April 20, 2018 • 53 mins
Nowadays it seems like a few times a year we’ll hear about a food scandal -- contaminated meat, perhaps, or recalled yogurt. We’ll also inevitably hear something like “studies show coffee is good, or bad, for you.” When you add up all these complaints, studies and articles it becomes alarmingly easy to think the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Or, rather, breadbasket. So what's the truth of the matter? Grab a snack and join the guys as they explore several troubling, possible terrifying foods consumed every day in the good ol' U.S. of A.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. Welcome
(00:24):
back to the show. My name is Matt. My name
is Noel. They called me Ben. We are joined with
our super producer. Most importantly, you're here. You are you,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Did you, guys, happen to grab lunch today? Yes, I
grabbed it double fisted. Well, not surprise. But what what
did you have for lunch today? Some delicious sausage just
(00:49):
just that, just just like a pile of sausage. Yes,
I threw it on a fire and then I just
grabbed it with my bare hands off the fire and
just ate upon it. You must have some real calloused hands, class, Matt.
What about you know? I had some lemon pepper chicken
breast that I prepared this morning, mixed with a nice
root vegetable medley that I had left over from a
(01:09):
few nights prior. It was delightful. Blue Apron dot Com
okay with myself? Whoa with your skills? Talked to you
by Blue Apron and the Gordon Ramsey Masterclass. And as
Checkers says in there, as Checkers is a fast food
chain here for people outside of the United States, as
Checkers is wont to say you gotta eat Is that
(01:32):
Checkers when they follow it up with you gotta eat Checkers?
Oh yeah, yeah, there's an implication not to be too
Dennis Reynolds about it, but it remains true. And food
is one of the great U nineteen factors of our
our species. We can't agree on much, but we can't
agree that we should all probably eat something. And nowadays
(01:54):
it seems like a few times a year we'll hear
about a food scandal. It's so not that it's common,
but it's uh frequent enough not to be astounding every
time it happens. There's like horse meat in some pies
in the UK, or something you know, yeah, or the
spinach has been contaminated with this or the other in
(02:16):
its preparation process. And inasmuch as it is a thing
across our entire species, just the very word taste implies
such a specificity of preference to food, and we use
that word to talk about any kind of preference for
all things. So you know, yes, food very universal, but
also very particular. Yes, yeah, and there are also cases
(02:37):
of recalled yogurt, both in both senses of the word cases.
I recall the yogurt I had none the different kind
of you're talking about spoiled, contaminated yogurt that gets forcibly
removed from the market, right right, Yes, of course. And
we'll also inevitably here uh pop science studies that come
(02:59):
out right that have a very alarmist, almost web Md
tone to them. You know, recent studies show that coffee
is tremendously good. Oh no, weight, bad for you? Oh
no weight, It's good again, you know, yeah, exactly like
butter is another thing we hear about sugar, and they
kind of intertwine, and one of them is giving you
(03:21):
cancer and the other one is saving your life. And
when you add up all these complaints and these studies,
these contradictory opinions and perspectives, it becomes alarmingly and surprisingly
easy to think that the world is going to hell
in a handbasket, or should I say a bread basket?
What is a bread basket? Like a cornucopia? It's I've
(03:43):
seen you know, I was thinking the same thing with
a bread box. They're literally just the whole bread sort
of an outdated thing too. I don't think people keep
their bread in boxes typically anymore more in plastic in
the cabinet. My parents totally have a wooden bread box,
but they don't keep bread in to do that. Yes
they do, they do, yep, and all kinds of I
was gonna say egg mcmuffins, but that's not a thing.
(04:05):
You've clearly gone mad, you know, you know it's it's true.
Isn't it true that bread will tend to go stale
more quickly in a refrigerator. That's that's something I had heard. Also,
I would love it if people kept bread the way
that bonds. Supervillains keep a cat, like it was just
on their armchair, and they would pet it while they
(04:26):
talked to you, like a nice baghette that you had
just like tucked under your arm and you pet it
like a creature. Life hack if you buy a baguette
and you eat half of it and you don't want
it to go stale, put it in the freezer and
then the next day, um put it directly in the oven.
It is fresh and crispy, as convened. Just putting that
out there, life has been hacked. Life has indeed been hacked,
and bighetts and more. And regardless of what we hear about,
(04:51):
you know, the dirty yogurt industry or contaminated meat. Uh,
the truth of the matter is that, at least here
in the unit I need states, things in general are
safer than they have been in the past. You can
go into a grocery store nowadays and you can buy
(05:11):
I can of what spam, a can of you know, uh,
the tuna. I'm thinking of things that seem weird to
be in cans. Uh. And you have a pretty high
likelihood of not dying immediately, which is amazing. Yeah. But
about deviled ham? How do you guys feel about deviled ham? Honestly,
I don't even really know what it is. I think
(05:33):
it's kind of like spam, but it's just canned ham
and it's got a little devil with a pitchfork on it.
To me that says, stay, oh, stay away. I love
the idea of devil to being a process. And I
think we talked before, I don't know it was on
air off about what is it to devil something, to
bedevil it? In my mind, when you devil something, you
(05:53):
take out a portion of it. You you mix it up,
like grind it all up, and then you put it
back on to a part that has not been ground up,
like if you devil an egg. Sure, there we go.
So maybe the ham is a portion of it has
been ground up to pieces and then put back with
the rest of the ham and as clack out maybe
bird style. I feel like we're onto something. And the
(06:15):
good news is that regardless of the way something is
prepared here, at least in the United States and in
many other countries, there's some sort of organization that supervises
and regulates the quality of these food products. This was
not always the case. In fact, the reason we have
the f d A today is thinks in large part
(06:37):
to a imperfect fellow named Harvey Wiley. It's true. And
then you and I actually did an episode about Mr Wiley,
Dr Wiley. Dare I say, um, I think he was
an empty so we'll call him yeah for our other show,
Ridiculous History. And we talked about his poison squad, which
was a thing that he assembled, a study made up
(06:58):
of some very iron gutted fellows who volunteered to be
poisoned on purpose. Effectively. Yes, and that you were talking
with us about this off air. Right, Yeah, there's a
quotation about the there were twelve younger guys who would
they would go to this kitchen where foods would be
prepared for them, and with increasing doses of food additives
(07:21):
stuff that Um, later on, we would know you do
not want to put in your foods. But at the time,
something like borax was added to foods just because it
was a food added to increase the yield or something. Yes, exactly.
A lot of times they were for preservation, to keep
the foods fresh longer. But you know this, this gentleman,
Harvey Um, Harvey Wiley realized that perhaps some of these
(07:44):
are very very dangerous and they illustrated it perfectly by
giving these increased doses until the subjects would just get
awfully sick. And they realized that that's the threshold. Oh
there we are, yeah after the fact, right, yeah, yeah,
Oh that's how much more axes? Too much more ax?
Harvey Wiley. As as you can learn in depth in
our episode on Ridiculous History, Harvey Wiley was a man
(08:07):
on a mission, and ultimately his work led to a
passage of law in nineteen o six that eventually led
to the f d A today, they're tasked with determining
safety standards for food manufactured in, grown in, or imported
to the US overall, as well as some exportation since
(08:29):
it's would be grown or created here. We live in
a divisive political age. But one thing that's beautiful about
this idea, if not this organization, is that everyone can
agree it's it's a good thing to try to keep
fingers and meat packing factories attached to the hands they
came in with instead of in you know, your next
(08:51):
uh can of deviled ham. And that's not to say
that there aren't conspiracy theories about the f d A
and what they may or may not be doing at
l and programs, and that we've covered before in the show,
and if you're interested, you can look up some of
our some of our stuff on GMOs and there's several
other topic rominaded vegetable oil. Yeah, and whether or not
(09:13):
the you know, the conspiracy theories around whether or not
the FDA is purposefully trying to get some of these
things into our diet. But you know, that's for another day,
and we're gonna look at both sides of that in
a little bit. But before we do. Why don't we
kind of give a little rundown of some of the facts. Absolutely,
So let's look at the scale of the FDA first,
the Food and Drug Administration. They are a huge deal.
(09:36):
Some estimates report the twenty cents out of every single
dollar Americans spend goes toward a product that has been
supervised or regulated by the FDA. We're talking one trillion
dollars in goods. Wow. I got to the grocery store
like five times a week. I like to do little shops,
so I definitely am part of this trend. And here's
(09:58):
the here's the hilarious thing about an entity with so
much power that has such an ubiquitous effect right on
consumers and on organizations. As Matt said, the FDA is
often roundly criticized, but it's criticized in such a strange way.
It's often accused of both overregulation and at the same
(10:21):
time underregulation, doing way too much and doing not near enough. Constantly,
it's constantly accused of these things. Well, yeah, and you
imagine that this one administration one, I mean a very
large group of human beings that are working at it,
but they're they're covering, Like you said, a whole host
of different products, from drugs to food. That's a lot
(10:42):
of things, man, I mean one trillion dollars in goods.
That's a lot of goods. I mean each one of those.
You know, some might be less than a dollar, like
a like a particular piece of produce, but you know,
a lot of package stuff it's like five or six bucks.
We're talking about millions and millions and millions of individual
items of food that this one organization, SHIN is responsible
for ensuring that we are not getting poisoned by Yeah,
(11:04):
and I love to point that out too, because we
are counting things that are less than a dollar. Everything
from a single grape, if you if you buy a
single grape, if you're at that point, a kiwi, a kiwi,
that's probably a better example, uh, to the you know,
to some very high end seafood or something. Sure, let's
(11:25):
look at the idea of overregulation. When people talk about
the FDA overregulating stuff, they're talking usually about what they
see as some sort of unfair censorship in terms of
the language used in advertising and products exactly. So, take
dietary supplements. We've all we've all seen the infomercials, you know,
(11:46):
my life was a dumpster fire, and still I started
taking fish oil eight times a day. Or you know,
I'm making that example up. Those products fall smack dab
in the middle of the Venn diagram between food and drugs.
