The Next, Episode #54

Water quality, how to fight Big Food, and beating your own psychology

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

I used to believe I could not put on muscle. I’d look at two of my brothers who - annoyingly - could walk past a gym and gain weight, and thought gaining muscle wasn’t in my genetic destiny.

This script was completely wrong. After going through a breakup, I hired my first personal trainer and began to take lifting seriously. It turns out that - like most humans - I can, indeed, put on muscle. But only when I actually lift weights! 

Wrong though this “I can’t put on muscle” script was, it served me for decades. Armed with this script, I could skip the gym, rarely work out, and never push myself physically. It turns out that feeling bad about myself for being unable to gain muscle was something I preferred to the physical pain and discipline of actually working out. I was being lied to, by myself. 

I’ve seen this pattern multiple times in my life, where a story I’m telling myself insulates me from doing the hard work of changing. I’ve told myself I’m not ready to commit to avoid changing. I’ve told myself I’m not experienced, and wallowed in my experience of “not enough” to avoid the potentially greater pain of failing at something. Over and over again in my life, I’ve seen times where things I struggle with consistently are not harming me, but serving me. Protecting me from some Other Thing that I’m more afraid of. 

As one of my favorite writers, TLP, said:

The mistake is in thinking that misery and self-loathing are the "bad" things you are trying to get away from with Ambien and Abilify or drinking or therapy or whatever, but you have this completely backwards. Self-loathing is the defense against change, self-loathing is preferable to <mental work.> You choose misery so that nothing changes, and the Ambien and the drinking and the therapy placate the misery so that you can go on not changing. That's why when you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you don't immediately crank out 30 pushups, you open a bag of chips. You don't even try, you only plan to try. The appearance of mental work, aka masturbation.   The goal of your ego is not to change, but what you don't realize is that time is moving on regardless.

So often in my life, when I come upon a belief I’m struggling with - like that I’m “not good enough for a relationship” - I’ve later found that the Thing I was struggling with was protecting me from something deeper. Protecting me from being hurt dating, from failing in a relationship, from the pain of breaking up. The beliefs I thought I struggled with were, in fact, serving me. 

These are some of the ideas behind Internal Family Systems and “parts work”: a recognition that so many of the beliefs and parts that comprise my experience of “I” are parts that are trying to help. 

And often, when I explore what’s going on behind the 1st layer of belief or story, I find an underlying fear or other motivation that I can work with more directly. And by working with the root cause issue, well, I often can address the Thing head-on, and by doing so create actual change in my life. 

💪 Health stuff

Our tap water in the US is awful. Pop your zip code into EWG and you’ll see what I mean. Here’s what I see for Austin:

With 71% of the country drinking tap water (and with 95% of all tap water tested having exceeded the limit for at least 1 carcinogen), toxins in your water are likely one of the biggest threats to your health. 

A recent study found that nearly half of US tap water is contaminated with forever chemicals, though this number is likely higher (as they only tested for 32 of the 12,000+ types of PFAS).

Our water is also getting worse. The average water utility pipe in the US is 45 years old, and current federal limits on common contaminants are often 10-100x higher than scientifically established safe limits. For example, in the land of the free and the home of the brave 🇺🇲, acceptable levels of glyphosate in tap water are a mere seven thousand times (yes, 7000x) higher than that of the EU. I assume “freedom to poison thy people” was one of the amendments or something. 

Andrew Huberman even spoke out against tap water in this recent podcast, which discusses how disinfection byproducts (DBP’s) are found in tap water supplies and that “It's very clear that DBPs have been shown to disrupt ovarian function, spermatogenesis, and fertility outcomes."

He also talks about the dangers of fluoride, which is actually ADDED to municipal water supplies, saying "Fluoride negatively impacts thyroid-stimulating hormone and so-called T3 levels... even just 0.5 mg/L of water can disrupt thyroid function."

These chemicals found in tap water can also get in your stuff through your shower, through your food (if you wash it in the sink), via restaurant tap water… 

This stuff is bad, and if you really want to scare yourself, just google around and learn more about the phthalates, PFAS, and other chemicals present in US tap water. Yay! 

In the meantime, let’s talk about what you can do to avoid the impact of horrible tap water! 

The best possible way to source water would likely be filling directly from an untouched spring (like one of the ones here). That said, because this is impossible for most people, you can also order unprocessed spring water from AliveWaters or Tourmaline Spring (warning: volume on 😂). 

The next best option is to buy bottled spring water in glass. Most commercial drinking water labeled as “spring water” is pumped out of aquifers, ie wells. No bueno. 

The company I’ve used for glass-bottle spring water is Mountain Valley, while other companies include Saratoga, Castle Rock, Aqua Panna, Eldorado, and Simpson Spring.

Outside of sourcing spring water, having an at-home water filter is quite important. A Brita or the filter in your fridge isn’t going to cut it, and you probably need something more like a ZeroWater (most affordable) or a Rorra (which launches soon). If you’re really into improving your water, I’d recommend getting a whole-home water filtration system: Ophora, Radiant Life, and Aquasana all have solid options. If you’re not opting for a whole home filtration system, I’d at least recommend getting a shower head filter (cheaper, more expensive). 

There is much more to be said about water and its role in human health, but this is a good start. Tap water is toxic and should be avoided as much as possible.

Filtering your water with a quality product is the bare minimum, drinking glass spring water and having a quality shower filter is the next step up, adding a whole-home filtration system to your home is basically about as much as you can do. 

