Are you being influenced to death? With Victoria LaFont

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Content By: Ari Whitten

In this episode, I’m speaking with Victoria LaFont, co-host of the Influenced to Death podcast, owner of The LaFont Agency, and someone I’ve been working with for a few years now and consider a friend and trusted peer.

It might seem strange that I’m recording a two-part podcast about another podcast, but the reason is very clear in my mind: There are many highly controversial topics in health science, and many experts cherry-pick and distort the evidence. 

Influenced to Death is a podcast specifically about taking on these controversial topics and trying to systematically bring greater clarity to them, in a balanced, evidence-based way. Plus, it does so in a way that’s entertaining and actually fun to listen to.

I know you’ll enjoy my conversation with Victoria, and I highly encourage you to listen to Influenced to Death, as well, to get a new perspective on some of the most controversial topics in natural health and functional medicine.

Be sure to listen, follow, rate, and review Influenced to Death on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Table of Contents

In this podcast, Victoria and I discuss:

  • The reason Victoria felt the need to create Influenced to Death and how it connects to her own health journey…her story might shock you!
  • Why the podcast has a comedic edge and isn’t strictly focused on facts and figures 
  • Why Victoria and her co-host, Hannah Wright, feel it’s so crucial to name their personal biases in each episode 
  • The evolutionary reason why many influencers present such imbalanced, one-sided information in the first place…and what makes us susceptible to this phenomenon
  • The real-life impact of what happens when false information influences large numbers of people
  • A primary quality you should look for in the teachers and influencers you follow to know if you’re getting balanced information…or not
  • Our own histories of being over-committed to one “true way” of thinking about nutrition or lifestyle and how we ultimately realized this wasn’t the best approach
  • How “evidence-based” can be used in a balanced, responsible way or in a narrow, limited way that lessens its usefulness
  • Some specific topics Victoria and Hannah will cover in upcoming episodes like detoxification and medicinal leech therapy
  • The powerful nocebo effect and how it possibly leads to health outcomes even more negative than the unhealthy food or toxins people attempt to avoid

Listen or download on iTunes

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Transcript

Ari: Victoria, welcome to the show.

Victoria: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Ari: We’ve had a lot of conversations in recent years working together, but this is a first. This is a first of us having a conversation publicly about your podcast. We’ve talked a bit about what you’re doing, just in our own friendly communication, as in our personal relationship, but now I’m featuring you on the podcast to talk about the work that you’re doing.

What you’re doing with your podcast is very interesting and very novel, and very fun, and just a very cool concept. Let me have you tell our audience why you started this podcast, Influenced to Death, and what it’s all about.

Victoria: Awesome. Again, thank you so much for having me. It’s exciting for me to talk to you about it, and spread the word about it. Yes, myself and Hannah Wright, we are the hosts of Influenced to Death. Yes, we started this podcast. This has been a brainworm for me for the past 15 years. Really, the goal of the podcast, is to shine a really balanced light on what’s happening in our world, Ari and I’s world in integrative medicine, maybe in conventional medicine a little bit, but it’s just not my shtick, like my people are the functional people. I try to stay in that world.

When we pick out topics, they’re usually topics that are more holistic in nature. Really, it came from my background growing up, the health problems that I had myself, and then, becoming a professional in this world, and just seeing there’s a lot of bias that is in integrative health, and we want to talk about that. That’s where Influenced to Death came from.

We try to infuse it with a little bit of comedy, which is even in the name. It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, right? We’re speaking to influencers, not all influencers, but some of them. Actually, the fact that some people have truly been influenced to death. That’s not to take the focus off of the fact that we are autonomous, we have responsibility for our own choices, but I think that we can all see, or we’ve experienced, I’ve experienced this. We’re pretty desperate for answers.

That’s one of the big pros of functional medicine, is that we help people explore. For instance, the meme that comes up most of the time is somebody goes to the doctor, and they’re just dying in front of the doctor, and they’re like, “Your lab tests look totally normal.” [laughs] It’s like, “Hey, well, hang on a second. Something isn’t right.” We try to consider both sides.

We’re doing it in a way, where it’s not drudgery. That’s not my personality. Hannah’s a lot more thoughtful, and I don’t want to say introverted, but considerate compared to me, but my personality is fairly gregarious, and I enjoy laughing and comedy, and like that, but from an entertainment standpoint, it seems smart to infuse this subject matter with more than just like, “Here are the facts, here’s the research,” and like that. It’s like, we want to bring a little bit of levity to this topic, because it can get dark.

Victoria’s story

Ari: Okay. What would you conceptualize as the goal of Influenced to Death? Why is this work important? What are you trying to accomplish with it?

Victoria: Yes. I’m also thinking like, maybe– Could I just tell a little bit of my background?

Ari: Please, yes.

Victoria: What got me here? Was sick kid, the story that so many people have in this world, couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I was vegan, tried all the different diets, everything–

Ari: Oh, I remember you telling me about the stint in Hawaii as well. I’m sure you get there.

Victoria: Yes. I lived in Eugene, Oregon first, switched to very hardcore vegan diet. Got worse and worse and worse. Went to Hawaii, dropped out of college, hitchhiked around Hawaii. Tried to figure it out. Ended up living at this raw food community on Big Island called Pangaea. My guess is, even knowing the people who listened to your podcast, somebody out there might be like, “Pangaea?” [laughs] Because it was an ecotourism spot.

A lot of people came to Big Island and stayed with us there, but we ate the primal diet. It’s a completely raw diet that includes animal foods.

Ari: Wow.

Victoria: Pretty trippy. It was the first time in my life that I was like, “I think I feel like other people feel now.” You can feel this good. Looking back, I’m like, “Okay,” I was getting major doses of sun every day. We worked out on the land every day. There was no gluten in that diet, and I happened to be celiac.

Ari: Wow.

Victoria: That took me years and years to figure out. Of course, it’s like there’s all these different factors, but it was really the first time that I felt like, “Okay, maybe my body works. I’m not just going to be stuck in here for the rest of my life.” Then, from there, I moved to Northern California, and actually got a nutrition certificate. Started seeing clients in Northern California.

During this whole time, I developed more symptoms. I still wasn’t just right. I think, the big symptom that I dealt with was rosacea. Really extremely severe rosacea. The videos and you’re like, “Oh, it was painful.” It looked painful. It was embarrassing. I mean, we usually don’t think about quality of life as the first issue that comes up when people are sick, but it’s hard to have this thing on your face. [chuckles]

Ari: Yes. That’s actually the first thing I thought of, because I had acne when I was a teenager, and I remember just having no self-confidence, and just like looking at girls that I was attracted to, but like, “Oh, there’s no way I’m ever going to go talk to her, because I just have all this stuff all over my face,” that is horrifying,

Victoria: Yes. It’s really impactful for people. What ended up happening is like, okay, I’m a nutrition professional, and I have this horrible, it’s like peelings. I remember contacting Doctor’s Data, which is this testing lab. I was like, “Can I mail you the skin that comes off my face that you analyze it to tell me what’s going on?”

I’d seen so many people had never gotten a diagnosis. I think what has influenced me in this direction with Hannah to do this podcast, is I saw all of these integrative clinicians. I spent so much money. I swallowed so many pills. Looking back, I was on supplement regimens that were bananas, ate really restrictive diets. I remember I was on AIP, but AIP with no tropical foods, because maybe there was some issue [chuckles] with tropical foods. In hindsight, I’m like, “Oh my God.”

Ari: For people listening, AIP is autoimmune paleo.

