Biomedical Scientist Answers More Pseudoscience Questions Tech Support WIRED

I'm Dr. Andrea Love, biomedical scientist, and I'm back to fact check false health claims. Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is Pseudoscience Support 3. Chamath says, advice I gave my son, which I need to follow more myself. Read the ingredients when you buy food. If you don't know what it is or can't pronounce it, don't buy it and surely don't eat it. Whether you can pronounce a word or not has nothing to do with what the thing is. I mean, it took me years to figure out how to pronounce acai, and that doesn't mean that it's harmful. This is 5-R-1-S-1-2-dihydroxyethyl-3-4-dihydroxyfuran-2-5-H-one. Now, if you saw that word on a label, you might be scared of it based on Chamath's logic, but the colloquial word is just vitamin C. The name of chemicals tell scientists important information about them, how many molecules are in them, how they're organized, and their properties. This logic about avoiding foods or ingredients with chemical names you don't understand or can't pronounce is just an example of chemophobia, irrational fear of chemicals, and this has been a clever marketing ploy by many in the wellness industry to scare people away from things that have no potential risk to their health. DecorThrowaway wants to know, have you all seen the Dirty Dozen list? What are we supposed to feed our families? The Dirty Dozen list is an annual list written by the Environmental Working Group, or the EWG, and they claim it is the 12 most contaminated conventionally grown fruits and vegetables. They're covered in pesticides, and you should avoid them, scaring people away from very safe and nutritious conventionally grown fruits and vegetables that are half the cost of organic options in order to direct people to buy organic versions of those items. According to this year's list, spinach is the dirtiest of the Dirty Dozen. They fail to include the fact that the amount of spinach you'd have to eat in order to hit the safety threshold for pesticide levels is 145 pounds of spinach. This is just two pounds of spinach. What the USDA's annual pesticide residue report actually says is that in 99% of all sampled foods, those trace levels of pesticides are well below the safety thresholds for each of those different substances. Atkali Means asks, while 40% of modern humans will get cancer, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, rarely get it despite sharing nearly 99% of our genes. Why is that? Well, Kali, I'll help you. Since you're a wellness industry lobbyist and have no scientific or medical expertise, chimps do get cancer. Cancers are diseases of aging, broadly. In humans, the median age of cancer onset is 60 years old. As you get older, your cells get older too. And cancer occurs because of mutations in very specific families of genes. There's one tumor suppressor gene called P53 that is very differently expressed in people versus chimpanzees. And that's a big reason why more chimpanzees don't get cancer. But the biggest reason is that in the wild, chimpanzees only live to be between 25 and 33 years old. But we know that in captivity, when chimps live to 40, 50, and beyond, they do develop cancer. Grassfedguru48 wants to know, genuine question, why has Red Dye 40 not been banned? Literally everyone knows it's bad for you. Why are we willfully allowing poison in our food? Red 40 is a coloring that's used in a variety of food, drinks, and medicines, including some gummy candies, medicines, they're colored so that people don't misdose them, as well as meal replacement shakes. Colorings are really important for people's perception of foods and flavors, particularly those with sensory issues. And if you look at the acceptable daily intake of something like Red 40, in the US, it's seven milligrams per kilogram per day, which is the same as it is in Japan, the same as it is in Europe, the same as it is in Canada, and the same as it is in Australia. And there's no way that you would be eating an excess in your daily diet, even if you only ate red-colored gummy candy for your entire daily intake. We're not just gonna remove colorings. They're going to be replaced with other colorings, naturally derived chemicals. For example, one of which is coconil, which is a red coloring that is extracted from scale insects. So it's very ecologically damaging because these insects live on certain cacti species and they're harvested by farm workers. They have high rates of allergenicity. We don't have that with Red 40. And on top of that, vegans and people that adhere to Muslim or kosher dietary habits cannot eat foods that are colored using insect-derived coloring. So you're not actually solving a problem. In many ways, you're making a worse problem. East Illustrator 225 wants to know, what does M.A.H.A. mean? M.A.H.A. is the acronym for RFK Jr.'s former slogan of his failed presidential campaign. It stands for Make America Healthy Again. The problem is that the whole M.A.H.A. platform and the movement are actually in direct opposition to what would make us healthier. We could be expanding healthcare access, but instead we're actually removing that from the most vulnerable people with cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. And with unfounded accusations about the harms of vaccines, we're seeing resurgence in many of these preventable diseases. They're also trying to cut funding for SNAP, which provides food access and financial support for lower-income families. So if we really want to address some of these chronic illnesses that are the leading causes of death in the U.S., we might want to continue to develop novel and innovative cancer screenings and treatments. Unfortunately, this current administration just gutted