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122: A Science Communicator Explains Pseudoscience, with Dr. Joe Schwarcz, PhD
1.3k Plays9 days ago
In this episode, Laurel and Sarah are joined by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, Director of the Office for Science and Society at McGill University and one of the most experienced science communicators working today. They explore why pseudoscientific health claims spread so effectively, even among educated and well-intentioned people, and why wellness culture is so drawn to simple explanations for complex biological problems.
The conversation moves through three dominant narratives shaping modern health messaging: the obsession with finding a single root cause, the moralization of food, chemicals, and health behaviors, and the pressure to optimize every biological variable imaginable. Dr. Schwarcz explains how these narratives distort public understanding of science, create unnecessary anxiety, and distract from the few behaviors that reliably matter for health, like movement, nutrition, and basic risk management.
They also discuss how science actually works, including why it changes over time, how peer review can fail, how industry funding complicates research interpretation, and why cherry-picked studies and observational data are so easily weaponized in marketing. The episode closes with practical guidance on how to evaluate health claims, how to think about trust and expertise, and why asking better questions is often more powerful than finding definitive answers.
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RESOURCES
Dr. Schwarz's radio show
McGill University blog
McGill University YouTube
Book: The Certainty Illusion, by Timothy Caulfield
Recommended
Transcript
The Art of Science Communication
00:00:00
Speaker
ah Science communication is a specialty, just like any other area in science. yeah You have to work at it. You have to have experience in talking to audiences, know at what level you have to present things, know how much data you have to flood them with. You can't drown them in data.
00:00:24
Speaker
You also have to learn words, what works and and what doesn't. When you live in the world of science and you think that you know what the truth is, you get very aggressive with people who take stances which you know are wrong.
00:00:42
Speaker
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? i mean, you have to resist from... using vile language and calling them ignorant or stupid. That doesn't work.
00:00:54
Speaker
Stupid people don't realize. you know So you you have to try to convince them in ah fashion that doesn't upset them too much.
00:01:05
Speaker
And generally what I find works best is by using questions. When they ask you a question, you ask, well, where did you hear this? How do you know whether or not that source is reliable? yeah You know what we mean by a reliable source. yeah You know how scientific information gets transmitted.
00:01:26
Speaker
Why should you believe me? Right. Instead of Joe Mercola on the Internet, who's the biggest promoter of pseudoscience and is an absolute fiend.
00:01:38
Speaker
Right. You know, why should you not believe him? So you have to slowly guide people and lead them to the water. But often it is difficult to make them drink.
Empowering Women Through Strength Training
00:01:49
Speaker
I'm Laurel Biebersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts. or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt?
00:02:14
Speaker
Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices. Let's dive in.
00:02:38
Speaker
Hey, everybody, Laurel here. in today's episode, we have a very special guest.
Pseudoscience in Health and Wellness
00:02:43
Speaker
Sarah and I talk to renowned science communicator, Dr. Joe Schwartz from McGill University. We talk about why so much health and wellness messaging can sound very confident, scientific, extremely convincing, and still be totally wrong.
00:03:05
Speaker
We sit down with Dr. Schwartz to discuss how pseudoscience spreads, why we're so drawn to things like root cause explanations, optimization, this idea of clean eating and fear around chemicals, and how all of these beliefs really end up doing a lot more harm than good. We get into why science changes over time,
00:03:31
Speaker
how cherry-picked research often gets turned into marketing, and why the most persuasive claims are often the ones offering the simplest answers.
00:03:42
Speaker
And the simplest answers, of course, to incredibly complex problems. If you've ever felt overwhelmed, confused, subtly judged by today's wellness culture, and it is a multi-trillion dollar industry as well last time I checked. This conversation will help you understand exactly what's going on under the hood and how to think more clearly in a very noisy landscape.
Magic and Chemistry: A Dual Fascination
00:04:10
Speaker
I think Dr. Schwartz is one of the best guests we've had on and so I think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation.
00:04:22
Speaker
right, Dr. Schwartz, thank you so much for joining us on the Movement Logic Podcast. We're honored and excited to talk to you. Well, it's my pleasure. So fire away.
00:04:33
Speaker
Okay. Well, you're the director of science and society at McGill University. You have a background in chemistry. You've published, I believe I read 19 books. te books i think I think we're up to 21. Okay. All right. You are a renowned science communicator and debunker of pseudoscience.
00:04:52
Speaker
And I read at age nine, you watched a magic show and subsequently became interested in both magic and chemistry. That is exactly how it all started. Okay. Can you tell us about that? ah I was back in grade six and I was invited to a birthday party that my friend's parents had organized.
00:05:12
Speaker
And they had hired a magician to entertain us. You know, it's a common thing to do for kids' birthday parties. And he was a teenager. the truth is he wasn't very good. And most of the tricks he performed, I have long forgotten.
00:05:28
Speaker
But there was one that was memorable and believe it or not, it was life changing. He said he was going to perform a miracle with ropes.
00:05:38
Speaker
Of course, we had no idea what he was talking about, but he told us three lengths of rope ah colored red, white and and blue. And he said he was going to perform magic with these and meld them into one.
00:05:53
Speaker
So he held up the three ropes and he reached into his pocket for what he said was an invisible magic chemical that he sprinkled on these ropes. And sure enough, the three ropes that had appeared to be individual now became one long, multicolored rope.
00:06:11
Speaker
I was amazed by that, not as much by the magic trick, but by the words that he had used. Because he said magic chemical.
00:06:22
Speaker
Instead of alakazam or hocus pocus or abracadabra, which were the common words for for magicians, And i wonder what on earth is this, you know, magic chemical?
00:06:35
Speaker
And it intrigued me. And I went to the school library. We still had libraries and schools in those days. And I took out a book on chemistry and took out a book on magic.
00:06:46
Speaker
See what this was all about. And believe it or not, I have followed both of those ever since. Yeah. And at first it might seem like a very odd juxtaposition because chemistry is a basic science firmly rooted in the laws of nature, right?
00:07:07
Speaker
Magicians do exactly the opposite. They do unnatural things. Besides melding ropes into one, they cut women in half and restore them and teleport a person from one side of the stage to
Real-World Science Applications
00:07:21
Speaker
the other. and you know, all the classic illusions.
00:07:25
Speaker
And of course I realized pretty soon as I started reading that that all of these were done by perfectly explicable scientific means. to which the audience obviously was not privy.
