Speaker 1: Previously on the Dream. Okay, it begins, We're about to
Speaker 1: enter the zone, the wellness zone, past life regression pop up.
Speaker 1: It's a meditation and wellness pop up shop. And then
Speaker 1: next door hot Yoga. Do you believe your crystals do
Speaker 1: anything other than look pretty? Oh? My god, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'll say this, then they're rocks. All of this talk
Speaker 1: of wellness, of being healthy and having a positive mindset
Speaker 1: and all that from the very beginning of intently thinking
Speaker 1: about it. Because of this podcast, it's really caused my
Speaker 1: anxiety to spike. My days are filled with creepy thoughts
Speaker 1: about what my insides look like, where cancer is growing
Speaker 1: or might grow later, how clogged my arteries probably are,
Speaker 1: and what my liver thinks of everything. It's not just days.
Speaker 1: The anxiety is creeping into nighttime too, it's let's see
Speaker 1: eleven o four at night. I woke up out of
Speaker 1: my sleep tonight with the idea that I should try
Speaker 1: to do wellness. I had a nightmare that the speaker
Speaker 1: system at the drive through at Arby's stopped working. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: And then I was the one at the speaker when
Speaker 1: I was trying to make my order, and I couldn't.
Speaker 1: And then a line of like thirty cars lined up
Speaker 1: behind me, and they were all honking at me, but
Speaker 1: no one could hear me. On the other side of
Speaker 1: the speaker. I was hungry in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of one of those dreams where
Speaker 1: you have to pee, and you really do have to
Speaker 1: pee at any rate for this podcast. Perhaps I could
Speaker 1: get healthy. I don't know how. That's not true. I'm unhealthy,
Speaker 1: not a complete dingdong. What I mean is that I
Speaker 1: don't know how to actually implement wellness in my life
Speaker 1: in a way that's authentic. Like my first concern was
Speaker 1: that I'd have to stop eating fast food, obviously, and
Speaker 1: then I'd have to throw out everything in my house,
Speaker 1: every cleaning product and toiletry and all my makeup. Maybe
Speaker 1: the crystals Dan has given me are all wrong or
Speaker 1: in the wrong places. Or what if the stress from
Speaker 1: never chilling out is killing me? What if I'm living
Speaker 1: in the wrong place and the wrong body, with all
Speaker 1: the wrong stuff entirely. At first, I considered hiring someone
Speaker 1: to help me figure out where to start, and the
Speaker 1: person who came to mind was Teddy Mellencamp of The
Speaker 1: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and her father's fame. Once
Speaker 1: I started holding myself accountable, I just said, I'm going
Speaker 1: to open my own Instagram account. I'm gonna name it something,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to post my workouts every single day.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just said, Hi, I'm Teddy mailingcamp Ariave
Speaker 1: follow me. If you're lost in your journey and you're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what to do, let's see what happens.
Speaker 1: According to the TV show, she's an accountability coach, which
Speaker 1: I imagined meant that I could hire her to call
Speaker 1: me every single day and remind me to eat well
Speaker 1: and work out and keep a gratitude journal or something.
Speaker 1: But she wasn't available, because it turns out you can't
Speaker 1: just call people you see on TV and ask them
Speaker 1: to fix your life. And then I recalled a very
Speaker 1: buzzy wellness guru here in LA, a woman named Amanda
Speaker 1: Shantal Bacon. Here's a video of Amanda from The New
Speaker 1: York Times. I grabbed us a selection of really potent
Speaker 1: foods that I put into my diet almost every day.
Speaker 1: We're going for something that's going to be energizing and
Speaker 1: also good for the brain. So we're sort of winging
Speaker 1: in here, that's what's happening. And we are going to
Speaker 1: start with a base a raw sprouted, stone grown nut butter.
Speaker 1: The next one that we're going to go for our
Speaker 1: to katrinos, and then we are going to be adding
Speaker 1: this protein blend. The amino acid profile is very very
Speaker 1: very similar, almost exact to human breast milk. Doesn't body good.
Speaker 1: Our next trick No offense, Amanda, But after everything I've
Speaker 1: read about you, I don't really feel like sitting down
Speaker 1: and talking would be very productive or very nice of me.