Victoria: Yes. An autoimmune protocol, very restrictive. Got treated for issues, that “issues” that came up on a gut test that were not actually a problem. Went through all of this work, and there was very little change in my face. There was like no effect. It made me think like, “Okay, I’m glad that there is this alternative route that people can take, but even it’s failing me.”

I don’t have an answer that has become clear here. Then, in the midst of that, working in this little town in Northern California, I’m this new kid on the block, and I’m putting myself out there everywhere. It just so happened that this town was a gold mining town. All of the tailings piles are there. People are exposed to this, and there’s this like massively high rate of breast cancer in this little town.

Ari: What do you call that? Tailings piles?

Victoria: Yes. From the gold mining. They would use mercury and tungsten, and I want to say arsenic to mine that gold.

Ari: What? They use those metals to help strip out other compounds to isolate the gold?

Victoria: I think so. Yes. I think it would bind it, and then they could get the gold more easily.

Ari: Oh, wow.

Victoria: There’s these huge, they’re called the diggings in this area. It’s like these huge places where they use hydraulic mining equipment. They basically like use water just to blast away the dirt, and then they would get the gold out of there. There’s these enormous craters people go hiking in now, but–

Ari: Presumably, this stuff gets into the groundwater in those areas?

Victoria: [crosstalk] By the way– In the dust and it’s everywhere. I was actually part of a study in that area, trying to look at the connection between metal exposure and breast cancer. It’s prevalent. All these women come to see me for breast cancer, and I’m like– Really have no business working with these women, but I could see they aren’t getting as much help as they would like from their doctors.

They’re eaten up with this disease. I’m trying my best. Then, there’s some people who are telling these women like, “Oh, yes, I can absolutely, basically, heal you from cancer.” I was like, “Hang on.” [laughs] It’s just too much. This just isn’t true. I started to get influenced where I was like, “Oh my God, like where do we go if conventional isn’t helping us, and integrative isn’t getting the job done? What else is there?”

At that time, I just had this side project from my practice as a nutritionist. I started a protein powder business. We’re like Laverne & Shirley. [laughs] My business partner and I are like in– That are like hair nets in a commercial kitchen, mixing the protein powder ourselves. It just happened that business did well and we sold it. I had this money, and I went to graduate school.

That’s where I was like, “Okay, maybe this is an answer for me,” because there is a way to approach health science that isn’t just like– I think people had good intentions. Let me say that. Looking back, slapshot or conventional, there’s this other way, where we can follow really good clinicians, and the experiences that they’ve had, and research. That just was not my experience up until that point.

Going through grad school like, “Okay, right. It’s rosacea. There’s research that helps to resolve that.” I’m super lucky that I’ve sold the protein powder business, and went to grad school, and had this experience where I had an amazing symptom resolving the rosacea. Then, just started to see like, “Okay, we really have to do our due diligence when we’re working with people, and putting information out there.”

It led to the work that I do now, and particularly this podcast. The way that we have designed Influenced to Death, is we examine a topic in each episode. We’ve looked at soy. That’s a huge, controversial– [laughs] It’s one of the most controversial topics, or we’ve looked at the carnivore diet. We give the backstory of that topic. The history, and then we look at our own biases.

I can see for myself, there’s some topics where I’m like, I absolutely have a pro bias. Then, I go look at the research literature, and I’m like, “It’s not so great. I think I’m wrong,” or conversely, I have a negative bias. Then, I look at the research literature. I look at the fact that it’s helped lots and lots of people. I’m like, “I’ve got to consider this.” We’re very upfront in every episode, like, “Here’s what we think.”

Then, we go through the research literature, and then we give people a takeaway. We do our best to make every episode follow that template. People can see like, “Okay, there’s not just one story on this topic, the popular narrative, or what people have seen in marketing, or on social media. There’s a very complex story that accompanies most of these hot topics.”

Influenced to death podcast

Ari: Excellent. The goal of this, ultimately, with each episode of Influenced to Death, and why you think that this is important for the broader, natural health functional medicine community, is to help balance out biased information, or cherry-picked, or distorted information. Is that how you would conceptualize it, or explain that side of things?

Victoria: Yes, to a degree. I think that, that’s important, but my history with being a clinician, and being a patient like that. Mainly, I just think about the people. It’s like, there’s just people out there that need answers. They need something that works to help themselves, or their families. The main exposure that we get is, we go on Google, or we go on social media, or we even have these people that we trust that we get our information from, and we all have our biases.

It’s just part of being human, right? That’s why we talk about our biases in the show, but I would like to show people that there is more maybe than meets the eye in what they see like on an Instagram reel, or what their favorite influencer tells them. Hopefully, they’re getting their information from someplace that’s really accurate. The person’s done their due diligence.

They’re presenting both sides, but more and more we see that people just pick one side. Their followers believe that, they follow it. If they’re not getting results, they need to follow it harder. [laughs] It’s like just recently we had an episode on this foundation, and it’s like, “The guidelines of the foundation are, God’s true law. If you don’t have good results, you just have to go harder with those guidelines.

Ari: Wait. Sorry, what? The thing is called the foundation?

Victoria: Oh, it’s– No, it’s The Weston A. Price Foundation was the episode that-

Ari: Okay, got it.

Victoria: -we did, but– There’s wonderful things that foundation has done, but then we look at some of what’s happened, and people again have spent, probably, millions of dollars. Some people have had really negative outcomes, and it’s like, “Well, because there’s more to the story for almost every part of health sciences than what people are told.” From a business perspective, I get it.

It’s like put your stake in the ground, give people your stance, you get a crowd behind you, you get your audience. Then, if you change your mind, it’s like, “What are– Are you an expert? Are you not an expert?” It’s very easy, I think, to have it go in that way, and be successful. The reality is so much more complex. We say this often, Hannah and I, to each other, like, “We can’t meme-ify medicine. It just doesn’t work that way.”

Yes, I think for me, and I would say, I don’t want to speak for Hannah, but likely her too, our main goal is to just, again, make people laugh. We try not to get too dark. We keep it light. I share my crazy stories from– We’re going to do an episode on leeches in [laughs] February. That’s going to be a wild one. I have personal experience with leech therapy.

Ari: I see.

Victoria: Also, like to give them information that, hopefully, will help their lives, and help them think like, “Okay, maybe I don’t have to avoid gluten at all costs. It’s okay to eat this.” Maybe just to lighten the load a little bit, and give people a different perspective.

Why influencers make bold claims

Ari: Yes. This is a very sort of meta question. It’s a big one. I know there’s lots of nuances and complexities here, but I’m just curious to get your take, to think about the psychological dynamics at play, that even make such a podcast like yours necessary in the world. What are the psychological dynamics at play that lead to influencers dishing out often such distorted, misrepresented, cherry-picked, bad, inaccurate information that ultimately leads people in a bad direction?

What are the psychological dynamics at play among consumers in the general population that make them susceptible to these kinds of phenomena, or the extreme of which that make them susceptible to, let’s say, the charismatic cult leader type of influencer, who’s got some very extreme approach to something, let’s just say diet, because that’s the most common one.

Why it is so common over– Throughout history, throughout, let’s say, recent history in the last century, in particular, for this thing to emerge again and again, which is, some person comes out and says, “I’ve found the one true diet, the one– The best fat loss diet, or the ancestral diet. This is the way that humans ate throughout all of history. This is the one right way to eat. You need to get rid of all these foods, and only eat these foods.” Right?

