Dr. Jessica Nurik (4:44)

I am. Thanks for having me.

Derek Barris (4:46)

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 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (5:26)

Thank you so much.

Derek Barris (5:28)

I want to start with the 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, 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? 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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (6:29)

Yeah, I think it's really confusing for most people because most people don't even know what a dietitian is or that there's a difference between a dietitian and nutritionist. And 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, nutritionist. It's a tricky thing because there are. 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 legitimate certifications, like a cms, that they're nutritionists. They're not dietitians, 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, is enough to understand their schooling.

Derek Barris (8:09)

So can you explain a little bit about what your training entailed as a dietitian? Yes, correct.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (8:16)

Sure. Yeah. So I went through a little bit of a different kind of avenue. I am 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 school nutrition. So you can work in all these different kind of like areas of nutrition and 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.

Derek Barris (9:21)

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 Kali Means actually says 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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (9:55)

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 just think about any other area. You're gonna want an expert doing it. You want an expert flying your airplane. You don't want somebody who learned how aviation on YouTube. You want an expert for sure doing cardiothoracic surgery. If you're going in for heart surgery, I want an expert doing that surgery. I don't want like Uncle Bob doing that 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 science. And. And I will say we should take some of the blame as scientists in the sense that, like, 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? I think it was only around for 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 all live too. So I would go, even in my office, I would just 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 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 science has kind of come on, it's really easy to paint them as like, you shouldn't trust them.

Derek Barris (12:38)

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 at 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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (13:13)

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, but. 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 like 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 lifestyle 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 up, I saw that Congress, they had that congressional panel. When was that? That was like September of 2024 last year.

Derek Barris (14:48)

Yes.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (14:49)

Yeah. And so they brought all these, the same wellness influencers that me and many of my scientists, 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.

Derek Barris (15:05)

Right, Right. A second opinion.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (15:07)

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 2022.

Derek Barris (15:48)

Our book came out conspirituality in June 2023, and Time magazine excerpted the chapter on RFK Junior. 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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (16:25)

I think it's the fact that my DMs are filled every single day with people terrified to eat and scared about what? The amount of health anxiety right now that I'm seeing with people who are, 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, like, if they eat a cracker that has some seed oil, it's gonna be toxic for them. Cause 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.

Derek Barris (17:01)

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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (17:54)

Yeah, I mean, it's a frustrating conversation to have because I see good intent with so many supporters of the Maha movement. And I think that, like, most of them, with the exception of, like, 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, like, systems change and healthier things, healthier public health systems, but they refuse to actually engage with experts, and they refuse to actually engage with the people who have been, like, 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, is they. And they don't. 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, like, 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, you know, we've been spending more than we ever have on public health systems, and that's just not. I mean, that could be the case, but that's not. That's a correlation and not causation. Right. So I kind of push 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 to understand that. Like, you know, we were talking about agricultural subsidies and, and considering pizza a vegetable. And he was saying that that's because the science has said that pizza is a vegetable. 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.

Derek Barris (20:24)

One of the things I had to laugh because I was in your session yesterday and then I gave a presentation later and we used some of the same slides and it's just this. You can look at in America where it, 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 healthcare access and where is the highest chronic disease prevalence? All five of those are the same red hotspots 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 be to. To get out, which is the social determinants of health. So when did you start to become interested in talking about that angle?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (21:34)

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 4,000 steps per day. We have good evidence based recommendations for that. No one follows them. So I started to realize no one's following the evidence based recommendations that we have. Why is that? And, and initially we had this cohort and there were behavior change researchers in that cohort. And I just did not care about. I was like, I cannot 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 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% 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 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.

Derek Barris (23:25)

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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (24:22)

Yeah, this is similar to the question you asked me yesterday. And it's like, it's a hard thing. 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 happens 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 high, close to highest in the world for food safety. I think we're third in the world for 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 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 focus that energy on like things that could actually really be beneficial. But yeah, so I completely forgot the question.

Derek Barris (26:08)

That's okay. That's okay. About making people care about public health care.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (26:11)

Oh yeah. So how do we make people care? So I mean, I think what you do is 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, come to the table and do that and kind of spread more messages and talk about the wins we have, like with the WIC program. I brought Dr. Shannon Whaley on my 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 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 kind of in the past.

