The Internet Is The World's Worst Pharmacy w/ Paris Martineau & Ashwin Rodrigues

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Speaker 10 Corezone Media.

Speaker 9 Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittra.

Speaker 9 Now, the other day, someone suggested I shouldn't do ASMR-style voices, and I'm still not sure what that means, but it does it mean I shouldn't be this close and like being like, you're in the bathtub.

Speaker 9 Either way, I'm never listening to a single bit of feedback I've ever received, but today I'm in studio in New York, goddamn city, and I'm joined by the incredible freelance writer Ashwin Rodriguez.

Speaker 9 Hey, Dan Ashwin, good. Thanks for having me.
And Paris Martineau of Consumer Reports.

Speaker 10 Hello, should I do mouth noises too?

Speaker 9 Yeah, they love that.

Speaker 9 But you had a huge story, Paris, in the last week, last week or so. It was like a week or two.

Speaker 10 Yeah, like a week or two times a bit of a blur, honestly.

Speaker 9 So it was a story around 23 protein powders and ready-to-drink shakes and properly brands. And you found that heavy metal contamination was common.
How common exactly? Very common, actually.

Speaker 9 Like more than two-thirds of them, actually, this will be really important for you and your listeners, 69% of them.

Speaker 9 69% of them had

Speaker 9 levels of of lead in one serving that are more than what our food safety experts say is safe to take in a day. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 9 And the more you kind of dig into the specifics, I feel like the more concerning it gets.

Speaker 9 Some of the most contaminated powders we found were plant-based ones and overwhelmingly plant-based powders instead of, you know, versus like whey or dairy or like dairy-based products like whey or beef-based, they had just higher levels of lead.

Speaker 9 Where is the lead getting in?

Speaker 9 I mean, the lead is getting in from

Speaker 9 a lot of different ways, but probably the most common is like the soil that plants are grown in. So basically like plants, when they're grown, they suck up all the nutrients around them.

Speaker 9 But if those nutrients are also contaminants like lead from either industrial pollution or just lead being in the natural environment, it gets in there.

Speaker 9 And who would have guessed, the process of making protein powder, which is called protein concentrate or protein isolate from stuff like plants, involves concentrating and isolating things in it.

Speaker 9 And if lead's one of those things to begin with, it might get more concentrated. And all these like popular brands, all these small brands? These are popular brands.
We basically worked with a market

Speaker 9 analytics team and like trend reporters to figure out what are some of the best-selling protein supplements, what are the most popular brands, most popular flavors.

Speaker 9 And we kind of did a general kind of sweep of the market and tested those.

Speaker 9 And to be clear, we didn't just test like a one-off scoop of each. We had, I mean, this was like an experiment designed by our laboratory scientists.

Speaker 9 Over a period of months, they went out and bought different samples of each product, tested multiple lots,

Speaker 9 and then analyzed all the results. Lead plaint.
Lovely. Yeah.
So is, and so it was, but it's more in plant protein ones. Yeah.

Speaker 9 So plant protein powders overwhelmingly, like they had about nine like lead levels that were nine times as much as dairy-based ones and twice as much as beef-based ones.

Speaker 9 How the fuck are people not dying? Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 9 The thing about lead is it's not like a, to be very clear, this is not like a, you need to panic if you're eating these, you're really going to get lead poison. That's kind of what I was getting.

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah. It's like a

Speaker 9 lead.

Speaker 9 If you ask like the FDA or the World Health Organization or the UN or anything, there's like no known safe level of lead. It's bad for you, but it's not like...

Speaker 9 immediately you're going to die bad in these sort of quantities.

Speaker 9 These are low but concerning levels and they're concerning because the kind of fucked up thing about lead, I didn't really think about lead that much until I started reporting on this, obviously. But

Speaker 9 the fucked up thing about lead is that it like kind of lingers in your body.

Speaker 9 So one of the ways people test for lead is like blood lead level tests, but that doesn't even give you a really full picture. That just shows you how much lead is in your blood.

Speaker 9 But the thing about lead is your body, this is a gross oversimplification, your body kind of thinks of it like calcium because they kind of look similar.

Speaker 9 So it's like omnom nom and puts it in your bones or in your teeth. And so it hangs out in there for like the blood in your

Speaker 9 lead in your blood kind of can come in and out of your body relatively quickly. The lead in your bones can stay there for a period of like years or decades.

Speaker 9 And then during periods where your bone, because your bones are always kind of repairing themselves. And when that happens,

Speaker 9 then the lead leaches out and it goes bad for you. So the real issue with these products in particular is Consumer Reports has done a lot of like heavy metal testing and stuff.
But

Speaker 9 we've like tested things like chocolate or tuna or like things like that.

Speaker 9 But with protein powder, people who like protein powders take them every day, or sometimes multiple times a day for periods of years.

Speaker 9 And that's kind of like a perfect storm to give yourself like low-level chronic exposure to lead in a way that could in like years or decades, like have measurable health effects.

Speaker 9 And there's no regulation or testing that should have stopped this. Is there a thing that this breaks?

Speaker 10 Like is there a

Speaker 9 FDA?

Speaker 9 We kind of have an FDA. This has been one of the most interesting things about this.

Speaker 9 The last time I was on your podcast, I was a tech reporter, the information, and I've been focusing on tech companies doing bad shit for years.

Speaker 9 When I switched to consumer reports this summer, I'm mostly focusing on food safety, still doing some tech.

Speaker 9 But it's been fascinating for me to dive into things like the FDA and realize the FDA historically

Speaker 9 you know, has always come under criticism like every government agency for whether or not it's doing the best with the F part of FDA food or drugs.

Speaker 9 Within that purview is dietary supplements, which due to some chicanery in the 90s, are regulated kind of totally different in a way that basically boils down to the FDA is like, well, we can't really do anything until it comes to market.

Speaker 9 And then when it comes to market, maybe we'll scrutinize it. And you just did, Ashwin, a big piece about supplements.
Right. And you kind of remarked upon this to me a few times in the past.

Speaker 14 Yeah. So my story in the Times was about how supplements, to this point that I saw in the Consumer Reports story about protein, is in the 1994 D.
Shea Act. Yes.

