In this episode, I’m back with Victoria LaFont, co-host of the Influenced to Death podcast. Be sure to listen to part 1 of our conversation if you haven’t already.
In each episode of Influenced to Death, Victoria and her co-host, Hannah Wright, draw on their graduate-level education in nutrition and functional medicine. But they’re very upfront about their own biases and dive deep into the research to provide a more balanced view on controversial topics, particularly ones that have been portrayed in a one-sided way.
Today, Victoria and I discuss specific topics they’ve covered, such as The Medical Medium, seed oils, the carnivore diet, the ketogenic diet, and, believe it or not, breatharianism!
I hope you enjoy the second part of our discussion! Be sure to follow Influenced to Death to get more insight into all the topics they cover.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Victoria and I discuss:
- Are fruits and vegetables good for you? It may seem straightforward, but this assertion has been challenged by extremely popular influencers online
- The partial truth that lies at the heart of the carnivore diet and why many people may feel better when they try this approach
- The 4-part format of each Influenced to Death episode and why Victoria believes challenging her own beliefs is so important
- A little-known fact about probiotics that many people may not realize when they engage in habits that harm their microbiota
- The phenomenon of breatharianism, a fringe health practice that is still gaining followers today
- A core value of Influenced to Death—providing the most benefit to listeners—and how Victoria and Hannah try to accomplish this in each episode
- Why Influenced to Death features influencers who have changed their stance and can share their experience communicating new findings to their followers
- Why “myth-busting” doesn’t always tell the whole story and can exclude kernels of truth that led to a larger myth
- What is an EBIT? The funny and interesting acronym that describes how some people use research to disingenuously prove their point
- Some of the major weak points of functional medicine and Victoria’s personal experience with functional testing that may have done more harm than good
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Transcript
Ari: Vic, welcome back to the show.
Vic: Hello. Nice to be back. I’m silencing my phone so there’s no buzzes.
Ari: Perfect. I want to pick up where we left off in this discussion and get into some more specifics so people can understand some of the more controversial topics that exist and how you help people navigate them. I know we touched on soy briefly in the last one. I want to get into some of these other topics with you and get into some of your insights and layers of helping people understand how you navigate these topics, how you sense make, how you design your podcast in a way to navigate them well and to account for your own cognitive biases, which is a tall task to do all of those things well. Let’s start with maybe the alkaline diet stuff and pH, or we can start with another topic if you prefer.
Thoughts on the carnivore diet
Vic: We haven’t done an episode on that. We want to. That’s on our list actually, I was wondering, do you want to talk about carnivore?
Ari: Do I?
Vic: Yes. We have done a podcast on that.
Ari: Not really. I have my own pretty strong biases on that topic. Well, I’ve done two episodes on it previously. One was a debate that I hosted between Paul Saladino and Alex Leaf, which to be blunt, I found one of the most unpleasant experiences that I’ve ever been through. I don’t want to get into saying anything mean, but basically, I felt like there was a lot of cherry-picking going on. I didn’t feel that it was taking place in good faith where both people are actually trying to arrive at truth.
I found one person was trying to do that and the other person was trying to defend their ideology and doing it in ways that I didn’t particularly enjoy. It was really interesting to see the aftermath of that because Paul also published that episode on his podcast channel. I almost couldn’t believe the way his audience interpreted what took place in that episode because it was so far from my reality, and I think the reality of anybody who went into it without being of the carnivore ideology.
I think they would have seen the exchange of what took place in that episode and understood things very differently than the way that people who actively have a carnivore diet commitment or ideology, how they interpreted it. The way they interpret it was that I was this really biased and aggressive person that was trying to argue with Paul’s views and stuff like that. From my perspective, I was being extraordinarily gentle and suppressing 99% of all the things that I wanted to say.
Vic: You’re like, “If you knew the effort it was taking me to hold back.”
Ari: Yes. I found the whole thing to be a very– it was really interesting from the psychological dynamics to go and observe how those people interpreted what took place because I’m like, “Really? It’s crazy how ideology can filter your reality so you interpret something in one way that is completely wildly different from how somebody without that ideology would interpret the same thing.”
Vic: Absolutely. It sounds like you might have a little carnivore PTSD. We cannot talk about that topic. [laughs]
Ari: From my perspective, this really gets into a broader discussion, but I think that probably the single most well-supported finding in all of nutritional science is that fruits and vegetables, and especially vegetables, are beneficial for health.
Vic: They’re good for you.
Ari: In my mind, fundamentally, if you are going to make the claim that the very thing where we have the most robust evidence that this is very clearly overall beneficial for health is actually secretly bad for us, and it’s full of toxins that are harming us, if you understand scientific literacy, you need to have a really strong body of evidence to make an extreme and extraordinary claim like that. What I see taking place there isn’t really grounded in good evidence at all. It’s based on cherry-picking this or that random study to make that claim. It’s very clearly, very obviously distorting and cherry-picking the evidence. Now, does that mean that carnivore diets don’t ever help people? No, it doesn’t.
There are many mechanisms by which that diet can potentially help somebody lose weight or improve their health that don’t necessarily mean that plant foods are full of toxins that are harming us. I don’t want to get into a whole lecture on that subject, but anyway, I find that to be probably the most extraordinary claim that someone could possibly make in all of nutritional science that these plant foods are secretly bad for us despite an enormous mountain of evidence showing that they’re good for us as a generalization painting with broad brushstrokes.
Anyway, I find ideology and cult psychology dynamics to be a big enough factor in what’s going on there that it almost becomes not worth having the discussion when you’re dealing with people who are so committed to that ideology.
Vic: We felt the same, which was why we were like, “We have to do a podcast about this.” We actually ended up doing– I can’t remember if we did two or three episodes. Ari, I don’t want to keep talking about this if it’s not the topic that you want to focus on.
Ari: No, I’m happy to talk about it, and for you to talk about how you navigate the subject. I do want to briefly mention, I also had Stephan Guyenet and Mario, I forget what his coauthor is from Red Pen Reviews. They did a book review of Paul Saladino’s book, along with Steven Gundry’s book. That was an excellent episode where basically, they rigorously and very thoroughly analyze all the scientific claims made in the book and take you through step by step. Here’s this claim. Here’s the evidence. Here’s how it was distorted. Here’s all the evidence that was left out that contradicts this claim and so on. I think that was a podcast that’s really worth listening to.
Vic: Totally. Those guys were awesome. That organization, they’re a nonprofit maybe even, I want to say,-
Ari: Yes, non-profit.
Vic: -inspired us a lot. Carnivore is perfect because people have strong views on both sides. Hannah and I, for instance, came into it in the podcast, we talk about our bias, which was, we think this is absolutely crazy. What you’re saying was also true. There’s hundreds of thousands of people on forums across social media who are like, “This completely saved my life. How do we square this? What is happening?” From an influencer standpoint, we walked in with this bias of like, “This looks so off to us.” It’s a good example of how we approach the topics that we cover on Influence to Death, which is we pick topics sometimes because we have such a strong bias. Carnivore is an example of that.