Derek Barris (27:19)

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Dr. Jessica Nurik (29:43)

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Derek Barris (29:54)

Magic isn't about spending more, it's about.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (29:56)

Giving more for less. Ross, work your magic.

Derek Barris (29:59)

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 D.C. 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 think they're going to do that. What else do you see that you think maha gets right?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (30:52)

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. It's generally recognized as safe. And the loophole, I mean, the idea of generally recognized as safe, which is a designation that we. That they use at the FDA to basically, you know, it had a good. Like it had a good. 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 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 that. 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 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, 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 at the foods division so that the head of the foods division resigns. And 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 there's a lot of talk. And then the actions that they're actually doing counteract what they're actually saying. So I know you asked me for points that 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.

Derek Barris (33:22)

Well, it reminds me of another one that came 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (33:46)

And they rely on people to not understand how anything works. And that those systems, in order to kind of be conspiratorial and spread this information with that, people have to understand running large clinical trials is very expensive. Pharmaceutical industries, 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 a few drugs that are gonna 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, because those are the only really two places. I mean, like the American Cancer Society does a little bit of funding, but those philanthropic places, it's like less than 10% of the 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.

Derek Barris (35:38)

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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (36:09)

Yeah, 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 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 was like, oh, if you have this issue, take this pharmaceutical medication. And I think a lot of people don't realize 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 proud kind of alternative health and supplements, they won. And we didn't have the regulation that we should have with supplements.

Derek Barris (37:24)

Along those lines, I want to think about language for a moment. So a few months ago, a number of the influencers, including Cali Means and Will Cole 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 Trumed 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (38:33)

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 the hardest thing about communicating this in a really nuanced way is that when you start to say there's not actual good evidence for what you're saying and there's no, 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 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 could have that feeling about it 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 initially it was pretty, it was talked about a lot. So I think the issue with this whole food diet 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.

Derek Barris (40:42)

Last week, RFK Jr and JD Vance and a number of. I think Macari 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 Gorton, who is the head of the MAHA Institute, said he explicitly said, I want to end the childhood vaccine vaccination schedule and I want to get all vaccinations off the market. It's masking 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 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (41:36)

I mean, he's clearly not detached from them. No, he's clearly not. I do think that this 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 agree with it just because he's a Republican. And I didn't say this, but 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 because he's spreading anti science information. And so whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, if you're spreading pseudoscience, we're equal opportunity debunkers. So I think it's interesting in the Maha movement he really came from, 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 they don't necessarily align. So there's a lot of conflict within the Maha movement itself. And I know the anti vaxxers get annoyed with the Maha people, like the Maha mom people, because they're like, those don't matter. This matters. Like getting vaccines 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 even filled the like ASIP with his anti vaccine friends. Like, to imagine that he's not still involved in all of that is silly.

Derek Barris (43:23)

The inventor of mRNA, Robert Malone. Yeah, that's a deep. 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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (44:24)

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 like 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 week, 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 try to stay away from that at this point stage, I'm not sure how that's going to play out because like, I really want, I don't, 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, 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, we need to switch some policies now at this time, I think from a policy perspective what needs to happen is I kind of talk about four pillars. There's nutrition, there's physical activity, there's stress, and then there's sleep. Those are the pillars of health. 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 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, outcomes decrease as income inequality increases. And so when you're thinking about policy that you have to, you have to have policies where everyone can at least meet their basic needs. I think there's this idea that it's 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, get adequate food, get adequate healthcare access. So policies that expand healthcare 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 work since SNAP is incentives, incentive programs, right? So say you come in, we have a program in Colorado called Double Up Bucks, and you basically, 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 allowing more people who are using SNAP to have access to cooking classes or better, just educational content so that they can understand, how do you cook, how can you cook healthfully on a budget for a week and helping those types of things, those programs we know are effective in 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, and you know, 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 that the Biden administration enacted, never spoke about and never told anyone about investing in those types of things. So we start to bring some of that without hurting our commodity crop farmers. 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 healthcare 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. If you have a lot of money and you want that kind of high touch fun service, do it. But if we're thinking about a public health measure, we already have primary care. People don't have access to it and they're constrained by 10 to 15 minute appointments. 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 dietitians 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 gotta just shut it all down and cut all the funding.

Derek Barris (50:21)

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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (50:45)

It's the number one cause of personal micro.

