Biomedical Scientist Answers More Pseudoscience Questions

WIRED

Biomedical scientist Dr. Andrea Love returns to WIRED to answer a new slate of the internet's burning questions about pseudosciences, health fads, and false wellness claims. How can someone avoid falling into the trap of pseudoscience? Why do people swear by lion’s mane mushroom as a supplement? Does acupuncture do anything? Is it really that bad for your body to eat late at night? Do more children have diabetes today than in the past? Answers to these questions and many more await on this brand-new third edition of WIRED Pseudoscience Support.  Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey Director of Photography: Charlie Jordan Editor: Richard Trammell Expert: Dr. Andrea Love Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen Associate Producer: Brandon White Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Arielle Baron Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer Camera Operator: Lauren Pruitt Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo Assistant Editor: Billy Ward

Transcript

00:00I'm Dr. Andrea Love, biomedical scientist, and I'm back to fact-check false health claims.

00:05Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is pseudoscience support three.

00:14Chamath says, advice I gave my son, which I need to follow more myself, read the ingredients when

00:19you buy food. If you don't know what it is or can't pronounce it, don't buy it and surely don't eat

00:24it. Whether you can pronounce a word or not has nothing to do with what the thing is. I mean,

00:29it took me years to figure out how to pronounce acai, and that doesn't mean that it's harmful.

00:34This is 5R1S12-dihydroxyethyl-3,4-dihydroxyfuran-2-5-H-one. Now, if you saw that word on a label,

00:43you might be scared of it based on Chamath's logic, but the colloquial word is just vitamin C.

00:49The name of chemicals tell scientists important information about them, how many molecules are

00:54in them, how they're organized, and their properties. This logic about avoiding foods

01:00or ingredients with chemical names you don't understand or can't pronounce is just an example

01:05of chemophobia, irrational fear of chemicals. And this has been a clever marketing ploy by many

01:12in the wellness industry to scare people away from things that have no potential risk to their health.

01:17Decor Throwaway wants to know, have you all seen the Dirty Dozen list? What are we supposed to feed

01:22our families? The Dirty Dozen list is an annual list written by the Environmental Working Group,

01:27or the EWG, and they claim it is the 12 most contaminated conventionally grown fruits and

01:34vegetables. They're covered in pesticides, and you should avoid them scaring people away from

01:40very safe and nutritious conventionally grown fruits and vegetables that are half the cost of

01:47organic options in order to direct people to buy organic versions of those items. According to

01:55this year's list, spinach is the dirtiest of the Dirty Dozen. They fail to include the fact that

02:04the amount of spinach you'd have to eat in order to hit the safety threshold for pesticide levels is

02:12145 pounds of spinach. This is just two pounds of spinach. What the USDA's annual pesticide residue

02:21report actually says is that in 99% of all sampled foods, those trace levels of pesticides are well below

02:29the safety thresholds for each of those different substances. At Cali Means asks, while 40% of modern

02:35humans will get cancer, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, rarely get it, despite sharing nearly 99% of our genes.

02:42Why is that? Well, Cali, I'll help you. Since you're a wellness industry lobbyist and have no scientific or

02:49medical expertise, chimps do get cancer. Cancers are diseases of aging broadly. In humans, the median age

02:57of cancer onset is 60 years old. As you get older, your cells get older too, and cancer occurs because

03:03of mutations in very specific families of genes. There's one tumor suppressor gene called P53 that is

03:10very differently expressed in people versus chimpanzees, and that's a big reason why more

03:16chimpanzees don't get cancer. But the biggest reason is that in the wild, chimpanzees only live to be

03:21between 25 and 33 years old. But we know that in captivity, when chimps live to 40, 50, and beyond,

03:28they do develop cancer. GrassfedGuru48 wants to know, genuine question, why has Red Dye 40 not been

03:34banned? Literally everyone knows it's bad for you. Why are we willfully allowing poison in our food?

03:39Red 40 is a coloring that's used in a variety of food, drinks, and medicines, including some gummy

03:46candies, medicines. They're colored so that people don't misdose them, as well as meal replacement shakes.