00:07:38
Speaker
And then I also, you know, upon reading chemistry, realized that a lot of this seems like magical to a scientifically uneducated observer, because if you don't know anything about acids, bases, and indicators,
00:07:53
Speaker
it looks absolutely magical that you take a clear solution, pour it into a supposedly empty glass, and it turns into a brilliant mauve color. I mean, that's shocking and impressive. But of course, there is a scientific explanation there.
00:08:10
Speaker
And as a scientist, of course, what we want to do is explain it and show people behind the magic and tell them how indicators or substances that change color in an acid and a base, and the glass that at first appears to be empty has a thin layer of an indicator at the bottom, and the apparently clear liquid has a base dissolved in it, and then presto, you have a magical color change.
00:08:40
Speaker
So while magicians are really scientists of the stage, that's what they are. They're actors playing the role of a magician. right? And they don't want to reveal the science.
00:08:53
Speaker
Whereas in chemistry, of course, the beauty is in the revelation. So the two are very similar in the sense that when you don't have an understanding of something, it seems to be magical.
00:09:06
Speaker
So that's what got me started. And so I started reading more and more about chemistry because, you know, there there were books available for sort of introduction to everyday science and everyday chemistry. So I started to read about cooking and cleaning agents and and cosmetics and and I was intrigued.
00:09:29
Speaker
And I was hoping that, you know, when I finally got to high school, i would start to formally learn about these things. Unfortunately, my chemistry teacher and in high school was was terrible.
00:09:43
Speaker
And then and to to this day, you know, I'm surprised that that I kept my interest going because we already did nothing except memorize formulas and and use a stencil to draw laboratory equipment. We never did anything in the lab.
00:09:59
Speaker
But anyway, because I was reading a lot of stuff on the outside, you know, I could see the the the interest. And then finally in university, I started to have some profs who really did make connections, although not as many as they should have.
00:10:15
Speaker
I mean, i remember very well having a course in physical chemistry, which usually is ah you know an undergraduate horror. And I remember, you know, doing all the calculations and learning about the redox and nurse equation, and which I could do very well because, you know, you could just learn it from books.
00:10:34
Speaker
And I remember near the end of the course, the prophet describing a set of chemical reactions and and said, well, you know, I mean, sort of an offhanded remarks. This is how battery works.
00:10:46
Speaker
And said, bingo, shouldn't you have said that before? right and Isn't the real purpose here to find out how things work? I mean, if he would have said, batteries are really important. Let's let's let's see how these work. What's the chemistry? It made ah a total difference. So I kind of decided that if I ever had the chance to go into academia, I will always put that in the forefront. I would always think of why it is that the students should know this.
00:11:18
Speaker
What is the potential application? You know, why is it important to, to, to learn? And, uh, Sometimes, of course, the connections are a bit obscure. i mean, you know, when you start teaching things like quantum mechanics, the tunnel is very long, yeah but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
00:11:39
Speaker
And that is what is so important to point out to students. Where is this tunnel going? Why do we have to torture ourselves going through all of this? because there's a goal there there is a pot of gold at the end you know that that is to be found uh i found that you know when i started teaching first courses i thought were organic chemistry i always asked myself why should they be learning this reaction where where can this be used and of course i always did find a connection and that's what made it interesting
00:12:16
Speaker
And it was clear from students' response that that they liked that. So you took ah an interest in the actual process of teaching the material, which I've taken several science courses in college and found that there are professors, of course, they're all interested in science. Some of them are better at teaching than others. And I think it's the ones who've taken an interest in the communication of that science to the students in front of them that are the best up teachers? Absolutely. I mean, communication at every level is critical.
00:12:48
Speaker
There's no point in doing science if you can't communicate to someone else. You know, I mean, in the long run, the world community at large needs to benefit whatever it is that is being done in an individual's lab.
Communicating Complex Science
00:13:04
Speaker
of Science is is critical and and it's very difficult. I know this because you know on on my radio show I will sometimes interview top-notch scientists but they are inept in communicating their work to the public. And it's kind of understandable why, because you know when you live your world of research, the terms that you use are so familiar to you that you can't even conceive that someone might not understand what you're talking about. yeah I mean, you know, you will, you'll talk about DNA, you'll, you'll talk about isomers, you'll talk more, you'll, you'll talk about molecular structures, ah you know, transcription and translation, which if you're doing research, these are innate to your vocabulary, but not to the public.
00:13:59
Speaker
so that's why communication is so important to make sure that you're defining your terms that that people understand what you're talking about i mean the real challenge is to communicate science in a fashion that is not trivial yeah the science is sound but that it can be understood by someone who is reasonably intelligent but does not necessarily have the background and it's It's a great challenge. I mean, our motto is actually separating sense from nonsense.
00:14:33
Speaker
That's the description of of what it is that we're supposed to do and separate myth from fact. Or science from non-science. Sarah, did you have a question? Yeah, well, not a question so much as a comment. I just, i I have flashbacks of all of my prerequisite courses for becoming a physical therapist. And Organic chemistry was so unbelievably difficult because we had a teacher who really didn't seem to care much about the communication part. And i I remember essentially having to teach it to myself. So I really, you know, the value of someone who understands. What you're saying is like taking a knife and pushing it into me.
00:15:15
Speaker
I'm so sorry. But I wish more professors were actually good communicators. Organic chemistry should be so interesting and captivating, which it is, as long as you provide the examples of why you're doing what you're doing.
00:15:32
Speaker
Organic chemistry lived in this kind of like world of of just theory. And it had, there was no like application given to sort of ground it. That's terrible. Yes, it was terrible. Thank you. They should be fired. On the flip side, I had an incredible human biology teacher and he would illustrate everything that he was talking about with a real life story.
00:15:56
Speaker
And to this day, I remember those stories. I mean, that's that's the key. I can't tell you how often i I'll give a public lecture somewhere and someone will come up to me. Sometimes a lady with even gray hair, which is disturbing because she'll say I was a student in your class. And she says, you know, that organic chemistry that you taught, I mean, I still remember those examples. I remember why margarine, you know, is sat yeah saturated. And, you know, so it's very fulfilling when you hear that back.
00:16:32
Speaker
But there also will be people who will come up up after and say, you know, I failed chemistry in high school. Now, I don't know why they feel they need to unburden their soul to me like that. But I know- It's a confession. Yeah. I know what they're really saying. They're really giving a compliment, saying that had it been taught like you've just taught, I would have been much happier. And then there's a third kind of thing that that comes up you know often after these public lectures. Someone will say, you know,
00:17:02
Speaker
You guys, you scientists, I remember when I was in in your class 30 years ago, and you were saying vitamin E you know has actually been shown to be ah beneficial for cardiac function, and that vitamin E supplements you know should be thought about. And now you're saying that there's no reason to take vitamin supplements. You see, you guys, you scientists, one day you say this, and the next day you say that. Mm-hmm.
