Biomedical Scientist Answers More Pseudoscience Questions

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.

[upbeat music]

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 5R-1S-1,2-dihydroxyethyl-3,4-dihydroxyfuran-25H-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.

decor_throwaway 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,

and 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.

@calleymeans 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, Calley, 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 U.S.,

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 cochineal,

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 MAHA mean?

MAHA 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 MAHA 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.

RobynInWellness 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.

loshed 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 fluorinate 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, 1/20 of a drop of water.

If you tried 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.

LotsName 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 they're 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.

@driptechh 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-1,

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 Loans 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.

azurricat2010 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.

Well, 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 Levi,

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.

WhenYoureStraaange 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 gonna 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 gonna have fluctuations within that range.

You don't actually have to monitor it

'cause 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.

@RobertKennedyJc, 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 U.S. 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, in our 50s,

we were 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.

@u_dnt_get_it_85 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 Bechamp,

a counterpart to Louis Pasteur, the founder of germ theory.

And Antoine Bechamp 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.

SunflowerSeedsO 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.

mirawaaa 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 1 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 have 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 reemergence 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.

BurtRigg 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 is 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 fats,

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 skincare,

and this all hearkens back to this appeal to ancestry,

because the ancestors used beef tallow,

a 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 of these different molecules

that help to hydrate your face,

reduce aging signs, things like sun damage.

Beef tallow is not gonna replace that.

UwStudent98210 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.

ric4100 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 Ric, 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 anti-vaxxers that we're 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.

nzt48nootropics 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 gonna improve brain function.

The problem is, all the evidence to 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 gonna somehow reverse normal aging of your brain

or improve your cognitive function,

because the data just aren't there.

brand_air asks, Is it really that bad to eat at night?

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 gonna 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.

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