Speaker 10 Which was?

Speaker 14 Yes. It basically

Speaker 14 classified all dietary supplements to be regulated as food and not drugs.

Speaker 14 And dietary supplements is like such a broad umbrella where, you know, it makes sense to me that protein is considered a food, you know, like a whey protein or whatever.

Speaker 14 But then there's also things that people are taking for purported like drug-like effects like ashwagandha or, you know, even like melatonin. What they call gas station heroin is a dietary supplement.

Speaker 10 What is

Speaker 10 a dietary supplement also?

Speaker 9 What, horny goatweed? Is that?

Speaker 14 No, there's a different,

Speaker 14 I believe it's kratom and something else.

Speaker 9 Oh.

Speaker 14 But this is the stuff that some people were using to wean themselves off of opiates, opiates. And then other people who weren't on opiates were

Speaker 9 really great that that classifies as something the FDA is like, meh.

Speaker 14 Yeah. I've always been fascinated that like the gas station is like at the cutting edge of pharmaceuticals for some reason.

Speaker 10 I mean, yeah, and it's just, it's so Roba Evans would love this.

Speaker 10 It's so interesting to me because these supplement manufacturers aren't required to prove their products are safe before they like go to market.

Speaker 10 They aren't required to prove that their products are effective. And they're supposed to comply with good manufacturing processes.

Speaker 10 But for instance, one stat that really stood out to me while reporting this is like the FDA says there's 12,000 registered dietary supplement manufacturers.

Speaker 10 Last year, they inspected 600 of them and like 510 of those inspections were domestic manufacturers. There's only 90 that were inspected abroad.

Speaker 10 And I suspect that's where a lot of the manufacturing of these products actually occurs.

Speaker 9 Is there like a bleedover effect where they say, oh, yeah, designed in America, but manufactured in the global south?

Speaker 14 However, I mean, there's lots of misleading labeling issues, not necessarily where it's manufactured, but more so what they're allowed to say

Speaker 14 these things can do.

Speaker 14 It's like structure of function claims where you can be like, because we know protein is healthy for you, or, you know, this compound is known to be involved in like whatever biological process they can say supports immune function or designed to help with brain health and all these things where it's like mechanic, mechanistically it might work, but this thing has not been proven to

Speaker 14 have the effect that people think it does. So like that is a broad, a larger problem than being like, this has been designed in the U.S., but it's actually.

Speaker 14 And then the way that they aren't regulating these things for any possible like positive benefit, it's the same issue with negative, where it's like, unless there's either a class action lawsuit or someone proactively finding the people who are experiencing negative side effects, those aren't being reported in the same way that a pharmaceutical drug is required.

Speaker 9 They're required to. Which is crazy because Amazon is full of the fucking things.

Speaker 14 Because I lift a decent amount.

Speaker 9 It's been a bad month for it, I guess. But I tried various supplements and nothing changed anything.
Like I was straight up just like, oh, I'll try that and nothing. Just completely.

Speaker 9 And I just, I would write down how I felt in the morning and

Speaker 9 the same. Like, I fairly good attachment to the body.

Speaker 9 But you can go on like the freak Andrew Huberman's Reddit if you want to see just like, here's all the things that Andrew, and it's like 47 different pills. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And how do you even who has the time is my question. Like, how do you, that's like a level of rich person brain.
I can't understand.

Speaker 9 Once you get into like the hundreds or like multiple dozens of supplements, I'm like, I can't even regularly manage to take two pills a day.

Speaker 14 I think it's like, it's pseudo, sometimes it's like pseudo,

Speaker 14 you feel like you're doing something scientific because there's a bunch of companies now where you can go.

Speaker 14 And even if you want to do it by yourself, you go to, you know, Quest Labs or one of these startups and get a blood test. And most of them will offer a doctor's

Speaker 14 evaluation of those numbers, but you can look and be like, oh, okay, my iron is low. This was something that happened.

Speaker 14 A doctor relayed this story to me that they had with a patient where the patient was taking an iron supplement because they were low on iron, and a naturopath that they were seeing recommended that.

Speaker 14 And, like, that makes sense. If you're low on iron, take iron.
But what they didn't do is try and figure out why they were low on iron.

Speaker 14 And when the patient came to see this cardiologist, the cardiologist was concerned that they might have a reason for low iron, thought it might be internal bleeding, refers them to a GI doc.

Speaker 14 The GI doc did a colonoscopy, colonoscopy,

Speaker 14 colonoscopy, and they had stage four colon cancer.

Speaker 14 So it's one of these things where it's like, if you don't understand the pathology as to why you might have a deficiency, even with like the quote unquote boring things, like, you know, I don't think people think iron supplements are sexy or like calcium or vitamins.

Speaker 10 But they think like quick shortcuts to health are sexy. And this is something, I mean, I just found fascinating researching for the protein story.

Speaker 10 It's just like, I spoke to a food historian at length, and I'm sad I couldn't make it more into the article because obviously I had to focus on the other stuff.

Speaker 10 But she had like spent months researching

Speaker 10 how basically protein mania has been just a huge thing over the last two decades at the very least. But it's because people

Speaker 10 attach like a health halo to certain words. I think supplements are definitely one of those categories where people just assume they're an unalloyed good because it's like medicine, but not medicine.

Speaker 9 And then they don't ever think of the fact that these companies.

Speaker 9 I mean, one of the most interesting details about the supplement regulation or lack thereof in comparison to other drugs is that supplement manufacturers are supposed to make sure their products aren't harmful, but basically they get to determine what counts as harmful and set their own limits for that.

Speaker 9 So there's like no saying, hey, you can't have this much amount of lead.

Speaker 9 Give me an example of a limit they'd set. So for like heavy metal contamination, for instance,

Speaker 9 the government might say like, hey, you probably shouldn't have like contaminants like heavy metal or you know foreign like metals and contaminants in your product.

Speaker 9 But they don't say like, hey, you shouldn't have X amount of lead in there.

Speaker 9 The companies themselves get to decide how much of a contaminant is harmful and they get to do their own testing to make sure their products meet those self-imposed limits.

