infrastructure.
	And unless something happens that's negative, that's when you start to hear about public health.
	And so most people are only thinking about the negative things that they've heard about our public health agencies because, again, we haven't done a good job of kind of, this is one thing I'll credit Maha with.
	I mean, they've done a great job of just like kind of talking about public health.
	I mean, I don't think that people who now know what the FDA and CDC and NIH do never knew before.
	And now they do.
	So I think that's an interesting thing about the Maha movement.
	And one of the positive things I see about it is it has kind of like brought people thinking about, like, brought people to the table thinking about these issues who maybe never did before.
	I just want to kind of like bring them over here and be like, so now let's like, let's focus that energy on like things that could actually really be beneficial.
	But yeah, so I completely forgot the question.
	That's okay.
	That's okay about making people care about public health.
	Oh, yeah.
	So how do we make people care?
	So I mean, I think what you do is you, we have good data, we need better communicators.
	So in public health communication, we have oftentimes had, we have good communicators.
	They just communicate in areas that people don't go to, right?
	We have great stuff on like websites that if people went, there'd be great information there, but they don't go.
	So we need more people kind of doing what I do on social media.
	And we're seeing more and more people kind of come to the table and do that and kind of spread more messages and talk about the wins.
	We have, you know, like with the WIC program, I brought Dr. Shannon Whaley on my like Substack Live one day, and she has been the director of research at WIC for many, many years.
	And so she talked about how incredible like the outcomes are with WIC.
	And I think that that's important to kind of say, a lot of these programs are very evidence-based.
	Here are the outcomes and kind of like make it engaging and exciting and like explain to people how it actually impacts their daily life, which we have failed to do in the past.
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	You mentioned what Maha gets right.
	I think of two things always, which what Kennedy purports, which he wants to end direct to consumer pharma advertising.
	All he's come forward with is the idea that he's going to pull it back to the 1997 rule, which is basically you have to list the full disclosures, which is going to make pharma commercials four minutes long now.
	Instead of that real quick voice, it's going to be very long.
	So he's kind of punted that, and we don't know when that's going to be implemented.
	And the other thing is to end the pharma lobby in DC, which I think absolutely should be ended.
	But since 1996, Republicans have gotten about 55% of pharma money.
	Democrats are also getting pharma money about 45%.
	So it's bipartisan.
	So I don't think they're going to do that.
	What else do you see that you think Maha gets right?
	RFK Jr. has talked about closing the grass loophole.
	I'm very on board with closing the grass loophole.
	For those of you who don't know what that is, is generally recognized as safe.
	And the loophole, I mean, the idea of generally recognized as safe, which is a designation that they use at the FDA, it's basically, you know, it had a good back, like it had a good start.
	It was because they didn't want to have to go through a whole approval process for foods that have always been in the food supply.
	Things like flour and balsamic vinegar and those types of things.
	So those were just under a different category that were generally recognized as safe.
	They still needed to get the stamp of approval from the FDA, but they didn't have to go through the whole regulation like a synthetic food dye would.
	And so in the 90s, we were kind of, you know, very deregulatory coming out of the Reagan era, really pushing deregulation.
	There was this whole backup that food manufacturers had for all these additives they wanted to be designated as grass.
	And so instead of Congress deciding to fund the FDA food division, because the way that they did this with the pharmaceutical industry was they started implementing user fees at the pharmaceutical industry.
	So that's how that side of the FDA started getting their funding.
	But on the food division, they've never had a funding mechanism like this.
	So they rely on appropriations from Congress.
	And we decided, or Congress decided, that instead of allocating more money so that we could approve these food additives, they were going to let corporations approve them themselves.
	So corporations could hire their own scientists.
	Theoretically, they still have to go through the exact same process.
	They have to show a safety and efficacy, but like the corporations get to do it all.
	And then they can or cannot tell the FDA.
	So it's something that I think, I mean, this is where I find a lot of like, Maha and me, like we're right there together.