Almost a drug, almost a food, but not quite either,
which is the slogan for Matt's Newurbal supplement company, right, Yeah,
(12:12):
it's not quite food or a drug. Matticaps like that,
the fine makers of Matt Mints. Yeah. So the the
advocates of the supplement industry, people hoisting all kinds of
vitamins at you. They'll argue that the FDA prevents manufacturers
from making claims about the effectiveness of a product, even
when research, they say, proves the benefits are genuine. But
(12:34):
you're you're talking about such a range here of of
things that a supplement can supposedly do, because you can
still find things occasionally that will claim to cure cancer,
and it will be a supplement of an extract of
a certain fruit or a berry or something. And you know,
when you when you still can have things like that,
(12:54):
my opinion is that you need to have something regulating it. Say,
you know, you can't say that this will let you
be able to fly. Mm hmm. That's probably a bad idea, right. Well,
there's also I mean, how is saying something would cure
cancer any different? Correct? People on the other side would argue, Yeah,
that's that's a great point because we have to ask
why why this comes about. It's because, as far as
(13:19):
the f d A is concerned, legally, dietary supplements, whether
they are purported cancer cures, it's vitamin B twelve, what
fish oil, whatever you want, regardless they're considered foods, which
means they're makers can only create limited claims about the
structure or function, and specifically, to Matt's point, they cannot
(13:40):
claim that any supplement can prevent, cure, or mitigate UH
disease or condition, regardless of what kind of scientific literature
they find or pay for regarding those abilities. And I mean,
through our various shows that we do here at how
stuff works, we've encountered advertisers that have very specific language
in the copy that they give you where it says
(14:02):
you cannot say this, you can you have to say this.
This is the part you have to read. And we
know that from things like medications on television and have
those litany of side effects and things that are clearly
regulated by law that they have to rattle it off
or else who would do it right, because it's just
totally derailed the experience of watching that, you know, delightful
scene of a young child and then her mother frolicking
(14:22):
through a field of green grass and being pushed on
a swing set or something. What's that old trope in
stock stock images and stock footage lady eating a salad
alone and laughing. Now you will not be able to
unsee that. But it's also I'm really glad we brought
this up, because I believe it or not, residents of
(14:42):
the United States, those strange, very vague, as Noll said,
pharmaceutical ads that we see on television are illegal in
most other developed countries. Yea, even having billboards for any
kind of drug, he's illegal in a lot of places,
but advertising of any kind, and that lends credence to
the idea that the pharmaceutical industry in the United States
(15:05):
has a massive amount of control. This is something that
even members of Congress take issue with. So a critic
who would say that the f d A is censoring
dietary supplement manufacturers would be someone like Ron Paul uh.
He says that this stuff comes about because the f
d A is in bed with the pharmaceutical companies. They
(15:26):
don't want you to know that, you know, uh st
John's wart can cure your brain fever, your I'm just
gonna make up a disease your your gutter hand. On
November tenth, two thousand and five, Ron Paul introduced something
called the Health Freedom Protection Act HR four two D two,
(15:47):
which he argues would prevent the f d A from
censoring truthful claims about the curative, mitigative, or preventative effects
of dietary supplements. He said this would also adopt the
federal courts suggested use of disclaimers as an alternative to
straight up censorship. So in this case of censorship or
(16:07):
over regulation, people who believe it also believe there's an
active conspiracy of foot by big pharma to prevent people
from knowing that their food can be their medicine, which
is something you hear a lot if you're a fan
of dead Press, another alternative hip hop. But what about
the other side of the argument, What about the people
(16:28):
who say the f d A is not doing near
enough For people who believe that the FDA underregulates food.
The agency is a washing corruption, a lack of oversight,
and at times purposeful railroading. A valuable medical research. Whoa, So,
what kind of stuff are we talking about here? We'll
hold your horses, buddy. We'll get right into that after
(16:50):
a quick ad break. So, the United States, despite being
a massive developed country, permits multiple food additives that are
generally acknowledged throughout the rest of the world as either
unhealthy or dangerous in some way. Remember earlier when we
(17:11):
were talking about advertising of pharmaceuticals and billboards and stuff.
Now that's illegal, and a lot of other countries very
similar case here. Why is this? That is the crux
of the questions. So it might be surprising for people
who have traveled to the U S from another country
to notice the change in food. If you're if you're
(17:33):
a redditor, if you learn on Reddit, then you'll read
things that people from other countries visiting the US have
written about regarding what confused them or what surprised them
for the good or the bad when they visited this country.
And one of the top things they always mentioned is
the food. They say it's delicious, The portions are way
(17:53):
too big. Why is there such an abundance, a plethora,
an over abundance of food, and then later why is
so much of this stuff so bad for people? Like
but the in specifics, we have multiple specific examples of dangerous, scary,
or even terrifying things that you might have just eaten earlier,
(18:16):
this week or today you might be eating now as
you listen to this podcast and pet your baget on
your arm on your armchair. One of the one of
the big examples that's familiar to a lot of people
would be food coloring. Right, food coloring, you see it
in candy a lot, and so does um and a
(18:37):
lot of just manufactured foods. And whereas some chemicals have
their entire name printed out, a lot of food coloring
just has a description of the color and a number, right,
like yellow number five one better than yellow number four.
Yellow number five is a very strange one. Do you
(18:58):
guys remember the rumors of yellow number five in Mountain
dew right when you were growing up? Did you tell
there was a rumor that was always at my school,
at least before the internets, that yellow five food coloring
would reduce your sperm count. I was going to say,
shrink or peep and and um mess with your downstairs
(19:18):
area in various ways. The rumors were different throughout Australia.
Huh yes, the old downstairs um. But but it goes
back to some real things in this guy named Ben
fine Gold who was he was working at, I believe
the medical center, the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. He he
(19:39):
mentioned that this and other food dies may cause hyperactivity
in children, or reproposed this idea at least, and there
were studies that rebuted this claim. There were some studies
that showed perhaps there was some truth to this claim.
And it's that same situation that I think we've been
in for a long time where depending on how you
interpret data from something or data from something, let's study
(20:02):
like this, you can make it lean one way or
the other. Really, I mean, that makes sense, and that's
a dangerous thing we always run into. That's why you
always want to be careful when you hear nutrition advice.
You want to see not only is this from a nutritionist,
but wait, wait, what school did this nutrition is go to? Well,
not only that, like people who write studies are all
(20:24):
about numbers and data, and when you package that up
and put it in the press release, you are editorializing
said data, and you are giving it weight with language
that it's not really how it was intended to be read.
Maybe there's an abstract that gives you, like a basic
rundown of the findings of the study. But when it's
it's like when you start taking movie reviews out of context,
you know, I mean, it becomes a whole ball of wax,
(20:45):
except in this case it's your health rather than just
if your eyes enjoyed something or not true true. And this,
this point is so incredibly important. We would add to
it too that another question is who paid for to study,
because the scientists are typically not out there working entirely
for free. In the case of coloring agents, we we
(21:09):
should point out that they do play an important role,
especially if there's competition in a grocery store, because most,
not not all, but a lot of the food that
we eat has an artificial color so that it adheres
to our idea of what that food should look like,
as you know, as it was presented in a Norman
(21:30):
Rockwell painting or in a commercial. And this this explains
why artificial dies have increased, like the use of artificial
dies has increased fivefolds since the mid nineteen fifties. It's
like the idea of margarine being colored yellow. Margarine and
it's untreated form is white, but people expect it to
(21:52):
be yellow because it's meant to be like a butter substitute.
And there's a whole another story there about how margarine
was maligned by the butter industry because it was seen
as competition, unfair competition because it was cheaper. But it
just goes to show that we it matters to us
as consumers what color something is. I still have an
aversion to margarine just because of growing up hearing stories
(22:12):
about oh, don't eat margarine. What really? Yeah, well you're
from a bread box community. Well yeah, but my parents
always only stock margine at their house. Really yeah, margarine house. Yeah,
margarine house. Dude. My wife's Cuban family is like, what
is margarine? Get that out of here? Why are you
doing this to us? Matthew, and I said, I love
(22:33):
you and I will be with you forever because real
butter is the way to go. So yes, so we
see this, We we see this fight between additives between
food impersonators, right and today most artificial colors that that
you're going to find in use are actually made from
(22:53):
coal tar. This is the same stuff that seal coats
products to protect the shine of an industrial floors. You
can see it in head Life shampoo as well because
it kills lice. Yeah, yeah, great thing called indigo teen
I think is what they call it. That's the blue
number one or two number two, I believe. Just good stuff,
(23:15):
really good stuff. And there's there's another specific example which
I know a lot of people are waiting for us
to mention, and it's the use of antibiotics in live stock.
This regardless of whether you're a vegetarian or you're a
person who just wants to eat a live cow every
day for the rest of your life, which is a
(23:36):
lot of beef. We can say that they are compelling
studies UH indicating the dangers of using antibiotics in live stock.
This is used in the pork industry as well as
the beef industry, and one of the concerns there is
(23:56):
that this could somehow lead to the creation of a superbug.
I think we mentioned this later in our our superbug episode.
