Biomedical scientist Dr. Andrea Love returns to WIRED to answer a new slate of the internet's burning questions about pseudosciences, health fads, and false wellness claims. What common household chemicals are definitely worth avoiding? Is there really arsenic and lead in tampons? Are probiotics helpful or not? What's the concern with consuming raw milk? Are GMOs and synthetic foods harmful? Why do the dangers of vaccines get blown out of proportion? Dr. Love answers these questions and many more on Pseudoscience Support Part Two!
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Alex Mechanik
Expert: Andrea Love
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Anthony Wooten
Talent Booker: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Chris Eustache
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Jason Malizia
Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Alex Mechanik
Expert: Andrea Love
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Anthony Wooten
Talent Booker: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Chris Eustache
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Jason Malizia
Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00Hyperbaric Oxygen, Dietary Supplements, Urine Therapy, Ozone Therapy, Metal Chelation.
00:07None of these have evidence to support their use for any ailment.
00:10I'm Dr. Andrea Love, Biomedical Scientist.
00:12I fact check false health claims.
00:14Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:16This is more pseudoscience support.
00:23Okay, first question.
00:24A sentient Nazgul wants to know, what's wrong with raw milk?
00:28God forbid it tastes better than store-bought.
00:30What's wrong with it?
00:31Well, a lot of disease-causing microorganisms.
00:34Pathogens like E. coli, Campylobacter, Brucella, and Salmonella.
00:39These are all bacteria that can be found in milk or living in cows.
00:44Before the pasteurized milk ordinance went into effect in the early 1900s,
00:48milk-borne illnesses accounted for about 38% of all food-borne illnesses.
00:54Now that we pasteurize milk and we don't consume raw milk,
00:58that level has dropped to 1% of all food-borne illnesses.
01:0270% of milk-borne food outbreaks occurred in states that had permission to sell raw milk.
01:10So, there's a reason that we pasteurize milk.
01:13Now, proponents of raw milk claim that it tastes better,
01:17it preserves the nutrients better,
01:19or it improves your immune system,
01:20and there's just no science behind any of that.
01:23You might think raw milk tastes better because you're drinking milk with a higher fat content
01:28compared to milk that you're buying at the store,
01:30but pasteurization, which is heating milk to a temperature of 161 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds,
01:39has no impact on the nutrient quality of the milk.
01:42It does, however, have a huge impact on killing all of those disease-causing microorganisms
01:48that might be in your dairy.
01:49AtBob'sBlog wants to know,
01:51Do artificial sweeteners actually give you cancer?
01:54Is that like Gwyneth Paltrow-level health ****?
01:56Artificial sweeteners do not cause cancer.
01:59Aspartame is actually made up of two amino acids that are joined together,
02:03aspartic acid and phenylalanine,
02:05so when you ingest aspartame,
02:07they split apart and you use those amino acids to make proteins like you would with anything else you ingested.
02:13Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than regular sugar,
02:17so the amount that's needed to sweeten a beverage is miniscule.
02:22Based on extensive studies of aspartame,
02:25we know that in order to have even a minimal risk of harm,
02:31you'd have to drink up to 50 cans of diet soda in a single day.
02:38Now, I love my diet soda,
02:40but I don't think it's physically possible to even consume that much.
02:44You'd be far more likely to experience water toxicity from drinking that amount of fluid
02:50than you would by having toxicity from the aspartame.
02:53AtStillSickOfIt says,
02:54Remember that time Joe Rogan interviewed RFK Jr. and said he believes vaccines cause autism?
03:00I do, yeah.
03:01RFK Jr. has spread the myth that vaccines are linked to autism for several decades,
03:07and it's a central feature of his organization, Children's Health Defense.
03:11That organization made over $23 million in 2022 alone,
03:16and in fact, recent investigative journalism has revealed that RFK Jr. himself
03:22was being paid over $20,000 a week as the chairman for Children's Health Defense in 2023 alone.
03:30The purported link to autism and vaccines has been debunked and addressed over 20 plus years,
03:38and there is no relationship.