	Like we should close that loophole and we should allocate funding to the FDA in order to close the grass loophole.
	The problem is that RFK Jr., because it's a great talking point, like, yeah, we're going to close the grass loophole, and we're going to cut FDA funding, and we're going to fire all the scientists with the foods division so that the head of the foods division resigns because he says he can't do his job.
	You can't do both of those things, right?
	So that's where I'm saying, like, there's a lot of talk, and then like the actions that they're actually doing counteract what they're actually saying.
	So I know you asked me for like points that are, you know, I like or that I agree with, but it's usually always that.
	It's like, I agree with what they're saying.
	It's just what they're doing is the exact opposite of what they're saying.
	Well, it reminds me of another one that came to mind when you were speaking, which is some wellness Maha influencers will say, why are pharmaceutical companies funding their own studies?
	And I'd be like, yeah, why?
	Because the government's not.
	They're giving it to them to fund the studies, and I think that that's a huge problem.
	So I always fall on, you say the right things, but you're implementing the wrong policies.
	And they rely on people to not understand how anything works in those systems in order to kind of be conspiratorial and spread this information.
	Like with that, people have to understand, like, running large clinical trials is very expensive.
	Pharmaceutical industries, like they spend billions and billions of dollars on these clinical trials, and 90% of the drugs that enter phase one clinical trials fail.
	So that's a lot of wasted money that they spend on drugs that never ever see market.
	And so they are spending all of that money.
	And I'm not pro-pharma by explaining this to you guys.
	This is just how it works.
	So they spend an incredible amount of money for like a few drugs that are going to bring them in all that revenue back, right?
	And so if we take that mechanism away and we say, and there's a lot of stopgaps in there.
	There's a lot of things in there, disclosures that have to happen, and blinded things where pharma is funding it, but independent researchers are doing the trials.
	And so there's a lot in there that there's a lot of nuance that people don't really realize.
	But if we're going to say pharma should not be funding this, you have to understand what that means.
	That means that we're going to have to push that off onto government funding, right?
	Because those are the only really two places.
	I mean, like, the American Cancer Society does a little bit of funding, but like those philanthropic places, it's like less than 10% of overall funding.
	And so, okay, we're going to not have pharma fund the trials.
	We're instead going to have the NIH fund the trials or some other government agency with our taxpayer dollars.
	So now we as taxpayers are funding the trials for pharmaceutical medications that then pharma gets to profit off of.
	And that's not a good sell.
	I bet those people would not want that, right?
	And so they're just relying on them to not really understand that.
	And so we can always just be like, pharma bad, bad pharma.
	You know, corruption.
	I spent 10 months working with the New York Times on an investigation into how Maha radicalizes people.
	So very much what we're coming out.
	It came out in September.
	It's a 17-minute video.
	If you're interested, you can see it on the New York Times or it's on YouTube, so you can see it free.
	But at the end, we wanted to be prescriptive.
	And one of the things we landed on was we believe, Alex, my partner on the project and I, that supplements should be regulated and be required to go through trials as rigorously as pharmaceuticals.
	Do you think that's ever possible?
	How do you feel about that?
	Yeah.
	I am 100%, I think this is like logical consistency, right?
	Like I want very strong regulation on our pharmaceutical medications, and I want very strong regulation on our supplements that many, many, you know, doctors, healthcare practitioners, what have you, if you go to their website, they'll list a condition and then they'll list like seven supplements under the condition.
	So like if you go in and you're like, I have IBS, oh, here's like the seven supplements I can take.
	And then, you know, it's, my friend Jen Gunters calls it, you know, unregulated pharma, which is exactly how these are like pitched.
	It's like, oh, if you have this issue, just take this supplement, which is the same as pharma.
	It's like, oh, if you have this issue, like take this pharmaceutical medication.
	And I think a lot of people don't realize like the reason we don't regulate supplements in this country is because they had one of the strongest lobbying efforts in history back in the 90s.
	And so the FDA wanted to regulate supplements.