We’ve seen just endless permutations of that, and iterations of that sort of phenomenon. To the extent someone is a particularly charismatic leader, and often to the extent that they don’t ground things in nuance and complexity, and present the opposing evidence and counter arguments to their perspectives, but to the extent that they actively distort, and cherry-pick and present this very extreme narrative, they tend to attract a very strong following of devout followers who swear by these methods, and think they’ve found the genius influencer, and the one true right way to eat and to live.

Victoria: Yes. [chuckles] Okay, I have an answer for that, and I’m actually curious what you think also about this, but then there’s a connected idea that I’ve thought about a lot lately. To answer the main question, I think it’s evolutionary biology. We need bias. It saved us. It’s the reason that we’re here, and our ancestors survived. I truly believe that to be the case.

That’s actually, to me, one of the most fascinating fields of study is, the way that our behaviors and mind, and behaviors evolved over millennia since we’ve been human, and maybe even before. We had to stay with the pack. It was not good to separate from the pack. We needed this heuristic– This template for seeing the world. Our brains are designed in that way. Actually, the first time I read about this was in Michael Pollan’s book, I think, How to Change Your Mind, where he talks about when people take psychedelics, it actually decreases the activity of the default mode network, and we can see all these possibilities.

If we were like that all the time, we would use up so much calories that we would like kill ourselves, essentially. [laughs] He’s like– It’s very fascinating, because kids have very low activity in their default mode network all the time. It’s like everything is new, but eventually we– I think around puberty our brain changes a little bit, and then we have this set way that we see the world, and we have to have that to conserve enough calories to get through our day.

We do have to have that way of seeing things. Like I said, I don’t think it’s malicious. I have to also believe that, in order not to go insane. I want to come toward this topic with a lot of charity, because if I did believe that people were malicious, and how they marketed, or picked this stance, and every other input source of information be damned, like this has to be the way that it is, I would go crazy myself, so. [laughs]

Ari: Well, I don’t want to lead you off track, but just to briefly comment on that. I think it is a good assumption to be charitable and generous in the assumptions you make about what’s going on in a person’s psychology, and their intentions in that way. However, I have witnessed several very clear examples of people who are very knowingly distorting the evidence, and distorting their arguments, and deliberately ignoring and leaving out all of the information that goes against their narratives, to present an afactual narrative, or a distorted narrative to make money.

There’s a strong financial incentive to do that based on this dynamic that I was describing earlier, to be the guy who, or the girl who presents the next big one, the next big diet fad that goes viral. If you are that person, you stand to make a lot of money, and therefore, there’s a financial incentive to be that person, and to not present a very complex, nuanced, picture of, “Well, this evidence says this, and this study showed this, but these other studies showed this, this and this, which countered those studies,” and therefore, we need further research to make a strong conclusion about X, Y, Z topic.

It’s like, “No, this is the magical diet. If you just do this diet, you’re going to have endless energy. Your brain– Your performance is going to be off the charts. You’re going to like physically, mentally, you’re going to lose fat without even trying.” You present that narrative. “This is how our ancestors ate. All the– This is the one true human diet.” Right? To the extent that you present those kind of distorted narratives-

Victoria: To make money.

Ari: -you potentially can get that virality aspect, and certain people know this, and do this intentionally.

Victoria: Yes. It breaks my heart. Honestly, it’s like, if I’m able to drop into how it makes me feel, I just think about all of the clients that I saw over the years, and I’m like, “Yes, that hurts people.” It just makes me so sad to think that, but when people aren’t intentionally doing that, and I believe you, I’m sure you have seen that, and it is a great marketing–[crosstalk]

Ari: I’ve seen some pretty extreme intellectual dishonesty.

Victoria: Oh, yes. It’ll make money, but I do think it truly kills people. We have evidence of that with certain influencers. People who are trying to do their best, and it’s not malicious. I think it probably is based in just this very primal brain that we have. The good news is, we have a frontal cortex. [laughs] We can step out of that, and I think it’s one of the reasons that I like working with you so much.

It’s like, we can see ourselves a little bit, maybe not in every moment, but I also think there’s a way that I have faith in human beings. [chuckles] I’m like, I do believe that even though we’re short on time, and like the eggs we buy are $9 a dozen. Whatever the obstacles are, I do think we have the ability to step outside of ourselves, and make choices based on balanced information. We try to make the podcast fun and anecdotal, and like that to make it a little easier. It’s like a spoonful of sugar. Totally cool with doing that, and it’s fun for us too.

I believe that the tide is turning in that way. I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s like people who are starting to present a more complex picture are gaining in popularity. I want to see that grow more and more. The reality is, I don’t have to be the person who does that. Yes, I love this field, and I love the podcast, and I want to keep doing it like that, but I’m like, “Anybody, take this idea. Run with it. Tell your audience about it. Let them in on the fact that there are actionable steps you can take from a balanced viewpoint.”

I think it was David Perlmutter, a couple years ago, I saw on his Facebook page, he was like, “Hey, I just want everybody to know I used to say, ‘You shouldn’t eat honey, because of the effects that it has on brain function,’ but I think I was wrong.” I went nuts in the comments, and I was like, “Thank you so much.” Like, “This is such a big thing.” That to me is the trust factor in any person who has an audience, is for them to say like, “For better or worse, I think I was wrong.” That’s huge. I think that that is gaining in popularity. I think people are starting to be like, “We can see behind the curtain of this.”

Then, the adjacent point that I think is really interesting to this, Ari, and this might be a little too far off track, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about, so I’m just going to put it out there. I have such a love of examining bias, and looking at these different sides, and trying to find, what would be the most appropriate path for a person, or what is the full story? The more I play around with this topic, I actually wonder if that is what’s best for most people.

When we look at studies, and we see that people who have a faith community, have better outcomes, or we see when people really believe in something, whether the mechanism is effectual or not, they have better outcomes, I’m like, “Who am I to burst somebody’s bubble?” There is a way where when we just believe really deeply in something, and we don’t examine the bias, and we don’t think about it too much, sometimes it works really well. [laughs]

I’ve actually been questioning my own methods of pointing out bias, and looking at the research in all these different ways to be like, “I don’t know if that’s what’s best for people.” We’re going to keep doing the podcast. It’s fun. I do think that it serves. I will say, after grad school, there are things that I used to believe in that were really effective for me. Once I understood there was nothing really to back that up, it lost its effectiveness. I’ve had that conversation with Tim Sharp before, where I’m like, “My placebo got stolen from me in grad school.” [laughs] He’s like, “That absolutely happens.” Like, “It’s a phenomenon.”

The role of cognitive bias

Ari: I would be interested to have Tim on here. Timothy Sharpe is somebody I’ve had on the podcast before, actually, talking about the subject of cognitive biases, for people that are listening. Tim is a mutual friend of both Victoria’s and mine. Just in overall, very smart guy, very interesting guy to have these kinds of conversations with.

My personal opinion on what you were just describing, I think, it’s a really interesting topic to consider. It’s something I’ve given quite a bit of thought to as well. It’s something that also sometimes springs up in personal relationships I have with friends. Sometimes I encounter friends who have certain belief systems about certain things that I see as, what’s– To say this in a very non-judgmental way, but things that are just maladaptive, or not serving them, or not based in good logic, or evidence.

When I’m having these conversations with them, I go through this mental calculus of, how much would I be serving them by helping them think through these belief systems, and maybe temporarily rupturing some of these ideas that they have, and beliefs that they hold? How much would that benefit them in the long run to actually destroy, or disrupt some of those belief structures to help them, ultimately, form new ones that are maybe closer to what you could call truth, or something that’s more closely– Something that’s more logical, or more grounded in evidence?

