Transcript of Setting the Record Straight on Seed Oils, Raw Milk & Formula with Dr. Jessica Knurick

Lemonada. Is it just me or are things actually really weird right now in the world of public health? Every day brings another confusing headline or far-fetched claim.

It's almost impossible to find baby formula without seed oils. Seed oils, they're believed to be pro-inflammatory. One thing that helped me lose so much weight is I think of raw milk as my pre-workout. Do I keep vaccinating? Am I an anti-vaxxer?

Not to mention the cuts to cancer research, to women's health research, to brain research, to the dismantling of the suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQ+ kids. People's lives are at risk. Welcome to That Can't Be True, a show that sorts fact from fiction, especially on issues impacting our health. Today, we're talking to Dr. Jessica Nurek. She's a registered dietitian with a PhD in Nutrition Science. Lately, she's emerged as one of the most prominent experts and critics of Maha. Make America Healthy Again. On social media, she's constantly, and thankfully, myth-busting wellness fads and exposing the real dangers that come when people distress science and public health institutions. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you.

Great. Well, we open every episode with something called That Can't Be True. I'm going to play a recent news clip, and Jessica, you're going to tell us what the real deal is. Here's Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Testifying in front of the Senate Finance Committee last month.

Chronic disease has reached crisis proportions in our country. Finally, we have an administration that is taking action. We are the sickest country in the world. That's why we have to fire people, the CDC.

They did not do their job.

This was their job to keep us healthy. Thank you, Mr. I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn't happen again.

We've already righted the ship at NIH, at FDA, at CMS, and we are going to end the chronic disease epidemic. That can't be true, right? Is the CDC the reason we're the sickest country in the world?

I think that he is using a very real issue that exists in the United States, which are the chronic disease rates that we observe and we see. A lot of in a very bipartisan way, are very concerned about that. It's why I got into this field a decade and a half ago, was specifically to figure out and study the reducing rates of chronic disease. But what he's doing there is redirecting the cause of the issue onto our public health institutions. I think a lot of it comes from him relying on people to not really understand the role of public health institutions and actually what's contributing to much of the chronic disease rates that we see in this country. He's using the rates of chronic disease as you could hear him there, as an excuse to fire and essentially gut the CDC, which is an agency that he spent two decades condemning and calling corrupt. As if they're responsible for the chronic disease epidemic in the United States, they're an advisory group. They're not regulating, they're not legislating, they're not in your household buying your groceries. I think instead of looking at what the actual issues are and the causes of chronic disease, we're just blaming our health institutions, which obviously the Trump administration is currently defunding and reorganizing.

I want to talk a little bit about how you first became familiar with the Maha movement and where you found yourself as I think many of us who are parents do, in deep agreement with some of the stated goals. Also, as public health people, deeply wary and even in opposition to some of their goals. I think it was around the time that you were pregnant with your second kid that you first noticed that your social media feed was becoming more and more populated with a lot of fear mongering, vitriolic content around health. What did you first think when you began to notice these trends? When did you decide you wanted to not be a passive recipient to them?

In 2022 is when I was pregnant with my daughter. I had been pregnant with my son in 2019, had my son in 2019. So there was a little gap there. I just noticed, and this was just for me personally, a huge change in terms of the amount of misinformation that I was being fed in my algorithms towards pregnancy because I was pregnant at the time, particularly around pregnancy, nutrition, and things like that. I don't know what it was specifically. I don't know if it was because of COVID and more people were on social media, or if it was because of the release of TikTok, because this This is largely on TikTok that I was seeing this. That's where I actually started on social media. But that's what brought me to social media. It was just to combat some of the false narratives. I felt like a responsibility to do it, too. I had postpartum anxiety with my daughter, and so I just felt this like, it really opened my mind to how much anxiety women in this life stage are going through. Then they're online and it's just making it even worse. All of the misinformation and fear, mongering, and conspiratorial information that really plays well to social media algorithms.