	And because of all of the lobbying and of the politicians who were very pro kind of alternative health and supplements, they won.
	And we didn't have the regulation that we should have with supplements.
	Along this line, I want to think about language for a moment.
	So a few months ago, a number of the influencers, including Calimeans and Woke Hole, started saying petroleum-based food dyes.
	It was this idea that, ooh, they're oil, they're bad.
	Now, first off, petroleum should be like a wellness influencer's dream.
	It's ancient, it's natural, it's a marine organism, like it's everything along those lines, but obviously they want to make the connection to oil.
	I started looking on their websites like Cole and like TrueMed, and I found so many of their supplements contain synthetic versions of the vitamins, which is great.
	They're stable, they're non-allergenic, but they're petroleum-based supplements.
	And so they're used, it takes the same exact chemical process to make food dyes as it does supplements, the stuff they're selling out there.
	So it's this sort of sleight of hand.
	And a couple months ago, RFK Jr. posted a Maha wins screen grab of 20 things, and they were almost all, this company agreed to take out food dyes.
	How do you feel about that, his attack on that particular aspect?
	I think it's, I've been very clear.
	I think it's a big distraction from all of the other issues and all of the cuts they're making and all of the anti-public health things that they're doing.
	I'll say about food dyes, I'm surprised this didn't come up in my last talk actually, the petroleum-based food dyes.
	I'll say that, you know, it's the big, the hardest thing about communicating this in a really nuanced way is that when you start to say, you know, there's not actual good evidence for what you're saying and there's no evidence that if you just swap the color of Swedish fish, that's going to make any meaningful impact on health, people will say you're pro-food dye.
	And that's not the case, right?
	I'm not pro-artificial food dye.
	I'm not pro-natural food dye.
	I actually think that when we dye food, you know, we use them in a lot of low-nutrient, ultra-processed foods that are marketed towards children, and that could be a negative thing.
	So I can have that feeling about it, right, or belief about it, and say it's just not even close to the top of the biggest issues in our country.
	And so if we're focused, I mean, I would say, what would you guys say the discourse on social media has been on food dye for the last year in terms of like the percentage of what we talk about in terms of the health issues in this country?
	I'd say it's a huge percentage, right?
	Constantly, I'm just seeing it in news feeds and videos being sent to me.
	It's kind of like weaned a little bit, I think, but like initially it was pretty, it was talked about a lot.
	So I think the issue with this whole food dye thing for me is just that we're focusing so much attention on it with no indication that it's going to make any measurable improvement on health while all of these other things are happening.
	If we were supporting public health systems and we were funding programs like the local food for schools program and we were funding better school nutrition and we were doing all these other and we weren't cutting a trillion dollars from health care and so we were doing all these good public health things and then we were like hey, let's also maybe see if we can make some deals with corporations and get food dyes out of the food.
	Fine, but that's not what's happening.
	It's being used as a distraction while all of these other cuts are being made.
	And that's the issue.
	Last week, RFK Jr.
	And JD Vance and a number of I think Macri was there, maybe Bhattacharya they spoke at the Maha Summit.
	Now this was produced by the MAHA Institute, which Kennedy had co-founded with Del Bigtree, who's one of the biggest anti-vaccine advocates out there.
	Just the week before, Mark Gordon, who is the head of the MAHA Institute, said he explicitly said, I want to end the childhood vaccines vaccination schedule and I want to get all vaccinations off the market.
	It's masks off time.
	It's time to go for what we really want.
	Given the fact that he said that and a few days later Kennedy and Vance appear at the summit, what are your feelings on these, these organizations that Kennedy started, like Children's Health Defense, and now he's supposedly detached from them, but he still seems to keep popping up around them.
	I mean, he's clearly not detached from them.
	No, he's clearly not.
	I do think that this is an interesting thing within the Maha movement itself is that, you know, RFK Jr.
	Comes from a strong anti-vaccine background.