00:17:27
Speaker
Well, first of all, I would propose that 30 years is not exactly one day this, one day that. If I was saying the same things in class now that I was saying 30 years ago, it would suggest that that we have not gained any more knowledge, where of course there has been a profusion of knowledge dispensed over the last 30, 40 years in science.
00:17:49
Speaker
And science is is series of evolutions, a series of steps. Contrary to what people think, there are no giant leaps.
00:17:59
Speaker
The progress goes through a series of of small steps. And also, of course, importantly, science is a self-correcting discipline. Yes, there are mistakes that are made, but eventually they get corrected.
00:18:15
Speaker
And that's one of the big distinctions from pseudoscience. The pseudoscience people who have learned the lingo of science, you know, and they can sound very seductive. You have to give them some credit for that, you know. They have learned to cloak themselves in the garb of science.
00:18:34
Speaker
They're like magicians of the internet. Yes. But they're not using science. like They're misusing it. But they sound like they are. Yeah. you know? And they keep preaching the same thing.
00:18:45
Speaker
Like the homeopaths, 200 years ago, were saying exactly what they're saying now. There's no evolution. So that's one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience.
Why Pseudoscience Persists
00:18:56
Speaker
Dr. Schwartz, why do you think that pseudoscientific health claims tend to spread so effectively, even among educated and well-intentioned people?
00:19:07
Speaker
because they're seductive. What they propose are are simple solutions to complex problems. That is a very seductive thing. It's very alluring to think that you can just pop this pill or take that dietary supplement and forget the exercise, forget the nutrition. People want easy solutions to complex problems. We call those the boring basics. Yes, but it is very rare that there is a simple solution.
00:19:35
Speaker
Life is very complicated. The human body is by far the most complicated machine on the face of the earth. and There are thousands of chemical reactions that are going on in our body all the time. I mean, collectively, of course, we call them metabolism, which is a term that confuses a lot of people. To suggest that there are simple solutions to alter these thousands of chemical reactions all the time doesn't make any sense. But the truth is that you have to be pretty involved in science and you have to have a pretty significant scientific education to understand the complexity of the body's chemistry and the difficulty of altering it in a beneficial way. but I mean, it's so simple to say that if you just abide by this diet, that everything is going to.
00:20:28
Speaker
But when you take food, which is unbelievably complex, you know, I mean, ah an apple is composed of over 300 different compounds, I mean, naturally occurring.
00:20:40
Speaker
And you put something like that into the human body where there are thousands of reactions going on all the time. You can't come up with something simple. no But it's very inviting to think that you could.
00:20:54
Speaker
So I think that's that's the reason that pseudoscience spreads so so readily, because it gets your attention and it seduces you. Well, it makes me think about your interests that you discussed in the beginning about how magic and chemistry kind of came up together. It strikes me that people want they want the magic up without having to understand the chemistry. Yeah, they do. And I keep telling them, you want magic, go to a magic show. That's the only place that you will find the real magic. Of course, there is magic and science in the sense that I mentioned in in looking behind the scenes and understanding what is going on.
00:21:36
Speaker
I mean, life is the most magical thing. I mean, starting from if you just think of it, mean, it's mind-boggling that you think of two cells coming together, and from that, a person emerges, right? And all of the chemistry that is going on there, it's mind-boggling.
00:21:55
Speaker
And, you know, one thing that I have found in this career now that is... going on 50 years, which is scary. And obviously you learn a lot during that time.
00:22:07
Speaker
And one thing you learn is how incredible it is that anyone is ever healthy. When you know everything that is going on and all the things that can go wrong and that most of the time things go okay.
00:22:25
Speaker
yeah It's a remarkable thing. but You can't really appreciate that until you've studied all the nuances, you know, and how complex it is. And the other thing, of course, that is mind-boggling is how so much is known.
00:22:45
Speaker
ah about the complexity of actually what happens in in the body. I mean, how we can explain energy release in terms of ATP and and going to ATP and recycling. And all of this has been worked out all over years and years and years of thousands of scientists all over.
00:23:04
Speaker
putting the information together. That's right. Science is so fascinating because you never know what was going to come up. I mean, I come into the office every morning and as soon as turn on the computer, of course, it's emails galore.
00:23:19
Speaker
And many of them are are news releases or or reports of of scientific papers or whatever. There's something new every single day. always interesting.
00:23:32
Speaker
you know I mean, obviously there's a lot of nonsense that comes out too, which is also interesting for me because I'm dedicated to separating the sense from the nonsense. But the amount of information is just stunning. I mean, it's a tsunami of information that comes at us every day.
00:23:51
Speaker
I mean, when you just think that there are five, roughly five scientific papers published every single minute of every day, 365 days a year, it says you know it's stunning.
00:24:04
Speaker
ah So, I mean, you can't even keep up to date on one little sliver of of science. But whatever you you come across and you start looking into it, it inevitably becomes more and more interesting. When you scratch the surface, it always becomes more interesting. And unfortunately, it also becomes more complicated.
00:24:23
Speaker
Nothing is is simple. There's always nuances, but it's it's stimulating, entertaining at the same time. Yeah, I remember reading about the tsunami of scientific papers coming at us every single minute of every single day in Timothy Caulfield's book, The Certainty Principle, in which you're quoted. tonight we had already We had already invited you on as a guest, and then I was like, oh Dr. Schwartz is quoted. It's great. I mean, yeah you know, he does the same kind of thing that that we do, although more in the legal area, because he's a lawyer.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yes. We share a lot of things. I know Tim quite well. Yeah. So Dr. Schwartz, I wanted to run by a a few common umbrella narratives, or maybe we can call these magic tricks, you know, we'll put one by one through them. We're referring to them. These are the words we're using to refer to them as, ah you know, just umbrella terms. But this root cause obsession, which is one we want to talk to you about The second is the tendency to moralize health behaviors. And then the third one is the desire to optimize everything.
00:25:29
Speaker
So we'll start with root cause obsession. From my perspective, there appears to be a strong obsession online and in podcasts and wherever you get your media from finding the quote root cause of a particular ailment or problem in both health and wellness.
