Kayla: Someone get this beer a guy.
Chris: Are we recording?
Kayla: Yeah, we are.
Chris: So did you capture someone get this beer guy?
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Okay. Do you want to explain to our listeners what the fuck you're talking about?
Kayla: No.
Chris: What this beer glass is that you had to buy?
Kayla: Someone get this beer a guy.
Chris: It says, someone get this beer a guy on it.
Kayla: I got it from the dollar store.
Chris: You are so try hard.
Kayla: It was by itself. There was no other glasses. Did someone get this beer guy next to it? I knew it was like when you go to the pound and you see that one, like, really old, gross cat, and you're like, that one's for me?
Chris: Only you. That's not relatable. Only you do that.
Kayla: Absolutely not.
Chris: Only you do that and probably actually like, half of our listeners because they're all weirdos like you.
Kayla: They're good people. Someone get this beer a guy?
Chris: I guess we did take a cat that is now 21 years old, so.
Kayla: Yup.
Chris: So do we have any? Oh, so I guess we should say welcome to culture. Do we say our names at the beginning?
Kayla: Welcome to culture or just weird? That's Chris, that's Kayla, and this is cult or just weird.
Chris: You already said, I'm Kayla and I'm.
Kayla: Chris, and welcome to cult or just.
Chris: Weird is that we're just gonna do this the rest of the episode, say our names and then. Okay. Do we have any Biznas?
Kayla: I think so, but I don't know what it is. Halloween. Good. Hope you had a good Halloween. We hope that you all had a good Halloween. We hope that you're all, if you're listening from the United States gearing up for a wonderful Thanksgiving and that you.
Chris: Had a great All Saints day. Or wait, also, isn't day of the.
Kayla: Dead Dia de los Muertos?
Chris: Isn't that on November 1 also?
Kayla: So we hope you had wonderful holidays. Yes, and we hope that you're gearing up for more wonderful holidays. Hot tip. If you celebrate Christmas and you haven't started your shopping, this is your reminder to start now. Start now. Get it out of the way. Go to your local mall that's not dead and do it now.
Chris: Engage in the capitalist machine early.
Kayla: Get everyone, you know a build a bear and save them all today. That's my psa.
Chris: That's a great hot tip. Wow. Okay. I think we should kind of get into it because we sort of left our audience with a cliffhanger last time. Don't you dare say we about the call. My. I did.
Kayla: I was.
Chris: My innocent bystander guy. It's 100% my fault. You're right. But we sort of owe them. So, anyway, are you gonna recap us.
Kayla: From what we talked about today?
Chris: We will. We will. We'll get there. So, yeah. So if you're ready to get started on part two of our exploration of genetics and madness.
Kayla: Wait, genetics and madness?
Chris: Yeah, madness.
Kayla: What does that mean?
Chris: Oh, okay.
Kayla: What does genetics and madness mean?
Chris: Oh, you'll see.
Kayla: Oh, no.
Chris: So, listeners, if you haven't yet, be sure to go back and listen to part one of our episode on Ben lynch in epigenetics pseudoscience, episode 18, the Blueprints. We do a lot of explanation there of the very basics of genetics, which sort of sets up what we're going to talk about on the show today. But if you're joining us from that episode or you already know there everything there is to know about genetics, then I welcome you back.
Kayla: You probably don't.
Chris: I don't know, maybe some of our listeners do. I talk to you.
Kayla: If you're a geneticist, then maybe you do.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, the person that recommended this topic to us is probably an expert and didn't need that entire last episode. That person will be very bored.
Kayla: Yeah, that's fine. We're pretty boring. I'm excited to hear what you have to say this week about genetics and madness.
Chris: Yeah. So, today's episode, as we dig further into this mess of pseudoscientific claims, it's a very good time to place a spotlight on another one of our cult criteria. Ooh much how, like, the Woodman episode highlighted the importance of the ritual criterion. Today's episode is kind of going to highlight one of our other criteria, one which is near and dear to me and honestly, is probably, like, a good 50% or more of why I feel good about doing this podcast.
Kayla: Wait, the criterion is near and dear to you?
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: It's one of my favorite of our criteria.
Kayla: Can I guess what it is?
Chris: Yeah, guess.
Kayla: Antifactuality, maybe. So why can't you just tell me?
Chris: In order to turn that spotlight on Kayla, I have to do what I always do and ask you a question.
Kayla: God, I'm so sick of your questions.
Chris: No, you're not. Shut up. Except in answering the question. Do you trust me?
Kayla: You?
Chris: Yeah. You trust me. Great.
Kayla: No, no.
Chris: Perfect.
Kayla: Okay. Yes, I do. You are part of my trust network. There are definitely claims that you can make where I would go. Huh. I don't know if I believe that without independent verification, but in general, I have found you to be a trustworthy figure in my life. Except for when you said the thing about superior breast milk. And my other podcast proved that to.
Chris: I didn't know, inaccurate statement, or at.
Kayla: Least a baseless statement.
Chris: If we leave this or go to Patreon. Just so you guys know, for some reason I feel like I have read somewhere in the past that the quality of breast milk given to the first child is superior to the quality of breast milk that is produced by the mother for the second or third or fourth child. And I have no idea why I feel like that's a fact, but I.
Kayla: Feel like it's not a fact.
Chris: No, it's not. I mean, I haven't been able to find it, and you haven't been able to find it. Apparently it's not a fact, and I don't know how it got into my.
Kayla: Head.
Chris: So don't trust me on that. But part of why maybe you do trust me is because when you challenge me and I go look something like that up, I go like, oh, I guess I'm wrong.
Kayla: Oh, you are very. You lack a lot of motivated reasoning. Like, you very much are comfortable with being proven wrong and then adjusting your worldview to align with the facts that you've just learned.
Chris: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Kayla: You're welcome.
Chris: So, yeah, and we've talked about this a lot before off podcast, just you and me. And I'm not sure if it has a real world name already, but we've actually. You already mentioned it. We've called it just between you and me, we've called it our trust network.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And what we mean by that. Well, so actually, we'll go into it a little bit here. So. No, so we're not going to. So when we first talked about you and I first talked about what we now call the trust network, it was when were watching a documentary about a group that we will eventually do on the show. So I won't say it here.
Kayla: Wait, did you make up the phrase trust network? I just heard it elsewhere in, like, other skeptic groups. Or you just said trust network.
Chris: It's possible that this is like, the converse of the breast milk thing, and I did hear it, and I just don't remember. But, yeah. So for our listeners, when we say that word or those two words, what we mean is that believability of information, even though it seems this way, isn't just dependent on the source of that information or even by the procedure by which the information was developed by said source, it's also dependent on how you evaluate the source of that information. And it's also dependent on other people or information sources, also validating the same criteria about that source. Does that make sense at all?
Kayla: Can you put that in layman's terms?
Chris: Yeah, it's a complex topic.
Kayla: Trust network.
Chris: Trust network is people. I believe it's the fact, it's not just the people you believe, it's the fact that you believe a particular thing is not just dependent on that thing, it's also dependent on the other people that believe it. A web of validation of other things that you have found to be trustworthy in the past.
Kayla: So, like, we believe that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west because why?
Chris: Well, that one we can actually see. So we don't really need to trust.
Kayla: We believe that oxygen exists because why?
Chris: Right, well, so actually, I already have another one to walk through.
Kayla: Fuck you, oxygen. We don't believe in you.
Chris: Yeah, oxygen is actually. It's a hoax.
Kayla: Yeah, birds aren't real.
Chris: But let's say you're browsing your Twitter feed and you see a tweet from NASA's official Twitter and that they just discovered an asteroid headed straight towards Earth and it'll arrive in one year. Do you believe that statement from NASA?
Kayla: Yeah, yes.
Chris: Yeah, of course. First take. You probably do, but why?
Kayla: I'd probably like also google it, but I'm a probably, but it would pretty much trust NASA.
Chris: Right. And it's because you trust NASA to be scientific, unbiased, and accurate, and they.
Kayla: Fucking staged that moon landing, so.
Chris: That's right.
Kayla: Like the production value. Muah.
Chris: Mm. I know somebody in Hollywood, I'm sure you can really appreciate that. But, yeah, you trust NASA, but why? Why do you believe those things? Well, you've learned about NASA your whole life and what discoveries they're responsible for, what their mission is. Other people, maybe teachers, maybe speakers, maybe books, other things that have that validate what NASA does and reference NASA are things that you have found to trust as well. And then that extends even further to those things that have been given to you by, again, maybe parents or teachers or whatever that you trust. So again, it just kind of fans out in this web, and that's why you trust this tweet without necessarily needing to be, like, doing too much background work on it. So, yeah, so you trust NASA to be scientific, unbiased, and accurate.
Chris: But why do you believe those things? Well, you've learned about NASA your whole life and what discoveries they're responsible for, what their mission is. So why do those things make you trust them? Well, someone or some source that you already trusted probably first told you about NASA going to the moon or launching satellites. And then as you continued your life, you learned about how modern society is dependent on the technology of satellites. And you probably learned those facts from someone else you trusted and also verified them against the stories you initially heard about the moonshot and so on. And at the base level, you probably end up trusting things. Like, I mean, you probably honestly started building your trust network before you were even aware, right?
Chris: Something that you see with your own eyes is something that ends up being real and true or something that your parent tells you as a young pre memory child ends up being true. Those are the first little footholds that we gain on reality. But anyway. But you can see how some small things that you sort of can verify yourself then can branch out into people that you trust and sources that you trust. So all this fact checking and all this cross verifiability is all part of what we say when we say that, right? In the case of NASA, you've probably never personally set foot on the moon or touched a satellite yourself. So the trust network is actually extremely important. Right. You mentioned before, like, sun going up in the east instead of the west. Or is it rising in the east?
Kayla: Setting rises in the east, set to the west.
Chris: But you can see that, right? But you've never actually set foot on the moon. And, like, we're all, like, both of us here are not moon skeptics, right? Like, we. We truly think that's the thing that happened, but we haven't seen it, so why do we trust that it happened?
Kayla: I don't know.
Chris: The trust network.
Kayla: The trust network. You know what else I haven't seen myself?
Chris: Indiana Jones.
Kayla: The, the globe.
Chris: Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, we'll get to that next season. So, yeah. And if you think about it, actually, a lot of pieces of information, maybe even most pieces of information we need to make this believability choice about, like, we can't actually verify with our five senses.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: Although technically, I mean, growing up in Orlando, I did used to watch space shuttle launches for my front yard with my own two eyes. So maybe that helps a little bit with my trust network. But the point is, in our world right now, there's just so many things that are not, like, part of our direct experience that we have to come to some sort of conclusion about.
Kayla: We believe. Like, I'm sure it was difficult for people to believe that cells existed until it was widely accessible. To view them on your own, we have to believe that atoms exist. There's almost no visible evidence on our day to day life that atoms exist, but we generally, most of us, believe that atoms exist.
Chris: Right? And again, that comes, I think, back to the trust network, because the sources that tell me that atoms exist also are verifiable for a number of other reasons. And there's all these things that they're telling me about atoms and how we know they exist. And I trust those methodologies and so on and so forth out into the web. Not the World Wide Web, the trust web. But anyway, imagine for a second, going back to that Twitter example, that you saw the exact same bit of information, and it was from some crazy end of the world cult Twitter feed, a Twitter feed from some, like, weird fringe group with a weird, fringy website that looked like geocities and links to other conspiracies and pseudoscience. I assume that you probably wouldn't believe the exact same bit of information about the asteroid coming to Earth.
Chris: And I bet that's completely independent of whether the tweet from them contained even the exact same words as theoretical NASA tweet.
Kayla: I would be far less likely to believe Ramtha. If Ramtha tweeted out, an asteroid's coming.
Chris: Yeah. Even if Ramtha was like, oh, I use the same telescope and scientific methodology, even if they claimed that I would.
Kayla: Know some way she's twisting it, like, I would know that she was making an untruth.
Chris: And why?
Kayla: Because you can't trust Romtha. Don't trust Romtha, kids.
Chris: Well, the trust network that you have, all of these things that gave you the trust in the example in the NASA tweet, did the opposite. In this case, all of the conspiracies and pseudoscience on the fringe cults website and all the things you have learned that are false and not to be trusted from other sources that you do trust, who in turn were verified, yada, yada, in this case, said, this is not to be trusted.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So I'm saying all this again to focus the lens the way we did sort of with the Woodman episode, where we. They were sort of a good way for us to focus on ritual and how the presence of lots of esoteric ritual flavors something is culty. This episode will be a bit of a case study on. Yes, you guessed it, the anti factuality criterion. And how that can flavor.
Kayla: So smart. Yes.
Chris: And how that can flavor something as culty. Yeah, that's my favorite criteria. You know, I guess we're married. So you know that shit.
Kayla: I mean, the anti factual, I think for me it goes like charismatic leader and then anti factuality.
Chris: Like, that's definitely up there.
Kayla: And maybe ritual, probably third ritual is pretty fun. But, like, the antifactuality is the mindfuck, you know?
Chris: Yeah, totally. And it's easy to look at something and say, like, look at those weird, interesting rituals they perform, like with Woodman. But it's much harder sometimes to look at, say, like, a medical claim, a claim couched in the verbiage of science and say, wait a minute, that sounds wrong. After all, who are you to disagree with a doctor?
Kayla: Yep, it's hard. I've been there.
Chris: Right? So what I'm kind of asserting here with this whole opener is that sometimes only your trust network can save you when something feels wrong. Even though it's coming from a source that feels maybe like it should be reputable based on some, like, authority or whatever, it's probably worth taking another look, referencing from somewhere else or asking someone that you would trust to have good information.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: It's 2019, so that means, unfortunately, all of us are being bombarded constantly with fake news or allegations that real news is fake, with alternative facts, with marketing designed to hijack our brain functions, with groups that believe some things that are really good mixed with some things that maybe aren't. I just totally added that one. It's tiring and demoralizing, believe me. I know this episode isn't necessarily about solving that problem or making it better, but I kind of think that maybe our podcast as a whole is a little bit about that.
Kayla: I think you're right.
Chris: So before we move on, I just want to say, cultivate that trust network. Be skeptical, and if something feels off to you, trust your gut and follow up on that feeling. And hopefully culture, just weird can be a tiny little part of your own trust network. We may not get everything right all the time, but I can promise that we will try and we will issue corrections when necessary, and we will be comfortable telling you. We just don't know.
Kayla: That was really good. That was beautiful. Yay.
Chris: Beautiful speech. End of episode. No, just kidding. I'm not gonna do that again.
Kayla: I was gonna say that, like, and in addition to all of that, having a trust network or having things you can call can fall back on is so important to your, like, mental health and mental well being.
Chris: Oh, my God.
