The Next, Episode #53

Light exposure, metabolic psychiatry, and taking down Big Food

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

Some of you may have seen the news that supermodel Gisele Bundchen cured her depression by changing her diet. Though mainstream media was skeptical, there’s actually quite a long history of using metabolic interventions to change health outcomes. As Dr. Chris Palmer has said in his exceptional book Brain Energy:

From 1927 to the 1960s, insulin coma therapy was widely used in the treatment of serious mental disorders. Clinicians would inject patients with large doses of insulin until they went into a coma. This process was repeated a few times per week. Most reports from that era suggested that it was a highly effective treatment, at least for some people. At one point, it was the most widely used treatment for psychosis and severe depression in the Western world.

I think we are on the cusp of a future where many more humans are like Gisele, and work on their mental health by improving their biology. This emerging field of metabolic psychiatry is wildly interesting to me. If I had to bet, my guess is that a nutrition intervention + some sort of effective psychology approach will FAR outperform the best mental health interventions we have today (ie ketamine therapy). And maybe there’s a future where psychedelic therapy combined with food or other metabolic interventions is the best possible tool we have. 

I tend to hate on mental health interventions because I don’t think they’re tackling the right problem. Biological health is upstream of mental health: it’s hard for the brain to feel well if it’s metabolically dysfunctional. And when we try to address biological issues with talk therapy, it’s no surprise that approach doesn’t seem to work. 

I’d love to invest in or find anyone building a company in the metabolic health space, as I think it will be one of the health mega-trends of the coming decade. 

💪 Health stuff

I’ve recently come to believe that I/we have been missing something big when it comes to human health. Namely, the impact of light + sun exposure on our fragile human bodies. 

Humans are animals. And like animals, we get sick when removed from our ancestral environment. Like a polar bear dying of heat exposure in the Texas sun, the further removed we are from our ancestral environment, the greater the likelihood of sickness and disease. This, in my opinion, is why our ultra-processed diets are so bad for us: few foods could be as different from our ancestral diet as a McDonald’s Happy Meal. 

When applying this ancestral lens to light exposure, I worry. Nowhere does our ancestral environment deviate more from today’s environment than light exposure. 100,000 years ago, “inside” didn’t exist. Certainly, the average person wasn’t sitting under white light until the wee hours of the night, blue light flickering on their screens. 

Last week I finished reading Health and Light (published in 1970!). The book made a case for something I’ve been thinking more and more about: the negative impact that light has on both our mental and physical health. 

Obviously, something is going on. Poultry farmers have known for decades that hens living under red light lay eggs earlier, and produce more eggs. Hens raised under blue light also seem to have more body weight! 

We know that jaundice, psoriasis, eczema, and other diseases can be treated with UV light. Light therapy seems to work to help men regain interest in sex. And there are a whole host of studies linking photobiomodulation (ie red light therapy) to treating or improving various diseases (please don’t ask me how I find this stuff). 

As I’ve dug into this topic, a few studies caught my eye. These studies showed that the timing of food intake predicted weight gain (a new field of study called chrononutrition). One study found that mice fed day and night (vs just at night, when they are normally awake) gained 150% more weight than mice eating at normal times. How much of our current obesity crisis can be linked to eating at times the body doesn’t expect? 

I suspect that over the next decade, the impact of light on health and biology will become increasingly important. For those who want to go deeper on this topic, Huberman has a breakdown here (and a longer podcast with the rather wild Dr. Jack Kruse here). And my friend Michael Chapiro has also written about the topic here.  

It may be placebo, but as I’ve started to pay attention to my light exposure, I feel better. I’ve started to try to spend the first hour (or so) of my day outside, and work outside (in the shade) as much as possible. 

For those of you deeper down the light rabbit hole than me, please do share resources or interesting studies on chrononutrtition. For the rest of you, I’ll continue to write about the impacts of light on health as I continue my journey. 

🤑 Biz stuff

I’m a big fan of capitalism. Where countries implement it, wealth and prosperity follow. I’ve benefitted personally, both by growing up in the US (a wealthy, capitalist nation) and by building companies, raising money, investing… all (relatively) unconstrained by some centralized power. 

As much as I believe in free markets, I’ve been wrestling with a conundrum. Some of the companies I think are doing the greatest harm to the country - namely, big food and pharma companies - are massive players in our capitalist system. It just so happens that I also think they’re killing millions of Americans. 

I’m not quite sure how to square this. I believe that markets are good, freedom to transact is good, and capital allocation is good. Or at least, the best we have. 

At the same time, I can’t help but see the ways that Big Food and pharma use their deep coffers to rig the playing field to their advantage:

• Big Food funds 11x more research than the NIH
  Pharma lobbies to exclude vaccines from consumer liability

• 95% of the people who create our nutrition guidelines have conflicts with Big Food or pharma)

…and think there’s something deeply wrong here. 