00:25:46
Speaker
In food and consumer health, we often see claims that a single ingredient, a single chemical exposure to this ingredient or chemical is the root cause of things like fatigue, inflammation, weight gain, chronic disease, and it's gotten such that I'm so becoming suspicious the moment I hear these words, leave the mouth of anyone uttering them. And my hackles immediately are raised anytime I hear root cause now do you think I should be this skeptical? What what is going on with this phrase root cause and the way it seems to be used in wellness? Welcome to my world. This is what I deal with with all the time.
00:26:25
Speaker
I mean, I think really the the bottom line here is that science is not white or black. Science is shades of gray. And there are different opinions on just about everything in in science.
00:26:39
Speaker
Rarely is the opinion in the middle. When you look at the consensus, it will always gravitate towards one side. Now, this searching for the root cause of everything, I think this is part of human nature.
The Search for Simple Solutions
00:26:53
Speaker
You can think of yourself if you get sick for any reason. What's the first thing you think of is where did this come from? You get a gastro, you think, well, what did I eat? What could have caused this? And of course, more frighteningly, if if there is some more serious diagnosis, you think, well, you know, what did I do wrong in in life? You know, was I eating too much fat? Was I drinking too much coffee? Was I drinking too much alcohol? You know, is is that what caused this?
00:27:24
Speaker
I think the search for cause is, part and parcel of of human thinking and it's also part and parcel of science. I mean, isn't that what we really do? Isn't that the base of science? Is is try to find out why things happen. what is the What is the root cause? I think the problems appear when they focus in on something, as you said, singular as as the root cause, which is very rarely the case.
00:27:54
Speaker
Sometimes, of course it is. I mean, you can be poisoned by arsenic and and we know what what that is or by ricin or whatever. So, I mean, there are cases like like that where there is indeed a specific cause.
00:28:10
Speaker
But generally, when you're thinking of health, it isn't that. it There is not one single cause. It's often a compendium. I mean, if you're looking, you know, as as we do these days for longevity, you know, I mean, everyone wants to live longer, as long as you can live live healthy.
00:28:32
Speaker
ah You know, you think of of blood pressure, you think of cholesterol, you think of triglycerides and then body waist circumference. And because we know all of these are parameters that control and then you start thinking about what can I do to ameliorate this? So yeah, I mean, I think it's natural in terms of thinking about root causes.
00:28:52
Speaker
but very often it can be misleading because there is not one single root cause. We all often hear, for example, seed oils or sugar or gluten yeah or food additives, pesticides, plastics. And um we know these days whose mouth that is coming out of. ah Right? I mean, as you can imagine, I'm not a fan of your secretary of health. Neither are we. Yes. How this has happened, how a man who is so scientifically illiterate, a man who's
00:29:27
Speaker
has such a checkered history in everything, has risen to this level. Of course, there is an explanation for that. It's because he did make a pact with the devil, that if he supported the devil, he would get this disposition.
00:29:42
Speaker
But, I mean, his influence has been tremendous and his bizarre views have become mainstream. This demonizing of seed oils is totally ridiculous.
00:29:56
Speaker
First of all, you can't put seed oils into one category. right I mean, canola oil and coconut oil are dramatically different. You can't put them into into the same box and vilify them.
00:30:10
Speaker
I mean, just constantly looks for scapegoats, you know, that can be blamed for whatever problem. This whole business of making America healthy again. I mean, of course, I also have a ah problem with the term make America healthy again.
00:30:26
Speaker
When was America healthier? What is this business of again? Okay, was America healthier when when kids were were dying of swamp pox and measles, when infectious diseases were striking, when polio was ever present, when breakfasts were whiskey and bacon?
00:30:47
Speaker
You know, was this when America was healthier? So this is this whole thing is a myth of making America healthy again. you again right or you can talk about making America healthy you're certainly not going to do that by eliminating vaccines which of course is dedicated to doing now in terms of a food I mean we saw with the emergence of the new guidelines very interesting i mean it's not quite as bad as I thought it could be I mean at least he wasn't telling people to drink raw milk
00:31:20
Speaker
Although, you know, the business of telling kids that they should be consuming high-fat dairy products is questionable, but ah it's not dramatically wrong. But having this inverted food pyramid with a giant rip steak at the top and a giant roasted turkey sends the wrong message.
00:31:42
Speaker
But there's there's a war on protein, don't you know? Oh, yeah. Haven't you heard about it? The war on protein? Yeah, well, protein is a whole other issue that we can discuss. But the bizarre thing is that in these guidelines, they have still kept the recommendation to curb your saturated fat intake at 10% of your total caloric intake.
00:32:05
Speaker
This is totally incompatible with the rest of the pyramid. This is just nonsense. You cannot have high fat foods at the top of this pyramid and then talk about keeping your saturated fats at at less than 10%. I mean, I have several other issues with this guidelines, but another one is the alcohol.
00:32:27
Speaker
Limit alcohol. What does that mean? To one person, that may mean one drink a day to another two drinks a day. Another could mean six. Absolutely. The currency of science are numbers.
00:32:41
Speaker
Numbers matter. If you're going to tell people about alcohol, put a number to it. Say what you think is okay. ay Now, I mean, the truth is that with all of the emerging information,
00:32:56
Speaker
What is okay is none. You know, yeah you know that's that's what the evidence shows. However, I think that also needs sort of a corollary. And that is that that there's more to life than evaluating every morsel we put into our mouth and every drop of drink as is it good for me or not.
00:33:18
Speaker
Food is also a source of pleasure. Obviously for some people too. Great a source of pleasure, but it's also a source of pleasure And there are some things with which we take risk. Yeah, I think drinking alcohol is a risk.
00:33:32
Speaker
Question is, to what degree? I mean, I think drinking every day is absolutely documented risk. If you're going to have a glass of wine with dinner on a Saturday night, that's a different story. Because even if there's a risk, you think the benefits outweigh the risks, right? Almost everything we do in life has a trade-off. There's an upside, there's a downside. Everything. And and you know life comes down to evaluating risk benefits. yeah what is Absolutely. good And this this does actually lead us into our next umbrella discussion.
00:34:05
Speaker
phrase or or cause the idea of the tendency to moralize health behavior. Right. So there's a really strong tendency in the wellness sector to moralize health behaviors, especially around food and chemicals, but certainly around exercise as well. Right. We hear food labeled as clean or dirty, you know, natural or toxic.