Kayla: Like, I know for me, like, literally, some of the most important people in my trust network are, like, therapists that I can go back to and be like, I have this. I learned this thing, quote, unquote, about medicine or health or mental health or whatever, and I don't know how to feel about it. So I can take it to XYZ therapist. That has never led me astray, who I believe actually does the work and is knowledgeable and check it against that. And that's been so helpful in my life that it really has improved my mental health and well being and my ability to be confident in the things that I believe.
Chris: Right? Same. And I don't know if you remember from last episode where I talked about my sources on this one and the fact that I got a little disoriented. I talked to eight people to help me sort of reorient. And I'm like. I'm somebody that I consider has, like, pretty strong beliefs and pretty strong, like, you know, understanding of the world and of science, and I have a degree in it, but even for me, I was like, man, this is weird. Like, I gotta talk to a bunch of people that I trust, and they all had, like, slightly different perspectives, but it was all. It was good to hear the things that I heard to help kind of make me go, like, no, no.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: It smelled weird for a reason.
Kayla: Right? Also find people who don't get drawn in by the same YouTube videos as you, so that when you're going, look at this guy, zero and Infinity are the same number. They can look at you and go.
Chris: Were you high at the time, though?
Kayla: I have no idea. Who knows? I still kind of believe that zero and infinity are the same number. But luckily, I have you in my trust network to explain why, while it makes a great YouTube video, it's not mathematically correct.
Chris: Right? Infinity is not a number.
Kayla: I still kind of think that infinity and zero are the same thing. Sorry.
Chris: Oh, my gosh.
Kayla: So there's twelve dimensions.
Chris: Actually, that's a good segue, because here's where I was gonna talk about the fact that I'm like, if you wanna hear sources, that's last episode. I'm not gonna bore you with the same list of sources, the list of your trust. But there's one source I neglected to mention, actually purposefully didn't mention last episode, and that's because it's less of a source and more of a feature. But that is another interview that you and I are going to conduct together, which we talked about at the top of the show. But we're gonna be playing that this episode, and it was really exciting to get this guy to do an interview for the show, by the way. I'll tell you why when we get to that part.
Chris: But let's just say we really kind of punched above our weight class getting him to speak to the likes of us because we're like a fake little podcast and he's like a real live person.
Kayla: Hell yeah.
Chris: So it was really cool. So we'll get to that. Okay, so do you remember what we talked about last episode and where we left off?
Kayla: We ended after you introduced our charismatic leader, Doctor. A certain Doctor Ben lynch.
Chris: Yes.
Kayla: Who I suspect may not be on the up enough.
Chris: He's not in my trust network. We'll spot that one.
Kayla: All right, good to know.
Chris: But also, just to recap, we talked about most of the episode, actually. We talked about DNA and genetics and sort of set that table. And it's kind of too much to get into here without just doing the episode again. We talked about, like, how basically DNA contains genes, and then genes get translated into little strips of rna, and then that's used by your cells to manufacture the proteins that are critical for all of the basically microscopic machinery and metabolism that makes your body function. And it's fricking fascinating. So that was sort of the science. And then we talked a little bit about who our charismatic leader is. Just very briefly, but let's teased us. Yeah, it was more of a tease. So let's return first to Doctor lynch.
Chris: And I guess I ought to mention first off that depending on who you ask, and I'm really sorry in advance for sounding like a pretentious dickhead here, but I should actually be calling him Mister lynch, not Doctor lynch, because Ben Lynch's undergraduate studies, while they were in a perfectly good, valid scientific field, he earned a degree in cell in molecular biology from the University of Washington in 1997. But his doctor title, quote unquote, is from his doctorate in naturopathic medicine from Bastier University in 2000. 710 years later.
Kayla: I'm assuming that's a non accredited university.
Chris: Not for medicine. Okay. I don't know what the accreditation process is like or even if it exists for naturopathic medicine. Right, but you don't have to do any, like, med school stuff or residency or anything like that.
Kayla: Really?
Chris: No, I don't think so.
Kayla: Wait, what school did he go to?
Chris: Bastille. B a s t y r. Yeah.
Kayla: That'S not an accredited university.
Chris: It's accredited by, like, the naturopathic folks.
Kayla: Yeah, but look, listen, I mean, I'm sure you read. Did you read the Wikipedia about it?
Chris: About Bastille? No.
Kayla: Do you want me to just read it for you?
Chris: Yeah. So actually, do you want to, like, do a thing where you say, like, stop me, and then read the Wikipedia for Bastir?
Kayla: Yeah. So if we're trying to figure out if this dude is accredited in the way that you and. I mean, he's accredited. I just really quickly pulled up the Wikipedia for besteer university. And if Wikipedia is part of your trust network, then go ahead and trust what I'm about to read. Besteer University is an alternative medicine university with campuses in Kenmore, Washington, and San Diego, California. Programs include naturopathy, acupuncture and oriental medicine, nutrition, herbal medicine, ayurvedic medicine, psychology, and midwifery. Mesteer's programs teach and research topics that are considered pseudoscience, quackery, and fake by the scientific and medical communities. Quackwatch, which is part of one of. That's part of my trust network. I believed Quackwatch. Quackwatch, a group against health fraud, put Bastille University on its list of, quote, questionable organizations.
Kayla: As a school, which is accredited but not recommended, Bastir University and similar naturopathic programs are not accredited as medical schools, but as special programs that are overseen by a naturopathic council, which is not required to be scientific. Bastille's naturopath program has been accused by critics of misrepresenting its medical rigor and its ability to train primary care clinicians. So that tells me a lot.
Chris: Yeah, well, so that's where his doctor title is from.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: Is a doctorate in naturopathic medicine, which does, I believe, allow him to practice medicine in the state of Washington, although we might want to check that later, too.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: But he has essentially started his business empire from a basis of almost zero standard medical training. You know, like, he got. Again, he got his degree in cell molecular biology in 97. He got his doctor of naturopathy in 2007, and in between, there wasn't a lot of medical training that I'm aware of, and after it, there wasn't either. Okay, so. So, yeah, so it's kind of. Let me just read this, because I don't know if this. How much this overlaps with what you just said.
Kayla: Oh, sorry.
Chris: I.
Kayla: Sorry.
Chris: No, no. Not at all. That was better. I just don't. I just want to read this because I don't know, naturopathic medicine is. Okay, so, like, it gets a little complicated here, because for anyone who has had a bad experience with the sort of standard medical industrial complex, which I.
Kayla: Think is most of us.
Chris: Yeah. And has felt good about their experiences with alternative medicine practitioners. I don't want to minimize your personal experience, because those types of experiences are actually a key component to understanding all of this, which we will definitely get to later in the show. But for right now, I have to talk about the other side of things, which, as you mentioned in that Wikipedia article about Bastille University, is that naturopathy is not science based. Its practices are at best pseudoscientific, and prescriptively it offers at best, placebo effects, and at worst, the treatments can sometimes actually be harmful.
Kayla: Oh, geez.
Chris: Again, I'll get to the pros of alternative medicine, because despite my being a full on, 100% bonafide skeptic, same. I do understand that there are important pros to alt med. But in talking about Ben lynch, well, that's why he's technically not a doctor. He didn't go to medical school or do a residency after his naturopathy degree. Okay, so in the rest of this episode, I will likely be omitting that title. I also want to do a little caveat in here that I don't know this guy, and, like, he might be a perfectly nice person. So, like, I'm not, like, trying to attack him personally. And it's likely that he even probably believes that what he's doing is right and good. I don't know.
Chris: It was a little easier in our second episode to criticize someone like Jay Z Knight because her claims are just so outlandish, right. That they're easy to dismiss. Like, she talked about being a 30,000 year old warrior spirit and on a continent that doesn't exist. And also, apparently, she's a big fat.
Kayla: Racist and she also let her husband die.
Chris: Yeah, so with her, there's all these really easy red flags to kind of go like, okay, but with Mister lynch, that's not the case. At least not that I'm aware his claims may not be scientifically supported, but he's also not claiming to be a dead warrior spirit. None of that dismisses what he's doing. I'm not saying that what he's doing is okay. I'm just saying that it makes it harder to judge when it's, like, a guy that's ostensibly trying to heal people and there's no crazy stuff going on that lets you say that's messed up.
Kayla: He's not saying all of your physical symptoms are because of the lizard people.
Chris: Like, wait, what? Not because of the lizard people. But we'll talk about all of your physical symptoms is because of blank thing.
Kayla: I'm just saying it's like what we said either at the end of the last episode or the top of this episode. Like, the borderline scientific woo is sometimes the most dangerous and most destabilizing.
Chris: And that's 100% true here.
Kayla: And that's why naturopathy as a medical practice and naturopathy is something that patient seek out. It, like, rides that line, man, of, like. Yeah, I know anecdotal cases of where it's very useful and helpful, and then also it is pseudoscience.
Chris: Right? So, yeah, I guess that's. That also goes back to the trust network, right. Which is like, when things are, like, just slightly off, it's. It's. You know, it's like you can't just say, okay, well, obviously it's not from Lemuria. You have to go like, oh, that's slightly off. I need to talk to someone about this.
Kayla: Right, I.
Chris: So I mentioned this in the previous episode, but again, the only bio information on this guy online is from his own website.
Kayla: I've run into that with people before.
Chris: Yeah, and he does talk about his degrees, but the rest of his bio is also full of these, like, bizarrely specific things, so I'm gonna read you some of them.
Kayla: Hold on, let me go to the website. You know what this reminds me of? Just even before I hear this? You know whose website this reminds me of?
Chris: Whose?
Kayla: Supreme Master Shanghai. Because again, very little information on her outside of things that directed back to her own website and had a series of very specific.
Chris: Oh, man. So much when I was, like, doing this research, so much online just redirected back to either his site or his book, or. There was very little, like, criticism or. I mean, it exists out there, but it's like, most of it was funneling you back to this.
Kayla: God, that makes me so freaked out.
Chris: Really? Yeah, I know. So let's see. Here's some things that are on his timeline. He says, bottom line, I am not your typical guy, nor am I your typical doctor. He has on his timeline of his bio that 1984 turned ten.
Kayla: Wait, I'm sorry, what?
Chris: Look.
Kayla: Wait.
Chris: 1974, born in Portland, Oregon. 1984 turned ten. That's super important to know. Positive. I told you, it's full of, like, bizarrely specific stuff.
Kayla: We can do the math. Why does he need to tell us that?
Chris: Turned ten?
Kayla: Tell us when you're born and then. Well, then we'll know when you turned ten. I don't understand. Does it say, like, turn ten and, like, got his witch powers? Turn ten and.
Chris: No, just turn ten. Just turn ten. Then the next one is 1986. Moved to central Oregon. Lived on a hundred acre horse ranch in Prineville, Oregon. Prineville has two famous claims. One, highest teenage pregnancy rate in the state of Oregon, and two, home of less Schwab tires. Really?
Kayla: Okay. What, is he proud of those things?
Chris: I don't know what that has to do with him.
Kayla: It doesn't. He's just giving you fun facts.
Chris: 1994, finally reached my final height of six'five.
Kayla: What?
Chris: I'm skipping a bunch of bullet points here. I'm just trying to go to the ones that are like. Why did you say that? Oh, here's. Here's a good one. That's, like, very excellent. Yeah. 1985 to 96. Had enough of, quote, structured life in lecture halls and training rooms.
Kayla: Wait, wait, please. Yellow tag. I have another red flag. This is the year before that. Overcame a serious two year knee injury after discovering the root cause on my own.
Chris: Yeah, it was probably vaccines.
Kayla: That's genius.
Chris: But there's just a whole bunch of other stuff. Like, he talks about his backpacking trip, and he goes into, like, very specific details about his backpacking trip.
Kayla: Okay, wait, this is still all bio.
Chris: Look at this. Yes. It's huge. You have these many stupid details. It's gonna be this. It's gonna be this large.
Kayla: Truly is exactly how supreme Master Ching High's website is, where it's, like, intensely detailed. And then this is also what Teal Swan's website looked like before she got all, like.
Chris: Like, polish marketing gene. Yeah, yeah. Russia visit number three. Russia visit number four.
Kayla: Why do we need these information?
Chris: Healthy goods is one of the 500 fastest growing companies in America.
Kayla: Is this. Just throw enough information and people will stop looking into you because there's boards.
Chris: I think so. I don't know. And then he has some things on here that are actually important. But I just wanted to kind of, like, go there and show. And I'm glad I showed you that, because I didn't know that about Qinghai's website, but it's so, like, turned ten, became six, five. What?
Kayla: Okay, okay.
Chris: Anyway, so the website I was just on, by the way, his own website is mthfr.net dot.
Kayla: All right.
Chris: Are you curious what that URL actually means?
Kayla: It kind of. It reminds me of a cus.
Chris: We'll get to that.
Kayla: Wait, what?
Chris: Cause it reminded me of a cus. Two. Not that it's like. There's a, like. Yeah, but I don't know if you remember last episode. And in the recap, earlier, we might have said it too, but he built his brand around a gene.
Kayla: Ooh, yeah, you did say that.
Chris: That gene is the one that codes for MTHFR. It's the motherfucker gene, which maybe sounds like a bit of a mouthful to say, but it's. It's so funny that you're saying that. Just, just hold, tighten. But it's an acronym replacing. Give me a sec. All right, methyl. This is all one word. Methyl anitra hydrofolate reductase. I probably said that wrong. That was a lot. But anyway, so clearly that's even worse. So it gets shortened to MTHFR. Now, he didn't invent this. Like, this is a thing that exists.
Kayla: This is a real thing that exists.
Chris: This is a real. Yeah, so, and actually, this is, before we go into that, this is where I write. When I was doing all of my reading for this topic, I always internalized mTHfr as motherfucker.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Because if you look at it like, you know, if you just especially, like, it's always mother. It's always in all caps, and it looks like, it just kind of looks like. You want to say motherfucker.
Kayla: It looks like mth f k r something. You know, it looks like motherfucker. Yeah, yeah.
Chris: Or fc uk or something.
Kayla: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: But, yeah, so in Ben Lynch's videos, I. Man, it was. I could not for the life of me figure out how he was saying this word, but he basically says, mt. Jafar.
Kayla: Mt. Jafar.
Chris: Mt. Jafar.
Kayla: Mt. Jafar.
Chris: Empty Jafar. And I couldn't figure it out until I started saying empty Jafar. Like, you know, like from Aladdin. If he were. If. If the bad guy from Aladdin was not full, it would be empty Jafar. And that's exactly what it sounds like he's saying. So, like, I'm basically gonna say empty Jafar. And I actually, like, even type it as empty Jafar a bunch in my script here. Yeah. So anyway, what is. Jean, show you a what? Show you the gene.
Kayla: Show me an empty Jafar in your script.
Chris: Oh, like the words here, mtG far. I'll show you later too, when we're like, not even talking about that. So let's talk about the gene. So, as I mentioned, MTGFR is actually.
Kayla: Not gonna be able to do this.
