As science and technology become more and more opaque, this appeal to simple black and white answers becomes even greater.

Ask anybody on the street how Ozempic works or how large language model AI works.

Almost nobody knows the answer to these questions.

All of these major developments are becoming more and more opaque and they're full of nuances.

And we're always driven to look for very simple answers to complex questions.

And people like Andrew Huberman and Joe Mercola and those kinds of people, they are very happy to provide the average person with these very simple answers.

Hello and welcome to the October 3rd edition of the Tridoc Podcast.

I'm your host, Jeff Sankoff, an emergency physician, triathlete, triathlon coach, and a multiple Ironman finisher.

Coming to you as always from beautiful sunny Denver, Colorado.

The voice you heard at the beginning of the program was that of Jonathan Jarry.

He is my guest on the show later on in this episode and he is a science communicator from the Office of Science and Society at McGill University, my Alma mater in Montreal, Canada.

Jonathan spends his time helping people sift through sense versus nonsense when it comes to the disinformation that is promulgated every single day across social media and within the mainstream media as well.

Jonathan came onto the show to talk to me specifically about just an absolutely crazy story that I came across when I saw his video on YouTube called the Mercola Tapes.

It turns out that a certain Dr. Merkerla, somebody I had never heard of, is a huge influencer in the world of wellness and anti kind of Western medicine, even though he himself is trained in a traditional Western medical or allopathic school.

And Dr. Mercola has made a very large amount of money and quite a comfortable living by selling a bunch of stuff that, well, on this podcast we have debunked as being particularly helpful.

But that hasn't stopped people from shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars into his bank account so that he could become incredibly wealthy.

The problem is Dr. Mercola is informed, or perhaps ill informed, by a medium who channels a spirit by the name of Balon.

And well, Jonathan Jerry did a very, very, very good piece on YouTube about an hour long, where he really goes into all of this and talks about how it could be that such a large organization could be taking advantage of by a medium like that and what it means for disinformation in this world and all of the people who are being taken advantage of by People like Dr. Mercola.

Well, Jonathan is going to be one of the first of a few different voices you're going to hear on this program in the next couple of months or so.

As you know, as a listener to this program, I spend my time trying to help you understand the truth from the fiction that is around marketing that comes to us as endurance athletes.

What is the truth behind the different supplements or the different gear or the, the different remedies or techniques that you hear about that are supposed to be able to make you train and race and recover better than your competitors Most of the time, as you know, if you've been listening for any amount of time, the things that you're being told are simply not rooted in any kind of reality.

Well, Jonathan helps us understand why it is that the general public is so easily duped, is so eager to believe the kinds of things that we are being told by these people who often know they are telling us things that are not true.

And he also gives us some tools to help us understand how we can sift through these things.

Now, I, on this show, have tried very hard to also help you with this.

And that's why I was so interested in speaking with Jonathan and with the other guests that I'm going to be having come on in the next few episodes.

One of them is an author who's written extensively on this subject about disinformation and sports science.

And the other one actually has set up a foundation in Canada and runs a website that is its sole purpose is to help people understand the fact versus fiction when it comes to the different things that are being promulgated across social media.

It relates to things like vaccines.

It relates to things like Tylenol.

It relates to things, all of the different things that you're hearing on a daily basis.

But my other guest also has written several books about disinformation in sports science.

So the two of them are going to contribute to this series of interviews that starts with Jonathan Jerry on this program today.

And I think you'll enjoy it.

Certainly the story we're going to hear about Dr. Merkola is a little bit insane.

Honestly, it kind of blew my mind.

I'm going to include a link to the YouTube video where you can actually watch the Mercola tapes because I highly recommend that you do.

It is a very entertaining, very well researched program that Jonathan put together and I really enjoyed it.

I thought it was just incredible.

So I highly recommend that.

And like I said, the link will be in the show notes before we get to the interview with Jonathan, of course, we have our medical mailbag subject for today and we are going to be answering a listener question, and I'm going to apologize right off the top.

I don't remember who submitted the question.

The question was submitted quite a while ago.

It was a question that I kind of kept in reserve as we were answering some other questions that kind of came to the fore.

But somebody at some point, and whoever you are, I do apologize for misplacing the communication that asked about this.

So if it's you, please reach out and remind me, preferably in the Facebook group.

But you can also reach out just in the regular ways.

But we're gonna be answering a question about L. Theanine.

L. Theanine is a compound that's found in tea.

It can be found in green tea, can be found in black tea and oolong tea, a kind of tea I had never heard of before.

But any of you tea drinkers are going to be encouraged to hear that L. Theanine does have some science behind it.

Perhaps not so much when it comes to endurance performance, but there is some science to suggest that L Theanine can provide some benefits.

And we're going to get into all of that when coach Juliet Hockman and I get together for the Medical Mailbag.

And that's coming up right after this break.

It is time once again for that part of the program called the medical mailbag, which can only mean that I'm being joined by my friend and colleague, Juliet Hockman.

Juliet, congratulations once again.

We are a week removed from your second overall age graded win.

I don't even know how to call it.

I don't even know what it is.

Yeah, currently I just did a 4 hour 70.3.

So look out, Trofield.

I'm coming for you.

Yeah, it is nice to look at those.

It is nice to look at those A week ago.

Actually, when you hear this, it'll be just about two weeks ago.

Juliet and I were in Richland, Washington.

We had a fantabulous time at the race.

It's a really wonderful event.

And Juliet was the third overall female finisher.