03:40The biggest predictor for autism is having an immediate family member also with autism,
03:47which suggests that there's a strong genetic link.
03:50The prevalence of autism has increased, but this is a function of diagnosis.
03:57We have better, more appropriate diagnostic criteria to recognize autism cases,
04:04whereas in decades past, we were not capturing and recognizing how prevalent autism truly was.
04:11AtLiza777777 wants to know,
04:18There's a common perception that GMOs, especially food crops,
04:23are some unnatural thing that we've altered in a way that's harmful,
04:27but the reality is that humans have been genetically modifying and messing with nature since the dawn of time.
04:34Most people don't know that the vegetables we know to be cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts,
04:40kohlrabi, and cabbage are actually all genetically modified versions of the wild mustard plant.
04:46They're the same species.
04:48Modern day GMOs allow us to do this in a faster and more controlled way.
04:53AtChefBuy says,
05:01So the good news is that aluminum salts and antiperspirants and parabens don't cause cancer,
05:07so you can breathe a sigh of relief.
05:09Parabens are a class of antimicrobials,
05:14and they're used to inhibit contamination and inhibit the growth of bacteria and fungi
05:20that would contaminate a product that you're using repeatedly.
05:24And they've been used in these products for over a hundred years.
05:28The levels at which you would be exposed to parabens are not posing any sort of harm.
05:33It's why they've been asserted and reasserted as safe for use.
05:38People have been led to believe that parabens are linked to breast cancer
05:42because there was a really terribly done study in the Journal of Applied Toxicology
05:47where they took breast tumor biopsies that were stored in the freezer,
05:52and they detected minuscule levels.
05:54We're talking parts per billion of parabens in these breast tumor tissues.
05:59And when they looked at their negative controls, their blank values,
06:04levels of parabens detected in those were actually higher than some of the tissue samples,
06:08which actually suggests that their instrumentation was contaminated.
06:13So over here we have four different types of parabens.
06:16Ethylparaben and methylparaben bind 100,000 times more weakly to estrogen receptors.
06:24So 1 versus 100,000 of your actual estrogen hormone, estradiol.
06:30And butylparaben and propylparaben bind 10,000 times more weakly.
06:35So 10 versus 100,000 versus your estradiol hormone.
06:40So the likelihood of these paraben chemicals actually outcompeting your estrogen hormones is near zero.
06:51Unfortunately, they're more BS than they are evidence.
06:55Probiotics are a type of supplement that contain live microorganisms.
07:00But there's 40 trillion bacteria that live in your GI tract,
07:05and they make up hundreds of different species.
07:09The problem with probiotic supplements is they usually only contain one, two,
07:14or a small handful of species of bacteria.
07:17The reason that they're in the probiotic supplement
07:19is not because they've been identified to be beneficial for your health,
07:22but they're relatively easy to grow in large quantities,
07:26and so they end up in your supplement.
07:28But there have been a lot of studies that have evaluated
07:31or assessed the ability of probiotic supplements to improve health.
07:35And unfortunately, there's really no data to support their use.
07:39The stomach is very acidic.
07:41And if a probiotic supplement doesn't have what we call an enteric coating,
07:45those bacteria are very likely going to be killed by your stomach acids.
07:49So there's no data to even show that these supplements are even going to make it
07:54into your intestines where they need to be.
07:56Prebiotic is another term that we often confuse with probiotics,
08:00but prebiotic is really just a fancy word for fiber.
08:03So prebiotics are the food that the bacteria in your gut are going to use
08:08to do what they do.
08:10While you might see supplements that say they're filled with prebiotics,
08:14it's really just saying they're containing different types of fiber.
08:17And so you can get a lot of those health benefits that we know we need from fiber
08:20just by eating some fresh fruits and vegetables.
08:23Atwordsmatter wants to know,
08:24which pseudoscience has done the most harm?
08:26I would have to say anti-vaccine misinformation.