03:53Colorings are really important for people's perception of foods and flavors, particularly

03:59those with sensory issues. And if you look at the acceptable daily intake of something like Red 40,

04:06in the US, it's 7 milligrams per kilogram per day, which is the same as it is in Japan, the same as it

04:13is in Europe, the same as it is in Canada, and the same as it is in Australia. And there's no way that

04:19you would be eating an excess in your daily diet, even if you only ate red colored gummy candy for

04:26your entire daily intake. We're not just going to remove colorings. They're going to be replaced with

04:32other colorings, naturally derived chemicals. For example, one of which is cochineal, which is a red

04:38coloring that is extracted from scale insects. So it's very ecologically damaging because these insects

04:45live on certain cacti species and they're harvested by farm workers, they have high rates of allergenicity.

04:51We don't have that with Red 40. And on top of that, vegans and people that adhere to Muslim or kosher

04:59dietary habits cannot eat foods that are colored using insect-derived coloring. So you're not actually

05:06solving a problem. In many ways, you're making a worse problem. East Illustrator 225 wants to know,

05:12what does MAHA mean? MAHA is the acronym for RFK Jr.'s former slogan of his failed presidential

05:20campaign. It stands for Make America Healthy Again. The problem is that the whole MAHA platform

05:26and the movement are actually in direct opposition to what would make us healthier. We could be expanding

05:35healthcare access, but instead we're actually removing that from the most vulnerable people with

05:41cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. And with unfounded accusations about the harms of vaccines, we're

05:47seeing resurgence in many of these preventable diseases. They're also trying to cut funding for

05:54SNAP, which provides food access and financial support for lower income families. So if we really want to

06:01address some of these chronic illnesses that are the leading causes of death in the U.S., we might want to

06:08continue to develop novel and innovative cancer screenings and treatments. Unfortunately, this

06:14current administration just gutted funding for cancer research, which is certainly going to have

06:21the opposite effect. Robin and Wellness says, high-dose vitamin C is lethal to cancer while leaving healthy

06:27cells unscathed. Cancer cells can't survive it. They implode from within. Yeah, none of this is true.

06:33Just like with most pseudoscience claims, that nugget of truth that vitamin C is incredibly important at

06:40a small level has been wildly exaggerated. Now, vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin, so if you

06:46overdose on it, it will be excreted in your urine. The claims that relate to megadosing or intravenous

06:53doses of vitamin C and killing cancer cells are all based on petri dish studies where they're growing

06:59cancer cells on a piece of plastic and they're blasting them with vitamin C. But you can kill

07:04cells on a piece of plastic with anything. If you pour pure water on cells in a petri dish, they'll

07:10explode. Unfortunately, people who believe this information often will then forego proven cancer

07:18treatments before the cancer progresses to a later stage. Lost says, I just spent the past hour reading

07:25about why fluoride is bad and freaking out, freaking out, tin-hatting like a mother. They're killing us.

07:30Good news is, they're not killing us. Fluoride is everywhere. It's ubiquitous in nature. Decades ago,

07:37some dentists noticed that in areas where people had discolored teeth, they had extremely low rates

07:44of cavities. It was because of naturally high levels of fluoride in their water. We fluoridate water

07:51at a very, very small level, 0.7 parts per million. So to put that in context, a gallon of water is

07:59about 3.78 kilograms. We would be adding about 2.6 microliters of fluoride solution, 1 20th of a drop

08:10of water. If you try to drink enough water where you might experience fluoride toxicity, you would have

08:17to be drinking 357 liters of water or 94 gallons in a day. You would die from water toxicity way before

08:28you would experience adverse effects from the fluoride. Fluoridated water has over 75 years of

08:34data to show that it prevents cavities and improves dental health. The studies that are cited to suggest

08:40that fluoride lowers IQ or can cause neurodevelopmental issues, they're not correcting

08:48for other variables that can impact the outcome, such as high levels of arsenic or asbestos in the

08:55environment within those communities. Those exposures can credibly cause some of those issues

09:02that they're observing. Lotsname wants to know, so we should stop giving kids milk at school because

09:07of the hormones that are in milk, right? No, you don't need to fear milk because of hormones.

09:13The current body of evidence suggests that among children who enter puberty earlier than normal,

09:21it's often linked to obesity or excess adiposity. It has nothing to do with hormones in milk. Milk

09:29generally always contains hormones because cows, just like humans and other animals, produce hormones.

09:37Sometimes you might see on the label, no RBST added to the milk. This is referring to bovine

09:43somatotropin, a hormone that's already naturally produced by cows. Dairy cows sometimes are given

09:51additional amounts of bovine somatotropin because it can increase milk production. Bovine is the key

09:58word there. This is a cow-specific hormone. It has no biological effect on people, even if you were to

10:05deliberately consume it. Claims about all sorts of other growth hormones or sex hormones is just

10:11patently false. Even if there were a biological effect, if you pasteurize your milk, which you all

10:16should be, it's not going to have any biological impact. At drip tech says, I developed EDS and

10:22POTS within the year that I got the vaccine and my heart health has been in steady rapid decline.

