The Next, Episode #52

Deadly beliefs, public health miracles, and Zbiotics

Hi there, and welcome to The Next - my take on health, wellness, and company building.

In the last few years I’ve founded 3 health brands (Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, Surely non-alc wine), which do tens of millions in revenue. I’m now working on Truemed, which allows health and wellness brands to accept HSA/FSA funds. Previously, I worked in tech and had no experience in CPG, DTC, or any other 3-letter industries.

If you missed past episodes, I recommend checking out Episode 42 on finding work you love and why I’m worried about environmental toxins. Otherwise, let’s dive in! 

🆕 What’s new

In our information age, bad ideas die slowly. Ideas are selected for how quickly they spread, not for how correct they are. 

You see this in the health domain: influencers talking about how meat is bad, how Lucky Charms are better than beef, and accuracy-challenged documentaries pushing a vegan diet. Yet these ideas persist, gain steam, and soon enough kids can’t have meat in NYC public schools. 

Most bad ideas (vegan is good for you, seed oils are fine) are not so bad that they immediately kill you. And because they don’t immediately kill you - and because they happen to align with the beliefs and profit motive of many influencers and special interests - these bad ideas persist for decades. 

The recent, early deaths of several pro-obesity influencers are an exception. It’s hard to take an “obesity is healthy” person seriously when many with that belief have died. You wouldn’t go to couple’s therapy with a therapist on their 5th marriage (unless they were suuuuper cheap), and you’re unlikely to believe that obesity is okay when the leading proponents of this idea don’t live beyond 40. 

As I read about the tragic recent deaths of these influencers, it got me thinking about Kevin Simler’s idea of crony beliefs: beliefs that serve the purpose of social belonging, not truth-seeking. In a world where relationships increasingly happen online, a belief’s signaling value becomes more important than its truthiness. 

I doubt that many of these pro-obesity influencers literally, truly to their core believed that obesity is healthy. But I am positive that they were surrounded by others who saw that belief as high status, and rewarded them for carrying it. 

This is something I watch for in my own life. When I encounter a belief that so neatly fits my model of the world (and makes me feel high status for holding it), my feeling should be instant suspicion.

It turns out, that if it’s socially beneficial to believe X to be true, a lot of people will believe X is true! If, on the other hand, you can ignore what everyone assumes to be true and dig into a topic on its own merits, there’s a chance you discover something previously unknown. This is how you discover secrets. 

It’s also a fun way to live. I have friends who think dinosaurs aren’t real, the moon landing is fake, reincarnation is a thing… and have decent arguments for all of them. I’m not quite sure where I land (most of my time is spent reading about the food system after all), but it certainly has helped me be a bit more open minded, and a bit more suspicious of ideas that neatly fit my existing beliefs. 

💪 Health stuff

In 1918, Switzerland was suffering from an epidemic of “cretinism”, as nearly 10% of the population had an enlarged thyroid (also known as goiter). 

Besides harming your Tinder prospects, this condition also led to stunted growth and mental disability. This was truly an epidemic, and struck huge portions of the population in mountainous areas. 

In 1918, the Swiss doctor Otto Bayard proposed that goiter was an iodine deficiency, not a result of infection, alcoholism, “ill humors” or other proposed causes of this monstrous condition. Otto Bayard ran a controlled experiment: he’d mix iodine into salt to iodize it, and then bring it to the many cantons around the country that were suffering from goiter. 

This campaign was immediately successful. As soon as Otto’s iodized salt was introduced into a population, cases of goiter disappeared (2). Today, 100+ years later, Switzerland (and most developed countries) are practically goiter-free, a public health miracle. 

Salt iodization did more than eradicate goiter: it may also account for the Flynn Effect, an observation that IQ has risen about 3 points per decade (in developed countries) throughout the 20th century. According to a bunch of studies, the addition of iodine to table salt may have raised the IQ of millions of Americans by as much as 15 points (3)! 

Here we have a tiny chemical compound that when added to salt in 45 microgram quantities (ie 0.045mg, or about the weight of 3 eyelashes), improves IQ by 10-15 points, prevents goiter, and may be responsible for American IQ increasing steadily over the last 100 years. Three eyelashes worth of a chemical!! 

When I talk to people about environmental toxins and why I’m so concerned about them, this is why. The US has 40,000+ chemicals allowed in our food, in our water, in our environment, that have never gone through any sort of regulatory review for safety or lack of harm. It’s why we’ve spent tons of money to test all of our Kettle & Fire products for phthalates, BPA, PFAS and other harmful compounds (and come up empty), without any regulatory requirement to do so.

This is insane. Not only do we have strong evidence that glyphosate, PFAS, phthalates, and a whole host of other chemical compounds are by themselves bad for humans… but we know nothing about the chemical interactions between these chemical compounds, what happens when these compounds bioaccumulate… nothing. 

Take glyphosate. Each year, 280 million pounds of glyphosate/Roundup are sprayed on US crops, (while the same compound is banned in Europe). The evidence around glyphosate toxicity is becoming clearer: after 15 years of lawsuits around glyphosate exposure and cancer, Bayer/Monsanto paid $10.9B, the largest settlement in pharma history. The first scientific studies linking RoundUp to adverse health effects were in 2005, yet only now are the courts and the media waking up to the devastating impact glyphosate has on human health.