	Many of us have been, you know, countering his misinformation for 20 years right, he's been doing this for 20 years and people think, like I got accused in the last talk of being like, very partisan and like, if RFK Jr.
	Did something I agreed with, I wouldn't, I wouldn't agree with it just because he's a Republican and I, you know, I didn't say this, but I've been, I would, I have been criticizing RFK Jr.
	From when he was a Democrat to when he was an independent, to when he was now a Republican, you know as, because he's spreading anti-science information, and so you know that whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent, if you're spreading pseudoscience, like we're equal opportunity, like debunkers, right.
	So I think, I think it's interesting in the Maha movement he really came from this anti-vaccine side of things, but the Maha movement itself was really fueled by a different sect of Maha.
	It was like on chemical additives and food additives and the Maha moms and, and that they don't necessarily align.
	So there's a lot of like conflict within the Maha movement itself and I know like the anti-vaxxers get annoyed with the Maha people, like the Maha mom people, because they're like those don't matter, this matters these, and like getting vaccines, you know, eliminated matters, and so I, from an anthropological kind of perspective, it's fascinating to watch it happen.
	But yeah, I mean RFK Jr.
	Is clearly, I mean he fill, he even filled the like ASIP with, with his like anti-vaccine friends like to imagine that he's not still involved in all of that is silly.
	The inventor of mRNA, Robert Malone yeah, That's a deep Cut.
	I mean, I remember in 2020 when we started the podcast, all of the hardcore traditional 4chan QAnon people were so mad that the wellness people were coming over there.
	And that created its own sort of tension.
	Okay, one more question, and then we'll open it up if any of you guys have questions.
	But another person you had on your Substack Live, or you've done Instagram reels with, is Elizabeth Warren.
	And so you've really started to make a mark, and you're talking specifically, you're reaching out to people who could affect policy.
	I was talking to someone yesterday who I met here, and she was talking about how can we catch the tailwinds of what's happening right now because we don't know how long this administration is going to last.
	We don't know a lot of factors, but there is always a resurgence movements when things are so stark as now.
	So in terms of policy, what are your greatest hopes and do you think there are any tailwinds that we can catch at this moment?
	I definitely think there's tailwinds we can catch.
	I think that, you know, the Biden administration, they were, they obviously, a lot of their public health efforts were dealing with an infectious disease.
	But even on the like food system perspective, they actually did several things from a policy perspective.
	No one knows what they did, though.
	Right?
	So no one knows that they created these wonderful grants for small farmers to be able to start regenerative farming and these co-ops where they had all of this money allocated for these like small business co-ops for like to bring back and strengthen local food systems because it wasn't discussed.
	And so I think what the Democratic Party is seeing right now is that they are terrible communicators.
	And they just are.
	I mean, it's their biggest weakness, I would say.
	And so I think they're realizing this like Maha movement.
	There is a huge interest in a bipartisan way to improve a lot of the issues in our country.
	And they need kind of their own messaging arm of their party.
	And so I get reached out to all the time by politicians for just like, how do we message?
	How do we, I don't, I try to stay away from that at this stage.
	I'm not sure how that's going to play out.
	Because like I really want, I don't want to be an arm of the Democratic Party.
	I want to be an arm of like public health and pro-science.
	That's my goal.
	And so whoever wants to like enact policy that is doing those two things, whoever wants to fund scientific research and do better about public health policy, that's the team I'm going to be on.
	And so I do think that they are kind of recognizing that and saying, okay, we need to switch some policies now at this time.
	I think from a policy perspective, you know, what needs to happen is I kind of like talk about four pillars.
	There's like, there's nutrition, there's physical activity, there's like stress, and then there's sleep.
	Those are like the pillars of health, right?
	But when you're thinking of, and then there's healthcare access.
	So those are the four, stress and sleep are one.
	And then there's healthcare access.
	And so when you're thinking about, okay, from a policy perspective, how could we actually start improving these things?
	And also, by the way, income inequality underlies all of this.