Chris: Of an enzyme, blah, blah, yadda, reductase. And so that's the. Technically, it's an enzyme that the gene codes for, but they're sort of referred to interchangeably, which I will probably also do today. But as you recall from what we talked about with DNA and genes, it's sort of kind of interchangeable. Like one thing is just the blueprint for the other thing. So like they're kind of one to one, right? So that's why they kind of get referred to interchangeably. So this enzyme plays an important role in a very complicated dance of your body processing folate or vitamin b nine. Now, how mth far actually does this and all of the chemical processes, I know it's gonna be funny every time. MTHFR, should I just say motherfucker? I don't know. Now how motherfucker actually does this.
Chris: All of the chemical processes involved in processing folate truly gets complicated. And remember how I warned about that in the previous episode, how complicated the chemistry is with all of this stuff? And believe me, Ben lynch, his supporters and his detractors, they all do really get into the complicated, detailed bits when discussing and arguing about this enzyme and gene.
Kayla: Interesting.
Chris: Like when people say, like, I did this and it helped me, and it's because you're not thinking about this bit. And it's like, it's just real easy to kind of like, well, I don't know if it's easy to key on something that you feel like was effective or something, or if it's more just that I'm. It's easy to be confused about it for somebody looking, you know, outside looking in, but there's just a lot of detail that are easy to get lost in the weeds of involving the processing of folate and this gene. So, yeah, so I don't want to get too lost in the minutiae of how folate is processed by the, maybe I should say vitamin B nine anyway, how it's processed by the body.
Chris: I just wanted to mention that it does get detailed and it does get discussed in the community.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: For our purposes, though, the important thing to understand is it's an enzyme that regulates how folate gets processed. Now, problems with getting enough folate in usable form by your body can definitely lead to health consequences. And women listening to this show that have experience with pregnancy will likely already know one of them. Lack of folate or folic acid supplementation, whatever. Lack of having that vitamin B nine can lead to developmental issues with the fetus, leading to things like spina bifida and other really bad neural tube defects in the fetus, which is why pregnant women are often prescribed or recommended to supplement their diet with folate or folic acid.
Kayla: Can I add an addendum? Yes, it's also, it's not just important to take folic acid when you know you're pregnant. If you are planning to become pregnant, you should go ahead and start taking your prenatals whilst you're trying. Because oftentimes the developmental issues that the fetus will later encounter start happening before people even know that they're pregnant.
Chris: Interesting.
Kayla: I forget what it's called, but there's a. When a fetus is forming, there's a tube that connects the brain stem to the. There's a tube that's basically the neural tube. It's the neural tube. The neural tube forms very early and sometimes can form. I mean, I think it generally forms at a stage which is like earlier than when many people know that they're pregnant. So it's recommended that if you're trying.
Chris: To become pregnant, you should also be supplementing this. Got it.
Kayla: And fun fact, got another fun fact. A lot of foods, like, you'll see it a lot in cereal and, like, grain products. A lot of foods say, like, fortified with folic acid or fortified with folate. Because I think at some point, the government basically decided that it was because I think like, 50% of pregnancies are unplanned. It was just smart to start fortifying foods with folic acid so that it would, you know, so that you can.
Chris: Brainwash people with the fluoride and the chemtrails.
Kayla: Yes. No. So that developing fetuses that would potentially become viable babies would have a fighting chance.
Chris: That's actually super smart. Yeah. And from others who may not know this, which, like, I didn't know this until, you know, I started doing some of this research. Yeah. So good. Good catch on that. Yes. Start supplementing beforehand. But that's also interesting. Interesting that the government is doing that as well. So. But what about what Mister lynch claims? Well, what he's claiming is that defects in the empty Jafar gene.
Kayla: Sorry? Empty Jafar.
Chris: Empty Jafar. I told dude, we'll watch a video of him and you will see, like he says, empty Jafar. I think it's just because he says it so much, because it's like the key branding thing.
Kayla: He's like, he's turned it into a word.
Chris: He's got it down to, like, the fastest, most, like, efficient way to say the word.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Anyway, so he's claiming, though, that defects in the gene for MTGFR or SNP's. So we'll talk about SNP's more. So let me tell you what those are because we didn't talk about them last episode.
Kayla: Yeah, I've never heard of that.
Chris: They're essentially, think of them as sort of like genetic defects, but defects is also like a bit of a misnomer because they're not necessarily bad.
Kayla: Okay? They're just defective, like genetic deviations.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. So literally, what SNP's stand for is single nucleotide polymorphism. So do you remember last episode that we talked about, like, what nucleotides are? So nucleotides are like the individual letters of the DNA. Oh, so like Gatcagc and t? Yes. So each little rung on the DNA strand is called a nucleotide. And a single nucleotide polymorphism means that one of those nucleotides in a gene is not the right letter. So instead of an a, it has a c. Instead of a t, it has a g or whatever. There's just something that's just not the right letter and that's called a snip.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: Because it's easier to say that than single nucleotide polymorphism.
Kayla: I would rather see snip.
Chris: Now that can lead to disease. Or maybe it doesn't. It may not. It really depends. Right? It's like very complicated.
Kayla: What does it depend on?
Chris: Very complicated. That is a question for a geneticist, for sure.
Kayla: For Doctor Ben lynch.
Chris: For a geneticist.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: So anyway, Mister lynch claims that empty Jafar gene snp's cause the gene to be, quote, dirty. And then this causes an entire swath of health problems running the gamut from. Actually, I don't want to be here all day, so we'll link to this in the show notes. But do you want to see what he claims is the are all the things that can be caused by snips in Mt. Jafar?
Kayla: I.
Chris: Okay, so whatever that is. Hyper something. You know what, we can't read all these.
Kayla: What is colorectal neoplasm?
Chris: I don't know. But there's also breast neoplasms. There's also stroke, coronary disease, thrombosis, diabetes, habitual abortion, brain ischemia. I don't even know what any of these are. Oh, there's neural tube defects, schizophrenia, arthritis. Like, do you see this list? Alzheimer's. This is just a list of every disease.
Kayla: Everything.
Chris: It's just everything. Oh, but it keeps going.
Kayla: Obesity.
Dr Gorski: It.
Kayla: Wait wait wait wait.
Chris: It.
Kayla: Disease progression.
Chris: It keeps going. Sickle cell glaucoma, bipolar chronic disease, osteoporosis, IB's, birth weight graft versus. I'm still scrolling, I'm still scrolling. Multiple sclerosis, dementia, lymphoma. I mean, I'm only listing like, what is this? Hundreds?
Kayla: This is hundreds.
Chris: It's basically every disease. I'm still scrolling.
Kayla: Oh, my God, look at this.
Chris: Oh, he says, this beats my original.
Kayla: List, which was like, oh, my God.
Chris: So what? All those little numbers are after the names of the conditions or diseases are. So those are number of publications. So. But all he says is like, number of publications. Like, I don't know where he gets that. Those are connected to MTGFR, but the precursor for this whole page that I just showed you, it's really interesting. He, like, does, like, some serious cya here, I'm just gonna read it to you. Mt. Jafar gene mutations can cause absolutely no symptoms at all. Okay. So he's with the medical community there. They may also increase susceptibility to severe health conditions. Okay, what does that mean then? That seems like a, that seems like equivocating.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Research is still pending on which medical conditions are caused by, or at least partially attributed to the MTTVR gene mutations. Again, correct. I don't, I actually don't think any of these are actually caused by MTGFR mutations. Okay. And then he says, I would rephrase that and state that the mt two far mutation increases susceptibility to these conditions. That's a big difference. What does that mean? I don't know. I don't know if susceptibility to conditions.
Kayla: Like, I guess he's saying if you have the Mt. Jafar gene mutation, you're more likely to get these things.
Chris: But that's all that. Like, that's all that disease is anyway, is it's all chance. Like, it's all susceptible. It's all, like, all of this works in probability anyway, right?
Kayla: It's like, not every smoker dies of lung cancer.
Chris: Exactly.
Kayla: But a lot of smokers get lung cancer, right.
Chris: Increasing smoking increases your susceptibility to lung cancer. Right. So it's kind of like a meaningless thing to say. And it seems like he's just saying that to, like, keep the door open on, like, I'm not saying any of this causes that because that would be factually incorrect.
Kayla: He gets to say MTGFR causes these things without actually saying. Without saying that. I also want to just quickly state that he said, he used the word dirty.
Chris: Oh, we'll get to that too, because.
Kayla: That makes me automatic. I have an automatic side eye there.
Chris: We'll get to that.
Kayla: With his book utilizing the phrase dirty. When you're talking about anything health related.
Chris: The book he's known for is called dirty jeans.
Kayla: I'm very skeptical. Like, there's a lot of issue with like using phrases like dirty and clean and pure and not just hang on to that. Various medical communities. So this is already making me side eye and I'm interested to hear that there's more to that later on.
Chris: So that list, if that looks absolutely insane to you.
Kayla: It does.
Chris: I'll talk more about that later and why that's like kind of an interesting thing that the list is so long, but it's something common with alt med actually. But we'll get to that.
Kayla: Oh yeah, well, it's just like, yeah, sorry.
Chris: No, we'll get to that. So one of the things that I read there that I said is like he's in line with the medical community at least making the statement is that there's just no evidence that MTG far SNP mutations cause these kind of problems, or in most cases any problems at all. A large portion of the population are running around with MTHFr SNP's. I mean like you and I probably are. It's very common and it bears no ill effect on them at all. Of course, what Mister lynch says about this is that, you know, about this type of thing is like, oh, nobody's looking at this. Doctors want you to think that there's no problem here, but there really is.
Chris: And I'm the only one willing to tell you the truth about this gene, and I'm the only one that can sell you the right stuff to make this okay again and to clean up your dirty jeans.
Kayla: That sounds very culty.
Chris: Yeah. And if that's familiar, it's because, well, yeah, our show, and also because every pseudo scientific or non scientific healer kind of says the same thing. It's always a conspiracy from the medical industrial complex and only I know the truth.
Kayla: And it's just like, oh, this makes me so frustrated because it goes back to a lot of conversations were having just over this weekend, just you and I off podcast. And it's like so frustrating because. It's just frustrating. It's frustrating, I know, because there's like they take something with a tiny kernel of truth and then turn it into this like bastardized thing. And it's so frustrating.
Chris: So at this point I'm actually going to quote and paraphrase sort of intertwined here from one of the, that I consulted for this episode because they had a lot of good things to say in a way that I wouldn't have been able to say it, because again, I'm not a geneticist myself. I'm not a gene counselor. I'm not. Wait, I know.
Kayla: What do you go to the office for every day?
Chris: All right, so here comes the quote, paraphrasy take on this whole mtHfr gene defect dirty gene situation. First of all, SNP's, remember, that's an incorrect DNA letter in a gene. In the MtHfR gene don't necessarily mean anything will be wrong with you. The frequency of these snp's in the population is extremely high, between ten and 25%. And this person also said that, like in genetics, they think of even a 10th of a percent of people having something as common. So even if one 10th of 1% of the population have something that's considered common.
Kayla: Interesting.
Chris: So ten to 25% is like extremely common.
Kayla: Yeah, 25% is a quarter.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: This is math corner with Kayla and Chris.
Chris: And what that person went on to say is that there's just no way that the occurrence would be that high if they were, quote, dirty and caused all those health problems that lynch claims. Nothing in genetics happens for no reason. So saying that these extremely common polymorphisms are dirty is really oversimplifying it. And it can start to sound a little too close, uncomfortably close, to eugenic language to use the words dirty genes. Yeah, part of it is just using language understandable to his audience. But no one should be made to feel ashamed of their genetics, even, and especially people with actual genetic syndromes or conditions. Genetics is so intertwined with our race, sex, and identity that it seems rude, if not downright irresponsible and potentially dangerous to use the word dirty to describe something in every cell of someone's body.
Chris: And even well known bad genes can involve trade offs. Think of the gene for sickle cell, for example. Being a carrier of this gene is actually protective against malaria. So in populations that are at risk for malaria, this quote, bad gene, or maybe something, maybe it might be called dirty by someone else, is actually good if it's protecting you from that disease. And there's other genes like that too, like Tay Sachs. So saying that these snp's on MTHF are that in reality we either don't know what they're for or know that they're not causing any problem with the actual human's health and metabolism is irresponsible. This person also mentioned to me that it's difficult because books like Lynch's dirty jeans and 23 andme and Ancestry.com and all that stuff get people interested in genetics and how that might guide their lifestyle.
Chris: So there's some good in all of this, too. And lifestyle changes absolutely can help people take control of their health. But saying that these genes lead to this disease in this case is simply an assumption that's incorrect. Also, none of this means that we won't learn more about what these mTHfR polymorphisms mean in the future. But for now, we need to stick with evidence based recommendations to guide our decision making.
Kayla: That all sounds good to me.
Chris: Yeah. So that person, yeah. Kind of went into what you were just talking about where it's like the word dirty jeans is just a very irresponsible use of that word.
Kayla: Right. I also want to say that, like, watching the frequency with which, like, at home DNA testing, which has incredible benefits, it's also been a little bit scary to think about the, like, maybe not so good side effects that come from it. Like, one of the things that I've.
Chris: Noticed recently, if I have a cousin that's a serial killer, well, I mean.
Kayla: It'S good if they get caught. Oh, no. What I was gonna say is that I keep getting something that keeps getting advertised to me, and it's very frustrating. Are new, like, diet programs that utilize, like, you found out what your genes say, so now you need to find out what your genes say about how you should eat.
Chris: That is like 90% of this.
Kayla: Wait, really?
Chris: Yeah, like, we'll get to it a little bit, but, like, I'm hopefully, I guess I'm jumping the gun a bit.
Kayla: But, like, I can cut this out.
Chris: But the prescription, it's always like, now that you know this about your genes, you can eat a certain way, and if you eat a certain way, you'll be healthy. It like, very dovetails into orthorexia. And like, it's always, it's never like, you're a McDonald's person. Like, it's never that. It's always like, if you eat the good, like, you know, holy foods, then you'll be all right and it'll match with your genetics. Even though, like, there's companies that do that whole thing. I forget what the name of the company is that I looked into, but that's, their whole thing is like, they'll take your genetic tests and, like, spit out, like, what your diet should be.
Kayla: Like, I think that's what keeps getting advertised to me.
Chris: It might be the same company I looked into, but, like, it's, maybe that's.
Kayla: Why they're getting advertised to me, because.
Chris: You google, actually, I'm certain that's what it is. Yeah, but. Cause it's like there's no real connection, like.
Kayla: Right. The science doesn't back that up.
Chris: There's just not enough precision with measuring your genetics to be able to translate that into today. You should eat spinach. It just isn't now, just at this point, and I'm probably gonna say this again in this episode, but it bears repeating. I, Chris Carlson, co host of Cult, are just weird as an illustrious of a co host as I am. I am not a doctor, I am not a geneticist, I am not a genetic counselor, I am not even a professional scientist. So I am not asking you to trust me as one of those things, but what I am asking you to do is trust that I spoke to members of all four of those professions to deliver you the information on this podcast. Maybe Mister lynch can say that he also talks to the same types of folks.
