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- [00:02]
A
Lemonade.
- [00:07]
B
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton. I'm dropping into your feed to share a new podcast that I think you'll like. It's called that Can't Be True, and it's all about separating fact from fiction and public health. Each week I talk with experts and dive into the big questions shaping our health today, from vaccines and mental health to the everyday misinformation that spreads online. We'll unpack what's real, what's not, and how to tell the difference. Here's part of my conversation with guest Dr. Jessica Nurik, a registered dietitian with a PhD in nutrition science who has emerged as one of the most prominent critics of the Make America Healthy Again movement. You're about to hear a clip from the show produced by Limonada Media and the Clinton Foundation. To listen to the full episode, just search for that Can't Be True wherever you get your podcasts or click the link in the show notes and please make sure to follow so you don't miss an episode. I want to talk a little bit about how you first became familiar with the Maha movement and kind of where you found yourself, as I think many of us who are parents do, like in deep agreement with kind of some of the stated goals and also as kind of public health people, deeply kind of wary and even in opposition to some of their other goals. And so I think it was around the time that you were pregnant with your second kid that you first noticed that your social media feed was becoming more and more populated with a lot of fear mongering, kind of vitriolic content around health. What did you first think when you began to notice kind of these trends and when did you decide you wanted to not be a passive recipient to them?
- [01:54]
A
In 2022 is when I was pregnant with my daughter and I had been pregnant with my son in 2019, had my son in 2019. And so there was a little gap there. And I noticed, I just noticed and this was just for me personally, a huge change in terms of the amount of misinformation that I was being fed in my algorithms towards like pregnancy because I was pregnant at the time, particularly around like pregnancy, nutrition and things like that. And so I don't know what it was specifically. I don't know if it was because of COVID and everyone more people were on or if it was because of the release of TikTok, because this was largely on TikTok that I was seeing this. And so that's where I actually started on social media. But that's what brought me to social media was just to kind of like, combat some of the false narratives. I think I felt like a responsibility to do it too. I had postpartum anxiety with my daughter, and so I just felt this, like, you know, it really opened my mind to how much anxiety women in this life stage are going through. And then, you know, they're online and it's just making it even worse, right? All of the misinformation and fear mongering and conspiratorial information that really plays well to social media algorithms. And so it can be really hard to, like, cut through the noise. And if you get into the wrong algorithm and you keep seeing it, it can really make anxiety a lot worse. And so I decided to go on and just start combating some of the misinformation I was seeing and just kind of set the record straight and explain why it was false information. And so I grew kind of like a nice little community of, like, pregnant women and postpartum women at that time. And then I actually remember exactly when I first heard about, like, Maha. I was doing a Q and A in my Instagram stories. Someone was like, what do you think of the Maja movement? Or what do you think of Maha? I think they had maybe just announced it. And I just remember thinking, like, what is Maha? And so anyway, that's when I started seeing, obviously, the narratives come out of this movement. And I think because it was just my exact area that I have been studying for so long, it was nutrition science. And then it was also kind of the policies that impact our food environment and how we can reduce risk of chronic disease. It was very easy for me to see how manipulative the narrative was, whereas maybe other areas of politics, it wouldn't be as easy for me to spot.
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You know, clearly, like, you thankfully spend a lot of time, you know, individually and also kind of in your kind of social media forum, like, engaged with people who have, like, very specific concerns, some of which might be for you, like, feel quite outlandish, like, oh, my gosh, someone thinks this about nutrition. Like, someone thinks, like, red dye 40 is the source of, like, any cold that their child has ever gotten. What are kind of the questions, the sincere questions people have come to you with about your area of expertise that have most surprised you or that feel most kind of untethered from kind of any evidence that you or kind of any nutritional scientist might be familiar with?
- [04:53]
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I would say seed oils is a big one.
- [04:55]
B
All right, talk to us about seed oils.
- [04:58]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's not my favorite topic to talk about, but I can't answer this question without bringing it up just because it flies in the face of nutrition science research. It really does. And so it's an example of what happens a lot on social media where people will take a mechanism of action. They'll say linoleic acid leads to arachidonic acid and that causes inflammation. And so seed oils are causing inflammation in people and causing chronic disease. And you know, there's so many, so many examples of how a mechanism can be true. But when it goes, when we actually look at a human model, it doesn't actually pan out because humans are complex and just doesn't always work like it does in a lab when you're actually looking at a human model. And so, and this is a really good example, there's just no data, there's no evidence to suggest that seed oils are inflaming us or harming our health. And in fact, quite the opposite when we look at epidemiological data and you know, when we look at, at trials of people who are consuming seed oils and again, seed oils are consumed all around the world by people. So it's very interesting that like in the US we're really focusing on this. Where a little bit of the truth lies is, you know, seed oils are very cheap, they're highly processed and so they don't have a lot of flavor. So when you like compare them to like an olive oil, right? Olive oil has a pretty strong flavor. So because of that they're used in a lot of these foods that food manufacturers are creating a lot of these ultra processed foods and particularly low nutrient ultra processed foods. And so we tend to over consume those foods in this country. And so we're eating a lot of them. And that can be harmful. When you over consume anything, it can be problematic, right, because it's a fat source and that's problematic. But if you're just like making a stir fry with some sunflower oil, I mean, my mother in law is from Romania and she constantly uses quote unquote seed oils, what we call vegetable oils, to make her food and she's cooking vegetables and things like that with them. And so again, there's just not evidence that they're harmful. But because social media has really leaned into the seed oils idea and that like, because it kind of plays into this idea that we're poisoning the people in the country, right?