	And so when you're passing policies, like the policies passed in the Big Beautiful Bill, that is going to, by every metric, by all economists, is going to exacerbate income inequality, right?
	Because it's concentrating wealth at the top.
	That's a public health issue.
	It's not just an economic issue.
	Because public health outcomes decrease as income inequality increases.
	And so when you're thinking about policy, you have to have policies where everyone can at least meet their basic needs.
	I think there's this idea that it's like either unfettered, unregulated capitalism or socialism, right?
	And there's no in between.
	And it's not that.
	It's that like people just need to have their basic needs met.
	That's like what public health is trying to do.
	Like get adequate food, get adequate health care access.
	So policies that expand health care access, particularly to the people who are struggling most in this country with their health.
	Expand food access to the people struggling most and incentivize that food.
	You know, we had a big discussion about SNAP earlier, but what we've seen works in SNAP is incentives, incentive programs, right?
	So say you come in, we have a program in Colorado called Double Up Bucks, and you basically, if you use a dollar on fruits and vegetables, you get $2 worth of fruits and vegetables.
	So it's like incentivizing people to make healthier choices.
	And then at the same time, something like SNAP Education, which is, you know, allowing more people who are using SNAP to have access to like cooking classes or better, like just educational content so that they can understand how do you cook, you know, how can you cook healthfully on a budget for a week?
	And helping map those types of things.
	Those programs we know are effective and work.
	So policies that kind of expand those programs instead of cutting those programs is certainly where I would start.
	And then from the food system perspective, I mean, I could talk about this for another hour, but just very quickly, from the food system perspective, just starting to, from the way we grow our food to the way we market our food, we have to start looking at that and saying, why have we designed a food system that's 70% ultra-processed foods, most of those low-nutrient, ultra-processed foods, and then we are upset or we're surprised that people are overeating and they're not eating healthfully.
	And we are having poor health outcomes.
	So kind of looking at our agricultural system, investing in small farms, investing in local food systems with a lot of the programs the Biden administration enacted, never spoke about and never told anyone about, right?
	Investing in those types of things.
	So we start to bring some of that without hurting our commodity crop farmers.
	Like let's also support our commodity crop farmers to make some of these shifts.
	I think you have to start looking there.
	You have to start looking at regulating corporate marketing and food marketing and you have to expand health care access for basic primary care.
	We should be expanding primary care access.
	Like primary care, we spend so little in this country on primary care.
	The answer is not $5,000 functional medicine.
	That's cool.
	Like if you have a lot of money and you want that kind of like high touch, fun service, do it.
	But like if we're thinking about a public health measure, we already have primary care.
	We just don't, people don't have access to it.
	And they're constrained by like 10 to 15 minute appointments.
	Like let's change the model where they don't have to be constrained to a 10 minute appointment.
	They can have a few more touch points.
	Let's bring in dieticians because right now the only way to have access to a dietitian is to be diagnosed with something like diabetes or something or type 2 diabetes and other issues.
	So let's bring them into the healthcare model that we have right now and just enhance that and make it better instead of saying, oh, it's all broken.
	We got to just shut it all down and cut all the funding.
	Yeah, that binary you brought up a moment ago is wild, the unfettered capitalism, the socialism.
	I hear often because it's presented as that, yet we know that the most successful countries have mixed economies, which just simply means they have capitalism, but they have more social services than we have in America.
	And we are the only country in which hundreds of thousands of people every year claim medical bankruptcy.
	No other industrialized nation does that.
	It's the number one cause of personal microto.
	Yep, number one cause.
	It's up to, I've seen ranging from 300 to 500,000 people, and it is wild.
	And when you say successful, we should define what that means, like in terms of health outcomes, right?
	So they're more healthy than we are, right?
	They're healthier than we are.
	I don't think you say more healthy, do you?
	They're healthier than we are, and they live longer than we do.
	I presented this yesterday.
	Like they live on average six years longer than we do, on average, for the top OECD countries, eight years longer in countries like Japan and Switzerland.
	And it's not because they have natural food diet, Which is literally what the narrative is.
