← That Can't Be True with Chelsea Clinton
That Can't Be True with Chelsea Clinton
Listener Favorite: Dr. Jessica Knurick on MAHA, Seed Oils, and Raw Milk
00:42:38
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- [00:01]
Michelle Obama
I am Michelle. And I am Craig. Craig here is my big brother. We are so excited for you to listen to our brand new podcast. It's called IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. Together, Craig and I are gonna take your questions about the challenges you're grappling with in life. So get in touch, send us your questions and join us on IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Hi.
- [00:35]
Chelsea Clinton
That can't be true. Listeners, it's Chelsea. This week we've decided to revisit one of our most popular episodes with Dr. Jessica Nurek. She truly is one of the best when it comes to debunking health misinformation online and really just telling us where science says something is true, where science says we don't know yet, and where science overwhelmingly says that that's just not true. This conversation first aired back in October of last year, and yet somehow we're still talking about seed oils and raw milk and, well, so much more. Dr. Nurick is a registered dietitian, nutrition scientist, and public health communicator. This chat was incredibly enlightening, certainly for me, and I hope that you find it as helpful and clarifying as I did and continue to do whenever I revisit it. And if you're newer to our feed, it's a great introduction to the show. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us today.
- [01:36]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you.
- [01:39]
Chelsea Clinton
Great. Well, we open every episode with something called that Can't Be True. I'm gonna play a recent news clip, and Jessica, you're gonna tell us what the real deal is. Here's Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Testifying in front of the Senate Finance Committee last month.
- [01:55]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Chronic diseases reach crisis proportions in our country. And finally, we have an administration that is taking action. We are the sickest country in the world. That's why we have to fire people at cdc. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy.
- [02:13]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Thank you.
- [02:14]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn't happen again. We've already righted the ship at nih, at fda, at cms, and we are gonna end the chronic disease epidemic.
- [02:26]
Chelsea Clinton
That can't be true, right? Is the CDC the reason we're the sickest country in the world?
- [02:32]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
I think that he is using a very real issue that exists in the United States, which are the chronic disease rates that we observe and we see and, you know, a lot of us, in a very bipartisan way, are very concerned about that. It's why I got into this field a decade and a half ago was specifically to figure out and study the reducing rates of chronic disease. But what he's doing there is kind of redirecting the cause of the issue onto our public health institutions. And I think a lot of it comes from him relying on people to not really understand the role of public health institutions and actually what's contributing to much of the chronic disease rates that we see in this country. And so, you know, he's using the rates of chronic disease, as you could hear him there, as an excuse to fire and essentially gut the cdc, which is an agency that he's spent two decades kind of condemning and calling corrupt, as if they're responsible for the chronic disease epidemic in the United States. They're an advisory group. They're not regulating, they're not legislating, they're not. They're not in your household, you know, buying your groceries. And so, you know, I think instead of kind of looking at what the actual issues are and the causes of chronic disease, we're just blaming our health institutions, which obviously the Trump administration is currently kind of defunding and reorganizing.
- [03:47]
Chelsea Clinton
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 vitriol 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?
- [04:39]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
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 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 social media, 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. 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, and someone was like, what do you think of the Maja movement? Or what do you think of Maja? 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.
- [06:47]
Chelsea Clinton
You know, clearly, like, you thankfully spent a lot of time individually and also kind of in your kind of social media forum, like, engaged with people who have very specific concerns, some of which might be, for you, feel quite outlandish, like, oh, my gosh, someone thinks this about nutrition. Someone thinks Red Dye 40 is the source of 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 any nutritional scientists might be familiar with.
- [07:37]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
I would say seed oils is a big one.
- [07:40]
Chelsea Clinton
All right, talk to us about seed oils.
- [07:42]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
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, like linoleic acid leads to arachidonic acid and that causes inflammation. And so seed oils are causing inflammation in people and causing chronic disease. There's 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. In fact, quite the opposite when we look at epidemiological data and when we look 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 in the US we're really focusing on this. Where a little bit of the truth lies is seed oils are very cheap, they're highly processed, and so they don't have a lot of flavor. So when you 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 because it kind of plays into this idea that we're poisoning the people in the country. Right.