Chris: I dont know, but none of those professions are ones which Mister lynch himself occupies. So even though I am just a lowly podcast host, I don't want to make any. I'm not trying to present myself as something I'm not, you know, I'm not a geneticist.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: But I am someone who talks to those people.
Kayla: Right, right. So, and again, I'm shocked to hear that you're not a geneticist. It's.
Chris: I know. So, yeah, I know. Because we spend most of our waking hours together, you would think anyway. So bottom line with having polymorphisms on the MTHFR gene is that it does not, quote, make your genes dirty, and you don't need to buy supplements from one of Lynch's business ventures to clean yourself up. Tests for MTHFR polymorphisms aren't even recommended because any issue that might crop up as a result of not processing folate correctly is easily determined by routine blood tests whether you have an MTFR SNP or nothing, and then your doctor can address that accordingly.
Chris: One site I read put it best when they said, if you have a genetic inability to utilize folic acid, which by no means is assured by virtue of this SNP, this Mt JFR gene, chances are you would have died a long time ago from anemia by a lack of red blood cell creation or bone marrow failure due to lack of folic acid. The Cleveland Clinic, which is just a, it's like a large clinic in Cleveland, well known institute, health Institute, the Cleveland clinic says there's no reason to test for this. And the Mayo clinic, which I think you've probably heard of, which also does a lot of genetic testing. Agrees. Did you ever hear of a medical center that does not want to run a test on you?
Chris: From what I have seen, they would gladly test men for pregnancy if the insurance would cover it, end quote. All right, so not recommended to even test for it.
Kayla: Okay, that feels like that's important to note.
Chris: So why then does Mister lynch say all these things about anti HFR? What's the agenda? Well, he's built quite a brand, quite a following, and quite a business on it. And I think some of it actually comes back to what you were saying earlier about like, oh, it's interesting to be able to build a brand around a gene because it's something that you can sort of claim authority on. But now he's basically known as like the MTHFR guy, which I think he even said a couple times in a couple of the talks I watched him give.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: And that's sort of on purpose. We mentioned his website earlier, which is actually mthfr.net dot. His whole personal website is branded after this enzyme and gene, which is just nuts to me.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Really interesting. And it's a smart brand to build, like for the reasons that we just said. But also he's carved himself out a chunk of an enormous market by focusing one specific, specific gene that he can, quote, call potentially dirty and is in a huge chunk of the population. If you go search mTHfR on Google, if you just type in those letters, all you get is articles and videos that support him and his claims. It's like were talking about earlier. That all leads back to him.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: All leads back to his business, kind.
Kayla: Of flood the web and then it gives an air of legitimacy.
Chris: It's kind of scary. Yeah, and it's a big business. The price of personal genetic testing has absolutely plummeted. Taking a DNA test is literally popular enough right now to be pop culture. Thanks, Lizzo. But it used to be prohibitively expensive, impossibly so, not that many years ago. So with the drop in cost of DNA testing, you essentially create this enormous new market for healthcare and utilizing this vast amount of information being spewed forth by 23 andme and Ancestry.com and all that stuff. So some professions and businesses will of course crop up around this gold rush, and some will be legitimate and use evidence based scientific methodology, such as genetic counselors, some not so much. By the way, I also posed this. Why the MTHFR gene? Like, why that though? I posed that question to some of the folks I interviewed. For this episode.
Chris: And one of the interesting things that one of them answered about this was because it involves folate, which is a nutrient we've all heard of and also is something many women will be familiar with from prenatal care.
Kayla: I don't like where any of this is going. It's really upsetting me.
Chris: So it's something that people can relate to, like, they can relate health problems to easily. So that's like another thing, right. It provides an important gap in understanding from, like, you know, just enough about this to be worried.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: But not enough about it to actually challenge what this guy is saying.
Kayla: That sounds about right.
Chris: I mentioned last episode as one of my sources was a Forbes article. Well, the title of that article is how your genetic sequence can be exploited by the supplement industry, end quote.
Kayla: God.
Chris: And I don't know if that title gives anything away about its contents. I think maybe it does, but what if I quote you? There are two summary points from the start of the article.
Kayla: Please do.
Chris: Point one. Most people with MTHFR polymorphisms have no health consequences.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: Patients should be skeptical of anyone claiming to divine health information from direct to consumer genetic testing. End quote.
Kayla: So that seems to blow doctor Ben Lynch's whole sitch right out the water.
Chris: Mm. And actually, they spend a good chunk of the article talking about him specifically and his business empire. All right, here are another few choice quotes that essentially say the same thing that I'm saying on the show. The alternative health industry is widely broadcasting that so called dangerous genetic variation is lurking in the human population, causing a public health crisis that is ignored by the medical community. This curious forewarning appears to have emerged out of an explosion of direct to consumer genetic testing and health gurus preaching that natural remedies can override our genetic makeup.
Kayla: This is just what you said earlier about, like, it dancing perilously close to, like, eugenics language.
Chris: Like, yeah, this touches eugenics and worse.
Kayla: Like, there are dangerous genes lurking in the population and only we can solve it. Like, that's so eugenic.
Chris: But I'm gonna use this scientific language to sort of, like, prop this up, which also makes it touch the second episode we did. We've talked a little bit about this already, but, you know, using quantum mechanics to kind of, like, support your, like, oh, you can spiritually just do. All you need to do is take my courses here at, what is it called? Ramtha's school of enlightenment. Yeah, RSC.
Kayla: It's like, take, yeah, you take this thing that there's like, some information out there about. But it's like, not, it's something you can kind of like use as a canvas.
Chris: Yeah, it's a total canvas, like a candy.
Kayla: And it also, like the dirty jeans thing just, again, kind of makes, it's gross. It makes me think outside of the eugenics situation. It also, it's like a natural next step after all of the, like, in these same kind of communities, in these, like, pseudoscience and alternative communities. It's like the natural next step after talking about, like, toxins and how we're full of toxins.
Chris: It's exactly, yeah, it's just like that, one of the articles, actually, the same article that I quoted above that was saying, like, you know, they'd test men for pregnancy if they could actually drew that line between, like, antioxidants. Like, this is the next big thing. So, like, antioxidants was like the big thing, right. And now this is gonna be the big thing because antioxidants is kind of like on the downswing because people are like, oh, was that real?
Kayla: Right.
Chris: That wasn't real, which a whole other topic. But it's interesting that you say that. Cause that's very, like, now this is the thing, right? So anyway, so in this article, it gets better, though. Lynch has set himself up as an expert and a leader on this problem that he's invented out of MTHFR polymorphisms. This is me speaking, by the way, right now, not Forbes. And then on the other side, he also chairs and owns a stake in a business that sells the exact solutions to that problem.
Kayla: Oh my God. I'm shocked.
Chris: I know. So, yes, he has his own site, mThfr.net, comma, but he also has a stake, a large stake in a company called Seeking Health, where he sells the exact solutions to the problems he's invented back over in his business of being a quote doctor. And it's so gross, too. Like, you have to go to the landing page to see this. Like, if you go to the landing page for seekinghealth.com, comma, wham. Huge font words, right? In fact, I'll just, I'll show you. But huge font words right in your face. Do you have symptoms of dirty jeans?
Kayla: Oh my God. I, God. Oh my God. No.
Chris: Yeah. So if you go to seekinghealth.com, comma, do you have symptoms of dirty genes? Take the dirty genes character quiz and find out what your symptoms may be telling you. So the answer, of course, is no. No, you don't, because it's a fake thing. But yeah, just to be clear, he's selling nutritional supplements on seeking health. Side note, and we kind of talked about this a second ago, but it's also funny to me just how much of this alt med stuff I readdeze and listened to is like thinly veiled orthorexia.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Which, do you want to explain that for our listeners that don't know what orthorexia is?
Kayla: Orthorexia is an eating disorder. It is, I believe, at the time of this recording, not yet in the DSM, but it is more and more widely gaining acceptance in the mental health treatment communities as a real disorder. And basically it's characterized by, it's similar to anorexia in that there's a lot of food restriction happening. But with orthorexia generally, the obsession isn't necessarily with thinness and losing weight. It's with eating cleanly. It's very much like you start restricting more and more of your diet because you become concerned about what foods are clean, what foods are dirty, what foods are good, what foods are bad, and you kind of start labeling everything in this binary, and that becomes disordered eating. So much so that, like, you know, some people only, will literally only eat chicken and broccoli.
Kayla: And people with orthorexia generally, not always, generally have very low body weight, end up being very malnourished or having nutritional deficiencies. Because when you limit your diet in this obsessive way, you prevent yourself from being properly nourished. And it's an eating disorder that requires a. Requires similar treatment in order to manage and recover from as other eating disorders.
Chris: Yeah. So the way I kind of rocket in my head is that, like, orthorexia is about sort of like, different foods are sort of like good and evil to people. And if you eat this food, it's virtuous and clean and good, and you'll make you a virtuous, clean, good person. And if you use this one, you're bad and evil and wrong and should feel bad.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So that's what a lot of these guys, including lynch and also guys like Deepak Chopra, a lot of what they're saying nutritionally is that, yeah, there are virtuous foods and villainous foods, but, you know, science. So, yeah, you must be sick and have some of those millions of problems we listed because you are not virtuous enough with your eating. That stuff comes up a lot in this. Now, I'm not saying that it's bad to try and have a healthy, well rounded diet, but these guys tend to take it to those sort of like, virtuous, like, villainous levels.
Kayla: A healthy, well rounded diet doesn't have moral judgments.
Chris: Exactly.
Kayla: And also it's important to recognize that with food rules and with restrictive food rules, you can convince yourself that anything you put in your mouth is bad and wrong. Like, I can take you through all the ways that broccoli is bad for you and all the ways that chicken is bad for you and all the ways that quinoa is bad for you. You, in all the ways that dairy is bad for you. And like, if you listen to a lot of, like, pseudoscience rules about food, you stop being able to eat food, right?
Chris: Because everything has something that, like some alt med or pseudoscience person out there will be able to say, this is bad or wrong. So going back to the Forbes article, it continues to say, I want to give you another few quotes here. So this one quote, Ricky Lewis, an author of genetics books and who is a licensed genetic counselor and who has a PhD in human genetics, cautions that any health practitioner who sells such services, and she's talking about these, like, you know, like genetic, nutritional, whatever supplement services, is a modern day version of a snake oil salesperson.
Kayla: Damn.
Chris: And I have one more quote to share from this Forbes article, because it gets even better and it's just so delicious. Oh, God, here we go. Quote, lynch is the founder of Seeking Health Educational Institute. And I checked, and I guess this is actually a different thing than seeking health. So that website we just went to, seeking health, that's different than seeking health educational institute. They're two different things, okay? At least on the interwebs, which is whatever. So seekinghealth.com is where went. Seekinghealth.org is this place. Anyway, continuing with the, quote, SeekingHealth Educational Institute, which provides him with another revenue stream here, lynch sells virtual courses, what? To health practitioners wanting to implement genetic screenings, consultations and treatments into their businesses. These courses are also available directly to patients.
Chris: He claims to teach how to create a million dollar online business, as he allegedly did for himself while in medical school.
Kayla: Wait.
Chris: And through a pyramid like incentive scheme.
Kayla: What?
Chris: No. Lynch gives commission no. To seeking health education institute members who recruit others into buying strategene and other sh ei products. End quote. Surprise. It's an MLM episode. Are you kidding me?
Kayla: This whole thing's been an MLM. My socks are blown clean off. What?
Chris: If it helps, I didn't know that when I started the episode either when I started my research.
Kayla: Why?
Chris: And I read that and I was.
Kayla: Like, is every fucking fraud go back to fucking mlms every.
Chris: Every time, right? I think I even write that down here.
Kayla: So upset. I'm so mad. I'm going to vomit.
Chris: Actually, here's what I write. I say, I've got. I shouldn't say, here's what I write on the pod. I should just say it. But I've got bad news for the patient. The MLM cancer has metastasized, and it's now pretty much everywhere. Your economy only has a few months to live. I'm sorry. And then here's where I. And then here's where I say what you just said, which is, like, doesn't it seem funny that, like, all these charismatic leaders wind up walking down the same, like, pyramid MLM path somehow?
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: And I'm, like, leaving a bunch of shit out, too, about his businesses.
Kayla: Money. Money is so bad. I love money, but oh, my God.
Chris: This may completely and utterly surprise you, but did you know that Mt. Jafar snips also play a role in giving your kid autism? And also blah, anti vax stuff, too?
Kayla: Wait, he's anti vaxxer?
Chris: He has, yes. There's a lot of detail about, like, conferences that he's, like, spoken at and whatnot. That it's, like. It's kind of hard to, like, say, like, but for the purposes of this podcast, like, talking about Ben lynch. Yes. He's anti. He's. He's part of that community.
Kayla: Cool.
Chris: So. But again, like, does that surprise you?
Kayla: I mean, no, it doesn't. It's just. It's always shocking, but not so surprising.
Chris: Yeah. So I'm leaving a bunch out, like I said, but I wanted to mention those things here just to add more evidence to the pile of, like, that we keep coming back to. Weirdos all have, like, the same set of eight or nine beliefs.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: Like, just like we talked about the episode with teal. Like, it's like, okay, that's all the same stuff that the romp that people believe.
Kayla: Honestly, it makes me want to go back and, like, reevaluate some of the topics we've already done. Like, I want to go back and look more into how Supreme Master Shanghai makes money off of her, like, vegan franchises, actually.
Chris: Yeah. You know what I mean?
Kayla: Like, I want to.
Chris: I do know what you mean is.
Kayla: How does the completion process actually work with teal swan?
Chris: Like, well, I mean, she does.
Kayla: Scaling, but, like, will that change at some point?
Chris: Right? So she had to train her practitioners, like, that was a thing. She had to train them. Right? But if it ever got to the point where like, they could train, right, them, then that would suddenly also be a pyramid guarantee that happens. Anyway, I also read an interesting article on sciencebasedmedicine.org that talked about a phenomenon called the, quote, the one true cause of disease, end quote. It's like this phenomenon, right?
Kayla: I feel like I understand what that is before you even explain it.
Chris: Yeah, well, you saw that website earlier in the episode with all of the diseases ever on it. Basically it goes like this. A commonality that a lot of non evidence based quacks have is that their thing is the cure for everything. The thing that they know about causes all disease and only they can fix it. So look no further than what chiropractic used to before it was mostly just like physical therapy. They claim that subluxations, which were like issues with your spine, cause literally everything. All diseases. Every disease that you can, like all the ones we listed on that site, all of those too.
Kayla: Even like tooth stuff.