	This is literally what they're saying.
	It's like we should be more like these countries on their additives.
	But by the way, definitely not on social programs.
	Definitely not on expanding healthcare access.
	That could not be the reason that they're healthier.
	Oh, Kennedy, I found a clip of Kennedy saying people don't want universal health care in America.
	And this was recent, which is just absurd given all of the focus they do on your.
	it's very cherry-picked.
	So the question was, Jessica, do you have any ambitions to run for public office?
	You know, people ask me this all the time, and I have not come up with a good answer.
	I, at this stage of my life, have a two- and a six-year-old, and I just think that would be...
	I know, this is, like, such a politician answer to give, but, like, it's true.
	Not at this time of my life.
	Certainly not.
	I understand, like, I think that I'm just more effective right now as a communicator than I would be like as a freshman congressperson.
	So, so no, not right now.
	Maybe when my kids are older, but I don't know.
	I honestly don't know.
	I don't know how I would feel about like, I don't know.
	Have you found success with any key decision maker that maybe believes in like the Maha values?
	And after talking, there was a solution found, because right now it seems like I know people in my life that strongly believe these Maha perspectives.
	How do you move forward?
	Or have you had success with anyone where we found one solution?
	I don't know.
	So have you talked to any policymakers that believe in Maha values that you think could be successful policy-wise in implementing something that would help people?
	Yeah, so the people who are like the highest up in Maha have pretty much refused to talk to like scientists and public health experts.
	Not to say that they wouldn't.
	I just talked to Will Cole a few hour ago, two hours ago, and we had a conversation and he said that he would connect me with them because I have a lot of friends in these spaces as well who have tried and who have been told we're not talking to you.
	Our FK Jr., I mean, we heard a congressional testimony from people in the CDC that he's not, he's instructed all of his political appointees to not even talk to any of the scientists within the agencies.
	And so I think that I would absolutely be open to a conversation.
	Maybe Will can make it happen.
	We'll see.
	But yeah, I think that the people within the movement, I think this is a really important distinction.
	I think the people within the movement, like Will even, like some of these bigger influencers who are like pro-Maha, I think that they are open.
	Will said in our conversation several times, I agree with all of that.
	I think the problem is from the policy perspective, the people actually enacting the policy don't actually have any intention of coming to meet in the middle.
	I would love to be wrong.
	I would love to see that there's actual policy that's going to be enacted.
	I haven't seen it yet, but I'm open to the conversations.
	I'll just add to it's important to recognize that this entire administration is being run by the Project 2025 playbook.
	And Project 2025 is just an extension of Regonomics, which is just an extension of post-World War II deregulation after the New Deal, which is all to say that privatize as many bureaucracies as possible.
	And we're seeing that when RFK Jr. gets on stage or has an event with Mark Hyman, for example, to talk about how they want more public-private partnerships with alternative medicine companies, which is something that happened a few months ago.
	That is a way that you start to shift to private industries and take more money away from public health care access.
	And we're watching it happen.
	And so until that changes, I don't see how you move ahead with that.
	Can I just say one thing more on that?
	Because I think Maha really likes to say that they're apolitical and they would go with any party who just cared about health.
	And I think it's really important to understand that the Maha movement exists for the Trump administration.
	That's why it exists.
	It is a wonderful arm of the Trump administration because as Derek's saying, their goal, and they tried it in their first term, they tried to cut tons of public health funding.
	Their goal is to cut bureaucracies, which is governments, which are government agencies.
	And so they tried and they've had so much pushback because they didn't have this kind of movement that was eroding trust in our public health agencies.
	And so the idea that they'll talk about the dietary guidelines and how the science is corrupt, not that no one follows the guidelines.
	So they'll really play into that corruption narrative, which erodes trust in science and regulatory agencies, which then allows the Trump administration to come in and cut all the funding, which is exactly what was outlined in Project 2025 and exactly what they've been trying to do for years.