Speaker 1: But to be fair, I reached out anyway and got
Speaker 1: no response from your press office or the request that
Speaker 1: I submitted through your website, So I'm just going to
Speaker 1: talk about you. Amanda runs a company called Moon Juice.
Speaker 1: They make supplements and things that seem kind of like foods,
Speaker 1: and they have a couple of cafes here in La,
Speaker 1: but if you're not in La, you can get their
Speaker 1: stuff at Sephora. Seriously, they have products called dusts, brain
Speaker 1: dust and sex dust and beauty dust that contain things
Speaker 1: like pulverized, dehydrated mushrooms of different sorts and root extracts
Speaker 1: and berry powders and pearl like actual pearl. I use
Speaker 1: pearl a list every day. This pearl powder is literally pearl.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that's nice is you can actually
Speaker 1: put this on your face at night. Ashwaganda. I try
Speaker 1: to get a little bit of ashwaganda in every day
Speaker 1: as well. And our last guy here, Amanda's been written
Speaker 1: about by l magazine and New York Magazine and Bonappetite
Speaker 1: and everybody. And somehow, even though I love keeping up
Speaker 1: with the gossip about her, I've managed to avoid going
Speaker 1: into her cafe, which is literally down the street from
Speaker 1: my house. It's so close I could walk there. But
Speaker 1: this is la. I had never noticed this place before.
Speaker 1: But it's right by Dan's house too. It's like the
Speaker 1: middle spot between my house and Dan's house. Maybe this
Speaker 1: will be our new hangout. In the store, I talked
Speaker 1: to the saleswoman and she was very woo woo and
Speaker 1: told me how some powder could fix my pancreas. But
Speaker 1: I didn't bring up my pancreas. She brought up my pancreas.
Speaker 1: She recommended combo of protein powder and a thing called tocos,
Speaker 1: which is a product name of a thing called tocotrienols,
Speaker 1: which is it turns out just rice bran, but a
Speaker 1: very expensive version of rice bran. Just left Moon Juice,
Speaker 1: and I want to try to remember the sales pitch
Speaker 1: before I get home and forget it. Okay, the vanilla
Speaker 1: mushroom app to adapt to genic protein that I got
Speaker 1: is protein I don't know. She said something about ashwaganda rice.
Speaker 1: She cordusps something about antioxidants, and this will help me
Speaker 1: help my muscles feel better or my body feel better
Speaker 1: in some way. No. Eight, that was the other one.
Speaker 1: I don't know, And then I've chose the beauty dust
Speaker 1: and the power dust. I ended up buying four jars
Speaker 1: of powders and it was just over two hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: which made me think that maybe you only put a
Speaker 1: tiny sprinkle on or in something or whatever you do
Speaker 1: with it. So I asked the sales lady and she
Speaker 1: said I could mix it in whatever I want water, tea,
Speaker 1: not milks, or sprinkle them on any of my food,
Speaker 1: or I could just eat it by the spoonful, which
Speaker 1: reminded me of my favorite interview with the owner of
Speaker 1: Moon Juice. It was in the New York Times Sunday
Speaker 1: magazine a few years ago. The reporter Molly Young asked Amanda,
Speaker 1: is it possible to overdose on dust? And Amanda said, no,
Speaker 1: you're good, You're safe. I mean, is it possible to overdose?
Speaker 1: You'd probably have severe physical symptoms first, And here I
Speaker 1: was thinking that severe physical symptoms was the definition of overdosing.
Speaker 1: But seriously, there are no directions on the bottles, no
Speaker 1: information about how many grams or milligrams of what I'm
Speaker 1: getting for whatever serving I choose, or how often I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to mix it, and nothing, nothing, It might as
Speaker 1: well be blank. I thought I'd be able to adk
Speaker 1: Dan since he takes all kinds of weird powders and stuff,
Speaker 1: but it was only after I spend all this money
Speaker 1: that he informed me he's recently thrown everything out of
Speaker 1: his cupboards because of this woman. I'm Katherine Price. I'm
Speaker 1: a science journalist and the author of Vitamania, How vitamins
Speaker 1: revolutionized the way we think about food. Hi? Hi, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what you were saying was right after I spoke
Speaker 1: with Catherine, I ended up throwing away a lot of
Speaker 1: crazy stuff from my pantry. Forgive me for not knowing
Speaker 1: the answer. To this already. What vitamins were you taking?