08:31It leads to the increased spread of infectious diseases,
08:34which means that we have increased amounts of morbidity, illness, and mortality,
08:38death among populations where those illnesses and deaths are preventable.
08:43For example, anti-vaccine misinformation about the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine,
08:48the MMR vaccine, led to a spread, an outbreak in Samoa in 2019
08:56that caused the death of 82 people, primarily children under five.
09:01Vaccines are estimated to have saved over 150 million lives
09:06in the last several decades.
09:08They truly are one of the miracles of modern medicine.
09:12Atremerville wants to know,
09:14my doctor advised against ozone therapy.
09:16Is it helping people?
09:17No, it is not helping people.
09:20Ozone, chemically called O3,
09:23is a type of oxygen compound that makes up parts of our atmosphere.
09:26Proponents of ozone therapy claim that it has a variety of health benefits.
09:32They inhale it, they use it in enema form,
09:35and in some cases they will actually infuse it through a transfusion of your blood.
09:40Ozone has zero therapeutic benefits and can be potentially very harmful,
09:46especially if inhaled at very low doses.
09:49Your doctor is absolutely right.
09:51There is zero reason for you to expose yourself to ozone.
09:54At Logan Hentz says,
09:55you don't detox from sweating.
09:57You sweat water and salt, not f***ing toxins.
09:59Doesn't make sense for said toxins to just dry on your skin, does it?
10:02Absolutely.
10:03Sweating is for temperature regulation.
10:05When you sweat, you secrete fluids, water, and some salts.
10:10And when that dries, it leads to a phenomenon called evaporative cooling,
10:14which means that your body now cools down as a result of taking that energy away.
10:19The way that your body gets rid of toxins is through your excretory organs,
10:24so your lungs, your liver, your GI tract, and your kidneys.
10:28Those organ systems are working all the time to remove any toxins
10:33or any substances that your body just no longer needs anymore.
10:36People like to tout saunas as a method to detox,
10:40but this is basically like accelerating your sweating process.
10:44A lot of people feel better after a sauna
10:47because the heat and the environment lets them feel more relaxed,
10:52but it has nothing to do with removing toxins from your body.
10:56At Milk16478,
10:58what the f*** is alkaline water, bro?
11:00You been drinking bleach or something?
11:02Proponents of alkaline water and the alkaline diet
11:06believe that increasing the pH of your body
11:10or reducing the acidity of your body can improve health outcomes.
11:14It can prevent cancer, it can reduce inflammation,
11:17but the reality is that you can't actually change the pH of your body.
11:22Your blood pH is very tightly regulated at around a pH of 7.4,
11:27and if you could change it, it would be life-threatening.
11:31And we can't change it because we have buffer systems
11:34that maintain balance in our bodies.
11:37There have been a lot of studies that have tried to show a benefit,
11:40but there just isn't.
11:42The same goes for those at-home water ionizer equipment
11:46that you can pay $5,000 for.
11:49That is just adding extra minerals to your water,
11:52which is basically what alkaline water is.
11:55So things like potassium hydroxide, magnesium sulfate, calcium chloride.
12:00These are chemicals that increase the pH of water
12:04to a pH of 8 or 9 or so on.
12:08These substances are not offering any health benefits,
12:11and as soon as you drink this alkaline water,
12:13that higher pH is going to be neutralized by the acid in your stomach.
12:17Atnisa Andrea asks,
12:19If the moon affects how the tide rolls in and affects dementia Alzheimer's patients,
12:23then why can't the stars affect human behavior and influence certain traits?
12:28This is a confusion of a phenomenon called sundowning,
12:31which is a situation in which dementia patients,
12:34including Alzheimer's patients,
12:36have worsening symptoms as the day progresses.
12:39Now there's a few theories as to why this occurs,
12:42and some of it has to do with just the progression of the disease itself,
12:46but also the confusion that these patients are living with.
12:51The irritability grows as the day progresses,
12:54so they may appear to have worse symptoms as the day goes on.
12:58But it has nothing to do with the sun setting or the moon cycle,
13:01it's simply just that's later in the day.