00:34:26
Speaker
healing or inflammatory. What's the deal with mixing morality and food or morality and chemistry? Yeah, um it it's etans us I mean, I mean, chemicals themselves, of course, have no morality, right? They're just, they're things. The building blocks of all matter. That's why it annoys me so much when people use the word chemical to be synonymous with poison or toxin. they Say more about that. Yeah. These are just things, right?
00:34:53
Speaker
People, can be poisonous. People can do terrible things. And the same chemical that can be used for benefit can also be used for detriment. I mean, you can drink too much water. yeah Absolutely. And the classic example would be morphine.
00:35:10
Speaker
I mean, if someone suffers from the intractable pain of of cancer, morphine is an absolute godsend, right? yep But if you're mainlining it in order to get high, that's a totally different story.
00:35:23
Speaker
But that molecule has not decided whether it's going to jump into your vein or be used as a cancer treatment. People make those kinds of decisions. And we make decisions about chemicals all the time, but those are pretty complex decisions.
00:35:39
Speaker
Why? Because the world is composed of millions and millions of chemicals, you know, 99% of which are, of course, are naturally occurring. As I said, an apple has about 300. The aroma of coffee, believe it or not, over a thousand compounds.
00:35:57
Speaker
A thousand. And what is, of course, amazing, even to us in chemistry, that... This is known that those compounds have been identified and we know the molecular structure of of of many of them.
00:36:10
Speaker
The interaction of chemicals is significant. very, very complex and very difficult to predict. And to start moralizing about them is is is's absolute nonsense. You just have to look at the underlying science. Eventually, there there are some blanket recommendations that we can make and exercise, obviously, which you know you guys appreciate.
00:36:38
Speaker
Only trouble is we can't bottle it. It would be great if you could sell it in Just drink my exercise for day. Although, of course, there are websites that that basically say that. yeah you know There are supplements that can do the same thing as like exercise. you know The complexity of our world in terms of chemistry is staggering.
00:36:59
Speaker
no very often what they will do is take fragments of of kernels of truth and blow completely out of ah proportion. We see this all the time. And you see it happening even in in mainstream media where there'll be some study that came out about high-fat cheese being linked for reduced risk of dementia.
00:37:22
Speaker
And these these normally come from observational studies, you know, where populations are followed for decades after having filled out some food frequency questionnaires to see, you know, what eventually happens.
00:37:36
Speaker
These are very problematic because, first of all, filling out these frequency questionnaires, people can't remember what they ate. They can't judge amounts of what they ate. And very often they will report that they have eaten things that they think they should have eaten instead of what they ate. know, there's a classic story that that in these food frequency questionnaires, there's more broccoli consumed than the world is capable of producing. um And the the other problem is that it is very often assumed that the questionnaires that are filled out at one point in time This is the the diet that people will follow for you know the 30, 40 years. And of course, that that doesn't happen. So anyway, much of our nutritional research is based on these kind of observational studies, which can be misleading. So for example, the one I was referring to was a recent study where over decades after following people, and looking at their mental health, they found an association between eating fatty cheeses and reduced risk of dementia.
00:38:43
Speaker
First of all, an association is very different from a cause and effect relationship, right? In Germany, there's a strong association between the number of storks found in cities and birth rate, because storks have moved out of the cities because of pollution and the birth rate has gone down. So it's a very strong relation. but i think we can be pretty confident that storks don't bring babies. oh I don't know. It seems pretty obvious to me. um
00:39:15
Speaker
so okay, so they find this association. between high fat cheeses and reduced risk of dementia, barely statistically significant. okay And then you look at the media reports of this study and the headline is, eating fatty cheese reduces the risk of dementia.
00:39:35
Speaker
It's totally out of context. And that is a kind of moralizing, telling people you know what to eat, but it's not science-based. Yeah, I think people ultimately they want to do what's good.
00:39:48
Speaker
They want to do what's right. And in Caulfield's book, he talks about this goodness button that a lot of marketing and media reporting can do, which is it can press the button in a person's brain, which is what kind of person am I if I don't do this? yeah Right. yeah I want to be the good person. I want to be the person who does right by me and my family. I want to make smart decisions, healthy decisions. I want to eat natural foods.
00:40:11
Speaker
The people who want to make those kind of decisions or generally people in the upper levels of society yeah yeah who have money who can buy the broccoli and who can buy the vegetables, yeah who don't have to go to McDonald's for their meal. I mean, this is also you know one of the problems with the food guide. The title of it is, Eat Real Food, right?
00:40:35
Speaker
What on earth is that? What is real food? you know McDonald's is still real food, right? And I think that most people, even the ones who are not highly scientifically educated, know that eating all the ultra processed foods is not good.
00:40:52
Speaker
They're not eating that because they think that this is what they should be eating. right It's the default position. They're eating it because it's cheap, it's readily available, and you know, that divorced mother who works all day and has two children at home, is not going to come home at night and start cooking a meal from scratch, from raw vegetables. First of all, she can't afford those raw vegetables. I mean, you know, they came out with this nonsense of the $3 meal, forget that, cannot be done. What are you referring to, the $3 meal? Together with the food guide that was published, the Secretary of Agriculture said that, well, if people just paid attention because referring to the high cost of everything, right if they just bought smartly and cooked food at home, you could serve everyone for $3 a meal. Well, good luck with that.
00:41:48
Speaker
yeah you know I mean, people are eating all of the crappy ultra-processed foods Not because they think that that's what they should be eating, but they're driven to that by, you know, the life. Systemic inequity. You know, it's yeah it's all well for us who are reasonably affluent to start preaching and telling people, well, yes, you should all be eating the Mediterranean type of diet. But it's not realistic for most people.
00:42:18
Speaker
And then when we moralize those behaviors, we get to feel good about ourselves. Yes. And we get to blame the other people for not being smart, for not eating clean, for making stupid decisions with their diet, for being lazy. And then we don't actually have to fix the systems that created their inability to access the things that we can access, right? We can just think about it as their personal failings.
00:42:41
Speaker
You know, I mean, obviously there are many things that need fixing in our food system. The fact that a third of all the food that is produced in the Western world is thrown out. I mean, that's, you know, that's a scandal.
00:42:54
Speaker
When you watch what happens at a buffet, you know, where people will pile on the food and half of it is leftover, which I always found so curious. I mean, if it's a buffet, you can go back as many times as you want.
00:43:09
Speaker
Take whatever you want, eat it. If you want more, go back. But that's not what happens. I mean, you see that. So, I mean, those are the kind of behaviors that that need to be modified.