- [09:54]
Chelsea Clinton
It's like the big olive oil conspiracy. It's like the olive oil producers of manufacturers got together and were like, we're going to demonize seed oil so more people buy our products.
- [10:06]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
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.
- [10:35]
Chelsea Clinton
Or maybe there is a reason for it.
- [10:38]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah. No logical reason.
- [10:39]
Chelsea Clinton
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, like, 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 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?
- [12:11]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
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 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.
- [13:16]
Chelsea Clinton
My husband was a formula fed baby.
- [13:19]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
I was a formula fed baby.
- [13:22]
Chelsea Clinton
I'm so thankful both you and here in the world, right? Like, we're a better place for both of you.
- [13:27]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah, exactly. Well, and what's really cool about it is that, you know, 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 Stork Speed, 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 a lot of formula companies have done on their own. But from 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. 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 conspiracy idea that they're trying to like 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 like anti science movement or this like anti expert movement that's, 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, about what an infant needs.
- [16:09]
Chelsea Clinton
You've said that Maha largely gets the problem, right, but they get the cause and the solutions largely wrong. What do you mean by that?
- [16:18]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Well, I mean, the problem is that we have a, we do have a lifestyle related chronic disease problem in this country. Right. And so that's what they're very focused on. And that's largely right now. Oftentimes they overstate the problem, but largely they get the problem. Right? Right. We have a chronic disease issue, we have a lifestyle related chronic disease issue. We have a food environment that is not built for our health. We have systems in this country that are not built for us to succeed in a healthful way. And so when I'm talking, I can often sound like RFK Jr. When we're talking about the problem specifically because we're talking about a very similar thing. Where I diverge from him and most scientists and public health experts do is in the causes of that problem. So for example, his causes and the Maha movement's causes really lean into this idea of toxins and poisoning our kids and public health agencies being corrupt and scientists and medical doctors all being bought off and not being able to be trusted. And you know, they kind of completely ignore all of the very evidence based determinants of health, what is actually causing a lot of these lifestyle related chronic diseases. And they do that because it plays into this kind of narrative about kind of the conspiracy and the toxins and all of that. And so what I say is when you get the causes wrong, you largely are going to get the solutions wrong. Right? Because you have to figure out like what's causing the problem to come up with a good solution. And if you're getting the causes wrong, your solutions will, you know, either be benign, maybe some will be randomly helpful, but some will be very harmful. And we see that with, I mean, I can give a couple examples like fluoride, fluoride in the water, right. If we're saying that without evidence that fluoride is a toxin and causing chronic disease in our kids, when by the way, the number one chronic disease in children is dental caries, and we remove fluoride from the water supply, that's going to increase the number one chronic disease in our children. Right. With no evidence that it's going to help in any kind of way. And more than that, it's to exacerbate health disparities because wealthier children are going to go to the dentist, they're going to get fluoride treatments, they're going to be able to brush with fluoride toothpaste. But public health measures are often to help everyone in the United States and often targeting the people who need it most, which tend to be low income populations in this country. And so it will exacerbate health disparities even more. And so that's an example of something that would actually harm us even more so than help us. Another one is focusing our energy on food dyes to improve the food supply. Right? Like our food supply is not problematic because of food dyes. It's problematic because the entire system has been built for corporate profits at the expense of our health. And it's resulted in a food supply that's 70% ultra processed foods, many of those low nutrient ultra processed foods. Right. And so what we have available to people and accessible are these convenience foods that aren't necessarily health promoting foods. And we have an accessibility issue with a lot of these health promoting foods. And so if you just think that, okay, I'm going to swap the color of Skittles, right, and make it not as vibrant, that's not going to change health in any meaningful way and we're going to be distracted kind of thinking that's going to improve anything. Meanwhile, we're not putting our energy into the policies that could actually help improve the food supply.
- [19:35]
Chelsea Clinton
And so Jessica, like, what advice do you give to anyone but I guess specifically moms about kind of what they should be advocating? Because I think it can feel really like satiating, like, oh my gosh, like Kellogg is going to remove food dyes from their cereal. Just to continue on your last point, how do you say like, yes, like that can be a win. And also we should be advocating for what to really fix our food.