It can be really hard to cut through the noise. If you get into the wrong algorithm and you keep seeing it, it can really make anxiety a lot worse. I decided to go on and just start combating some of the misinformation I was seeing and just set the record straight and explain why it was false information. I grew a nice little community of pregnant women and postpartum women at that time. Then I actually remember exactly when I first heard about Maha, I was doing a Q&A in my Instagram stories, and someone was like, What do you think of the Maha movement? Or, What do you think of Maha? I think they had maybe just announced it. I just remember thinking, What is Maha? Anyway, that's when I started seeing, obviously, the narratives come out of this movement. I think because it was just my exact area that I had been studying for so long, it was nutrition science, and then it was also the policies that impact our food environment and how we can reduce risk of chronic disease, it was very for me to see how manipulative the narrative was. Whereas maybe other areas of politics, it wouldn't be as easy for me to spot.

Clearly, you, thankfully, spend a lot of time individually and also in your social media for from engaged with people who have very specific concerns, some of which might be, for you, feel quite outlandish. Like, oh, my gosh, someone thinks this about nutrition. Someone thinks red Dye 40 is the source of any cold that their child has ever gotten. What are the questions, the sincere questions people have come to you with about your area of expertise that have most surprised you or that feel most untethered from any evidence that you or any nutritional scientist might be familiar with?

I would say seed oils is a big one. All right.

Talk to us about seed oils.

Yeah. I mean, it's not my favorite topic to talk about, but I can't answer this question without bringing it up. Just because it flies in the face of nutrition science research. It really does. It's an example of what happens a lot on social media where people will take a mechanism of action. They'll say, linoleic acid leads to arachidonic acid, and that causes inflammation. Seed oils are causing inflammation in people and causing chronic disease. There's There's so many examples of how a mechanism can be true, but when we actually look at a human model, it doesn't actually pan out because humans are complex. It just doesn't always work like it does in a lab when you're actually looking at a human model. This is a really good example. There's just no data. There's no evidence to suggest that seed oils are inflaming us or harming our health. In fact, quite the opposite. When we look at epidemiological data and when we look at trials, of people who are consuming seed oils. Again, seed oils are consumed all around the world by people. It's very interesting that in the US, we're really focusing on this. Where a little bit of the truth lies is seed oils are very cheap.

They're highly processed, and so they don't have a lot of flavor. When you compare them to an olive oil, olive oil has a pretty strong flavor. Because of that, they're used in a lot of these foods that food manufacturers are creating, a lot of these ultra-processed foods, and particularly low and ultra-processed foods. We tend to overconsume those foods in this country. We're eating a lot of them. That can be harmful. When you overconsume anything, it can be problematic because it's a fat source, and that's problematic. But If you're just making a stir fry with some sunflow oil... My mother-in-law is from Romania, and she constantly uses seed oils, what we call vegetable oils, to make her food. She's cooking vegetables and things that with them. Again, there's just not evidence that they're harmful. But because social media has really leaned into the seed oil's idea, because it plays into this idea that we're poisoning the people in the country, right?

It's like the big olive oil conspiracy. It's like the olive oil. Like, producers and manufacturers got together and were like, We're going to demonize seed oil so much more people buy our products.

Well, and another layer here, by the way, is seed oils are affordable. They're much more affordable than olive oil. This is where it can be harmful. If you're demonizing this oil that is affordable for people and they're using it to cook vegetables in or whatever, and you're saying that they have to be consuming olive oil, but they don't have the budget for olive oil, you're causing unnecessary anxiety and shame in a person that there's no reason for it.

Or maybe there is a reason for it. Yeah. No logical reason for it. No logical reason. No defense sensible, logical or moral reason. But I do want to talk about baby formula because certainly, I'm so thankful that I was able to breastfeed all three of my children, that that was something that my body permitted me to do, that it was something that I had the time and the resources to be able to prioritize doing, that all three of my children latched easily, and that that could be part of my experience with each of my three kids when they were little. Sometimes one of those things isn't true for a new mom, and sometimes all of those things aren't true. It has been noticeable to me, the increasing sense of not only breast is best, but if you're not breastfeeding your children, somehow you're failing. Alongside the increasing, demonization is too strong Not long of a word, but denigration of formula broadly, and then all of the swirling questions around what is in formula, what is good formula, what is bad formula. What do you have to say to any of that? What should any of us who, of course, care that any and every small human gets the nutrition that we would want for our own children should know as we try to be productive participants in conversations around formula?