Because doctors have been historically over prescribing antibiotics to human
patients and there's much less regulation in the world of
non human patients. Dude, as you can probably tell, I
have a cold right now. If I went to my
doctor today with this cold, they would give me a
(24:18):
Z pack and send me out the door. They do
every time. I have a medicine cabinet full of these
because I never take them, because they never actually fix
the problem. And that is like a systemic cultural thing.
It's weird. Well, then, when you talk about factory farming
and just the closeness of all the animals and everything,
you're giving antibiotics many times to animals as a preventative
(24:39):
so they don't get sick, which is a whole other
just issue. And now in the European Union, the use
of antibiotics has been drastically phased down or out, you know,
country by country. I think Sweden bandit back in six.
You can still see it in use in some other
(25:00):
countries after that, but they were making phase out plans,
you know, and to take it down to like six
of our current antibiotic use. And yeah, the preventative thing
mainly mainly concerns people because it could essentially be like
a a tough love camp for bacteria. Yeah, that's you're
(25:23):
exactly right. In sharp stark contrast, eight percent of antibiotics
sold in the United States are used on livestock, not
on Wow. Wow, that's incredible, especially since it's becoming more
and more popular to buy non antibiotic meat, or at
(25:44):
least it's growing a little bit. I'm not saying it's ubiquitous,
growing as fast as those cows on the hormones, though,
are there. Yeah, And that's the whole thing. We have
so many human beings in this country and throughout the
world that you've got to provide food for them. So
how do you do that. You you you have to make
sure you have enough healthy you know, in this case
cattle or chickens or pigs or whatever, and you have
(26:05):
to make sure they're growing as fast as possible. There's
a really interesting film on Netflix called ka Um. It's
about the breeding of these super pigs and how that
enters into this kind of like near future kind of
dystopian society where this is part of the food production cycle.
But you start to see they kind of pitch it
(26:25):
as this like delightful thing where this little girl grows
raises the best super pig that's the most friendly and
the largest or whatever, and then at the end of
the day you start to see the behind the curtain stuff,
how this sol enters into this like factory farming, meat market.
That's all incredibly dark. It's a really really cool film.
If you haven't seen it, I have not, but I will.
(26:46):
Oh yeah it should and uh he's right about it
going dark. Do be warned. Yeah. So yeah, while we're
while we're here in this hypothetical farm, right, let's let's
look at the hormones, the growth hormones that I think
we were mentioning here. Uh, these synthetic growth hormones like
(27:06):
r B G H, r B s T were approved
for using cows by the f D a way back in.
This did not fly in other countries. And at the
risk of sounding dismissive, we must ask, where's the beef?
M I know these are all gonna be clunkers today. Well, well,
the issue here is that not only do these cows,
(27:28):
the ones that are injected with these hormones suffer, they
suffer from significant health problems, some of which then get
treated by guess what, administering those antibiotics to the cows
that then get sick. They're also birth defects that these
these cattle have to deal with. Due to the hormones
and the products, the products for human consumption that include
(27:49):
r B g H and r BST, they do not
need to be labeled as being used. Now a lot
of a lot of companies will say on their packaging,
you know, these are hormone free or antibiotic free or
something like that. If you find milk, were sometimes cheeses,
all that kind of stuff, those products, you'll find that.
(28:12):
But if it doesn't say it, you kind of just
have to hope that it's not being used. And there's
a bit of a I don't want to say a rant,
but I have a position on this which is entirely
my opinion. We know for a long time that people
had been worried about possible dangers from consuming things that
(28:34):
had genetically modified organisms in them or GMOs, right, and
there are similar concerns about consuming something that consuming meat
from an animal that was given these growth hormones. And
on the other side, there would be people who consider
themselves skeptical of any dangerous there and they would say
(28:55):
stuff like, well, uh, quite a few of the agricultural
products that we know and love today are if you
go back far enough genetically modified organisms. Corn didn't start
as corn. People made it into corn by breeding it. Uh,
And then they would say, you know, also, if there's
no hard proof that a growth hormone will injure you
(29:21):
if you eat it, then why do we need to
label it? But I feel like that's unnecessarily I don't know.
I feel like that's getting the wrong part of the argument,
because if it's not harmful, the opposite is true, then
why have a law against labeling it as such? But
don't you think that those foods that don't expressly say
these were not used almost definitely have these hormones in them.
(29:44):
It feels like that would be the assumption now, right,
because it's like a premium. You're paying a premium for
products that don't have these things because these are things
that up your yield and allow you to get more
bang for your bucks. So logic would dictate that the
ones that cost a little more can't yield hit as much.
They have to like charge a little bit more because
they're not using these things that up there yield. So
(30:04):
I would you know, I just think if if it
doesn't say it, then it probably hasn't call doll get Yeah,
maybe we should maybe we should call me. Uh, he
keeps a very different schedule from our own. Very true.
I forget about Kyle. Let's call Ira. Ira will get
to the bottom of this. Oh. Actually he might just
(30:26):
tell us to do it for a segment. That's true,
which I am totally fine with. If you are listening, sir. Uh.
The European Commission banned hormones and livestock in nine one
due to some of these concerns, and no, ife think
you raised. I think that's a really good point. I
think it's a fair assumption to say that if it
doesn't specifically bill itself is organic hormone free, et cetera free,
(30:52):
then you should just assume that it does have something
in there. Right. Well, it's like if I buy a
product and it's made of plastic and it costs eight dollars,
I'm not going to be surprised if it breaks in
two days. So it's like if I want to buy
a really nice coffee machine, say, for example, and you
get it and it's like made of machine steel and
it's gonna cost a couple hundred bucks probably, but if
(31:12):
I get one that's like ten bucks, I shouldn't be
surprised that it's a piece of crap because I paid
ten dollars for it. It's the same with me with meat.
If I if I'm like getting a steak that costs
two dollars, it's probably a crap steak. I mean, unless
you know the guy. Yeah, maybe it's a deal man.
Speaking of knowing the guy, though, when I used to
(31:33):
live in Athens, Georgia, we there's farmers markets all over
the place and you could go buy beef straight from
local farmers. So, I mean, I know that seems obvious,
but if you have access to that, that's that's the
way to go, because it's not it's a little pricey,
but it's not that much more expensive and you know
where it's coming from. Well. It's also yeah, it is
a question of affordability too, because with when we hear
(31:56):
about when we hear about the been a fits of
healthy living, especially where diet is concerned, one thing that
we often run into will be the inarguable fact that
some people cannot afford to you know, they could not
afford the premium at a farmer's market or whatever. And
you know, vegetarians and vegans in the audience will make
(32:18):
a very good point, which is that you can live
in it with a reasonable budget without consume. You can
cut out meat living a reasonable budget and eat fresh
food all the time. It just takes preparation, and I
think that's something that stops a lot of people. The
United States is not a very preparation oriented society when
(32:38):
it comes to food. It also takes mental fortitude, just
gotta say to make a big change like that. And
one last thing I don't like, get on a soapbox.
And in Georgia, at least if at a lot of
farmers markets, there's a program that will give you double
your snap the Snap program BBT. It will give you
double the value for spending those tokens. You convert them
to tokens at a kiosk and you get double the
(32:59):
value of the is that you would get the grocery
store for going to the farmer's market, So that who's
in and check to see if your state or community
has something like that. If this is a concern to you.
While you're checking this out, also check the back of
labels for cereal bread products you buy, because it might
contain something called azo dike carbon amide or a d
(33:22):
a azo dike carbonomide. This is also known as the
yoga mat chemical. Yeah, you're gonna find this in commercially
based bread and in yoga mats. Makes sense, right, But Matt,
yoga mats aren't a food. Well, they can be just
add butter, not margarine butter. Don't eat your yoga mats.
(33:43):
I want to point out that if you practiced yoga technically,
you would be a yoga mat. Oh wow, I am
really not fans to really swinging a missing on these
jokes today. That was over the fence, my friend. That's
all good. Actually, yeah, thank you. So what is this doom? Well,
it's an additive that was a whitening agent. It was
also a dough conditioner um, and it's something that the
(34:07):
FDA considers safe for food uses, including cereal flour and
bread dough. Now, um, here's the deal. Does bread need
this chemical to taste good? Nope, not not at all.
So this is more for a textual quality or for
an appearance or cosmetic quality. Yeah, it's a textual experience
(34:30):
to make your bread more bread like the street of
the Yeah, the striations when it's when it's um, what
do they call it? After it's sat for a while proven,
after the dough has proved proved, and then when you
bake it, then I'm assuming this chemical gives you that
just the strations that are nice without actually having to
(34:51):
do the work. Yeah, and this is banned in Europe, right, oh, yeah,
totally banned in Europe. But it's found in almost five
d common American groceries, store and chain restaurant foods. And that's,
of course, despite the World Health Organization linking this chemical
to uh potential you know, diseases. It's a carcinogen they
call it, and it could lead to cancer to several
(35:13):
other things. But despite being legal, a lot of big
fast food chains have taken notice and action as well,
right right right. Subway phased out the ingredients in twenty
fourteen because the public found out. It caught on and
the public was saying, what's all this a d A
and the sandwich bread? That was when I first heard
about yoga mat bread was because of the Subway. Yeah,
(35:38):
and then Subway had a couple other kerfuffles right after that.
Would I have to talk about this that's different topic,
different episode. Yeah. And also chains like Wendy's and McDonald's
took steps to remove a d A from their supply.
And as we record today, despite the controversy, is Noel
pointed out, it remains legal in the United States. Who
(35:58):
you may have eaten it today, you may be eating
it currently. But what's another example, which I think I
safely say is if not Matt Knowles one of one
of my favorite examples. We'll get to it after a
word from our sponsor. Here it is this part of
(36:20):
the show is going to be a little bit juvenile.