Speaker 1: I know that you had green powder stuff that you
Speaker 1: would put in one of those hydro flasks or whatever,
Speaker 1: like an insulated water bottle and shake it up with juice. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what was That's maringa powder? Okay, Well I was taking
Speaker 1: it because one of the things that it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be able to help with is poor circulation. Wait, what
Speaker 1: made you decide that? I don't know isasic ignorance. I
Speaker 1: know there was other stuff lying around the house, but
Speaker 1: I don't really know. So that I had two bottles
Speaker 1: that look like kind of like the giant doctor Browners.
Speaker 1: One was a like a morning multi and one was
Speaker 1: a nighttime multi or multi, and then I would take
Speaker 1: more vitamins. I had these sprays for vitamins E and D.
Speaker 1: There were just vitamin E and D anything else. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that was it. No, there was that other
Speaker 1: one actually, now the other one, the NAD plus stuff. Oh, sure,
Speaker 1: that one I believe in. And I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I'm me too, And I don't know why that's supposed
Speaker 1: to like extend your cellular health or something. Thing. Sure,
Speaker 1: it's literally the one that tells you you'll live longer
Speaker 1: and look younger. Yeah. So that's the thing that's so funny,
Speaker 1: Like that is the most grandiose claim of anything I've
Speaker 1: ever taken before, and yet I just was like, great,
Speaker 1: let's do it, like, not even an ounce of skepticism,
Speaker 1: all of that stuff. And then you talked to Catherine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and she explained to me a lot about what it
Speaker 1: was I was putting into my body, or really what
Speaker 1: I didn't know about what I was putting into my body. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was how I ended up throwing a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff away. The first thing you guys talked about
Speaker 1: was like real basic, Yeah, I mean, I really just
Speaker 1: wanted to find out what a vitamin actually was. I
Speaker 1: would say a couple of things. The easiest definition would
Speaker 1: be that there are thirteen chemicals known as vitamins and
Speaker 1: their substances that we need in very very small amounts,
Speaker 1: with out which we would develop a particular deficiency disease,
Speaker 1: and in most but not all cases, we can't make
Speaker 1: them ourselves. The thirteen vitamins that Catherine is referring to
Speaker 1: our vitamins AC, D, E, N K, and eight different
Speaker 1: B vitamins. These thirteen micronutrients. Our bodies need them, but
Speaker 1: we weren't born being able to produce them on our own.
Speaker 1: With one exception vitamin D, which we can produce but
Speaker 1: not without the help of sunshine. In the olden days,
Speaker 1: we had to get all of them from our food.
Speaker 1: And then when we're vitamins discovered, so the heyday of it,
Speaker 1: I would say, is the late eighteen hundreds and early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds. The word vitamin itself was coined in nineteen
Speaker 1: eleven by a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk, and at
Speaker 1: that point no vitamins actually had been isolated, so they
Speaker 1: were suspected, but they weren't actually isolated from foods, and
Speaker 1: a lot of his contemporaries really didn't like the term.
Speaker 1: In fact, he had trouble getting it published. It was
Speaker 1: only published in nineteen twelve, in part because they were
Speaker 1: arguing for their own terms for these substances, which included
Speaker 1: ideas like food hormones and food accessory factors. If you
Speaker 1: think about it, I find it difficult to believe that
Speaker 1: if they had been called food accessory factors that we
Speaker 1: would end up with a giant dietary supplement industry because
Speaker 1: food accessory factor not that great of a word. Vitamin Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly would you buy something called food accessory factor fortified
Speaker 1: not milks? Maybe you would. The process of discovering vitamins
Speaker 1: was very long, because, if you think about it, discovering
Speaker 1: a vitamin isn't like someone gives you a treasure map
Speaker 1: and you go dig somewhere in the forest and let's
Speaker 1: like X marks the vitamin C, and then you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I found it, you know, and moving on. It actually
Speaker 1: took a really long time for people to recognize deficiency
Speaker 1: diseases like what they were, that it was a deficiency,
Speaker 1: and then to identify what sorts of food seemed to
Speaker 1: prevent that disease. The whole idea of the lack of
Speaker 1: something causing a disease was very difficult. One interesting conflating
Speaker 1: factor that one might argue delayed the discovery of vitamins
Speaker 1: was that in the eighteen seventies that was when people
Speaker 1: discovered that germs, first of all, existed and that little
Speaker 1: bacteria were behind many of the world's most destructive diseases.