To what extent would that actually be harming them? They have this particular belief system, which they’re very attached to, that gives them some degree of maybe psychological comfort in hard times, or they feel very personally identified with. It’s a big part of who they perceive themselves to be. Therefore, by me poking and prodding a little bit, maybe all I’m going to do is just anger them, and make them think I’m a jerk.

I’ve encountered that very often in my personal life with people, and I find myself doing that sort of mental calculus a lot. Usually, I err on the side of leaving them alone, unless I perceive them to be in a– It’s somebody that I care about deeply, and I perceive themselves to be really self-sabotaging or harming themselves, as a result of their own belief systems, then I’ll try to gently guide.

I’m much more gentle about it than I used to be. I used to piss a lot of people off, [chuckles] in how blunt I would be, and direct I would be in poking and prodding, and most of the time, I leave people as they are, unless they invite me to give advice. Anyway, I think that applies on a broader scale, as you described here. My personal belief is that, you have to have a set of values that guides, like a set of heuristics that guide how you behave when it comes to questions like that.

Like, should I leave this person’s placebo effect intact, even when I think that their way of understanding things is inaccurate, or should I poke and prod, which may be uncomfortable initially, but ultimately, arrives us to a better place? My personal feeling is that truth needs to be the highest goal, and that we need to work together to arrive at something that’s closer to what we might call truth, for lack of a better word, understanding the imperfectness of that.

I think that has to be the highest goal. I don’t think it’s ever really, or rarely is it a good idea to leave someone’s bad, for lack of a better word, inaccurate, or untruthful belief systems intact that maybe give them a nice feeling, make them comfortable, but are ultimately are less– Are further away from objective reality. I think, truth has to be the highest goal that we value, and moving towards that has to be the highest objective.

There needs to be a mutual agreement about that, right? Both people need to agree that, that is the highest goal. If one person’s like, “No, I don’t want you to take me there. I like my beliefs as they are. Leave me alone.” Then you can’t really engage in that dynamic.

Victoria: [chuckles] I’m with you on the personal relationship. I remember at one point coming home from Hawaii, and being so bought in to the raw food thing that I was into at the time, and my parents being like, “Leave us alone. Leave us alone. We’re in our 50s, we’re from Kentucky, we’re going to eat fried chicken, and whatever else.”

Ari: We don’t want to eat raw liver.

Victoria: “We’re not interested in your gross, raw liver smoothie. [chuckles] This is not going to happen.” In clinical practice, we used to have a joke, like the one that I share an office with. It’s like, people are going to pay you if they want your opinion. I think the same, people can listen to the podcast or not, or engage with who they want to engage with.

I do think, still, I’m on the track of putting it out there in a way that, hopefully, is balanced and entertaining in some way, will draw people to maybe ask these questions. I think it just starts with that. If we go on social media, right now, I’ve been researching this one product, and I see all these ads, and I’m like, “This is not in line with what I’m seeing in the research literature.”

It’s like, I just want people maybe to have a moment, where they’re like, “Really? Is this really the answer to my rosacea?” Or, “Is this gut test the thing that I need that also happens to cost $800 or whatever it is?” That’s what we’re trying to do, is simplify it in the podcast, so people can come and be like, “Oh, okay, there is an episode on this. We know at least these two people are trying to do their due diligence, and they are upfront about where they stand,” which is, why we’re– I feel like it’s really important that we say, “Here’s our bias when we get started.” We can at least walk away with a little bit more of a balanced viewpoint to make a personal decision. It’s just another point of information that isn’t driven by our need to make a lot of money off of it. Yes, I hope people start to question it a little bit more.

Ari: Yes, this is a bit tangential, but it’s relevant to some lines of– Some threads of what we’re talking about here. I remember, I’ve been studying health science since I was a kid, since I was 12 or 13, this has been my passion and my obsession. Like you, I never did lots of raw animal foods, but I did a lot of extreme diets, and a lot of stupid stuff.

Victoria: You’re a bodybuilder, right?

Ari: Yes. I was an athlete and an aspiring bodybuilder from the time I was a young teenager, my older brother was-

Victoria: It’s pretty extreme.

Ari: -a personal trainer, and a bodybuilder at that time. Huh? What was that?

Victoria: That’s pretty– It’s like bodybuilders have to eat a pretty extreme diet. I mean, that’s–

Ari: Bodybuilders are the original biohackers. Before biohacking was a term, bodybuilders were doing it for a few decades. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s generation, Frank Zane, all those guys, they were the first guys just shooting themselves up with all kinds of chemicals to see what it would do, how fast they could build muscle and strength, and lose fat.

Bodybuilders have been doing crazy stuff for decades. I’m fortunate. I never went to that extreme of injecting myself with anything, but, certainly, did lots of stupid stuff. I remember, given that I’ve been in this space for so long, and studying different people with advocating different diets and exercise approaches, for many, many years, I would say the first, let’s say 15, maybe 20 years of studying all that stuff, I would be convinced of one thing after the next, and commit deeply– Ideologically committed to one thing after the next.

Very identified with it. Having conversations with people, I was coming from a place of like, “No, this really is the one right way of doing things. This is the best way. This is the true way.” Engaging in conversations, or arguments from that place, is like this very stressful thing, where it’s like, “No, I have to convince you that my way is right, and you are wrong.” The other person’s coming from that perspective.

It’s really interesting to look back on that now, because now I come from a place where like, I’m not afraid to have an argument or debate about any of my health positions with anybody, because my interest is arriving at truth, and if you are a knowledgeable, respectful person who has a lot of expertise, and you’re coming from a good place, I’m happy to learn and alter my perspectives.

If I’m wrong about something, I want to know, I want to engage with you if you think I’m wrong about something, because I want to know if I’m wrong, I want to move closer to the truth, and it’s just really interesting to think back on all the years of my life, where that kind of conversation was so stressful to me, because it felt like it was a threat to my belief systems, instead of an opportunity to arrive close, more closer to the truth, and the reality of the situation.

I feel like more and more people need to make that shift, where less identification with a particular health ideology, and more just openness to explore what the best evidence says is true.

Victoria: Yes, absolutely, Ari. Oh my God. I almost got a vegan tattoo, dude. [laughs] I have some tattoos, and I’m like, I may not make that choice now, but if I had a vegan tattoo, I just can’t even imagine. I totally hear that. I also think back to the conversations I would have with people, and it’s like the brain gets really wily, or mine would to be like, “Okay, well, that’s the point that you’re making. What if we look at it from this perspective?”

It’s like the need to prove, like this is the right way. I’m totally with you. It’s like to have the goal of like, “Okay, hey, I can totally be wrong.” I’ve said this so many times in conversations with people, where I’m like, me and Hannah both, we’re just two people over here, like trying to explore this. We absolutely could be wrong. Sometimes we bring in subject matter experts.

For instance, on the soy episode, we just emailed one of the authors of– He has multiple publications, these studies that we were reading. He’s just this very nice man that lives in Iowa. He’s been studying soy since God was a child. He came on the podcast, and it’s 50 years or something of information on soy in this man’s head. In his writing, you can see it. He’s so balanced. He’s like, “Maybe this, maybe that, we’re still trying to figure this out.”

It just felt so good to approach a topic from that place, and like you’re saying with the end goal to be like, “Okay, truth, and accuracy and making it better for the people that are going to encounter this information, versus I have to put my stake in the ground, and there is no way around the guidelines of this topic.” My nervous system feels a lot better. [laughs]

Ari: Yes, totally.