There will be many more stories like this one. Interventions with 45mcg of iodine can be public health miracles, and improve millions of lives. Today, we are running the opposite of a public health campaign, and exposing you and your families to record levels of chemical compounds not found and nature and never before tested on humans. What could go wrong? 

I recently had my researcher do a deep dive into the relationship between iodine and IQ for those interested. You can read the full writeup here.

🤑 Biz stuff

I’ve long been a fan of Zbiotics (I bought 400 of them for my wedding) and have been blown away by how well they work. Zbiotics has engineered probiotics that release an enzyme that helps your gut break down and process acetaldehyde (one of the compounds that leads to hangovers). End result: you’re less hungover! 

Seeing their efficacy has got me wondering if targeted, genetically modified strains of probiotics are where the future of pharma is headed. 

If it’s not obvious, I’m not a fan of pharmaceuticals. Many commonly prescribed drugs (like SSRIs) barely work better than placebo and come at with a whole host of side effects. A recent study of 17M+ people found no significant difference in terms of quality of life for those on SSRIs vs those not on them. And boy are there a lot of Americans on SSRIs - 1 in 8 Americans over the age of 18 has taken them recently, and 20%+ of women over 40 have taken an SSRI in the last 30 days. 

Pharmaceuticals today all follow roughly the same paradigm. Find a molecule, patent it, hope for minimal side effects, and introduce it in the form of a pill (or a shot) to hundreds of millions of Americans. 

One of the many problems with this approach is that novel small molecules have lots of side effects! Medical history is full of pharmaceuticals with unintended, hugely harmful side effects: fen-phen, rimonabant, depakote, to name just a few. And those are drugs that have been withdrawn due to severe side effects! All sorts of antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, and other currently available pharmaceuticals come with loads of known side effects that we view as just part of the package of taking these drugs. Move along, nothing more to see here. 

Probiotics are different. Not only are several strings of probiotics shown to treat depression, but I suspect we are not far away from a time when we’ll be modifying probiotics to create other specific enzymes that enter the body, achieve their aims, and are then sent packing. 

I expect we’ll see more special-purpose probiotics over the coming years, aimed at replacing many of the current crop of expensive, side-effect-creating pharmaceuticals we have today. Candidly, it can’t happen soon enough. I’m increasingly of the opinion that pharma companies are one of the entities most responsible for the poisoning of Americans, a topic I’ll write more about very soon. 

😌 Dope stuff on the internet

Some of my favorite things since the last newsletter (note: I don’t get paid to recommend anything here):

• 📰  Article - A recent review found that meat intake is associated with increased life expectancy. Obviously: humans have been eating meat for millions of years. How it’s somehow become en vogue to think that meat is a core issue in our chronic disease crisis, I have no idea. 

  • Related, I am willing to bet pretty much any amount of money that lab-grown meat won’t work. Not only because people don’t want it, but because the economics behind it seem frankly impossible to get over.
    

• 📚 Book rec - I just started Craving and have been loving it. At this point, I’m on a mission to read pretty much every book I can about food, agriculture, and our very broken food system. And I suspect that taste + artificial flavors messing with the body’s natural ability to balance and seek out certain nutrient-dense foods is a missing component of that discussion.
  I’ll write more about this in future episodes, but if you have any books I should read on food/ag/etc, I’m all ears.
  

• ⌚ Cool product - I recently got back from my honeymoon in Japan and have started the long and arduous journey to becoming a tea person. I’ve been loving this green tea prepared in this kyusu every morning.
  

• 🎵 Music  - This Tycho Burning Man set (which I had the good fortune of seeing live) is killer. As is this new Flavor Trip set, created by two of the wackiest DJs I’m aware of.
  Also, if you’re into what my friend Ben calls “sad boy music” (ie Bon Iver, James Blake), this song by Novo Amor (one of my favorite artists) will hit the spot.
  

• 🏀 Random - In another blow to “pharmaceuticals will save us” lines of thinking, a recent study shows dancing is more effective than SSRIs to treat depression. Along with yoga, walking, jogging, strength training, relaxation, qigong, and cycling. But guess which one the average doctor will prescribe when you tell them you’re depressed? Truly, I look forward to the day when you go to the doctor and get prescribed 18 minutes of manic Skrillex, or 12 seconds of Disturbed.
  

• 🔥Hot take -  I’m convinced that we are only juuuust starting to understand the impact that PFAS, microplastics, and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals have on society and behavior. I tend to agree with the hypothesis in this article, that these novel chemical compounds (and the way they impact testosterone and hormones) play a not-insignificant role in the rise of gender dysphoria and other gender-related changes that have become much more prominent the last 50 years.
  

• 🙋‍♂️ Ask - Truemed is growing and looking for young, hungry people who want to fix our chronic disease crisis. If you’re interested in building partnerships with hundreds of players in the health and wellness ecosystem, I’d love to chat about working together. 

***

This year is going fast, and life feels both fun and very full at the moment. I’m grateful to all of you for spending your team reading the insides of my brain this month, and will see you again in April! 

• Justin