00:43:21
Speaker
and ah But again, How do you do it? Modifying behavior is very complex. I mean, with everything you know about exercise, right? All of the benefits, all of the scientific evidence.
00:43:36
Speaker
Can you get people to do it? Yeah. Even though you don't need anything special, you can do it in at home. But people just don't. Yeah.
00:43:48
Speaker
Welcome to our world.
Health Metrics and Anxiety
00:43:49
Speaker
So let's talk about optimization. There's this obsession with optimizing everything it seems and every biological variable you could think of lab numbers, chemical markers, blood sugar, metabolism stuff, hormones, inflammation, cardiovascular and fitness metrics, gut and digestion related metrics, sleep and recovery, it just goes on and on and on. Do you think this stuff is actually helping us? Is it is it just making us all more neurotic?
00:44:20
Speaker
Could you weigh in on optimization? I mean, again, you know, it's shades of gray. Some of it is clear cut. Yes. You should know your LDL levels. You should know your HDL levels. You should measure triglycerides.
00:44:34
Speaker
It's very important to measure glucose levels. These are clear cut because these are manageable in terms of making changes. May I just jump in for a second? Because one of the things we're seeing in this sort of optimization culture at the moment with, for example, that example of glucose levels is people decide or being told that, that you know, people without diabetes or not, they're not pre-diabetic need to be monitoring their glucose like constantly. This is nonsense, of course. yeah I mean, you do a basic blood glucose test after fasting.
00:45:11
Speaker
If the numbers aren't what they should be, then of course you start monitoring. But for someone who's got normal glucose level, you don't need to continually monitor it.
00:45:22
Speaker
But I mean, things like blood pressure, yes, absolutely, you should be aware of. And that is something that that you can monitor because having your blood pressure measured when you go for your annual visit at the doctor is is useless.
00:45:38
Speaker
You know, white coat hypertension is very real and it's not indicative. So you do need to have a baseline, yeah which means really getting yourself a blood pressure monitor, which these days is easy to do, they're not expensive.
00:45:54
Speaker
And for a week to take it every morning and take it every night and then show the doctor. Then you have some idea that is certainly worth doing. Because blood pressure, you know, is the the silent killer, as it is said. And it's manageable. I mean, you can do things about it, starting from cutting down on sodium to using medications. Similarly for cholesterol levels. But when you start looking at markers for cancer, that's a different kind of of story.
00:46:25
Speaker
And also, you know, when talking about doing sort of prophylactic um MRI imaging when you're healthy, I think that's a bad idea. So when you say it's a different story to look for markers for cancer or to do prophylactic MRI imaging, why do you think those are are not as helpful? Because the evidence for it is not as clear cut.
00:46:47
Speaker
Having a marker is not the same as having the condition. And as i was saying, as especially with MRI, you know, where people now are paying for MRI when they're healthy, you do an mr MRI, chances are you're going to find something.
00:47:03
Speaker
which is generally inconsequential, but it's going to make you crazy. Same thing with the markers for cancer, I imagine with the markers for cancer. Yeah, so it's going to change your behavior. Yeah, it's going change your behavior. And it's going to create and anxieties.
00:47:18
Speaker
Now, eventually, of course, as science evolves, there may be markers that are very specific that are worth measuring, just like now we know that cholesterol is worth measuring and blood pressure is is worth measuring. I mean, eventually, we may have things like that, especially genetic markers. But right now, I think to go for those, the markers that might have some connection to real disease, I think is just going to upset your life for no real reason, unless there are symptoms. Now, of course, when there are symptoms, then the doctor will know what is worth looking at and what is not. But in terms of what you mentioned, optimizing health,
00:48:05
Speaker
I mean, the basic things are exercise and diet. That's what you need to optimize because there we know that the the consequences are real. you know, you can affect the real changes.
00:48:17
Speaker
yeah So you have to know what is really important and what is less less important. So you named you named a couple LDL, HDL, blood pressure, and that annual glucose checkup. The others that you think are worthwhile,
00:48:32
Speaker
Body weight, for sure. Body weight. Body weight that you know should be monitored. Waist circumference is is actually quite meaningful because abdominal fat is very active metabolically. That certainly is worth looking at.
00:48:48
Speaker
Vitamin D levels in the blood, I think that this has been overstated. Okay. Can you say more about that? Yeah. I think in case of northern climates where, you know, really exposure to the sun is is very small, I think one can argue for vitamin D supplements.
00:49:06
Speaker
But most of the time, there is no real evidence. you get 15 minutes of sun a day, it is enough. Supplements, of course, this is a whole other story. That's a whole world in and of itself. There's 100,000 dietary supplements, roughly, that are available in the Western world, yeah which are loosely regulated, to to give them some credit, because it really almost non-regulated. yeah yeah You can sell almost anything as a dietary supplement and make all kinds of claims that
00:49:41
Speaker
except making the claim directly on the bottle okay that that you cannot do but in accompanying literature or in podcasts etc you can basically see whatever whatever you want and there are miracles galore lots of magic yeah i mean the number of supplements is astounding as are the claims and the basic methodology here is to look through scientific literature Find some study that showed some benefit for some substance in the lab or in some animal.
00:50:19
Speaker
Collect many of these, put them into a pill and start selling it to the public yeah with claims of scientifically proven or whatever.
00:50:31
Speaker
Never is the whole product actually tested. individual components might have some history of you know tests at at some dose, but not the whole whole product. yeah It's very easy to make this sound very appealing by selective cherry picking is the term that we use of of the scientific literature. yeah And that's why you know when people ask me, as so often happens about the value of some supplement, they say the first thing to check
00:51:03
Speaker
has that supplement specifically been clinically tested, has been tested in humans? Not whether or not the individual components have some testing behind them, but has this product actually been tested?
00:51:19
Speaker
if Very often when it has, the company selling the product paid for the oh paid for the research. I mean, the answer almost always is no. There is no legitimate testing.
00:51:31
Speaker
And even when it comes to the peer-reviewed literature, as as you mentioned, I mean, money is always in, you know. That's why I... When I read a scientific paper, i mean, one of the first things I look at is the funding. Not because you would immediately dismiss a paper just because ah of the funding. You have to look at it reasonably. I mean, let' let's face it. If you're going to do some research on some probiotic, let's say, where are you going to go for funding?
00:52:01
Speaker
I mean, are you going to go to a light bulb manufacturer or are you going to go to a yogurt producer, right? I mean, you know, it's pretty obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But just because you may get funding from a yogurt producer doesn't invalidate the the data. I mean, you have to look at the data itself.