13:04Unfortunately, there's no evidence to suggest that
13:07the stars and astrology has any impact on human traits and behaviors,
13:12and it's a long-held arm of pseudoscience.
13:14Adjace Snowden wants to know,
13:16Why are supplements pretty much unregulated,
13:18yet we strictly test the safety and efficacy of real medicine?
13:21Ah, yeah, you can thank the politicians and the legislators of our U.S. Congress.
13:27In 1994, they passed, in a bipartisan effort,
13:30the 1994 Dietarily Supplement Health and Education Act.
13:34Many senators have financial motives to pass this law,
13:38particularly Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch.
13:43Both of them received extensive amounts of lobbying money
13:47from dietary supplement companies in order to push this legislation through.
13:51What this did was it removed the oversight that the FDA had on dietary supplements.
13:57As a result, that industry has grown exponentially,
14:01and nearly all supplements on the shelves today lack evidence to support their use.
14:06Some examples would include a lot of your greens powders,
14:10things like AG1 and other dietary supplements
14:14claiming to give you your servings of fruits and vegetables.
14:17But when actually analyzing the composition of them,
14:20often they don't contain measurable amounts of those products,
14:24and worse, many contain substances that are not disclosed.
14:29At Mojo Pono wants to know,
14:31is it true that sugar in foods feeds cancer?
14:33There's no clinical evidence that eating sugar, avoiding sugar,
14:38or anything related to sugar has an impact in preventing or curing cancer.
14:44This misconception stems from the fact that we use a type of imaging called PET scan.
14:49So on a CT scan, you might detect a structure,
14:52but on a PET scan, we use a radioactive labeled sugar
14:57that's taken up by your body,
14:59and it lights up in regions where cells in your body are metabolizing that sugar more quickly.
15:05Because cancer cells do have faster metabolic activity,
15:09because they're growing very quickly,
15:11unfortunately this has been misinterpreted to lead people to believe
15:15that sugar itself is causing cancer when it's just a feature of certain cancer types.
15:21Cancer cells will consume glucose at a faster rate
15:25because they need to take that glucose and make new cell components
15:30because those tumors are growing very quickly.
15:33So it's not the sugar that's feeding or causing cancer,
15:38it's a function of how cancer cells are using sugar that's available.
15:43At Bubblegum Monarch says,
15:45I knew receipt paper was thermal activated,
15:47but I didn't know that that coating is like toxic BPA?
15:49What? I handle that sh** all day every day.
15:52BPA, or bisphenol A, is a chemical that's used primarily to help manufacture plastics.
15:59In thermal receipt paper, it's used as a coating to facilitate that printing.
16:04There's a concern that this chemical may be implicated in
16:08endocrine disruption or interfering with your hormones.
16:12There have been some studies that suggest cashiers or other customer service people
16:18who handle lots of receipts over a working shift may be exposed to high levels of BPA.
16:24But that particular study used an estimate value in a modeling equation
16:30that was orders of magnitude higher than what any other data set would suggest.
16:35So they're skewing their data to overestimate how much BPA someone would be in contact with.
16:41BPA is the same chemical when people express concern about microwaving certain types of plastic.
16:48And just as is true with the receipt handling,
16:51the amount of BPA that might be in the food products that you microwave
16:57is going to be orders of magnitude lower than what you would actually need to be exposed to
17:02in order to see some sort of impact on your hormones.
17:06And on top of that, BPA is rapidly metabolized by your liver and excreted,
17:11so you don't have to worry about it accumulating in your body.
17:15At BrettNA70273495 asks,
17:20Question for you, Andrea, if you don't mind.
17:22What common household chemical would you say you are definitely worth avoiding?
17:26I know I probably eat too much Teflon, but still buy nonstick cookware.
17:29For me personally, there isn't one thing that I have in my house that I would say I need to get rid of,
17:36but there are certain considerations.