Yeah. So formula has certainly been something that the Maha movement has talked a lot about. I don't exactly know why. It probably speaks to more of this glorification that we see about moms who are at home with their kids and this idea of going back in time and living like our ancestors lived, more close to nature and that thing. Infant formula is an incredible scientific advancement. I mean, I'm just blown away by the science. Like you, Chelsea, I breastfed both of my children, and I was fortunate enough to be at home with them, working from home and able to do that. It's not as if I'm partisan towards formula because I used it myself. It's just from a scientific perspective, it's an incredible advancement. Infants who would have otherwise died without a reliable source of nutrition now get to live and thrive. Because we've been able through many scientific advancements be able to, essentially, as closely as possible, mimic breast milk, which is so cool.

My husband was a formula-fed baby.

I was a formula-fed baby.

I'm so thankful, both you and here in the world. We're a better place for both of you.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and what's really cool about it is that it's opened up the opportunity to not only allow babies to live, but also to thrive and to be healthy and live full lives. What's interesting about formula is there's always advancements that are coming out. And what I think is interesting about Maha and the Operation Stork Speed, I think it's a long time coming for us to do a thorough view of all of the nutrients because from a science perspective, there are some nutrients that we could be looking at. We can be looking at potentially lowering iron levels and also maybe looking at these human milk oligosaccharides. And there's some cool advancements that a lot of I think a lot of formula companies have done on their own, but from a federal perspective, we haven't actually looked at that in a long time. I think that's great. What I think is not so great is what's coming out of all of this is this idea that formula is toxic, particularly in the United States versus the EU. I've done a lot of videos on this where I compare the formulas, and they're pretty much exactly the same, with very little variability.

The seed oil has always come into this as well. For some reason, there's a narrative out there that only we are using seed seed oils in the United States, and that's not true. I mean, every infant formula, to my knowledge, every infant formula in the entire world uses seed oils. The reason for that is because of the polyunsaturated fatty acid content, which more closely mimics the fatty acid composition of breast milk. Because if you just use lactose, if you just use cow's milk, which is what most formulas use, cow's milk is not as high in polyunsaturated fatty acids as human milk. What you have to do is you have to take the milk and then you have to add in those polyunsaturated fatty acids, and you do that with these vegetable oils. That's why they're included. There's a scientific basis for it and a reason. It's not this conspiratorial idea that they're trying to hurt the children. It's quite the opposite. They're trying to really help the children. I think that's the fear from a science perspective in terms of this anti-science movement or this anti-expert movement that everybody has these ideas and they all should be on the same playing field when there's It's people who have been studying this field forever and ever, and particularly with Infant Formula, and we should be listening to them about what an infant needs.

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Well, I mean, the problem is that we do have a lifestyle-related chronic disease problem in this country, right? That's what they're very focused on, and that's largely right. Now, oftentimes, they overstate the problem, but largely, they get the problem right. We have a chronic disease issue. We have a lifestyle-related chronic disease issue. We have a food environment that is not built for our health. We have systems in this country that are not built for us to succeed in a healthful way. When I'm talking, I can often sound like RFK Jr. When we're talking about the problem, specifically, because we're talking about a very similar thing. Where I diverge from him, and most scientists and public health experts do, is in the causes of that problem. For example, his causes and the Maha movement's causes really lean into this idea of toxins and poisoning our kids and public public health agencies being corrupt and scientists and medical doctors all being bought off and not being able to be trusted. They completely ignore all of the very evidence-based determinants of health, what is actually causing a lot of these lifestyle-related chronic diseases. They do that because it plays into this narrative about the conspiracy and the toxins and all of that.