funding for cancer research, which is certainly going to have the opposite effect. Robin and Wellness says, high-dose vitamin C is lethal to cancer while leaving healthy cells unscathed. Cancer cells can't survive it. They implode from within. Yeah, none of this is true. Just like with most pseudoscience claims, that nugget of truth that vitamin C is incredibly important at a small level has been wildly exaggerated. Now, vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin, so if you overdose on it, it will be excreted in your urine. The claims that relate to megadosing or intravenous doses of vitamin C and killing cancer cells are all based on petri dish studies where they're growing cancer cells on a piece of plastic and they're blasting them with vitamin C. But you can kill cells on a piece of plastic with anything. If you pour pure water on cells in a petri dish, they'll explode. Unfortunately, people who believe this information often will then forego proven cancer treatments before the cancer progresses to a later stage. Losht says, I just spent the past hour reading about why fluoride is bad and freaking out. Freaking out. Tin-hatting like a mother. They're killing us. Good news is, they're not killing us. Fluoride is everywhere. It's ubiquitous in nature. Decades ago, some dentists noticed that in areas where people had discolored teeth, they had extremely low rates of cavities. It was because of naturally high levels of fluoride in their water. We fluoridate water at a very, very small level, 0.7 parts per million. So to put that in context, a gallon of water is about 3.78 kilograms. We would be adding about 2.6 microliters of fluoride solution, 1 20th of a drop of water. If you try to drink enough water where you might experience fluoride toxicity, you would have to be drinking 357 liters of water or 94 gallons in a day. You would die from water toxicity way before you would experience adverse effects from the fluoride. Fluoridated water has over 75 years of data to show that it prevents cavities and improves dental health. The studies that are cited to suggest that fluoride lowers IQ or can cause neurodevelopmental issues, they're not correcting for other variables that can impact the outcome, such as high levels of arsenic or asbestos in the environment within those communities. Those exposures can credibly cause some of those issues that they're observing. Lots name wants to know, so we should stop giving kids milk at school because of the hormones that are in milk, right? No, you don't need to fear milk because of hormones. The current body of evidence suggests that among children who enter puberty earlier than normal, it's often linked to obesity or excess adiposity. It has nothing to do with hormones in milk. Milk generally always contains hormones because cows, just like humans and other animals, produce hormones. Sometimes you might see on the label no RBST added to the milk. This is referring to bovine somatotropin, a hormone that's already naturally produced by cows. Dairy cows sometimes are given additional amounts of bovine somatotropin because it can increase milk production. Bovine is the key word there. This is a cow-specific hormone. It has no biological effect on people, even if you were to deliberately consume it. Claims about all sorts of other growth hormones or sex hormones is just patently false, even if there were a biological effect. If you pasteurize your milk, which you all should be, it's not gonna have any biological impact. At Drip Tech says, I developed EDS and POTS within the year that I got the vaccine, and my heart health has been in steady, rapid decline. I really urge anyone who thinks mRNA is safe to really think about why you think restructuring DNA is any way safe or healthy. mRNA, particularly mRNA in COVID vaccines, is not restructuring DNA. In reality, every single one of your cells is producing mRNA at all times because that's how you make proteins. In order to do that, DNA is converted through a process called transcription into RNA, and that RNA leaves the nucleus. That's a one-directional process. Then it hooks up with a protein complex called the ribosome, where it's converted into an amino acid sequence that then folds into a protein. So in the case of the mRNA vaccine, that vaccine contains the mRNA sequence in the case of COVID vaccines for the spike protein. That RNA hooks up with the ribosomes, and our cells create that spike protein, which then our immune system mounts a defense against. So nothing ever enters or approaches the nucleus where our DNA is located to even change the DNA. People who still believe that the mRNA vaccines can change DNA often cite this paper from 2022. They look at the ability of an enzyme called line one. Instead of going DNA to RNA, it converts RNA to DNA. And they say that the mRNA in the COVID vaccine is being converted into DNA. They never show that any of that mRNA ever interacts with cellular DNA. But beyond that, they're using a liver cell line, meaning these are cells growing on a piece of plastic, and these are cancerous, meaning they are not behaving normally. And they express this reverse transcriptase enzyme, whereas our healthy cells do not. So this model isn't biologically plausible in the way that these vaccines work in our bodies. No other studies have shown anything similar. And we have orders of magnitude higher data points with actual human clinical data to show that mRNA vaccines are not changing our DNA, and they're safe, and they save millions of lives. Ivan Lones asks, why do we have so many kids with diabetes? We actually have very low rates of diabetes amongst children. Only 0.35% of people under the age of 20 have diagnosed diabetes. 