17:38Say if you live in an older home and you might have some antiquated plumbing,
17:43you might want to get that looked at to see if there's high levels of things like lead,
17:47or if you have an old building that maybe has asbestos in the walls or the countertops.
17:54Since you mentioned Teflon, that's an interesting topic because it's gotten a lot of attention in recent months.
18:01Teflon, chemically, is part of the class of chemicals called PFAS.
18:06Now, PFAS incorporate thousands of different chemicals,
18:10and Teflon, chemically called PTFE, is a very long chemical and it's very stable.
18:17And so the likelihood of you actually experiencing harm from being exposed to Teflon by using nonstick cookware
18:23is actually very low.
18:25When people are stressing about these exposures to chemicals that generally don't have a big impact on their health,
18:32we should be redirecting our focus to things like healthy lifestyle habits,
18:36getting good quality sleep, eating a diverse diet,
18:39and staying up to date with your preventive health screenings,
18:43which really are the things that can impact your health.
18:45At Uncouth Primate wants to know,
18:47there's an emerging trend of people claiming that sunscreen is more harmful than good.
18:51Any thoughts?
18:52Let's clear up a few things.
18:53So the reason that sun exposure is a risk factor for cancer is because there are two main types of ultraviolet radiation,
19:01UVA and UVB.
19:03And these ultraviolet radiation energy essentially penetrates your skin.
19:08That energy is then transferred to molecules in your cells,
19:12which can cause DNA damage and mutations.
19:16And those mutations can ultimately lead to cancer the more you're exposed to it.
19:20By taking a sunscreen and putting some of it on your skin,
19:25the molecules of chemicals in the sunscreen now absorb that energy and convert that to heat.
19:32As a result, those ultraviolet rays don't get into those deeper layers of your skin,
19:38they're absorbed right by the sunscreen,
19:40and so your cells don't experience the damage.
19:43So people are saying that chemicals that you might find in sunscreens,
19:46particularly your organic filters like avobenzone, are causing cancer.
19:51And so it's causing more harm than doing good and preventing sun exposure.
19:56But these chemicals have been extensively studied for safety.
20:00There's no clinical evidence that they're linked to cancer in any way.
20:04At DaddyPinks asks,
20:05Wait, what do you mean there's arsenic and lead in tampons in the US?
20:08I hate it here.
20:09The good news is that this is blown wildly out of proportion.
20:13So there was a recent study that went viral and really, really scared a lot of people,
20:19but for no good reason.
20:21So this study took 20 individual tampons,
20:24and they took the fabric and they digested it with high temperatures,
20:29350 Fahrenheit, and an acid extremely concentrated to digest the fabric.
20:36And from there, they used analytical chemistry equipment
20:39to look at the levels of different trace impurities, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and so on.
20:44And they found very, very small quantities.
20:47We're talking parts per billion.
20:49And for context, one part per billion is equivalent to one second of time in 31.7 years.
20:58But I think we can all agree that 350 degrees Fahrenheit and a pH of one is not the environment of a vagina.
21:05For context, a vagina is about 99 degrees Fahrenheit and a pH of 4.5.
21:10So not only did this study actually show that you're going to be exposed to any of this,
21:14but the levels that they were detecting in the tampons are orders of magnitude lower
21:19than other things like tea leaves and water and cannabis.
21:24Tampons are made out of cotton, and cotton is a plant.
21:27And when plants grow in the environment,
21:30they pick up elements and substances that are in the soil and in the air and in the water.
21:36And that's where lead, arsenic, cadmium, these are all elements, right?
21:40They're part of our Earth's crust.
21:42So you don't need to freak out about your tampons or throw them away.
21:46But you also have to realize that this is something that is universal to all plants,
21:51including ones that you eat on a daily basis.
21:53At Al Bowers, one asks,
21:55Which vaccines contain mercury?
21:57None of the vaccines contain mercury.
21:59There's a preservative that's used to prevent contamination of vaccines
22:03with things like bacteria and fungi that is called thimerosal.
22:08And thimerosal is a salt of a different compound called ethylmercury.
22:13Now, ethylmercury is not mercury.