What I say is when you get the causes wrong, you largely are going to get the solutions wrong, right? Because you have to figure out what's causing the problem to come up with a good solution. If you're getting the causes wrong, your solutions will either be benign, maybe some will be randomly helpful, but some will be very harmful. We see that with... I can give a couple of examples. Floride, the fluoride in the water. If we're saying that without evidence that fluoride is a toxin and causing chronic disease in our kids, when, by the way, the number one chronic disease in children is dental caries, and we remove fluoride from the water supply, that's going to increase the number one chronic disease in our children, with no evidence that it's going to help in any way. More than that, it's going to exacerbate health disparities because wealthier children are going to go to the dentist, they're going to get fluoride treatments, they're going to be able to brush with fluoride toothpaste. But public health measures are often to help everyone in the United States and often targeting the people who need it most, which tend to be low-income populations in this country.

It will exacerbate health disparities even more. That's an It's an example of something that would actually harm us even more so than help us. Another one is focusing our energy on food dyes to improve the food supply. Our food supply is not problematic because of food dyes. It's problematic because the entire system has been built for corporate profits at the expense of our health, and it's resulted in a food supply that's 70% ultra-processed foods, many of those low-nutrient ultra-processed foods. What we have available to people and accessible are these convenient convenience foods that aren't necessarily health-promoting foods. We have an accessibility issue with a lot of these health-promoting foods. If you just think that, Okay, I'm going to swap the color of Skittles and make it not as vibrant, that's not going to change health in any meaningful way. We're going to be distracted thinking that's going to improve anything. Meanwhile, we're not putting our energy into the policies that could actually help improve the food supply.

Jessica, what advice do you give to anyone, but I guess, specifically moms, about what they should be advocating for? Because I think it can feel really satiating. Oh, my gosh, Kellogg is going to remove food dyes from their cereal. Just to continue on your last point, how do you say Yes, that can be a win. Also, we should be advocating for what to really fix our food.

Yeah, I think we have to look at the entire system. From what we grow to to what we put on the shelves to what we market to children and Americans in general. There's some evidence-based ideas on both of those sides. On the side of what's being promoted, you can regulate marketing to children and to low-income populations and to just America in general. You can put regulations.

We do it when it relates to smoking.

We do, yeah, and we should with pharmaceuticals, but that's another story. But yeah, we can put those regulations on. I mean, what we know from an evidence-based perspective is that what makes a food hyper-satiating is really the combination of salt, sugar, and fat. We can see, we can look at what are these companies putting in their foods and what should we be potentially allowing or not allowing. We do it in school nutrition. We can also look at what we grow because what we grow is really incentivizing these... I mean, corporations within our economic system are going to try to maximize profit at the expense of health. Not even at the expense of health.

It's just that they're not like- They're just trying to maximize profit.

Yeah, they're not trying to make people sick.

It's just- How do we align their incentives? Maximize profit and return on health dollar or whatever the right metric is.

Exactly. We have to think about what do we grow and how do we incentivize farmers to grow different products? How do we bring back local food systems? Because we have lost local food systems primarily because of policy over the last many, many decades. What we're seeing now is we really have a heavy reliance on big agribusiness, and big agribusiness grows a lot of commodity crops, which is corn, wheat, and soy. We grow those very well in this country, but we've incentivized the growth of them over a long period of time. What we can do is through grants and offerings for farmers and helping them to be able to diversify their crops and helping smaller farmers through grants. There were some There are wonderful grants that the Biden administration came out with, helping local farmers get foods to schools and food banks in their area. We saw with the Trump administration, they cut a billion dollars in that funding. Those are the grants that can help to bring more fresh fruits and vegetables to local areas. We have an issue in this country with food deserts where a lot of people just don't have access. They may want to eat more healthfully, but they don't have necessarily access.

