Kevin Hall

I don't have a good, I don't see a rational explanation for this because you're right in pointing out that if a pharmaceutical or other sort of device that is generating some sort of claim of effectiveness for treating a disease

or a condition, it has to undergo trials and demonstrate both safety and effectiveness, whereas dietary supplements have to undergo neither.

They don't have to demonstrate safety nor effectiveness.

I guess the only way I can kind of wrap my brain around this is the idea that some folks will say, well, I'm taking supplements to prevent illness.

I'm not actually trying to treat anything.

But there's no evidence that they prevent illness either.

And it just boggles the mind.

I think that the cynic in me would say, well, it's exactly what you say.

It's an easy way for folks to fund health.

The kind of rhetoric that has promoted them to levels of political power that are enabling them to make changes into our food system.

And hopefully they'll have a beneficial effect.

I haven't given up on them entirely.

But yeah, that is a source of revenue for many of these social influencers who have now influence at the highest levels of political power at the Department of Health and Human Services.

You know, it's a very human phenomenon to focus on acute things and delay discount the future consequences of our current actions.

And I think that it's so it's a very human thing to have a food regulatory system that's focused on things that can happen immediately to folks as opposed to.

acute food poisoning and death that happens within days or potentially a week after consuming a bad batch of spinach or something like that.

It's also easier to track down in some sense, as opposed to things that are affecting us over decades, which is what we're now currently experiencing with the rise in obesity and whatnot.

It's also kind of driven in part behind the fact that

In the history of humankind, we have been devoted to avoiding the problem of starvation.

And we've always faced this problem of producing enough protein and calories to feed populations and this specter of mass starvation because the population is growing too fast compared to our ability to increase agricultural production.