86.6% of those are type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune disorder where the pancreatic insulin-producing cells are destroyed. 0.046% of people under the age of 20 have type 2 diabetes. That's not a lot of children with diabetes. Azuricat2010 asks, RFK Jr. removes all members of CDC panel advising U.S. on vaccines. How is this beneficial to America? It's not. The Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices, or ACIP, previously consisted of 17 members, all of whom were vetted very thoroughly before appointment, and they are an outside impartial committee that reviews FDA and CDC data. Only ACIP-recommended vaccines have to legally be covered by your health insurance. But what RFK Jr. did was he removed all 17 members of the previous ACIP, and he replaced them with eight people of his own choosing. And these include people like Robert Malone, who you probably heard of during the COVID pandemic. But since then, he's also said that people were hypnotized by mass formation psychosis, that COVID vaccines killed 17 million people. Just to be clear, all of those things that Robert Malone has said are objectively false, and he is now one of the members of CDC's ACIP panel. Another one would be Martin Kulldorff. He was the co-author, along with Jay Bhattacharya, our head of NIH, of the Great Barrington Declaration, an opinion piece that basically said we should just let COVID run rampant. You also have Retsef Levy, who has a PhD in operations management. It has nothing to do with vaccine science, regulatory expertise, and he has repeatedly said that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people. So when you have these individuals on what should be our leading advisory panel, you can understand why that's not going to improve the health of Americans. When You're Strange asks, How can I avoid falling into the traps of pseudoscience? It can be really hard to discern pseudoscience, which maybe looks like science or uses science-sounding language, but does not have evidence to support it. Watch for buzzwords instead of evidence. So if you see claims about gut healing, immune boosting, brain health, usually those are going to be followed by products or claims that don't have clinical evidence to support them. Check your source, but then also check your source's source. PubMed is often used because it's a repository of peer-reviewed papers, but it's not a fact checker. It's basically like a library that's storing all these papers, and it doesn't automatically score them for whether they're reliable, whether they've been reproduced. The best way to be able to discern what's real and what's not is to go to a trusted expert in that field because scientists and scientific experts are trained to pick apart these studies and understand whether what they're saying is actually supported by their data. There's never going to be a situation in which a single paper is going to disrupt everything we know about a given scientific topic. And if that were the case, it would not be circulated by a popular press article. It would be something that would be taking the scientific field by storm. WasteofSpace778 wants to know, what is the obsession with glucose spikes? The wellness industry have created this notion that non-diabetics should be tracking, monitoring, and trying to manipulate their blood glucose levels by wearing what's called a continuous glucose monitor. It tracks blood glucose levels after you eat, before you eat, and so on and so forth. Doing this is not going to offer you any sort of health benefits if you don't have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Non-diabetic people typically have blood glucose levels that range between 80 and 140 grams per deciliter of blood. Throughout any given day, you're going to have fluctuations within that range. You don't actually have to monitor it because your pancreas is already doing it. Casey Means, for example, founded the company Levels where she sells a continuous glucose monitor and a list of supplements and a recipe book, and it costs several hundred dollars a month to kind of stay on the subscription plan that she claims is going to improve your overall health. The glucose goddess recently launched a supplement that she calls Anti-Spike. There have been studies where they tracked non-diabetics wearing continuous blood glucose monitors. In 99% of the cases, the blood glucose levels were always within that normal excursion range. There has been no clinical data that suggests that wearing this or trying to reduce the number or range of these blood glucose excursions is offering any sort of health benefit. It's not preventing the development of diabetes. At Robert Kennedy JC, a commentary account says, when JFK was in the White House, America was strong, healthy, and full of energy, free from today's epidemic of chronic disease. Since then, illness has skyrocketed, draining our vitality. Let's make America healthy again. JFK was in the White House in the early 1960s. Since then, we've actually improved health in a lot of ways. See these really thick bars, the most predominant causes of death in the early 1900s, these were infectious diseases, tuberculosis, pneumonia caused by bacterial infections and influenza, respiratory viruses and viral diseases, and gastrointestinal infections. These are all gone from our causes of death in the US today. And that's because of vaccines, sanitation, water treatment, antibiotics, the ability to do surgeries in aseptic environments, blood transfusions. Today, we deal with mostly diseases associated with aging, heart disease, things like atherosclerosis, heart blockage, cancers, and cancers are hundreds of different diseases with a median age of onset of 60 years old. So when we were dying in our 40s and our 50s, we're not living long enough for cancers to