Speaker 1: And so that was incredibly exciting to realize, like cholera
Speaker 1: had a bacteria behind it, and if you could figure
Speaker 1: out where the bacteria was, you could work on preventing
Speaker 1: and curing cholera. But once you have that mindset, it
Speaker 1: makes it more difficult to recognize diseases where the cause
Speaker 1: is an absence of something. So there's actually a bunch
Speaker 1: of different deficiency diseases and one I'm sure that people
Speaker 1: have heard of is the old sailor's disease scurvy. What
Speaker 1: is scurvy? Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin
Speaker 1: C and it does terrible things. I know it from
Speaker 1: grapes of wrath. I think because they finally is that
Speaker 1: the one where they finally get to them, like the
Speaker 1: orange groves in California and they're like grabbing that have
Speaker 1: fallen off of trees to combat there's scurvy. I haven't
Speaker 1: read that in a long time, but that sounds right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the main ways you could get scurvy is
Speaker 1: you go on a boat and now instead of traveling
Speaker 1: short distances, the boats are bigger. This is kind of
Speaker 1: you know, as boats got bigger and could travel long distances.
Speaker 1: Then you have to figure out what kind of food
Speaker 1: are you going to take, and there's not really fresh
Speaker 1: produce on the open seas, No, there isn't. And so
Speaker 1: what they ended up eating a lot of were biscuits
Speaker 1: or fish, and neither of those are high end vitamin C.
Speaker 1: And scurvy is a really terrible disease. You end up
Speaker 1: with open sores all over your body and in your mouth,
Speaker 1: your gums end up turning a kind of gummy blackish
Speaker 1: color and texture, your teeth can fall out, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just pretty brutal. What other kinds of deficiency diseases, Well,
Speaker 1: one that is still kicking around a lot is night blindness,
Speaker 1: and that's caused by a lack of vitamin A. So
Speaker 1: you got scurvy, you got night blindness. What else is there?
Speaker 1: Berry berry? What's that one? So berry berry is caused
Speaker 1: by a lack of thamin or vitamin B one and
Speaker 1: it attacks your cardio and respiratory systems. So all of
Speaker 1: these sorts of diseases have been around since the beginning
Speaker 1: of time, if people don't have access to the right
Speaker 1: kind of food, right, But it wasn't until like a
Speaker 1: hundred years ago then that they figured out the cause
Speaker 1: of any of this stuff. Yeah, it took a really
Speaker 1: long time, but then it progressed very rapidly. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons why it took such a long time is
Speaker 1: because of what Catherine was talking about. With germs and
Speaker 1: bacteria being discovered around the same time as vitamins, you
Speaker 1: had these kind of competing scientific discoveries. In an example
Speaker 1: of how that played out with Barry Barry that became
Speaker 1: a problem with a technological advancement, which was then's ability
Speaker 1: to make white rice as opposed to brown rice, which
Speaker 1: still has the husk on it, and when you take
Speaker 1: the husk off, you lose the diamond and you end
Speaker 1: up with berry berry as a result. So even when
Speaker 1: people had figured out that there was some connection between
Speaker 1: the types of rice the people were being fed and
Speaker 1: berry berry, there was a long period of time where
Speaker 1: people were insistent that there must be a bacteria present
Speaker 1: in one form of the rice that was causing the
Speaker 1: berry berry, that it wasn't the absence of this invisible substance.