22:16It's a compound that contains a mercury ion.
22:20This was conflated to suggest that vaccines contained mercury.
22:25It's also further confusing because there's a different type of a mercury compound called methylmercury.
22:32That's the one that we're warned about eating too much fish like tuna
22:36because the methylmercury is found everywhere and that can accumulate in our bodies.
22:41But to illustrate this, I want to talk about two different types of alcohol.
22:46So we have rubbing alcohol here, which is isopropyl alcohol.
22:51And we have champagne, which is ethanol.
22:54We know that ethanol is safe at relatively low doses and many people enjoy a drink or two,
23:02but nobody's going to drink a bottle of rubbing alcohol because we know that that would be toxic.
23:08The same is true for methylmercury versus ethylmercury.
23:12One of them can be harmful at a relatively low dose and the other one can be safe at a relatively low dose.
23:19So thimerosal was used in several vaccines to prevent contamination, but thimerosal is not mercury.
23:27However, because of misunderstanding about this chemical difference,
23:32most vaccines ended up removing the thimerosal outright.
23:36The only vaccines in the U.S. that even have thimerosal now are multidose flu vaccines
23:41and those account for less than 7% of all flu vaccines being administered.
23:46HelloHCourtney asks,
23:48Anyone hear of any alternative cancer treatments that work?
23:51There's a belief that scientists and health care providers are hiding natural treatments
23:58for a variety of diseases, including cancer.
24:01But you might be surprised to know that we actually often harness nature and improve upon it using science.
24:08Today, we have many different pharmaceuticals that target cancer that are actually derived from natural chemicals
24:16and we tweak them to improve their safety, their efficacy, or reduce side effects.
24:24For example, a chemical called potophilotoxin, natural chemical derived from the Mayapple plant,
24:31is used in pharmaceuticals or in medical treatments,
24:35but we've also altered it chemically to create a chemical called etoposide.
24:40It's better able to treat more cancer types and it has reduced side effects compared to the natural version.
24:48Another example would be something like paclitaxel, a natural chemical from the Yew tree,
24:55and we've altered it chemically to create a compound called docetaxel.
25:00Docetaxel is often used to treat certain cancers like breast cancer, prostate cancer,
25:06non-small cell lung carcinoma, and certain types of head and neck cancer.
25:10And this is not something that's unique to cancer treatments either.
25:14Aspirin, which chemically is called acetylsalicylic acid, is actually derived from a chemical found in willow bark.
25:22Unfortunately, people who opt for unproven treatments for cancer have increased risk of poor outcomes.
25:30When you look at breast cancer survival, breast cancer patients that forego proven treatments
25:36have a 5.7 times increased risk of death compared to patients that use proven treatments.
25:43adjacentq295178 wants to know,
25:46Why are cancer rates in young people skyrocketing?
25:49The good news is cancer rates in young people are not skyrocketing.
25:54Unfortunately, there have been a lot of headlines that have said things to that effect.
26:00But this really requires context.
26:02Most of the risk factors for cancers are things that you actually can't control and they relate to your genetics.
26:09But there are some that are impacted by modifiable risk factors.
26:13So for many of these, cancer rates are actually declining.
26:16We're also seeing declines in cancer rates for lung cancer because of public health measures and smoking cessation education campaigns.
26:25We've seen a lot of headlines that have said that colorectal cancer is increasing 1% year over year in people under 50.
26:32But that is actually not the correct way to look at it.
26:35So to illustrate this, these are the colorectal cancer rates in the US by age group.
26:41And so colorectal cancer is the most common in older individuals compared to younger individuals, which is the case for nearly all cancers.
26:50Cancers are, by and large, a disease of aging.
26:53So the rate of cancer, these are number of cases per 100,000 people.
26:59In individuals for age 40 to 49, there's a rate of 37 cases per 100,000 people.
27:06So an increase in 1% means we've gone from 37 cases to 37.37 cases per 100,000 people.