10:26I really urge anyone who thinks mRNA is safe to really think about why you think restructuring DNA

10:31is any way safe or healthy. mRNA, particularly mRNA in COVID vaccines, is not restructuring DNA. In reality,

10:40every single one of your cells is producing mRNA at all times because that's how you make proteins.

10:48In order to do that, DNA is converted through a process called transcription into RNA. And that RNA

10:55leaves the nucleus. That's a one-directional process. Then it hooks up with a protein complex

11:01called the ribosome, where it's converted into an amino acid sequence that then folds into a

11:07protein. So in the case of the mRNA vaccine, that vaccine contains the mRNA sequence, in the case of

11:14COVID vaccines, for the spike protein. That RNA hooks up with the ribosomes and our cells create that spike

11:21protein, which then our immune system mounts a defense against. So nothing ever enters or approaches

11:27the nucleus, which is the nucleus, where our DNA is located, to even change the DNA. People who still

11:33believe that the mRNA vaccines can change DNA often cite this paper from 2022. They look at the ability

11:42of an enzyme called line one. Instead of going DNA to RNA, it converts RNA to DNA. And they say that the

11:51mRNA in the COVID vaccine is being converted into DNA. They never show that any of that mRNA ever interacts

12:00with cellular DNA. But beyond that, they're using a liver cell line, meaning these are cells growing on

12:06a piece of plastic. And these are cancerous, meaning they are not behaving normally. And they express this

12:12reverse transcriptase enzyme, whereas our healthy cells do not. So this model isn't biologically plausible

12:20in the way that these vaccines work in our bodies. No other studies have shown anything similar. And we

12:27have orders of magnitude higher data points with actual human clinical data to show that mRNA vaccines

12:35are not changing our DNA, and they're safe, and they save millions of lives. Ivan Lones asks,

12:41why do we have so many kids with diabetes? We actually have very low rates of diabetes amongst children.

12:48Only 0.35% of people under the age of 20 have diagnosed diabetes. 86.6% of those are type 1

12:58diabetes, which is an autoimmune disorder where the pancreatic insulin-producing cells are destroyed.

13:040.046% of people under the age of 20 have type 2 diabetes. That's not a lot of children with diabetes.

13:13Azuricat2010 asks, RFK Jr. removes all members of CDC panel advising US on vaccines. How is this

13:20beneficial to America? It's not. The Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices, or ACIP,

13:26previously consisted of 17 members, all of whom were vetted very thoroughly before appointment. And they

13:32are an outside, impartial committee that reviews FDA and CDC data. Only ACIP-recommended vaccines have to

13:42legally be covered by your health insurance. But what RFK Jr. did was he removed all 17 members of

13:48the previous ACIP and he replaced them with eight people of his own choosing. And these include people

13:55like Robert Malone, who you probably heard of during the COVID pandemic. But since then,

14:00he's also said that people were hypnotized by mass formation psychosis, that COVID vaccines killed 17

14:08million people. Just to be clear, all of those things that Robert Malone has said are objectively

14:12false. And he is now one of the members of CDC's ACIP panel. Another one would be Martin Kulldorff.

14:21He was the co-author, along with Jay Bhattacharya, our head of NIH, of the Great Barrington Declaration,

14:29an opinion piece that basically said we should just let COVID run rampant.

14:34You also have Retsev Levy, who has a PhD in operations management. It has nothing to do

14:42with vaccine science, regulatory expertise. And he has repeatedly said that mRNA vaccines cause

14:51serious harm, including death, especially among young people. So when you have these individuals on

14:58what should be our leading advisory panel, you can understand why that's not going to improve the

15:06health of Americans. When you're strange asks, how can I avoid falling into the traps of pseudoscience?

15:12It can be really hard to discern pseudoscience, which maybe looks like science or uses science

15:17sounding language, but does not have evidence to support it. Watch for buzzwords instead of evidence.