Ho hum: just another day in The Great American Poisoning. Take care of yourself out there! 

🤑 Biz stuff

Our regulatory agencies are failing us. I’ve written about this before, how regulators have fallen down on the job time after time again when it comes to glyphosate regulation, on PFAS and other environmental toxins, on microplastics, on infant formula, on trans fats…

Not only have our regulatory bodies completely failed us, but unfortunately, they actively promote harmful products. Large institutions like Danone and Coca-Cola fund “research” that says no, actually, sugar water isn’t bad for you, Lucky Charms are healthy btw. And bam, Coca-Cola products end up in 80% of schools, Lucky Charms are healthier than beef, and pizza is a vegetable - don’t you know! 

Americans today exist in a haze of toxic chemicals, toxic food products, toxic dietary advice, and a chronic disease crisis that’s killing tens of millions of Americans. Yet regulators spend their time making guidelines that will result in more disease (maybe because 95% of the people creating these guidelines have conflicts of interest with Big Food or pharma), tickling the wrists of Johnson & Johnson for toxic levels of lead in baby formula and arresting Amish raw milk sellers. 

With our regulatory agencies this broken, it’s up to us to ensure that we aren’t getting poisoned. To reverse The Great American Poisoning, I’m bullish on two things that can help reverse this trend:

More testing and transparency - I’m very bullish on companies like Light Labs (disclosure: I’m an advisor) bringing more transparency to our food and other systems by making it easier for brands to test and show consumers what’s actually in the products they’re making. Today, consumers mostly buy products with no idea as to pesticide load, PFAS content, microplastic contamination, and so on. 

I expect this to shift in a major way, and I think that Light Labs, and other certifications like The Detox Project’s glyphosate-free program to grow in popularity. Kettle & Fire was the first brand in our category to test for glyphosate, and the first to get “glyphosate-free” certified. That resonated with our consumers, and we’ll continue to invest in this area. 

Class action lawsuits - Class actions are a surprisingly under-utilized tool for forcing better behavior by companies. Bayer-Monstanto recently settled the largest non-tobacco suit in history ($13B!), 3M is settling a similarly huge lawsuit around PFAS, and we are only just starting to understand the impact many of these other compounds have on our health and bodies. 

I’m bullish on companies and individuals utilizing these tools more to force large companies to behave better. Like my friend Jason Karp who recently sent Kelloggs a demand letter around removing food dyes from their US cereals (dyes that don’t exist in the EU versions of their products). 

I want to learn how these class actions happen, and am even willing to hire a researcher to explore further. I feel like there’s an interesting opportunity to build a playbook on how to hold some of these big, naughty brands to account, and class actions seem like a useful mechanism to do so. 

😌 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 - Gang, we are winning. Recently, canola and other seed oil suppliers banded together to form the “Seed Oil Coalition”, all with the explicit goal to fight “seed oil misinformation”. Like the stuff I talk about!
  The framing on this is hilarious to me. As this post outlines, today we have a chronic disease crisis. The question should not be “what evidence do you have that seed oils are harmful?!?”, but rather, “why would we think that seed oils are not harmful?”. After all it’s not like anyone enjoys the taste of these oils: they’re just cheap, and pushed on us by companies that make a lot of money doing so. But thanks to online friends spreading “misinformation” about the many links between seed oil consumption and disease, well, I’m hopeful we’re starting to see some change. 
  

• 📚 Book rec - I’ve read a lot of health books, but am going to start recommending Good Energy the most out of all of them. I suspect that so many of the things that are bad for our health - seed oils, excessive sugar consumption, microplastics, etc - are bad for us thanks to the impact they have on our mitochondria and metabolic health.
  This book is one of the first to really dive deep into mitochondrial health and its impact on our well-being. I’d strongly recommend you check it out - and it was written by my Truemed co-founder!
  

• ⌚ Cool product - I recently bought an Ocushield for my laptop, monitor, and iPhone. Both for privacy reasons and to lower the amount of blue light my little eyeballs are pounded with on a daily basis (yes I use screens too much). It seems to help, and I’ve had a bit less screen tiredness at the end of the day. I’m digging more into the impact of light on health, and this was an easy purchase to make to lower blue light exposure!
  

• 🎵 Music  - This set is epic, that’s all, enjoy. 
  

• 🏀 Random - This study found that artificial light at night leads to cancer causation in humans, even after adjusting for a bunch of stuff. In my view, the data is adding up that circadian rhythm has an important role to play in health and cancer prevention. 

  • Also, my friend Nick Gray went on a blind date in Tokyo because, well, that’s just who he is. He’s also an amazing storyteller, check out his post on how it went.
    

• 🔥Hot take - Everything around PFAS and microplastic exposure will be the DDT/Silent Spring issue of our time. These compounds are in everything, they’re everywhere, and we’ve known their harmful effects for decades. Inaction has killed millions of Americans, and the problem shows no signs of getting better. Learn more about them here.
  

• 🙋‍♂️ Ask - I don’t know how to grow this newsletter, but feel like maybe I should? Or maybe it’s good to keep as it is right now, a low-pressure outlet for me to share some things I’m thinking about. This isn’t as much an ask as much as it is a statement to let you know I’m confused. 

***

That’s all gang. Don’t touch the water in the plastic bottles, I’ll see you in June.

• Justin