Chris: Tooth stuff, yeah, everything. Every possible thing that could be wrong under the sun could be cured by fixing these subluxations, by fixing your spine. And now Ben lynch is claiming sort of the same thing with MTHFr. Would you like me to read a partial list to you that this one true cause article contained of the different things that have been claimed as one true cause throughout the ages? Yes, it's pretty eye open. So I already said subluxations, that's towards the top for them. Oxygen deficiency. I'm only going to read some of these because there's a bunch fearful, tight and negative minds. Destruction of the chi, what? Refined sugar grains in the diet. Imbalance, stress, anger, modern medicine, arrogance, inadequate nutrition.
Kayla: I don't understand, what is this a list of?
Chris: This is a list of all the things that have at one point or another been claimed to be the one true cause of all disease.
Kayla: Okay, okay.
Chris: So some people are like, refined sugar causes everything, right? Right. Some people are like, witchcraft is causing everything, right? This is going through history, right? Bad health habits, God, poor sanitation, weak digestive fire.
Kayla: Why did matter?
Chris: Free radicals, we just talked about that a little bit with antioxidants. Sin. I mean, that one's like, you know, before we had like a germ theory of disease, it was like if you were sinful, you got a disease, right? And that was the cause of everything, right? Overeating, breaking taboos, liver flukes. I think liver flukes is talking about the flukes. Probably talking about like drinking turpentine thing.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Anyway, there's a whole long list. But the point is, there's just a been a lot of things that have claimed that they are the one true cause of all disease, which. That's funny, because, like, if there's only one true cause of all disease and each of these things is being claimed, you can kind of see the logical problem with that, right? In reality, human bodies are extremely complex machines. And just like, it would be silly to say that all the problems with your car are caused from car gremlins, or all problems are caused from ionized core diversion gases, because science and I just totally made those words up.
Kayla: Wait, really?
Chris: I just made those words up?
Kayla: That sounded real.
Chris: Thanks.
Kayla: We should start a cult.
Chris: Well, what I was trying to illustrate there is, like, it can be something like, really like magic sounding that people claim is one true cause or something science y sounding, but the same way that. That's silly. It's silly to say that same thing for human disease. Before I move on from talking about this one true cause thing, I want to give you a cool mnemonic that actual medical practitioners use to discuss all the possible categories of things that can go wrong with you.
Kayla: Okay?
Chris: It's called vindicate, which stands for vascular, infectious, or inflammatory neoplastic drugs or toxins intervention, or iatrogenic, which. I don't know what that means. Congenital or developmental autoimmune trauma, or endocrine and metabolic. So those are sort of like all of the categories that they sort of put diseases into. And again, it's like, those are all the different ways something can go wrong. Like, vascular is very different than autoimmune.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So to say that, like, subluxations or MTGFR or anything else can, like, affect both of those things and everything else.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: It doesn't make any. It's just silly, and it's nonsense. Red flag.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: So here we are. We've talked a lot about Mister lynch and empty Jafar and all of the genetics and pseudoscience and all that stuff, and I promised a few things back at the top of the episode that we haven't done yet.
Kayla: Okay. I don't remember them.
Chris: Perfect.
Kayla: Sorry.
Chris: And one of them is the fact that I had this weird sort of journey with this topic.
Kayla: Oh, right. I do remember that.
Chris: Yeah. I. I don't know. Like, it didn't make me question everything, but it was just very. It just got disorienting for a hot minute. And that's why I have so many different sources like this person from Johns Hopkins and this person. But, you know, so let me. I just kind of want to go through that just a little bit because it's basically. It's relevant to the sort of theme of the episode, which is, you know, the trust network and how do you know what to trust and all that. So. Yeah, so there was one YouTube channel in particular, my favorite. It was recommended to. All right, fair. But it was run by a. So it's like this genetic counselor, and it's basically to, like, supplement her practice.
Chris: So one of the weird things is that, like, normally I would say that genetic counselors are the people that you do want to talk to. Like, they're the person. They're the people that will have, like, the evidence based methodologies and everything. And I do feel like this person's videos, for the most part, seemed pretty good. Okay. I feel like a. I'm a non expert in genetics. There's a bit of a. But, yeah, they, for the most part, seem pretty scientifically sound and, like, good information. But then there were, like, a couple of the videos that made me kind of go, wait, what? Just enough of a tickle on my skeptic brain to make me kind of question, even though I was out of my element. So one of those videos from this channel, they brought on a person for an interview by the name.
Chris: Here we go. Name and names again.
Kayla: Oh, God.
Chris: Sorry. Of Rudy Tanzi. I believe that's how you pronounce this. Tanzi. And. Oh, man, this guy has accolades out the wazoo. So I'm on his Wikipedia page right now, and there's just so much. It helps localize Huntington's disease gene via genetic linkage.
Kayla: Wow.
Chris: Was among first to clone something that I can't pronounce gene and map it to some other chromosome. Discovered some. Some disease gene. Like, you know, I don't want to, like, get too bogged down here, but there's. There's so much of this. He also did a lot of stuff with Alzheimer's research.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: But, I mean, you can see this list. Right?
Kayla: That's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of stuff going back to, like, 1983.
Chris: Huh. So a lot of stuff that he, like, either discovered or whatever. And then, you know, he wrote some. These are all the books he's written or co wrote.
Kayla: What is this?
Chris: Well, it says Wikipedia page. So it also says that he, like, plays keyboard with Aerosmith. Okay. To be fair, I did not see that part when I wrote this script for this episode. So that is pretty crazy.
Kayla: Jeez.
Chris: So maybe he's just a bit of a star fucker, then. I don't know. But either way, he's got an honorary doctorate from the University of Rhode island. He is a Joseph P. And Rose F. Kennedy professor of neurology at Harvard, vice chair of neurology, director of the genetics and aging research unit, co director of the Henry and Allison McCancy center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. I mean, and I'm not even listening. Like, you see, there's all this stuff about Alzheimer's research and all this genetic work that he's done, right? So that's true.
Kayla: We're supposed to not trust this guy.
Chris: That'S a heavy hitter or we're supposed.
Kayla: To trust this guy?
Chris: Well, that's how he was presented, and that is while all of those things are true. But he comes onto this YouTube channel show and starts talking about his book, Super Genes, which is one of those books that we just listed. And then he starts talking about how you can kind of, like, meditate and think your way into changing your genetic makeup via epigenetics. And that's where I was like, hold on. And actually, at this point, they. I mean, I hadn't gone to his Wikipedia page yet.
Kayla: I didn't know that he was playing keyboards with arrows.
Chris: No, I didn't know that part. I only, like. It was. It was only, like, five of the accolades. It was only like, you know, all this stuff for Alzheimer's and also the vice director chair, blah, blah, at Harvard. And then I went to the Wikipedia page and saw it even more. But at this point. So I was just a little bit like, hold on. Wait. This guy, though? And then it turns out he co wrote this book, this super genes book with one Deepak Chopra. And it's not the only book he's written with him, I think. So, for our listeners, are you about.
Kayla: To talk a little bit more about who Deepak Chopra is?
Chris: Just a tiny little bit?
Kayla: Because we've mentioned Deepak Chopra a couple times, and I think that for the vast majority of people, Deepak Chopra is a name that we hear and go, oh, that's a trustworthy, learned person.
Chris: Interesting.
Kayla: We have a high opinion of Deepak Chopra as, like, a very enlightened, very educated person who is an authority to be speaking on the various spiritual topics he speaks on. And I have a sense that you're about to maybe tell us why we should think twice.
Chris: Oh, actually.
Kayla: Oh, God.
Chris: Actually, it's more the other way, is that when I heard that he wrote a book with Deepak Chopra. I immediately went like, oh, red flag.
Kayla: I think. Absolutely red flag for folks who already have their toe dipped into the skeptics world.
Chris: Right?
Kayla: But if you're somebody who isn't, or if you're somebody who kind of just, like, lives in the world, like, a normal fucking person, deepak Chopra is, like, oprah's guy. You know? Like, I'm just saying.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: The way Deepak Chopra is presented to most of us is via Oprah.
Chris: Yeah, but Oprah is also the person who introduced or not introduced but helped popularize the secret. Yeah, I know, right?
Kayla: So Oprah's also done incredible.
Chris: Oprah's done incredible stuff. But Oprah is no skeptic. Like, Oprah is no, like, empirical scientist. Is Oprah an amazing businesswoman? Is Oprah, like, one of the original, like, you are your own brand people like, yes, brilliant woman, right? But her scientific medical credentials are not the same as those things. And of course, she's also. That's something that we also do, like, in our society, where, like, we'll take one thing and we'll assume that because somebody's, like, really good at this.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: That they're also going to be really good at that, which is not always the case.
Kayla: Right. She's also where, like, doctor Phil and I think Doctor Oz got their starts, and one day we'll do both of them on our show.
Chris: Exactly.
Kayla: But I do want to mention, especially because this kind of, like, dovetails with the topic we did. A topic you did a while back. She actually has some really great important things to say about why since, like, I think since the late eighties, early nineties, why she has never allowed white supremacist to have a platform on her show, even, like, to come on and argue with, or even to come on and kind of be like, look at these goofs. Like, she maybe will link to it or something. But she makes a very good point as to why it's important to not give people platforms, even when you think they're ridiculous, and even when you're like, I'm just gonna talk to them to tell them how ridiculous they are.
Chris: Right? So, yeah, so when she brings on these other guys that we're talking about, these doctors Phils and Oz's and whatnot, it's not because she's bringing them on to give them, like, a counterpoint platform. It's because she's a. She agrees with them. Right. So I just want to complain now because I got to almost the end of my episode without talking about white supremacy. And then you had to bring it back up.
Kayla: Sorry.
Chris: God damn it.
Kayla: I don't know why you keep bringing it up.
Chris: That was not my fault this time. Oh, my God. Anyway, but. No, but that's a good point. And kind of tying it back to this whole. Woo. Spiritualism thing. Yes. Deepak Chopra is a very well known person, in part thanks to Oprah's show. And he practices what's called ayurvedic medicine. But then he also. It's also kind of like his own thing at this point. It's almost like Chopra ism at this point. And, you know, and he does have some credentials, but for the most part, he is well known, or maybe should be well known, as sort of like a. I don't know, a leading figure in the alt medicine woo sort of arena.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And because of that, when I found that, or when it. When it was stated that Rudy Tanzi had written this book with him, that was another red flag for me. And it. That. And this is. And this is sort of like my max. Disorientation. Sure is, because I was like. I'm like, am I. Am I wrong? What's going on here?
Kayla: Like, somebody who's, like, the professor at.
Chris: Harvard, director of, you know, and, like, discovered Alzheimer's genes and, like, all plays.
Kayla: The keyboard with Aerosmith.
Chris: Right. Well, that's what I was saying when I. When you said that. And I was like, maybe he's just a star fucker, is like.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Maybe it's just, you know. Okay, well, Deepak Chopra is just another celebrity for him to kind of like, you know, rub elbows with a. But anyway, like, it's not to take away any of those things that he's discovered. Like, he's a smarter guy than. I mean, he's. I'll never discover genes for Alzheimer's.
Kayla: Right? So it's just like talking about Oprah. Like, we can talk about the bad things of Oprah. Oprah's also done a lot of amazing things. This Mister Tanzi. Gentlemen. Doctor Tanzi, I'm assuming, has done a lot of incredible things. And also Doctor Tanzi seems to have done some, maybe not as incredible academic things.
Chris: Yeah. So at this point, during my sort of, like, breaking of my brain, I was just like, yeah, how could these two people write a book together? And then even, you know, back then, how could this genetic counselor on their YouTube channel, who generally had good information, although, actually, I later watched a few more videos, and there's a. There are a couple more sketchy ones. Gotcha. Nothing crazy. Just, like, slightly. Woo.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: But anyway, how could this guy, with all these accolades sitting on all these boards and all these blah blah, espouse the claim that you can kind of, like, think hard your way into changing your genetic makeup, right? What the fuck is going on? But, yeah, so it mentions the books on the. As you saw on the Wikipedia article about him, but it doesn't say anything about there being any sort of controversy around these books or around the guy or anything like it. It still really freaks me out. Like, the one thing I saw was, like, in some blog or comment or something somewhere, somebody mentioned that it was, like, maybe hurting this guy's career that he was working with Deepak Chopra on these books. But drop in the bucket, though, right? Like.
Chris: So anyway, this is kind of going back then to, like, I felt disoriented enough that I felt like I really had to seek a lot of outside expertise on this topic. So that's why I spoke with that genetic counselor I trusted, the private firm gene researcher. That was the family of a friend, Alex, and another former gene researcher from Johns Hopkins. We mentioned all these in the citations back in last episode, but finally, I also secured an interview with someone that were super lucky to get on our little show. His name is Doctor David Gorski, MD and PhD.
Kayla: Oh, damn.
Chris: He's actually a fairly well known skeptic. He had his own blog for a while, which ended up turning into being the managing. One of the managing editors for Sciencebasedmedicine.org dot. And he also has, like, this awesome Twitter where he just gets, like, unabashedly political. Like, hell, yeah, I fucking love it. Like he does, you know, because you think, like, a lot of these guys, you know, like, have a platform, and they try to be maybe, like, a little careful, but.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: He just says what he fucking thinks on his Twitter, and it's great.
Kayla: Nice.
Chris: I try to like a lot of his tweets, but, yeah, he totally has all the credentials, too. He's an oncologist, by the way. And just from reading some of his articles and everything, I felt like his brand of skepticism is pretty close to ours. Like, again, like, just a lot of it was from his Twitter. Skeptical, but not, like in a. Like a sort of an asshole kind of way, just more like a, hey, this isn't real. Don't do this. Kind of.
Kayla: So, yeah, it's the skeptical, but not an asshole about it.
Chris: Yeah. So I felt pretty good about his brand aligning with ours, so I had to get him on the show, and I finally did, which is crazy. Cause, like, he's literally, like, just kind of, like, saving lives because he's. Well, he's an oncologist and he's a surgeon, right. So, you know, he does that for a living. And he actually was able to take some time to talk to us, so we're super lucky. Do you want to go talk to him now?
Kayla: Ooh, I get to talk to him.
Chris: We totally have him on the horn right now. Just kidding. But we're gonna basically, we're gonna. Yeah, you get to talk to him. We're gonna.
Kayla: Hell, yeah.
Chris: We're gonna tag team this interview.
Kayla: Nice.
Chris: Then we're gonna plunk it down here, and then after the interview, and I will say another few words about it, depending on how it goes. All right, cool.
Chris: Hello, doctor Gorski, this is Chris Carlson on the call here, along with my co host and wife Kayla.
Chris: Hi.
Kayla: Thanks so much.
Dr Gorski: Hello.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us. So, yeah, I want to be respectful of your time so we can pretty much just jump right into it.
Chris: So if you have.
Chris: If you could just introduce yourself for our listeners and tell us who you.
Chris: Are and what you do.