Victoria: It’s very relaxing, but I can also see from somebody who, I think, I have friends that have nothing to do with health. They’re lawyers or pharma reps, or whatever they’re into. They’re raising their kids. They’re trying to hold it down in their job. They know they need to go to the gym or whatever. They have some idea, but they don’t have time to go through all of this.

Then, it’s like they get on social media at night, or they Google something, and it’s like they see something that is popular, or they latch onto an idea that’s popular, and it feels good. It’s like to take any steps in a direction toward an ideology, it feels like, “Okay, I’m going in the right direction.” It’s like, I really understand that.

Again, back to the goal of our podcast, is to give people an outlet, where it’s like, “Hey, just listen to this podcast and see if this is the thing that you really want to go toward.” Maybe it is, but maybe there’s a different way.

Ari: It gets back to what we were just talking about a minute ago about really having the value system of desiring to move towards truth above all. Not necessarily to find the one magic pill, but to understand, to have a more complex understanding of the landscape of information that there are many different lines of evidence, which might disagree with one another. There might be controversy.

There might be experts who think one way, and experts who think another way. It is a very complex information landscape. If you understand that, the goal is like, how do I navigate? How do I sense make? How do I navigate this very complex landscape, so that I can arrive closer to the truth, and not get duped by the first person claiming to have the magic pill, which might be a very distorted, and cherry-picked view that me as a non-expert in that particular area, that maybe I don’t even have the expertise to be able to discern what is good information, and what is not.

Just having those sort of meta layers of awareness, changes the goal of what you are pursuing. Are you looking for the first person who claims to have a compelling fat loss diet, or are you looking to actually understand the bigger picture of evidence in a more balanced and accurate way?

Victoria: Yes. I think if people understood that, that shift would lead to better fat loss, and to better skin or whatever they wanted to accomplish, it might be easier to make that shift. I don’t think we realized that yet. It’s like marketing is good, sales are good, ads are really good at pulling people in. It’s hard to convey that shift in a three-second reel, unfortunately.

Ari: Yes. [crosstalk] Sorry, go ahead. There’s another– Actually, Victoria, I’ve been meaning to say this to you. I want to interrupt briefly. Your eyes are looking slightly this way. Is it possible to maybe adjust the thing, so it’s closer to your camera, so you’re looking more at your camera?

Victoria: Yes. You’re over here to me, so I’m like looking at you.

Ari: [crosstalk] Drag me over to the right spot. [chuckles]

Victoria: I think you might be better now. Let me see if that’s better.

Ari: That’s perfect. That looks good. There’s another– I think exploring the psychological dynamics at play from the influencer perspective is also interesting, and which both you and I can speak to at this point. You’re an influencer now. You have your own podcast. [chuckles]

Victoria: That’s so ironic.

Ari: I hate the word “influencer”. [crosstalk] I don’t like when people call me an influencer. I’m like, “Please don’t describe me that word,” as if I’m on social media trying to influence people.

From the perspective of somebody who is, let’s say, trying to promote themselves as a health expert and trying to build a business around it, trying to make money, there’s these almost two diverging paths that I would say exist, and probably it’s more complex than this, but to simplify. One path is like somebody who’s going to do what we were describing before. Somebody who’s going to say like, “I’ve got this amazing magic diet. All you’ve got to do is get rid of all these bad foods. Only eat X, Y, Z foods. It’s the best diet ever, and it’s just going to melt the fat away,” and blah, blah, blah.

It could either be done in a well-meaning way by somebody who just isn’t that sophisticated scientifically or intellectually. They genuinely think that that is the right path, or it could also be done by somebody who is knowingly trying to distort things to present a misleading perspective for the sake of making money. Regardless of that, that’s one path, is sort of, “Here’s this one right way of doing things that’s cherry-picked.”

The other path that has emerged in recent years is to say, “Well, I’m the evidence-based person,” right?

Victoria: Yes.

Ari: This exists in a lot of areas. If you look in the fitness community, you have all these fitness influencers who are saying, “Well, I’m going to teach you. I’m not like all those bodybuilding bros who are just telling you the stuff that’s been around for decades from the bodybuilders of the past. We now have science to show us the right way to build muscle, the truth about building muscle, and so I’m the guy who’s going to teach you what the actual scientific research says about building muscle.” It’s all well and good. There’s certainly a strong place for that, and I think ultimately, it’s mostly a good thing that I don’t have too much criticism of, though I will say there’s a guy that I liked.

Brief digression. There’s Nesima– I forget his last name, but he just did a very nice video critiquing that model. Nesima– I forget his last name, but he’s like a jujitsu fitness guy who produces some really interesting novel content. The issue with that pathway is that now the information from lots of different experts who take that path becomes very homogenized. Everybody’s sort of saying the same thing. Ultimately, that becomes like, well, you could probably get lots of the same information by just going into AI and plugging in, “What is the latest scientific consensus on the right amounts of sets and reps to build muscle for biceps?” or “How do I design my workout program? What’s optimal for hypertrophy and how close to failure should my sets go?” It becomes generic and homogenized instead of each person’s unique path.

The downside of that is it actively discourages people to think in novel ways, to be innovative, to be creative because to the extent that you’re innovative and you’re saying, “Hey. For the last few years, I’ve been working on developing this totally new way of working out. It’s really cool. It has this, this, and this benefit,” well, then one of those evidence-based guys can come along and say, “That’s a bunch of pseudoscience. You don’t know what you’re talking about because there’s no evidence to support all of your claims for all of that,” which is true. That’s ultimately how science progresses is like people innovate-

Victoria: Try and think [unintelligible 00:49:18]

Ari: –then ultimately the science catches up to people who are innovating. Sometimes people who are innovating turns out to be not so good and it turns out to be ineffective. Sometimes it turns out to truly be a genuine innovation. Anyway, that’s this landscape of the influencer side of things that I see emerging. What do you think of that?

Victoria: I think it’s an interesting aspect of health science to keep in mind. I hear you saying like people using research as a bludgeon versus like a helpful tool. I see it in this way. Ari, actually before I got into like really being into science writing and like that, I wanted to be a medical philosopher, but there’s no money in medical philosophy, so I was like, “Well, it’d be super fun to pursue this.” My focus was really epistemology, where information comes from because, in my mind, I’m like, “You can say whatever you want.” I can come up with all kinds of crazy, cool, interesting, seemingly correct, whatever. You can come up with anything and put it online and gain a following.

In my mind, I was like, “Where does the information come from that we access?” For me, this is what I came up with. It’s actually the only paper I’ve ever published. I could send it to you if you want to put it in the show notes, but it’s to break it up into we can have personal experiences of our own that are beneficial to us. We can get information from tradition. We have all of this incredible evidence of how people lived for a long time that was very effective for them. Then people see things in their practices. There’s anecdotal information from good clinicians, and then there’s research. There’s the science.

In my mind, we need to have all four. We need to tap into those different ways of getting information to have a balanced experience in this world. We can’t just rely on one or the other. I almost see it like– instead of a white lie, it’s like a black lie. It’s like you’re not leaving the information out when you’re just like, “This is evidence-based and it’s the only way it is.” It’s sort of a black lie where it’s like you’re only relying on this one thing, but there’s these other ways to have positive outcomes for people.