even develop. And then we're also dealing with accidents as a leading cause of death. When were we healthy in these people's estimation? When life expectancy of humans was 47, 31% of those deaths were in children under five. Well, that was what it was like in the 1900s. Penicillin, the very first antibiotic was not available until 1945. So it might be really appealing to romanticize back in the day, but the reality is we're living longer, healthier, more vital lives today than we were when JFK was in the White House. At youdontgetit85 wants to know, what's your take on germ theory denialism? Germ theory denialism is the false belief that diseases are not caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi, and so on. This belief started in the 1800s by a gentleman named Antoine Bichon, a counterpart to Louis Pasteur, the founder of germ theory. And Antoine Bichon believed in something called terrain theory, in that your environment and your overall physiology determined whether you would become sick or not. If you're healthy, you won't get measles, or if you were taking the right supplements, you won't develop cancer. But unfortunately, our bodies are a lot more complicated than that. And we know these microorganisms that cause many of these infectious diseases. And because we know them, we can either treat them or we can prevent them through vaccination. And so the fact that there are still people that promote this, people like Joe Rogan and Bill Maher and RFK Jr. and many of their allies, just goes to show that there's no amount of scientific data that's going to get people to concede that their beliefs and their strongly held opinions are wrong. Because we've been collecting this data for over 200 years now. Sunflower Seeds wants to know, are IV lounges, drip bars, therapies a scam? Yes, just like all dietary supplements, IV dietary supplements are also unregulated, meaning they do not have to have evidence of efficacy or even safety. IV bags can contain some vitamins that you maybe need, but they also can contain a lot of things that you may not even know. You're now allowing an untrained person in a med spa to put an IV line directly into your vein, which opens the door for opportunistic infections. While many people report feeling better after receiving an IV drip at one of these bars, usually it's because they're getting hydration, not because this mystery cocktail of supplements is offering any sort of health benefits. Eat a healthy diet, eat your fruits and vegetables. And if you're feeling dehydrated, maybe drink some Pedialyte instead. Mirawa wants to know, how to convince your family that these vaccines are safe? Please help. The risk of getting into an accident in your car are actually orders of magnitude higher than the risk of an adverse event from a vaccine. Mild adverse events are what we call reactogenicity. Those are signs that your immune system is doing what it's supposed to do. Swollen lymph nodes near the vaccination site, a low-grade fever, some fatigue, sore arm. Serious adverse events happen very rarely, less than one time out of every 100,000 doses of a vaccine. And very serious adverse events, like an anaphylactic allergic reaction, happen around one in one million doses of a vaccine. So these risks are incredibly rare. Before the smallpox vaccine was developed, we had over 110,000 cases of smallpox every year in the U.S. Smallpox had about a 30% mortality rate. Solely because of the smallpox vaccine, we had eradicated smallpox from human existence. Pertussis caused about 175,000 cases of whooping cough every year. Now, because of the vaccine, we've reduced it by 89%. Measles used to cause millions of deaths globally every single year before the measles vaccine. But the vaccine globally has reduced measles by 99%. Unfortunately, because of refusal to vaccinate, we're now seeing re-emergence of measles. Godless Mom wants to know, acupuncture. We've had a discussion in our parenting group on Facebook. Some say it worked for them, others arguing from the side of science. What do you think? When you look at robust, randomized, and blinded clinical studies, the effect most people are reporting is more placebo than therapeutic benefit. Now, it's important to note that acupuncture is a multi-billion dollar industry. And while insurance companies often do cover acupuncture treatments, it's not inherently because there's science to support it. It's because there's a market for this practice. There's no strong evidence that acupuncture is going to offer something that science-based physical therapy or musculoskeletal rehab is going to offer you. But people often report a benefit because they want to feel a benefit. Bert Rigg asks, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says beef tallow is healthier than seed oils. Is he right? No, he's wrong. Like he is about most things. Beef tallow is a type of rendered fat derived from cows. And it's high in saturated fatty acids like myristic and palmitic acid. We actually have decades of robust evidence that show that a diet high in polyunsaturated fat like those in seed oils compared to a diet high in saturated fats like those found in beef tallow reduce your risk of heart disease, atherosclerosis, high levels of LDL, cholesterol, that's the bad one, and triglycerides and actually promote heart health. A lot of people have been misled to believe that the process of extracting oils from seeds is harmful or it's leading to toxic substances in the seed oils. And that's just objectively false. These oils are purified and any sort of materials that are used for the extraction are not present in the seed oil. And finally, some people claim that seed oils are inflammatory because when they're heated at really high temperatures, they generate these