Derek Barris (50:47)

Yep, number one cause. It's up to. I've seen ranging from 300 to 500,000 people and it is wild.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (50:53)

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, 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 you know, it's not because they have natural food dye, you know, which is literally what the narrative is. This is literally what they're saying is like we should be more like these countries on their additives. But by the way, like definitely not on social programs, definitely not on expanding healthcare access. That could not be the reason that they're healthier.

Derek Barris (51:37)

Oh, Kennedy. I found a couple clip of Kennedy saying people don't want universal healthcare in America. And this was recent, which is just absurd given all of the focus they do on you. Yeah, it's very cherry picked.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (51:55)

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Well, maybe not the ones where you're.

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Derek Barris (53:17)

So the question was, Jessica, do you have any ambitions to run for public office?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (53:21)

People ask me this all the time and I have not come up with a good answer. I, 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 in 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 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. 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, like, I know people in my life.

Derek Barris (54:14)

That strongly believe these Maha perspectives.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (54:18)

How do you move forward? Or like, have you had success with anyone where we found one solution? I don't know.

Derek Barris (54:26)

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?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (54:36)

Yeah, so the people who are like the highest up in Maha have pretty much refused to talk to 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. 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, RFK Jr. I mean, we heard a congressional testimony that 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 is a really important distinction. I think the people within the movement, like Will, even like some of these bigger influencers who are like, I think that they are open. Will said, like in our conversation several times, like, 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.

Derek Barris (55:59)

I'll just add too. 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 Reaganomics, 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. So until that changes, I don't see how we move ahead with that.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (56:45)

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. Just, like, cared about health. And I think it's really important to understand that, like, the Maha movement exists for the Trump administration. Like, 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'd had so much pushback because, you know, they didn't have this kind of, like, movement that was eroding trust in our public health agencies. And so the idea that, like, they're, you know, they'll talk about the dietary guidelines and how the science is corrupt, not that, like, 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.

Derek Barris (57:49)

Trust me, if you go back and 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? Something? Oh, okay. Yeah. I thought someone raised their hand. I kind of did.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (58:15)

You just answered a lot of it. So. 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, weaponized. 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. The ideal state.

Derek Barris (58:51)

What's the ideal way to market these products? I mean, that's always gonna 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. 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 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 in that way. Do you have thoughts?

Dr. Jessica Nurik (60:55)

Well, I'll just kind of echo what you're saying, because I've thought through this a lot 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 Functionality 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. But 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. Be very clear that your audience is high income, high net worth people and that's cool. And then have 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.

Derek Barris (62:11)

Great, 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (62:55)

Nope.

Derek Barris (62:56)

Okay.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (62:57)

This is more will to vote, but the exhaustion.

Derek Barris (63:01)

How do you deal with the exhaustion of debunking bullshit? We'll start with Jessica. Jessica, how do you deal with the exhaustion of debunking bullshit? Great question.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (63:13)

Oh my God, I'm so exhausted right now.

Derek Barris (63:15)

And just yesterday, Jessica, I actually, I will say this. I don't know, I do sleep 18 hours. 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (63:29)

I do. I also have a two and a.

Derek Barris (63:31)

Six year old thing.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (63:35)

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 my mental. 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, like, 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. You know, I just have to have. I have to have better. I actually have an assistant that is I just hired starting Monday, and I think that's gonna be helpful. Do you have any better advice than I do?

Derek Barris (64:53)

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 in his throat. Like, I very much resonate with. 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 multimillionaire 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (66:10)

I do think it's so interesting that we get attacked so much of 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 shilling 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, like, it's like multi, multi millionaires who have built these giant wellness corporations telling me that I'm bought and paid for.

Derek Barris (66:42)

Yeah, it's wild.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (66:43)

It's wild. And people believe it. I'm like, what are you talking about?

Derek Barris (66:47)

We are lucky to make a livable income. Most of the three of us have other jobs too, on the side. But most of our efforts are on conspirituality. 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.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (67:19)

There's a lot of money to be.

Derek Barris (67:20)

Made in the supplement industry and growing and growing. We'll end on that note.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (67:27)

Stay skeptical.

Derek Barris (67:28)

Thank you, Jessica. Thank you very much. Yeah, of course. Thank you, everyone.

Dr. Jessica Nurik (67:32)

Thank you, guys.

Derek Barris (67:54)

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