27:14And when you look at the fact that there are about 150,000 colorectal cancer cases diagnosed every year,
27:22that means that we're seeing a few hundred total more cases in people under 50.
27:28Previously, colonoscopy was recommended for individuals 50 and above, but it's actually been reduced to individuals 45 and above.
27:36So rates are a function of the ability to detect cancers.
27:40So if we're screening more people within those younger age groups, we're also going to find more cancers.
27:45At Harrison, H. Smith says,
27:54So this is not true.
27:56But it underscores misinformation about how we manufacture citric acid.
28:02Citric acid is used in foods to give it a sour taste.
28:06So it's used in candies, but it's also used in seasonings and spices, pickles, ketchups, vinegars, mustards.
28:15It gives everything that nice little sour flavor.
28:18Every organism creates citric acid as part of their basic metabolic process.
28:24That's why in the cell respiration pathway, we have the citric acid cycle.
28:28So we harnessed this fundamental principle of all organisms, and we use a specific species of fungi called Aspergillus niger.
28:36We grow up mold in really large containers, and we give them molasses.
28:41And as they're metabolizing the molasses, they're producing citric acid during the citric acid cycle.
28:47And so we harvest that citric acid from the liquid that the mold is growing in.
28:52And there's no mold in it.
28:54Aspergillus niger is technically a black mold because it produces a pigment that gives it a black coloring.
29:01But the color of a mold has no bearing on whether it's a harmful organism or not.
29:06And there's lots of black molds that exist, including many that we eat in foods every single day.
29:14Tofu or soy sauce or koji, these are all produced using black molds.
29:21At AG Huff wants to know, does chronic Lyme disease exist?
29:25This is a very controversial topic.
29:27And unfortunately, Lyme disease has actually been plagued with controversy since it was first identified in the 1980s.
29:33Lyme disease is an acute infection by bacteria called Borrelia rudorferi that are deposited into your skin through the bite of certain species of ticks that are infected with it.
29:44So when you get Lyme disease, you take antibiotics, such as doxycycline, which will eliminate the bacteria and clear the infection.
29:52The phrase chronic Lyme disease is used in two contexts.
29:56The first refers to symptoms that may persist in a small proportion of people after you finish that antibiotic treatment.
30:03This is correctly termed post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome.
30:07And it occurs in about 3% to 5% of people with legitimate Lyme disease.
30:11And this has to do with the fact that the bacteria may have caused some direct tissue damage and your immune system takes some time to return to baseline.
30:19So you may have some symptoms for a period of time.
30:22This is not unique to Lyme disease either.
30:24Nearly every infection that we know of, there's a small proportion of people that may have lingering symptoms after the infection is gone.
30:31Context two refers to a persistent infection that is ongoing and is long-term.
30:38There are many organizations that promote this unfounded theory.
30:43And what they do is they recommend and prescribe treatments that have no evidence and are potentially harmful, including long-term courses of antibiotics.
30:53Now clinical trials have demonstrated that there's no therapeutic benefit of extending antibiotic treatment for this bacterial infection.
31:02Yet people still prescribe these.
31:04And this can lead to serious consequences like sepsis and opportunistic infections because you're taking antibiotics for too long.
31:12They also promote a variety of unproven wellness interventions, things like colloidal silver, bee venom therapy, urine therapy, enemas, herbal supplements, hormone treatments, metal chelation, and a variety of other interventions.
31:32Not only do these things have no evidence to support them for any ailment, they certainly don't have evidence to support them for the treatment of a persistent infection that does not exist.
31:44This is why scientific expert agencies like the CDC have revised their phrasing to discourage the use of the term chronic Lyme disease.
31:54AtLodd63 wants to know, what are your thoughts on leaky gut? Is it real? If so, what is the best way to address it?
32:00So leaky gut, sometimes called increased intestinal permeability, is a diagnosis that is promoted by a lot of wellness influencers.
32:08Like all pseudoscience diagnoses, has a little bit of truth behind it.