But with the way that the results are age graded, then she was vaulted into first overall.

Yes.

That was a sensational.

Yes.

And what's more, what's funnier in what we were referring to is they give you an adjusted time.

So even though my time was really, I don't know, 440 and change or something, apparently my real time, if you were to take age into account, is 404 or something.

So that's why I was down.

I still could get my pro card you better watch out.

I had a similar benefit.

I was very.

I had a very similar time to Juliet.

Finished about a what, a minute behind you?

I think just about.

And also with the age graded results ended up with this very low fours and I'm like, wow, I wish that was my real time.

How nice would that have been?

Anyways, for anyone who has, who is interested in doing a different race and is interested in coming to the Pacific Northwest, if you're not already here, we can.

This is the second year they've done the event, the second year that Jeff and I have gone out to it and we just have nothing but good to say about it.

Amazing community, fun course.

Just as I ran out of T2, I just couldn't stop grinning that people were just cheering so loud and it's just people who have, who are, who just live in the area and they come and they spectate and they cheer and you'll go through the run course and people have brought their couch out to the front lawn and they're sitting on their couch cheering.

It's really fun.

So Highlands I was actually impressed with as we were riding through the wine country, how many people were out on their driveways cheering and it was super nice.

Yeah, it's nice to go to a community that appreciates the race and welcomes athletes like that.

And I concur.

I think it's just a terrific event.

I'm sorry I will miss it next year, although I'm not sure why.

Yes, Jeff's got.

We should mention that Jeff.

Four people from our coaching group earned their world championship spots and Jeff was one of them and he took it.

So he will not be able to do this race next year because he will be thinking about Nice instead.

So congratulations.

A little bit of a conflict, but thank you.

I'm excited.

So Marbella in November.

Nice.

Marbella will be a good training race for Nice, I guess given all the climbing the climbing signed up for.

Yeah, yeah, that's going to be good.

All right.

We also had today, as we're recording this on Sunday was the race in Augusta.

And we want to acknowledge another Life Sport athlete who had her professional debut, Maya Watson, who is the daughter of the owner of LifeSport, Lance Watson, the coach of both Juliet and I.

And Maya did an amazing debut.

I'm just so happy for her.

So excited.

It was so much fun watching her.

She had a great swim, very solid bike.

But then the fourth fastest run of the day for the pro women and.

She ran her way back from 16th off the bike.

Into ninth, so solid top 10.

Finished in her very first pro race out of, I think, 21 or 22 professional women.

So that's a good one.

Congratulations.

Amazing.

Yeah, congratulations.

I have communicated with her after the race.

She is very much on the same cloud as her position.

Cloud nine.

That's great.

Yeah, it's really exciting for her.

And Lance was.

I said to him, I said, gosh, I can only imagine how proud you must be.

And he said, oh, he's just bursting.

So, yeah, really nice.

Really nice.

Also had a few life sport athletes out there today.

They all did well.

And my friend, previous guest on the program, Joe Wilson, also managed to win.

His age group did very well.

Congratulations, Joe.

Y.

Even though he's a crappy swimmer, Joe, you got to work on that swim, I'm telling you Anyway, so there's only.

I think there's only so much you can do at a certain point.

And when you go to Augusta, I mean, it's like swimming Oregon.

Yeah, it's very fast down river swimming.

All right, we are here for the medical mailbag.

We should probably get to the actual question for the medical mailbag.

And I apologize in advance.

It's my fault.

This question came by.

I'm pretty sure it came by the way of email, and it came quite a while ago and I misplaced who asked it.

So I apologize, whoever you are, who sent in this question, I am very grateful that you sent it in.

Juliet, what is it that we are answering today?

So we are going to discuss or to answer questions around L. Theanine.

And from what I can tell, L. Theanine is chemical.

It's all the rage amongst youthful influencer types, and they're advocating it as a way to gain mental clarity and potentially some performance benefits along the way.

But tell us what your research group.

I've never heard of this stuff.

I don't know anybody who takes it, or if I do, I certainly haven't shared it with Mace.

But maybe it's a generational thing.

So tell us what you and your research team found out about L. Theanine.

I had not heard of it either.

When it came across, I thought, oh, this is just going to be one of these things.

But we started looking into it, and there is evidence.

It's always fun when we can say, oh, you know what, there's some science behind this, so that's good.

L. Theanine is a chemical that is found in tea leaves.

It's found to varying degrees and concentrations in green, black and green oolong teas.

I'm not a big tea drinker.

Are you familiar with oolong tea?

Yeah, it's Chinese.

It's.

It's just another tea varietal.

Okay.

All right.

It's not.

It doesn't seem to be standardized in terms of how much you can find.

It seems to vary.

You can get 5.8 to 32 milligrams per 200 mils of brewed tea.

So it can be all over the place in terms of how much you're actually getting.

And I do want to pause just to thank Cosette Rhodes, who was my intern who looked into this, and she really enjoyed looking into this topic because, as she put it, it's nice to find a subject where it's not just.

No, it doesn't do anything.

She was happy in that regard.

So L. Theanine is a non protein amino acid.

And what that means is it's a amino acid.

It has the same structural components in that it has a nitrogen and it has a amino group that is fixed to a carbon backbone.

So it looks like it's got the same kind of architecture of amino acid, but it is not one of the amino acids that is generally incorporated into proteins.

And if you look at the molecule L. Theanine, it bears a very striking resemblance to two naturally occurring neurotransmitters that are also amino acid derivatives within the body.