15:23So if you see claims about gut healing, immune boosting, brain health, usually those are going

15:28to be followed by products or claims that don't have clinical evidence to support them. Check your

15:34source, but then also check your source's source. PubMed is often used because it's a repository of

15:41peer-reviewed papers, but it's not a fact checker. It's basically like a library that's storing all these

15:48papers and it doesn't automatically score them for whether they're reliable, whether they've been

15:53reproduced. The best way to be able to discern what's real and what's not is to go to a trusted expert

16:01in that field because scientists and scientific experts are trained to pick apart these studies and

16:07understand whether what they're saying is actually supported by their data. There's never going to be a

16:12situation in which a single paper is going to disrupt everything we know about a given scientific

16:18topic. And if that were the case, it would not be circulated by a popular press article. It would be

16:25something that would be taking the scientific field by storm. Waste of Space 778 wants to know,

16:30what is the obsession with glucose spikes? The wellness industry have created this notion that

16:36non-diabetics should be tracking, monitoring, and trying to manipulate their blood glucose levels

16:44by wearing what's called a continuous glucose monitor. It tracks blood glucose levels after you

16:49eat, before you eat, and so on and so forth. Doing this is not going to offer you any sort of health

16:56benefits if you don't have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Non-diabetic people typically have blood glucose

17:02levels that range between 80 and 140 grams per deciliter of blood. Throughout any given day,

17:08you're going to have fluctuations within that range. You don't actually have to monitor it because your

17:13pancreas is already doing it. Casey Means, for example, founded the company Levels where she sells a

17:18continuous glucose monitor and a list of supplements and a recipe book and it costs several hundred dollars

17:25a month to kind of stay on the subscription plan that she claims is going to improve your overall

17:30health. The glucose goddess recently launched a supplement that she calls anti-spike. There have

17:36been studies where they tracked non-diabetics wearing continuous blood glucose monitors. In 99%

17:41of the cases, the blood glucose levels were always within that normal excursion range. There has been no

17:47clinical data that suggests that wearing this or trying to reduce the number or range of these blood

17:54glucose excursions is offering any sort of health benefit. It's not preventing the development of

18:00diabetes. At Robert Kennedy JC, a commentary account says, when JFK was in the White House, America was strong,

18:07healthy, and full of energy, free from today's epidemic of chronic disease. Since then, illness has skyrocketed,

18:13draining our vitality. Let's make America healthy again. JFK was in the White House in the early 1960s.

18:20Since then, we've actually improved health in a lot of ways. You see these really thick bars,

18:27the most predominant causes of death in the early 1900s. These were infectious diseases, tuberculosis,

18:34pneumonia caused by bacterial infections and influenza, respiratory viruses and viral diseases,

18:41and gastrointestinal infections. These are all gone from our causes of death in the U.S. today.

18:48And that's because of vaccines, sanitation, water treatment, antibiotics, the ability to do surgeries

18:58in aseptic environments, blood transfusions. Today, we deal with mostly diseases associated with aging,

19:06heart disease, things like atherosclerosis, heart blockage, cancers, and cancers are hundreds of

19:12different diseases with a median age of onset of 60 years old. So when we were dying in our 40s and our

19:2050s, we were not living long enough for cancers to even develop. And then we're also dealing with

19:25accidents as a leading cause of death. When were we healthy in these people's estimation? When life

19:32expectancy of humans was 47? 31% of those deaths were in children under five? Well, that was what it was like

19:39in the 1900s. Penicillin, the very first antibiotic, was not available until 1945. So it might be really

19:48appealing to romanticize back in the day, but the reality is we're living longer, healthier, more vital

19:56lives today than we were when JFK was in the White House. At YouDon'tGetIt85 wants to know,

20:03what's your take on germ theory denialism? Germ theory denialism is the false belief that diseases

20:09are not caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi, and so on. This belief started in the 1800s by a gentleman

20:17named Antoine Bicham, a counterpart to Louis Pasteur, the founder of germ theory. And Antoine Bicham believed

20:25in something called terrain theory and that your environment and your overall physiology determined

20:32whether you would become sick or not. If you're healthy, you won't get measles. Or if you were

20:38taking the right supplements, you won't develop cancer. But unfortunately, our bodies are a lot more

20:44complicated than that. And we know these microorganisms that cause many of these infectious diseases. And

20:51because we know them, we can either treat them or we can prevent them through vaccination. And so the fact that

20:58there are still people that promote this, people like Joe Rogan and Bill Maher and RFK Jr. and many

21:06of their allies, just goes to show that there's no amount of scientific data that's going to get people

21:13to concede that their beliefs and their strongly held opinions are wrong. Because we've been collecting

21:20this data for over 200 years now. Sunflower Seeds wants to know, are IV lounges drip bars therapies a scam?