- [20:04]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah. I think we have to look at the entire system. And so, you know, from what we grow to what we put on the shelves to what we market to children and Americans in general. And so there's some evidence based ideas on kind of both of those sides. Right. So on the side of like what's being promoted, you can regulate marketing to children and to low income populations and to just America in general. Right. You can put regulations.
- [20:30]
Chelsea Clinton
Right. We do it when it relates to smoking.
- [20:32]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
We do, yeah. And we should with pharmaceuticals, but that's another story. But yeah, so we, and we can put those regulations on. I mean, what we know from an evidence based perspective is that what makes a food hyper satiating is really the combination of salt, sugar and fat. And so we can see, we can look at like what are these companies putting in their foods and what should we be like potentially allowing or not allowing, we do it in school nutrition. Right. We can also look at what we grow because what we grow is really incentivizing these low. I mean, corporations within our economic system are going to try to maximize profit at the expense of health. Right. Not even at the expense of health. It's just that they're not like they're
- [21:13]
Chelsea Clinton
just trying to maximize profit. Yeah.
- [21:14]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
They're not trying to make people sick.
- [21:15]
Chelsea Clinton
It's just, so how do we align their incentives?
- [21:18]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Right.
- [21:18]
Chelsea Clinton
So maximize profit and return on health dollar or whatever the right metric is.
- [21:23]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Exactly. So we have to think about like what do we grow and how do we incentivize farmers to grow different products? How do we bring back local food systems? Because we have lost local food systems primarily because of policy over the last many, many decades. Right. And so what we're seeing now is we really have a heavy relian big agribusiness. And big agribusiness grows a lot of commodity crops, which is corn, wheat and soy. And so we grow those very well in this country. But we've incentivized the growth of them over a long period of time. And so, you know, what we can do is through grants and offerings for farmers and helping them to kind of be able to diversify their crops and helping smaller farmers through grants. There were some wonderful grants that the Biden administration came out with helping local farmers get foods to schools and food banks in their area. And we saw with the Trump administration, they cut a billion dollars in that funding. And so those are the kind of grants that can help to bring more fresh fruits and vegetables to local areas. You know, we have an issue in this country with food deserts where a lot of people just don't have access. They may want to eat more healthfully, but they don't have necessarily access. They're primarily going to a corner store or a dollar store for their groceries. And I think a lot of Americans who have never experienced this don't even realize that millions of Americans live like this. But you know, to get to a grocery store they have to take a couple of buses and it takes a lot of time, so they're not going to opt to do that. So like incentivizing things like mobile grocery carts to go into those areas or incentivizing grocery chains to open there with the grants and things like that can be helpful on that perspective too. So there's a lot that we can do just from a systems approach to think of how can we start increasing the accessibility and availability of these like, you know, nutrient dense foods and reducing the reliance on these heavily ultra processed foods.
- [23:19]
Chelsea Clinton
And yet last month, the Trump administration released its strategy to make our children healthy again. And I don't think any of that was included. Right. There was a lot of kind of recommended policy reform around food dyes, around baby formula, but it wasn't the comprehensive vision that you just articulated. And it lacked kind of any mechanisms for how the government would actually implement even what was in the quote unquote strategy. Like, do you think they're serious about really trying to make our children healthy again or no?
- [23:59]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah, I was very interested to read that because that's obviously the follow up to the original Maha report that came out that was supposed to identify the causes of chronic disease. So this was supposed to be what we all expect it to be, the policy based kind of response to that. Right. Or follow up to that, like, how are we going to improve upon these things? And it's very, it's incredibly light on actual policy. Right. And actual action. It has a lot of good ideas. You know, talking about increasing physical activity for children and decreasing, you know, reliance on low nutrient, ultra processed foods.
- [24:33]
Chelsea Clinton
Screens.
- [24:34]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah, screen time. All things that like all of us can get behind. You know, Maha constantly says, like, this is not a political movement. Everybody should be behind these things. And yes, when we talk about what we all want, it's pretty bipartisan. It's what we are going to do about getting there that can be a bit partisan. But there was very little in terms of what they're actually going to do. So what I see it as somebody who closely follows policy. I see it as a movement that's keeping people excited without actually taking action to do anything. And what was most striking to me is a lot of the things that Maha wants and claims to want. You know, the Trump administration is legislating in the opposite direction. You know, we see it with even, like, heavy metals. I think they brought up heavy metals in, like, infant formula. I mean, if you want to reduce heavy metals, you got to go to the root cause of what's causing heavy metals in our soil and our water. And a lot of that are these chemical industries. And so if you are deregulating all of these chemical industries and allowing them to opt out of environmental regulations by emailing the administration, like the Trump administration is doing, and, you know, ushering in the greatest era of deregulation of all time at the epa, you're increasing the problem of contaminants and heavy metals in our soil, our air, our water, and ultimately our food supply. So that's just, like, one example. But there's so many examples of what they want versus what's actually being done.