We're talking about potato chips or potato chips, hold of one,
my friend, Yes, diarrhea chips, very brown hole in one.
It's all thanks to something that was named uh one
of the fifty worst inventions by Time magazine and approved
by the FDA. It's a substance called Olestra, a calorie free,
(36:42):
fat free, cholesterol free chemical that removes the need for
cooking oil and all the fatty ummmy goodness it brings
with it, but salls a flavor similar to foods like chips,
sam fries. Yeah, you'll find a lestra in diet versions
of all kinds of food products, including chips, frozen yogurts,
and plenty others. And if it sounds too good to
(37:04):
be true. That's because it most definitely certainly Oh my god,
is they hotta call it irano lestra because it it
makes you more hungry. It's supposed to like be a
diet thing, but it actually makes you more hungry. Well, yeah,
I I would say it is because it seems deliberately
contrary to what was expected. Right. It's it's like buying
(37:28):
a seat belt that is that you know, kills you.
It's like the oh Henry of foods. There we go.
It's like the Shamalan of snacks. Exactly. It's like rain
on your wedding day, you know what I mean? There
we go, We got there. Don't we feel like we got?
We got to have reference? Yes or lestra around lester?
Why what's the hubbub with this stuff? Well, in addition
(37:51):
to actually being a appetite increaser um, it has been
linked to gastro intestinal disease in children and terrible awful, horrible,
no good, very bad bouts of diarrhea and grown adults. Yeah,
and if you if you feel the need to personally
(38:13):
investigate this, just uh go find some chips. I'm sure
you can find some with that ingredient. Because it's just
the legal in the United States, and give yourself a
few hours off, you know what I mean, go home first.
It's research research. You'll you'll probably see it listed as Olean,
(38:33):
which is like the brand name. You might even see
Lestra somewhere. Um. Probably in American foods, you'll find Olean.
You will not find it in Canada or Europe, however,
because that's where it is banned. What else you might
be thinking? What else at this time? What? What other
terrifying things did I have on my plate when I
(38:54):
sat down and said, I'm gonna listen to this podcast
while I well, I have a nash one of could
be arsenic. Yeah, straight up poison like old lace, arsenic
and old lace like that stuff. Uh, it's so famous
and mystery novels of yesteryear. It's still allowed in small
levels in chicken feed here in the US, not in
(39:15):
the European Union. It's actually such an effective poison um
in those days of yesterday because they didn't actually have
a test for it, and that didn't come until much later. Yeah.
And here's the thing. When you have arsenic and chicken feed,
it gets in those chickens. Uh, pesky pesky thing. About
chicken feed gets into the chickens, and then the chickens
somehow get into you, and then there's arsenic in you.
(39:36):
That's not good. And the f d A, for their
for their part, stresses that the amount of arsenic involved
is too tiny to be dangerous to people who eat chicken.
A lot of this has been exaggerated on the internet.
It's not as if someone just tried to kill a
bunch of chickens found out they loved arsenic and said, hey,
(39:57):
we've got a good thing going. Uh. It goes back
to a It goes back to a substance called rocks
or zone, which is made by Fightser, And they announced
that they would discontinue the sale of the additive. But
at the at the time this was still a this
(40:20):
was still a very controversial thing. In two thousand eleven,
the f d A announced that Fiser, through its its
subsidiary al Pharma, voluntarily suspended the sale of this stuff,
which was also called three nitro, because of an f
(40:40):
d A study that detected inorganic arsenic UH higher levels,
specifically in the livers of chickens. Did you say three nitro?
Three nitro? That sounds like some sort of like fruity
malt beverage, like four loco. I feel like it sounds
like a great nickname for someone. I'm really into nicknames
now have specific numbers. I really like three nitro. Well,
(41:03):
maybe that could be maybe we should do you think
Paul would let us call it three nitro? Paul three
nitro decond Yeah, super producer, Paul three nitro, three dog nitro.
Here we go. And then the the list of these additives,
it goes on and on and on. There were going
to be several that we don't have time to mention today.
(41:25):
One example would be that shiny coding on apples short
name is d p A that is also banned in
other countries but available here in the US. And you
wash your apples, make sure you wash your apples, you know,
not naturally shiny like that, like when the teacher shines
it up on their their pants. That person was wearing
d p A, naughty. It looked like, I know, it
(41:46):
looked like fabric. They were dp ants. They were Oh.
As we search for a dp answer to the to
to the controversies around the f surrounding the f d
a UM, what we learned is that these are just
some of the common contaminants or additives if you prefer
(42:07):
that you might have eaten recently. And this leads people
to larger concerns, not just folks who would describe as
health nuts, but people who are just you know, see
themselves as reasonable. Right. They might splurge on a on
a crate, on a huge steak now and then, but
usually they're like three square meals day, a couple of snacks, right. Uh.
(42:27):
Even people who don't consider themselves health nuts often believe
that the f d A may be too closely related
to the industries it is meant to oversee. No, stay
it ain't so, you know, you can say to many
times as you want to on a podcast like this,
there is a revolving door between private industry and government regulators,
(42:47):
and it just I don't know how you close it,
because it revolves. You can't close it, and it's just
gonna exist. Before two, the f d A was, as
you would spect fully regulated and mainly funded by the
US government. However, in h Congress passed the Prescription Drug
(43:12):
User Fee Acts or PADUFA. I knew you'd like that on,
making the pharmaceutical industry much less like a force or
a sphere of business to be overseeing and much more
like a client for whom the f d A was
performing a service. Anyone who's ever worked as a freelancer
(43:32):
knows what you do to a client. You worked tirelessly
to make them happy so that they'll pay you. And yeah,
and critics of this situation, this post situations say that
now the f d A his is screwing up left
and right and their general their general just Their argument
(43:54):
is that the f d A should be considering the public,
the u S public and the health of US public
as its primary clients, not the industries. And to be
completely clear, this enters the realm of the drug industry
and the f d A h there's more money involved there.
(44:16):
We also know that the f d A has been
pursuing special relationships with media outlets in there was an
article in Scientific American where an author named Charles C.
Pointed out that the f d A was doing this
this move where they would offer to give some media
outlets early scoops on a story, with the condition being
(44:39):
that the f d A got to choose who these
journalists talked to about it afterwards. So like if Matt
is doing a story for what news outlet? Do you work? Formatt?
Pr Okay, so p r I. Matt works for p
r I, and he goes to the f d A,
who will be played by L. We're done this role here,
(45:02):
I am and uh and uh they in NOL being
the FDA gives Matt being p r I the scoop
and then Uh, Matt attempts to go to UH someone
who disagrees with the f d A and that could
be either Paul or me, depending on how we want
to do the casting, and then fundamentally violates a legal precept.
(45:27):
P r I is huge trouble. Matt might get fired
and p r I would get blacklisted from these other
reports until they became public knowledge. You guys, am having
a kind of a kaiser SoSE moment. Here f d A,
p r I three letters? Are they the same thing? ABC, NBC,
(45:51):
H S W WHOA no one is safe? No one,
no one is safe? And wait all of our initials
or three letters, But what about std W y t K.
We're the loan outlier, the loan outlier. The names sounded unwieldy,
but finally, several years in, you know why we chose
(46:15):
that approach. So additionally, you know, you can see reports
we're scientists during the Barack Obama presidential administration, we're begging
the government to prevent managers at the FDA and other
industry insiders from forcing the spin data or suppress results. So,
in conclusion, yes, there is a chance that you are
(46:39):
eating things that the rest of the world considers dangerous, unhealthy,
and possibly some extreme cases terrifying. Uh. It also seems that,
whether you're ascribed to one particularly conspiracy or another, something
fishy seems to be happening at the f D A
and more and more people are asking is the FDA
(46:59):
looking out for you or is it looking out for
an industry. Yeah, the cynics, i would say, probably myself included,
are really starting to view the FDA and a lot
of a lot of other regulatory groups and administrations within
the United States government as just a part of the
game that you have to play if if you want
(47:20):
to be a part of an industry, whether it's food
or drugs or arms, or you know what, whatever, name
your industry and your regulatory body, they seem to be
more of gatekeepers than anything else. Oh and then last thing,
it's just just knowing that Europe, most of Europe, and
(47:40):
a lot of other countries say no to most of
the things that we listed out today, It just it
really does make you worry. Well, when I went to
Europe for the first time, the thing that that surprised
me was that they have breasts and they're advertising here.
That's where we draw the line. But yoga, mat chemicals
and our bread. Okay, buddy, that's a good point, it's true.
(48:03):
But no nipples. No, no nipples are still a hard
no in the United States. Poor choice of words. So
so we hope that you enjoyed this episode. We're only
scratching the surface and pointing out the contrast between what
one government considers fine and dandy and another government considers
(48:26):
dangerous and troubling. However, this does not end our show.
It's time for a very special corner. Okay, guys, you
know how on shout out Corner we usually do a
couple of emails, right, Okay, Well, I found I found
something that's a little different. I hope you like it.
(48:47):
This is gonna be a surprise for all four of us,
and I've been hiding it behind my back the entire time.
We've been recording. We got a package. Uh so this
comes to us from Nathan Suh and you taped it
up really well. It's about the size of a CD
(49:09):
container you want to describe compact disc container, but it is.
It's got that packing tape all over it. I am
seeing what appears to be a disc maybe or hold on,
Oh my gosh, do you think it's full of government secrets?
I don't know. Let's let's pull one of these out early.
