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I'm Dr. Andrea Love, biomedical scientist.
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I fact-check false health claims.
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This is pseudoscience support at Away From The Keys wants to know, "How do you define pseudoscience?"
0:17
So pseudoscience refers to beliefs or practices that appear scientific on the surface, but they lack the repeatability, the reliability, or the credibility of science.
0:17
Often, they're making claims that are based on anecdotes as opposed to evidence.
0:17
They often start with a nugget of truth and then widely exaggerate that beyond what reality would indicate.
0:17
At Shanny X-ray wants to know, "Should I buy this flat tummy tea or not?"
0:17
"Anyone tried it?"
0:17
I hate to break it to you that these things are really just glorified laxatives.
0:46
So what's happening is that you're speeding up your digestive process beyond what it should be normally, but what you're flushing out is food that you haven't finished digesting properly and absorbing their nutrients.
1:00
So you're creating a lot of diarrhea and you're also dehydrating yourself.
1:02
So while you might feel like you have a very flat tummy, it's not because you're actually losing weight or removing toxins.
1:10
It's simply because you've removed food too quickly from your body and you're dehydrating yourself.
1:15
At S. Duche is asking, "Why am I only just learning that chiropractors are not real doctors?"
1:24
Yeah, so Chiropractics is a $15 billion industry and it was invented by a guy named D.D. Palmer who thought that ghosts were telling him to create it.
1:35
They believe that the joints and the nerves that go through our body are the cause of every ailment that we know of.
1:45
Unfortunately, Chiropractic is a full-on pseudoscience.
1:48
There are certain chiropractors that maybe stay in the lane of more physical therapy, and there's a little bit of data to suggest that for certain types of low back pain, chiropractic adjustment can offer temporary relief, but it's not fixing a musculoskeletal problem and it's definitely not doing the other things that chiropractors claim to do.
2:08
So if you see the abbreviation DC after someone's name on social media, that means that they're a chiropractor and they're not a medical or scientific expert.
2:17
At Pathogen Flock, "Is it just me, or is belief in pseudoscience rising recently?"
2:21
This is absolutely correct.
2:30
We have seen a dramatic rise in anti-science and pseudoscience beliefs, and this does trend with the prevalence of social media.
2:30
It also coincides with the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing amount of politicization of vaccines.
2:30
So this past year, only 93.1% of entering school-aged children received vaccinations for the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine.
2:30
This is a 2% drop compared to the previous school year, particularly for measles disease where you need at least 95% coverage to stop the spread of measles.
3:08
This is a very concerning trend.
3:08
At Guts Not Guts wants to know, "How the F did the vaccines cause autism myth even start?"
3:08
This myth started in 1998 because of a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield who has since lost his medical license and the ability to practice medicine, but he published a paper in The Lancet, which is a very prestigious medical journal, and claimed that he had to demonstrate a link between the MMR vaccine, which is the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and autism symptoms in children.
3:37
The problem was he falsified all of the data in that paper.
3:41
More than that, he used self-reports from parents who were planning to sue the existing manufacturers of the MMR vaccine.
3:48
On top of that, he was trying to sell and market his own MMR vaccine.
3:58
But because it was published in such a prestigious medical journal, it took the world by storm and caused a lot of fear.
4:00
Eventually, that paper was retracted, but that retraction did not occur until 2010, 12 years later.
4:09
Now, in recent years, we're seeing measles rates above what we have ever seen in the US, and it is really a cause for concern because the very first measles vaccine was put on the market in 1963.
4:19
So we have over 60 years of data that demonstrate that there is no relationship between vaccines and autism.
4:29
At Briney for Trump, "GMOs change our DNA every day and give people several diseases.
4:34
Why did we approve of this?"
4:34
This is not true.
4:37
In the 1980s and 1990s, the papaya was being wiped out by a virus called the papaya ringspot virus.
4:44
So we created a GMO papaya that can resist the papaya ringspot virus.
4:57
90% of the papayas are GMO, and when you eat them, it is not changing DNA.
4:57
So when you eat the papaya, you're eating all of its cells, and all of those cells contain DNA.
4:57
So those DNA molecules are going to enter your stomach and it's going to mix with an enzyme called pepsin.
4:57
So when the pepsin interacts with the DNA molecule, it blasts it apart into all of these individual subunits, and therefore the DNA is no longer intact.
5:18
It's not going to change your DNA.
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It's not going to cause any harmful consequences.
5:27
At Johnny V 45385760 wants to know, "How can you tell if a health influencer is legit or full of...?"
5:33
Some of the red flags to look for are, number one, they are trying to evoke very strong negative emotions, things like fear, anxiety, or worry, particularly as it relates to your health or the health of your children or your family.