They're primarily going to a corner store or a dollar store store for their groceries. I think a lot of Americans who have never experienced this don't even realize that millions of Americans live like this. But to get to a grocery store, they have to take a couple of busses, and it takes a lot of time. So they're not going to opt to do that. Incentivizing things like mobile grocery carts to go into those areas or incentivizing grocery chains to open there with the grants and things like that can be helpful on that perspective, too. There's a lot that we can do just from a systems approach to think of how can we start increasing the accessibility and availability of these nutrient-dense foods and reducing the reliance on these heavily ultra-processed foods.

Yet last month, the Trump administration released its strategy to make our children healthy again. I don't think any of that was included. There was a lot of recommended policy reform around food dyes, around baby formula, but it wasn't the comprehensive vision that you just articulated, and it lacked any mechanisms for how the government would actually implement even what was in the strategy. Do you think they're serious about really trying to make our children healthy again or no?

Yeah, I was very interested to read that because that's obviously the follow-up to the original Maha report that came out that was supposed to identify the causes of chronic disease. This was It's supposed to be what we all expect it to be the policy-based response to that or follow-up to that. How are we going to improve upon these things? It's incredibly light on actual policy and actual action. It has a lot of good ideas talking about increasing physical activity for children and decreasing reliance on low-nutrient ultra-processed foods. Screens. Yeah, screen time. All things that all of us can get behind. Maha constantly says, This is not a It's a political movement. Everybody should be behind these things. Yes, when we talk about what we all want, it's pretty bipartisan. It's what we are going to do about getting there that can be a bit partisan. But there was very little in terms of what they're actually going to do. What I see it as, as somebody who closely follows policy, I see it as a movement that's keeping people excited without actually taking action to do anything. What was most striking to me is a lot of the things that Maha wants and claims to want, the Trump administration is legislating in the opposite direction.

We see it with even heavy metals. I think they brought up heavy metals in infant formula. I mean, if you want to reduce heavy metals, you got to go to the root cause of what's causing heavy metals in our soil and our water. A lot of that are these chemical industries. If you are deregulating all these chemical industries and allowing them to opt out of environmental regulations by emailing the administration like the Trump administration is doing and ushering in the greatest era of deregulation of all time at the EPA, you're increasing the problem of contaminants and heavy metals in our soil, our air, our water, and ultimately our food supply. That's just one example, but there's so many examples of what they want versus what's actually being done.

I wonder, what advice do you have for any of us and for me, based on what you've seen work to try to help us move out of a place where we're constantly debating or relitigating or thinking it's a he said, she said dynamic around science.

Yeah, Chelsea, sometimes I have to ask myself, is this just a social media thing? If I go out in the real world, are people talking about this as much as it's happening on social media? But I think that where I found success is a lot of people are distrusting right now. That's also coming from the top. We have an HHS secretary that is literally telling you not to trust experts.

His own experts who actually work for the department that he leads.

Obviously, the reason for doing that is to pretend that expertise doesn't matter so that anybody can come in and fill those gaps. You and I, and anyone have the same... Our opinions are weighted the exact same, which just is not true. You should not trust my opinion on how to fly an airplane as much as you should trust a pilot. My opinion should not matter in that conversation. That, obviously, is in all areas. Expertise is very specific, and people spend their lives dedicated to a very specific topic. But I do think that what we're dealing with right now is this era where a lot of people have lost trust in expertise and experts. For some people, you're not going to win them over with this appeal to authority or or appeal to expertise. What I found to be successful is explaining why something's false. Again, in my area of expertise, because I can't do this outside of it, but within my area, I can, and I can show why it's false. I can show the reference I can show them, go look it up themselves. Go fact-check everything I say. Please do it. Be open to that.

Then it slowly but surely starts to build trust with people. I've had people who send me messages who are like, I came to your page as a hater, and I kept looking up what you were saying, and it was true. Now I really appreciate you, and you've really changed my mind on a lot of things. I think that's how you start to build trust with a lot of people who are maybe inquisitive, maybe skeptical, maybe just, by the way, where I was when I was pregnant and had immense postpartum anxiety, maybe just so anxious that you just don't know what to believe. You're looking for the answer, But because you've been told expertise doesn't matter, you're like, Well, I don't know who's right here. But if somebody goes through and explains why, I think that can be a really effective way.

