Mercola was the beginning of the real descent into insanity, for my dad. This was way back before Qanon or even Trump - it was early Obama years, really - and I was just so blindsided by what felt like this sudden loss of my dad to a cult. Wellness itself was not the cult, but it was the gateway to it, and it was so shocking how it came from this very progressive, positive kind of place. It was all so innocuous that it wasn't until a couple years later that I even remembered how it all kind of felt like it started when he got super obsessed with forwarding me articles from Mercola. At the time, it felt maybe a little wacky but mostly harmless - like, "No, dad, cutting out sugar will not fix the deviated septum that has resulted in me getting pneumonia twice in two years. I'm having surgery," - and then suddenly he was so far gone on all these other levels.
It is hard, because it's almost like a two-front assault. I have struggled for decades with migraines, and two years ago had a debilitating hives situation that took over a year to address. These things received almost no real attention from any medical professionals. It was all extremely dismissive like "have you changed detergents lately?" on endless repeat (fucking no! I haven't!) or "have you tried cutting out/drinking more caffeine?" The only relief I ever got from the hives came from acupuncture, and that provided a lot of relief from the migraines as well. It was my first experience with someone just listening to medical symptoms and taking me at face value, and I could feel how life-changing that was. Going through that process definitely gave me an appreciation for how comforting and how - idk, loyalty-inspiring it can be, to just feel seen and heard and supported, let alone helped.
It would be really, really great if the medical industry didn't set us all up to seek out alternate solutions and sources of support. I mean, some of these things are valid! But the overall broad feeling of being dismissed and ignored and unheard leaves the door open for a lot of abuse and manipulation.
Oh wow thank you so much for this. I have a chronic illness, and there are constant recommendations, *constant* to 1, go completely gluten-free, and 2, do an elimination diet, and 3, get testing to see what other foods I am allergic to. That's not even counting the other diet modifications that get recommended.
There is also no evidence I have celiac, I have a history of disordered eating, and looking at the research for these food allergy blood tests, it seems they are looking at this entirely wrong Ig protein that mostly just says "this is a food you have eaten at some point in your life." But the recommendations and treatment plans keep coming, from my former doctor, from every book about my condition, from patient groups, just everywhere.
So hearing that no, I was not actually wrong to be skeptical and resistant to all of that is just such a relief right now. Thank you Christy and Virginia for that. Whew. Seriously, thank you.
May 4, 2023Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith, Christy Harrison, MPH, RD
Thank you for this episode—I love Christy’s podcast so much!
I feel like elimination diets are everywhere right now. In my very niche world of classical singers and professional voice users, there is so much advice out there about how to treat or avoid GERD or reflux as a singer, or what “nutrition for singers” should be, and a lot of it is stuff like, cut out gluten and sugar and dairy. A lot of the recommendations for “optimization” strike me as also being recommendations for how to be a thin opera singer…but also like, I eat everything and I’ve never found any particular food to impact my singing beyond like, if I’m very full breathing is difficult. Why would I eliminate whole food groups on the off chance that I might develop acid reflux?
This conversation really highlights the issue of trust, at least for me.
I began pushing away from a life of dieting around 2013, worked with an RD who’s also certified in intuitive eating and I was fascinated by the assertion that there was no evidence for gluten sensitivity.
I took this (erroneously) to mean, “You made the pain up in your head. You were gullible to lies.” So of course I don’t want to be driven by false information. I’m on a goddamn daily trust fall with my body. 😂 And this initiated a sort of dissociation from the pain I was experiencing, for, oh, say, three to four years. I had a massively confusing period of time where I was just miserable and mentally just STUCK because dietitians and intuitive eating says “It can’t be gluten. There’s no evidence for that.” But my body feels like sh*t every day -- bloated, foggy, irritable. I went to round after round of MDs (not functional or anybody in between) and sheesh. I just got tired of feeling miserable and found guidelines for an elimination diet that had guidance for anyone with eating disorder history. I was so so so frightened to even try something remotely close to food removal. Or to open to a thing that might cast me into “not being loyal” to intuitive eating and anti-diet circles.
But you know what, dag nabbit, I feel better with some foods set to the side most of the time. And it’s annoying because I know that eliminating food can be risky!
But I think where I’m trying to pull this comment back around to is that having a body feels terribly fraught. It takes so much energy to remember to trust our bodies and emotions, while also having a thinking brain that can take in nutrition and scientific data that often backs us into a corner and tries to also define what’s real and what’s not.
May 4, 2023Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith, Christy Harrison, MPH, RD
This episode is excellent! I found Christy back in 2016 when I began my own recovery and have found her work invaluable over the years. I just ordered her new book and noticed that on Amazon it’s listed as “#1 in Vaccination” which says so so much about society right now! Also, I was SO happy with my daughter’s pediatric GI specialist who did ALL the tests, but cautioned against any elimination diets when my daughter was having lots of issues last year. We need more doctors like this!
I LOVE seeing the SIFT method cited. It is one of the most important things for people to learn as they engage with the internet. Thank you!