When I said there was a surprise, no, you would
asked me if it was like a poisonous chemical additive.
(49:31):
I said, I don't know. What is it? Matter? Have
passed this around? It is? It appears to be a disc.
I think it is. I can't open it right now,
but it's titled Missouri Loves Company Presents Leck Concert Infernal EP.
It appears to be some sort of heavy metal record,
not the kinds of things that would poison your food,
but the the rock variety. Um, we've got a track list.
(49:53):
That's the Concert Infernal l EP, Scandal in Wait, Misery
Loves Company, Borderline Obsessives, Hounds, Shepherds, and may Day. Um,
so we're gonna you know, I don't I don't know
if I have a way to play this. We have
three copies, though I'm streaming and vinyl only today these days, guys,
I can listen to this in my car on the
way home. And that's what we're gonna do. Alright. We we
(50:14):
we report back on the next episode. Yeah, absolutely, So
this was a surprise out of the blue for us,
and we're going to check it out. I I think
I also am going to listen to the cin a car.
I need some good road music. I'm driving around doing
some completely non shady things after this, I want to
play on my PS four right yeah, yeah, Oh, hey,
(50:35):
we have a note you guys. Oh please, yes, read
we're supposed to. I was hoping for a note, Nathan
says Ben Matt Noel, Hey, guys, I just wanted to
say that I'm a big fan of the show. It
keeps my skeptic side nice and aware that things aren't
always as they appear. I've sent a few of my
band's EPs to say thanks. I know Noel as a musician,
and Ben and Matt have some good taste, so I
hope you dudes enjoy. By the way, I'm a musician too.
(50:59):
I'm horrible taste. Yeah whatever right hunch today, Nathan says,
it's just a little d I y c D. But
it's the least I could do for the hours of
free entertainment you guys have given me. We should have
an an LP done this year, so if you like
the tunes, we can send that one. It's all done
to keep up the good work and keep shining a
(51:20):
light on this stuff they don't want you to know. Well,
maybe we can. You know what we should do. We
should rip one of these tracks and and play it out,
play play the episode out on one like a little
sample of his music. What do you think. I think
that's a fantastic idea. Thank you so much, Nathan s
This concludes our but not our show. We will be
(51:43):
back very soon with another episode of stuff they don't
want you to know. We hope that you enjoyed this one,
and we hope that you will drop by your platform
of choice toss us a review if you would like.
You can also find us at other places on the Internet,
and we do this social meds to to take a
page out of the Chuck Bryant book. We are conspiracy
(52:05):
stuff at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We are Conspiracy
Stuff show, and we have a brand new Facebook group
called Here's Where He Gets Crazy. You can join us
there if you haven't already. You can join discussions about
each episode. You can send all kinds of cool messages
that we'll get to see and discuss things with your
your your friends and family basically like us who listened
(52:27):
to the show, and we're actually we're also actually on
this page and active, so do check it up if
you want to find out where it gets crazy. There's
one more thing though, for everybody who despises or lows
the social hullabaloo that is the what was that social meds?
The social meds? You can write to us directly. We
(52:48):
are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com and without
further ado, friends and neighbors, Missouri Loves Company down
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. Welcome
(00:24):
back to the show. My name is Matt. My name
is Noel. They called me Ben. We are joined with
our super producer. Most importantly, you're here. You are you,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Did you, guys, happen to grab lunch today? Yes, I
grabbed it double fisted. Well, not surprise. But what what
did you have for lunch today? Some delicious sausage just
(00:49):
just that, just just like a pile of sausage. Yes,
I threw it on a fire and then I just
grabbed it with my bare hands off the fire and
just ate upon it. You must have some real calloused hands, class, Matt.
What about you know? I had some lemon pepper chicken
breast that I prepared this morning, mixed with a nice
root vegetable medley that I had left over from a
(01:09):
few nights prior. It was delightful. Blue Apron dot Com
okay with myself? Whoa with your skills? Talked to you
by Blue Apron and the Gordon Ramsey Masterclass. And as
Checkers says in there, as Checkers is a fast food
chain here for people outside of the United States, as
Checkers is wont to say you gotta eat Is that
(01:32):
Checkers when they follow it up with you gotta eat Checkers?
Oh yeah, yeah, there's an implication not to be too
Dennis Reynolds about it, but it remains true. And food
is one of the great U nineteen factors of our
our species. We can't agree on much, but we can't
agree that we should all probably eat something. And nowadays
(01:54):
it seems like a few times a year we'll hear
about a food scandal. It's so not that it's common,
but it's uh frequent enough not to be astounding every
time it happens. There's like horse meat in some pies
in the UK, or something you know, yeah, or the
spinach has been contaminated with this or the other in
(02:16):
its preparation process. And inasmuch as it is a thing
across our entire species, just the very word taste implies
such a specificity of preference to food, and we use
that word to talk about any kind of preference for
all things. So you know, yes, food very universal, but
also very particular. Yes, yeah, and there are also cases
(02:37):
of recalled yogurt, both in both senses of the word cases.
I recall the yogurt I had none the different kind
of you're talking about spoiled, contaminated yogurt that gets forcibly
removed from the market, right right, Yes, of course. And
we'll also inevitably here uh pop science studies that come
(02:59):
out right that have a very alarmist, almost web Md
tone to them. You know, recent studies show that coffee
is tremendously good. Oh no, weight, bad for you? Oh
no weight, It's good again, you know, yeah, exactly like
butter is another thing we hear about sugar, and they
kind of intertwine, and one of them is giving you
(03:21):
cancer and the other one is saving your life. And
when you add up all these complaints and these studies,
these contradictory opinions and perspectives, it becomes alarmingly and surprisingly
easy to think that the world is going to hell
in a handbasket, or should I say a bread basket?
What is a bread basket? Like a cornucopia? It's I've
(03:43):
seen you know, I was thinking the same thing with
a bread box. They're literally just the whole bread sort
of an outdated thing too. I don't think people keep
their bread in boxes typically anymore more in plastic in
the cabinet. My parents totally have a wooden bread box,
but they don't keep bread in to do that. Yes
they do, they do, yep, and all kinds of I
was gonna say egg mcmuffins, but that's not a thing.
(04:05):
You've clearly gone mad, you know, you know it's it's true.
Isn't it true that bread will tend to go stale
more quickly in a refrigerator. That's that's something I had heard. Also,
I would love it if people kept bread the way
that bonds. Supervillains keep a cat, like it was just
on their armchair, and they would pet it while they
(04:26):
talked to you, like a nice baghette that you had
just like tucked under your arm and you pet it
like a creature. Life hack if you buy a baguette
and you eat half of it and you don't want
it to go stale, put it in the freezer and
then the next day, um put it directly in the oven.
It is fresh and crispy, as convened. Just putting that
out there, life has been hacked. Life has indeed been hacked,
and bighetts and more. And regardless of what we hear about,
(04:51):
you know, the dirty yogurt industry or contaminated meat. Uh,
the truth of the matter is that, at least here
in the unit I need states, things in general are
safer than they have been in the past. You can
go into a grocery store nowadays and you can buy
(05:11):
I can of what spam, a can of you know, uh,
the tuna. I'm thinking of things that seem weird to
be in cans. Uh. And you have a pretty high
likelihood of not dying immediately, which is amazing. Yeah. But
about deviled ham? How do you guys feel about deviled ham? Honestly,
I don't even really know what it is. I think
(05:33):
it's kind of like spam, but it's just canned ham
and it's got a little devil with a pitchfork on it.
To me that says, stay, oh, stay away. I love
the idea of devil to being a process. And I
think we talked before, I don't know it was on
air off about what is it to devil something, to
bedevil it? In my mind, when you devil something, you
(05:53):
take out a portion of it. You you mix it up,
like grind it all up, and then you put it
back on to a part that has not been ground up,
like if you devil an egg. Sure, there we go.
So maybe the ham is a portion of it has
been ground up to pieces and then put back with
the rest of the ham and as clack out maybe
bird style. I feel like we're onto something. And the
(06:15):
good news is that regardless of the way something is
prepared here, at least in the United States and in
many other countries, there's some sort of organization that supervises
and regulates the quality of these food products. This was
not always the case. In fact, the reason we have
the f d A today is thinks in large part
(06:37):
to a imperfect fellow named Harvey Wiley. It's true. And
then you and I actually did an episode about Mr Wiley,
Dr Wiley. Dare I say, um, I think he was
an empty so we'll call him yeah for our other show,
Ridiculous History. And we talked about his poison squad, which
was a thing that he assembled, a study made up
(06:58):
of some very iron gutted fellows who volunteered to be
poisoned on purpose. Effectively. Yes, and that you were talking
with us about this off air. Right, Yeah, there's a
quotation about the there were twelve younger guys who would
they would go to this kitchen where foods would be
prepared for them, and with increasing doses of food additives
(07:21):
stuff that Um, later on, we would know you do
not want to put in your foods. But at the time,
something like borax was added to foods just because it
was a food added to increase the yield or something. Yes, exactly.
A lot of times they were for preservation, to keep
the foods fresh longer. But you know this, this gentleman,
Harvey Um, Harvey Wiley realized that perhaps some of these
(07:44):
are very very dangerous and they illustrated it perfectly by
giving these increased doses until the subjects would just get
awfully sick. And they realized that that's the threshold. Oh
there we are, yeah after the fact, right, yeah, yeah,
Oh that's how much more axes? Too much more ax?