	Trust me, if you go back and if you have, if you like to have fun like I do, if you go back and listen to videos and audio and read transcripts of the Reagan era, what was going on in health, the bootstraps version of individual health, the cowboy version, that is basically the same exact thing Maha is doing now, just with different language crafted by wellness.
	So did you have something?
	Oh, okay, yeah, I thought someone raised their hand.
	I kind of did.
	You've just answered a lot of it.
	But I do have another question for you.
	Because I know that a pain point that you have with a lot of the people who are selling things are like weaponizing, you mentioned this earlier, weaponizing data, saying, I have a solution for this data, but like at a high price.
	I'm curious what your ideal marketing message would be.
	Is it just like it's being placed on these products?
	Or like, yeah, I'm curious if you could just share your perspective on that more.
	Yeah.
	The ideal state.
	What's the ideal way to market these products?
	I mean, that's always going to be a challenge because in marketing, differentiation is what matters.
	So you have to always make your product seem like it's better than someone else.
	And I've also worked as a marketing writer for a number of companies and you're always looking for the angle to which to say, oh, this is how we differentiate ourselves.
	So I find it personally kind of impossible in the current environment that we're in because what we were talking about, like with supplements, if they were to be regulated as much as pharmaceuticals, first of all, most of them would be off the market because they couldn't do that.
	But then they would also have to be truthful with their messaging.
	My wife works in UX design, but for pharma companies, so she works on pharma apps.
	I cannot tell you the amount of legalese to get.
	So I want DTC pharma advertising gone, but the amount of steps and the number of lawyers have to read every single word before it goes to print or to wherever it's going, it takes months to do these programs for regulatory reasons.
	None of that exists with a lot of these products we're talking about.
	You can just say something, put a little asterisk, and then say it's not FDA approved, but people don't look at that.
	So I think, I'll be charitable.
	If Function Health got a public-private partnership to do some sort of scanning for the public, but they're charging, remember there's $180 million in VC funding behind that company by like Andreessen Horowitz, big Silicon Valley investors.
	They want a return on investment.
	If they had something where they also offered to go to these monthly clinics in rural areas and offer some services for free, I would be much more amenable to what they're doing.
	I just never see any of that.
	I never see any of the influencers we've been discussing talk about the social determinants of health ever, unless they're weaponizing it in that way.
	Do you have thoughts?
	Well, I'll just kind of echo what you're saying, because I've thought through this a lot, and because I actually love conferences like this.
	I think they're fun.
	I'm like, look at all this like cool, unique wellness stuff.
	You know, like I come from the wellness side of things.
	I actually have been to an IFM, an Institute for Functional Medicine conference years ago, because I was like, oh, they are doing what I'm doing, I thought at the time, because I didn't know anything about it.
	I was like, oh, they're looking at like prevention of chronic disease.
	This is so great.
	So I realized it was a business model.
	And so I think that there is a way where you can still, like, I want to go into a sauna, right?
	Like, you could still sell a sauna.
	You can still sell these high-end wellness products, but be very clear that that's not solving public health issues.
	Like, be very clear that your audience is high-income, high-net worth people, and that's cool.
	And then have like a leg of your company that's an advocacy arm, right?
	You're advocating for public health so that we can democratize health and we can actually have everybody kind of engage in the riches of our country instead of just a few.
	And I think that would be the best way for a wellness company to really go about it.
	So that they're kind of like, you know, I don't know, just democratizing health in a way that they can't with their single product.
	Great angle.
	And I'll just say that every country with socialized medicine also has private options.
	So it's not like replace.
	So when Kennedy says people don't want that, you don't have to lose.
	If you can afford private access, Canada has private.
	Like that exists everywhere.
	So I think a lot of the marketing that happens on the wellness side is just relying on people's ignorance of not knowing international systems and bureaucracies.
	And explaining them, it takes time.
	You're not going to find it in one headline.
	So you have to, there's nuance and there's steps that have to be taken.
	And that, unfortunately, in the sort of environments we play in on social media, people don't stop for that stuff, unfortunately.