And wanted to chime in as a biopsy-diagnosed celiac to say how irritating the gluten discourse can be. It would be so great if I could eat gluten on many levels, including from a kind of traditional "healthy eating" perspective because seriously, try to get the recommended amount of whole grains on a GF diet, just try it. GF bread is generally filled with all kinds of weird things to make it function without gluten and the pieces are about half the size of regular bread and so on. And, fine, that's what I have to live with because I have an autoimmune condition that makes me really sick if I eat gluten, but only do it if you really have to.
And I see so much of the kind of shady thinking in a GF Facebook group I'm a part of. People who are convinced that using shampoo with gluten in it will cause celiac symptoms, and, no, it won't unless you're drinking the shampoo. You could separately have an allergy to something in the shampoo, but gluten is only a problem for celiacs if ingested. And now if you google that basic question, you get all these "some people report reactions" takes despite the science being very clear. People who are convinced that every time they get sick, it must be gluten, like "I only ate food at home that I cooked for the last 48 hours and I've gone back and looked at all the labels and I can't see what could be making me sick, but there must be something so I'm going to call all the manufacturers." Or it could be a virus, or regular old food poisoning! In those moments I am always repeating the story of the night I spent throwing up and plotting the phone call I was going to make to the restaurant that had obviously glutened me, only to have my dad start throwing up the next morning before the restaurant opened. And the blatant intersections with overt diet culture, like someone saying they can "sometimes make room" for a slice or two of a specific kind of bread. Lady, that bread is keto bread. It has very few calories and half your fiber RDA in a single slice. Don't talk to me about "making room" for it in your diet.
I have so many thoughts and I need to listen again. Except that Christy’s experience as a new mother resonates very very deeply for me. In looking back a decade since my time in those trenches, all I can think now is “wow, I have more guidance in caring for my houseplants than I ever had with a baby.”
Just now catching up on this episode and absolutely loved it. A large part of my work when I was in tech was leading policies in the industry (my team wrote the first health misinformation policy on a social platform) to change the irresponsible way that platforms address health misinfo. A lot of it comes right down to financial incentives and there being SO much money in these wellness grifters (a point I regularly tried to make was that Goop is in the same bucket as Mercola). I was eventually pushed out of my job at Pinterest very publicly and unceremoniously, in part because of this work so lol. But the part of the episode on section 230 made me think of another, nuanced perspective on moderation that’s worth sharing. It’s an old article so some formatting is off, but a good read for anyone interested in the intersection between the legislation and what we see online. https://www.techdirt.com/2019/09/04/pinterests-way-dealing-with-anti-vax-nonsense-scams-is-only-possible-because-section-230/
Thank you for this.
Mercola was the beginning of the real descent into insanity, for my dad. This was way back before Qanon or even Trump - it was early Obama years, really - and I was just so blindsided by what felt like this sudden loss of my dad to a cult. Wellness itself was not the cult, but it was the gateway to it, and it was so shocking how it came from this very progressive, positive kind of place. It was all so innocuous that it wasn't until a couple years later that I even remembered how it all kind of felt like it started when he got super obsessed with forwarding me articles from Mercola. At the time, it felt maybe a little wacky but mostly harmless - like, "No, dad, cutting out sugar will not fix the deviated septum that has resulted in me getting pneumonia twice in two years. I'm having surgery," - and then suddenly he was so far gone on all these other levels.
It is hard, because it's almost like a two-front assault. I have struggled for decades with migraines, and two years ago had a debilitating hives situation that took over a year to address. These things received almost no real attention from any medical professionals. It was all extremely dismissive like "have you changed detergents lately?" on endless repeat (fucking no! I haven't!) or "have you tried cutting out/drinking more caffeine?" The only relief I ever got from the hives came from acupuncture, and that provided a lot of relief from the migraines as well. It was my first experience with someone just listening to medical symptoms and taking me at face value, and I could feel how life-changing that was. Going through that process definitely gave me an appreciation for how comforting and how - idk, loyalty-inspiring it can be, to just feel seen and heard and supported, let alone helped.
It would be really, really great if the medical industry didn't set us all up to seek out alternate solutions and sources of support. I mean, some of these things are valid! But the overall broad feeling of being dismissed and ignored and unheard leaves the door open for a lot of abuse and manipulation.
Oh wow thank you so much for this. I have a chronic illness, and there are constant recommendations, *constant* to 1, go completely gluten-free, and 2, do an elimination diet, and 3, get testing to see what other foods I am allergic to. That's not even counting the other diet modifications that get recommended.
There is also no evidence I have celiac, I have a history of disordered eating, and looking at the research for these food allergy blood tests, it seems they are looking at this entirely wrong Ig protein that mostly just says "this is a food you have eaten at some point in your life." But the recommendations and treatment plans keep coming, from my former doctor, from every book about my condition, from patient groups, just everywhere.
So hearing that no, I was not actually wrong to be skeptical and resistant to all of that is just such a relief right now. Thank you Christy and Virginia for that. Whew. Seriously, thank you.
Thank you for this episode—I love Christy’s podcast so much!