00:52:20
Speaker
Now, I will admit that You want to be more careful looking at the data when there is some vested interest in in the funding. yeah But I think with the vested funding, the bigger problem is is not published data, but unpublished data.
00:52:37
Speaker
Because if you look for something and it is not in the interest of whoever is funding it, It's never going to be published. Right. So we have kind of a sort of survivor bias for research. And negative information also important because it's important to alert scientists to what they not need to do because it's been done and it's been shown to have you know negative effects. Yeah, to your point about making the small steps, right? That science is a ah series of small steps. Some of those steps are in the direction of, oh, actually don't go down this pathway because it's going to be a waste of time. Turn left instead or whatever. Absolutely. It's important to know what not to
The Evolutionary Nature of Science
00:53:22
Speaker
do. Right. What doesn't work, what's not effective.
00:53:25
Speaker
I wanted to ask as well, yeah yeah and this is sort of piggybacking on what we're talking about generally, for the layperson out there, if they want to be a better consumer of health information, are there like two or three important questions to ask when they see a new claim about something?
00:53:43
Speaker
Yes. The question to ask is where does the information come from? Where did you see this? Was it in a peer-reviewed journal or in a report of a peer-reviewed journal?
00:53:55
Speaker
Or did you see a reel on Instagram or or was it on someone's podcast? Or was it the headline in the you know in the newspaper or the magazine that you get? So you you you you have to dig into it and look at the source. And it often takes digging. It takes work. Like anything else in life.
00:54:17
Speaker
If it's going to be good, it's going to require work. That's the equation. And if you really want to get to the bottom of whether or not any diet, any food supplement, any medication is really going to be effective, you have to look into the science. You have to look into literature. Now, luckily these days that is becoming easier to do.
00:54:41
Speaker
Obviously, because of the Internet, which is a double edged sword. Obviously, there's terrible information there, but there's also volumes of fantastic information. You know, I mean, I haven't been to a library in years.
00:54:56
Speaker
Why should I go? a few keystrokes and everything that I want from a library shows up on the screen. And now with with AI, of course, finding sources and looking at the path of how information has come is becoming easier. But you also have to know how to use it properly and realize that it's not a perfect system. Although I must say that over the last little while, I've been using AI a fair bit.
00:55:26
Speaker
And I've never come across some of these problems that you hear about of hallucinogenic references and that I find that the information generally is very reliable. And not only that, it is actually getting better day by day because it's more up to date. So, I mean, it's obviously useful. But again, i mean, AI is this...
00:55:46
Speaker
a double-edged sword because, you know, we used to say, believe only what you see, not what you hear. o Well, you can't say that anymore yeah because AI can generate anything.
00:56:00
Speaker
yeah So you you have to be more critical. You have to make sure that you're tracking the right way, but it does give you the opportunity to gather information very quickly.
00:56:13
Speaker
But you have to check the references that are are provided and see. And when we're checking the references, what are we looking for well in terms of the ones we can trust? And then what are the ones we should maybe not trust as much, at least not on their own?
00:56:25
Speaker
Well, first of all, you you look at the journal itself. And if it's the New England Journal of Medicine or the Lancet or the American Journal of Medicine, You look at it with somewhat more interest than the Indian Journal of Homeopathy.
00:56:42
Speaker
you know I mean, there's pretty good classifications of journals and the impact of journals. Where do people find those, though? One of the main points in The Certainty Principle by Caulfield was that there is actually an enormous mountain of fraudulent journals.
00:56:59
Speaker
of journals that publish non-peer-reviewed papers that seem very legitimate. And it's really hard for the layperson who's going online and seeing the vast amount of information and research papers available to them to be able to know, well, this sounds like a credible journal, is it?
00:57:16
Speaker
Well, it it is hard for the layperson, but just because it's hard doesn't mean that you don't make the effort. And you can make the effort because if you go track things down on the internet and look at each journal, there'll be articles about it and about reputation.
00:57:35
Speaker
So of course we look for information that is published in proper peer reviewed journals, but you also look at at who published the authors. okay Do they come from a reputable place?
00:57:47
Speaker
Is it Harvard or is it Bastyr University, which is a naturopathic college? okay They don't necessarily publish things that are are wrong, but you would trust something that comes from researchers at Harvard more.
00:58:00
Speaker
Although there is also a corollary that has to be introduced here. And that is that the period literature is not set in stone.
00:58:12
Speaker
That awful paper that Andrew Wakefield first linked autism to vaccines was published in The Lancet, which is one of the world's top research journals. How does this happen?
00:58:26
Speaker
Because when you get a paper to review as a referee, you have to accept that what was written in the paper is what was done.
00:58:38
Speaker
And at the data that they gathered was indeed properly gathered and the calculations were properly made and the conclusions arrived at were justified.
00:58:51
Speaker
If someone is going to present fraudulent information, you're not going to detect that as a referee because of course you can't redo the work, which is the work of often groups of people over years.
00:59:05
Speaker
So you have to evaluate what you see in front of you on on the paper. And sometimes if there is fraudulent data, as was the case with Wakefield, This is not going to emerge until someone tries to duplicate the work, which is a complex endeavor already, and finds that it can't be duplicated. But by the time that happened in this case, we've had epidemics of measles, which are just increasing now, of course, because of Kennedy's lunatic stance.
00:59:37
Speaker
It seems to me like there is some personal responsibility on all of our ends to verify our resources. but But I also think that for people who don't have a science background, which is the vast majority of us, right?
00:59:52
Speaker
We're going to need to know what people to trust, right? Because these are the people that can communicate the science, that can validate, verify, corroborate, or critique.
01:00:05
Speaker
the science because they have the skill set to be able to do it. And so something I've become very interested in is connecting our audience with those trusted people, you being one of them. But it takes a long time to come to such a conclusion, you know, and realize where proper information can be found. It it does take a lot of scrutinizing of what is out there until you eventually realize which is reputable and which is not, which has more backing and which does not.
01:00:35
Speaker
I mean, like I was saying, I like to think that our website is very reliable because we we're very, very careful about everything that is there. We tend to be maybe a bit more anal retentive. This is the McGill University website.
01:00:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's mcgill.ca. We'll link it in the show notes. Yeah, I can guarantee that everything that we have on there is never going to be altered as new information comes out. I mean, I'll tell you honestly that we do have ah an article on creatine.