5:47
Number two, they're making all or none statements, they're saying that this thing is causing cancer or this thing is going to fix some disorder.
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Number three, if they're selling you something that is related to the claims that they're making, whether that is a supplement or a diet plan or a protocol or a book.
6:04
Number four, if they have an obvious conflict of interest, are they working for the company of the product that they're selling you?
6:13
And last but not least, if they're speaking way outside of their area of expertise.
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If someone is a neuroscientist that specializes in optic nerve signaling and they're pretending to be an expert in infectious disease immunology, that's probably a red flag.
6:28
At 10,000 Problems wants to know, "Why does homeopathic medicine work so much better than real medicine?"
6:35
Unfortunately, that is not the case, but let me tell you a little bit about what Homeopathy is because it's often confused with other sorts of alternative remedies.
6:42
Homeopathy is a pseudoscience that was created or invented in the 1700s by a German guy named Samuel Hahnemann.
6:54
He created this based on two beliefs.
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The first is that like cures like, meaning that if something causes a symptom, that same substance can cure an ailment that creates that symptom.
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Onion causes watery eyes when you cut it, therefore homeopathic onion is going to cure things like allergies that also cause watery eyes.
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But that goes along with the second belief or the law of infinite decimals, meaning that the remedy becomes more potent the more it is diluted.
6:54
If you find a label on a homeopathic remedy that says 12C, C means 100, and 12 means that you've diluted the substance 12 times 100-fold over, which means you have one part in this many parts, which is also called one septillion.
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So what that means is that there's no actual active ingredient in that.
7:44
And that is probably a good thing because there are many homeopathic remedies that can be very dangerous if you would ingest them at normal dosage.
7:44
For example, teething tablets that claim to have homeopathic Belladonna, which is deadly nightshade, were contaminated with measurable levels of Belladonna and hundreds of babies developed seizures and at least 10 babies died.
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This happened starting in 2010 and 2012, and there were several brands that were to blame.
8:09
One final danger of Homeopathy is that many people believe that they're taking something that's beneficial and beyond the fact that it is nothing more than a sugar pill, it often leads people to forgo actual medical care, which is one of the biggest harms of all.
8:23
At Paul Meta 555 asks, "Are cell phone towers detrimental to our health?"
8:42
"Why so many?"
8:42
"Why do they emit high-pitched noises?"
8:42
"Are they carcinogenic?"
8:42
"Why the spiking cancer rate since they arrived?"
8:42
Cell phone towers look like this, you have this primary node that's coming out from all sides and you have these radio waves that are being emitted.
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You also have these secondary nodes that are a little bit smaller, but all of these radio frequency waves are projected in every direction because otherwise we wouldn't have cell reception.
8:55
So this myth kind of started because people heard the word radio frequency radiation and got scared because we know that there are certain types of radiation that are linked to cancer.
9:06
Here we have the electromagnetic spectrum.
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Things on this end are very high energy, and this rainbow right here is our visible light spectrum.
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Ultraviolet and above, these types of radiation can potentially damage our cells and our body and can lead to changes in our cells and mutations.
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But when you get below the energy level of visible light and you get into infrared and microwaves way down here, those are your radio waves.
9:32
So this radio frequency radiation is one of the lowest energy types of radiation and it's considered what we call non-ionizing, meaning it cannot penetrate your body.
9:44
So even if those radio waves are all over our planet because we have cell reception everywhere, the amount of energy that they're exerting is not actually going to damage your body or cause you any potential harm.
9:58
At John Peterson FW wants to know, "I'd really like to know from someone that actually knows if buying organic food for double a price is actually worth it/better for you?"
10:12
The biggest misconception is that organic is pesticide free.
10:12
Here we have organic blueberries, they are grown using organic pesticides, and organic pesticides are simply chemicals that have not been synthetically altered from the original state in which they exist somewhere in nature.
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In contrast, these are conventional blueberries who were grown using conventional pesticides.
10:12
Conventional pesticides are those that can be synthetically altered in order to improve their specificity.
10:12
A 2010 study in PLOS ONE was looking at six different pesticides that are used to control aphids on soybean plants.
10:12
It was found to not only control aphids, but it also killed the natural predators of the aphids, the insidious flowerbug and the Asian lady beetle, having a more broad negative ecological impact.
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Another misconception about all produce is that they have all these residues of pesticides on them.
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We're talking about parts per trillion, parts per billion.
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These are minuscule levels.
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If you're very concerned about it, absolutely wash your produce in water, but aside from that, you don't need to be stressing about your produce.
10:12
At Toya Rachelle wants to know, "What do people think they're cleansing when they do juice and smoothie cleanses or detoxes?"