I'm curious, since you referenced earlier the messages that you receive, which I hope make you feel as good as you deserve from people who say they now spot information that now they know is not real or fact or evidence-based, that it is misinformation because of the work that you've done. What advice do you have to anyone who might be listening about specific ways that they or any of us could spot misinformation when it comes to nutrition?

There's a few things that I would say to look for. Usually, there's a playbook. The video will be very sensational, and there'll be something that's very scary in it. When you hear a science communicator talking, they're not usually going to scare you. They're going to explain nuance, and they're going to take you through the process. If you hear a video of someone starting it, saying, Are you poisoning your kids? Or something like that, It's usually not going to be accurate information.

That just scared me.

I stitched a person doing that exact video. She was like, Are you poisoning your kids? And then she drove to Home Depot and showed you an ingredient that was also in a food item, which that's also just a misunderstanding of science and chemistry because think of sodium bicarbonate, right? We can use that in cookies, but you can also use it to clean, right?

My nine-year-old told me the other day that we have enough iron in our bodies to make a three-inch nail.

There you go.

Right? I was like, wow.

I don't even know that that's true, but it must be. He must have learned it in science class.

I don't know, but I think he learned it in science class since he's definitely not scrolling Instagram or has any access to technology. Probably actually, yeah. Or National Geographic, National Geographic or science class. But I'm not going to eat a three-inch nail, even though apparently I have enough iron in my body to make one.

Yeah, that's funny. But yeah, I mean, that's the playbook to look for. They scare you at the beginning, then they will misrepresent science, usually. Then a lot of times, most of the time, they will sell you something on the back end. They will tell you how toxic this thing is, and then they will sell you their non-toxic alternative or whatever it is. They'll scare you about folic acid, and then they'll sell you their natural methylfolate supplement, those types of things. We see that all the time. A couple of other things just for media and science literacy on social media, things to look out for is people conflate correlation and causation. They will show you a graph, two things are correlating, and then they will use that to imply causation, like one caused the other. I always say the best way to spread propaganda online is to show a graph, basically over time, of two things that increased at the same time and pretend that one caused the other. In science, what we do is we use that. That's interesting information. Let's look at that observational data that two things are increasing at the same time.

Then you go and you design studies to actually assess causation. Most of the time that thing is not causing the other thing. But sometimes it is. Then beware of people using, this is in the science realm as well, people using mechanisms of action to imply that that's actually going to impact you on a human level. So for example, if someone's telling you that... I did a parody on somebody doing this, and I used pickles as an example because pickles have vitamin K. Okay, here's an idea for you. Instead of brushing your teeth with unnatural toothbrushes, what if instead you ate seven pickles? It's true. Seven pickles act as a natural teeth cleaner. And so I said, pickles have vitamin K in them, and vitamin K is really important to create osteocalcin, which is needed to create dentin in your teeth, which is a calcified tissue that protects your teeth from cavities. And so I said, Because of that, you should just drink pickle juice instead of brushing your teeth with unnatural toothbrushes. And so that's an example of, I know it sounds ridiculous, but this is literally exactly the playbook of what people will do.

Obviously, eating pickles is not going to protect your teeth from cavities, but they'll do that a lot on social media, so just beware of that as well.

I've never had a cavity. It's one of the only things I shamelessly, I'm very proud. I've never had a cavity, and I do like pickles. So, hey, Jessica. There you go.

There you go. There's your anecdotal evidence.

I'm so grateful for your time and want to just hopefully do a couple more things while we have you, which is one, do something that we call the Factor Fiction segment, where I throw out some things that we've seen online and have you react to them. Okay. All right. We're going to focus on Secretary Kennedy since he's already had a supporting role here in our conversation today. Secretary Kennedy says he can see chronic inflammation and mitochondrial challenges on the faces of children that he sees walking down the street. Do you think that's fact or fiction?