Harvey Wiley. As as you can learn in depth in
our episode on Ridiculous History, Harvey Wiley was a man
(08:07):
on a mission, and ultimately his work led to a
passage of law in nineteen o six that eventually led
to the f d A today, they're tasked with determining
safety standards for food manufactured in, grown in, or imported
to the US overall, as well as some exportation since
(08:29):
it's would be grown or created here. We live in
a divisive political age. But one thing that's beautiful about
this idea, if not this organization, is that everyone can
agree it's it's a good thing to try to keep
fingers and meat packing factories attached to the hands they
came in with instead of in you know, your next
(08:51):
uh can of deviled ham. And that's not to say
that there aren't conspiracy theories about the f d A
and what they may or may not be doing at
l and programs, and that we've covered before in the show,
and if you're interested, you can look up some of
our some of our stuff on GMOs and there's several
other topic rominaded vegetable oil. Yeah, and whether or not
(09:13):
the you know, the conspiracy theories around whether or not
the FDA is purposefully trying to get some of these
things into our diet. But you know, that's for another day,
and we're gonna look at both sides of that in
a little bit. But before we do. Why don't we
kind of give a little rundown of some of the facts. Absolutely,
So let's look at the scale of the FDA first,
the Food and Drug Administration. They are a huge deal.
(09:36):
Some estimates report the twenty cents out of every single
dollar Americans spend goes toward a product that has been
supervised or regulated by the FDA. We're talking one trillion
dollars in goods. Wow. I got to the grocery store
like five times a week. I like to do little shops,
so I definitely am part of this trend. And here's
(09:58):
the here's the hilarious thing about an entity with so
much power that has such an ubiquitous effect right on
consumers and on organizations. As Matt said, the FDA is
often roundly criticized, but it's criticized in such a strange way.
It's often accused of both overregulation and at the same
(10:21):
time underregulation, doing way too much and doing not near enough. Constantly,
it's constantly accused of these things. Well, yeah, and you
imagine that this one administration one, I mean a very
large group of human beings that are working at it,
but they're they're covering, Like you said, a whole host
of different products, from drugs to food. That's a lot
(10:42):
of things, man, I mean one trillion dollars in goods.
That's a lot of goods. I mean each one of those.
You know, some might be less than a dollar, like
a like a particular piece of produce, but you know,
a lot of package stuff it's like five or six bucks.
We're talking about millions and millions and millions of individual
items of food that this one organization, SHIN is responsible
for ensuring that we are not getting poisoned by Yeah,
(11:04):
and I love to point that out too, because we
are counting things that are less than a dollar. Everything
from a single grape, if you if you buy a
single grape, if you're at that point, a kiwi, a kiwi,
that's probably a better example, uh, to the you know,
to some very high end seafood or something. Sure, let's
(11:25):
look at the idea of overregulation. When people talk about
the FDA overregulating stuff, they're talking usually about what they
see as some sort of unfair censorship in terms of
the language used in advertising and products exactly. So, take
dietary supplements. We've all we've all seen the infomercials, you know,
(11:46):
my life was a dumpster fire, and still I started
taking fish oil eight times a day. Or you know,
I'm making that example up. Those products fall smack dab
in the middle of the Venn diagram between food and drugs.
Almost a drug, almost a food, but not quite either,
which is the slogan for Matt's Newurbal supplement company, right, Yeah,
(12:12):
it's not quite food or a drug. Matticaps like that,
the fine makers of Matt Mints. Yeah. So the the
advocates of the supplement industry, people hoisting all kinds of
vitamins at you. They'll argue that the FDA prevents manufacturers
from making claims about the effectiveness of a product, even
when research, they say, proves the benefits are genuine. But
(12:34):
you're you're talking about such a range here of of
things that a supplement can supposedly do, because you can
still find things occasionally that will claim to cure cancer,
and it will be a supplement of an extract of
a certain fruit or a berry or something. And you know,
when you when you still can have things like that,
(12:54):
my opinion is that you need to have something regulating it. Say,
you know, you can't say that this will let you
be able to fly. Mm hmm. That's probably a bad idea, right. Well,
there's also I mean, how is saying something would cure
cancer any different? Correct? People on the other side would argue, Yeah,
that's that's a great point because we have to ask
why why this comes about. It's because, as far as
(13:19):
the f d A is concerned, legally, dietary supplements, whether
they are purported cancer cures, it's vitamin B twelve, what
fish oil, whatever you want, regardless they're considered foods, which
means they're makers can only create limited claims about the
structure or function, and specifically, to Matt's point, they cannot
(13:40):
claim that any supplement can prevent, cure, or mitigate UH
disease or condition, regardless of what kind of scientific literature
they find or pay for regarding those abilities. And I mean,
through our various shows that we do here at how
stuff works, we've encountered advertisers that have very specific language
in the copy that they give you where it says
(14:02):
you cannot say this, you can you have to say this.
This is the part you have to read. And we
know that from things like medications on television and have
those litany of side effects and things that are clearly
regulated by law that they have to rattle it off
or else who would do it right, because it's just
totally derailed the experience of watching that, you know, delightful
scene of a young child and then her mother frolicking
(14:22):
through a field of green grass and being pushed on
a swing set or something. What's that old trope in
stock stock images and stock footage lady eating a salad
alone and laughing. Now you will not be able to
unsee that. But it's also I'm really glad we brought
this up, because I believe it or not, residents of
(14:42):
the United States, those strange, very vague, as Noll said,
pharmaceutical ads that we see on television are illegal in
most other developed countries. Yea, even having billboards for any
kind of drug, he's illegal in a lot of places,
but advertising of any kind, and that lends credence to
the idea that the pharmaceutical industry in the United States
(15:05):
has a massive amount of control. This is something that
even members of Congress take issue with. So a critic
who would say that the f d A is censoring
dietary supplement manufacturers would be someone like Ron Paul uh.
He says that this stuff comes about because the f
d A is in bed with the pharmaceutical companies. They
(15:26):
don't want you to know that, you know, uh st
John's wart can cure your brain fever, your I'm just
gonna make up a disease your your gutter hand. On
November tenth, two thousand and five, Ron Paul introduced something
called the Health Freedom Protection Act HR four two D two,
(15:47):
which he argues would prevent the f d A from
censoring truthful claims about the curative, mitigative, or preventative effects
of dietary supplements. He said this would also adopt the
federal courts suggested use of disclaimers as an alternative to
straight up censorship. So in this case of censorship or
(16:07):
over regulation, people who believe it also believe there's an
active conspiracy of foot by big pharma to prevent people
from knowing that their food can be their medicine, which
is something you hear a lot if you're a fan
of dead Press, another alternative hip hop. But what about
the other side of the argument, What about the people
(16:28):
who say the f d A is not doing near
enough For people who believe that the FDA underregulates food.
The agency is a washing corruption, a lack of oversight,
and at times purposeful railroading. A valuable medical research. Whoa, So,
what kind of stuff are we talking about here? We'll
hold your horses, buddy. We'll get right into that after
(16:50):
a quick ad break. So, the United States, despite being
a massive developed country, permits multiple food additives that are
generally acknowledged throughout the rest of the world as either
unhealthy or dangerous in some way. Remember earlier when we
(17:11):
were talking about advertising of pharmaceuticals and billboards and stuff.
Now that's illegal, and a lot of other countries very
similar case here. Why is this? That is the crux
of the questions. So it might be surprising for people
who have traveled to the U S from another country
to notice the change in food. If you're if you're
(17:33):
a redditor, if you learn on Reddit, then you'll read
things that people from other countries visiting the US have
written about regarding what confused them or what surprised them
for the good or the bad when they visited this country.
And one of the top things they always mentioned is
the food. They say it's delicious, The portions are way
(17:53):
too big. Why is there such an abundance, a plethora,
an over abundance of food, and then later why is
so much of this stuff so bad for people? Like
but the in specifics, we have multiple specific examples of dangerous, scary,
or even terrifying things that you might have just eaten earlier,
(18:16):
this week or today you might be eating now as
you listen to this podcast and pet your baget on
your arm on your armchair. One of the one of
the big examples that's familiar to a lot of people
would be food coloring. Right, food coloring, you see it
in candy a lot, and so does um and a
(18:37):
lot of just manufactured foods. And whereas some chemicals have
their entire name printed out, a lot of food coloring
just has a description of the color and a number, right,
like yellow number five one better than yellow number four.
Yellow number five is a very strange one. Do you
(18:58):
guys remember the rumors of yellow number five in Mountain
dew right when you were growing up? Did you tell
there was a rumor that was always at my school,
at least before the internets, that yellow five food coloring
would reduce your sperm count. I was going to say,
shrink or peep and and um mess with your downstairs
(19:18):
area in various ways. The rumors were different throughout Australia.
Huh yes, the old downstairs um. But but it goes
back to some real things in this guy named Ben
fine Gold who was he was working at, I believe
the medical center, the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. He he
(19:39):
mentioned that this and other food dies may cause hyperactivity
in children, or reproposed this idea at least, and there
were studies that rebuted this claim. There were some studies
that showed perhaps there was some truth to this claim.
And it's that same situation that I think we've been
in for a long time where depending on how you
interpret data from something or data from something, let's study
(20:02):
like this, you can make it lean one way or
the other. Really, I mean, that makes sense, and that's
a dangerous thing we always run into. That's why you
always want to be careful when you hear nutrition advice.
You want to see not only is this from a nutritionist,
but wait, wait, what school did this nutrition is go to? Well,
not only that, like people who write studies are all
(20:24):
about numbers and data, and when you package that up
and put it in the press release, you are editorializing
said data, and you are giving it weight with language
that it's not really how it was intended to be read.