I feel like elimination diets are everywhere right now. In my very niche world of classical singers and professional voice users, there is so much advice out there about how to treat or avoid GERD or reflux as a singer, or what “nutrition for singers” should be, and a lot of it is stuff like, cut out gluten and sugar and dairy. A lot of the recommendations for “optimization” strike me as also being recommendations for how to be a thin opera singer…but also like, I eat everything and I’ve never found any particular food to impact my singing beyond like, if I’m very full breathing is difficult. Why would I eliminate whole food groups on the off chance that I might develop acid reflux?
This conversation really highlights the issue of trust, at least for me.
I began pushing away from a life of dieting around 2013, worked with an RD who’s also certified in intuitive eating and I was fascinated by the assertion that there was no evidence for gluten sensitivity.
I took this (erroneously) to mean, “You made the pain up in your head. You were gullible to lies.” So of course I don’t want to be driven by false information. I’m on a goddamn daily trust fall with my body. 😂 And this initiated a sort of dissociation from the pain I was experiencing, for, oh, say, three to four years. I had a massively confusing period of time where I was just miserable and mentally just STUCK because dietitians and intuitive eating says “It can’t be gluten. There’s no evidence for that.” But my body feels like sh*t every day -- bloated, foggy, irritable. I went to round after round of MDs (not functional or anybody in between) and sheesh. I just got tired of feeling miserable and found guidelines for an elimination diet that had guidance for anyone with eating disorder history. I was so so so frightened to even try something remotely close to food removal. Or to open to a thing that might cast me into “not being loyal” to intuitive eating and anti-diet circles.
But you know what, dag nabbit, I feel better with some foods set to the side most of the time. And it’s annoying because I know that eliminating food can be risky!
But I think where I’m trying to pull this comment back around to is that having a body feels terribly fraught. It takes so much energy to remember to trust our bodies and emotions, while also having a thinking brain that can take in nutrition and scientific data that often backs us into a corner and tries to also define what’s real and what’s not.
🫶
This episode is excellent! I found Christy back in 2016 when I began my own recovery and have found her work invaluable over the years. I just ordered her new book and noticed that on Amazon it’s listed as “#1 in Vaccination” which says so so much about society right now! Also, I was SO happy with my daughter’s pediatric GI specialist who did ALL the tests, but cautioned against any elimination diets when my daughter was having lots of issues last year. We need more doctors like this!
I LOVE seeing the SIFT method cited. It is one of the most important things for people to learn as they engage with the internet. Thank you!
And wanted to chime in as a biopsy-diagnosed celiac to say how irritating the gluten discourse can be. It would be so great if I could eat gluten on many levels, including from a kind of traditional "healthy eating" perspective because seriously, try to get the recommended amount of whole grains on a GF diet, just try it. GF bread is generally filled with all kinds of weird things to make it function without gluten and the pieces are about half the size of regular bread and so on. And, fine, that's what I have to live with because I have an autoimmune condition that makes me really sick if I eat gluten, but only do it if you really have to.
And I see so much of the kind of shady thinking in a GF Facebook group I'm a part of. People who are convinced that using shampoo with gluten in it will cause celiac symptoms, and, no, it won't unless you're drinking the shampoo. You could separately have an allergy to something in the shampoo, but gluten is only a problem for celiacs if ingested. And now if you google that basic question, you get all these "some people report reactions" takes despite the science being very clear. People who are convinced that every time they get sick, it must be gluten, like "I only ate food at home that I cooked for the last 48 hours and I've gone back and looked at all the labels and I can't see what could be making me sick, but there must be something so I'm going to call all the manufacturers." Or it could be a virus, or regular old food poisoning! In those moments I am always repeating the story of the night I spent throwing up and plotting the phone call I was going to make to the restaurant that had obviously glutened me, only to have my dad start throwing up the next morning before the restaurant opened. And the blatant intersections with overt diet culture, like someone saying they can "sometimes make room" for a slice or two of a specific kind of bread. Lady, that bread is keto bread. It has very few calories and half your fiber RDA in a single slice. Don't talk to me about "making room" for it in your diet.
I have so many thoughts and I need to listen again. Except that Christy’s experience as a new mother resonates very very deeply for me. In looking back a decade since my time in those trenches, all I can think now is “wow, I have more guidance in caring for my houseplants than I ever had with a baby.”
Just now catching up on this episode and absolutely loved it. A large part of my work when I was in tech was leading policies in the industry (my team wrote the first health misinformation policy on a social platform) to change the irresponsible way that platforms address health misinfo. A lot of it comes right down to financial incentives and there being SO much money in these wellness grifters (a point I regularly tried to make was that Goop is in the same bucket as Mercola). I was eventually pushed out of my job at Pinterest very publicly and unceremoniously, in part because of this work so lol. But the part of the episode on section 230 made me think of another, nuanced perspective on moderation that’s worth sharing. It’s an old article so some formatting is off, but a good read for anyone interested in the intersection between the legislation and what we see online. https://www.techdirt.com/2019/09/04/pinterests-way-dealing-with-anti-vax-nonsense-scams-is-only-possible-because-section-230/