Speaker 1: So when you think about it that way, you realize
Speaker 1: that's really hard to figure out that there's an invisible
Speaker 1: substance that you can't measure and you can't see and
Speaker 1: you can't taste, and that's what must be behind this
Speaker 1: At the same time, on top of everyone's still being
Speaker 1: bananas about germs, the industrial Revolution had just happened and
Speaker 1: foods were suddenly being mass produced and processed foods are delicate.
Speaker 1: Heating and cooling and preserving them often destroys a lot
Speaker 1: of the really important stuff like vitamins. So now you've
Speaker 1: got vitamins isolated and you can fortify foods with them,
Speaker 1: you know, put the stuff back in that you just
Speaker 1: took out. And people were nuts about this discovery too.
Speaker 1: In fact, a few of the most prominent scientists working
Speaker 1: on vitamin discovery. We're also writing about it in magazines
Speaker 1: that you could get at the grocery store checkout, like
Speaker 1: Good Housekeeping and McCall's, and it kind of freaked the
Speaker 1: public out, this idea that there's an invisible substance that's
Speaker 1: maybe in your food or maybe not, who knows. How
Speaker 1: would you know if it's not there, you could die.
Speaker 1: So there was a bit of a panic, and you
Speaker 1: can see that directly carrying through to today, where we
Speaker 1: take all of these supplements, not just vitamins but dietary
Speaker 1: supplements out of hope that they're going to help us
Speaker 1: live long, healthy lives and fear that if we don't
Speaker 1: take them, something horrible is going to happen to us.
Speaker 1: You can't take a vitamin until scientists that figure out
Speaker 1: how to isolate it and synthesize it to actually be
Speaker 1: able to make it so that you can do things
Speaker 1: like added back to foods or create a dietary supplement
Speaker 1: product with it. The real ability to take vitamins as
Speaker 1: pills really starts in like early thirties, late twenties, like
Speaker 1: when the first vitamins are actually isolated and processes are
Speaker 1: developed to synthesize them, and then that really does start
Speaker 1: to take off, so that by World War two you've
Speaker 1: got synthetic vitamins being a real source of concern and
Speaker 1: some companies providing vitamin packs for their workers. A whole
Speaker 1: three day conference for National Defense focusing on vitamins in particular,
Speaker 1: with a concern that American soldiers were going to lose
Speaker 1: the war because they would not be adequately nourished when
Speaker 1: it came to vitamins. Here's an ad that Westinghouse, that
Speaker 1: kitchen appliance manufacturer, put out about what they called vitamized foods.
Speaker 1: Healthy America is a strong America. Yet some of our
Speaker 1: leading nutrition authority tell us that in this nation, forty
Speaker 1: percent men, women and children are improperly bet and under nourished.
Speaker 1: You ask, is there a practical remedy for this appalling condition?
Speaker 1: You bet there is. Unsung hero working with tireless persistence,
Speaker 1: have discovered the vital influence of vitamins and minerals in
Speaker 1: our health. These discoveries have a far reaching effect on
Speaker 1: our daily lives. So profit by the research of that
Speaker 1: great army of b men. Yes, a healthy America is
Speaker 1: a strong America. Thankfully nowadays, at least American companies can't
Speaker 1: require their employees to take a certain vitamin every morning.
Speaker 1: So Catherine figured, if you want to find a testing
Speaker 1: ground for the nexus between productivity and nutrition, go to
Speaker 1: the place where people don't get to choose. That's how
Speaker 1: she ended up in Natick, Massachusetts, home of the United
Speaker 1: States Army Soldiers System Center. Yeah. I went to Natick,
Speaker 1: which is where they work on, as one person put
Speaker 1: it to me, everything that doesn't shoot out of a gun.
