It's time for the annual update of things that are making me a Scrooge and driving me crazy in health news, social media, and supplements.
I try not to let all of the crazy things drive me nuts, but sometimes there seems to be a firehose of bullshit, and I need to vent about it.
So strap on in and get ready for a holiday vintage Josh rant. I haven't done a rant in a while, so I would say it's overdue.
Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide
First up is hydrogen peroxide.
Y'all need to stop ingesting hydrogen peroxide and putting in nebulizers, nasal sprays, and, even worse, IVs. The amount of damage people do to themselves and their children when doing this is immense. There is no such thing as “food-grade” hydrogen peroxide. It is a marketing term, not a scientific one, and it sure as hell does not mean it is safe to ingest.
As my therapist likes to say, when I'm doing something stupid, STOP IT!
Next up is the eight thousand ads I get bombarded with every day for a certain brand of crappy white colostrum powder that has the audacity to advertise itself as a whole food supplement when it is definitely not.
Colostrum Supplements
Colostrum powder should NOT be white! It should be a golden yellow color. If colostrum powder is white, it means one or more of the following things was done to it:
It was high heat dried.
It was made from old milk.
It had important compounds stripped out of it.
It has been defatted.
None of those things should be done to colostrum.
Check out our blog, How To Choose The Best Colostrum Powder, to learn more about how colostrum should be made and how to find a good one.
Ingesting essential Oils
Up next is the terrible advice to ingest essential oils. You should never ingest essential oils! You can cause serious harm to yourself.
The people selling essential oils often try to make it seem like essential oils are just like using herbal teas or tinctures, but that is not the case. Essential oils are highly concentrated oils of the fat-soluble compounds in herbs. They are very different than using a tea or a tincture. As an herbalist, it really pisses me off how they try to make people think it's just like using an herbal remedy. It is not!
There is no such thing as essential oils that are safe for internal use, even ones that use the BS claims of being “therapeutic grade.” There is no such thing as therapeutic-grade essential oils; it is a marketing term, not one with any scientific meaning. One of the largest essential oil companies that frequently used the term therapeutic grade in their marketing had to pay a five million dollar settlement and agree to stop using the term.
Once again, STOP IT!
American Dietetic Association
The next thing really grinding my gears is the pushback from the American Dietetic Association (ADA) against the vilification of ultra-processed foods that is occurring on social media.
Before I set off on this topic, I want to make a few points.
I totally agree that anything can be taken too far, and super restrictive dietary regimes can cause someone to develop an eating disorder. However, telling people to replace ultra-processed food with whole foods is not the same thing as encouraging an eating disorder. Just because someone avoids ultra-processed junk food does not mean they have an eating disorder, and labeling it as such is complete nonsense.
I also agree we should not shame people for having a cookie or buying a chocolate bar.
Lastly, there are some amazing dietitians out there (I married one); this is not meant to be a dig at all of them. There are great people and not so great people in every profession.
The ADA and a bunch of dietitians are currently all over social media, saying how telling people not to eat ultra-processed foods is contributing to and creating eating disorders.
My question to the ADA is, why is it wrong for people to tell people to avoid ultra-processed foods, which are a huge contributor to the obesity crisis and other health crises like heart disease and diabetes, but I had to listen to, for my entire life, you vilify cholesterol, foods like red meat, eggs, butter, and full-fat dairy products? You helped create huge numbers of people (especially women) who were deathly afraid of fat, and many of them developed eating disorders because of it. Where is the apology for that? On your website and literature, you still have scare tactics about saturated fat being bad despite the “evidence and studies” backing up those claims being complete garbage. Why is that not contributing to eating disorders, but telling people to eat real food instead of ultra-processed garbage is doing that? Maybe when you stop fear-mongering people about the made-up dangers of whole foods like whole milk, eggs, and butter, you can lecture people about whether they should be telling people to avoid ultra-processed junk foods. Could it be that millions upon millions of dollars of funding and conference sponsorships you get from ultra-processed food companies are influencing your pushback against real food? It's weird all these companies are spending millions paying dietitians to promote ultra-processed foods on social media. Because, of course, companies like Nestle, Mcdonalds, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Pepsico, Bayer, ConAgra (and a lot more) don't expect anything back in return for their "donations"; they are just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Please stop your bullshit handwringing and pretending that you care and just openly admit that all you care about is those sweet, sweet corporate "donations."
Probiotic patches
I have seen a lot of dumbass products in my over twenty years in the supplement industry, and yet, I was recently asked about what has to be the stupidest supplement I have ever seen.
It’s a “probiotic” patch. The company claims the patch will deliver probiotics directly through your skin and into your digestive system.
There is so much wrong with this. While you can absorb certain things through your skin, probiotics are not one of them unless you have an open wound or infection. If that is the case, don’t put a “probiotic” patch on that area; you will get a nasty infection.
There is no possible way in which you can get probiotics into your gut from a patch on your skin.
In addition, it is very doubtful that any probiotic could survive the process of being put into a patch; they are extremely delicate, and the process would probably kill all of them.
Companies selling “probiotic” patches should have things done to them that I cannot mention without getting put on a list.
Make America Healthy Again
For my last trick, I will do something they say businesses should not do: talk about politics. This is going to make a lot of people mad, but it's important for people to hear about it. This is a company dedicated to health, so when health and politics intersect, I'm gonna write about it.