- [07:10]
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It's like the big olive oil conspiracy. It's like the olive oil like producers and manufacturers got together and Were like, we're gonna demonize seed oil so more people buy our products.
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A
Well, and another layer here, by the way, is seed oils are affordable. Right. They're much more affordable than an. Than olive oil. And this is where it can be harmful. Right. So if you're demonizing this oil that is affordable for people and, you know, they're using it to cook vegetables in or, you know, whatever, and you're saying that they have to be consuming olive oil, but they don't have the. They don't have the budget for olive oil. You're just. You're causing unnecessary anxiety and shame in a person that, like, there's no reason for it.
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B
Or maybe there is a reason for it.
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Yeah. No logical reason.
- [07:55]
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No logical reason. No defensible logical or moral reason. But I do want to talk about baby formula, because certainly, I mean, I'm so thankful that I was able to breastfeed all three of my children. That that was something that my body permitted me to do, that it was something that I had the time and the resources to be able to prioritize doing that all three of my children latched easily, and that that could be part of my experience with each of my three kids when they were little. Sometimes one of those things isn't true for a new mom, and sometimes all of those things aren't true. And it has been noticeable to me, kind of the increasing sense of not only, like, breast is best, but if you're not breastfeeding your children, somehow you're failing. And alongside, kind of the increasing, like, not demonization is too strong of a word, but like, denigration formula, broadly. And then kind of all of the swirling questions around, like, what is in formula? What is good formula? What is bad formula? So what do you have to say to kind of any of that? And what should any of us, who, of course, care that any and every small human gets the nutrition that we would want for our own children, should know, as we try to be, like, productive participants in conversations around formula.
- [09:26]
A
Yeah, so formula has certainly been something that the Maha movement has talked a lot about. I don't exactly know why. It probably speaks to more of, like, this kind of glorification that we see about, like, moms who are at home with their kids and kind of this idea of, like, going back in time and living like our ancestors lived. Lived more close to nature and that sort of thing. Infant formula is incredible scientific advancement. I mean, I'm just, like, blown away by the science. And like you, Chelsea, I breastfed both of my Children. And I was fortunate enough to be at home with them, you know, working from home and able to do that. And so it's not as if I'm like partisan towards formula because I used it myself. It's just from a scientific perspective, it's an incredible advancement. I mean, infants who would have otherwise died without a reliable source of nutrition now get to live and thrive. Right. Because we've been able, through many scientific advancements, be able to essentially as closely as possible mimic breast milk, which is so cool.
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B
My husband was a formula fed baby.
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A
I was a formula fed baby.
- [10:37]
B
I'm so thankful both you and here in the world, right? We're a better place for both of you.
- [10:43]
A
Yeah, exactly. Well, and what's really cool about it is that it's opened up the opportunity to not only allow babies to live, but also to thrive. Right. And to be healthy and live full lives. So what's interesting about formula is there's always like, advancements that are coming out. Right. And what I think is interesting about Maha and the Operation Storkspeed, I think it's a long time coming for us to do a thorough review of all of the nutrients, because from a science perspective, there are some nutrients that we could be looking at. We can be looking at potentially lowering iron levels and also maybe looking at these human milk oligosaccharides. And there's some cool advancements that like a lot of formula companies have kind of done on their own. But from like a federal perspective, we haven't actually looked at that in a long time. And so I think that's great. What I think is not so great is what's coming out of all of this is this idea that formula is toxic, particularly like in the United States versus the eu. And I've done a lot of videos on this where I like, compare the formulas and they're like pretty much exactly the same, like, with very little variability. And the seed oils always come into this as well. And for some reason, there's a narrative out there that, like, only we are using seed oils in the United States, and that's not true. I mean, every infant formula, to my knowledge, every infant formula in the entire world uses seed oils. And the reason for that is because of the polyunsaturated fatty acid content, which more closely mimics the fatty acid composition of breast milk. Because if you just use lactose, if you just use cow's milk, which is what most formulas use, cow's milk is not as high in polyunsaturated fatty acids as human milk. So what you have to do is you have to take the milk, and then you have to add in those polyunsaturated fatty acids. And you do that with these vegetable oils. And so that's why they're included. And so there's a scientific basis for it and a reason. It's not this conspiratorial idea that they're trying to hurt the children. It's quite the opposite. They're trying to really help the children. And so I think that's the fear from a science perspective, in terms of this anti science movement or this anti expert movement, that, you know, everybody has these ideas, and they all should be, like, on the same playing field. When there's people who have been studying this field forever and ever, and particularly with infant formula, and we should be listening to them about what an infant needs.