Dr. Andrea Love
Appearances
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
Did you know that this toxic chemical could be on your food?
It's Been a Minute
Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
And more. You have this kind of ecosystem where now it's the wellness industry and all these podcasters who are telling you the truth that the scientists and the doctors and the government are hiding from you. And that has led to the explosion of kind of this alt-right wellness industry.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
If you look at people who believe in those medical conspiracies, like we're hiding the natural cures for cancer or fluoride in our water is poisoning us, those same people that believe those, they're the ones that participate in the wellness behaviors, like eating organic, going to the farm stand and taking supplements and herbs and vitamins.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
And simultaneously, they're the ones that are not doing the proven things to improve health, like preventive well visits, vaccines, wearing sunscreen and going to the dentist.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
The water is toxic. The food is toxic. The vaccines are toxic. Well, parents are going to resonate with that because they want to do what's best for their kids.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
I think we have this more obvious convergence of political ideologies. The ultimate passage of the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which was bipartisan. It was led by Orrin Hatch and Tom Harkin. And that basically removed all of the oversight and regulatory ability of the FDA to make sure that supplements were safe and produced with quality. They're still not really effective.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
In addition to all of that, lobbying organizations of organic farmers wanted to have a certification created by the USDA. But the products that they're producing are not more eco-friendly. They're not more nutritious. You have a lot of eco-conscious people who have been misled that organic is pesticide-free and they're just naturally derived pesticides as opposed to ones that have been altered.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
And the irony as a biomedical scientist is that the way in which we create a cell therapy for cancer and the way in which we create a genetically engineered plant for farming, it's the exact same scientific principle. It's just what species you're working on.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
I think a lot of it really is you have this kind of ecosystem where now it's the wellness industry and all these podcasters who are telling you the truth that the scientists and the doctors and the government are hiding from you. And that has led to the explosion of kind of this alt-right wellness industry.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
And this has kind of converged with the growth of increasing health anxiety as a result of the COVID pandemic, where people were You know, they're looking for voices who are going to tell them the quick fixes to take control of their health.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
That's exactly right. And I think this is actually something that is deliberately exploited by these people who are pushing the contrarian anti-science rhetoric, right? Whereas instead where we could be having a legitimate conversation about something like Tuskegee.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
Right. And as a result of that, we have really strict laws about human subjects and human clinical research to avoid those things that were conducted very unethically.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
Or when we talk about how women were not historically included proportionally in clinical trials and laws have been implemented and regulations have been implemented because we know as scientists and as healthcare providers that when we don't appropriately run clinical research where we include the actual groups of people that need to be represented, the data can be impacted, right?
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
That's why we talk about study design and sample size and why you can't use a mouse study to make human claims. And as a result, starting in the 90s, we've seen a dramatic improvement in participation in clinical trials, which then informs our therapeutic development. The infrastructure, the institutions have learned from this.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
And these things were bad and that's been acknowledged and we're doing better as a result. What ends up happening is instead of talking about that, they say, oh, well, they don't care about you. That's why they did this. And we talk about things like how the FDA has really strict oversight. And then it's inevitably, well, the opioid epidemic.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
And that is a really complex topic, but it completely derails any conversation about the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of medicines that are safe and regulated and overseen by the FDA.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
You could start to see some of these themes last summer when Ron Johnson hosted the Congressional Roundtable on Nutrition and Health, and it had Callie Means, RFK Jr., Vani Hari. Brigham Bueller, Jillian Michaels, all people that are Maha. But the on-ramps, they all pick at these individual ideologies that resonate with these different factions of people.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
So you're targeting parents and you're saying, oh, well, the water is toxic. The food is toxic. The vaccines are toxic. Well, parents are going to resonate with that because they want to do what's best for their kids. What they're not told is that RFK Jr. is spreading misinformation about
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
modern farming tools like GMOs, he's the one that actually was one of the leading litigators making the false claims that glyphosate causes cancer, which has now been picked up by Moms Across America, by the Environmental Working Group, by Vani Hari, by all of these other activists that now tout that.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
Oh, let me count the ways. I mean, I've written quite a bit about this in terms of the harm of legitimizing health disinformation and pseudoscience at a federal level. Now that it's essentially been co-opted into the government, now you have someone who undermines things that save lives and prevent illness and improve health outcomes and also reduce health care costs for all of us.
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Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again'
So everyone is going to be exposed to that. And as we're seeing measles outbreak continue to rage on, we're seeing vaccines continue to be undermined. That's going to cause preventable illness, preventable death. It's going to cause increased healthcare costs for all of us. And it's going to cause economic impacts for all of us.