Speaker 9 This just feels like it's going to kill someone.

Speaker 9 I'm sure someone has already had a situation where they

Speaker 9 over supplemented. Well, no, this was a real issue back in the day.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 And I mean, I think what's fascinating/slash scary about it is because of the way this is reported, you, I think, get a very under-reported figure of when someone comes to the hospital and they triangulate that it was due to supplementation because there can be issues where whatever you're taking, even if it isn't contaminated, can interact with a prescription drug you're taking or another supplement that you're taking.

Speaker 14 And the doctors I spoke to said that it's not always clear what is causing the issue because it could be

Speaker 14 one of the active ingredients in a supplement. It could be something that's a contaminant in the supplement.

Speaker 14 And, like, broadly speaking, liver damage is a huge issue in supplements broadly, just because when you ingest something, part of the liver's job is filtering that out, whether there's lead or whatever in it, even if it's exactly what you're supposed to be taking.

Speaker 14 It's taxing on the liver.

Speaker 14 So, like, what I found kind of scary in the literature is that even when they know that liver damage was caused by supplements, the reason why is not always clear. It could be because

Speaker 9 you don't know.

Speaker 14 The dosage, like what it says on the label, very often is very different than the concentration of, you know, what's in the actual pill or powder.

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Speaker 9 See, this is the thing I've seen in a lot of Amazon reviews because I've absolutely gone down this rabbit hole before.

Speaker 9 And you'll read things and people on Reddit will argue it will be like, actually, the concentration of the main ingredient is different to the one they say. And it's just like, okay.

Speaker 9 But I mean, then you can go even further.

Speaker 10 It's like, yeah, for that person, the concentration was different. Let's say it's like 200% more.

Speaker 10 That person, the next pill they took from that same bottle could be 100%, could be like 50% less or 300% 300% more. It's really difficult.

Speaker 10 And it also baffles me because I feel like a lot of people who turn towards supplements do so because they

Speaker 10 perhaps are skeptical about the medical establishment or pharmaceutical companies. So instead, they're turning to a less regulated industry with fewer checks and

Speaker 10 no one seemingly checking, or I guess on the same level of checking, to make sure the products are what they say they are.

Speaker 9 And I will say, I have some sympathy to that. Don't worry, I'm not going that direction.

Speaker 9 Talking to a, when I, I used to be really overweight, it was like 350 pounds as a kid. Crazy fact.
And when I go to doctors, they pretty much go, yeah, you're fat. I'd be like, yeah, mate, I know.

Speaker 9 I'm told this every day at school, 17 times a day. I'm well aware.
But any idea is like, you should eat less. I'm like,

Speaker 9 sick. And then maybe 10, 15 years later, put on a bit of weight, not quite as much.

Speaker 9 Basically the same. You tried some walking.

Speaker 9 It's like, okay, but nutritionally, I could put you in touch with a nutritionist like it's like the base level knowledge isn't well knowledge or advice isn't there and then booking especially in america getting a doctor's appointment costs money costs time you wait an hour to get in like you have all of these things that are in the way and then there are full of communities full of people who will talk to you about supplements all day and be like yeah it changed my life i can tell you which of these 19 pills i take an hour have changed my life.

Speaker 9 I feel really good. And I have a way of referencing that.
It's the same way that people get radicalized.

Speaker 10 It gives them a sense of control over something something that feels uncontrollable.

Speaker 9 And the reason I looked at the Huberman Lab stuff is not because I listen, but because there's a ranking of podcasts on Reddit.

Speaker 9 And you're, I assume, every, I assume right now you have a window open, just refreshing that to see if we're going to be able to do that. I stopped doing that weeks ago.

Speaker 9 But it's, you can look and you can see it is like a cult-style thing where it's like, let's look at your stack. I think you may, actually, you may, but it's like the pill stack, and it's just.

Speaker 10 I'm sorry, stank? Can you stack? Oh, okay.

Speaker 9 I was like, the pill stank is what you get when you poop when you kind of poop on. I'll supplement for that.

Speaker 10 I was going to say it.

Speaker 9 And since I started posting my workouts a few years ago, I get the most insane advertisements on Instagram. These new, like, oh, yeah, brain power.
Like, mind, brain power.

Speaker 9 Every fitness influencer I've ever followed and unfollowed has always had like, there's this really great one called like the blind lifter. He's just this guy who's blind and lifts insane amounts.

Speaker 9 And his wife's like a very like normal looking woman. And like really nice guy.
And they'll be like, yeah, it's my favorite supplement. It's like brain fuse.
It's bright green.

Speaker 9 It's like, what the fuck? How do you know that this helps you? Does this, do you feel smarter?

Speaker 14 I think like going back to, you know, some people feel alienated or they don't feel like doctors are listening.

Speaker 14 I heard that from doctors themselves where it's like, you know, depending on where you practice as a physician, you might have about 15 minutes to see each patient. Yeah.
So like you're trying to.

Speaker 14 figure out the relevant symptoms, what you can do. Maybe it's a procedure, maybe it's a medication.

Speaker 14 But like doctors themselves themselves are telling me that either, you know, you don't get enough time to talk about lifestyle, proven lifestyle interventions you can make, talk about exercise, talk about nutrition and all these things.

Speaker 14 It's more like just putting fires out so people don't feel like they are, have any space to talk to their doctor about things they could try, whether it's with exercise or whatever.

Speaker 14 So then you can find these people who will give you the time of day to walk through, you know, their spiel and their pitch.

Speaker 14 And then at that point is where poor poor decisions can be made because just someone makes you feel seen and heard doesn't mean you take their bathtub pills that they made but exactly or like oh go get magnesium pills and picking a random one there's like 70 options on Amazon and to your point Paris it's like how do you know pill to pill how much magnesium is in it do you have no consistency to it I think there's two different kinds of people here though like

Speaker 14 There's some people who are resorting to supplements because they haven't found something that works for them in the traditional system, either because they haven't been diagnosed properly or they haven't had access to an expert or whatever.

Speaker 14 And those are people who are very desperate to, who will admit, like, I am lowering my threshold for evidence because I've tried everything else.