The Weston A. Price Foundation is one of the very few episodes where we’ve named the name. We both came in with like, “What they’re saying looks very off to us for the past few years, so we’re going to discuss this. Maybe we’re wrong. Let’s talk this through.” When we format an episode that is one of the main categories that we focus on. We open every episode with history. This was Hannah’s idea. I would have never done this, but she’s really into medical anthropology looking back on how things came to be. It’s made the podcast really rich, particularly with the carnivore diet. We looked back and found papers from over 100 years ago, people eating these meat and water diets.
It was really interesting to see where it started. Then we talked about our bias, which was like I said, we feel like this is really off. Then we did a pretty thorough research review, which actually it’s interesting on that particular topic. There’s not a lot of research on carnivore. Then the epistemological part of me, the information gathering part of me comes in and is like there’s all this anecdotal evidence of people having these positive outcomes. That’s interesting. I think it’s worthwhile talking about, and we discussed that at length. Then we try to give a takeaway. With every topic that we cover, we try to go through that. Like I said, it’s picking these controversial topics like keto was another one.
We had Dr. Tim Sharpe and Dr. Mike T. Nelson on to talk about keto because they’re two metabolism guys. Tim in particular has done a lot of research on the ketogenic diet and cancer. I knew he had a lot of research tossed in that area, more than what we would have between him and Dr. Mike T. Nelson. We pick the topics to be challenging for us. Carnivore, for sure, was that. The interesting crux that we came to, and I know Ari, this is probably your most fascinating topic to dive into broadly is that these influencers that promote carnivore technically are right. Plants are poisonous to an extent. We can bring back magnitude conversation to what extent are they poisonous.
Ari: Magnitude but also semantics and distorting of evidence.
Vic: Totally. It’s interesting to see though, yes, that’s true, and it’s one part of this very complex story where they’re considered a xenohormetic. Exercise or eating plants or actually the ketogenic diet is a positive stressor. There’s a lot of research on that. There are all these activities that we engage with as humans that are minutely stressful enough where our body can handle it, but not even handle it, produce a result, a reaction that is so beneficial for us that little bit of a stressor is actually very good for us in the long run. That’s the endpoint that we came to where it’s like there are many explanations about why carnivore is beneficial for some people.
They maybe cut out foods that they’re sensitive to, or they cut out processed foods or, they cut out carbohydrates or they eat more protein. There’s all of these mechanisms that could be running this, but the mechanism that plants are poisonous doesn’t hold water. I would love to see research on if there are some people who are exquisitely sensitive to those stressors and maybe can’t handle it. I don’t know the answer to that, but the percentage of the population that would be is probably so small.
It’s more than likely you would get the same effect of the carnivore diet if you increased protein to the physiological amount that you need, cut out processed foods, and you’d be way healthier in the long run. Especially because we know that the main problem with protein consumption at higher quantities is microbial imbalances that lead to GI issues. That’s a really big deal is taking care of the microbiome. Our gut bugs will eat anything. When we feed them a lot of protein, we feed the bugs that can lead to problems in the GI tract versus when we feed whole food fibers. It feeds the species in our gut that leads to positive outcomes, but the mechanism of plants are poison is–
Ari: The main way to counterbalance higher protein diets like the kinds that I eat and probably you eat as well is fruit and vegetables.
Vic: Absolutely.
Ari: Also the risk of– Dr. Jason Harlack, who’s one of the top microbiome experts in the world that you and I both have a lot of respect for and that we’ve partnered with and do a program with, The Gut Optimization Program, talks a lot about all the people that he sees in the clinic who have gone carnivore and talks about the harms actually doing microbiome testing with those people and the potential long-term permanent harms that can be done, which I think is probably the biggest concern. I think most of whatever effects you might encounter from doing extreme diets are for the most part reversible, but if you do a particular type of extreme diet that results in the extinction of certain species of bacteria in your gut, you don’t get those bacteria back.
Vic: Unless you want to do a fecal transplant, which is not ideal. [laughs]
Ari: Yes, unless you want to do a fecal transplant, but each person also carries their unique microbiome from their ancestral lineage, much a fingerprint. We have certain species that are unique to us in our ancestral line. If you deprive them of plant fibers for long enough, several types, several species of bacteria can actually go extinct, and you will never get them back. That is a type of permanent harm. There are no types of probiotics that are going to give those bacteria back to you. I think where there is a concern of permanent harm, caution should really be advised.
Vic: Totally. That’s why we named the podcast We’re Influencing the Microbiome to Death, I guess, in that circumstance. To explore that to me is beneficial, especially I think in the way that we do it where we’re trying to be upfront. If somebody is so hardcore carnivore that they hear that our bias is anti, and they don’t want to listen to the episode, then there’s nobody forcing them. They don’t have to keep listening. I tend to think it’s the goal is to speak to the people. It’s like any influencer is going to have what they believe. If they hear the podcast and maybe they change their opinion or not, but the impact hopefully is on regular people who are listening.
It’s not their job to show up with information. It’s like they’re after help. That’s the goal is to hopefully explain things in a balanced, again, research-based way and in a way that is practical so that they can walk away and be like, “Oh, okay, there is a benefit of this. It’s probably not based on the fact that I need to be afraid of kale or whatever the fear-mongering is of that day.” Right now we’ve covered keto, carnivore.
Breatharianism
We actually did an episode on breatharianism, which is still happening around the world.
Ari: Is it really?
Vic: People are going on retreats. Oh, yes, totally.
Ari: Let’s dig into that one. I’m curious what you found. Give us the big rundown and also speak to people who have never even heard that term before.
Vic: Yes. Lucky you [laughs] if you have never heard of breatharianism. Breatharianism is the idea that someone can live on air. Most people that are breatharian gurus let’s say like Prana life force of the universe. Some breatharians drink water. Some don’t. Some have a dry version of breatharianism. This was actually popularized by a few different influencers. I would have to go back and look at our show notes to remember their names.
The one that I was most familiar with wrote this book. God, I still have the book, and I can’t even remember the name of the book right now. Victor– I have to tell you the name later. I don’t know his last name. It was pretty trippy dude who brought breatharianism into the hippie experience of the 1960s. Actually their institute, it was this food for life, raw food-based transition.
Ari: I think it’s Truviano. Victor Truviano.
Vic: Victor Truviano. Here, let me see if– If you look at the episode, we have pictures from that book. I see his name, Victor Truviano. This guy, gosh. I have his book on our bookshelf. Should I go grab it-
Ari: Sure.