Dr Gorski: Alrin, I'm doctor David Gorski. I'm a breast cancer surgeon and translational researcher at Wayne State University. I'm also the editor of Science based Medicine, which is a blog devoted to discussing science and pseudoscience in medicine. I've also been known to give a few talks every now and then at various skeptic meetings.
Chris: That's awesome.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Actually, science based medicine is where I found you, and I like some of your articles there. And actually, I really like the site in general. I read a bunch of stuff on science based medicine for this episode. How did you get involved with that? And just in the skeptic community in general.
Dr Gorski: Oh, this is. This goes back more than 20 years now. I can't believe it.
Kayla: Oh, wow.
Dr Gorski: Is anyone familiar with something called Usenet?
Chris: Yeah.
Dr Gorski: Yes. Okay, well, you know. Well, sometimes. Well, here's the thing. I'm getting up there now, and I feel like ancient sometimes when I mention Usenet, and I get either blank stares or dead silence, depending on whether we're face to face or on a, you know, on phone or podcast. So, yeah, in the nineties, like, for some reason, I got into Usenet, and oddly enough, I ended up falling down this rabbit hole of Holocaust denial, and that was kind of my gateway drug, so to speak, into getting into skepticism. I was to start refuting misinformation on the Holocaust because I just. It was just so out there that I couldn't believe that there were actually these people who, you know, denied or downplayed the scope of the Holocaust or tried to make it sound like, you know, Hitler wasn't such a bad guy.
Dr Gorski: Eventually, I started finding my way, because they actually made medical claims, believe it or not, for instance, that, you know, and we don't need to get into it. It was basically, there was this, like, this one long thread that I still remember. Like, God, it's got to be 21 years later now where this one Holocaust denier was arguing about the difference between, you know, protein versus total calorie starvation in the camps. And he actually made this claim that the Nazis would actually, when they had a prisoner who was starving, would actually take him aside and feed him milk for several days until he was back up to snuff, which was just so ridiculous. In any event, we don't need to go into that because the memory is more vague now than it was.
Dr Gorski: But eventually, I ended up finding my way into alternative medicine newsgroups and anti vaccine newsgroups. And this went on for about six years, because at the time, blogs were in the news, and I was, you know, I had been sort of becoming vaguely dissatisfied with just arguing with randos on using it.
Chris: Sure.
Dr Gorski: So I decided. So I sat down in front of blogspot, if you remember what that is.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Dr Gorski: And started my first blog, respectful insolence.
Chris: Oh, interesting.
Chris: I have.
Chris: Is that still around? Can we go check it out?
Dr Gorski: Oh, no, it's my main blog. It's like, I used to keep it secret, but that didn't last too long, because, you know, if there's one thing I've learned about anti vaxxers and alternative medicine quacks is they really, like, ad hominem personal attacks really like to harass you at work. So they really work hard to find out who you are if you work under, if you're right, under a pseudonym. It wasn't that difficult to figure out who I was. It took about all of six months, but, no, I've been blogging since 2004.
Chris: Wow. Wow, that's. Yeah, that's 15 years now. Yeah.
Chris: So how did that transition into science based medicine?
Dr Gorski: Well, apparently Steve Novella and the guys who were working on founding science based medicine liked my stuff, so they invited me to be one of the founding bloggers. But the condition was that, you know, I couldn't write under a pseudonym. So I had to think about it a while, and I decided that since by then, which was the end of 2007. You know, science based medicine went live, like, January 1, 2008. Since I. Since it was one of the worst kept secrets around, I figured there was no real reason for me not to start writing under my own name. And so I did. I still do respectful insulins, like two, or. I still do two or three posts a week on respectful insulins, along with science based medicine, which I often will sort of recycle on respectful insulins a week or two later.
Kayla: Cool. I mean, that sounds. That sounds like quite the online journey. I love that. Since we're kind of talking about, like, epigenetics, specifically in this episode, do you think you could help clarify what epigenetics is for our listeners?
Dr Gorski: Well, epigenetics is basically all the mechanisms for regulating the expression of genes. And by expression of genes, I mean, what. How they make, you know, how they go from genes to protein that are. Do not. They're not directly DNA based. So, for instance, there are epigenetic modifications of DNA that can affect how it is expressed, such as DNA methylation. There is histone modification. DNA is wrapped around protein, is intimately associated with proteins known as histones. And if you look at the illustrations, it basically wraps around the protein, and then it kind of looks a little bit like beads on a string. And then it spirals. Those histones spiral on themselves for more complex order structures. And there's a whole level of gene regulation based on histones.
Dr Gorski: And we discover more of these mechanisms seemingly every year that basically epigenetics is above genetics or outside of genetics. It's any sort of mechanism to regulate how genes work that is not basically the DNA sequence itself.
Kayla: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Chris: Okay.
Chris: So with this episode, we've been talking about not just epigenetics, but the potential for abuse of people not understanding how epigenetics works, and the explosion in ability for people to test their own DNA, and people being able to fill that gap and say, oh, well, you don't know what it is, but I do, and being able to exploit that. And one of the people we've talked about is Ben lynch, who is a naturopath, so. Yeah, but do you know a little bit about what he does that you could maybe speak to why he is able to use this MTHFR gene as his sort of, like, you know, selling point, like, why he's able to say, like, everything that could possibly ever be wrong with you is due to MTHFR, and all you have to do is buy my supplements. Like, can you.
Chris: Can you speak a little bit to that?
Dr Gorski: Well, first, this isn't really epigenetics per se, because the idea is that changes in the sequence of the MTHFR gene, which encodes a gene called methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase.
Chris: Right?
Chris: Yeah, it's a mouthful.
Dr Gorski: Which is involved in the metabolism of folic acid, which is very, you know, important for all sorts of biochemical pathways. The idea is that these various changes in the sequence of the gene have all these effects on your health, which in reality, multiple medical societies have said MTHFR testing is pretty much worthless, and that the vast majority of these changes in the sequence that can be picked up with something called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNP's, have no significance.
Dr Gorski: You know, as far as they can tell, they don't change the structure of the gene, the vast majority of them, but a whole cottage industry has come up, and it's not just him, you know, it's like basically any form of alternate, you know, alternative medicine you can think of that isn't like, based in ancient knowledge, like, you know, traditional chinese medicine or something like that. They've adopted these gene tests. There are only a couple of diseases known to be related to these polymorphisms, these single nucleotide changes, such as they can be associated with neural tube defects, for instance, and a disease called homocysteineuria, which is high levels of the amino acid homocysteine. But it's not just the MTHFR SNP's, and it's also, you know, the vast majority, nearly all polymorphisms in the MTHFR gene have no known health consequences that flow from them.
Dr Gorski: Of course, people like lynch disagree with all the experts, with all the science and the experts, and try to link them to, like, everything from adrenal fatigue to, oh, God, if there's a diagnosis, you can think of it.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: One of the things I thought was interesting that I saw on your site was on science based medicine was there was an article talking about, like, the one true cure and how a lot of these pseudoscience, natural medicine, all, you know, that whole group, well, that's a hallmark of that, is that it's like whatever it is that they're pushing cures not just one thing, everything, or almost everything.
Dr Gorski: Yes, the one true cure. Now here's the other thing, you know, not bringing it back to epigenetics, one reason, you know, so the MTFR SNP's are just, that's genetics. And the vast majority of those polymorphisms have no effect on the function of the gene. Or if they do, there's not any known disease associated with it. Now, what's appealing about epigenetics is epigenetics, in a lot of alternative medicine, there's a lot of element of something that I like to liken to the secret, if you know what the secret is. Oh, sure.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Dr Gorski: You know, where if you wish something for something or want something badly enough, the universe will somehow manifest it for you. Right, right. And, you know, like all good woo. There's a small element of truth in there. And that, like, if you really want something, you're more likely to go out and try to get it and work for it and, you know, etcetera. And which does, of course, make you more likely to get it. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about, you know, if your will and your desire is enough, that somehow the universe will magically manifest this stuff for you. Well, there's a heavy element of that in alternative medicine, which unfortunately runs into a huge roadblock when you come against genetics because, you know, there's, there is a degree, you know, genetics is not necessarily always destiny.
Dr Gorski: You know, it's a stochastic thing where, you know, it changes probabilities. But genetics is pretty much not really changeable. At least, you know, not significantly. So. There is actually a heavily, there's actually, in alternative medicine, there's an element in a lot of it of what I like to call genetics denialism, where like, you can overcome your genes. Now here comes epigenetics that says, well, you can change your gene expression by these various other elements, you know, and so, well, you know, we know that you can change, you can do things that change your gene expression with, you know, exercise or etcetera, while they're, you know. Well, you can see where this is going. Well, you buy my supplement.
Dr Gorski: Buy my supplement, and it will work through epigenetic mechanisms to overcome any issues that you might have a problem within your genetics, whether it's MTHFR or whatever it is, because MTHFR is certainly not the only gene that various alternative medicine practitioners have latched onto. And it even goes beyond that. If you can get into Deepak Chopra territory here, we're.
Chris: I was actually going to bring him up, but I'm so, I'm glad you brought him up because I, I ran into that, actually, I'll just, I'll let you keep going.
Chris: But there's a part where I ran.
Chris: Into him in my research.
Dr Gorski: Okay, Deepak Chopra, his. His angle on this is, okay, you don't even need supplements, exercise, yoga or whatever, to change your epigenetics, you know, to supposedly, you know, improve your health. You can just do it by thinking. You can just do it by meditation. You can basically just will your body, through epigenetics, to, you know, improve itself, fix itself, you know, improve your health, etcetera. And so where did you run into them? Because I bet you that's it.
Chris: Well, so that actually kind of brings me to my question, the 6th question on my list here. This sort of the wrap up question is, guys, you don't have.
Dr Gorski: To do them in order.
Chris: Oh, no. Yeah. Believe me, I don't think I've ever.
Chris: Done them in order.
Chris: So, yeah, so it's really, the question to me is, actually, let me give you, like, a very short story. So when I started doing this research, there were a few recommendations that were given to me for like, hey, go listen to this person's YouTube videos and go to this site and they know what they're talking about.
Chris: Okay.
Chris: And so for the most part, that was true. And then I ran into this video. That was one video amongst many. And the majority of these videos seemed like good science and pretty good. And then this one video, the person brought on Rudy Tanzi to speak.
Dr Gorski: Yes. He works with Deepak Topra. Right.
Chris: He researches. He has like a. He does a lot of research into Alzheimer's and, like, genes involved in Alzheimer's. He has all of these accolades and all of these, you know, he's discovered this and discovered, I mean, he's from, you know, legit universities and everything. And then on this show, he's like, oh, yeah, I started writing this book with Deepak Chopra called Super Genes.
Dr Gorski: Right? Something like that.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: So I have to tell you, this is where I got pretty, like, I don't want to. Maybe not quite discouraged, but certainly disoriented, because here's a guy who has all of these accolades, all of these, has done all this legitimate research and discovered all these legitimate Alzheimer's genes and whatnot. And then the back half of his career, he's writing a book and has since written more than one with Deepak Chopra and is pushing some of this.
Chris: Woo.
Chris: And in fact, a lot of the books, I read some reviews of these books, that's exactly what they talk about in the book, is like, you can just think your way to awesome, healthy genes. And anyway, that is actually, at that point is when I ran into science based medicine and found you. And I was like, okay, I'm not going quite crazy, but then it still weirds me out. So I guess my question is, after all of that, my question is like, what's your take on how to. How to navigate this environment where there's so much information and there's people that seem like they should know what they're talking about for the most part, and have credentials just, you know, out the wazoo, but then can also have these things that they do that are like, very pseudoscientific and woo.
Chris: Like, how do you navigate that?
Dr Gorski: Well, you know, it can be really hard, right? No, I mean, no doubt about it. Humans are complicated. And I know that sounds trite, but it's true. We can be absolutely brilliant in one area and have these wild blind spots that, you know, I'm not sure if I coined this term or if it predates me, but I've sort of. It's sort of become associated with me, is something called the Nobel disease.
Chris: I kind of know a fair number.
Dr Gorski: Of Nobel Prize winners who later in life turned into cranks, really. You know, like, for instance, Luc Montagne. He was one of the co discoverers of HIV. Okay, so he was a Nobel laureate. He is a Nobel laureate still. However, if you look at the sort of stuff he's been doing in the last ten years, you'll see that he wondez. He is started doing research trying to support homeopathy. He's published some rather bad research claiming to show that, like, DNA can teleport or it would take a while to explain. So you don't.
Chris: Yeah, no, I get it.
Dr Gorski: Look up DNA teleportation one of our websites. It'll explain our DNA. Or montagnier and homeopathy. Even more recently, though, he's become very anti vaccine.
Kayla: Oh, no.
Dr Gorski: And has shown up. He's spoken at the autism one quackfest. That's like the early quackfest they have every year in Chicago. He's signed on to dubious treatments for autism, lending his name to this study of long term antibiotics to treat autism in France.
Kayla: Oh, my gosh.
Dr Gorski: So. And he's not the only example. I mean, there's Linus Pauling and high dose vitamin C, you know.
Chris: Right.
Dr Gorski: That happened too, right?
Chris: That's right.
Dr Gorski: Louis Ignaro, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the nitric, of nitric oxide as a signaling molecule. And I actually saw a talk of his in 2006. And so he started out, you know, being very inspiring. And then towards, you know, like in the middle of his talk, years shifted. And, like, to me, it was kind of like grinding a metal on metal.
Chris: You know, like you can sense it coming.
Dr Gorski: He started talking about, you know, diet and heart disease, and how he had developed this arginine supplementation. That supposedly increases nitric oxide levels to protect against heart disease. And I later learned, you know, that he was lending his name to, you know, a major supplement company. Herbalife.
Chris: Oh, God.
Kayla: Oh, man.
Chris: So we've done other episodes.
Dr Gorski: So let's see. There's at least three or four Nobel Prize winners who, you know, gone. Oh, there was another one that I like to joke about, a guy by the name of Nicholas Tinbergen. He used to quip that his Nobel acceptance speech represented a nearly unbeatable record. For the shortest time between receiving the Nobel prize and saying something really stupid about a field that he had little experience with. Basically, he adopted the refrigerator mother hypothesis as a cause of autism.
Chris: Refrigerator mother.
Dr Gorski: Basically that autism is because your mom is too cold and distant. Okay, you haven't heard that one.
Chris: I have this.
Dr Gorski: It was an actual hypothesis decades ago.
Chris: Wow. Okay.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: So it's so funny that you mentioned herbalife, because we've done other episodes of our show on mlms, and obviously they're one of the biggest. So it's so funny that it's like all the, you know, we find doing this show that, like, things that we research that don't seem like they would ever end up tying together, do tie together. And it's just there's like this weird sense that all of this, like, woo, pseudoscience, mlms, things that behave in sort of anti factual manners. It seems like it's almost like all one big blob, for lack of a better word.