That's fiction. Yeah, you cannot see mitochondrial challenges. It's very interesting, the wellness space. I mean, it's very clear that he's talking to a lot of these wellness influencers who also talk about mitochondrial challenges. But it's interesting that they focus on that part of the cell. There's so many parts of the cell that you could focus on, but it's the mitochondria for them. But yeah, you cannot look at a child and know if they have mitochondrial dysfunction. I think what he's doing there is using that. I actually don't even know what he's doing there. No, fiction.

He's also a very a vocal proponent of raw milk and believes that raw milk provides health benefits that processed alternatives do not. Fact or fiction?

I mean, when you say processed alternatives, what we're talking about as the alternative is pasteurization, which is simply heating milk. The reason pasteurization exists, I mean, think about dairy farmers and producers. This is an extra step they have to do. Why would they want to do this? They wouldn't. But it exists because people were getting very sick from raw milk, and we were changing the way that we distributed milk as well. There was even more opportunity for people to get sick. But I mean, raw milk can harbor a lot of pathogens that can make people quite sick. What Louis Pasteur was able to identify was, Hey, if we just heat the milk, one way to pasteurize is you just heat the milk for 15 seconds at 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you rapidly cool it. If you do that, it decreases the risk of foodborne illness significantly and drops the rates of disease that we see from people consuming raw milk. That's what we're talking about when we say processed milk. It's heating the milk a bit and then cooling it down, and that just gets rid of pathogens. That's what I would say on that.

Love pasteurization.

I mean, it's a great public health advancement that we have. I love...

I should make a T-shirt, I love pasteurization. Thank you, Louis Pastore. Something else that Secretary Kennedy is a big proponent of is beef tallow as a preferred alternative for cooking, saying that it's a more traditional way to cook, that there are a lot of health benefits, although he can't always describe what those are. So factor fiction on beef tallow as a better way to prepare food.

Yeah. So beef tallow is just like fat from beef, right? It's a saturated fat. What the evidence is very clear on is that overconsuming saturated fat is a problem for cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis. We see clinical trials that when you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats, it reduces risk of cardiovascular disease. If you're going to be replacing polyunsaturated fats and unsaturated fats with beef tallow, which is a saturated fat, what we would expect to see, because there's absolutely no data on this of increasing beef tallow and having any health benefits, what we would expect to see is the exact opposite of having health benefits at a population level. Particularly, what he's talking about a lot is that French fries at a fast food restaurant and overconsuming these foods is going to be problematic. This is an example. When you get the causes wrong, you get the solutions wrong, and your solutions can be harmful.

Okay, last one. Factor fiction, Coca-Cola with cane sugar is healthier for you than Coca-Cola made with high fructose corn syrup?

Fiction. They're both Coca-Cola. They're both high sugar, low-nutrient drinks that we should be consuming less of. Cane sugar is 50% glucose, 50% fructose. High fructose corn syrup is anywhere between 42% fructose and 55% fructose, they're metabolically the same, given all the information that we have. It's the overconsumption of sugar. I think people don't really realize this. The reason that we use high fructose corn syrup in the United States is because we subsidize corn and because of some of our trade policies and quotas that we've done in the past on sugar. We're protecting our farmers in the United States, essentially, and our corn producers. Manufacturers and corporations, they're looking for cheaper ingredients. Because we've made corn quite a cheap ingredient, that's what we use as sugar here. If you look over in Europe, they've really protected their sugar beet industry because they grow sugar beet really well. And so that's what they predominantly use versus what we use here for sugar. But they're both sugar sources, and sugar is sugar, and we don't want to overconsume sugar. We want to limit our added sugar intake no matter where it's coming from.

Well, thank you for your time today. You can find Jessica at Dr. Jessica Nurek on TikTok and Instagram. She's also got a Substack newsletter. I hope you'll subscribe. I do. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us today, and thank you to everyone who's listening.

Thank you so much for having me.

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