Vic: -and show it to people? [laughs]
Vic: Okay, this is some very vintage influencing here. Viktoras Kulvinskas. Survival in the 21st Century. It’s a beautiful book, actually, these beautiful illustrations of people living on the land and eating raw food and making their own shoes. It’s this really sweet text. I carried this in my backpack in Hawaii for years. I was totally committed to the pure, way of living on the land. Planetary Healer’s Manual. The interesting irony is they had this center for the way that they lived six blocks from where I live in Boston.
This was one of their main centers was here. Anyway, he was a huge proponent of breatharianism, and then it spread into the 1960s and 1970s. Michelle Pfeiffer was an adopter of breatharianism and the idea is pretty straightforward.
Ari: For six days.
Vic: What?
Ari: For six days.
Vic: For six days?
Ari: No, I’m just kidding.
[laughter]
Vic: Yes, until she was like, “Hang on a second. This is hard.”
Ari: She’s like, “I’m really hungry now. I’m going to eat something.”
Vic: I’m at the Oscars. You don’t eat food. People really buy into this when they’ve tried everything else and nothing has worked. Then it’s there is this beautiful aesthetic of purity and flowing linen, robes dyed in earth colors. You go on these retreats and tropical places. It’s this whole thing that people charge a lot of money for and people absolutely buy up until, present day for sure. I was hearing about this from friends living in Vilcabamba, this hippie holdout in South America that there were breatharian retreats going on on their streets a few years ago. We did a podcast episode about this, and it was our first episode.
I will tell you, we shouldn’t have started the breatharianism. It’s like there isn’t a physiological way to live without food, but Hannah and I stretched ourselves to the limit of what we could really mentally and emotionally handle looking at research literature to see, is there any way that this would be possible? No, there’s not, based on our understanding of metabolism. We have to have nutrients to fuel our body.
Ari: Did you encounter any blowback from the episode of people who were upset at you for claiming that it’s impossible?
Vic: No. I think it was our first episode, so it hasn’t been as popular as other episodes. I think it’s not as in vogue now. We got a lot more blowback around keto and carnivore. Even that blowback wasn’t extreme in any way. I think part of the reason why is because the way we present it is we’re not attached. It’s like, “Here’s what we think.” There have been episodes, for instance, the episode on soy, my bias, even today, knowing what I know about soy and eating soy regularly, I drink soy milk almost every day, I still have that little bit of a feeling is this okay? I was told something different for so long.
I think because we share that experience, maybe people don’t feel as threatened. It’s, I think true for both of us. We have, the experience of, we were steeped in this world, Hannah in one way and me in another, for so long that we still have those residual feelings that we come up against. I guess people maybe relate to that, and we don’t get a lot of hate mail. Not yet. [laughs]
Ari: Not on breatharianism. I think, I remember several years ago encountering what was considered to be the most credible report of some Indian guru who had been observed in a hospital for, I don’t know, six weeks or something like that. Doctors observed him in person with video cameras. He didn’t take a single bite of food for six weeks or eight weeks or something to that effect. Did you encounter that specific thing that I’m remembering?
Vic: Yes. There are actually a couple of accounts of hospitalized patients where they were under observation 24 hours a day. Yes, and we talk about that in the episode. It’s a mystery, but then the skeptical part of me is there’s no way. Then the more famous influencers around breatharianism, there’s many accounts of they were sneaking out to eat or, people saw food in the refrigerator.
Ari: There’s lots of reports of like, “Oh, yes, it was a couple of bites of food here and there.”
Vic: Yes. That was probably the most difficult episode that we’ve done to date because probably likely my bias is so strong, but I believe we have to have food to live on this earth. It is interesting now to see that, okay, there are people who supposedly can live without it, but I’m still very skeptical.
Ari: I want to, I want to come back to some more specific topics in a minute, but I want to ask you something that’s a bit more meta here relating to cognitive biases in a way but is even broader than that. I probably won’t even know the right– there are probably phrases that have been invented to describe what I’m trying to get at here, but I don’t know them. One is that there can be a tendency almost a cognitive bias that it’s almost a heuristic, an operating principle that says, “If I’ve got this argument over here, that says this extreme thing, and I’ve got this argument over here that says the opposite thing, therefore the truth must be in the middle.”
Oftentimes that is a really good heuristic because it’s often true. There often are elements of truth. Maybe this one’s true some of the time, in these certain cases, and this one’s true some of the time in these cases. The truth therefore is in the middle or they’re two extremes where they’re both really exaggerated in opposite directions. Really the truth is smack dab in between them, but this is sometimes a really bad heuristic. I find a really bad way to operate.
I find it can be a very intellectually lazy way for people to operate because sometimes it is the case that if you’ve got a perspective over here on this side and a perspective over here on this side, sometimes one of those two perspectives really is the right one. The other one is a bunch of nonsense. To operate based on the principle that the truth is somewhere between those, actually means that you’ve moved away from truth towards the direction of nonsense. Now you think that you’re doing this really intellectually sophisticated thing of being the balanced, being the nuanced one, saying there’s truth on both sides, yada, yada, yada, which can be a way that people make themselves look intellectually superior.
It’s almost a substitute for actually doing the hard work to arrive at the real truth, which might mean that, “Hey, that claim over here was actually nonsense. It was actually made-up nonsense that’s totally inaccurate and/or largely inaccurate.” Really the truth pretty much is over on this side in this particular case. Given the nature of what you do and you’re trying in a way not to take sides, not to piss people off and that thing, how do you avoid doing that, making that mistake?
Vic: We’re trying. [laughs] We’re trying. I hear you. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it in those terms, but it’s a good example. When I think about our episode on breatharianism, where we basically ended with our head in our hands. We were like, “There’s no way to make this make sense based on what we know.” Hannah and I aren’t experts in anything. We love research and we love thinking through these topics and have seen the detriment when people don’t. We’re like, “Okay, we’re going to try to do our due diligence in our show notes.” Actually, in the beginning, I spoke to someone, this is a little bit of an aside, but it’s connected.
I spoke with someone who knows about podcasts, and he was like, “Your show notes are a nightmare. What are you doing?” We were linking directly to the primary studies that we were drawing from. 1 out of 100 people is going to look at these, even in your audience. Don’t put those as your show notes. Summarize the podcast. If they’re really important studies linked to those, but you don’t list 50 studies from, wherever, ncbi.gov on your podcast show notes. We were like, “Okay.” We were trying to parse it out, but there are some topics I think where you’re it’s like breatharianism or when we look at what we know right now about fruit and vegetables, with carnivore.
You can’t go down the center of these two pretty intensely opposing sides and say that you found the accurate point. I think that that’s probably true. For me, again I’ve never thought of it in those exact terms, but I can feel it in my guts where I’m like, “We don’t have the information to back this up even 10%, even as nonexperts.” It’s like we could pull in somebody who’s an expert on metabolism, they’re absolutely going to say it’s nonsense. We’re trying our best to give the benefit of the doubt, but we can’t. It’s exhausting. You can’t do it.