21:28Yes. Just like all dietary supplements, IV dietary supplements are also unregulated, meaning they do

21:36not have to have evidence of efficacy or even safety. IV bags can contain some vitamins that you

21:43maybe need, but they also can contain a lot of things that you may not even know. You're now allowing

21:48an untrained person in a med spa to put an IV line directly into your vein, which opens the door for

21:57opportunistic infections. While many people report feeling better after receiving an IV drip at one

22:03of these bars, usually it's because they're getting hydration, not because this mystery cocktail of

22:10supplements is offering any sort of health benefits. Eat a healthy diet, eat your fruits and vegetables,

22:16and if you're feeling dehydrated, maybe drink some Pedialyte instead.

22:20Mirawa wants to know how to convince your family that these vaccines are safe. Please help. The risk

22:26of getting into an accident in your car are actually orders of magnitude higher than the risk of an

22:32adverse event from a vaccine. Mild adverse events are what we call reactogenicity. Those are signs that

22:38your immune system is doing what it's supposed to do. Swollen lymph nodes near the vaccination site,

22:43a low-grade fever, some fatigue, sore arm. Serious adverse events happen very rarely. Less than one

22:52time out of every 100,000 doses of a vaccine, and very serious adverse events like an anaphylactic

22:59allergic reaction happen around one in one million doses of a vaccine. So these risks are incredibly rare.

23:08Before the smallpox vaccine was developed, we had over 110,000 cases of smallpox every year. In the U.S.,

23:16smallpox had about a 30 percent mortality rate. Solely because of the smallpox vaccine, we have

23:22eradicated smallpox from human existence. Pertussis caused about 175,000 cases of whooping cough every year.

23:31Now because of the vaccine, we've reduced it by 89 percent. Measles used to cause millions of deaths

23:37globally every single year before the measles vaccine, but the vaccine globally has reduced

23:42measles by 99 percent. Unfortunately, because of refusal to vaccinate, we're now seeing re-emergence

23:49of measles. Godless Mom wants to know acupuncture. We've had a discussion in our parenting group on

23:54Facebook. Some say it worked for them, others arguing from the side of science. What do you think?

23:59When you look at robust, randomized, and blinded clinical studies, the effect most people are

24:06reporting is more placebo than therapeutic benefit. Now it's important to note that acupuncture is a

24:13multi-billion dollar industry, and while insurance companies often do cover acupuncture treatments,

24:20it's not inherently because there's science to support it, it's because there's a market for

24:27this practice. There's no strong evidence that acupuncture is going to offer something that

24:34science-based physical therapy or musculoskeletal rehab is going to offer you, but people often

24:40report a benefit because they want to feel a benefit. Burt Rigg asks, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says beef

24:46tallow is healthier than seed oils. Is he right? No, he's wrong.

24:50Like he is about most things. Beef tallow is a type of rendered fat derived from cows,

24:57and it is high in saturated fatty acids like myristic and palmitic acid. We actually have

25:03decades of robust evidence that show that a diet high in polyunsaturated fats like those in seed oils

25:11compared to a diet high in saturated fats like those found in beef tallow reduce your risk of heart

25:17disease, atherosclerosis, high levels of LDL, cholesterol, that's the bad one, and triglycerides,

25:25and actually promote heart health. A lot of people have been misled to believe that the process of

25:32extracting oils from seeds is harmful or it's leading to toxic substances in the seed oils and

25:39that's just objectively false. These oils are purified and any sort of materials that are used for the

25:46extraction are not present in the seed oil. And finally, some people claim that seed oils are

25:52inflammatory because when they're heated at really high temperatures, they generate these harmful

25:58byproducts. These seed oils would have to be heated to well above 400 degrees Fahrenheit for any of these

26:05potentially harmful byproducts to be generated and that's not going to be happening if you're cooking

26:11with them or using them in your foods on a day-to-day basis. Some people promote the use of beef tallow for

26:18skin care and this all harkens back to this appeal to ancestry because the ancestors used beef tallow,

26:25the false belief that natural chemicals are better and so beef tallow is a natural fad, it must be good for

26:31your face but science has given us knowledge of all these different molecules that help to hydrate

26:37your face, reduce aging signs, things like sun damage. Beef tallow is not going to replace that.