Sometimes that is just their personal experience where it is with a clinician. The whole beginning of evidence-based information, like you’re saying, is we started seeing it in the field. That’s a case study. People publish those for a reason. It’s like case studies are really, really important part of the evidence base that we have access to. When you go on PubMed, you can read case studies about all kinds of things. It’s like how we understood that AIDS was happening. In the 1980s, all these doctors were like, “Hey, this is what we’re seeing on the West Coast. Is this what you guys are seeing on the East Coast?” and they’re like, “Yes.” “Okay. We have to put this together.” That happens with all kinds of topics.

I do think people get stuck. Maybe detox is the most popular place where people get stuck with like, “You don’t need to do a detox, your liver and your kidneys. If you have a liver and kidneys, that’s enough.” It’s like you don’t need to help that out. The acid-base– Let’s talk about that if you want to.

The misconception around detox

Ari: Yes. That’s a really good segue because the next thing I wanted to go into is some specific topics. Both of the things that you just mentioned are actually great specific examples to discuss, the acid-base, alkalines, diet sort of stuff, which I know you and I have talked a lot about, and then the detox thing. Maybe take the detox thing first and let’s dig in a little bit to some of the details there to help people understand how maybe arguments on both sides “can be distorted.”

Victoria: We’re going to do an episode on this in February. Ari, I’m curious what you think too. It’s like you’ve been around the block and seen a lot of things, but anecdotally, I remember getting detox kits. I would get the really nice ones with the crushed herbs and the pills that they would formulate for you when you ordered it. He used to be Dr. Cayenne. Dr. Schultz would have the incurable detox. Do you remember that?

Ari: I don’t remember that specific one, no.

Victoria: They would send you these incredibly strong herbs and tinctures and then you would have to take psyllium and juice apples, and carrots nonstop for days and you just crap your brains out and do enemas. The whole thing. There’s a lot that would happen there.

[crosstalk]

Ari: By the way, really quick digression. I remember first getting into this when I was a teenager. I was maybe 15 years old and stuff, and I encountered the world of detox and juicing, and so I saved up money, I bought myself a juicer, and then I went to the grocery store and I bought all this stuff and I juiced a bunch of broccoli and cabbage and threw in a bunch of garlic cloves. I’m like, “I’ve read all this amazing stuff on garlic,” so I put a bunch of garlic in it. I drank like halfway, half of the cup, and I literally ran out to my driveway and vomited. I was like, “Okay, maybe I got a little carried away on that,” on my first green

juice. juice. Maybe I need to pull it back just a little bit.

Victoria: It’s infectious too, this feeling of like, “I’m going to get clean.” There’s a vibe or at least there was for me where I was like, “Oh gosh, I grew up eating Cheerios, Cap’n Crunch, Jiffy peanut butter, and Bunny Bread.

Ari: You and me both. Don’t forget, I can’t believe it’s not butter. Margarine was a health food.

Victoria: And Crisco. My grandmother was like, “Put it in your hair. It’ll make your hair shiny.” It’s like, “Yes, it totally will.” Actually, God bless my amazing mother. She’s still to this day like, “A pie crust is not a pie crust without Crisco.” Having these inputs and thinking, “I know better now. I got to get all this stuff out of me. This is going to be what helps me lose weight and not have cellulite and clear up my skin, achieve perfect cellular health and beauty,” whatever these standards are. That’s been the vibe. I still see that vibe around. I don’t think it’s as strong as it was. In the early 2000s, there was a lot of strong vibe like that.

I can understand why there is this backlash of people being like, “Hang on a second. There are actually biochemical processes that happen in your liver and in your kidneys and in your gut, and they detox you every day. They make it so that your blood is clean and that your lymph is clean and that you have tonsils and a lymphatic system, whatever.” There’s these two sides that–

Ari: Just to be clear, the “evidence-based people,” basically came out with the argument, basically came out attacking all the natural health alternative types that were involved in these detox things, basically saying, “Detoxification is a bunch of pseudoscience. There’s no way you can detox your body. All of this stuff is nonsense. The science doesn’t support it. Our bodies come equipped with kidneys and a liver and that does all the detoxification we need. Anything outside of your kidneys and liver-

Victoria: It’s crap.

Ari: -is BS, is pseudoscience.”

Victoria: Yes, and I’m like, “Okay.” It’s interesting just as an aside. If you study art history or fashion, any trend, it goes up and down. It’s like an art history. It’s like the Dutch plain paintings. They’re on the farm and there’s very little color. It’s like Rococo and it’s all filigrees. Humans do this. We go back and forth all the time, so it’s like, “Yes, of course, we do this in our health.” That is what happened with what you described. The reality is– this is what we’re going to try and present. There are ways to assist your body, you know what I mean? The balanced logical view that we would try to discuss is thank God, yes. We have a liver, we have kidneys, we have a colon, we have a microbiome that’s incredible for detoxification.

There are ways to support those in a nutrient-based way, by the way. Nutrients are what fuel that entire process. When we talk about detox pathways, those are biochemical reactions that are based on nutrients. I think it was Brian Walsh, Dr. Walsh taught biochemistry and he was like, “Nutritional biochemistry, it’s a double negative for–” I might be saying this wrong. He’s like– what’s the right term for it? Basically, you don’t need to say nutritional biochemistry. All biochemistry is nutritional.

Ari: It’s redundant. It’s–

Victoria: Redundant, exactly.

Ari: Why am I spacing on the name?

Victoria: That’s the right word. That’s the word I was searching for.

Ari: It’s superfluous to add biochemistry to it.

Victoria: Yes, the nutritional part. He’s like, “All biochemical reactions are based on nutrients. Why would we call it nutritional biochemistry?” That’s the same for detoxification. While people probably– well, more than probably. They did go overboard with the juicing and the psyllium and the enemas and this and that and the other thing. It is also true and it is in the evidence that nutrients support that process. There’s this middle ground where it’s like, yes, we can go too far on one side. We can also go too far on the other side. There’s this place in between where it’s like we are exposed to stuff today.

I live on one of the main streets in Midtown Boston. When we clean our window sills, it is black, right? At night, we use an air filter. We put a shower filter on the shower because there’s lead. They’re literally lead pipes. Our building was built in the 1800s. Whatever is in the air, in our food, it’s like we were never exposed to that before, and so there are ways to support that that can be helpful to those organs. We don’t have to just rely on those.

Ari: True. If you’re living in unprecedented environment with orders of magnitude, more toxins and novel toxins that didn’t exist in the ancestral environment where your liver and kidneys evolved in, maybe it makes sense to try to support some of that.

Victoria: Give them a little help.

Ari: Then to your point, yes, the processes involved in detoxification in the liver, nutrients serve as precursors to help facilitate those processes. Therefore what you eat influences detoxification via that pathway.

Victoria: Big time.

Ari: It’s also been shown that different compounds can actually bind to certain toxins in the body and help excrete them. There’s also a physical process of detoxification of like– sweating is one of the main pathways of detoxification. Does going into a sauna or exercising, doing things that make you sweat more lead to more excretion of toxins? Yes, it does. The evidence clearly shows that it does. The idea that to talk of strategies to bolster detoxification is pseudoscience and that that is the “evidence-based” perspective is itself nonsense, right? Is itself going against the evidence. That’s an interesting thing to explore is how much of what gets promoted as the “evidence-based” perspective is itself pseudoscience.

Victoria: Bias, yes.

Ari: There can be a game of one-upsmanship here, but I’m not trying to play that game. I’m just trying to point out how often it is actually the case that the people who think that they have the evidence-based perspective actually themselves are ignorant or uninformed or are missing a big piece of the overall scientific picture.