Speaker 14 And if there's a chance, but on the Huberman side of things and like the stack where it becomes ritualized, like I do this every day, I do this every day.

Speaker 14 I think that's more like the wealthy or well-to-do, like worried well is what they're called, where it's like, I have everything else dialed in. I like optimizers.

Speaker 14 I eat Brian Johnson's eight ounces of chicken breasts and X, Y, and Z. And I make sure I get enough sleep because I'm tracking it and I have a bed that works as long as AWS is up.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 And, you know, all of these things.

Speaker 14 And then the supplement is really like the icing on the cake is usually the term that they call it, where it's like, if you have everything else dialed in, this might help.

Speaker 14 And, you know, if it works for you and if you're able to find things that are pure and like there's so many ifs, like, then maybe, but there haven't been studies to show, like, we have like 4,000 guys like you, and we've run this as a test.

Speaker 14 And a point that I think is missed sometimes is if something works, there's a mechanism. So, like, there's a trade-off somewhere.
And I think actually Dr. Cohen,

Speaker 14 who's an over-

Speaker 10 I was about to say, I could tell other people.

Speaker 10 Dr. Peter Cohen, I think he was referred to as now the supplement king because it's the opposite of that.
He's like the chief supplement like skeptic.

Speaker 10 He's a great researcher and doctor who we both spoke to for our articles that has been kind of tracking

Speaker 10 this same issue that we've been talking about, but for decades.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And he was like,

Speaker 14 he's like, I'm not fully against supplements as a concept, but all of these issues we brought up where it's like, you know, before you even run one of these N of one studies on yourself, if you decide to, you can't guarantee that what you're testing yourself with is what it says on the label and then asides from that he was like i think the main ones that he called out as being if his patients are using them it's like we need to have a conversation about stopping that's actually a question i had like

Speaker 14 um stuff for weight loss stuff for exercise uh stuff for male sexual enhancement which is another gas station genre. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 9 So I want to admit, like I take testosterone. I'm on weekly zyast.
I was prescribing my doctor. Before I went and got that, I really looked into all of these weird testosterone things online.

Speaker 10 You were doing the gas station boner pills?

Speaker 9 No, no, no. No, because like there was, like, it was a weird thing where I was like, I recognize this is a hormone.

Speaker 9 And I've known enough women in my life that, like, I know hormones do more that you can't just like hormone up one day and it'll be fine. But it's...

Speaker 9 It's interesting because when you go and look online, the amount of cons related to testosterone, just the word testosterone, there's a whole supplement thing of like testosterone enhancer.

Speaker 9 And it's just like based on no science. And then there are websites you can go to where it's like, we'll speak to a doctor and then you'll send us blood.

Speaker 9 And then we'll send you testosterone in the mail and you'll inject yourself in the butt, I think.

Speaker 10 I love to send someone blood. I love to leave an injection.

Speaker 9 No, there is a whole company. Viome, I think, where you said like poop and poop.

Speaker 10 Oh, and then they, yes. And then they, it was a couple that started this poop testing startup.
And now they're both on the lamb

Speaker 10 from, I believe, fraud charges.

Speaker 9 so that's why they didn't get back to me i sent them a lot of poop yeah some mine some others but it's just interesting how there's this whole predatory supplement testosterone protein powder thing online there's a hundred different companies that all doing weird share i get i get targeted for the the um high protein foods now yes that was a are any of those full of lead i don't know we didn't test them god damn it um but i'm fascinated by them and it's all i was thinking about about when I was reporting this out.

Speaker 9 I just put, because every store has like a protein-boosted pasta, protein croissant. Oh, I've eaten.

Speaker 9 I've eaten a lot of them as well. But then you look in the back and it's like, what's one of the first ingredients? Like a whey protein concentration.
Yeah, it just says lead.

Speaker 9 It's like a whey protein concentrate or like a pea protein. The plant ones I'm staying the fuck away from.

Speaker 9 Those ones are really fun though because you go and look, it's like, yeah, I only need 20 grams of protein and only 200 calories for the cookie. And the cookie is the size of a dime.

Speaker 9 It's like it's the insanity of these things as well. And it feels the internet is just this

Speaker 9 kind of abuse mechanism for it, because there's the ton. Actually, I will say there's a ton of really good Reddit threads where they're just like, no, it's bullshit.

Speaker 9 No, it's bullshit, which is awesome. But the amount of hoi bolloy around, like, yeah, this supplement changed my life.
And then another guy, I hate this. It gave me diarrhea.
And it's like, okay.

Speaker 10 I've been really fascinated.

Speaker 10 One of the responses I've gotten in my article from some of the people who take the supplements that are the most like is being like, well, it's not that much lead it's actually fine in comparison i was like why are we stumping for lead guys but second like to your point earlier i think just one of the things

Speaker 10 about this story that i find the most valuable is just people need to know like

Speaker 10 should people should be able to figure out what is in their product and make an informed decision about whether or not they want that.

Speaker 10 If you like read, yeah, that Huell, one serving of Huell's Black Edition has like 6.3 micrograms of lead in it. And you're like, I'm into that.
Good for you. Like, make your own decisions.

Speaker 9 I've tried their food.

Speaker 9 And what's great is they call it food product,

Speaker 9 which is what you really want from the thing you're eating. And it also tastes and looks like prison food.
It's like food products.

Speaker 9 Back in the day was a Soylent girly during a really deeply depressed time. Oh, yeah.
No, I've had some depressed times. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 But there was like a time where Soylent was just selling like a neutral rectangle of basically food products. It was just slop.

Speaker 9 It was slop, but in a square shape. A slop brick.
Yeah, it was a slop brick.

Speaker 9 Just stuff. Yeah.
I mean, that was giving me some sort of mental poisoning at the very beginning. Oh, yes.
There really is. Just based on vibes.

Speaker 9 I do think you kind of said something, Ashwin, that got, it's like, there is a faith-based thing to it. It's a ritual.
It's like...

Speaker 9 I know when I've been in the throes, I'm going to be very vulnerable.