01:01:08
Speaker
which I think is very sound. But if I now had to write it again, i would modify some because there's a lot of information that has emerged just in the last couple of years about creatine, which is, you know, a very interesting dietary supplement. it's one of those that actually does have scientific background for some people under some conditions, right? Not for the general public, you know, it's not going to do anything.
01:01:33
Speaker
If you're a competitive 100 meter swimmer, Yes, it gave off half a second of the time, which in your life, it makes a hell of a lot of difference. It can make the difference between an Olympic medal and then coming sixth or seventh.
01:01:52
Speaker
But for the average person, it doesn't matter. Of course, for that Olympic athlete, you have the problem that all your competitors are doing the same thing too. We have one more question for you, Dr. Schwartz, which is, is there anything right now about how science is communicated in health and fitness or health and wellness that worries you the most?
Developing Science Communication Skills
01:02:13
Speaker
That is very often communicated by people who don't have the right to communicate it. That's what it comes down to. I mean, there are a lot of good science communicators out there.
01:02:25
Speaker
But there's a lot of witchcraft as well. And, you know, science communication is a specialty, just like any other area in science. yeah You have to work at it.
01:02:37
Speaker
You have to have experience in talking to audiences, know at what level you have to present things, know how much data you have to flood them with. You can't drown them in data.
01:02:53
Speaker
You also have to learn words, what works and and what doesn't. When you live in the world of science and you think that you know what the truth is, you get very aggressive with people who take stances which you know are wrong.
01:03:11
Speaker
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? i mean, you have to resist from using vile language and calling them ignorant or stupid. That doesn't work.
01:03:23
Speaker
Stupid people don't realize. you know So you you have to try to convince them in a fashion that doesn't upset them too much.
01:03:34
Speaker
And generally what I find works best is by using questions. When they ask you a question, you ask, well, where did you hear this? How do you know whether or not that source is reliable? yeah You know what we mean by a reliable source. yeah You know how scientific information gets transmitted.
01:03:55
Speaker
Why should you believe me? Right? Instead of Joe Mercola on the internet, who's the biggest promoter of pseudoscience and is an absolute fiend.
01:04:07
Speaker
Right? You know, why should you not believe him? So you have to slowly guide people and lead them to the water. But often it is difficult to make them drink. Maybe don't tell them, but ask them to think through it themselves. Yes.
01:04:22
Speaker
Yes. I mean, you really only come to conclusions from within, not by listening to someone. You can listen to someone who will guide you on how to go about thinking of that.
01:04:33
Speaker
But you really have to come to conclusions from the inside. Wow, that's a fantastic note to end on. Yeah. Thank you very, very much. This has been an incredibly rich conversation.
01:04:46
Speaker
Well, good. It's been fun chatting with you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Schwartz. Yeah. Where can people find you? Where would you like to direct people to? Yeah, well, our website, mcgill.ca slash OSS.
01:04:58
Speaker
There you can look at our hundreds of articles that we've published. Also the entrance to our YouTube channel is there. Very good, very good content. And my radio program, which is on every Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern time, thanks to the web, is now available live everywhere in the world. Fantastic. i And yeah, all you have to do is go to cjad.com.
01:05:22
Speaker
Perfect. We'll put that in the show notes. Click on the button there and you can you can listen. going put that in my calendar. Yeah, me too. Thank you so much for chatting with us. i do Thank you very much, Dr. Schwartz. Chatting with you and I'm off to the gym.
01:05:36
Speaker
Nice.
01:05:42
Speaker
Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Schwartz. I know i did. I think it highlights something we come back to again and again on this podcast, which is science is not about certainty.
01:05:57
Speaker
And it's not about perfection and it's not about purity. Science deals in probabilities and trade-offs and a great deal of uncertainty.
01:06:08
Speaker
It's about asking why and how to get better answers to our questions and then also better questions over time. Science is a process.
01:06:21
Speaker
It's a community. If this episode made you more skeptical of the simplistic explanations that are rampant online, if it's made you more cautious about confident people making confident claims, or if it's simply made you feel a little bit more comfortable sitting with the uncertainty that science presents us, then I think it did its job.
01:06:45
Speaker
Also, if it left you in awe and wanting to learn more, as it did for me and for Sarah as well, then we're we're really glad about that. You can find more of Dr. Schwartz's work through McGill's Office for Science and Society. We've linked the McGill website blog, which is phenomenal. We've linked Schwartz's Schwartz's radio show as well, and also the McGill YouTube channel, which is where Sarah and I first encountered some really solid critique of osteostrong.
01:07:21
Speaker
If you've listened to our episodes, and we did some reporting on osteostronk, which is an exercise intervention that claims to be able to increase bone mineral density in a very short period of time using like mostly machine-based isometrics.
01:07:38
Speaker
um It is a total scam. And we first encountered some of the most evidence-based critiques of OsteoStrong from this YouTube channel that McGill University has. So if you have questions, these would be great resources for you to check out. Ultimately, we are awash in information.
01:08:00
Speaker
Some of it good, most of it not good at all. And so it's really important, in my opinion, that we find lighthouses like Dr. Schwartz, people who can help us find our way through this fog.
01:08:15
Speaker
And so i hope you check out McGill University's blog and YouTube channel and that you learn more from Dr. Schwartz in the various ways that you can. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us, give us a like, give us a review. i have to say we are experiencing a bit of a review drought.
01:08:34
Speaker
It's been several months since anyone lifted a finger to write us a review. You know, no pressure.
01:08:45
Speaker
But if you have something to say, we'd love to hear it. Mostly we don't even know if the reviews help us all that much. um In terms of reach, I have no idea how the algorithm, the podcast overlords work. But I do know that every time there's a new review, Sarah and i screenshot it. Whoever sees it first, usually it's me.
01:09:06
Speaker
And we share it with each other. And we always we always enjoy it. So yes, please leave a review. Also, our barbell mini course, free, great resource for learning to use barbells and string training in general is linked in the show notes, so you can check that out as well.
01:09:25
Speaker
Additionally, we have our Fold Up Verse barbell rack that fits under your bed that we also are collaborating with the company called Verse to let you know about. We do get a small commission on sales of this Fold Up barbell rack.
01:09:42
Speaker
which I consider to be one of the most problem-solving pieces of strength training equipment I've ever encountered. And it's very sleek and it works incredibly well. So check out the Verse Agile Rack, which is also linked in the show notes. And you can use our coupon code to get a sizable discount on that.
01:10:03
Speaker
All right, everybody. Thanks again for tuning in. And we will see you in two weeks.