Ari: There’s also a risk of doing some harm from giving too much benefit of the doubt to really bad ideas.
Vic: Yes, absolutely.
Ari: You almost can potentially legitimize them in people’s minds. Then you have to counterbalance that with, “All right, well, am I being too biased, too close-minded that I’m not even willing to consider this thing? I can do harm that way too, by being too close-minded to something that may turn out to actually have value.” It’s difficult to strike the right balance in a lot of cases. Are you there? Did you hear me complete that part?
Vic: Yes. There’s that saying. Yes, I can hear you. It’s a little bit glitchy, but I think I got it. It makes me think Ari, we, in that Breatharian episode talked about that saying, “Don’t be so open-minded that your brain falls out.” [laughs] I think what, to me, the core of this comes down to is when we are speaking to a large group of people, and I absolutely felt this as a clinician. I know Hannah has also. We have a responsibility to people. Sometimes that responsibility is saying, “You absolutely need to avoid this.” Sometimes that responsibility is saying, “Hey, we need to explore this more.”
The problem with speaking to a lot of people at once is like, “I don’t know where these people stand. I’m going to try my best to speak en masse in a way that brings the most benefit.” To me, that idea is a central aspect of Influence to Death that I don’t think we’ve talked about, which is I want people who have an audience to have more of a feeling of responsibility to these people. This hearkens back to work that I did a long time ago on rites of passage, but there’s a way when we’re an adult, it’s we have responsibility for our people. When you’re a kid, you don’t. You’re the one that gets taken care of. It’s like once we have some knowledge or we have a little bit of autonomy, then we take care of.
It’s something that I want to bring more of into integrative health because I care about it. It’s a topic that it’s the place where I feel like I can be an activist or I can give benefit. The best of my ability is in this realm, and I want more people to do the same. Think about the people who are hearing this. This was probably the most controversial episode we did. It’s one of the only other episodes where we called out people by name, but we did an episode on the Medical Medium.
Very clearly in that episode, Hannah and I, both, but I get wound up. I can feel my blood pressure going up right now thinking about him. We were like, “You have to avoid this person. It’s a cult or it has all these characteristics of a cult and people have died following his guidance or being sucked into this set of ideals.” Hopefully, we’re being responsible with our people. That’s absolutely our intention.
Seed oils
Ari: Beautiful answer. Let’s dig into some more specifics. I’m curious, have you encountered a topic yet where you really felt your bias going into it was wrong, where you really felt like, “I thought this was clearly nonsense, but actually as we explored it with openness, we eventually came to realize actually there’s a lot of value here?”
Vic: As you’re asking that, I’m like, “I’m going to look through our episodes and see if I can find one.” I feel like I’ve said that before in an episode, and I can’t remember which episode it was.
Ari: I wonder also if the opposite is true in certain cases. If you went into something really thinking that it was legitimate and that you encountered maybe that actually there’s much less evidence to support it, good evidence to support that it’s beneficial than you thought.
Vic: It’s true. I will say this we had Dr. Sarah Ballantyne on the podcast.
Ari: Yes. The seed oils.
Vic: Yes. She was lovely. Let me say that. It was really excellent talking to her. Lovely. from a personal perspective, but also the way that she described her experience. She was one of the main influencers around the autoimmune paleo protocol and got an enormous following for that as her work and then, over the years, started to look at research more and more that drew her away from those guidelines. She is a bona fide scientist by trade, not in the realm, I don’t think fully of health sciences. I would have to go back in that podcast. She actually speaks to all of her research experience but knows how to read a research paper. Her personal experience was that she used AIP to really help herself.
She came in, speaking about AIP from this personal point of view where she had seen a lot of resolution of her own symptoms with this protocol. We had her on the podcast, actually not even to speak about seed oils specifically. She had done that on many other podcasts. She’s laid out her views on why she is now actively recommending seed oils to people versus not recommending them. Rather we had her on to talk about how does it feel to have a combined audience of over a million people, to go to all these people and be like, “Hey, by the way, this thing that I told you for a decade, not only do I not agree with it anymore, I actually think the opposite is true,” and to have her talk through that.
Ari: She knows that seed oils are beneficial to health.
Vic: Yes and she is very adamant about that. She feels like she has a responsibility to her audience because she, in her mind, led them astray for all these years to now go back and say, “Hey, I was wrong. I think that they’re beneficial for you and you should start eating them.” She wants to spread that word as much as possible. I will tell you the woman-to-woman talking to her, I truly believe that she thinks this, that she has evidence to back this up. It didn’t feel like gimmicky to me or a scheme. I’ve definitely been in a position before talking to people where I’m like, “Okay, I don’t think you actually believe this, even if I give you the benefit of the doubt.”
I didn’t have that feeling with her, but people to us after the episode, were like, “Okay, well, have you bought your bottle of canola oil?” I was like, “No, and I don’t know if I can ever buy a bottle of canola oil.” Even though the point of the episode was more about her experience, changing her opinion, and then having to communicate that to her audience, still some of the science and the core topic that she’s speaking about came up.
I can’t release my bias around that. It’s adjacent to what you’re asking Ari, but that was the one where it was like, “Hey, I hear what you’re saying. I totally respect that you have really the cojones to go against what you told people for years and get a lot of backlash and some pretty nasty things said about you personally, but I can’t buy a bottle of canola oil, so sorry about that.”
Ari: I feel the same as you, but, and I don’t know how much you’ve explored the primary literature on that. I’m aware of the studies that you can draw from to say that seed oils are perfectly compatible with good health. There’s studies showing consumption of seed oils is linked with lower levels of LDL cholesterol or better markers of this or that. All of this is in the context of people eating the standard American diet. I think that there are very serious limitations of the conclusions that we can draw from that body of evidence. It takes, in my opinion, a pretty strong leap to go and start actively recommending people consume seed oils and to say, to say very clearly that they are beneficial to health.
I think you could definitely make a case that they are maybe benign, would be the best case I could imagine you’re making. It’s hard for me to imagine somebody making a case that they’re actively beneficial for health, but I’d be very curious to actually listen to her making that case and see the research that she’s drawing from to make it. I certainly haven’t seen research that I find that compelling.
Vic: It was one episode that our template, we changed to give her a chance to come on and talk about her experience versus the science that backs her view. We linked in our show notes two episodes of other podcasts that she’s been on where she’s outlined the science that she is saying backs this, as well as articles that she’s published. A really cool side part of that episode– Ari, I’m going to pause because you’re frozen. Can you hear me okay?
Ari: Sorry, I lost you. I’m trying to experiment because the Internet is choppy. I don’t know if it’s my end or your end, but you were saying that you changed the template of your show.
Vic: Yes, we changed the template of that episode because she had done the scientific explanations on other podcasts. We linked to those podcasts and then to the articles that she’s written in our show notes. We basically talked to her about the experience of having this enormous audience and what it was to say, “Hey, I’ve changed my mind.” A cool offshoot of that podcast was comments that we got from Paul Bergner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him,-
Ari: I’m not.