Speaker 9 The throes of like depression around weight loss and working out and such, the shit I would eat and like the small amounts of food or like the weird, insulting products I'd eat.

Speaker 9 And then you go online, and there are other people doing it too. It's like, yeah, I am the penitent man.

Speaker 9 I shall pass like in the Indiana Jones, and I suffer like you do, and everyone's kind of suffering together. And at the time, I was like, oh, this is great.

Speaker 9 Other people, I'm like, we all are very unhappy. And it's, but the amount of.

Speaker 10 But it's forming a community around being unhappy, and that's addictive.

Speaker 9 It's the predatory nature. It's the, it's radicalization, but in a different form.
And weirdly enough, I haven't seen it around the fitness things.

Speaker 9 Like, all the fight camp people I've talked to are just like kind of crazy. Like we just enjoyed punching the bag.

Speaker 10 I mean, but there is like such a cult around protein maximalization, like protein maxing that I, I mean, well, actually, tell me a little bit about this. It's

Speaker 10 well, people overwhelmingly think you need more protein than you actually do. Like I was definitely one of these people before I started like researching this story.

Speaker 10 I thought I was like, similarly in my pits of depression, like and micromanaging the food I ate, I was like, oh, I'm woefully protein deficient.

Speaker 10 I need to be making sure I'm having like seven chicken breasts a day or something crazy like that, because that'll be great with my working out.

Speaker 9 Ashwin was actually really helpful on this for me. Keep going sorry.
And it's just like for the average person, you're probably getting more than enough protein through your food.

Speaker 9 And unless you fall into some specific categories or have like a specific type of like workout need that you have, like you don't need to be having way over the recommended daily allowance of protein, which is 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight.

Speaker 9 Thank you. I'm glad you know the stat.
I was actually going to ask.

Speaker 9 But Ashwin, you've been quite transformative with my weight loss because you're the one who mostly advocated for doing less weird shit.

Speaker 9 Just like try and get like, work on consistency and eating enough protein. Yeah.
Food of guess doing doing things regularly is useful.

Speaker 14 I feel like because I definitely fall into the index, maybe over-indexing for protein, but in like, I think part of the reason that it's having a moment slash sustained moment is that when people like, if you're trying to have a rubric for, you know, how to assemble a plate and, you know, the largest things are protein and veg, like those are the most filling things, right, with fiber and how satiating protein is.

Speaker 14 And it's like, if you do that, there's not many other rules that you have to kind of abide by without getting into like, you know, you otherwise you can get kind of a little bit disordered depending on how you think about this stuff.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 14 But then I think what became an issue is that there's research and you know an emphasis on protein. And then it's like, okay, we need to put protein in water.
We need to put it in chips.

Speaker 14 We need to put it.

Speaker 10 Was protein beer? Like,

Speaker 10 we need to calm down, folks. Do we like the bread?

Speaker 9 I like the protein chips. It's fire.
Listen, the protein chips taste significantly better than you'd expect. Yes.
But that's always with proteins, though. It's like, it's better than you'd expect.

Speaker 14 It seems like it's a, we're just whoever is trying to solve like a much bigger problem with just a consumption.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and I think there was like some interesting research I came upon, which is like people, if they looked at like two identical like cereal brands, that one had the word protein on it and one didn't, they'd be like, oh, the protein one is healthier.

Speaker 10 And then if you actually looked at the ingredients in the back, the protein one was like less healthy. It's the new low-fat.
It is the new low-fat, but it's been like.

Speaker 10 It's the first of these diet trends that we've had go on for a long time without ever having the bubble pop on it. Like there's no people being like, oh, protein is bad for you.

Speaker 10 And I don't think like that's, I'm, protein isn't bad for you. It's totally fine to have, but you don't need to be obsessed with it.
It doesn't need to be the end all the time.

Speaker 9 And we both say this as people who have obsessed over proteins.

Speaker 10 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 14 I think it's like the old, the old trope was, you know, how in, you know, like women's fitness magazines, they'd be like, I'm worried about lifting weights because as soon as I pick up a dumbbell, I'm going to be like, you know, jacked bodybuilder.

Speaker 14 And I'm worried about that. That's something that happens to people yeah and i think now

Speaker 14 and that is categorically untrue just to be clear yeah no it's completely only it was that easy it's like you know you trip and fall and if you pick up something by i don't know about you guys every time i accidentally touch a weight i i just get ripped just like a rob lee feel i can't even like wear sleeved shirts yeah just to pop out but i think it's the same thing now where you know i've been like this i've had friends like this where it's like they go to the gym twice and they're like i don't think i'm getting enough protein they're like why if you're like i just i don't feel like I'm getting the results.

Speaker 14 And you're like, how long have you been doing whatever? And then they're like, two days.

Speaker 10 Like, okay.

Speaker 14 You're trying to solve a much bigger problem with a consumption, you know, solution. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And I think it's all taking advantage of a really shitty, sad thing, which is, yeah, if you're putting on weight, you might be eating too much food.

Speaker 9 If you're not putting on muscle, maybe you're not doing enough consistently. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe if you're not, if you're not feeling healthy, are you doing things that are helping? It's like.

Speaker 10 It's like a really easy shortcut to feeling better about your choices.

Speaker 9 You're like, like oh i'm not it's not bad that i'm having a pop-tart it's a protein pop-tart i'm not changing my i'm not changing my life in any way but my life will change somehow and it's not my fault it's not changing it's something else yeah it's like it's not bad that i had a whole bowl of pasta tonight because it's protein the protein pop-tarts are pretty good i've tried i feel like i do feel like we're in the golden age of like low calorie high protein things i love it but at the same time it's like yeah you can just eat as much food as you used to in protein and you're just gonna you're not gonna you're gonna plateau Yeah.

Speaker 9 And it sucks, and it's it sucks a lot because I don't know, this all gets back to the core internet thing: everyone wants the easy choices. It's like the radicalization of young men.

Speaker 9 Oh, it's because woman won't speak to you. Maybe you're brood, maybe you don't bring much to the control.
Maybe you've got bad vibes. Maybe you have bad breath.
Like, maybe you have a bad something.

Speaker 9 Maybe you have your body. Maybe all that protein you're eating.
Maybe you stay.