harmful byproducts. These seed oils would have to be heated to well above 400 degrees Fahrenheit for any of these potentially harmful byproducts to be generated. And that's not going to be happening if you're cooking with them or using them in your foods on a day-to-day basis. Some people promote the use of beef tallow for skin care. And this all harkens back to this appeal to ancestry because the ancestors used beef tallow, the false belief that natural chemicals are better. And so beef tallow, it's a natural fat. It must be good for your face. But science has given us knowledge of all these different molecules that help to hydrate your face, reduce aging signs, things like sun damage. Beef tallow is not going to replace that. UW student 98210 asks, anybody heard of chlorine dioxide? Yeah. So chlorine dioxide is the same thing as miracle mineral solution. This was promoted by a guy named Jim Humble, who was a Scientologist. And he wrote a book in the early 2000s called The Miracle Mineral Solution, where he essentially told parents that they should feed their children this chemical, chlorine dioxide. Now, chlorine dioxide colloquially is known as industrial bleach. Even at a relatively low dose, it can cause severe complications and health issues, including nausea, vomiting, kidney failure. It can also interfere with their ability to transport oxygen. And it can also cause severe GI distress. If you inhale it, it can cause pulmonary edema or fluid filling in your lungs. However, you have wellness influencers who tout it as a cure-all for autism, HIV, cancer. All of our scientific and regulatory agencies explicitly warn against the use of chlorine dioxide for any therapeutic use. The problem is, is because this falls into this loophole of wellness products, people are still able to find chlorine dioxide, whether through industrial chemical supply or through wellness companies. And they're using it to cause harm to themselves or to other people. Rick 4100 asks, why are we injecting newborns with a vaccine for a disease they can't catch? So this is referring to the hepatitis B vaccine, which is given to newborns. And Rick, they can catch hepatitis B. Contrary to the claims of anti-vaccine activists and our recent surgeon general nominee, Casey Means, hepatitis B is not just a sexually transmitted infection. The hepatitis B virus is spread to children perinatally. So during the process of birth or through direct contact with any bodily fluids, usually from a close family member. Hepatitis B infection in childhood leads to chronic hepatitis in 90% of the cases. And chronic hepatitis due to hepatitis B is the cause of 60% of all liver cancers. So you would think that knowing that we could prevent 90% of chronic hepatitis cases in kids and all the subsequent liver cancers that would result, we would be shouting from the rooftops. This is great. We're preventing chronic illness, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, because this has become this battle cry of the anti-vaxxers that were harming all these newborns by giving them this vaccine. But we didn't always vaccinate against hepatitis B at birth. In the 1980s, we had thousands and thousands of hepatitis B infections every year. But in 1991, the U.S. adopted a universal newborn vaccine recommendation. And since then, we have reduced the prevalence of chronic hepatitis B to less than 0.1% among kids under five. Acute hepatitis B infections themselves has declined by 82%, and it is incredibly safe and effective. NZT48NewTropics wants to know, why does everyone swear by Lion's Mane? Lion's Mane is touted in the wellness spheres as a cognitive performance enhancer, that it's going to improve focus, it's going to improve brain function. The problem is all the evidences suggest those sorts of things have been done in mice or in cells growing on a piece of plastic. There's no actual evidence in humans that Lion's Mane supplements are actually offering those sorts of cognitive or brain health benefits. You'll often find Lion's Mane mixed in a cocktail along with instant coffee. And so they'll say that the Lion's Mane is boosting your focus, but they ignore the fact that coffee, which has caffeine, actually improves your focus. Now, Lion's Mane is an edible mushroom, and mushrooms are a great part of a healthy diet. But don't be misled to believe that it's a miracle panacea that's going to somehow reverse normal aging of your brain or improve your cognitive function because the data just aren't there. Food is food, right? And besides, it's daytime somewhere. I mean, the earth is forever rotating, so late night eating could be daytime at any time. Our bodies function on a circadian rhythm, meaning we have these 24-hour sleep-wake cycles during the day and through the night. You have different levels of certain hormones and signaling molecules that can alter or change processes that are occurring in your body. In the evening, people generally have a little bit reduced insulin sensitivity, meaning if you ate the same exact thing at night that you did, maybe first thing in the morning, your normal blood glucose excursion might be slightly higher, but still normal. It's not going to be super impactful. The reason that some people experience weight gain or issues with eating late at night is because the quality of the food they're eating is generally calorie-dense, not nutrient-dense. So they're eating an excess number of calories beyond what they should be eating for their overall metabolic rate. So those are all the questions for today. Remember, always verify your sources. Take every piece of information you come across with a grain of salt. Sensational claims always get more attention than the more nuanced reality. Thanks for watching Pseudoscience Support 3.