Now, one of them is glutamate, which comes from glutamic acid, which is the amino acid.

The other one is gamma aminobutyric acid.

So glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter.

It basically ramps things up in the brain and gaba.

Gamma aminobutyric acid is a inhibitory neurotransmitter.

So interesting that L. Theanine can reproduce some of the effects of both of these.

It can cause both excitation and a certain amount of sedation, which is, I think, interesting.

It also has a property that it will competitively inhibit against the cannabinoid receptor 1.

So if you are someone who imbibes a certain amount of cannabinoids, you are going to find that this, if you take L. Theanine, you're going to block that.

Now, I'm not talking about thc, I'm talking about the cannabinoids.

Yeah, not cannabis, but the.

What is the stuff that people like to use?

Cannabidiol, the oils, like the.

So if you.

There's all these.

So cannabis is the plant.

And then THC is one of the compounds that is found in the drug is banned by whatever.

And then there's cannabidiol, which is CBD.

Okay, CBD.

CBD oil.

Yeah.

So CBD oil and all that stuff.

So the CBD receptor 1 is competitively inhibited by L Theanine.

I thought that was interesting.

It also is a partial agonist, which means it activates NMDA receptors.

NMDA receptors are the same receptors in the brain that are affected by or that are worked on by things like ecstasy.

A lot of potential effects.

Now, how much it actually causes any physiologic impact on all of these different receptors is not totally clear.

Just the fact that it has some impact on these receptors is one thing, but whether or not it's actually doing a whole lot on these receptors is not totally clear.

And there has been some studies that have looked at what it actually does.

And like, for example, they looked at this type of roundworm, C. Elegans, which is a very nice name, C. Elegans.

And they found out that, oh, if you give a lot of L. Theanine, it actually increases the lifespan of this roundworm.

So if you're a roundworm, L. Theanine's great stuff.

But no similar studies in any other living beings that we could find.

So I'm not sure what to make of that.

But this idea of increasing alertness, this idea of duplicating what we see with caffeine has been shown.

And there are several studies that say that L. Theanine promotes this.

It's an oxymoron.

But alert relaxation, which I think is.

You could conceive of what that might mean.

Right.

It's like your.

Your alertness is heightened, but you're not anxious in any ways.

You're just like.

You're chill, but you're much more cognitively processing things.

So I don't know.

I'm not a big tea drinker, so I can't say I've ever necessarily.

We'll have to ask.

Kelly's a.

Okay.

All the time anyways.

But that seems to be the thing.

And all of the people who are out there talking about L. Theanine really anchor on this idea.

And there are several studies that kind of try to tease this out and does seem to actually be a thing.

People perform better on cognitive types of tests, and they exhibit lower stress levels at the same time, which is neat.

Alert relaxation.

There you go.

It also seems.

Yep, but how.

Maybe this is good if you're going to take an exam.

But how.

I guess I'm kind of curious what the questioner wanted to know about whether or not this had any effect on performance in multisport.

We know that caffeine, besides its ability to improve some physiologic things in terms of performance, caffeine's cognitive improvement improvements also are important for endurance sport because it facilitates your ability to push yourself through pain.

It facilitates your ability to push yourself, stay focused and on task for what you're trying to do.

So there was some thought that L. Theanine may be similar.

And we did find.

I was just going to get to it, but we looked at.

We found three studies that were on athletes.

They're all very small.

The first one was on elite curlers.

So.

Oh, yeah, Canadian sport of curling.

We had an Olympic curler on the show a while ago.

I remember.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wonder if Joanne ever listens.

Maybe she'll hear this.

Yeah.

22 elite curling athletes, if they took theanine at 6 milligrams per kilogram, they actually had improved shooting scores.

They were actually able to better draw the stone to the, to the forefoot.

And they also had this test called a Stroop test.

I don't know what that is, but it was a way of measuring cognitive performance.

And they did better on it when they took the L Theanine.

And the authors in that study said curling is a very cerebral game on top of being a somewhat physical game.

But they felt that the improvements in these athletes performance had to do with their being better able to cognitively process what they had to do in order to get the stone to go where it had to go.

So thought that was interesting.

Okay.

And then you'll be interested in this one double blind, randomized control study of elite rowers.

20 different rowers.

They showed.

This is more of a lab study because basically what they did is they gave them theanine and showed that you could impact the trajectories of different immune system markers.

Absolutely nothing to do with performance.

Absolutely nothing to do with anything.

But what they did was they said, look, if you take L. Theanine, we can measurably see changes in how much interleukin 2, 4, 10 and interferon gamma.

We see after rowing, intense rowing sessions.

And the idea is that maybe L. Theanine is having an impact on inflammatory processes from these high intensity exercises.

Yeah, I was going to say because rowing would be about the complete opposite from curling in terms of.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

I don't know what to do with that one.

It's another one of these.

It's interesting But.

And then the last one is L. Theanine treatment.

And a double blind randomized control study of current and former athletes resulted in changes in movement accuracy during Makoto performance testing.

So we had to look into what Makoto performance testing is.

Basically, it is this.

How do I describe it?

You stand in the center of this platform and then you have to react to various, like, stimuli.

You have sometimes a light will illuminate, you have to strike it, or sometimes something will move and you have to kick it or step in a certain way.

And basically it's like your reaction time to doing different kinds of physical maneuvers.

And people who took L Theanine had improved accuracy doing this test.

But if you asked the people who were doing it, did you feel like you did better?

They actually didn't notice any effect at all.

Oh.