Maybe there's an abstract that gives you, like a basic
rundown of the findings of the study. But when it's
it's like when you start taking movie reviews out of context,
you know, I mean, it becomes a whole ball of wax,
(20:45):
except in this case it's your health rather than just
if your eyes enjoyed something or not true true. And this,
this point is so incredibly important. We would add to
it too that another question is who paid for to study,
because the scientists are typically not out there working entirely
for free. In the case of coloring agents, we we
(21:09):
should point out that they do play an important role,
especially if there's competition in a grocery store, because most,
not not all, but a lot of the food that
we eat has an artificial color so that it adheres
to our idea of what that food should look like,
as you know, as it was presented in a Norman
(21:30):
Rockwell painting or in a commercial. And this this explains
why artificial dies have increased, like the use of artificial
dies has increased fivefolds since the mid nineteen fifties. It's
like the idea of margarine being colored yellow. Margarine and
it's untreated form is white, but people expect it to
(21:52):
be yellow because it's meant to be like a butter substitute.
And there's a whole another story there about how margarine
was maligned by the butter industry because it was seen
as competition, unfair competition because it was cheaper. But it
just goes to show that we it matters to us
as consumers what color something is. I still have an
aversion to margarine just because of growing up hearing stories
(22:12):
about oh, don't eat margarine. What really? Yeah, well you're
from a bread box community. Well yeah, but my parents
always only stock margine at their house. Really yeah, margarine house. Yeah,
margarine house. Dude. My wife's Cuban family is like, what
is margarine? Get that out of here? Why are you
doing this to us? Matthew, and I said, I love
(22:33):
you and I will be with you forever because real
butter is the way to go. So yes, so we
see this, We we see this fight between additives between
food impersonators, right and today most artificial colors that that
you're going to find in use are actually made from
(22:53):
coal tar. This is the same stuff that seal coats
products to protect the shine of an industrial floors. You
can see it in head Life shampoo as well because
it kills lice. Yeah, yeah, great thing called indigo teen
I think is what they call it. That's the blue
number one or two number two, I believe. Just good stuff,
(23:15):
really good stuff. And there's there's another specific example which
I know a lot of people are waiting for us
to mention, and it's the use of antibiotics in live stock.
This regardless of whether you're a vegetarian or you're a
person who just wants to eat a live cow every
day for the rest of your life, which is a
(23:36):
lot of beef. We can say that they are compelling
studies UH indicating the dangers of using antibiotics in live stock.
This is used in the pork industry as well as
the beef industry, and one of the concerns there is
(23:56):
that this could somehow lead to the creation of a superbug.
I think we mentioned this later in our our superbug episode.
Because doctors have been historically over prescribing antibiotics to human
patients and there's much less regulation in the world of
non human patients. Dude, as you can probably tell, I
have a cold right now. If I went to my
doctor today with this cold, they would give me a
(24:18):
Z pack and send me out the door. They do
every time. I have a medicine cabinet full of these
because I never take them, because they never actually fix
the problem. And that is like a systemic cultural thing.
It's weird. Well, then, when you talk about factory farming
and just the closeness of all the animals and everything,
you're giving antibiotics many times to animals as a preventative
(24:39):
so they don't get sick, which is a whole other
just issue. And now in the European Union, the use
of antibiotics has been drastically phased down or out, you know,
country by country. I think Sweden bandit back in six.
You can still see it in use in some other
(25:00):
countries after that, but they were making phase out plans,
you know, and to take it down to like six
of our current antibiotic use. And yeah, the preventative thing
mainly mainly concerns people because it could essentially be like
a a tough love camp for bacteria. Yeah, that's you're
(25:23):
exactly right. In sharp stark contrast, eight percent of antibiotics
sold in the United States are used on livestock, not
on Wow. Wow, that's incredible, especially since it's becoming more
and more popular to buy non antibiotic meat, or at
(25:44):
least it's growing a little bit. I'm not saying it's ubiquitous,
growing as fast as those cows on the hormones, though,
are there. Yeah, And that's the whole thing. We have
so many human beings in this country and throughout the
world that you've got to provide food for them. So
how do you do that. You you you have to make
sure you have enough healthy you know, in this case
cattle or chickens or pigs or whatever, and you have
(26:05):
to make sure they're growing as fast as possible. There's
a really interesting film on Netflix called ka Um. It's
about the breeding of these super pigs and how that
enters into this kind of like near future kind of
dystopian society where this is part of the food production cycle.
But you start to see they kind of pitch it
(26:25):
as this like delightful thing where this little girl grows
raises the best super pig that's the most friendly and
the largest or whatever, and then at the end of
the day you start to see the behind the curtain stuff,
how this sol enters into this like factory farming, meat market.
That's all incredibly dark. It's a really really cool film.
If you haven't seen it, I have not, but I will.
(26:46):
Oh yeah it should and uh he's right about it
going dark. Do be warned. Yeah. So yeah, while we're
while we're here in this hypothetical farm, right, let's let's
look at the hormones, the growth hormones that I think
we were mentioning here. Uh, these synthetic growth hormones like
(27:06):
r B G H, r B s T were approved
for using cows by the f D a way back in.
This did not fly in other countries. And at the
risk of sounding dismissive, we must ask, where's the beef?
M I know these are all gonna be clunkers today. Well, well,
the issue here is that not only do these cows,
(27:28):
the ones that are injected with these hormones suffer, they
suffer from significant health problems, some of which then get
treated by guess what, administering those antibiotics to the cows
that then get sick. They're also birth defects that these
these cattle have to deal with. Due to the hormones
and the products, the products for human consumption that include
(27:49):
r B g H and r BST, they do not
need to be labeled as being used. Now a lot
of a lot of companies will say on their packaging,
you know, these are hormone free or antibiotic free or
something like that. If you find milk, were sometimes cheeses,
all that kind of stuff, those products, you'll find that.
(28:12):
But if it doesn't say it, you kind of just
have to hope that it's not being used. And there's
a bit of a I don't want to say a rant,
but I have a position on this which is entirely
my opinion. We know for a long time that people
had been worried about possible dangers from consuming things that
(28:34):
had genetically modified organisms in them or GMOs, right, and
there are similar concerns about consuming something that consuming meat
from an animal that was given these growth hormones. And
on the other side, there would be people who consider
themselves skeptical of any dangerous there and they would say
(28:55):
stuff like, well, uh, quite a few of the agricultural
products that we know and love today are if you
go back far enough genetically modified organisms. Corn didn't start
as corn. People made it into corn by breeding it. Uh,
And then they would say, you know, also, if there's
no hard proof that a growth hormone will injure you
(29:21):
if you eat it, then why do we need to
label it? But I feel like that's unnecessarily I don't know.
I feel like that's getting the wrong part of the argument,
because if it's not harmful, the opposite is true, then
why have a law against labeling it as such? But
don't you think that those foods that don't expressly say
these were not used almost definitely have these hormones in them.
(29:44):
It feels like that would be the assumption now, right,
because it's like a premium. You're paying a premium for
products that don't have these things because these are things
that up your yield and allow you to get more
bang for your bucks. So logic would dictate that the
ones that cost a little more can't yield hit as much.
They have to like charge a little bit more because
they're not using these things that up there yield. So
(30:04):
I would you know, I just think if if it
doesn't say it, then it probably hasn't call doll get Yeah,
maybe we should maybe we should call me. Uh, he
keeps a very different schedule from our own. Very true.
I forget about Kyle. Let's call Ira. Ira will get
to the bottom of this. Oh. Actually he might just
(30:26):
tell us to do it for a segment. That's true,
which I am totally fine with. If you are listening, sir. Uh.
The European Commission banned hormones and livestock in nine one
due to some of these concerns, and no, ife think
you raised. I think that's a really good point. I
think it's a fair assumption to say that if it
doesn't specifically bill itself is organic hormone free, et cetera free,
(30:52):
then you should just assume that it does have something
in there. Right. Well, it's like if I buy a
product and it's made of plastic and it costs eight dollars,
I'm not going to be surprised if it breaks in
two days. So it's like if I want to buy
a really nice coffee machine, say, for example, and you
get it and it's like made of machine steel and
it's gonna cost a couple hundred bucks probably, but if
(31:12):
I get one that's like ten bucks, I shouldn't be
surprised that it's a piece of crap because I paid
ten dollars for it. It's the same with me with meat.
If I if I'm like getting a steak that costs
two dollars, it's probably a crap steak. I mean, unless
you know the guy. Yeah, maybe it's a deal man.
Speaking of knowing the guy, though, when I used to
(31:33):
live in Athens, Georgia, we there's farmers markets all over
the place and you could go buy beef straight from
local farmers. So, I mean, I know that seems obvious,
but if you have access to that, that's that's the
way to go, because it's not it's a little pricey,
but it's not that much more expensive and you know
where it's coming from. Well. It's also yeah, it is
a question of affordability too, because with when we hear
(31:56):
about when we hear about the been a fits of
healthy living, especially where diet is concerned, one thing that
we often run into will be the inarguable fact that
some people cannot afford to you know, they could not
afford the premium at a farmer's market or whatever. And
you know, vegetarians and vegans in the audience will make
(32:18):
a very good point, which is that you can live
in it with a reasonable budget without consume. You can
cut out meat living a reasonable budget and eat fresh
food all the time. It just takes preparation, and I
think that's something that stops a lot of people. The
United States is not a very preparation oriented society when
(32:38):
it comes to food. It also takes mental fortitude, just
gotta say to make a big change like that. And
one last thing I don't like, get on a soapbox.