Vic: -but he’s an incredible herbalist and clinical nutritionist. He ran a school for years in Colorado that taught clinical herbalism and nutrition.
Ari: Oh, yes, he’s that. Okay, I know.
Vic: He’s a really educated, interesting man. He left some comments in the show notes that were like, “Hey, cool episode. Have you seen this study in this study that essentially shows an opposing view?” In that moment, Hannah and I were like, “Yes, this is the conversation that we want to start, which is congenial. It’s interesting, brings up more points.” That’s the goal of this is to have this conversation, to talk about this, to try and find the best solution for people, versus this is the right way or this is the right way.
Rather, she truly believes that she’s found this change, that she wants to change her opinion. She wants to tell her audience. Paul is incredibly educated, and he’s like, “Hey, what about this?” It was an interesting offshoot. Like I said, adjacent to your question before, it was one of those episodes where I was like, “I have a bias about this.”
Ari: I’m unwilling to let go of my bias. [chuckles]
Vic: Yes. I cannot cook in canola oil. I can drink soy milk. It feels really good. With the canola oil thing is not happening. I’m looking through some of our episodes to see if I’ve changed my stance.
Ari: Keep looking for a second. I’m going to plug in my Internet. We’ll edit this out.
[pause 00:43:44]
Ari: Computer is fully set up after returning from Costa Rica.
Vic: Oh
Ari: Ethernet is plugged in. Let’s go. Hopefully, that solves it.
Vic: I think that’s probably the episode where my bias was challenged and slung around the most. We had this researcher, Mark Messina on, Dr. Mark Messina on when we talked about soy. An interesting thing that came up around that is Hannah and I have talked a lot about myth busting and taking on that mantle we’re going to present this point of view. When we use that word with him, I could see he was a little prickly about it. I was like, “Hey,–
Ari: Was this the herbalist guy or the soy guy?
Vic: The soy guy. Yes. Dr. Mark Messina. I could tell, I was like, “Hey, do you not like that word or what’s the deal with that?” He brought up this really– it was this beautiful point where he was like, “I’m not a huge fan of that term because usually there is a myth that’s based on a kernel of truth or an experience that people have had.” He was like, “I would rather explore that versus saying here is the truth and this is a myth.” He gave us this even deeper perspective on what we’re trying to accomplish in the podcast from us bringing up that word. We’ve definitely been challenged for sure during the podcast.
The common reluctance of challenging your bias
Ari: What you brought up is interesting because I have a couple of things. One is that I’ve noticed sometimes can enter “myth-busting space” where really what they’re doing is confirming their own biases and cherry-picking things in a way that says, “This person’s got it all wrong and I’ve got it right. I’m going to go after all the people that I perceive as having the wrong perspective.” They’re not doing it in the way that you described what you’re doing there, where you’re really, “Hey, I’m genuinely open to exploring and discovering the truth. I have no really devout commitment to being an ideologue on this topic and being actively opposed to this thing.
I genuinely want to explore it and be charitable and give it the benefit of the doubt and discover what value is there and arrive at the truth.” I see some people really doing this in a way where it’s a game of one-upsmanship, where it’s really about making themselves look good to try to say, “I am the one who knows the truth and everybody else has it wrong.” I’ve also seen a lot of the evidence-based people do that. Chris Masterjohn came up with a term a few years ago called EBITS, E-B-I-T, which is the evidence-based Internet troll, which are the people who go around. Chris is genuinely trying to explore nutritional science and come up with new understandings and new ideas.
He would encounter people routinely, and I’ve certainly encountered lots of people. I’m sure you have, that are levels and levels and levels below him in terms of knowledge, who are then trying to argue with him and accuse him of pseudoscience. While he’s over there, so many layers of knowledge above them, genuinely trying to put things together and generate new insights into understanding things, it’s like the evidence-based Internet trolls come out and say, “Oh, there’s no evidence for that. I looked at the studies. I did five minutes of Google, of PubMed searches, and I didn’t find evidence that supports your claims.”
That’s a thing that exists. Then the other thing that I want to say here is I’ve seen people enter the myth-busting space, even do podcasts on this subject, who make natural health, functional medicine the target of their myth-busting. It ends up being people who are aligned with conventional medicine. It’s this enormous cognitive bias masquerading as this myth-busting thing.
Vic: Definitely.
Ari: Really what’s going on is I’ve seen people do this to the point where they’re arguing that conventional pesticide residues on produce are not harmful to health or all kinds of conventional medical positions that are deeply flawed. Where really what’s going on is the heuristic that guides their thinking is, sometimes people encounter very simplistic minds who you encounter that actually say this out loud. They say, “Well, if it had any science to support it, it would be medicine. It wouldn’t be alternative medicine or outside. It would be medicine because conventional medicine incorporates anything that has evidence to support it.
Therefore, by definition, anything outside of conventional medicine must be pseudoscience.” If you’re operating with that heuristic, you can say, “Well, I’m in the conventional medicine. I’m in the evidence-based camp. Therefore, from this vantage point of the one truthful, scientific, evidence-based way of doing things, I’m going to shoot my arrows down at all the pseudoscience-
Vic: The [unintelligible 00:50:11]
Ari: -that exists in the non-evidence-based camp. There are just so many gaping blind spots in the knowledge, in the cognitive frameworks that those people operate from. It’s hard to even know where to begin with people. They’re so ignorant of so many bodies of knowledge that exist outside of conventional medicine that they are just, in their ignorance, assuming all of it has no validity without actually exploring any of it.
Vic: Yes. To me, what I hear you say, it’s like there are these different camps that get mired in their bias. That’s the hard thing, right? When we say like, “Oh yes, everybody has their bias,” that’s not just a saying, it’s like that’s actually true. It’s hard to see what our biases are. I think maybe one of the reasons why we have a little bit of advantage in that way, it’s like, “Okay, we’re trying to speak to our biases, yes,” but for me, at least, being a clinician was so humbling, more so even than dealing with my own health stuff, because it was me. I was responsible for what I was doing to me.
Then it’s like having somebody sitting in front of you and saying, “Nobody else can figure this out. What do you think?” It’s like, “I’ve gone everywhere and now you have this nutrition office in town and so I’m going to try you.” It’s like feeling the weight of somebody’s life like that. Also, I think in probably every profession in health sciences, I don’t know if this is said, but in my world of nutrition, we talked about this where it’s like, you’re going to look back on your client folders from two or three years prior and just be completely embarrassed by how you worked with people because you’ve increased your knowledge base and you’ve worked with more people and you have more experience.