Huh.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the actual test performance was not marginal.

Yeah, it was very marginal.

So what we ended up taking from all of this is that L. Theanine, it's a natural subject, a natural substance.

It's not hard to obtain in tea.

You can buy this as a supplement, incidentally.

It's recommended as either 100 or 200mg.

We couldn't really find a lot of These papers used 100, some of them used 200.

It's basically, I think we saw 60 tablets for 40 bucks.

So it's not hugely expensive.

But we're not entirely clear what you get for this.

And we couldn't find any evidence that it really enhances any kind of performance attributes that would really be important.

But we can't say it's bad.

And we certainly.

This idea of alert relaxation I think, is intriguing.

And I wouldn't say not to.

I'd be very interested to hear if anybody's using this and getting any kind of benefits from it.

I would be thrilled to know because it sounds like the kind of thing where this might be one of those things very similar to normatex and other things where the science isn't fantastic.

But it sounds like if you feel like it's benefiting you, there's certainly reason to believe that it's real, so why not?

But I wonder if it's the whole larger process of drinking tea, particularly if you're getting in tea, right?

Yep, yep.

And there's other stuff too, right?

There's other stuff too.

But also tea is seen as something you do when you go and you sit on your couch and you have some tea, and so you're relaxed.

And so I could see.

And then if there is A caffeine like effect in it.

Then you can see how those two, the action of ting and the pro and whatever might be in it might offer that alert relaxation component.

Yeah, but.

But a lot of these studies were using theanine isolate in tablets.

So, like in tablet form.

So you're remembering the tea drinking form, the teeing, right?

Yeah, the teeing, yeah, the actual teeing.

And also, I can never remember.

Kelly gets very upset with me.

I never can remember.

Do you add the milk to the tea or the tea to the mil?

There's this whole thing, this whole rig of mermaid.

It depends if the tea is made in a teapot where it's already been brewing in there.

If you're making with a tea bag, then you would never put the milk in first.

But if it's coming from a teapot where it's steeped and everything in it's already made, then the milk goes in the mug first.

See, Kelly and I both come from colonial backgrounds, she being Australian, me having British parents.

I can tell you exactly your order you're supposed to be.

There you go.

And only take one biscuit when the plate is passed.

They better be biscuits of an appropriate size.

That's good.

That's good.

I can't say I'm going to be jumping onto the theanine bandwagon here, but like I said, I don't see any downside to it.

It was making me realize as we were talking about it that Cosette and I, it was making me think about recently we had this whole kerfuffle about Tylenol, which is silly.

And it's making me how people, so few people understand the scientific method.

And the scientific method is ask, observe something, develop a question, develop a test for that question, test the question, come up with an answer, see if you can reproduce that answer, come up with a conclusion, and then generate another question.

And you just continually repeat this process over and over again.

And I think with like theanine, people obviously were like, oh, drinking tea seems to make me feel good.

And I get this alert relaxation or whatever.

And so people developed a question, they came up with a test, they looked into it.

And now we're at a point, I think, where we have this sort of nascent science which hasn't really been fully fleshed out yet.

A lot of these papers are quite recent.

And I think that what's happened is a lot of these sort of influencers who don't understand the science, but they're see some of the.

They just see some of the oh, look how great this looks.

And they're just latching onto it.

And just as always, oh, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It's going to make you do xyz.

You need to just get on this bandwagon right now.

And oh, I'm selling it for so much.

So it just makes me realize how important it is.

I think the mission that we are fulfilling here and helping people understand how these things come to pass, what the science actually means, and whether or not these kinds of results are in actuality important enough for you to make a change yourself.

And again, we're not ever saying you should or shouldn't do something.

We're just giving you what the results are and helping you try to make that decision for yourself.

So I hope.

Now, before.

Are we finished talking about theming?

Yes.

Okay.

Before we leave this episode of the Medical Mailbag, I would like to share with you perhaps one of the most important study results that I have heard in a month, which Jeff shared with me when we were in Richland last weekend in Washington.

For all of you who are wondering if the old wives tale or the mother's adage about the two second rule is true or not, I want you to know that apparently some British scientists looked into this.

So this is the idea that if you drop a foodstuff on the ground, like a cracker or an apple or something on the ground that you have.

Some people call it the two second rule, some people call it the five second rule, but you have five seconds to pick it up and eat it before it picks up any contaminants that could seriously hurt you.

Now, I have been a long believer in the 5 second rule.

I will happily eat off the floor almost anywhere in the world.

I have to amend it because I did double check my reference.

The big thing is it really depends on the floor itself and the substance you're dropping.

Wet or wet or dry.

Yeah.

If what you're dropping is wet, don't give it even a second because the transfer is instantaneous.

If you're dropping it on a floor that is particularly dirty, I also wouldn't give it a couple seconds.

But if you're dropping it on a floor that's pretty clean, I think you're like, look, if you drop it in, if you're on a farm and you drop it, you probably don't want to.

Subway in New York.

Maybe not.

However, I did drop a piece of my ice cream at the local ice cream store on the fridge floor and I picked it up and ate it, even though it was wet.

And look, I'm fine, so it must be right.

Yeah.

So.

And I'm going to stick to.

I'm going to stick to the, you know, we've all done fine.

So all you moms out there, just keep letting your kid eat off the ground.

That's what we're saying.

Immune system boost.

Immune system boost.

Exactly.

That's what we've got for you this time.

Drink up your tea and if your cookie drops on the ground, you got a couple seconds to grab it.