26:43UW student 98210 asks, anybody heard of chlorine dioxide? Yeah, so chlorine dioxide is the same thing as

26:53miracle mineral solution. This was promoted by a guy named Jim Humble who was a Scientologist and he

27:01wrote a book in the early 2000s called The Miracle Mineral Solution where he essentially told parents

27:09that they should feed their children this chemical chlorine dioxide. Now chlorine dioxide colloquially

27:16is known as industrial bleach. Even at a relatively low dose it can cause severe complications and health

27:24issues including nausea, vomiting, kidney failure. It can also interfere with their ability to transport

27:30oxygen and it can also cause severe GI distress. If you inhale it, it can cause pulmonary edema or

27:37fluid filling in your lungs. However, you have wellness influencers who tout it as a cure-all for autism, HIV,

27:46cancer. All of our scientific and regulatory agencies explicitly warn against the use of chlorine dioxide for

27:54any therapeutic use. The problem is because this falls into this loophole of wellness products,

28:01people are still able to find chlorine dioxide whether through industrial chemical supply or through

28:08wellness companies and they're using it to cause harm to themselves or to other people.

28:13Rick4100 asks, why are we injecting newborns with a vaccine for a disease they can't catch? So this is

28:20referring to the hepatitis B vaccine which is given to newborns and Rick, they can catch hepatitis B.

28:26Contrary to the claims of anti-vaccine activists and our recent surgeon general nominee Casey Means,

28:35hepatitis B is not just a sexually transmitted infection. The hepatitis B virus is spread to

28:42children perinatally, so during the process of birth, or through direct contact with any bodily fluids,

28:49usually from a close family member. Hepatitis B infection in childhood leads to chronic hepatitis

28:55in 90% of the cases and chronic hepatitis due to hepatitis B is the cause of 60% of all liver cancers.

29:04So you would think that knowing that we could prevent 90% of chronic hepatitis cases in kids and

29:09all the subsequent liver cancers that would result, we would be shouting from the rooftops, this is great,

29:14we're preventing chronic illness, right? Wrong, unfortunately. Because this has become this

29:19battle cry of anti-vaxxers that were harming all these newborns by giving them this vaccine. But we

29:25didn't always vaccinate against hepatitis B at birth. In the 1980s, we had thousands and thousands of

29:32hepatitis B infections every year. But in 1991, the US adopted a universal newborn vaccine recommendation.

29:40And since then, we have reduced the prevalence of chronic hepatitis B to less than 0.1% among kids

29:48under five. Acute hepatitis B infections themselves has declined by 82%, and it is incredibly safe and

29:56effective. NZT48 Nootropics wants to know why does everyone swear by lion's mane? Lion's mane is touted in

30:05the wellness spheres as a cognitive performance enhancer, that it's going to improve focus,

30:11it's going to improve brain function. The problem is, all the evidence suggests those sorts of things

30:17have been done in mice or in cells growing on a piece of plastic. There's no actual evidence in humans

30:24that lion's mane supplements are actually offering those sorts of cognitive or brain health benefits.

30:29You'll often find lion's mane mixed in a cocktail along with instant coffee. And so they'll say that

30:36the lion's mane is boosting your focus, but they ignore the fact that coffee, which has caffeine,

30:42actually improves your focus. Now, lion's mane is an edible mushroom, and mushrooms are a great part of

30:49a healthy diet. But don't be misled to believe that it's a miracle panacea that's going to somehow

30:55reverse normal aging of your brain or improve your cognitive function because the data just aren't

31:00there. Brand Air asks, is it really that bad to eat at night? Food is food, right? And besides,

31:05it's daytime somewhere. I mean, the earth is forever rotating, so late night eating could be daytime

31:10at any time. Our bodies function on a circadian rhythm, meaning we have these 24-hour sleep-wake cycles

31:17during the day and through the night. You have different levels of certain hormones and signaling

31:22molecules that can alter or change processes that are occurring in your body. In the evening,

31:28people generally have a little bit reduced insulin sensitivity, meaning if you ate the same exact

31:35thing at night that you did maybe first thing in the morning, your normal blood glucose excursion might

31:41be slightly higher, but still normal. It's not going to be super impactful. The reason that some people

31:46experience weight gain or issues with eating late at night is because the quality of the food

31:52they're eating is generally calorie dense, not nutrient dense. So they're eating an excess number

31:57of calories beyond what they should be eating for their overall metabolic rate. So those are all the

32:02questions for today. Remember, always verify your sources, take every piece of information you come across

32:09with a grain of salt. Sensational claims always get more attention than the more nuanced reality.

32:16Thanks for watching, pseudoscience support 3.

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