Having that experience, all those different levels, it’s humbling. I think there is a way where coming into starting Influenced to Death, Hannah and I both have clinical experience. We both made– well, I don’t want to speak for Hannah, maybe she didn’t make terrible mistakes. I did. I made terrible mistakes that I would– I’m like, “Thank God. Hopefully, I did not hurt anybody drastically.” With myself, I’m sure I made [chuckles] horrible mistakes, but to be able to see that and see like, “Okay, well, how do you prevent that?” or, “How do you shore that up?”
Absolutely the primary reason that those mistakes happened were because I was not able to see the biases that I held. That was a huge driver for me just to try and understand like, “What is the best information for people and how can we get that to them?” Both on a personal level and through a podcast or the writing that I do, or whatever, a practical activity for that, that we use when we do writing is thinking about, “Okay, what bias am I coming into this topic with?” Then trying to find information that pushes against that bias, right?
Essentially, steelmanning is the technical term for that. To think through like, “Okay, yes, I believe this, but is there a case to be made and can I make a really good case for points of view that are different than what I hold?” That’s what we’re trying to accomplish in the podcast without using the technical terms of steel man or straw man, or like that. Just so that hopefully we can find the information that is helpful to people.
I think that one-to-one experience in an office, it’s like the door closes and then it’s like you and that person, and maybe they just had been constipated for 20 years. They’re in hell. [laughs] Just trying to think through how to help that person the most. Sometimes it works and sometimes you fail. That is, for me at least, put me in my place, like, “Okay, I want to try and get as much knowledge as possible that can actually make a difference in people’s lives.”
Ari: Yes. It’s always worth being very skeptical. I think one of the biggest red flags of practitioners is when they make very grandiose claims about 100% success rates and that they help everybody and that sort of thing. I think you want to look for those signs of humility of people being willing to say, to acknowledge the obvious, which is like, “Hey, sometimes it didn’t work. Sometimes I didn’t succeed. Sometimes I made mistakes,” and so on.
The biggest concerns with functional medicine in 2025
I’m curious what you think, since you’ve mentioned functional medicine a number of times, and it seems that you’re broadly speaking—you correct me if this is wrong—but broadly speaking that you’re ideologically aligned with functional medicine and what it’s trying to accomplish. I’m curious what your biggest criticisms are of functional medicine as it exists right now. Are there areas in functional medicine or things that functional medicine practitioners commonly believe or espouse that you see as specious as something that is not well supported by evidence or is an example of some kind of psychological phenomenon where people follow whoever the leaders are and people end up adopting a certain belief or practice that isn’t really well supported by evidence.
Vic: God, it’s a good question. I think it’s been a few years. My guess is that IFM, the Institute for Functional Medicine, has changed its stance on this. I hope that they have, but when I was watching some of the recordings of a conference that they held a few years ago, there was a lot of hype around lectins, and I was just like, “Oh my God.” [chuckles] I looked into the research literature, and I was like, “I don’t think this is the problem that they think it is.”
I think that that’s a specific example and actually, we’re going to do an episode on lectins. Obviously, my bias is this is not a problem for 99.9% of the population. Even that 0.1%, I’m still questioning if it is a problem, based on human studies.
Ari: By the way, the episode I did with Stephan Guyenet and Mario Kratz, I think is his last name. I’m spacing on his last name from Red Pen Reviews. Half the episode was dedicated to Steven Gundry’s book on lectins, Plant Paradox.
Vic: My mother-in-law, not long ago, was like, “Should I completely avoid blueberries?” I was like, “Not if you want to feel better. Eat blueberries, they’re delicious also. They taste really good. Make a galette, enjoy yourself.” That’s a pretty specific topic. I think probably what is troublesome for me, in functional medicine, is likely the same issue that is troublesome for me in conventional medicine. Because functional medicine doesn’t hold the lion’s share of medical interventions in the world, it’s like it doesn’t affect as many people, but is that there is more a focus on what may be the darling of that person is, or the darling of the research literature is, versus what works for people.
I feel that bias in myself. This is a very powerful story from my past that I got incredibly sick in Hawaii with some– I think a lymph node got swollen. Ari, my neck was so swollen, I could see it. It was like I could look down, see my neck. I remember hitchhiking into Hilo from the jungle. There was this wonderful naturopath that was working in Hilo at the time, Jackie Hahn. I think she’s just retired.
She would come out to the jungle and deliver everybody’s babies. She was just this wonderful woman. I remember, got into her office, and she was like, “You have to take antibiotics. This is going to kill you. Look at your white blood cell number. You’ve been out in the jungle thinking that your raw milk, raw egg yolk smoothies are going to be the thing that helps this. You just have this horrible infection.”
I think I talked her into giving me some type of oregano supplement. I just could not take antibiotics. I was like, “It’s going to kill me,” when the reality was I had been on my back in this Bali hut [laughs] in the middle of Puna for two weeks, dizzy. I was in my early 20’s, resilient, but very sick. I was so sick I couldn’t do any of the things that I needed to do. Antibiotics would have taken care of it in probably 48 hours or whatever. It would have been the solution.
Now I was lucky that I think she actually gave me– it’s a oregano product from Biotics, which I used a lot when I was in clinical practice, which is an irony, years later. I got to use that same intervention and it did happen to help. It worked, but it would have been the appropriate time to use that tool. I think the wish that I have to remedy this issue that I see in functional and conventional medicine, it’s just in humans, is if we could just get together—and this is like a pipe dream because it’s outside of the influence of lobbyists for insurance and pharmaceuticals and all the other fingers that are in that pot—but if we could get together and find the solutions that were just the best for that person at that time, that would be ideal.
We are all influenced by the supplements that make us money, or the pharmaceuticals that make crazy amounts of money, globally. I live in Boston, it’s like the biomedical capital of the country. It’s like, beyond that, though, if we could see just what works, that would be so choice. It would be so good. I think, often, we see conventional medicine, that’s the problem, and conventional medicine looks at us and they say, “Well, they’re the problem.”
The reality is we all have excellent tools. Let’s just take the cream off the top. I just don’t know if that’s possible, though. I don’t know if we’re there as humans. If we all had mass meditation and some consciousness shift, maybe we get there. Right now, I don’t know if that’s going to happen outside of one-to-one or small-group interactions between people who are really knowledgeable about this stuff. Yes, I know that’s a big answer to your question.
Ari: It is, yes. Are there any specific practices that are of concern or interest to you to explore on your podcast that are going on in functional medicine? I think one interesting thread is just understanding– one of the illusions that I had, many years ago, was that if a test is available that is being given by a practitioner, that test has been the subject of many, many years of study and rigorous verification that it is accurate, that it is clinically relevant, that it’s repeatable, it’s valid, that those results mean something and are telling you something important about your health.
I think what’s really interesting to dig into is, first of all, understanding just the market structure of this, that a lot of the companies that create these tests are for-profit companies who are hugely financially incentivized to just come up with a new test for something that may or may not be particularly accurate or clinically relevant or even repeatable, such that if you did the same test from one day to the next, that it would give you similar looking data, right?