As long as it's not icing side down.

No.

All right, Juliet, thanks for being here and I look forward to catching up on another episode in a couple weeks time.

Take care, everyone.

We'll see you then.

If you've been a listener of this podcast for any amount of time, then you know that I and my co host for the medical Mailbag segment, Juliet Hockman, spend pretty much all of our time working our way to debunk misinformation.

Now, specifically on this program, that misinformation has to do with the kinds of things that are propagated towards us as endurance athletes when it comes to supplements and technology.

Specifically, it's the kind of misinformation that leads you to believe that taking a specific pill, a specific powder, using a specific form of technology is going to get you over the hump, is going to make you into a new kind of athlete that you wouldn't otherwise be able to be if you didn't use said product.

Misinformation, of course, permeates all areas of society these days, and unfortunately, it's really become a big problem in healthcare, as we know.

I have tried very hard to stay out of politics, but politics is permeating everywhere that we go these days and it is very much influencing my own field of healthcare.

And so I, I can't help but be affected by what I am seeing every day, both in the mainstream media and of course, on social media itself.

Recently, I came across an absolutely fascinating video that I was brought to through Facebook and it involved a social media wellness influencer, someone who I had never heard of before.

And it brought me down a rabbit hole that I didn't know existed and was quite entertained going down.

And so I wanted to have the maker of that video on the program tonight to talk about the kind of misinformation that exists within the wellness sphere, how it is potentially very dangerous and how it is that we as consumers can so easily be influenced by misinformation and make poor decisions when it comes to our own fitness pursuits as well as our health and wellness pursuits.

And so my guest today is Jonathan Jarry.

Jonathan is a science communicator with my alma mater, McGill University, where he works for the Office for Science and Society.

He dedicates himself to separating sense from nonsense on the scientific stage.

He has a master's degree in molecular biology and he brings his experience in cancer research, human genetics, rehabilitation research and forensic biology to the work that he does for the public for 10 years.

He was also the co creator and co host of the award winning podcast the Body of Evidence.

He's a guest lecturer in multiple university courses, including classes in science communication, and gives talks to both general and professional audiences.

He's regularly interviewed in both English and French language media such as the New York Times, CBC and La Presse, which is a large newspaper in Montreal.

But I am thrilled to be able to have him here on the TRADOC podcast today to talk about a video that he recently produced and that I came across on Facebook.

Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast.

Thank you for the invitation.

So, for those of my listeners who may be naive as I was until I saw your video, tell us who Dr. Mercola is.

The subject of the Mercola files or the Mercola, Was it the Mercola files?

The Mercola tapes.

The Mercola tapes, yes.

It had a catchy phrase for the catchy title.

So tell us who Dr. Mercola is.

Dr. Joseph Mercalla is an osteopathic physician, which in the United States is indistinguishable from a medical doctor, which is not the case in Canada or the uk, but in the us.

He is basically a doctor.

And he was an early adopter of the Internet.

He created a website in 1997, I believe, under his name, Mercola.com and very early on he got seduced into this idea of natural health.

And he has built this massive, incredibly lucrative empire out of being this alternative healing figure.

Somebody who I've called the Upside Down Doctor.

So whatever medical doctors will say is true, he will say no, it's false.

And whatever they say is false, he will say it's true.

He has a massive online store where he sells every dietary supplement you can think of.

He is anti vaccine.

He promoted a lot of misinformation during the COVID 19 pandemic.

He is.

We your listeners are familiar with RFK Jr.

I'm sure right now he is.

He knows RFK Jr.

But unlike RFK Jr.

He's not a lawyer.

He is a doctor and he has been incredibly influential in promoting health misinformation for decades now.

And what got you to the Mercola tapes, what brought you into that world of what was going on, the way.

That this happened is that we've been, we've covered Mercola before for the office, we've written some articles.

I made a very long video doing a deep dive into Mercola.

And once that video was out, I ended up getting contacted by an insider within Mercola's company.

Because what I had found out as I was making this first video was that not too long ago, Mercola fired his entire C suite, including his own sister, at the behest or at the, under the counsel of a psychic medium.

And this was a big revelation within the natural supplement industry, but it didn't make any kind of ripples in the mainstream media.

And so this insider told me, hey, the story is way worse than you've heard of.

You, you know that they were, these sessions between him and this medium, they were recorded, there are videos of that.

Here are the videos.

And so I was given access to a lot of these video sessions between Joe Mercola and this medium who is advising him on all matters, including scientific and medical matters.

So such that some of the information on his website is influenced, validated by this medium, who claims to be channeling an entity called Balon.

And so I gained access to these videos.

I watched over 50 hours of them and reported back on them in this second video.

Call them or call the tapes.

Because I felt it was very important for people who buy his stuff, who consume his content to know where his information is coming from.

Now, in my experience, when you have someone like Joseph Mercola, you can counter with all kinds of evidence, science for example, and people will not be fazed.

They are true believers until the very end.

Do you have any sense whether or not the Mercola tapes have made a dent in the true believerism that his, his followers have?

No.

So I haven't heard from any, anybody who was a true believer in his stuff and then watched my video and got converted or deconverted, if you will.

It's very hard when you do this kind of work.

I do get emails from people whose minds I have, I have changed through the work that I do, but it is very hard.

Some people just don't know any better, right?

They just, they assume that Mercola is this benevolent, all knowing medical doctor and then when they read something that goes against that, they might change their mind.

Other people are hardcore believers.

They've been with him for Decades.

