Pieter Cohen

speaker

130 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Pieter Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 658. This Is Your Brain on Supplements · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

I think if we were to have access to those early tapes on Oprah, I think his advice would have been,

spot on terrific increase your vegetables get more exercise avoid empty calories you name it but then something happens when you need to produce a show or more a week and your audience is growing and growing and advertisers want more and more and more and more and it's hard to say every day like get some more exercise eat some more fruits and vegetables do more home cooking

When he did his show on that, he asked me to come as a guest.

And I assumed it was going to be a show that was good about debunking this weight loss practice.

And instead, I felt a bit ambushed because I remember one of these weight loss docs came out of her stretch limo with multiple patients outside the studio.

And the whole show was then designed to say, hey, you know, maybe there's something there.

I forget what I actually said because I was so surprised by the situation.

But I might have said something like, if you starve yourself, you will lose weight.

And starving yourself for a diet is not healthy.

That can lead to gallstone formation, a lot of other problems.

So I don't recommend this.

I remember that there were two patients who had actually suffered some sort of adverse effects after they had started this HCG diet.

But instead of being next to us on stage, they were out in the audience.

But I do remember that I chatted with them, connected with them, and commiserated with them as the show was going on.

There are some very thoughtful ways that we could improve the quality of these products.

If the political will was there, we could also quickly get a handle on the health claims.

So the idea that's been floated around is to have an FDA registry of legal permitted dietary supplement products.

For example, if a product label came to the FDA and it contained ingredients that were not legal supplement ingredients, the FDA would simply not post it.

If there were suspicious things, maybe the FDA could require additional testing.

Or maybe the FDA could require additional testing of all products before they posted it on their website by a high-quality third party.

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