- [25:57]
Chelsea Clinton
And so I wonder, what advice do you have, you know, for any of us and for me, based on what you've seen work to try to help us move out of kind of a place where we're constantly, like, debating or relitigating or thinking it's a he said, she said dynamic around science.
- [26:19]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah. Chelsea, sometimes I have to ask myself, like, is this just a social media thing? Like, if I go out in the real world, are people talking about this, like, as much as it's happening on social media? But I think that where I found success is a lot of people are distrusting right now. Right. And that's kind of also coming from the top. Right. We have an HHS secretary that is literally telling you not to trust experts,
- [26:43]
Chelsea Clinton
his own experts who actually work for the department that he leads.
- [26:46]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
I mean, and obviously, the reason for doing that is to pretend that expertise doesn't matter so that anybody can come in and fill those gaps. And, like, you and I, like anyone, have the same. Our opinions are weighted the exact same, which just is not. You should not trust my opinion on how to fly an airplane as much as you should trust a pilot. Right. Like, my opinion should not matter in that conversation. And so. And that, you know, obviously, is in all areas, expertise is very specific, and people spend their lives kind of dedicated to a very specific topic. But I do think that we're what we're dealing with right now. Is this era where a lot of people have lost trust in expertise and experts. And so for some people, you're not going to kind of win them over with this appeal to authority or appeal to expertise. So what I found to be successful is explaining why something's false. And again, in my area of expertise, because I can't do this outside of it, but within my area I can. And I can show why it's false. I can show the references, I can show them, go look it up themselves, go fact check everything I say, please do it right, like be open to that. And then it slowly but surely starts to build trust with people. I've had people who said me messages who are like, you know, I came to your page as a hater and I, you know, I kept looking up what you were saying and it was true. And so it's, you know, now I like really appreciate you and you've really changed my mind on a lot of things. And I think that's how you start to build trust with a lot of people who are, you know, maybe inquisitive, maybe skeptical, maybe, maybe just by the way, where I was when I was pregnant and had immense postpartum anxiety, maybe just so anxious that you, you just don't know what to believe. And so you, you know, you're looking the answer, but you don't because you've been told like expertise doesn't matter. You're like, well, I don't know who's right here, but, but if somebody kind of goes through and explains why, I think that can be a really effective.
- [29:11]
Chelsea Clinton
I'm curious since you kind of referenced earlier kind of the messages that you receive, which I hope kind of make you feel as good as you deserve from people who say they now spot information that now they know is not real or fact or evidence based that it is misinformation because of the work that you've done. What advice do you have to anyone who might be listening about specific ways that they or any of us could spot misinformation when it comes to nutrition?
- [29:43]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah, there's a few things that I, that I would say to look for. So usually there's a playbook, right? There'll be, the video will be very sensational and there'll be something that's very scary in it. Right. When you hear like a science communicator talking, they're not usually going to scare you. They're going to explain nuance, right. And they're going to kind of take you through the process, you know, if you Hear a video of someone starting it saying are you poisoning your kids? Or something like that. It's usually not going to be accurate information.
- [30:12]
Chelsea Clinton
That just scared me, right?
- [30:15]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
I mean I stitched a person doing that exact video. She was like, are you poisoning your kids? And then she drove to Home Depot and showed you an ingredient that was also in a food item, which that's also just a misunderstanding of science and chemistry because think of sodium bicarbonate, right? We can use that in cookies, but you can also use it to clean, right?
- [30:35]
Chelsea Clinton
My nine year old told me the other day that we have enough iron in our bodies to make a three inch nail.
- [30:41]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
There you go, right?
- [30:43]
Chelsea Clinton
I was like, wow, that's.