There’s an enormous amount of bad testing that gets done that people-
Vic: Non-necessary testing, yes.
Ari: -are paying thousands of dollars for, that ultimately delivers highly questionable data. To the point of something we discussed in the last episode, of humans being bad at understanding the magnitude of effect, a test result can be given for a particular marker and it might be slightly off, but the tendency of the way we interpret that for most people is like, “Oh my gosh, this marker is really important. It’s really off. If only I was to correct this marker, I would feel so much better.” Little do we know that actually the evidence to show that that marker is playing some important role in your health might be extremely weak.
Maybe you’re only off by 10%, which maybe actually you would be getting–
Vic: It was cold in the lab that day.
Ari: Yes. If you tested it tomorrow, maybe you’d be perfectly normal. Maybe there isn’t even a problem there. Maybe even if you corrected that problem by doing some intervention, you wouldn’t even feel any different and that marker has no particular correlation or very, very weak correlation to any particular disease or to all-cause mortality such that if you did an intervention to correct it, to bring it back to the normal range, it wouldn’t actually make any particular meaningful difference to your susceptibility to your likelihood of getting a particular disease or dying early or to your quality of life and your energy, your brain performance.
There are many, many hundreds of markers like that in the body that don’t really have strong evidence to show that they are especially meaningful to long-term health outcomes. Yet because we see a sheet with something off, our brains go, “Oh, that must be the cause of my problems.” Right?
Vic: Yes. Ari, functional testing would make a great episode. I’m like, “You should come on.”
Ari: I don’t want to be the subject of all that blowback. I’ve said enough here that, probably just based on what I said, people will be attacking me just based on that little 2-minute spiel I gave.
Vic: I’ll tell you a personal story with this. I had horrible rosacea, trying to figure out the cause of it. I took a stool test. You poop in a French fry container three days in a row. You mail it in to some poor sucker at a lab and they test your stool and then you get the results back. I came back high, for years, with blastocystis hominis, which is this little amoeba.
Ari: It’s a great example, yes.
Vic: The doctor I was working with at the time, lovely woman, I know this was not malicious, but she was like, “I think that’s the reason why you have this rash.” I was like, “Okay.” I didn’t know. I was like, “Yes, it’s coming back on this test as it’s–” They were classifying it as parasitic. I wasn’t research-literate at the time. I didn’t know to look through the research literature to see what is this thing actually.
Ari: Just super quick digression, that’s part of what we psychologically do is, we have a particular symptom, we go get this comprehensive panel of testing. Anything that shows up as wrong, our brains, just as pattern-seeking computers, immediately want to go, “That must be the cause of my problem.”
Vic: Yes. Actually, this happened two or three times in my journey with trying to resolve this rosacea because I was just desperate. Like I said, I bet I’ve spent more on faulty integrative medicine than I did on my graduate degree, which is actually what helped me dig my way out of it. This is like a $75,000 face. I ended up taking this– It was, I don’t think, particularly impactful, hopefully not, but an antibiotic to get rid of this amoeba. What happened is that my face cleared up.
Ari: Oh really?
Vic: It was like a miracle. When you’ve had bad– you had acne, you talked about. I would just sit there and just feel my skin like, “Oh my God, I don’t feel like a snake. It’s smooth. It’s healthy skin.” I was so happy. Actually, I went on Facebook and I posted, “Oh my God, you guys, it was this B hominis, and we figured it out and blah.” Do you know, it’s one of the reasons that I adore Dr. Tim Sharp is because he happened to be my professor at that time. He just commented in the most gentle way. He was like, “Hey, can I give you another perspective on this?” I was like [sighs]
Ari: I’ve had discussions Dr. Hawrelak on blastocystis hominis so I know exactly where you’re going with this.
Vic: I was like, “Oh my God, he’s going to burst my bubble. I’m on the cloud 9. I think I’ve gotten this figured out.” He was like, “Hey–“
Ari: Oh, he’d ruin your placebo effect, gee.
Vic: What had happened, now knowing what I know is, SIBO, Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth, it happens to people. There’s a connection between that and rosacea. Essentially, that antibiotic had cleaned out my small intestine, temporarily. I had this amazing effect thinking it was because I had gotten rid of the blastocystis hominis, but the reality is it was this different effect.
Dr. Sharp didn’t walk through it like that with me as specifically because he didn’t know my health history, but he was like, “Hey, B hominis is commensal. It can live in you forever. Most people are totally fine, and they don’t have symptoms. Though you might want to keep looking,” which was devastating, but it was one of those little moments where I was like, “Okay, hang on a second. How many other people are having experiences like this?”
Then, of course, like a month, a month and a half later, the underlying reasons for me having that rosacea, celiac, SIBO, these different things, it came back. Turns out he was right. When I think about testing like that, that’s the anecdotal story that comes to mind. Then professionally, I think about metals testing, the hair tissue mineral analysis, even a lot of the urine testing.
Ari: Hold on one second before you go there. I just want to say one thing. I’ll try to keep the very short version of this, but I did microbiome testing a few years ago and I agreed to do the one that this practitioner wanted to do. I said, “I also want to do another technology so that we can cross-check and verify anything that appears on the first one.” I ended up actually doing three different technologies, different testing on Dr. Hawrelak’s advice.
One of them showed up as positive for B hominis, for blastocystis hominis. I was told by the practitioner that that was definitely indicative of a problem. The testing company itself flagged it as a problem. The two other tests showed it was negative for blastocystis hominis, which itself, just that layer of the story is getting at the fact that a lot of this data is unreliable.
There’s another layer to the story, which is the practitioner wanted to treat me for this problem of blastocystis hominis, as you just said, that it’s actually commensal. Not only that, according to Dr. Hawrelak, while that amoeba was thought to be harmful for many years, actually a lot of the emerging lines of evidence are actually that it’s a beneficial microbe and that it helps actually act as a wolf in the microbiome that keeps other pathogenic species in check. Now–
Vic: Oh God, it’s like the final nail in my coffin, Ari.
Ari: Right. Just to understand the layers of, okay, the data is questionable, now the interpretation is questionable. One person wants to treat this thing because they think it’s pathogenic. Another person who’s quite bluntly a better expert in this field says, “Actually, no, you don’t need to treat that because it’s not actually a problem. It’s actually a helpful microbe.” There’s just layer upon layer of complexity here that is very difficult for people to navigate.
Vic: It’s important. Then think about this. People go see a functional medicine practitioner and there’s great ones. There’s like Dr. Hawrelak. Oh my God. Brilliant. He has this specialty, he’s worked at it for decades at this point, but normally, it’s cash pay and people pay how much ever just to see the clinician. Then they pay for the testing on top of that, which can be in the thousands of dollars. Then the products that are needed to treat.
