Two Percent with Michael Easter
Why We Argue About Health Like It’s Religion: Long Covid, Seed Oils & Diets
18 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What insights does a religion scholar provide about health beliefs?
Welcome to 2%. I'm your host, Michael Easter. So Alan Levinowitz, he is not a health journalist, nor is he a doctor. He is a religion scholar at James Madison University. But that background, that has allowed him to figure out something really important. And that's that the way most of us think about health, it often functions like a religion. Think about it.
There are ideas of purity and contamination and salvation. And there are also tribes that will turn on you the second that you question the doctrine. Now, once you see this pattern, you cannot unsee it.
Chapter 2: How does the backlash to Alan's article illustrate identity in health debates?
Arguments we all have online and see out in the world about science, diet, seed oils, longevity, raw milk, long COVID, they aren't disagreements about data. They're often disagreements about who we are. Now, why are we bringing on Alan now? Well, he recently wrote a piece for Wired Magazine about long COVID. And the backlash this guy got, it was vicious and it was immediate.
So we're going to start there. Not to reiterate the science, but because the backlash itself is the cleanest demonstration of Alan's thesis that I have seen in years. Now, this interview, it can help you think about your own health beliefs much better. I know it helped me. So let's bring on Alan now after a quick break.
Chapter 3: What role do purity and contamination play in health arguments?
It's that time to put on your jersey and wave your flag, whoever you root for.
Why do I watch the World Cup? That's like asking me, why do I breathe? and it's beautiful. The guys are young and cute and fit.
It's not just a game. It's your culture.
I like watching it with my dad.
It's a connecting force.
From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda Echavarri, and this is American Football, a show about soccer culture in the U.S.
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Chapter 4: How does Alan explain the connection between health beliefs and religious metaphors?
and its underdog roots. Listen to American Football on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 5: What examples demonstrate the extremes of health beliefs in society?
The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called Hey Jonas. Since everyone has a podcast, we wanted to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend Niall Horan is joining the show.
How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else really, is it? You know, our taste so good can't be about food.
Chapter 6: How does the concept of 'natural' influence dietary choices?
You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.
You too, Joe.
Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I talk to composer Mark Shaman.
It's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. and director Morgan Neville. Film school teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary.
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Chapter 7: What are the psychological aspects of health-related beliefs?
What do you want to say? Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard.
Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Alan, thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
All right, so a new edition of WIRED. You write an article on long COVID, basically about brain retraining approaches, the role of the brain in chronic illness, and why some of these treatments seem to work for some patients, but they're kind of seen as heretical among people who suffer from long COVID and these patient advocacy groups.
Chapter 8: How can individuals navigate the complexities of health information?
And the response, it was intense. What has it been like for you given the response online?
Well, it's been a little scary, to be honest. There's some people who have watched every second of every video that's available of me online, clicked it to make me look as bad as possible, read every single post, every single piece of writing. And again, I guess that's just the risk of being out there.
And I want to say up front and center, whatever I'm experiencing online, some kind of online pylon, it's nothing like being... debilitated by a severe chronic illness and told by your family and friends that you're faking, that it's all in your head, that it's fake, that long COVID isn't real. So I keep that in mind.
Yeah, I get a little scared if I get an email that's cc'd to my department head or I get people coming up with petitions calling for things to be changed or whatever. But at the end of the day, this is a group of people who have suffered something far worse than I can imagine.
Yeah, so tell us a little bit, I mean, I sort of touched on the article a little bit, but tell us kind of in your words, what is the article about? And then why was there such a backlash to the article in the first place? Also, let me say that we're focusing on the backlash, but there are a ton of people who have said this is a wonderful article.
And I will say from my own perspective as a journalist, I thought it was exceedingly well reported and generally fair and doing the job of journalism to raise big questions that are, I think, are trying to be helpful.
Yeah, so it's tough to summarize the article. I mean, it is about long COVID, basically. What's the state of the science on long COVID and what explains that? And in order to tell that story, I had to get into the world of what's called myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, which goes back many decades. But long story short is this.
No one really knows what causes long COVID other than sort of by definition, it's triggered by a COVID infection. And no one knows why some people's symptoms last longer. There are biomarkers that have been proposed to show that the symptoms are real, which they are, of course.
But we don't know whether those symptoms are caused by chronic stress, by infection, by deconditioning, by some combination of all of those. And... The problem is that all of those things that I've said, stress, deconditioning, some other kind of infection, these are arguments that people in this world have heard many, many times.
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