I keep getting people excitedly telling me how RFK Jr. will fix our food supply and make us all healthy. Unfortunately, those who believe he will clean up our food are missing some huge points. You have to look at the big picture of the responsibilities each government agency has and what is going to happen to them, not just what RFK Jr. talks about. A government agency does not act in isolation, for example, FDA, HHS, EPA, and USDA have a lot of overlapping responsibilities and what effects one, effects all. Government agencies and regulations are complex, and you cannot fix them with a magic wand or sound bites. It’s easy to say our food supply is a mess; it’s a whole other thing to create a comprehensive framework that involves all of the agencies that cover the food and health systems and how to correct the problems.
I get it; the FDA and many other government agencies have been letting us down, and we have a lot of crap in our food. I would not argue that point. However, that is not because having a government agency is bad; it’s for a number of reasons that are far too large and complex to get into in this article. The answer is to fix the problems the agencies have, not gut them.
The first big concern is heavy metals like lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury. The agency that oversees factories and regulates their pollutants is the EPA. That agency is set to get gutted. This means corporations will be dumping more heavy metals into the environment. These will end up in lots of your food, whether it is organic or not. The man being nominated to head the EPA wants to eliminate the regulations that have dramatically reduced the amount of heavy metals being put into the environment by corporations.
If you have ever seen a sign up somewhere and thought to yourself, someone must have done something really dumb for them to put up that sign, then you know why regulations exist. It's because some corporations did something awful, and now we need to have a rule about it because they won't be good corporate citizens unless we make them. It's not because a bunch of bureaucrats are sitting in a room somewhere just writing regulations for funsies.
Due to the upcoming gutting of the EPA, there will be significantly higher amounts of other pollutants in your air and water. Imagine a nice organic farm that gives its cows water and waters their crops from the nearby stream or river. Well, fifty miles upriver is a massive factory that is now free to dump as many pollutants as it likes in the water, which will now end up in the cows and the crops. While red 40 is not something we want in food, it’s pretty easy to avoid; just don’t buy foods with it. Determining which farms are heavily polluted from factory runoff upstream will be impossible for people to find out since there won't be people going around and testing for them because the USDA and EPA got gutted. I’m not sure banning Red 40 is worth a massive increase in water, air, and land pollution.
There will be more allowances for additives and pesticides in organic foods because the people who care will be replaced on The National Organic Standards Board with more corporate-friendly individuals.
Even if he managed to ban all pesticides, which he cannot and won’t, there would be no one to go around and inspect facilities and farms to ensure they are not illegally using banned things because there would be such huge cuts in funding and staff for inspections. You need people to do this; if you fire huge amounts of staff, who will go around doing it? Corporate self-policing does not work, and it never has.
With OSHA and transportation agencies being gutted as well, there will be a lot more crashes of trucks and trains carrying toxic waste and oil, which will spill into the environment and local waterways.
Now you might think, I live in a blue state, this won’t affect me. I hate to break it to you, but it will. Back in the day, acid rain was a huge problem in New York. Pollutants from coal-fired plants in Ohio and the midwest were drifting to New York and killing all the life in many lakes in the Adirondacks. This pollution also comes down in the rain, which will build up in the soil, no matter where you live. You don't hear about it much anymore because regulations were written and enforced. No matter where in the US you live, you will be affected by it. I think a lot of people forget that in this country, lakes and rivers used to catch fire, and many cities were covered in thick smog. These are some of the biggest reasons why the EPA was created. Allowing massive increases in pollution of our air, land, and water will lead to huge increases in cancer and health issues like childhood asthma. That does not sound very MAHA. I don’t think banning fluoride in water is worth that water being filled with massive amounts of pollutants, and god only knows what else.
One thing I hear a lot is how excited they are that he is going to legalize raw milk everywhere. Raw milk is a food that has a fairly high risk of food-borne pathogens, so good farm sanitation and cleanliness are important. If raw milk is going to be legalized, ideally, it would follow a model like New York State has, where farms are inspected monthly, and milk must be tested frequently to make sure it is free of unwanted bacteria and pathogens. This could be done, but it would require a large expansion of the USDA to increase personnel to expand farm inspections and monitor testing. However, this level of oversight will not be possible because the USDA will be gutted. So if they legalize raw milk, a whole bunch of people are going to be sick because there will be no one to monitor all of the farms selling it. While many farmers are good people, there will be a lot of people suddenly selling raw milk just to make a quick buck, and they are going to make a lot of people very sick. You cannot add a huge new program, such as raw milk legalization, which increases the workload of the USDA while simultaneously cutting staff and slashing funding when it is already understaffed and underfunded. It’s a recipe for disaster. Decreased USDA and FDA funding will also lead to more contaminated food, but you won’t hear about it or see as many recalls because there won’t be enough staff to handle it all. You can multiply the problems of a lack of inspectors and enforcement across your food, supplements, and body care products. Pretty much anything you use daily is going to be at risk of having serious contamination and adulteration concerns, far, far worse than it is now.
The rich have, very successfully, spent over fifty years convincing the working class that the government is bad, ineffective, and making their lives worse so they could get richer and richer. So many people are about to find out why those regulations existed in the first place. However, they won't blame the problems they will encounter on the lack of government oversight but on whichever group that the rich people tell them, through their media empires, to be mad at.
The FDA, USDA, EPA, and other agencies are not perfect by any means (and need a lot of reforms), but gutting them and leaving people at the mercy of massive corporations with virtually no oversight is only going to make things much, much worse. We have seen this show before, and it never ends well.
I hate to break it to the RFK Jr. fans, but Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is where we are headed, not some clean food utopia. But, hey, at least those Cheetos will be free of artificial food dyes!