Leeches

Victoria: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. It’s interesting to me. This is a little sample of what we do on the podcast is this exact thing. I think, ultimately, what it boils down to is that we have bias as humans and we see the world through that bias. If there is a time or a place where we can step outside of that and be like, “What is the opposing view or a different view from what I believe, or is there someone out there who can help me get closer to how you’re calling the truth,” that will be beneficial to help us accomplish our goals. If we can put it in a format that’s fun and funny, I can talk about buying leeches off the internet and all the crazy shit I’ve done–

Ari: Is that possible to do?

Victoria: Yes.

Ari: Oh, geez.

Victoria: Let me just say this.

Ari: For medical purposes or as pets or what?

Victoria: I don’t know if you still can. We’ve lived in Boston for seven years. I had leeches in our apartment in Tahoe. The water in Squaw Valley in Tahoe, it’s Palisades now I think is pristine. It’s some of the cleanest water in the country. It’s amazing. You just take a shower. It’s snow melt. You can keep leeches there really easily because they’re very sensitive creatures. They have to live in clean water. Anyway, if you don’t have that water, they just die. They’re definitely canaries in the coal mine. Eight years ago, nine years ago, we were living up there, you could go online. I think it’s leeches.net and you order this certain species of medicinal leech and use them. I don’t recommend that anybody do that.

Ari: Wow. It’s actually for medicinal purposes, leeches. I’m going to see in real-time if this exists. It’s not leeches.net. Let’s say “leeches for sale.”

Victoria: Yes. Look and see what you can find. I think at the time that was the URL.

Ari: Leeches.com, yes.

Victoria: Okay. Leeches.com.

Ari: Yes. There’s a lot of people selling leeches apparently. News to me.

Is soy bad for you?

Victoria: It’s to me still a super interesting topic just to explore. It’s weird. It’s novel. Then we pair that with like, “Okay, we’re going to talk about soy. We’re going to talk about the carnivore diet. We’re going to talk about keto,” things that aren’t as gross to people. I also think there is this element of the conversation in health science. I think probably because it deals with our mortality, it feels really heavy. For me, at least, a long time ago, I was like, “We’re going to die. We’re going to die.” That is just absolutely going to happen. Hopefully, we die in the most peaceful, functional way possible.

To lessen that feeling a little bit, that burden on people and to be like, “Hey, it doesn’t have to be as serious. You’re going to be trying these things out. Let’s try and just bring a little bit of lightness to this,” that seems beneficial to me because, like I said, I think for a lot of people, this topic can get really heavy, especially when they get entrenched in, “I have to eat this certain diet. If I don’t have the right food, just constant–“

Ari: “Then I might die someday.”

Victoria: Yes, totally. Totally. It’s sad. I think people lose a lot of beautiful moments in their life because they’re stressed out about this, and it’s like, “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

Ari: “You’re going to be fine. It’s okay. You’re going to be fine. You’re not going to–“

Victoria: Die.

Ari: “You’re not going to die, but it’s going to be fine.”

Victoria: There was this class. The first chemistry course I ever took was with Dr. Abbas Qutab. I don’t even know if he’s teaching anymore, but he was this lovely, lovely man. He was talking about detoxification and he was like, “Oh, one of the worst offending foods is strawberries. They’re heavily sprayed. I’ll try to get them organic or local.” He’s teaching, and then we’re in this ballroom at some hotel in Reno or wherever, we go to lunch, and on the salad is strawberries. I remember just sitting in his table waiting like, “Is this guy going to eat these strawberries?” He totally did. He was just like, “This is life. You just have to lessen up a little bit. It’s a strawberry. It’s not a freaking Big Mac or whatever.” That is also a goal of this podcast is to try and help people let go just a little bit and have some enjoyment while we’re here.

Ari: Yes. This broaches another topic, which we can either choose to go down or not. One of the other psychological dynamics that you’re getting at here is the nocebo effect and the potential to learn, let’s say– let’s give the benefit of the doubt to make the argument simpler. Let’s say perfectly legitimate and accurate facts about health, the amount of pesticide residues on strawberries, as a good example, or any number of other things, so-and-so protein powders or X, Y, Z thing has some arsenic in it, or seafood has mercury in it and so on. Wi-Fi could be harmful to your health and so on.

One of the things that’s been shocking was really evident during COVID era is to realize how bad we humans are at understanding the magnitude of effect size. We are horrifically bad at understanding magnitude of effect sizes. Our brain likes to understand things as, yes/no, either something harms me or doesn’t harm me. If we’re told, if we’re informed that something harms us or could harm us, our brain oftentimes starts to be like, “Well, geez, that’s really doing this enormous harm for me. I’m freaking out now because I have Wi-Fi around me or I’ve been eating strawberries for years and I had no idea that they have all these pesticide residues on them.”

There is a risk– two things. One is that the actual belief about– it’s the other side of the coin of what we’re talking about earlier with the belief systems, but the belief that something is harmful will tend to actually make it more harmful to you in general. There’s also a potential here where understanding the magnitude of effect size, maybe the actual objective effect of that harmful thing is actually very small in the grand scheme of things, but your psychological reaction to it of being so stressed out and anxious about it actually is quite harmful. Then your knowledge of that thing, your fear and stress about that thing actually starts to do more harm to you than the actual objective physiological effects of the thing itself.

Victoria: Absolutely. Yes. Man, if I could just give every person the gift who’s been told, “Don’t eat gluten.” I’ve seen some influencers like, “Gluten is killing your brain and your neurological function.” One, there’s just not much evidence to back that up for people who don’t have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity. If you’re really sensitive to gluten, you’re probably going to know. There’s a clear set of symptoms that happens.

If I could just give them the gift of like, “You could just eat this croissant and you’re going to be okay,” just to relax their nervous system, that is a goal of what we’re trying to do. That absolutely I see as an important part of what holds people back. Honestly, I didn’t believe that very much until I had a client. We worked together for probably a year and she was the most compliant client I’ve ever worked with. We’re still friends. My husband and I, and her and her husband, we’re so close.

She’d had chronic fatigue for years and some of it was connected to thinking the world was going to kill her. She went through a neural retraining program to basically work to teach her nervous system, “Hey, the world is not out to get you.” It was the most incredible resolution of symptoms. She can go hiking now. She can teach yoga again. This woman was housebound for I want to say like eight years, and she would have done anything. She literally was open to trying leeches with me, like Guinea pigging state of trying everything.

I do believe there’s evidence that– it’s like what we see as harmful and what we believe is going to hurt us for some people, maybe more than others, it does. It really does. It has a physiological effect on us that sometimes we’re not aware of until all of a sudden we’re down to eating three foods. We’re exhausted. It’s hard to put the pieces together. I hope that there can be some amount of relief that this brings like, hey, maybe soy, for instance. You believe it’s this estrogen mimicker and it’s killing you and you have to avoid it in every food, and it’s like, “Okay, hang on a second. Is that the true story? Could there even be benefit?” Maybe you think about that when you’re eating good quality soy, and it is beneficial.

Ari: Let me tell you a personal note on that. For years, I was influenced by, “The soy is bad for you,” from following a lot of the paleo line of thinking. When I was a teenager, some of the early paleo gurus’ soy was being heavily demonized as estrogenic. In the bodybuilding community, it was like, if you eat soy, you’re going to grow man boobs and turn into a woman overnight with two bites of soy. It’s true. Of course that happened to me with the first two bites. No, I’m just kidding.