Dr Gorski: Yeah. I mean, he even actually, ultimately founded a company called Nutrigenetics to sell his supplements. I'm talking about Ignaro now. So, in other words, being a Nobel laureate is no guarantee that you won't turn into a crank on some issue, on some area. Yeah. Humans can compartmentalize, is the thing.
Chris: Right.
Dr Gorski: And that's kind of one of my explanations for how ostensibly, doctors who think they're practicing science based medicine. Can still be susceptible to, you know, a lot of the woo that goes along with integrative medicine.
Chris: It's interesting, this whole thing, this whole epigenetics things. It smells a lot like the abuse of quantum theory.
Dr Gorski: Oh, it's very much like that. It's very much like that. It's basically, epigenetics can do anything. And part of the thing about epigenetics is there is some evidence that epigenetic. You know, some epigenetic changes can be carried on to the next generation, which has allowed evolution deniers to jump into the mix, too, and bring back Lamar. In reality, these epigenetic changes that they found, it's unclear whether it happens much in humans, but it certainly doesn't persist more than a generation or two. So it's, you know, it's not going to be a thing for evolution, but.
Chris: Right, right.
Chris: Oh, man, it's so interesting, so much. It's like you start pulling at the one end of the yarn and it's just, it keeps unraveling and unraveling. But because I do want to be respectful of your time, that sort of actually wraps it up for me in terms of the questions I wanted to ask. Is there anything that you'd like to.
Chris: Add or talk about maybe that you're.
Chris: Working on or anything that I should have brought up?
Dr Gorski: You know, I think we, you know, covered a pretty good swath of the area. I mean, basically, I really do think that a lot of. Oh, one other thing. As far as epigenetics, anti vaxxers love epigenetics because they can use it to claim that somehow through epigenetics or somehow the vaccines change epigenetics. Well, here's the thing. We have overwhelming evidence from many studies that vaccines are not correlated. Vaccination is not correlated with a higher risk of autism. So how do you get around that, you say? Well, maybe through epigenetics or genetics like these MTHFR mutations, there are certain special children who are uniquely susceptible to this, quote unquote, vaccine injury that causes autism, and we just don't pick them up in epidemiologic studies. Now, of course, this goes a lot against a lot of this.
Dr Gorski: One thing this goes against is the claim that vaccines cause autism in huge numbers. You know, remember, the original claim was that there, you know, there was basically almost no autism before the expansion of the vaccine schedule 30 years ago.
Kayla: Right.
Dr Gorski: You know, and you can't have it both ways that, you know, vaccines cause autism only in this tiny little subset of people, you know, children, you know, with these special genetic changes or epigenetics, and have the same claim that, you know, the vast majority, you know, that the reason we have, you know, so many more autism diagnoses, the reason the prevalence is so much higher now than it was 30 years ago is because of vaccines.
Dr Gorski: You know, you can't have it both ways.
Chris: Right? Interesting. So, yeah, if there's anything else you want to talk about that you're working on or whatever for our audience, science.
Dr Gorski: Based medicine is doing well, but we have some holes in our expertise, so we're always looking for people.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: So that makes sense. You know, so our listeners go check out science based medicine. Really appreciate your time. Also, I love your Twitter, by the way. So just for our listeners, that's Gorskon, G o r s k o n on Twitter. And definitely check him out. And, yeah, so thank you so much for being on the show.
Dr Gorski: No problem.
Chris: So, yeah, thank you for joining me on that interview with Doctor Gorski.
Kayla: Thank you for taking me on that journey. I hope I didn't sound like too much of a dumbass.
Chris: Well, we're both dumbasses compared to Doctor Gorski, which is okay. But, yeah, I mean, there's some key things that I want to kind of talk a little bit about in that interview just because there's some good nuggets. Right. So first of all, I love his comment. The. The best woo has kernel of truth.
Kayla: Oh, my God, you and I talk about that all the time.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. It's so true.
Kayla: It's why I like, it's how I justify to myself when I engage with woo.
Chris: Right, yeah, well, right, exactly. Right, exactly.
Kayla: I'm going to Reggie because it makes me feel relaxed.
Chris: Right. Well, it's not necessarily wrong. Not to tangent on this too much, but, yeah, like, you know, I do stuff, too sometimes that, I mean, we had that psychic medium that came over and we had that outing with our friends, basically with a psychic medium. And it's not that we thought that there was actually ghost conversations going on, but it's interesting to speak with someone who, a, does think that, and then b, clearly has some sense of intuition that allows her to know things about you that, whoa, feels like she shouldn't know based on, you know, how long we've sat in the room together, but. So, yeah, so bottom line is the.
Kayla: Best woo has a kernel of truth.
Chris: The best woo has kernels of truth. One of the other things he talked about, well, actually, it was in reply to my question that we sort of led this interview off with, which is like, what the hell's going on? Like, why are there so many smart people that kind of go down this whoopath?
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Actually, if you recall, we talked about that a little bit in the Romtha episode because there were a few folks that appeared on the. What, the Bleep movie.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: That there was that. That guy that's who's a physicist, nuclear physicist at the University of Oregon.
Kayla: He's also popped up in a couple other.
Chris: Yeah, he has.
Kayla: I forget which ones. But he's been around.
Chris: Yeah. Well, that's because it's the blob. Everything is everything.
Kayla: The blob.
Chris: It's the woo blob. But yeah. So I think actually his answer, Doctor Gorski's answer to me on why that is and kind of how to help navigate it was actually kind of helpful. First of all, you know, he mentioned like, it's hard. Which it is. It just is. There's a lot of information out there. There's more information that's ever existed for humans. It's almost like we're not evolved for this amount of information. This amount of information on things that we don't really know about but is and don't have like expertise in, but yet are sort of expected to be able to judge.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Like genetics. Like I would. I don't know anything about genetics, but if somebody's saying like, hey, I'm gonna sell you this thing, it'll make you healthier. Then all of a sudden I'm like being asked to judge something that I don't know about.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So it's hard. But then I also liked his answer about the, like the Nobel disease. That helps reorient me a little bit on things like, you know, a guy like Rudy Tanzi being so brilliant.
Kayla: Sure.
Chris: In one area kind of like what we talked about before this, before the interview with, you know, with Oprah. So brilliant in one area, but then another area just kind of like, oh, what's going on there?
Kayla: Right.
Chris: I don't know if we talked about it with Doctor Gorski, but you know, Jim Watson, co founder of the DNA double Helix. Watson and Crick. That Watson.
Kayla: Oh God, what did he do?
Chris: He ended up becoming a raging racist.
Kayla: Really?
Chris: Oh, yeah. So actually, I guess I was complaining earlier about like you bringing up white supremacy on the episode and I guess I was gonna end up talking about Jim Watson anyway.
Kayla: Great, so you blame me and it's still your fault.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: It's so interesting that somebody who is that who has made discoveries I know in DNA can end up being a racist.
Chris: Yeah, it's.
Kayla: I mean, I understand why that happens, but it's just so sad.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Kayla: If the study of anything could combat racial bias, you'd think it would be the study of like DNA and genetics.
Chris: But I know it's.
Kayla: I guess not.
Chris: It's very disorienting.
Kayla: Oh, I did also want to say to you that I think that the problem of us having, like, access to information and, like, having to weed through all of it's definitely getting more and more unwieldy. But I think it's something that we've always kind of had to deal with. Like the phrase, you know, you can't believe everything you read has been around for a while. And, like, just the act of reading something that's been written down, it feels like it gives it some sort of authority, and it feels like. It's like when I watch those fucking YouTube videos and it's like, crazy, insane claims. But I'm like, no, no. This guy is right because he's right. Like, it just. Even if you're a skeptical person.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: The brain. I feel like the brain kind of naturally gives authority to something that's been written down and presented.
Chris: Yeah, it's. It's. Being a skeptic is not, like, a naturally easy way to be. It's our brains are mandae. I don't want to make this episode go too long, but I'm listening to a really good book on audible right now called thinking fast and slow. And it's all about how our brains can be thought of as sort of, like, two different entities. There's this sort of, like, intuitive entity, and that's the thinking fast bit in the title. And then there's this more like the, like, the logical, deliberate, long planning, yada, all that brain. And that's the thinking slow in the title. And we think of ourselves as the second bit, because the second bit is the. Is the focus brain. It's the brain that has the sense of self in it. It's. That's what it is.
Chris: But so much of our everyday interaction with the world actually occurs via the other system in your head, which is that intuitive system. And because they give a really good breakdown of, like, why all this is. It all actually has a lot to do with, like, energy conservation and the way that your. Your brain works. Interesting, because your brain is by far the biggest energy suck in your whole body.
Kayla: Right. That's why you need carbs. People.
Chris: Back on the savannah, that was a big deal. Like, now it doesn't matter. But back in the savannah, some of us it doesn't. For some of us it does. That's a good point. When food is scarce, that's a really big deal.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: So were evolved, essentially to have, like, these two systems, and, like, one is there to sort of do, like, the fastest stuff and be intuitive and kind of make hasty assumptions and generalizations.
Kayla: Something looks weird over in that bush over there. I don't quite know what, but I'm going to avoid that Bush because it looks weird. And that's because there's a line in it or something.
Chris: And like this thing, I'm going to make this, like, fast judgment about this thing. And most of the time that'll be just fine. That'll be nice. And if the amount of time that it's wrong is really not a big deal, and then you only enlist your, like, I'm a think about it brain, which they call system two in this book, but you only enlist that when it's like something that intuition can't really handle or doesn't like, needs more information on or whatever. So anyway, the point is what you were saying, we're all sort of like kind of built to have biases and to use intuition. And sometimes intuition is, you know, it's not, it doesn't operate the same way that our logic brain does, our systematic brain does. It's gonna make assumptions.
Chris: It's gonna come to quick conclusions that are not necessarily fully thought out. So yes, it's hard to be a skeptic and it's hard to process information in such an information rich world in a way that is more critical. It's hard, right. And then on top of that, you have people like Jim Watson who are like, hella racist. And if you're somebody that doesn't know and you're like, you know, like, if. Imagine you're, you know, you're early. Imagine you're like a high schooler and learn about Watson and Crick. And the next thing you go home and you read about Jim Watson, like, and you don't necessarily have a trust network that, like, helps combat, you know, racist propaganda, right? That can, that can damage your sense of being like, you know, that can be bad. So anyway, but I did like what he said overall.
Chris: I liked what Doctor Gorsty said about how hard it is and how people can get a Nobel disease.
Kayla: Yeah, I like that phrase. I feel like it's going to come up again.
Chris: Yeah, I liked his commentary, too, about epigenetics. That was interesting. We talked a little bit about histones on the previous episode and how they get all. How DNA gets wound around them. And one of the things that helps regulate when and how often a gene turns into a protein is that coiling bit. So it's like they can either be lightly coiled or tightly coiled. I didn't mean to rhyme there. They can be coiled really tight or really loose. And if they're coiled looser, if the DNA is coiled around these histones looser, then it's like essentially it's easier to access for all the other mechanisms we talked about. So. Yeah, so that was one of the things he brought up. That was cool. But yeah, it was. Anyway, bottom line is really cool to have him on the show.
Kayla: Oh my God.
Chris: Yes.
Chris: It's really lucky and would love to have him on again. Sciencebasedmedicine.org is a great resource and we appreciate you being out there fighting the good fight. Doctor Gorski, if you are listening to.
Kayla: This episode, thank you, Doctor Gorski.
Chris: You want it? Anyway, this has been a really long journey. Start to finish, two episodes long. It's almost time for the criteria.
Kayla: It's almost time, or it is time.
Chris: Almost. There's one more thing, one more quote to bias you. I got this from another article that I read that was also doing its level best to crack that empty Jafar egg. And this is a quote from that article. So, quote, Ben lynch has just literally created, I hate to use the word, but I think it does apply in this case, a cult.
Kayla: Oh my God.
Chris: Yeah. So I don't want to bias you, but anyway, the rest of the quote.
Kayla: Goes, you didn't want to bias me, then you should have read this later.
Chris: Yeah, no, I.
Kayla: You definitely.
Chris: If I didn't want to bias you, I meant I am absolutely wanting to bias you. Anyway, the rest of the quote goes to me. The antioxidant free radical pathology theory of longevity was a cult. Many of those doctors who wasted generations of alternative medicine on the antioxidant hoax are now whole hog into the MTHFR gene scam. End quote.
Kayla: Okay, I didn't realize that antioxidant was like that.
Chris: Debunked from my understanding. Doing research on. Not that, on this mThfr stuff, but it does sound like it's pretty heavily debunked just from the tangential stuff I read about it.
Kayla: Oh, thank God. So I can stop eating blueberries. I'm kidding.
Chris: Well, so again, I only tangential. This episode isn't about that.
Kayla: Keep eating blueberries. They're still good for you.
Chris: My understanding is that the idea that having antioxidants in everything you eat, making you live to be 200, is what's debunked.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: That doesn't mean that antioxidants in some form or fashion are not good for you, but like, you know, if you're having a supplement that's, you know, 10,000% of your daily vitamin C, then you're mostly just pissing that out. Actually, it was.
Kayla: That's the same thing for all vitamins, though, right?
Chris: For the most part. And actually, that was one of the things that. That our friend, our genetic researcher friend Alex said is that, like, for the most part, all these supplements we've been talking about, they're mostly harmless. Like, there's some. That. That's not true, but for the most part, they are. Quote, she said, it just makes you have really expensive pee.
Kayla: I love that.
Chris: Yeah. So do you want to bust out Dem criteria?
Kayla: Oh, so we're officially ready.
Chris: There's the criteria page.
Kayla: We're ready for this.
Chris: All the coffee stains and. All right, all right, all right.
Kayla: Well, if we're gonna follow in Doctor Ben lynch instead. Wait, I thought we're not supposed to call him doctor anymore, right? He's just Ben lynch.
Chris: It depends on how you believe naturopathy, whether it's doctor or not, but I would say not. So Mister Ben lynch, we starting with charismatic leader.
Kayla: We have the criteria. We're gonna talk about Mister Ben lynch and his sitch. So the criteria are as follows. One, expected harm towards the individual. Two, the one that we never can say, right, is it niche or not? Population of the.
Chris: Except now for, like, ten episodes in a row, we've been like, no, it's niche. Just, like, start saying it that way.
Kayla: Is it niche?
Chris: It's only because we haven't written need to. Can we get it? Can we get a pen and, like, change this life on the show?
Kayla: No. Three, anti factuality. Four. Percentage of life consumed. Five, ritual and six, charismatic leader. Now, do you want my knee jerk response first or do you not jerk that knee?
Chris: Jerk it right on at me, Colt.
Kayla: What do you think?
Chris: I think I'm still a little torn. I think. I actually don't know what I'm gonna say until we go the criteria, to be completely honest.
Kayla: Then let's do it.
Chris: Let's do it.
Kayla: Expected harm. I'm gonna say that shit's pretty high.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: Because if you think you can treat your scurvy with MTHFR and then you don't treat your scurvy and the scurvy kills you, that's bad. And that is.