32:14So there are certain legitimate gastrointestinal diseases, like celiac disease or ulcerative colitis, where the pathology of the disease causes disruptions in how your intestines function.
32:27But wellness influencers have extrapolated that to tell people that your intestines just broadly become permeable and allow undigested food particles, toxins, and bacteria to get into your bloodstream and cause a really laundry list of symptoms.
32:47Everything from GI upset to brain fog and hair loss and weird food cravings.
32:53There's no evidence to support this diagnosis and there's no evidence to support any of the tests and the treatments that these wellness influencers promote.
33:01This is a hallmark of pseudoscience. They create a medical condition that they can sell a test for and then they can sell you the treatment for. Don't fall for it.
33:11At Traveling Genes says, hey James Quincy, as the CEO of Coca-Cola, did you allow your own children to grow up drinking Coca-Cola? Or is your preference that only other people's kids be exposed to high fructose corn syrup, which has harmful effects on the liver mirroring alcohol consumption?
33:25So high fructose corn syrup is very poorly understood. So what we do is we take the glucose that's normally 100% of corn syrup and we take an enzyme called glucose isomerase and we convert about 50% of it to the other simple sugar, fructose.
33:43So now you have in high fructose corn syrup, a mixture of about 50% fructose and 50% glucose. I bet you didn't know, but that ratio of glucose to fructose is almost identical to the ratio of glucose to fructose in honey and the ratio of glucose to fructose in table sugar or cane sugar.
34:05High fructose corn syrup is not any worse than honey or any worse than sucrose or table sugar. These are all just sugars. Your body views them and digest them and processes them essentially the same way. Your body needs sugars for optimal function, but anything in excess, including sugar, can be harmful at a high enough dose.
34:26At Je Suis Belle, one asks, why are people refusing to go through body scanners at the airport because of radiation? Damn it, don't you have a cell phone? Cell phones use radio frequency radiation and body scanners at the airport use millimeter wave radiation.
34:43Now, when we're talking about radiation, radiation, it all refers to different types of energy. The type of radiation that body scanners and cell phones use are down in the radio frequency range. These types of radiation waves are very long and have very low energy, which means that they're non-ionizing.
35:04When they interact with your body, they're not able to actually cause any damage to your cells or your tissues. Cell phones and body scanners don't contain types of radiation that are going to cause you harm.
35:18A lot of people confuse or are scared of the phrase radiation because we know that there are certain types of radiation, high energy radiation like gamma radiation, that can be ionizing. These are high energy, they can cause damage, but your radio frequency and your body scan radiation is very low energy.
35:41Atcerati Ball wants to know, are underwire bras still suspect as a cause for breast cancer? Definitely not. Scientific experts have actually never suspected that underwires are a cause for breast cancer. The logic is that something tight around the lymph nodes and the breast tissue was leading to toxin accumulation, which was then causing breast cancer.
36:02There's no scientific plausibility to this and it ignores basic concepts of physiology and how compounds and toxins and our lymphatic and cardiovascular, our blood system actually works. Now, if you don't want to wear a bra, do you, but don't omit wearing a bra because you've been told that it causes cancer.
36:22At Lori Smith 1962 says, carnivore diet is healthier for humans and better for the environment than being a vegan. So this is just objectively false. The carnivore diet is based on the premise that you should only be consuming animal products that includes meat, animal fats and eggs.
36:39And this diet omits food groups and nutrients that we know are critical for health, including fiber. Carnivore diet is nearly devoid of fiber and fiber is essential for proper GI function.
36:54It's also critical to help regulate levels of blood lipids and it's also really important for your overall immune system health. If you're adhering to a diet that doesn't have fiber and doesn't have things like fruits and vegetables, you're running the risk of severe nutrient deficiency and adverse health effects, including increased risk of GI issues, certain types of cancers and cardiovascular issues.
37:20So those are all the questions for today. Remember, false health information travels six times faster than credible facts, usually because it's scaring you and exacerbating your health fears. We all can play a role in helping to combat and fact check health disinformation. Thanks for watching Pseudoscience Support.