Speaker 1: So it's like everything from mrs the meals ready to
Speaker 1: eat to flame resistant fabrics. It's a very interesting place
Speaker 1: to visit. So the military is in this interesting position
Speaker 1: where they have to meet the nutritional needs of the
Speaker 1: armed forces, but they also have to have foods that
Speaker 1: last a really long time, so they're completely dependent on
Speaker 1: putting synthetic vitamins into the foods that they're creating for
Speaker 1: the members to eat. One thing I found really interesting
Speaker 1: when I was asking the people at NATICK about how
Speaker 1: they decided the levels of vitamins to put into the
Speaker 1: foods that they give to the warfighters, is that you'd
Speaker 1: think the military would know better than most organizations whether
Speaker 1: or not there's a benefit to adding vitamins beyond the
Speaker 1: basic levels. So, in other words, is it really going
Speaker 1: to be beneficial to put a ton of vitamin C
Speaker 1: into a product? If it is, they're going to do it,
Speaker 1: So I think it's really telling that they don't. Basically,
Speaker 1: the products the foods are designed to get you up
Speaker 1: to the recommended dietary intakes, but they're not giving their
Speaker 1: foods like extra boosts of vitamins in the way that
Speaker 1: many of us in the general public do when we
Speaker 1: take extra supplements for a purpose like ward enough colds.
Speaker 1: So we know when vitamins came around, but when do
Speaker 1: you start seeing the rise of the supplement industry. The
Speaker 1: rise of the supplement industry starts obviously when you have
Speaker 1: vitamins and pills as a possibility, and then it starts
Speaker 1: to expand in the fifties and sixties, with a real
Speaker 1: explosion in the seventies. And that explosion is in part
Speaker 1: cultural because of distrust of quote government or the pharmaceutical industry.
Speaker 1: And it's in part because of several celebrity influencers, to
Speaker 1: use a modern term, people who are really pushing supplement
Speaker 1: products as alternative ways to prevent your cure diseases. Who's
Speaker 1: the original Glennyth Paltrow here. So one was guy named
Speaker 1: Linus Pauling who was molecular chemist. He started saying things
Speaker 1: like vitamin C could prevent cancer. He had done some studies,
Speaker 1: studies that have since been debunked by, among others, the
Speaker 1: Mayo Clinic, Common Sense, Common Sense, and and then he
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Vitamin C and the Common Cold.
Speaker 1: In that book he talked about vitamin C being able
Speaker 1: to cure the common cold. That's not true either. Does
Speaker 1: vitamin C ward off colds from what you can tell, No,
Speaker 1: there's not been good research showing that vitamin C does
Speaker 1: anything to actually prevent colds. There's been like a little
Speaker 1: bit of evidence that maybe it will shorten the duration,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it's strong enough to warrant all
Speaker 1: the sales of airborne that are going on the right
Speaker 1: during cold season. With that said, if you're taking a
Speaker 1: sugar pill and you believe that it's going to prevent colds,
Speaker 1: it may actually prevent colds because the placebo effect is
Speaker 1: extremely strong. So in the case of vitamin C, I
Speaker 1: don't think most people are doing themselves a huge amount
Speaker 1: of harm by taking these vitamin C products, but it
Speaker 1: probably would be just as effective if someone tricked you
Speaker 1: and gave you life just to pill with I don't
Speaker 1: know sugar in it. So Linus palling is the one
Speaker 1: to blame for emergency Yeah, I mean pretty much. Anyways,
Speaker 1: it was at this point where there was something I
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to clear up about the terminology we're
Speaker 1: using here. Is there actually a difference between vitamins and
Speaker 1: supplements or are we kind of talking about the same thing.
Speaker 1: Dietary supplements and vitamins are not the same thing. Vitamins
Speaker 1: are dietary supplements when they're in pill form, but dietary
Speaker 1: supplements are not all vitamins. So again, there's thirteen human vitamins,
Speaker 1: but there's more than last time I checked eighty seven
Speaker 1: thousand dietary supplement products on the US market, which do
Speaker 1: include vitamin products, but is a category that goes way,
Speaker 1: way way beyond just vitamins or their counterpart minerals. So
Speaker 1: of dietary supplement that can include weight loss products, sexual
Speaker 1: enhancement products, bodybuilding products, things like RBS, and botanicals like
Speaker 1: Saint John's wort. It's a very wide ranging category, and
Speaker 1: you can see how big it is, and you can
Speaker 1: see some of the confusion if you go into your
Speaker 1: local drug store, for example, at Rate eight, and you
Speaker 1: look at the names they put on the aisles. You'll
Speaker 1: often see that there's an aisle that's called vitamins, but
Speaker 1: it really should be labeled dietary supplements, because if you
Speaker 1: look at the products that are in that aisle, you
Speaker 1: will see that it is not just thirteen letter vitamins.