Speaker 14 Yeah, protein parts are real.

Speaker 9 No, they really are.

Speaker 9 It's really bad.

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Speaker 9 But it's like you can't find an easy way out, so you blame something. And in this case, it's, I didn't have enough pills.
I didn't have all of the many pills.

Speaker 10 My stack needs to be.

Speaker 9 No, it really, the stack stuff is crazy.

Speaker 14 Well, that's actually to that point. Like I've spoken to like health influencers who have, and ones who I consider like pretty responsible.

Speaker 14 And they're like, we're trying to make boring things sexy, whether it's like, because otherwise you can't have a health podcast that comes out twice a week with just established stuff.

Speaker 14 Cause it would be like, hey, did you get enough sleep? How much have you exercised this week? How is your mental health?

Speaker 14 And how is your nutrition? And that would be it. You know, like, but they can be like, oh, there's a promising new rat study done on one, two rats.

Speaker 14 One of them exploded, but the other, you know, looks pretty good.

Speaker 10 as long as you don't expect this you'll be so hot only two out of the seven rats exploded and they had bad vibes and the others were jacked yeah no this is the problem whenever i spoke to um like fitness or uh performance like experts in like the research field of like protein and muscle i was like oh well what's like the best advice for you and he's like nobody wants to hear it but just like eat whole foods make healthy choices take care of your body everyone falls asleep if you say that it's i like like, my big secret is that I sleep seven and a half to eight hours a night.

Speaker 9 I mandate this. And it's like, doing that changed my life more than any pill I've taken in my goddamn life other than like maybe my methyl fandidate for my ADHD.
It's insane how much that helped.

Speaker 9 But the problem is, is once you, once you've got into the routine of sleep, it's great. Making yourself get into a routine of sleeping that much is actually very difficult.
Nightmarish.

Speaker 9 And you need, like, I sleep with like the blackout thing.

Speaker 9 I'm just imagining you in a coffin no I really a lot like it's super cold oh like I like have like the full blackout eye mask I take a I take like melatonin and trazodone sometimes if I'm having trouble sleeping I sleep like a baby and it's great but it's like to your point Ashmir it's like yeah that would really help I don't know how the fuck a parent does that Like, I don't know how like someone with like three kids would possibly ever fucking do that.

Speaker 9 Someone who works nights. Someone who works nights.
Someone who just has a stressful job that comes up in their mind when they close their eyes.

Speaker 10 Someone who's housing insecure. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 9 Like any number of things could change. Or just anyone with a decent amount of stress in their life, it's difficult.

Speaker 9 And even like the, I feel like some of these fitness influencers or the fitness communities, there is a degree of pressure. There's not really much empathy at all.

Speaker 9 Like, actually, I've definitely messaged you with just like, I feel like shit about my, it's most of the time you just say, you doing all right?

Speaker 9 Like, it could be maybe you got knocked off your routine. And I think that the grisly fact of all this this is, yeah, it's routine consistency, actually having good advice.

Speaker 9 Like, I took me years to find someone who could actually tell me a routine that would work.

Speaker 9 I was lifting and literally hurting myself for years because everything I read was like, you need to do the big three core lifts, you fucking moron.

Speaker 9 You can't bench, you can't

Speaker 9 bench your weight. Like, I'm like a buck 65, buck 70, right?

Speaker 9 Yeah, buck 70 maybe. And I can't bench my body weight, but I'm healthier and stronger than I've ever been, but just like on one core lift, I can't.
And it's like, I can squat 300 though.

Speaker 9 And it's, it's fucking strange because there's so much literature that says that's bad. Even the BMI, which is by like a,

Speaker 10 by like health insurance company. Not health insurance.

Speaker 9 I thought BMI is by like an anthropologist.

Speaker 10 No, it's by some corporate figure.

Speaker 10 Perhaps life insurance.

Speaker 9 No, no, that's steps. Steps were the one that I'm sorry, anyone who talks about steps.
That was a Japanese life insurance company. It was like

Speaker 9 a Japanese health insurance company. I'm pretty sure the BMI, I'm going to look this up live on the show.

Speaker 10 I was about to say, you have the technology here.

Speaker 13 Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 9 Who invented this? Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian

Speaker 9 astronomer, said that word flawlessly. Mathematician, statistician.

Speaker 9 Device the basis of the BMI between 1830 and 1850.

Speaker 10 Hey, that's when they really knew their stuff.

Speaker 9 That's when they really knew science, for example. It's just fucking stupid.

Speaker 9 There's so much bad, like the steps thing is the thing that frustrates me as well, because you can do so many steps without anything happening.

Speaker 9 Like, I've fallen into this trap myself, and I feel I hope that it's clear. Anyone listening to this, this is not a shame thing.
This is a thing that I have done many times.

Speaker 9 He's like, Oh, I got 10,000 steps. That means shit.

Speaker 14 It's like what's that based on? Like the Japanese pedal.

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. It's like the insurance company.
And it's, it sucks because that was the earliest version of this supplement fitness kind of scam thing.

Speaker 14 Well, I feel like you know, 10,000 steps was, you know, the

Speaker 14 kind of like the prototype for a bunch of things we've seen since where all of these devices have come up with some kind of proprietary metric where it's like, you know, you got a million Google points for, you know, your activity structure.

Speaker 10 The one I'm seeing so much now is like, your body's age, your biological age is 18 or something like that. And it's like, sir, you are a 39-year-old man.
Just feel good about yourself.

Speaker 9 You have boy blood.

Speaker 10 You've got boy blood. I should also be clear, by the way.

Speaker 9 If you're doing steps, moving is important. It's good.
If you're trying to...

Speaker 10 If you're doing any of these things, if you're walking anyway, if something makes you happy and you're an adult with free will, live your truth.

Speaker 9 But I have an aura ring, and I do have an eight-sleep mattress.

Speaker 10 Did it break? No. During the...

Speaker 9 And I'm a baby. I need like cold cold.
Like, I have it in like minus 10. I am like an actual creature.
But it's... I have stats from my ring.
I have stats from my bed.