I remember encountering some health experts. I’m trying to remember who it was. I know William Li or Li the cancer researcher has talked about it heavily where it’s one of the best anti-cancer, anti-angiogenic foods and some of the compounds, genistine and some of the other [crosstalk] chemicals in soy have very strong anti-cancer effects. I started to look into the literature myself and I was like, “There’s no real case for this food to be demonized. It’s clearly associated with lots and lots of health benefits, even in studies on women who had breast cancer, where soy was thought to be estrogenic and therefore could potentially harm women with estrogen-sensitive tumors. Actually, the evidence shows the opposite, that it’s beneficial even in that context.

I was like, “This is an awesome source of protein, and the research is clearly supporting health benefits and I included it in my diet.” I remember when I first told my older brother about that, because he was still influenced by all the paleo thinkers that had demonized it, he was like, “All right, it’s up to you if you want to grow a man boob. I’ll wait and I’ll be over here in a few months when you grow boobs and you can tell me what a horrible mistake that you’ve made.”

Victoria: That’s hilarious.

Ari: It’s interesting to see those kinds of dynamics, but actually soya is a sizable part of my diet now. I actually love eating tempeh in particular. I only eat organic soy. I do think that it’s important in that context.

Victoria: I will tell you from growing up on a conventional soy farm that, yes, you should [unintelligible 01:14:40]. Please try to get organic soy.

Ari: That’s an interesting one, right? So many people. I had a woman who bought one of my supplements years ago and one particular ingredient in Energenesis. NT factor, which is actually this amazing ingredient, super underrated ingredient that has a lot of really positive research on helping people with chronic fatigue is a phospholipid extract derived from soy.

Victoria: From soy, yes.

Ari: When she saw on the nutritional facts label, we have to say something like for legal regulation reasons, it has to be isolated from soy or something, that ingredient, she saw that and she freaked out and she started accusing me of all this stuff like, “You’re putting soy fillers in there and soy has all these terrible harmful effects.” She had such a violent, aggressive reaction to the idea that one single ingredient in the formula was isolated from soy and that therefore her body was just going to be bombarded with all of these horrible compounds from soy.

I was trying to explain to her, I’m like, “Actually, this is an ingredient that has an enormous amount of research showing that it is hugely beneficial in your context, but you are psychologically reacting to it as if I’ve tried to poison you.” It’s really interesting to observe just the reactions that people will have based on their belief systems from the information that they get.

Victoria: They’ve been influenced. To me, this just feels full circle. It’s like we have these different influences in our life. If I can be a source of influence that is positive, light, balanced, bias-conscious, research-based also, but also good horse sense– I grew up in Kentucky. I didn’t grow up with a lot of book smarts. It’s there is some amount of just good street smarts that comes in, even to working with our own bodies that I think people become divorced from, like your experience with green juice and puking in your driveway. It’s like, “That’s probably not it, so it might be better to go in a different direction.” If we can be a voice of that, that’s what we want to be. That’s what we’re doing over there.

Ari: And why they should follow you. I think this conversation is a good example of just helping to illustrate some of the psychological dynamics of good information, bad information, and lots of meta-level psychological dynamics that factor into this. Give them a little pitch of why they should tune in, a succinct version of everything we’ve talked about.

Victoria: Sure, that we talked about. Essentially, Influenced to Death is for people who want to make balanced decisions based on balanced information about their health, let go of some of the dogma, get accurate solutions so that they can have better outcomes. Then also maybe laugh a little bit. I imagine people listening to our podcast in the gym in the morning and it’s enlivening for them versus, “Oh my God, I just have to get through this for my own good.” If we were a food, we would just be really delicious zucchini bread where it’s like, “Yes, there’s a vegetable in there, but there’s some chocolate chips also.”

That’s the goal is to bring up topics that have a lot of influence also. We do try to stay topic-based. Our goal is not to go after people. That is part of our founding points is we’re not out here to take people down. I think we’re about to publish our 20th episode. There’s maybe only two or three episodes where we’ve specifically talked about one influencer. We more just try to focus on topics and give people balanced source of information. If you’re tired of the status quo; ads, social media, memes, making decisions based off of very one-sided or quick and dirty info, check us out. If you want to find us, we’re on Substack. We’re influencedtodeath.substack.com.

Ari: The podcast can be found on iTunes. Are you on YouTube as well?

Victoria: Yes, it’s everywhere. People get their podcasts. It’s syndicated to I think Spotify, Apple Podcasts. There’s many different podcast formats that Substack sends it out to. Then we’re on Instagram also. We’re @influencedtodeath on Instagram.

Ari: Are you on YouTube as well?

Victoria: Yes, it puts it on YouTube so people can find it. It’s interesting. Substack doesn’t bring the video over. It brings the audio, but it’s easy to listen on YouTube.

Ari: Do you have video?

Victoria: We do, yes. The video shows up on Substack, but whenever the syndication happens, it doesn’t bring the video over for some reason.

Ari: Geez, you’ve got to–

Victoria: I know.

Ari: Sorry, but you need to start-

Victoria: I’ll get better at that.

Ari: -giving the syndication through Substack and you need to directly upload the video on YouTube. You’ll get a lot more viewers that way.

Victoria: Okay, cool. That’s a good tip. Here’s the thing. It’s like Hannah and I are both research nerds and health nerds. We’re getting used to being podcasters, so it’s going to get better as we go and learn more.

Ari: No, it’s awesome already. I think I can give my own little pitch for why you guys should subscribe to Influenced to Death, I think you heard both Victoria and me talk about our own personal journeys of being suckered into one extreme approach after another. I think probably a lot of you guys listening have gone through similar experiences. Maybe not to the extremes, but you’ve been sucked into one particular approach to diet or to lifestyle or whatever, one extreme approach from one particular influencer on how to do things after another, after another, after another, and you eventually now look back on some of those and realize that a lot of the information was inaccurate, a lot of it was ineffective, a lot of it was years of wasted time, energy, and money.

To the point of what we were saying earlier about the highest goal being arriving at truth. I think, especially in an information age where there are so many different competing and contradictory claims, you really want to align yourself with as many clear thinkers as possible who can help you sense make, who can help you think through different lines of evidence, different claims, and what’s good information and what’s bad. Ultimately, that’s going to translate into saving you years of wasted time, energy, and money. That’s a huge benefit in and of itself.

The other thing I think that’s an important thread to circle back to is the nocebo effect. From my perspective, a big part of the benefit of the work that you do is helping people to lighten up, basically helping people to let go of some of the extreme neuroticism and stress and anxiety that they may have about the harms of certain things. It’s a balance, right?

Sometimes a lot of people need to move in the direction of doing things a lot better than what they’re doing, but there’s a certain subset of people that need to move in the direction of just relaxing a bit and not taking every little trip up, from perfection, as being so bad for their health, and understanding that their psychological reactions to those little things might actually be doing them more harm than the little things themselves. I think your work is a really great way to help people psychologically counterbalance those perfectionist orthorexic type tendencies.

Victoria: Cool. Thank you. Yes. Fingers crossed.

Ari: Yes. For everyone listening, Influenced to Death is where you want to go. Look up Influenced to Death. Victoria, thank you so much for coming on the show, and I look forward to the next conversation.

Victoria: Yes. Same, Ari. Thank you so much.

Show Notes

00:00 – Intro
00:40 – Guest intro
11: 58 – Victoria’s story
21:23 – Influenced to death podcast
25:04 – Why influencers make bold claims
36:44 – The role of cognitive bias
1:00:36 – The misconception around detox
1:10:02 – Leeches
1:12:05 – Is soy bad for you?

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