11:24
I hate to break it to you, if you have functioning organ systems, you're already detoxing all day every day.
11:32
So when people say that they're doing a parasite cleanse or a cleanse and they're claiming that these stringy things in their poop is parasites, what they're actually seeing is mucus and sloughed off intestinal cells, which is not a good thing, it's actually harming your GI tract.
11:32
At Big Papa Briggs wants to know, "On a scale from 1 to 10, how scared should I be of Lyme disease?"
11:56
So as someone who's actually studied Lyme disease for several decades, Lyme disease is actually not as easy to get as you think.
12:03
Not only do you have to have the right species of tick actually bite you, but it has to feed on you for at least 24 hours in order to have a chance to transmit the bacteria for you.
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Your likelihood or risk of getting Lyme disease is very, very low.
12:16
Scale of 1 to 10, I would give it about a two or a three.
12:21
There's only two species of ticks in the US that can transmit Lyme disease.
12:25
There are some areas in the country that you have higher risk, like the Midwest and the Northeast, and this is because you have higher proportions of both the ticks that live there and the bacteria in those ticks.
12:34
In other parts of the country, the risk is almost zero.
12:36
There are a lot of common myths about Lyme disease.
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The first is that once you're infected, you're always going to be infected, and that is just not true.
12:44
It is a bacterial infection, and once you've taken antibiotics for standard course, they're very effective treatments, you're going to eliminate the bacteria.
12:52
But unfortunately, since it was discovered in the 1980s, it has really been the target of a lot of misinformation and that can be attributed partially to some of these tests that are sold direct to consumer that claim to be able to diagnose you with Lyme disease.
13:15
Unfortunately, these tests are not FDA approved and are not accurate, but they tell people that they have Lyme disease when in reality they do not.
13:13
So it creates the perception that Lyme disease is not only more widespread than it is, but is much more prevalent and severe.
13:19
At Retired Dent, "I'm seeing more and more parents giving their children non-fluoridated toothpaste.
13:26
What's up with that?"
13:28
"Why are people so afraid of fluoride?"
13:30
Fluoride is a naturally occurring substance that can be found in minerals and soil and in our environment, and it was determined many, many years ago that communities that had naturally higher levels of fluoride in their water were less likely to develop cavities.
13:43
So we started fluoridating water and adding fluoride to toothpaste over 75 years ago, and that's really plummeted the amount of dental carries or cavities.
13:55
Unfortunately, claims on social media that are not based on reality tell people that fluoride is a neurotoxin.
14:02
What they don't mention is that the dosage at which you'd have to consume fluoride in order to have any toxic effect is well outside of the reality of anything you could possibly consume.
14:18
Fluoride in water is added at 0.7 milligrams per kilogram, which means that in order to hit the minimum threshold where you might have skeletal effects from fluoride, if you were a child weighing 22 pounds, you'd have to drink 57 liters of water a day.
14:18
So it really is not a concern.
14:30
At Karen Fron says, "Everybody should have a gluten-free diet.
14:36
I'm just saying."
14:36
The reality is, if you don't have a medical reason to avoid gluten, you don't need to avoid gluten.
14:45
Gluten is a structural protein that's found in certain grains like wheat, barley, rye, and others, and there are certain medical conditions that you should avoid this particular protein.
14:50
This would be something like celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disorder.
14:59
There's been a lot of studies in whether or not avoiding gluten offers a benefit, and the big consensus is that it doesn't.
15:02
Sometimes we hear claims that the gluten here is worse because we use all the processed chemicals and we use all the pesticides, and when you went to Europe, you were able to eat all the bread you wanted and you didn't have those issues with the gluten.
15:15
And unfortunately, the gluten quantity in wheats across countries is essentially the same.
15:22
On top of that, we also use the same pesticides.
15:25
Glyphosate is one that's often demonized because it's used to dry down wheat, but it's also used in Europe.
15:31
Europe imports millions of pounds of American wheat every year to make the very breads that you're eating.
15:37
I would suggest that maybe you're more relaxed while you're on vacation and you're not gulping down your food in between bringing kids to activities and swallowing air, leading to the perceived feeling of bloat, which has nothing to do with the gluten, but everything to do with the rushing and the stress that you have with your day-to-day life.
15:54
At Teal PB wants to know, "What makes a study any study reliable?"
15:58
So when we talk about the scientific method, we have what we call the hierarchy of evidence.
16:04
At the bottom, you have things that are generally based on small sample sizes or opinions.
16:08
From there, you're going into animal trials and in vitro data.
16:25
So these are your petri dish studies or your animal data that are not automatically representative of what's happening in people.
