← That Can't Be True with Chelsea Clinton
That Can't Be True with Chelsea Clinton
Setting the Record Straight on Seed Oils, Raw Milk & Formula with Dr. Jessica Knurick
00:40:11
Loading summary
Transcript73 lines
- [00:02]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Lemonade.
- [00:08]
Chelsea Clinton
Is it just me or are things actually really weird right now? In the world of public health, every day brings another confusing headline or far fetched claim. It's almost impossible to find baby formula without seed oils.
- [00:22]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And seed oils, they're believed to be pro inflammatory.
- [00:25]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
One thing that helped me lose so much weight is I think of raw milk as my pre workout. Do I keep vaccinating? Like, am I an anti vaxxer?
- [00:35]
Chelsea Clinton
Not to mention the cuts to cancer research, to women's health research, to brain research, to the dismantling of the suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQ kids. People's lives are at risk. Welcome to that Can't Be True, a show that sorts fact from fiction, especially on issues impacting our health. And today we're talking to Dr. Jessica Nurek. She's a registered dietitian with a Ph.D. in nutrition science. And lately she's emerged as one of the most prominent experts and critics of Maha Make America Healthy Again. On social media, she's constantly and thankfully myth busting wellness fads and exposing the real dangers that come when people distrust science and public health institutions. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us today.
- [01:25]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you.
- [01:28]
Chelsea Clinton
Great. Well, we open every episode with something called that Can't Be True. I'm going to play a recent news clip and Jessica, you're going to 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.
- [01:45]
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.
- [02:03]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Thank you.
- [02:04]
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.
- [02:16]
Chelsea Clinton
That can't be true, right? Is the CDC the reason we're the sickest country in the world?
- [02:21]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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 concern. 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 in 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 in your household buying your groceries. And so 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, obviously the Trump administration is currently kind of defunding and reorganizing.
- [03:36]
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 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?
- [04:28]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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, 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 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, 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 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. Maybe other areas of politics, it wouldn't be as easy for me to spot.
- [06:37]
Chelsea Clinton
You know, clearly, like, you thankfully spend a lot of time 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?
- [07:26]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
I would say seed oils is a big one.
- [07:29]
Chelsea Clinton
All right, talk to us about seed oils.
- [07:32]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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. 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 food. 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 things that 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?
- [09:44]
Chelsea Clinton
It's like the big olive oil conspiracy. It's like the olive oil like producers of manufacturers got together, were like, we're going to demonize seed oil so more people buy our products.
- [09:56]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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.
- [10:25]
Chelsea Clinton
Or maybe there is a reason for it.
- [10:27]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Yeah. No logical reason.
- [10:29]
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 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.
- [12:00]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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.
- [13:06]
Chelsea Clinton
My husband was a formula fed baby.
- [13:09]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
I was a formula fed baby.
- [13:11]
Chelsea Clinton
I'm so thankful both you and here in the world, right? We're a better place for both of you.
- [13:17]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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. 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.
- [15:49]
Chelsea Clinton
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Who do you turn to when you need help? A parent, a partner, a friend, maybe the barista or the bartender down the street. You know, we've all been there, we've all needed help. But none of the above are options for a great licensed therapist. And if you're ready to give therapy a try or looking for someone new, or if you have a friend who's looking to give therapy a try, check out BetterHelp. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp can help you find the right match. It's fully online and you can pause your subscription whenever that's right for you. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of Expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month@betterhelp.com CantBeTrue that's betterhelp.com can't betrue. 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?
- [17:09]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Well, I mean, the problem is that 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, you know, when I'm talking, I can often sound like RFK Jr. When we're talking about the problem specifically because we're talk 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. And so for example, his causes and the Maha movement's causes really lean into this idea of toxins and like poisoning our kids. And you know, 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 either be benign, maybe some will be randomly helpful, but some will be very harmful. And we see that with. I can give a couple examples, please. 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 going 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.
- [20:26]
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 for? Because I think it can feel really satiating, like, oh my gosh, like Kellogg is going to remove food dyes from their cereal. Just to continue on your 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.
- [20:54]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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.
- [21:21]
Chelsea Clinton
Right. We do it when it relates to smoking.
- [21:23]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
We do, yeah. And we should with pharmaceuticals. But that's another, 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, yeah.
- [22:03]
Chelsea Clinton
They'Re just trying to maximize profit.
- [22:05]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Yeah. They're not trying to make people sick.
- [22:06]
Chelsea Clinton
It's just, so how do we align their incentives? Right. So maximize profit and return on health dollar or whatever the right metric is.
- [22:14]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Exactly. So we have to think about 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 reliance on 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 like be able to diversify their crops and helping smaller farmers through grants. You know, 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 that. 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.
- [24:10]
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?
- [24:50]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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.
- [25:24]
Chelsea Clinton
Screens.
- [25:25]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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.
- [26:48]
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.
- [27:10]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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.
- [27:34]
Chelsea Clinton
His own experts who actually work for the department that he leads.
- [27:37]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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, not true. 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 that, 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.
- [30:02]
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?
- [30:33]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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 gonna scare you. They're gonna explain nuance, right? And they're gonna 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 you know, something like that, it's usually not going to be accurate information.
- [31:03]
Chelsea Clinton
That just scared me.
- [31:04]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Yeah, yeah, right. 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 like showed you an ingredient that was also in a food item. Which you know, that's also just like a misunderstanding of science and chemistry because like think of like sodium bicarbonate, right? Like we can use that for in cookies, but you can also use it to like clean, right.
- [31:26]
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.
- [31:32]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
There you go, right.
- [31:34]
Chelsea Clinton
I was like, wow, that's.
- [31:35]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
I don't even know that that's true. But it must be. He must learn either science class.
- [31:39]
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.
- [31:55]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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, you know, 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, you know, 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 liter on 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.
- [34:08]
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.
- [34:18]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
And there's your anecdotal evidence.
- [34:21]
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.
- [34:37]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Okay, okay.
- [34:39]
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 might mitochondrial challenges on the faces of children that he sees walking down the street. Do you think that's fact or fiction?
- [34:59]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
That's fiction, yeah. You cannot see mitochondrial challenges. And it's very interesting, the wellness space. 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. You know, 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. I actually don't even know what he's doing there. No fiction.
- [35:28]
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?
- [35:40]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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.
- [36:48]
Chelsea Clinton
Love pasteurization.
- [36:50]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Yeah. I mean, it's a great public health advancement that we have I should make.
- [36:54]
Chelsea Clinton
Treat 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 as a better way to prepare food.
- [37:21]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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, we see clinical trials that when you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated 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 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, what he's talking about a lot is french fries at a fast food restaurant, restaurants. 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.
- [38:25]
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.
- [38:35]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
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 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 in the intake no matter where it's coming from.
- [39:43]
Chelsea Clinton
Well, thank you for your time today. You can find Jessica at doctorjessica nurek 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.
- [39:57]
Dr. Jessica Nurek
Thank you so much for having me.
- [40:03]
Chelsea Clinton
That Can't Be True is a production of Lemonade and Be and the Clinton Foundation. The show is produced by Katherine Barnes Mix in Sound design by Ivan Koraev. Kristin Lepore is Senior Director of New Content and Jackie Danzinger 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 Hart Horowitz, Francesca Ernst Kahn, Caroline Lewis, Sage Spalter, 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 Mail membership. Thanks so much for listening and see you next week.