Speaker 9 I've got this thing called Somni that does like tax electrical things. It's great.
It really helps. And like my REM sleep is up and I think I feel.

Speaker 9 It's just like, I don't really have any frame of reference for what any of this does. Knowing how much I sleep is useful because it's like, yeah, if I have less than eight, I don't feel as good.

Speaker 9 But it's like, all I have data for years, years and years, years and years. I could not tell you a single fucking thing about my fitness other than I feel and look better than I have.

Speaker 9 Like, I can't tell you shit. But there's this guilt factor about it as well with like Strava loves to inform me, like, oh, you moved things down.
Your numbers are low.

Speaker 14 It's like thank you strava what am i meant to do with this oh i forgot to work out that's what happened i need guilt trips yeah i i think like it takes a lot of discipline and perspective to not go nuts from oh yeah you know having all this information in front of you like i remember when i got one of the first fitbits and it very very quickly became like a obsessive thing that I had to stop using where it's like, oh, I could get to a nice round number if I go for another run.

Speaker 10 It's like the MyFitnessPal trap.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that was when I, when I, once I signed up for a gym and they had to, like, as part of the package, you could get a

Speaker 14 session with a personal trainer. And I got this guy who's like, oh, you got to start tracking what you eat.
And I, he was like, use MyFitnessPal. And I tried it for a day.

Speaker 14 I was like, this is going to drive me insane and give me a new type of eating disorder that I don't want.

Speaker 14 And, you know, it's just one of those things where, you know, some people are able to do that and make it part of their lifestyle. And other people, it drives them fucking nuts.

Speaker 9 I do think we need some degree of like tonal, for example.

Speaker 18 I did injure myself using it.

Speaker 9 It was my fault. I just overtrained.
It feels like it should be able to tell you. Like, hey, man, you've done four heavy lifts in the last five days.
Maybe not.

Speaker 9 Maybe you should think about it for a second. Peloton, I mean, I've overtrained on it when I used to do it years ago.
You go on the Reddit, tons of people overtrain on it. You get obsessive.

Speaker 9 They have the medals you can get. And there's absolutely no like coaching aspect.
It's not like a, hey, you've done a lot of heavy stuff, maybe do some light.

Speaker 9 There's no real guidance and there's so much.

Speaker 10 It's because all of these companies now operate like tech companies where increasing user engagement is one of the end goals. Of course you want engaged users.

Speaker 10 Of course you want your users that are moderately engaged to become highly engaged. Why would you ever want to slow down that ramp?

Speaker 9 But it gets more complicated when you're talking about people and their bodies and habits and actual human things. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And it's also just, it gets back to the thing of there's not much qualified advice.

Speaker 9 There's a lot of seemingly qualified, but it's hard to tell what the actual, oh, there's a hundred million different people who be like, I'll build you a plan.

Speaker 9 There's none, none of them have worked other than a guy called Ben the PC guy on Twitter and as in personal computer. He used to work at Microsoft.
Love the guy.

Speaker 9 He's the only person, other than Ashwin, I think, who's given me like any useful, reliable fitness advice. And a lot of it's just, yeah, mix in a bit of cardio, volume's good.

Speaker 9 and it but you read a bunch of other stuff no dude starting strength 5x5 you fucking pig yeah if you don't have 1.5x by the end of the year

Speaker 9 come to your house and kick you the ball yeah i'm gonna squat you in half yeah i'm gonna do to what bane did to batman and then i'm gonna log that in strava strava's also shit a lot of these things are also shit for logging fitness like it's just like the apple watch also doesn't stay on my there's a lot of just times when i use this stuff i'm like do people who do fitness use this thing or is this just to your point, Paris, just another tech company?

Speaker 9 I like to, I will go to bat for tonal in that I've used it for years and I think it's one of the best ones because it does actually really hound you about form.

Speaker 9 But like things like Peloton, they don't give it away.

Speaker 10 I was specifically, I think any of these products, if you use them in moderation, if they bring some sort of joy to your life, they bring consistency.

Speaker 10 That's great. But it's hard when you mix kind of habit-forming products and the kind of flywheel of engagement with something like exercise.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and I feel like it's almost antithetical to what makes exercise successful, which is you kind of need to learn how your body feels, which is a very woo-woo thing, but it's true.

Speaker 9 Like, you know, when your body, like some weeks, you may do four exercises, sometimes you may do two because you're, I don't know, speaking from experience, you hurt your calf and you hurt your elbow in the same week.

Speaker 9 Yeah, you probably shouldn't push yourself to box or lift, even if your brain's saying you get fat if you do.

Speaker 9 But nevertheless, it's like that, it runs completely contrary to a product that's the goal is to keep you using it. Like the, the, you must log in every day.

Speaker 9 If you don't do that, you're a pig and a hang. The Duolingo owl is going to beat you up.
I will kill the Duolingo owl. I will.

Speaker 14 I use, I do my Duolingo every day. And like that, Lily will be like, hey, you haven't done, it would be a shame if you lose your streak and I take all of my sleeping pills tonight.

Speaker 9 You're like, chill out. I'll do it.

Speaker 9 In the garage.

Speaker 14 Like the incentive for these, you know, the companies, you know, obviously they act like tech companies where they're trying to keep things as sticky as possible and, you know, have things on subscription basis instead of just being able to buy stuff outright.

Speaker 14 And I found like it's antithetical to a proper business model, but a lot of this stuff is useful for a period of time. Like I tried whoop and some of it I found useful.
Some of it.

Speaker 14 It was annoying to me that it doesn't track weightlifting as well as cardio.

Speaker 14 And because I lost the forest for the trees, I would do more cardio because that would get counted, which is idiotic if you step back and be like, I'm doing it because of my bracelet that I'm paying for.

Speaker 14 But, you know, some people you use something to collect some data and then you kind of pair that with your intuition and what works or what you're feeling, you know, because I found whoop would tell me I had a great sleep and I felt like shit and vice versa.

Speaker 14 And you realize you have to know yourself well enough to maybe make an overriding decision that it's not

Speaker 14 accurately capturing how you feel. And then once you spend a period of time doing whatever training, you don't necessarily need a gizmo or gadget to tell you what you feel, you know, intuitively.

