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Chapter 1: What historical health fads have influenced modern healthmaxxing?
For as long as we've had a country, we've had quacks who claim that they alone understand the secrets of human longevity. And they tell us that if we simply follow their advice, we can maximize our lifespan. Typically, the most popular quacks are the ones who demand that we sacrifice some enjoyable, commonplace activity in order to supposedly improve our health.
Now, in the early 1900s, for example, a man named Horace Fletcher came up with the idea that if you wanted to avoid alcoholism, appendicitis, insanity, and a host of other illnesses, then you needed to chew your food obsessively hundreds of times to the point that it lost all of its taste before swallowing.
He once chewed a green onion more than 700 times just to make sure that it was totally liquefied. And appropriately enough, Fletcher became known as the Great Masticator. Not to be confused with the title claimed by Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call. This is Masticator. Fletcher quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, including Arthur Conan Doyle,
Mark Twain, John Rockefeller, and the author Upton Sinclair. In fact, Sinclair reportedly wrote the catchphrase of the movement, which was, and I quote, nature will castigate those who don't masticate. Johnny Cochran himself could not have invented a better slogan. Now, in every case, when fads like this catch on, it's a sign of a deeper sickness that needs to be addressed.
Fletcher was successful because at the time, the United States was transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrial one. People began eating more processed foods and living more sedentary lifestyles, so indigestion became more common, among other health issues.
There was also a widespread fixation on efficiency, and it became fashionable to see the human body as a kind of machine that could be optimized. Fletcher took advantage of the new health challenges and angst that the Industrial Revolution brought. The fact that his solution was nonsense didn't bother many people. They were terrified, and they wanted to extend their lifespans at any cost.
Now, today we're seeing a very noticeable return of this kind of thinking. The health consciousness stuff, the health maxing, as it's called, has gone massively overboard, as you've probably noticed. People are walking around with bracelets, tracking their vital signs every second of the day, like they're astronauts on the ISS.
They're monitoring their heart rates, getting daily reports on their sleep habits, treating alcohol or sugar like it'll kill them if they look at it, counting their steps. It's now widely believed that it's impossible to live a healthy life without being an obsessive, paranoid lunatic, nevermind the fact that you're eventually gonna die either way.
Just like the great masticator taught, people increasingly believe that they need to make life miserable in order to prolong it. Now, I feel it necessary here to issue what should be an entirely unnecessary disclaimer. which is that I'm obviously not saying that it's bad to try to live a healthy lifestyle. Of course, that's not bad. That indeed is very good.
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Chapter 2: How has the obsession with health tracking affected men's lifestyles?
And that even when you do get quality sleep, you still feel like you didn't. But if you want a popular podcast, then you're not supposed to point this out. Instead, you're supposed to do what Brian Johnson is doing. Again, he's a popular influencer. And here's one of his recent takes. Quote, friends, stop drinking alcohol, not cut back, eliminate.
Alcohol increases cortisol, disrupts REM sleep, accelerates epigenetic aging, shrinks hippocampal volume, elevates resting heart rate, raises inflammatory markers, impairs glucose metabolism for 16 hours. One drink does that. Now, not that anyone cares anymore, but what he's saying here is mostly not true. One drink does not, in fact, accelerate aging or shrink hippocampal volume.
He's taking studies that look at the effects of long-term drinking, and he's implying that one drink has the same effect. There is no reliable data showing that one drink does... most of the things that he just mentioned there in any kind of permanent, measurable, meaningful way. Okay.
The idea that one beer, one single solitary beer can accelerate aging is ridiculous on its face and not supported by any reliable studies whatsoever. So it's a lie in other words, but it's the kind of lie that people feel justified in telling because it's for a good cause.
Anybody who points out that it is a lie, like I'm doing right now, can simply be disregarded as someone encouraging alcoholism or some such nonsense, as I surely will be. And people have been using health hysteria to push lies and propaganda for a long time. And even though they all have something to sell, by the way, that's the other part of this.
Every single one of these people, they all are selling things to you. The clip with Bartlett was the most... He literally holds the thing up. He's selling that to you. Much of the propaganda is not that hard to understand. They're selling you something. When it comes to people lying about health-related issues, we lived through the most extreme example of it a few years ago.
You'd think we'd have become more generally skeptical of this kind of thing, but for a lot of people, the opposite has happened. I mean, you'd think we'd be at a point now where everybody just naturally, when you hear a claim like one beer accelerates aging measurably, you'd think everyone is now just programmed to go like, well, wait a second. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second.
That's not what's happened. In fact, a lot of people are more susceptible to absurd health-related lies than ever. But the bigger issue here is that, as Brian Johnson himself would probably concede, everything you do could have some negative effect on your body. Or could carry some kind of risk. Going outside means that you're exposed to the sun. It means that you could get skin cancer.
Does that mean everybody should stay inside? Does it mean that everyone should carry a canopy wherever they go to ensure that no UV rays touch their skin? Well, apparently that is indeed what Brian Johnson believes. And here's Brian Johnson doing everything he can to avoid exposure to any possible hazards at all. Watch.
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Chapter 3: What are the dangers of extreme health consciousness?