- [30:44]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
I don't even know that that's true. But it must be. He must learn it in science class.
- [30:48]
Chelsea Clinton
I don't know, but I think, I think he learned it in science class since he's definitely not scrolling Instagram or has any access to technology. Yeah, probably actually. Yeah, like or National Geographic. National Geographic or science class. But I'm not going to eat a 3 inch nail even though apparently I have enough iron in my body to make one.
- [31:05]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah, that's funny. But yeah, so that, I mean that's the playbook to look, they scare you at the beginning. Then they will kind of like misrepresent science usually. And then a lot of times most of the time they will sell you something on the back end, right? So they will tell you how toxic this thing is and then they will sell you kind of their non toxic alternative or whatever it is. They'll tell you, scare you about some like folic acid and then they'll sell you their natural methylfolate supplement those types of things. We see that all the time. A couple of other things just for like media and science literacy, social media things to look out for is people conflate correlation and causation. So they will show you a graph, two things are correlating and then they will use that to imply causation like one caused the other. And I always say the best way to spread propaganda online is to show a graph basically over time of two things that increased at the same time and pretend that one caused the other. In science, what we do is we use that, that's interesting information, like let's look at that observational data that two things are increasing at the same time. And then you go and you design studies to actually assess causation and most of the time that thing's not causing the other thing, but sometimes it is. And then beware of people using this is in the science realm as well. People using mechanisms of action to imply that that's actually going to impact you on a human level. So, for example, if someone's telling you that I did, like, a parody on somebody doing this, and I used pickles as an example, because pickles have vitamin K. Okay, here's an idea for you. Instead of brushing your teeth with unnatural toothbrushes, what if instead you ate seven pickles? It's true. Seven pickles act as a natural teeth cleaner. And so I said pickles have vitamin K in them. And vitamin K is really important to create osteocalcin, which is needed to create dentin in your teeth, which is a calcified tissue that protects your teeth from cavities. And so I said, you know, because of that, you should just drink pickle juice instead of brushing your teeth with unnatural toothbrushes. And so that's an example of. I know it sounds ridiculous, but this is literally exactly the playbook of what people will do. And obviously, eating pickles is not going to protect your teeth from cavities, but they'll do that a lot on social media, so just be aware of that as well.
- [33:18]
Chelsea Clinton
I've never had a cavity. It's one of the only things I shamelessly brag about. I'm very proud. I've never had a cavity, and I do like pickles, so. Hey, Jessica, There you go.
- [33:27]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
And there's your anecdotal evidence.
- [33:30]
Chelsea Clinton
I'm so grateful for your time and want to just hopefully do a couple more things while we have you, which is kind of one, do something that we call the Fact or fiction segment, where I throw out some things that kind of we've seen online and have you react to them.
- [33:46]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Okay, okay.
- [33:48]
Chelsea Clinton
All right. We're going to focus on Secretary Kennedy, since he's already had a kind of supporting role here in our conversation today. So Secretary Kennedy says he can see chronic inflammation and mitochondrial challenges on the faces of children that he sees walking down the street. Do you think that's fact or fiction?
- [34:08]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
That's fiction. Yeah. You cannot see mitochondrial challenges. And it's very interesting, the wellness phase. I mean, it's very clear that he's kind of talking to a lot of these wellness influencers who also talk about mitochondrial challenges. But it's interesting that they focus on that part of the cell. There's like, so many parts of the cell that you could focus on, but it's the mitochondria for them. But, yeah, you cannot look at a child and know if they have mitochondrial dysfunction. I think what he's doing there is using that. I actually don't even know what he's doing there. No fiction.
- [34:38]
Chelsea Clinton
He's also a very vocal proponent of raw milk and believes that raw milk provides health benefits that processed alternatives do not. Fact or fiction?
- [34:49]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
I mean, when you say processed alternatives, what we're talking about is the alternative is pasteurization, which is simply heating milk. So the reason pasteurization exists, I mean, think about dairy, dairy farmers and producers. Right. This is an extra step they have to do. Why would they want to do this? They wouldn't. Right. But it exists because people were getting very sick from raw milk and we were changing the way that we distributed milk as well. And so there was even more opportunity for people to get sick. But I mean, raw milk can harbor a lot of pathogens that can make people quite sick. And so what Louis Pasteur was able to identify was, hey, if we just heat the milk, one way to pasteurize is you just heat the milk for 15 seconds at 165 degrees Fahrenheit and then you rapidly cool it. If you do that, it decreases the risk of foodborne illness significantly and drops the rates of disease that we see from people consuming raw milk. Right. And so that's what we're talking about when we say processed milk. It's heating the milk a bit and then cooling it down. And that just gets rid of pathogens. So that's what I would say on that.