They've been buying his stuff and they subscribe to his newsletter for a very long time.

And so I'm not going to be able to change their mind.

And that's okay.

Whenever I do the work that I do, I think of this in terms of a spectrum.

And at one end of the spectrum, there are people who already agree with me, and at the other end of that spectrum, people who vociferously disagree with me.

I'm aiming for the people in the middle, people who are confused.

They've heard things on either side of this issue.

They just don't know.

And hopefully I can clarify things so.

Without getting too much into details, because it's a very long video.

And I will put the link to the video in the show notes.

It's really worthwhile watching.

It's quite honestly astonishing what goes on in these tapes.

But if you could just give us maybe just a very brief synopsis of the interactions between the psychic medium, who he goes by Kai something, but his real name is Christopher Johnson, and then Joseph Mercola.

What is the nature of the interaction between these two and how does it inform Mercola's business practices?

Basically, there's a lot of fluffing that is happening where Mercolis is being told by this alleged entity that is allegedly being channeled through this guy that he will write all of these amazing books and he will win more Nobel Prizes than anybody else who.

He will make these amazing discoveries.

Some of them will end up in museums.

That he will.

He's working on a new type of cheese that will not be toxic.

He'll be very happy to hear, apparently cheese is very toxic, but he's going to create a new type of cheese that is not toxic.

And he's going to create a new type of oil that is not toxic, because olive oil apparently is very toxic now.

And also he wants to have all the veterinarians killed in the world for unclear reasons.

He wants people to march in the streets with weapons to basically kill all the veterinarians in the world.

He has bought land in Latin America to build an end of days compound there.

Land that he has abandoned on multiple occasions, but he has plans to move somewhere else.

He also has a handgun that he waves at some point in front of the camera.

And he says people often miss when there's an intruder in front of them.

I'm not going to miss because there's no fear in this brain.

So there's a lot of very, very serious stuff.

And I was mentioning the fact that it is guiding the Information that goes out there.

You can see him validating information about women's health that he has on his website through Balon, who will tell him, yes, this is a good solution.

No, it's not.

Or he will use ChatGPT and say, ChatGPT doesn't lie.

And so I have to believe what ChatGPT is telling me to see where.

How the sausage gets made, essentially.

I already knew that most of this information was bs, that it wasn't true.

But to see how now it is being made and where he's getting his information, this kind of overconfidence, where he thinks he can figure out that's some preliminary study done in rodents is going to pan out.

So he needs to sell something to human beings based off of that, plus the confirmation through Balon, plus the use of ChatGPT.

None of this is serious, none of this is scientific, but it is.

This is stuff that is going out to the public and who knows the amount of harm that this is causing.

I want to move away from Mercola in just a couple of seconds, but I want to stick to the same theme of the kind of.

This idea that somebody is just promoting disinformation as if it's truth.

There was something you said in the video that really struck with me or that really stuck with me.

And that was early on where you were digging into the tapes and you had this.

It almost dawned on you that, you know what?

Joseph Mercola is not your common snake oil salesman.

He's not duping his customers on purpose.

He doesn't seem to actually know or believe that what he's selling is false.

He actually believes very truly in what he is selling.

And I felt like in the video you were almost giving him a little bit of a pass.

You were saying because, and this is my interpretation that because he truly believes in what he's selling, and he's being so earnest about it that you could almost forgive him for promulgating all of this stuff.

And I know you and I talked before we started recording.

That wasn't really your intent.

So what were you saying in saying that?

So as a skeptic, as somebody who says, I will change my mind if you provide me with better evidence, which I think is a good lens to use when you're looking at the evidence.

We are as skeptics, we're very quick to point to people like Mercol and say, oh, the, He's a con man, he's a grifter, he's just doing this for the money.

He's lying to people just to make money.

And so when I was watching those Mercola tapes, I was expecting him to confess to this medium, Hey, I just said this thing.

I know it's not true, but look at all the money coming in.

It's amazing.

And this never happened.

And instead, what I heard him say were things that were clearly deluded, that made very little sense, and were not scientifically grounded, but he really seemed to believe in them.

For me, I always want to adjust my worldview based on the evidence.

And I think that we're very quick to point to people like him and say they're grifters, when in fact, many of them are just deluded.

And it is a problem that we have as human beings.

Our brain is full of biases, and we don't.

We're not as rational as we would like to think that we are.

And that also includes these major alternative health influencers.

And yes, we can say that what he's saying is not true.

And he is making a lot of money out of this.

He is worth over 300 million American dollars by his own admission.

And motivation is very complex.

And I'm sure that the fact that he's making all of this money, he is a motivating factor.

But I think we have to be careful when we're looking at these people and saying, they're just con men, they're just lying to you, because very often they're not.

They really believe in this stuff.

And I think that it's a reminder of how vulnerable we are to believing in things that are not true.

In my space in the endurance sports industry, I am constantly being asked questions by athletes about the latest thing that's out.

It's often a supplement.

Sometimes it's tech.

And in general, you can find an influencer who has some kind of credibility.

Huberman is a great example.

This guy has millions of viewers of his podcast and listener viewers of his YouTube channel and listeners to his podcast.

And when I've had the unfortunate opportunity to actually partake of his content, it's rubbish.

It's complete garbage.

He is clearly being paid to have these people on and to promote the stuff that he's promoting where there's really no evidence.

I guess what I don't understand is why are we so easily susceptible to this?

Why do we have no curiosity to look behind what people are telling us anymore?