Speaker 1: There's a crazy assortment everything in GNC or vitamin shop.
Speaker 1: Again using the word vitamin, those are dietary supplements. I
Speaker 1: know Catherine just said it, but pause for a second
Speaker 1: and think about this. Close your eyes and imagine those
Speaker 1: beautiful white and yellow and green rows and rows and
Speaker 1: rows of pill bottles and tinctures and sprays and a
Speaker 1: million different brands and doses hanging out all over the
Speaker 1: vitamin aisles. Do we really need all that stuff? In
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies and then all the way up
Speaker 1: to the nineties, I would say that DA is really
Speaker 1: trying to figure out a way to regulate supplement products,
Speaker 1: including vitamins, at the same time that that genre of
Speaker 1: product is exploding, so people are becoming more interested in them.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the FDA is basically like, oh,
Speaker 1: oh dear, wait, wait a second, Like products are coming
Speaker 1: out that are not trying to replicate oranges. They're like
Speaker 1: trying to give vitamin C a crazy doses, like grams
Speaker 1: of vitamin C as opposed to milligrams, or that contain
Speaker 1: different substances all together all lumped under vitamin Like this
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like a great idea, Like we probably should
Speaker 1: have some rules, just as we've got standards in place
Speaker 1: for what enriched flower is versus non enriched flower, or
Speaker 1: basic safety checks for like selling a toothpaste, you know,
Speaker 1: being sure that it's not going to burn the inside
Speaker 1: of someone's mouth, like some kind of basic system here
Speaker 1: for this supplement market. And so they have a number
Speaker 1: of these attempts to change the way that the products
Speaker 1: are labeled in particular, and also to set standards so
Speaker 1: that there's instructions for what a particul clear type of
Speaker 1: products should contain, Like what level of vitamins should it
Speaker 1: contain if it's a vitamin C product, or should there
Speaker 1: be a limit beyond which the product is going to
Speaker 1: have to be considered an over the counter drug instead
Speaker 1: of a supplement. So like, if it's a vitamin C
Speaker 1: at a level that could be consumed in food, it's
Speaker 1: one thing. And if it's vitamin C at a level
Speaker 1: way beyond that, maybe it's not really a food like
Speaker 1: substance anymore, and maybe now it's over the counter drug.
Speaker 1: And that freaked out the nascent supplement industry, and they
Speaker 1: managed to get a number of really influential pieces of
Speaker 1: legislation passed. One of those was the Proxmire Amendment in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy six, which basically forbid the FDA from ever
Speaker 1: setting standards or limits on what vitamin products could contain.
Speaker 1: This right here is what should freak you out the
Speaker 1: most if you're wondering who's minding the store. The FDA
Speaker 1: truly tried. The FDA, who we've mandated to do exactly this,
Speaker 1: make sure the products we're buying and putting on our
Speaker 1: bodies are safe. They tried to do that. And the
Speaker 1: supplement industry sought as an opportunity to say that the
Speaker 1: vernament was taking away your basic rights, so they threw
Speaker 1: a bunch of money at lobbyists and basically cut the
Speaker 1: FDA off at the knees while they were trying to
Speaker 1: do their jobs. So you and I and Dan, we're
Speaker 1: all on our own. So that the FDA could not say, Okay,
Speaker 1: you can't have beyond x amount of vitamin C per pill,
Speaker 1: and it couldn't say that a standard multi vitamin by definition,
Speaker 1: must contain all thirteen vitamins and these minerals. If you
Speaker 1: actually look at the supplement facts on the back of
Speaker 1: multi vitamin products, you will see that they don't all
Speaker 1: contain even the same vitamins and minerals, especially gummies, and
Speaker 1: a lot of adults love gummy vitamins, but if you
Speaker 1: look at what vitamins the gummies contain, it's not the
Speaker 1: same as the chewables, and they're not the same as
Speaker 1: the ones that you swallow. I looked at the ingredients
Speaker 1: and Centrum Women's Multi Vitamin, that's the one you swallow,
Speaker 1: and Centrum Women's Multi gummies. One has forty percent of
Speaker 1: your recommended daily intake Vitamin A while the other has
Speaker 1: one hundred and seventeen percent. One has seventeen percent of
Speaker 1: your daily zinc while the other has seventy three percent.