	So I think we have one more question, if anyone has anything.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	So this is more difficult to vote, but the exhaustion.
	How do you deal with the exhaustion of debunking people?
	We'll start with Jessica.
	Jessica, how do you deal with the exhaustion of debunking bullshit?
	Great question.
	Oh my God, I'm so exhausted right now.
	Just yesterday, Jessica, I actually, I will say this.
	I don't know.
	I do sleep eight to nine hours a night.
	My wife is a champion sleeper and has pulled me in, so I am lucky.
	But you had mentioned you have to get better at sleep.
	I do.
	I also have a two and a half.
	Right, right.
	Man, I'm not the best person to answer this because I literally am very tired, especially right now.
	But I think that I have very good boundaries on social media.
	So for like my mental health, so I don't watch things that people have done about me, right?
	I don't engage with my comment section after about an hour because then it can get kind of crazy.
	And I just kind of like let it go.
	And that's been very helpful to me.
	I don't do the best job of staying out of my DMs, but that's because my DMs are like 98% positive.
	It's like very nice to be in there.
	And so I think that having some of those boundaries has been very helpful for me in terms of like the mental health side of all of this.
	I also find that like community with others.
	So I just a couple weeks ago got together with all the public health people within Denver, which is where I live.
	And it was just so nice being in community with other people, working on the front lines of public health and trying to improve people's health and kind of understanding that just in community is really helpful.
	And I think that I just need to get better at sleep.
	I have to have better.
	I actually have an assistant that I just hired starting Monday, and I think that's going to be helpful.
	Do you have any better advice than I do?
	Well, I can share what I do.
	First off, I'm from a tiny island nation called New Jersey.
	And in that, the way we grow up there is, at least boys men did in the 80s, is to always look for an angle to take down your friends.
	And so, in some ways, what I do is just I'm pro-science, but it's also the actual act behind it is like, what are you doing?
	No, no, I'm not taking that.
	And so I get fuel from it.
	I kind of like the old story of Shiva drinking the poisonous water and holding it in his throat.
	Like, I very much resonate with that.
	So it is exhilarating, but it is also exhausting.
	It's exhausting knowing the scale that these people.
	So when I sit with Dave Asprey, like our podcast has a half a million downloads a month.
	We're very fortunate to have built up a community around us.
	But I know I'm going against a guy who runs nine businesses and is a multi-millionaire and has vast influence.
	So that sort of sometimes it feels like climbing a mountain you can't get to the top of.
	And just in terms, I still practice yoga, I still do some meditation, and I've been using marijuana for 30 years.
	So THC gummy at 2.5, very light dose every evening, that helps me sleep.
	I do think it's so interesting that we get attacked so much at being like shills for Big X or like you must be paid off by this.
	And I'm like, no, do you want to see my bank account?
	Because I could be making so much more money if I was you with my following and just chilling a bunch of supplements all the time.
	Like that's who's in my inbox.
	They're like, will you partner with us for this like X supplement?
	I'm like, no.
	But if I were.
	And so it's like multi, multi-millionaires who have built these giant wellness corporations telling me that I'm bought and paid for.
	Yeah, it's wild.
	It's wild and people believe it.
	I'm like, what are you talking about?
	We are lucky to make a livable income.
	Most of the three of us have other jobs too on the side, but like most of our efforts are on conspiratuality.
	And it's mostly Patreon, which we're fortunate.
	But when we decided to partner with an ad agency for people who don't subscribe that way, the first thing I said is no supplement companies ever, no advertising.
	And a number of them have come with big budgets being like, but you can do a red ad.
	And I'm like, no, I can't.
	Because that just would compromise the values that I think are really important.
	There's a lot of money to be made in the supplement industry.
	It's and growing.
	Yeah.
	And growing.
	We'll end on that note.
	Stay skeptical.
	Thank you, Jessica.
	Thank you very much.
	Yeah, of course.
	Thank you, everyone.

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