And why do we just accept the loudest, not the loudest voice, but often the most irrational?

Because they're offering things that are so clearly not the old thing is if it's too good to be true, it is.

And this is constantly being thrown at us and people are so willing to accept.

I think there are a lot of answers to your question.

One of them being that we're always looking for simple answers to complex questions.

And as science and technology become more and more opaque, this appeal to simple black and white answers becomes even greater.

Ask anybody on the street how Ozempic works or how large language model AI works.

Almost nobody knows the answer to these questions.

All of these major developments are becoming more and more opaque and they're full of nuances.

And we're always driven to look for very simple answers to complex questions.

And people like Andrew Huberman and Joe Mercola and those kinds of people, they are very happy to provide the average person with these very simple answers.

There are also other things that play into that.

One of them is the appeal to nature, which Mercola plays up a lot.

And so if you look at the alternative medicine sort of landscape, there is a lot of this appeal to nature, which is this idea that our brain really loves, that if something is natural, it must be good for you and it must be safe.

And if it's man made, if it's synthetic, artificial, it must be bad for you.

And so those are things that we use to make these very quick judgments to decide if something is effective or not, if it's safe or not.

Things like the appeal to antiquity, oh, it's been used for thousands of years.

And these, we can teach people that these shortcuts are bad shortcuts, they're logical fallacies.

But it's easy to forget these things.

It's not easy to educate everybody about these things.

It's not part of the school curriculum.

And so we get seduced by these things.

And when you look at people like me and you look at government sources and university websites, they can be dull and boring.

But then you look at people like Huberman and Mercola and they have these beautiful websites and they have a brand, right?

They know how to brand themselves.

And that also plays a part in how people digest information.

And if you ask the average person who is not a scientist to find out what the scientific consensus is on an issue, they don't know.

And they don't know where to go and get that information because there is no scientific consensus website where you go and you type it in and there it is.

And it's very hard to interpret scientific data.

It's something that I do for a living, going through a bunch of papers and trying to figure out what is the answer that comes out of all of this?

It's very hard to do when you're qualified to do it.

It's almost impossible when you're just a member of the public who has not been trained to do that.

And so it's easy for these people to turn to these health influencers who provide them with these simple solutions and who often look appealing.

They look like, I want to be as healthy as this person looks, and therefore I'm going to listen to what this person tells me because I want to look as jacked as Andrew Huberman or I want to age as gracefully as Joseph Mercola.

That whole branding and that image plays a big part also in how seductive these ideas can be.

So I spend a lot of time on this show trying to educate my audience on how to see through this stuff.

The golden rule.

If it sounds too good to be true, it very likely is.

I try to teach them about the red flags to look for.

I try to teach them about how to go look beyond the fancy website and to try to find.

Now, it takes work, though, right?

At the end of the day, if you want to find the truth, you have to push through the gloss and you have to dig into the.

Not the nitty gritty.

And like you said, it takes some work.

How do we get past this?

How do we restore some balance to the universe and get away from this disinformation because it's causing real harm.

We're seeing vaccine mandates being revoked based on.

I don't even know what.

It's almost like we have a society that wants to stand up and cheer about its ignorance.

I just.

I don't even know how we combat this.

Yeah, you're asking the big question.

I don't have a clear answer to that.

I think that those of us who know better do need to stand up.

I think that we need to reach to people and let them know that.

Because a lot of people who buy into this, they have genuine grievances of unmet needs and things like that.

And they were being offered these false solutions from the Maha movement, for example, which is very quick to blame things that have never been convincingly tied to ill health and sweet distractors.

Yeah, exactly.

And so we have to make people realize that and it will just take time.

I hope that the pendulum swings back at some point when unfortunately enough damage is done that people realize that this was not the way forward.

But I suspect that's what it's going to take is a lot of damage.

And I don't want that I don't want.

Wish things were the way they are.

But I don't know what it's going to take for people to wake up and realize that they've been lied to and that this is not the way forward.

A lot of preventable damage, that's the worst of it.

It's easily preventable, and it's all.

It's all available.

All of the truth is out there.

It's based on.

It's always remarkable to me how people are willing to pick and choose from which science they're willing to accept.

If they're diagnosed with a cancer, they're more than happy to accept all of the chemotherapy and all of the radiation and all of the things that science has developed over hundreds of years to be able to treat their cancer.

But if it comes to protecting against an infectious disease that they've never seen because the vaccines have worked so well, they're not interested.

They'd rather find some kind of fallacy.

What can happen in that circumstance is that people are afraid of choosing a risk for themselves.

Right.

Because when you're choosing to get vaccinated, you are doing an action that could have a bad consequence on you.

Now, we know that the chances of a serious adverse event from a vaccine is really low, but because of all the misinformation around vaccines, people think, okay, so I can either choose the vaccine and then if something bad happens to me, it's my fault, or I don't get vaccinated and whatever happens.

And there's something that's very reassuring about this idea of it's out of my hands, it's out of my control.

If I get infected, well, I get infected.

It was my destiny.

But this idea of choosing the vaccine and choosing to potentially risk a harm, some people are very bad at making that calculus.

And it feels much easier to just say, I will just let things happen naturally and we'll see what happens.

But at least I didn't make this choice of bringing harm to my body.

And worse than that, we've lost the communal societal values of protecting each other, which is really the value of vaccination is.

It's.

Yes, it's of course, important to an individual, but it's really important to a society because herd immunity is huge for many of these vaccines.