I wonder if that thing is shareholder capitalism. Something these Big Food and pharma companies have in common is that the largest of them are 100+ years old. And over the 100+ years they’ve been around, the founders, employees and humans behind the company have changed. They’ve gone from being owned (at least in part) by people who work at the company, to almost entirely owned by money managers. The current Kellogg’s CEO, for example, owns just 0.11% of the company. 

With so little ownership, our poor Steven Cahillane has effectively no control over his business. He’ll either grow it and increase profit-per-share, or the board will fire him. Maybe that’s why he continues to have Kellogg’s include toxic substances in all of their US cereals, when those same toxins are banned in Europe (and thus not in their European products). 

With no ownership, there’s no control. And with no one able to actually influence these massive companies, they operate the way you might expect: as entities whose sole purpose is the increase of profit per share. Ignore the poisoning of Americans: share price must go up! 

For as much as people hate on him, I think it’s a great thing that Mark Zuckerberg (and others like him) still controls Facebook. Sure, he’s flawed and there are things to disagree with. But at the end of the day, he controls it. When he believes that content moderation is a problem worth solving (on moral or other grounds), he can spend $13B to fight it. Meanwhile, no matter what Steven Cahillane believes, there’s kind of nothing he can do? If removing Red 40 would make millions of American children healthier, but at the expense of profitability, well… America, you’re out of luck. 

These companies look a lot like the paperclip maximizers that haunt the dreams of AI researchers. Powerful entities that exist solely to maximize one thing, human desires be damned. 

I’ve no idea what the solve is here, nor am I certain my diagnosis is correct. But it sure is interesting to me that some of the companies I believe are most involved in the chronic disease crisis are effectively shareholder zombie corporations: operated for profit, owned by passive shareholders, and managed by figureheads without real control. Under a structure like this, where huge companies can spend hundreds of millions to influence regulators and make policy, perhaps it’s no wonder that we’re as sick as we are. I just want to find a way for the poisoning to stop. 

For more on this topic of regulatory capture, check out Bill Gurley’s talk. And if you have any resources worth reading, please do share! 

😌 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 - Not an article, but this 20 minute film on cancer as a metabolic disease (by our former 18-year-old Truemed intern Grace Price!) is incredible. It’s crazy to me that perhaps some of the best detective work as to the cause of our chronic disease crisis is being done by motivated high schoolers, but here we are. Grace is amazing, and you should definitely watch this. 
  

• 📚 Book rec- I read and absolutely loved The End of Craving. I’ll be exploring Mark’s hypothesis on obesity and nutrition in the next newsletter episode, but suffice it to say… it’s interesting stuff. Mark explores the relationship between vitamin over-saturation and metabolism I had never heard of before, and proposes some excellent solutions. Highly recommend.
  

• ⌚ Cool product - I recently discovered that many spices and herbs you’d buy in the grocery store contain high amounts of heavy metals: cinnamon, oregano, basil, and thyme all tested high for these metals. Not cool!
  I’m in the process of upgrading my spice drawer and buying from Pinch, as well as American Tumeric.
   

• 🎵 Music  - For something a little deeper, I’ve been really enjoying this Modd mix from some years back. These guys put out some of my favorite downtempo deep house mixes, and I’ve been jamming to this while writing as of late. 
  

• 🏀 Random - I’ll be spending all of June in beautiful Healdsburg, CA, attending the epic Edge Esmerelda! If this is something you’re interested in attending (for a few days, a few weeks, or the whole month), I’d recommend applying here - would love to hang out with you in June!
  

• 🔥Hot take - There’s a lot of interest in longevity. Tech people like Bryan Johnson (and me!) are interested in what could be possible in the longevity space. Are we on the cusp of a revolution in longevity? What will Science discover that can have us live longer, healthier lives?
  As I see the enthusiasm around longevity ramp up, I can’t help but feel the conversation completely ignores a spiritual + emotional component. Many of the reports we have of humans living 100+ years come from the yogic tradition, or other deep spiritual practice. Personally, if I think of the humans with the strongest life force, the strongest presence, I’ve met in the last decade, all of them had some deeply-rooted spiritual practice. I’m not exactly sure what to make of this, but I do know for sure that I resonate more with the spiritually curious than with the supplement squad.
  

• 🙋‍♂️ Ask - Speaking of Edge Esmerelda, I’m helping with the health + longevity track for a week at the event. If you have any recs on who I should invite (or want to participate yourself), drop me an email or apply online to join! 

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That’s all I got gang - enjoy the month! March has been a BUSY one for me, so apologies for getting this out a bit late. Enjoy, tell your friends that this newsletter exists, and I’ll see you next month. 

• Justin