So a 50% increase on 0.5%, when you do the math, means that your risk is now 0.75%. Okay, so your risk is not 50. It sounds like what we're saying is your risk is 50%. Actually, your risk is 0.75%. Pretty big difference. It's still overwhelmingly likely, more than 99% likely, in fact, that you'll never get lung cancer in your entire life. And the same principle applies to what Huberman is saying.
According to the studies I saw, a typical woman has around a 12% chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime. That's the baseline. Now, if Huberman is right and drinking one beer a day increases the risk of breast cancer by 13%, which is the very high end of his range, remember he said like 5% to 13%, which is a big range, that's like 5% or more than triple that, right?
But let's take 30%, worst case scenario. Then the beer drinking woman now has a 14% chance of getting breast cancer in her lifetime. Okay, that's what we're talking about, her relative risk. her relative risk has increased by 13%, but her absolute risk of getting breast cancer has increased by a little over 1%. Okay, because we're going from the baseline, it's actually 1%.
So again, if you want to swear off alcohol to avoid that 1% increased risk, totally fine. I respect it. What I'm trying to do is introduce some reality into the hysteria here. And you could do with it whatever you wish. Now, virtually all the propaganda that you read about cancer rates uses the same tactic. This is from a website called Our Cancer Stories, and see what you notice.
Quote, sodium nitrate is a chemical salt that is commonly used in bacon, ham, and deli meats. The study showed that it was associated with a 32% increase in the risk of prostate cancer. Potassium nitrate, closely related to sodium nitrate, was found to cause 13% increased risk of overall cancer and 22% increased risk of breast cancer.
Sorbates, especially potassium sorbate, are typically used in wine, baked goods, cheeses, and sauces to prevent molds, yeast, and some bacteria. They were found to increase overall cancer risk by 14% and breast cancer risk by 26%. Potassium metabusulfite, which is also used in winemaking, was linked with a 20% increase in breast cancer, 11% higher risk of all cancers.
Acetates are used in foods such as meat, sauce, bread, and cheese. They were associated with a 25% higher risk of breast cancer and 15% increase in cancer risk in general. Now, what do you notice there? Aside from the fact they're listing like every food, everything gives you cancer, apparently, which might be sort of true.
But the problem here is that in every single one of these examples, they're using rates of relative risk. Now, it's very scary to be told that your relative risk of prostate cancer goes up by 32% when you eat bacon and deli meats. But that information by itself is irrelevant unless you know your baseline risk of prostate cancer.
It's a bit like saying, you know, if you go outside, then you raise your risk of skin cancer by 200%. Well, 200% compared to what? If I told you that it was 200% when compared to someone who stays inside all day, like Desmond and Lost, and that your absolute risk only increased by 1%, then you probably wouldn't care at all, I would think. I mean, you'd keep going outside like a normal person.
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Chapter 4: How do healthmaxxing trends create anxiety around alcohol consumption?
That is not the relative number. Your relative percentage goes up like 2,000%. In other words, the person in that video is comparing the relative risk of eating ham with the absolute risk of smoking cigarettes. So it is apples and oranges, or in this case, ham and cigarettes. It is incoherent. But if you're not paying attention, it might sound convincing enough.
The truth is, for many years now, this kind of deception has been commonplace. About a decade ago, a scientist who worked on classifying different carcinogens, according to appeared on BBC, and explained that people are misunderstanding what this term means. Watch.
But to say that it's comparable to diesel fumes, asbestos, tobacco smoke, that's pretty scary. No one has done that. That is a distortion. Those are specific carcinogens. The best characterization of this is that eating red meat increases the risk of cancer, but it's a distortion to classify red meat as a carcinogen. We don't know what the carcinogens are.
What we're in a position to do is to provide the community with a clear basis for public health policy in relation to diet, And that doesn't involve labeling anything a carcinogen or prohibiting anything. It involves a sensible intake of red meat and processed meat to minimize any risk of cancer.
So this is the common sense advice that you've probably heard from your parents. Everything in moderation. Don't drink to excess. Don't eat anything to excess. And you'll probably be OK. Until you die, which you will also die along with the rest of us. But in the meantime, that's all you can do. It's not that complicated.
But if you're told the truth, then it's much harder to sell expensive app subscriptions and diet plans. And therefore, many of the so-called diet apps only contribute to the confusion here. They prey on the fact that people are more neurotic than they've ever been when it comes to food and don't understand statistical. Most people just do not understand how statistics work at all.
One of the great failures of the school system, of many, is we've got generations of people now who have no clue how to read statistical information and are manipulated all day long by everyone because of it. But here's a study from the UC San Diego released a few years ago. Quote, few researchers have studied how these apps affect women with eating disorders in university and college settings.
This research investigates the unintended negative consequences of engaging with these tools. Participants reported that diet and fitness apps trigger and exacerbate symptoms by focusing heavily on quantification, promoting overuse and providing certain types of feedback. Eight themes of negative consequence emerged.
Fixation on numbers, rigid diet, obsession, app dependency, high sense of achievement, extreme negative emotions, motivation from negative messages, and excess competition. So in other words, diet and fitness apps cause more problems than they solved in many cases. And even when they're functioning as designed, these apps aren't making people happier or more motivated.
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