Speaker 14 But that's not something that they're going to say, like, oh, try this and then throw it in the garbage.

Speaker 9 Yeah, you're only going to need this a minute, mate. Don't worry.
Just pass for a month. Who gives a shit? They love the all the growth people are yelling at me, but you just fucking get rid of it.

Speaker 9 It sucks, but I do love it. I really, I love it.

Speaker 10 You are the most, I feel like, metrics-obsessed person I know. In just terms of you're always posting your fitness metrics.

Speaker 9 I love it. No, I actually love it.
It's just also like good for me to just do and be like, okay, I did that. I forgot whether I did or not.

Speaker 10 Yeah, no, it seems like, I don't know.

Speaker 4 And it's fun.

Speaker 9 No, I just run to a local basketball court and I just run around for 45 minutes missing.

Speaker 10 I'm just imagining you by yourself. There's not even a basketball.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
I'm just

Speaker 9 air shooting. No, I admit, I went on Amazon and there was a tech-enabled basketball.

Speaker 10 Do you imagine that your basketball can like degrade you while you're doing it? I wouldn't. Yeah, it's not doing something.

Speaker 9 Like clap traps from borderlands.

Speaker 12 Ah, that was a match.

Speaker 9 That's a good fucking. No, it's like you can measure yourself.

Speaker 10 Guys, we should stop this podcast right now.

Speaker 10 A basketball that yells.

Speaker 9 If you're one of the companies with a connected basketball, send it to me. I would love to play the basketball.
You can send all my data to China.

Speaker 9 Just like there's a pig butchering operation that starts in on me because I can't shoot.

Speaker 10 If you shoot the basketball well enough, then a hole opens in it and it shoots the protein supplement right near.

Speaker 9 Like a fish biscuit from lost.

Speaker 9 No, or just like it, if you shoot really badly, you have to keep playing.

Speaker 10 The ball starts getting heavier.

Speaker 9 That was $250.

Speaker 9 $250. I guess, like...

Speaker 10 I mean,

Speaker 10 this is a dumb person thought, but my thought is, wouldn't it be kind of hard to make a tech product that works well that you also throw at the ground?

Speaker 9 That's the thing.

Speaker 9 I'm oddly curious about it. And I guess now I've talked about it on the show, I could tax deduct it.
But it's, there was also a $5,000 basketball hoop, which fucking...

Speaker 9 No, it's like, but it's so cool. I definitely went down.
I'm like, not wouldn't. What about it?

Speaker 10 What it is, is

Speaker 9 the backboard of it is a screen. So it's like Peloton.
And it's like,

Speaker 9 shoot the ball. Shoot the ball.
Why are you making a complicated tech product that is expensive that you throw something really hard at?

Speaker 9 Well, that I can understand because that's how basketball works. It's more I'm just like who the fuck is this for?

Speaker 9 Because five grand for that you can just you can probably just go to a local court where people play and they'll just tell you why you're trash.

Speaker 10 They'll screaming at you.

Speaker 9 And like if anyone in New York wants to get together shoot hoops, absolutely Ashwin, I know it would be meaning, but it's like the most joy I've got out of any of this isn't the tech-enabled stuff.

Speaker 9 It's shooting the shit with people. Once you get over the initial hoop of exercise sucking.

Speaker 9 And I wish like it sucks because the supplement stuff online is very noxious, the kind of predatory stuff, but the communities online with fitness have been very good.

Speaker 9 Like, there's actually like when you get away from the very negative ones, it's just the people having fun, it's great, but there's such a war within them of like the stat maxes or the cheats, of course, the people who just cheat.

Speaker 9 Yeah. The Peloton cheats are fucking great.
You can you can.

Speaker 10 There is that website that will allow you to cheat your Strava. Yeah.

Speaker 9 That's the Peloton ones you can change the magnets. You can unscrew it and change the magnets.

Speaker 9 No, because when I used to do Peloton a lot, I used to get really pissed off because I'd really like, I knew my stats and I'd see a guy doing like 500 watts for like 45 minutes.

Speaker 9 I'm like, you are fucked.

Speaker 10 What's this for?

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's like doping in the nerd Olympics.

Speaker 9 It's straight up broke. It's why I stopped using Peloton because I'm like.
The whole reason I do this is to get better. And this is a measurement of my strength.
This number no longer means anything.

Speaker 9 Like this number is meaningless now. I can't even tell you.

Speaker 10 Especially because it's obviously a competitive aspect. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 10 It's like you're like, I'm always being lapped by this person who clearly just has like their magnets.

Speaker 9 And you look, and the line is just at the top of the graph.

Speaker 10 I don't know, maybe the strongest guy in the world is just the guy with like

Speaker 10 Terminator.

Speaker 9 Alex Man. Like thighs, three feet wide, thighs.
Just like, he has to get a special pedal. But tiny feet.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 9 All right. I think we're going to wrap it there.
Now we've talked about the tiny-footed Peloton person. Paris, where can people find you?

Speaker 10 You can find me on BlueSky at paris.nyc or Twitter at Paris Martineau.

Speaker 10 And follow my work at Consumer Reports. Ashwin?

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah. You can find me at Blue Sky as well.
I think I'm the only Ashwin Rodriguez on there. And my website is ushwinrodriguez.com.

Speaker 9 And I am Ed Zitchon. You can find me on the podcast Better Offline.
I nearly missed the name of the podcast there, but I recovered flawlessly.

Speaker 9 I took a week off of my fucking premium newsletter last week, so please subscribe so that I can feel better about myself. Should be a fun, fun week coming up.

Speaker 9 I think I'm just going to do a very simplified monologue this week and just really run through the basics because I've had requests that we need the basics of the AI bubble done, which is crazy because I've done like 100 episodes on it.

Speaker 9 Anyway, I love you all. Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you to Bahid. We're out here in New York City.
We've kicked ass out here.

Speaker 9 And yeah, catch you next week and actually on the monologue as well.

Speaker 4 Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Speaker 13 The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matasowski.com.
M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 4 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

Speaker 18 I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 16 Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 15 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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