Speaker 1: And one has one hundred percent of your iron for
Speaker 1: the day while the other contains no iron at all.
Speaker 1: You've heard of anemia, right. It's commonly caused by iron deficiency,
Speaker 1: and anemia is much more prevalent in women than men,
Speaker 1: especially when we're pregnant. So it's weird that a women's
Speaker 1: multi vitamin wouldn't contain any iron. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: even bother telling you which one is which, because who cares.
Speaker 1: The manufacturer doesn't. And so the Proximer Amendment blocked the
Speaker 1: FDA's ability to create a system where there would be consistency.
Speaker 1: So you start to have these various pieces of legislation
Speaker 1: that take more and more power away from the FDA
Speaker 1: and start to shift it into the hands of the
Speaker 1: supplement industry, and they do that in a really genius
Speaker 1: way where they get the American public and the consumers
Speaker 1: to work for the supplement industry by framing this entire
Speaker 1: debate as a matter of personal freedom and saying that
Speaker 1: the FDA wants to take your vitamins away, even though
Speaker 1: the FDA never was trying to ban vitamin supplements, and
Speaker 1: in many cases with the dietary supplement industry is advocating
Speaker 1: for they're not vitamins, their dietary supplements are different substances.
Speaker 1: The supplement industry convinced the American public that keeping the
Speaker 1: FDA's hands tied was a matter of personal liberty. Instead
Speaker 1: of the industry going to the FDA and being like,
Speaker 1: let's work together and make sure nobody dies from our products,
Speaker 1: they told the public you can't trust the government. Does
Speaker 1: that sound familiar? So the Proxmyer Amendment. That's nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen ninety four they did it again,
Speaker 1: only this time they had more money and more politicians
Speaker 1: on their side, and they dug the hole even deeper
Speaker 1: next time. On the dream there are so many, so
Speaker 1: many products on the market, and you can't even know
Speaker 1: necessarily what's in the products because in many cases they
Speaker 1: have so called proprietary blends that is basically like code
Speaker 1: terminology for secret, because they don't tell you what those
Speaker 1: proprietary ingredients are. The example I use in my book,
Speaker 1: which I thought was very funny but also distressing, was
Speaker 1: this product called Natural Curves, which had a prominent photo
Speaker 1: of a woman's cleavage on it and then lots of
Speaker 1: uses of the word natural, natural, natural, natural, and then
Speaker 1: like its purpose was quite clear, and when I looked
Speaker 1: at the online reviews for this product, people were saying
Speaker 1: it did stuff like they were talked about breaking out
Speaker 1: in pimples like they did when they were in high school,
Speaker 1: and they were talking about what it actually did do
Speaker 1: to their breasts. And then when they stopped taking it,
Speaker 1: like they went back to I don't know, like deflated balloons.
Speaker 1: I forgot the terminology. Nonetheless, they gave it like a
Speaker 1: four and a half star rating, but I was like,
Speaker 1: this is where it gets scary, because the best case
Speaker 1: scenario is that Natural Curves does not do anything to
Speaker 1: your body, but if it is giving you acne, it
Speaker 1: is doing something to your hormones. All of that Freaky Stuff.
Speaker 1: An more is coming up next time on the Dream.
Speaker 1: The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher,
Speaker 1: written and reported by Me, Jane Murray and Dan Galucci,
Speaker 1: editing by Peter Clowney and Tracy Samuelson, with production by
Speaker 1: Stephanie Karayuki and Lyra Smith. The Dream is executive produced
Speaker 1: by Me, Dan Galucci, Peter Clowney, and Chris Bannon. Our
Speaker 1: mixing engineers are Casey Holford and Brendan Burns. Please rate, review,
Speaker 1: and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and thanks for listening.