And with not caring about what happens to anybody else, that is, it becomes a much easier decision to just take the risk for yourself and not care about what happens to anybody else, which is really unfortunate.

Yeah.

Toward the beginning of the pandemic, I was I was doing a podcast with a friend of mine who was a doctor who was complaining about all the selfishness that he was seeing in people.

And I, at the time I was like, I don't know if I would go that far, but five years into Covid and yeah, I would say that we're, we're probably, I'm not basing this on any hard data.

I don't know if it's been studied.

It probably has been.

But based on what I'm seeing, yeah, I think that we're making these decisions in a much more self centered way than we used to a few decades ago.

And that has consequences for us as a society for sure.

Okay, let's bring it back to the endurance athlete community and the disinformation that surrounds supplements and technology and the idea that something can make you better, faster, whatever.

Three action items that athletes can take to try and get themselves out of the disinformation loop.

Action item number one, of course is continue listening to this podcast and definitely check out the Mercola tapes, which I will link to in the show notes.

It is well worth your time.

I believe it's just about.

Is it a half an hour, an hour?

It's an hour.

It's an hour.

It's an hour worth your time.

I was like getting ready to go to sleep and I stayed up past my bedtime to watch it all because it was enthralling.

So I highly recommend it.

So two other action items.

Jonathan, what could people do to try and be savvy about disinformation and try to break this loop?

I'm going to combine them into one, which is that at the end of the day, you need to have trusted sources of information.

You can't be called upon to evaluate the scientific literature on every single thing that's out there.

It takes too much time, too much expertise.

There are tips that we can all give people.

Don't look at how many participants finished the study and whose data was analyzed.

Make sure it was done in human beings and not in mice, things like that.

Be wary of multiple analyses within a single data set where somebody will test participants for 25 different variables and they find an association with one of them.

The more of these of these tests that you do, the likelier you are to find a positive result by chance alone.

All of these tips are useful, but at the end of the day, people need to have reliable people that they can go to for this kind of information.

This is what we try to be at McGill's Office for Science and society.

That's what you're trying to do with your podcast as well.

There are others out there.

And so it is about finding the right voices on these issues.

People like Timothy Caulfield at the University of Alberta, people like Nick Tiller, who writes a lot about ultramarathons and interplay between science and exercise.

He's a physiologist.

So finding people like that who are evidence based.

And you can tell because there's a lot of nuance in the language that we use, whereas these big influencers typically are not nuance, it's black and white.

And there's a lot of nuance.

And there's a.

There's a willingness to say, I was wrong about this, here's the correction, or the evidence has changed, and so I have changed my mind.

Those are good criteria to vet a source of information.

I think that is excellent words of advice.

I love it.

And you've given me an idea that perhaps we should coordinate a little bit better because we're up against a system that, as you said, really favors those who are more jacked and better looking than I am and have a much bigger audience profile.

And perhaps if those of us who were doing the work of really digging into the evidence and trying to explain it to our audience members and be more transparent about the truth, maybe we could form a network of trusted sources for people to go to.

So we'll have to look into that.

Jonathan, Jerry, I cannot thank you enough for taking some time to be on the show this evening.

Or it's this evening when we're talking, but it won't be this evening when it comes out.

He is a science communicator with McGill University's Office for Science and Society, my alma mater in Montreal, Quebec.

I am deeply appreciative of his flexibility.

He it put up with me as I had to reschedule a couple times today, and I definitely really enjoyed the Mercola tapes.

I'm gonna look for some of your other works out there and I hope to be in touch with you again in the future.

And hopefully we will learn that some of these disinformation purveyors have maybe faded into the background.

We can only hope.

Thank you again for joining me today on the Try Doc podcast.

It's been a real pleasure having this.

Conversation and thank you for having me.

See the top of my lungs.

Hi, my name is Justin Rayfield and I'm a proud Patreon supporter of the Tridog podcast, the only show that's more addictive than carbs.

Before a long workout produced and edited by the one and only Jeff Stoff, along with this dynamic duo of intern Cosette Rhodes and Nina Takashima, who are so amazing they make superheroes look like they're on a coffee break.

You're looking for the scoop on all things discussed today-over to www.tridockpodcast.com for show notes and a treasure trove of past episodes.

Got a burning question that's keeping you up at night?

Or maybe just something you're curious about?

Fire off an email to jeff@trydocloud.com and who knows, your question might just be.

The star of a future episode.

If you're on the hunt for coaching services that'll make you faster than a greased lightning bolt, zip over to try.coaching.com or lifesportcoaching.com Trust me, it's like finding a shortcut in a mail.

You'll thank me later.

Lastly, don't just stalk your ex on social media, follow Jeff too.

Catch all the action on the Tridog Podcast Facebook page.

Double tap those picks on Try Dog Coaching Instagram and binge watch the Tridog Coaching YouTube channel.

Hey, why not join the cool kids in the Tridoc Podcast private Facebook group?

Just search, click and you're in.

This podcast tickles your funny bone or pumps up your adrenaline.

Show some love with a rating and review.

Subscribe to Never miss out on the fun.

If you're feeling extra generous, become a Patreon Faint of podcast@patreon.com trydockpodcast and lastly, I want to give a big shout out to Radio by Empty Hours for the killer intro and outro music with a high five and a fake.

Discover them and other indie gems@www.reaverbnation.com and support Little guys making big waves.

Let try it out Pacast will be back on faster than you can say, Is it race day yet?

With more medical music than another chat with the multisport maven?

Until then, train like a beast.

Enjoy the podcast.

It.