- [35:57]
Chelsea Clinton
Love pasteurization.
- [35:59]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah. I mean, it's a great public health advancement that we have loved.
- [36:03]
Chelsea Clinton
I should make like a T shirt. I love pasteurization or. Thank you, Louis Pasteur. So something else that Secretary Kennedy is a big proponent of is beef tallow as a preferred alternative for cooking. Saying that it's a more traditional way to cook, that there are a lot of health benefits, although he can't always describe what those are. So fact or fiction on beef tallow is a better way to prepare food.
- [36:30]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Yeah. So beef tallow is just like fat from beef. Right. It's like. And it's, it's a saturated fat. And, and what the evidence is very clear on is that over consuming saturated fat is a problem for cardiovascular disease. Right. And atherosclerosis. And so we see, you know, we see clinical trials that when you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated F fats, it reduces risk of cardiovascular disease. So if you're going to be replacing polyunsaturated fats and unsaturated fats. With beef tallow, which is a saturated fat, what we would expect to see, because there's absolutely no data on this of like increasing, you know, beef tallow and having any health benefits, what we would expect to see is the exact opposite of having health benefits at a population level. And we would particularly, you know, what he's talking about a lot is french fries at a fast food restaurant. And over consuming these foods is going to be problematic. So this is an example. When you get the causes wrong, you get the solutions wrong. Right. And your solutions can be harmful.
- [37:34]
Chelsea Clinton
Okay, last one. Fact or fiction? Coca Cola with cane sugar is healthier for you than Coca Cola made with high fructose corn syrup.
- [37:44]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Fiction. They're both Coca Cola. They're both high sugar, low nutrient drinks that we should be consuming less of. Cane sugar is 50% glucose, 50% fructose. High fructose corn syrup is anywhere between 42% fructose and 55% fructose. They're metabolically the same. Given all the information that we have, it's the over consumption of sugar. And I think people don't really realize this. The reason that we use high fructose corn syrup in the United States is because we subsidize corn and because of some of our trade policies and quotas that we've done in the past on sugar. And so we're protecting our farmers in the United States, essentially, and our corn producers. Right. And so, and so manufacturers and corporations, they're looking for cheaper ingredients. And because we've made corn quite a cheap ingredient, that's what we use as sugar here. If you look over in Europe, they've really protected their sugar beet industry because they grow sugar beet really well. And so that's what they predominantly use versus what we use here for sugar. But they're both sugar sources and sugar is sugar. And we don't want to over consume sugar. We want to limit our added sugar intake. Take no matter where it's coming from.
- [38:52]
Chelsea Clinton
Well, thank you for your time today. You can find Jessica at Dr. Jessica Nurik on TikTok and Instagram. She's also got a substack newsletter. I hope you'll subscribe. I do. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us today and thank you to everyone who's listening.
- [39:06]
Dr. Jessica Nurik
Thank you so much for having me.
- [39:13]
Chelsea Clinton
That Can't Be True is a production of Limonada Media and the Clinton Fund. The show is produced by Katherine Barnes Mix in sound design by Ivan Koraev. Kristen Lepore is Senior Director of New Content and Jackie Danziger is VP of Narrative and Production. Maggie Kralshore is our Managing Director of Partnerships. Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer, Stephanie Whittles, Wax, and me, Chelsea Clinton. Special thanks to Erica Goodmanson, Sarah Horowitz, Francesca Ernst Kahn, Caroline Lewis, Sage Svalter, Barry Lurie Westerberg, Emily Young, and the entire team at the Clinton Foundation. You can help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. And if you can think of someone who might benefit from today's episode, please go ahead and share it with them. There's more of that can't be true with Lemonada. Premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. You can also listen ad free on Amazon Music with your Prime Members membership. Thanks so much for listening and see you next week.