Chris: That is bad harm. I don't know how often that happens. Certainly not with scurvy.
Kayla: That's what happened to fucking Romtha's husband.
Chris: Oh, right.
Kayla: That's literally what happened to, like, this happens to people. They think that alternative medicine is the only thing that they need. And that's why there is another phrase for alternative medicine, and that's complementary medicine. Use it in addition to western medicine or evidence based medicine.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: I think, I think that there's expected harm is high there.
Chris: But yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think to me, most of the harm is the expensive pee thing. Most of the harm here seems to be just like, you don't need this.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: But certainly I did read about there were, you know, there are some cases where, you know, taking supplements that you don't need and over, you know, over indexing on certain vitamins and minerals can harm you. And to your point, if you do have something wrong with you legitimately and you don't seek help from an actual doctor, then something dangerous could go untreated.
Kayla: And that list of diseases that the MTHFR gene treatment, well, don't forget, it just contributes to. I know, but I'm saying if somebody with a serious illness that isn't just like the common cold goes and looks at that list and goes like, oh cool, this will fix my thing, and then they end up dying of it. Like Grumpha's husband, right? Yeah, Bronth's husband didn't die of MTHFR, died of Ramtha, but died of Romtha.
Chris: All right, is this niche or not?
Kayla: I think unfortunately the answer to that is no, it is not. If you are related to a topic that's been discussed widely on Oprah, you're not niche.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. And also, just like the fact that this guy's market, potential market is like everyone has gotten a genetic test on 23 andme or ancestry or whatever, right? That's a pretty big potential market, so I'd say population is big, so therefore not niche.
Kayla: Not niche.
Chris: Okay.
Kayla: Unfortunately, antisexuality. What do you think? I don't know. I'm really torn on this one.
Chris: I almost feel like we skipped because this is like how ritual was for me, for Woodman. This is like, this is the one that kind of brings it onto the show, right? It's, yeah, there's a lot of motivated.
Kayla: Reasoning and the anti factuality here is very high.
Chris: Yes, high.
Kayla: All right. Percentage of life consumed. That one seems to be low.
Chris: Yeah, I don't know, it doesn't feel like somebody that's following Mister Lynch's advice or buying his supplements. I don't think they're going to a compound and living there doesn't seem like it. So not yet, anyway. Not yet. Maybe in the future. So, yeah, I would say that's low. What about ritual?
Kayla: That one's hard because I don't. I still don't quite have a full grasp on, like, what the treatment is. Like, are you supposed to take supplement that? You take like, three times a day. Are you supposed to, like, I don't quite understand. Like, is the ritual reading his book? Is the ritual taking medicine that you are prescribed to by somebody who is a naturopathic doctor? Like, what are we counting as ritual here?
Chris: Good question. I certainly think reading the book counts because I think that's. I mean, wherever I look at Ben lynch on the web, it's always dirty jeans, dirty jeans. Which is his book.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So it seems like they're always trying to push you into that. But then he also has those business ventures with seeking health. It's actually funny. Like, I had a little bit of a hard time myself even figuring out, like, what is he actually recommending?
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Which is so similar to, like, what is this MLM selling?
Kayla: Yep.
Chris: So it's just like, it's getting you in the loop. And then. And then, of course, again, he does have that pyramid shaped incentive structure to, like, have people start their own, like, health based businesses around this. So I think that's part of it.
Kayla: Honestly, if there is MLM involved, then the ritual is high.
Chris: Yeah, I'd say it's depending.
Kayla: Medium.
Chris: Medium to high.
Kayla: Medium to high, depending.
Chris: Gotta read the book. Got to get your genetic tests, right.
Kayla: Oh, yeah. Actually, just the. The act of genetic testing can maybe fall under potentially ritual, depending on your, like, motivation.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: And that brings us to charismatic leader. Charismatic leader.
Chris: Now, I didn't show you any videos of the guy.
Kayla: How are you feeling about that? I think it's. You're kind of the authority on this.
Chris: Yeah, he. He seemed like a nice guy.
Kayla: Does he seem charismatic?
Chris: So I would say yes, somewhat charismatic. Like, I remember watching his videos kind of going like, oh, yeah. I mean, like, I can see where people would listen to what this guy has to say. He seems like he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. He seems like a good dude. He talks about his family.
Kayla: This kind of makes me go back to thinking about the, like, the Doctor Phil's and the Doctor Oz's and the Deepak Chopras of the world.
Chris: Like, all very charismatic.
Kayla: All three of those dudes. Those are charismatic leaders. And all three of those dudes are from, like, the Oprah style camp. And I just. It kind of seems like this guy's maybe like a doctor Oz light.
Chris: Yeah, kinda. He's Doctor Oz with his own like, little section of the alt health world.
Kayla: God, why haven't I done Doctor Oz yet?
Chris: Maybe we should.
Kayla: I really kind of want to.
Chris: Yeah. John Oliver has, so it's kind of. I feel like if John Oliver's done the topic, then, like, we should too.
Kayla: We should just ride on. All for Scotland. So we answered yes to every single criteria. So what do you.
Chris: Well, wait, no, no. Niche. It's not niche.
Kayla: It's not niche.
Chris: So it could just be a religion.
Kayla: But that's the only one. I think it's a cult. I think it's pretty clearly a cult. Definitely cult.
Chris: I think. I think if we're gonna call something like Mary Kay or herbalife, you know, when we do that episode. Oh, that's the other thing we didn't talk about is this. Remember Doctor Gorski brought up herbalife too, and I was like, what the fuck?
Kayla: It's very distressing that, like, MLm came up multiple times in this. I know what is going on in our world.
Chris: It's. It's a talk about a disease.
Kayla: We need that universal basic income. That's what I'm hearing.
Chris: So, so, yeah, I think. Oh, man. I think, yeah. So if we're gonna call herbalife or Mary K or whatever, a cult, even though they're just commercial ventures.
Kayla: Right, right. What are we calling the cult that.
Chris: This deserves it, too?
Kayla: Is it Doctor Ben. Is it Ben lynch? Is the cult. Is it like the cult of Mthfr? What's the cult? Is the cult of, like, genetic testing?
Chris: Well, I think that sort of both because he's so entwined with his brand of the gene. Right, right, sort of both. But then, like, you know, the acolytes are the members of the people that, you know, buy his book and, you know, buy his supplements and do seeking health business.
Kayla: Mlm.
Chris: Yeah, so I think it's that. Okay. But, yeah, so, all right. Yeah. Before, I was actually kind of leaning towards no, until we did the criteria.
Kayla: Really? Why?
Chris: Without breaking it down. It felt like the big thing here was the anti factuality, which kind of like, got it in the door. But then once it was in the door, it wasn't enough to win the award. But now I kind of feel like it does. Because when talking about those other things. Yeah, it wins.
Kayla: Congratulations. That's how we should end every episode.
Chris: Yeah. All right, well, we are ending this episode, but I just want to kind of talk about a few things. There's one thing we mentioned earlier that we actually did not get back to that I want to get back to now because it's related to this whole trust network thing and whatnot. So I do want to reiterate that I'm not trying to, when we say, like, oh, this is a cult, not trying to attack sick people who may have gotten well as they were following Ben Lynch's advice, because certainly that's going to be true for some people. I might say that the causality is not there, but I also don't know everybody's individual experience with this thing.
Chris: So, you know, if you're listening to this and you're someone who's, like, been involved with this and gotten well and whatever, this is not to say you're. You're dumb or wrong or anything. And in fact, I want to mention one last article here before we sign off. And this is the thing I was just talking about that we mentioned earlier in the episode about, like, there's some value to be had from the alternative medicine world.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And I never really explained that. So I also read an article. It's a piece on medium by a doctor, Zubin Damania. The title of the article is pretty illustrative. Illustrative. It illustrates a lot.
Kayla: There you go.
Chris: I don't know how to pronounce that word. Anyway, the title of the article is naturopathy is 99.9% bullshit. But here's what the other 0.1% can tell us. Oh, and yeah, it's. It's really interesting. So, I mean, I recommend reading it, but basically, the entire article, it doesn't pull any punches about naturopathy being unscientific, but it also tells the story of this woman who, as a child, had an awful and really dismissive experience with her dermatologist when dealing with a really bad case of psoriasis. I won't go into it too much, but basically, like, this doctor was basically just sort of like, oh, you're just being kind of a whiny kid. I have, like, real problems to treat kind of thing.
Kayla: Oh, my God. I think a lot of us has probably experienced that.
Chris: Yeah. Right? And actually, it ended up driving this person. This girl later grew up and then knew that she was, like, she wanted to be herself, be like, a healthcare practitioner. And it drove her to become a doctor of naturopathy because she didn't want to be like that.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And anyway, the whole thesis is essentially that, like, it's the bedside manner argument.
Kayla: Right? Right.
Chris: And it's that the main thing that alt med practitioners provide is time, attention, and taking you seriously.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: You know, an hour with a naturopath or an acupuncturist is an hour of them giving you their full, undivided attention. And sometimes that's, like, what you need. Sometimes it's really valuable.
Kayla: Absolutely. That's why I went to Reiki that one time. Cause I literally knew. I was like, I don't feel good, and I just want an hour.
Chris: You just want someone to take care of you.
Kayla: I'm just feeling like, I don't believe that Reiki is a thing going to actually physically fix anything.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: But I want an hour of feeling cared for.
Chris: Right, exactly. So, you know, in an hour at the doctor's offices, it can be a crapshoot. Right? Like, sometimes you can get good one one time with a doctor, or sometimes you have five minutes of them staring at a screen, calling you fat and prescribing some drugs. I've had both. I like my general practitioner doctor right now. I think he's pretty good, you know, but it can be a crapshoot. I've had the other experience, too. Right. But, and even then, like, I'm actually, I'm not, you know, I'm saying, like, oh, doctors can be mean. Like, I'm not actually saying this to indict doctors. They have to deal with a pretty crazy system themselves. There's too much demand, there's not enough supply. They have certain expectations from the insurance company and from all, you know, all sorts of things.
Chris: So they're just also trying to do their best for the most part, in, like, a system that's a little bit fucked up. So, like, I guess. I guess this wound up turning into, like, just another, like, lament about the US healthcare system. Is this capitalism as a cult again?
Kayla: Is that, if we're talking about insurance, then aren't we talking about that?
Chris: I guess so. No, we talked about insurance on my last episode. Oh, that was life insurance.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: So, I mean, I think, or I'd like to think that if were somehow to magically be able to untangle this gigantic clusterfuck of us healthcare, then doctors probably would have more time and more ability to give patients real time, real listening, and real attention. I think a lot. I think, at least in my experience, most of them want to do that. But at this time, unfortunately, the unmet demand for time, attention, and that kind of personal care, that demand is being met by energy healers and acupuncturists and sometimes Mt. Shafar, snake oil salesmen, unfortunately.
Kayla: You know who else can get an hour with their doctor?
Chris: Rich people.
Kayla: Rich people. Because capitalism.
Chris: Oh, boy. But I mean, like, you've had, like.
Kayla: You'Re, oh, yeah, no, I have fantastic doctors.
Chris: Yeah. Like, I think we've like, gotten to the point in our lives where we've been able to, like, mostly filter, yeah. The bad ones out and keep the good.
Kayla: Like, I like seeing like, x amount of doctors just like, get to one who will actually like, sit right. Talk to me.
Chris: Yeah. So that's a demand that it could be getting met by folks who practice science based, evidence based things, but it's not. And so people seek it elsewhere. Anyway, I'm no scientist. I'm no doctor.
Kayla: I'm just a lowly podcast host.
Chris: But I trust the people that I was able to talk to for this episode that are.
Kayla: Do you feel like you are no longer destabilized? You feel like you've come out the other side?
Chris: So, yes, I do feel better for, and some of the specific things that I think helped me get there were like, you know, talking to this friend of mine who was a geneticist at Johns Hopkins when I brought this up with her, she was like, oh, yeah, there's people that like, that happens all the time. Like, she was not surprised. She was like, yeah, people sometimes are just like, you know what? I'm gonna get money.
Kayla: Damn.
Chris: Like, she was very, she was very like, yeah, sometimes I, people just say like, kind of give, she says she even knew people that were kind of like pretty well respected themselves and then at some point were just like, im a sellout.
Kayla: Its just unfortunate that in this arena, being a sellout is like so dangerous.
Chris: I know, but, you know, that helped. Talking to Doctor Gorski helped. And again, like, Doctor Gorski said its hard and I think its okay that its hard. And sometimes youll be disoriented and thats okay. And, you know, hopefully this show can be for some people out there that sometimes get disoriented because again, it's 2019 and like, holy shit, everything is crazy. Maybe this can, like, sometimes be a little island of solitude. I don't know what I'm saying at all.
Kayla: That's fine.
Chris: I just hope that you like listening to this episode and this podcast and maybe sometimes if you feel like the world is crazy and you don't know what the hell is going on, I would like to think that maybe we help a little tiny bit.
Kayla: Hopefully this is a little bit of a bright spot. I think it definitely is good therapy for you and I, and hopefully it helps other people.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: Thanks for doing all that research.
Chris: Yeah. Anyway, end of episode stuff like share and subscribe.
Kayla: Like share and subscribe rate.
Chris: Send us your stuff. Oh, this is a perfect one to pimp the whole, like, tell us your stories thing because this whole episode was a suggestion from a listener.
Kayla: Oh, right.
Chris: So thank you to that listener. And, yeah, so, like, share, subscribe, and, hey, if you're someone that's had a good experience with lynch, email us and disagree and let us know why. And, you know, give me some. Some resources to go take a look at. You know, always open to, like, read more information and understand more.
Kayla: Thank you to everyone who helped in the making of this.
Chris: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, thank you to, like, half the country that I talked to, literally.
Kayla: Also, this is. This is our last episode before our finale.
Chris: Yes.
Kayla: Our season one finale in two weeks.
Chris: Yes. We are going to do something slightly different for our finale because we like doing things that are slightly different. Hopefully you guys will enjoy it. Then. We're gonna be on a little bit of a holiday break. We know there's a lot of content here to kind of swallow for one whole season of the show. I know there's like, I know my dad's still catching up, so, you know, catch up time for you, holiday time for us. And then we'll be back in the spring for season two, which we have such good ideas for season two.
Kayla: Doctor Oz.
Chris: Doctor Oz.
Kayla: Just the whole thing's on Doctor Oz. Add it to the list and, yeah, in the meantime, we'll obviously still be checking our social media and our email. So reach out to us culturejiswirmail.com or culturejisweird anywhere on the Internet.
Chris: But there's still one more episode. So I know we're talking about, like, this is what's gonna happen at the end of the season, but we still have one more. We have a finale. So look forward to that in two weeks.
Kayla: I'm Kayla.
Chris: And I'm Chris.
Kayla: And this has been cult for just weird.