16:25
Say you want to study a disease process in humans and you use an animal model that that disease doesn't occur in.
16:25
That's not going to be an accurate or representative research model because it's not going to give you data that you can then generalize to people.
16:34
Once you get above that, you're moving into human studies, randomized controlled trials.
16:43
They're usually also blinded.
16:43
Those are considered our gold standard.
16:43
So with vaccine studies, this is very common.
16:43
There is a group of people that received the placebo, which is usually salt water, and there are people that received the vaccine.
16:43
None of them know what they received.
16:43
You might report different symptoms than if you knew you were getting the placebo.
16:58
At the very top, you have what we call meta-analyses and systematic reviews.
17:02
These are analyses where we take multiple studies and we pull them and analyze them together.
17:13
There are really high-quality journals like JAMA, which is the Journal of the American Medical Association, or PNAS, which is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
17:19
But as a rule of thumb, if you're trying to find information on a given topic, you want to look for at the minimum that it is indeed peer-reviewed and that it is aligning with other topics or other papers that are in that field.
17:33
It is very, very unlikely that one study is going to displace the thousands of other studies within a given field on a topic.
17:33
We call that cherry-picking.
17:33
At Wishwell Therapy wants to know, "Study after study has revealed that aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin lead to cancer and other disorders of the cells and organ."
17:33
Saccharin was actually banned temporarily in the US because there was thought to be a relationship between saccharin and bladder cancer.
17:33
It turns out that the studies they were using were using a type of rat.
17:33
These rats had a genetic predisposition that they developed these bladder crystals and made them more likely to develop tumors.
17:33
Not only were we using rats that were not an appropriate or realistic research model, these rats were being fed close to 10% of their body weight per day in saccharin.
17:33
And it was at that point that a proportion of the male rats developed bladder cancers.
17:33
Follow-up studies using rhesus macaques, mice, and looking at human data have demonstrated that saccharin is not related to cancer in humans at all, and so the ban was lifted.
17:33
But ultimately, that stigma related to saccharin has actually transferred to other artificial sweeteners.
18:51
At Fly Rodo asks, "How do we know that supplements work?"
18:56
"Is there any real research on all these supplements that exist, e.g., athletic greens, etc.?"
19:00
So in the United States alone, the dietary supplement industry is worth nearly $60 billion.
19:15
Unlike FDA-approved medications, supplements do not have to prove that they are helping or offering a benefit.
19:15
A lot of people may take powdered vitamin C and mix it into their water when they feel like they have a cold or a flu coming on.
19:24
Vitamin C supplementation doesn't reduce the duration of respiratory illnesses.
19:28
It doesn't lessen the severity of them.
19:29
It doesn't prevent them.
19:31
There's been a lot of studies especially in recent years that have been looking at the benefits of vitamin D supplements.
20:09
So this one assessed the efficacy of vitamin D and zinc in combination to improve outcomes of COVID-19, and ultimately what these show is that vitamin D supplementation did not lessen disease severity, did not reduce hospital stay, did not reduce severity of symptoms, and did not improve mortality outcomes.
20:09
There was a study that actually found over 50% of immune-boosting supplements were lying about what was in the product, and worse, some were not mentioning things that were in them.
20:12
At Penn by Cameron wants to know, "Is there scientific evidence of crystals before and after charging?"
20:17
Many people believe that crystals have energetic powers, that the crystal or the energy in the crystal is vibrating with your own personal energy, and unfortunately, there have been no studies that have suggested that this is a true relationship.
20:31
It is likely nothing more than the placebo effect.
20:36
The placebo effect can be very strong.
20:39
There is a body of data that suggests that in some instances, people can feel like they're recovering from things more quickly or that their symptoms or side effects are lower because they have that power of the placebo.
20:53
So we don't want to discount the placebo effect, but we certainly don't want it to replace actual science-based medicine.
20:59
At Janani 802 wants to know, "Can fasting help cancer patients?"
21:03
So this claim is really pervasive, and as someone who works in cancer research, is really harmful for a lot of reasons and it kind of breaks my heart.
21:18
This claim originated from in vitro studies or petri dish studies where we're growing cancer cells, and what they found was depriving them of nutrients or simulating fasting caused the cancer cells to die.
21:18
But what that fails to account for is that any cell deprived of nutrient is going to fail to grow, and what's happening in a piece of plastic or a plastic dish like this is not what is happening inside the complex being of a human who has cancer.
21:23
Fasting can actually be harmful if you're battling cancer because you're depriving yourself and your body of very essential nutrients and calories that you need for your immune system to do its best work.
21:52
So those are all the questions for today.
21:54
Always be skeptical when you encounter things that may not be as they seem.
21:59
Thanks for watching pseudoscience support.