If it’s spot on, it is 100% worth the money, I believe. It can absolutely change our lives. If it’s not– and to your point, the accuracy, the reproducibility, the precision and the accuracy of these tests, the sensitivity and the specificity, if they actually are measuring what they say they’re measuring and they’re doing it accurately, we don’t have a lot of data on that. Blood tests really are some of the best tests that we have, in my opinion, based on what I’ve read.
Even our interpretation of it, I think, can get really, really wonky. What I see, and this is a criticism I have of– I wouldn’t even say functional medicine necessarily, but holistic medicine generally, is that we’ve gotten most of our education about blood tests from, like you’re saying, for-profit companies, whether it’s a supplement company or from the testing itself.
I spoke about him earlier, Dr. Brian Walsh, he, I think, does a bang-up job of teaching blood chem analysis, but there aren’t many people out there like that. Then you add on top of it, a woman who’s pregnant. That’s a totally different ball of wax when you’re looking at a blood test. Yes, there are these places where there’s blind spots. To me, again, I come back to, for people just– I think about my mom and dad. I came home not long ago and my dad was like, “Hey, I got these supplements, would you check them out?” Immediately, I just started sweating. I was like, “Oh God, I’m so afraid.”
My first question was like, “Have you taken any?” Please God, no. He was like, “No, I’m waiting on you.” He’d gotten sucked in for some marketing and bought these just crappy supplements off the internet. I was just like, “Oh my God, that’s my dad. I do this work.” People everywhere, we’re just taken by it. The sad part is because we don’t have reliable answers most of the time, people are suffering and they need help.
Again, I can’t speak to the conventional realm, it’s just not my field, but I definitely can speak to the integrative functional field. I know that like the back of my hand. It’s one point actually that we haven’t covered at all in this, but I think it’s important to say humility doesn’t mean lack of knowledge. It’s something that we’ve come up against in the podcast. I’ve definitely experienced this where it’s like saying that we don’t know, or being really interested in learning more.
It often puts this idea in people’s minds that the information that you have is not worthwhile or there’s this lack of expertise, but back to your point, that really should be the hallmark that you look for. That person is going to do their best to get you the most accurate example possible. We’re used to this sage on the stage and the, “I’m assuring you that I know exactly what’s happening.”
I’m sure that does exist, that’s out there, but when you’re talking about something as complex as biochemistry, normally you’re going to have to crack a book and get back to somebody. Yes, people walk away being like, “Oh my God, how do I know?” Look for that quality in somebody and take that as reassurance that who you’re speaking with is going to do their due diligence and truly give you the information that you need to feel better.
Upcoming episodes on Influenced to Death
Ari: Vic, let me ask you, what are some of the episodes that you have coming up? Then any final words you want to leave people with? I think we’ve painted a really good picture between these two episodes of a lot of different really cool meta elements of both from the influencer side and the general public side of what’s going on in this crazy complex information landscape. How do we effectively sense-make and navigate it and avoid pitfalls and avoid cognitive biases and avoid getting sucked into this or that thing that may or may not be accurate.
Hopefully, people get the sense, after listening to all of this, that they understand the value of a podcast like yours that is specifically designed to explore these topics. I have a style in my podcast, where when I interview experts, I like to poke holes. This is just how my brain works. I really like to poke holes in people’s ideas and belief systems. I’ve encountered that sometimes it really rubs people the wrong way. Not everybody can play that game in a– sometimes they see it as antagonistic or sometimes listeners may perceive me as being antagonistic when really I’m just trying to have a conversation and explore and find truth.
It doesn’t always work out where that can happen well. In the context of your podcast, it’s specifically designed for that; Let’s take a controversial topic and let’s like piece this together layer by layer to see if we can arrive at what the truth is. Hopefully, people really understand the value of that and subscribe to your podcast. Let people know what are some of the coming episodes, the topics that are going to be explored, and give them one last pitch to why they should subscribe to your podcast.
Vic: Actually, we have a podcast coming out later this month on melatonin. Then next month we’re going to get a little weird, but we’re going to talk about leech therapy, which actually still happens in many parts of the world. There’s some really interesting research on–
Ari: Including in Boston. I’m not going to name any names, but somebody’s Boston apartment.
Vic: [laughs] I definitely did use to have leeches, but the water here is so crappy. I can’t keep them here, or I would. At some point in life, I’m sure, again, I will have leeches.
Ari: Really?
Vic: Yes.
Ari: I’d be interested to listen in if you think it has value. I know that there’s some good research on donating blood. I guess it’s a form of getting rid of some blood here and there.
Vic: Yes. I don’t have to go too deep, but they release different compounds into us when they– and so that’s why I was saying you should not go online and buy leeches because you want to know that what you’re getting is like a clean leech. It’s biting into you, it is a medical instrument, but we are going to have an episode on that coming out next month and then one on detoxification, which, God, might be like the most longstanding controversial topic in all of integrative medicine.
I think the takeaway is people, I think, tend to go toward wanting to learn about specific topics. They want to learn about gut health or they want to learn about detoxification. If you can start to understand and dig a little bit more into some of these meta ideas that we’ve talked about or like what Red Pen Reviews is doing, then it’s like no matter what you learn, you have a handle on whether it is accurate or if it is helpful or if you’re just getting taken, which unfortunately, is the case sometimes. If I could just urge people to just a little bit– We make critical thinking fun, hopefully, at Influenced to Death, when you listen to an episode, but instead of just going toward like a podcast on GI health or a podcast on detox, start to think through some of this in a little bit of a different way, give it a critical eye. That’s the plug I’ll leave with.
Ari: Awesome. People can find you at?
Vic: Yes, it’s influencedtodeath.substack.com. You can go on substack also and search for Influenced to Death. Then we’re on Apple Podcast, Spotify, all the places that people get their podcasts, and we’re on Instagram at Influenced to Death.
Ari: Beautiful. Vic, thank you so much for joining me and having nearly three hours of conversation with me. It was a lot of fun, and enjoy the rest of your day.
Vic: Thanks. You too, Ari.
Ari: All right. To everybody listening, thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you guys see the value in following Vic’s podcast, Influenced to Death. I highly recommend you follow it. As we’ve said, this is a very complex information landscape with a lot of competing incentives and a lot of incentives that a lot of factors that incentivize influencers to actively cherry-pick and misrepresent literature. I think this is just it’s invaluable to have people on your side that can help teach you.
You don’t have to agree with their perspectives or their conclusions, but at least guide you through the process of how to think through things, how to sense-make, how to think critically about evaluating information. I highly recommend you subscribe to it. With that said, I will see you in next week’s episode.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
00:25 – Guest Intro
03:12 – Thoughts on the carnivore diet
19:06 – Breatharianism
35:22 – Seed oils
45:12 – The common reluctance of challenging your bias
54:53 – The biggest concerns with functional medicine in 2025
1:15:40 – Upcoming episodes on Influenced to Death
Links
Be sure to listen, follow, rate, and review Influenced to Death on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts!
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