And in Georgia, at least if at a lot of
farmers markets, there's a program that will give you double
your snap the Snap program BBT. It will give you
double the value for spending those tokens. You convert them
to tokens at a kiosk and you get double the
(32:59):
value of the is that you would get the grocery
store for going to the farmer's market, So that who's
in and check to see if your state or community
has something like that. If this is a concern to you.
While you're checking this out, also check the back of
labels for cereal bread products you buy, because it might
contain something called azo dike carbon amide or a d
(33:22):
a azo dike carbonomide. This is also known as the
yoga mat chemical. Yeah, you're gonna find this in commercially
based bread and in yoga mats. Makes sense, right, But Matt,
yoga mats aren't a food. Well, they can be just
add butter, not margarine butter. Don't eat your yoga mats.
(33:43):
I want to point out that if you practiced yoga technically,
you would be a yoga mat. Oh wow, I am
really not fans to really swinging a missing on these
jokes today. That was over the fence, my friend. That's
all good. Actually, yeah, thank you. So what is this doom? Well,
it's an additive that was a whitening agent. It was
also a dough conditioner um, and it's something that the
(34:07):
FDA considers safe for food uses, including cereal flour and
bread dough. Now, um, here's the deal. Does bread need
this chemical to taste good? Nope, not not at all.
So this is more for a textual quality or for
an appearance or cosmetic quality. Yeah, it's a textual experience
(34:30):
to make your bread more bread like the street of
the Yeah, the striations when it's when it's um, what
do they call it? After it's sat for a while proven,
after the dough has proved proved, and then when you
bake it, then I'm assuming this chemical gives you that
just the strations that are nice without actually having to
(34:51):
do the work. Yeah, and this is banned in Europe, right, oh, yeah,
totally banned in Europe. But it's found in almost five
d common American groceries, store and chain restaurant foods. And that's,
of course, despite the World Health Organization linking this chemical
to uh potential you know, diseases. It's a carcinogen they
call it, and it could lead to cancer to several
(35:13):
other things. But despite being legal, a lot of big
fast food chains have taken notice and action as well,
right right right. Subway phased out the ingredients in twenty
fourteen because the public found out. It caught on and
the public was saying, what's all this a d A
and the sandwich bread? That was when I first heard
about yoga mat bread was because of the Subway. Yeah,
(35:38):
and then Subway had a couple other kerfuffles right after that.
Would I have to talk about this that's different topic,
different episode. Yeah. And also chains like Wendy's and McDonald's
took steps to remove a d A from their supply.
And as we record today, despite the controversy, is Noel
pointed out, it remains legal in the United States. Who
(35:58):
you may have eaten it today, you may be eating
it currently. But what's another example, which I think I
safely say is if not Matt Knowles one of one
of my favorite examples. We'll get to it after a
word from our sponsor. Here it is this part of
(36:20):
the show is going to be a little bit juvenile.
We're talking about potato chips or potato chips, hold of one,
my friend, Yes, diarrhea chips, very brown hole in one.
It's all thanks to something that was named uh one
of the fifty worst inventions by Time magazine and approved
by the FDA. It's a substance called Olestra, a calorie free,
(36:42):
fat free, cholesterol free chemical that removes the need for
cooking oil and all the fatty ummmy goodness it brings
with it, but salls a flavor similar to foods like chips,
sam fries. Yeah, you'll find a lestra in diet versions
of all kinds of food products, including chips, frozen yogurts,
and plenty others. And if it sounds too good to
(37:04):
be true. That's because it most definitely certainly Oh my god,
is they hotta call it irano lestra because it it
makes you more hungry. It's supposed to like be a
diet thing, but it actually makes you more hungry. Well, yeah,
I I would say it is because it seems deliberately
contrary to what was expected. Right. It's it's like buying
(37:28):
a seat belt that is that you know, kills you.
It's like the oh Henry of foods. There we go.
It's like the Shamalan of snacks. Exactly. It's like rain
on your wedding day, you know what I mean? There
we go, We got there. Don't we feel like we got?
We got to have reference? Yes or lestra around lester?
Why what's the hubbub with this stuff? Well, in addition
(37:51):
to actually being a appetite increaser um, it has been
linked to gastro intestinal disease in children and terrible awful, horrible,
no good, very bad bouts of diarrhea and grown adults. Yeah,
and if you if you feel the need to personally
(38:13):
investigate this, just uh go find some chips. I'm sure
you can find some with that ingredient. Because it's just
the legal in the United States, and give yourself a
few hours off, you know what I mean, go home first.
It's research research. You'll you'll probably see it listed as Olean,
(38:33):
which is like the brand name. You might even see
Lestra somewhere. Um. Probably in American foods, you'll find Olean.
You will not find it in Canada or Europe, however,
because that's where it is banned. What else you might
be thinking? What else at this time? What? What other
terrifying things did I have on my plate when I
(38:54):
sat down and said, I'm gonna listen to this podcast
while I well, I have a nash one of could
be arsenic. Yeah, straight up poison like old lace, arsenic
and old lace like that stuff. Uh, it's so famous
and mystery novels of yesteryear. It's still allowed in small
levels in chicken feed here in the US, not in
(39:15):
the European Union. It's actually such an effective poison um
in those days of yesterday because they didn't actually have
a test for it, and that didn't come until much later. Yeah.
And here's the thing. When you have arsenic and chicken feed,
it gets in those chickens. Uh, pesky pesky thing. About
chicken feed gets into the chickens, and then the chickens
somehow get into you, and then there's arsenic in you.
(39:36):
That's not good. And the f d A, for their
for their part, stresses that the amount of arsenic involved
is too tiny to be dangerous to people who eat chicken.
A lot of this has been exaggerated on the internet.
It's not as if someone just tried to kill a
bunch of chickens found out they loved arsenic and said, hey,
(39:57):
we've got a good thing going. Uh. It goes back
to a It goes back to a substance called rocks
or zone, which is made by Fightser, And they announced
that they would discontinue the sale of the additive. But
at the at the time this was still a this
(40:20):
was still a very controversial thing. In two thousand eleven,
the f d A announced that Fiser, through its its
subsidiary al Pharma, voluntarily suspended the sale of this stuff,
which was also called three nitro, because of an f
(40:40):
d A study that detected inorganic arsenic UH higher levels,
specifically in the livers of chickens. Did you say three nitro?
Three nitro? That sounds like some sort of like fruity
malt beverage, like four loco. I feel like it sounds
like a great nickname for someone. I'm really into nicknames
now have specific numbers. I really like three nitro. Well,
(41:03):
maybe that could be maybe we should do you think
Paul would let us call it three nitro? Paul three
nitro decond Yeah, super producer, Paul three nitro, three dog nitro.
Here we go. And then the the list of these additives,
it goes on and on and on. There were going
to be several that we don't have time to mention today.
(41:25):
One example would be that shiny coding on apples short
name is d p A that is also banned in
other countries but available here in the US. And you
wash your apples, make sure you wash your apples, you know,
not naturally shiny like that, like when the teacher shines
it up on their their pants. That person was wearing
d p A, naughty. It looked like, I know, it
(41:46):
looked like fabric. They were dp ants. They were Oh.
As we search for a dp answer to the to
to the controversies around the f surrounding the f d
a UM, what we learned is that these are just
some of the common contaminants or additives if you prefer
(42:07):
that you might have eaten recently. And this leads people
to larger concerns, not just folks who would describe as
health nuts, but people who are just you know, see
themselves as reasonable. Right. They might splurge on a on
a crate, on a huge steak now and then, but
usually they're like three square meals day, a couple of snacks, right. Uh.
(42:27):
Even people who don't consider themselves health nuts often believe
that the f d A may be too closely related
to the industries it is meant to oversee. No, stay
it ain't so, you know, you can say to many
times as you want to on a podcast like this,
there is a revolving door between private industry and government regulators,
(42:47):
and it just I don't know how you close it,
because it revolves. You can't close it, and it's just
gonna exist. Before two, the f d A was, as
you would spect fully regulated and mainly funded by the
US government. However, in h Congress passed the Prescription Drug
(43:12):
User Fee Acts or PADUFA. I knew you'd like that on,
making the pharmaceutical industry much less like a force or
a sphere of business to be overseeing and much more
like a client for whom the f d A was
performing a service. Anyone who's ever worked as a freelancer
(43:32):
knows what you do to a client. You worked tirelessly
to make them happy so that they'll pay you. And yeah,
and critics of this situation, this post situations say that
now the f d A his is screwing up left
and right and their general their general just Their argument
(43:54):
is that the f d A should be considering the public,
the u S public and the health of US public
as its primary clients, not the industries. And to be
completely clear, this enters the realm of the drug industry
and the f d A h there's more money involved there.
(44:16):
We also know that the f d A has been
pursuing special relationships with media outlets in there was an
article in Scientific American where an author named Charles C.
Pointed out that the f d A was doing this
this move where they would offer to give some media
outlets early scoops on a story, with the condition being
(44:39):
that the f d A got to choose who these
journalists talked to about it afterwards. So like if Matt
is doing a story for what news outlet? Do you work? Formatt?
Pr Okay, so p r I. Matt works for p
r I, and he goes to the f d A,
who will be played by L. We're done this role here,
(45:02):
I am and uh and uh they in NOL being
the FDA gives Matt being p r I the scoop
and then Uh, Matt attempts to go to UH someone
who disagrees with the f d A and that could
be either Paul or me, depending on how we want
to do the casting, and then fundamentally violates a legal precept.
(45:27):
P r I is huge trouble. Matt might get fired
and p r I would get blacklisted from these other
reports until they became public knowledge. You guys, am having
a kind of a kaiser SoSE moment. Here f d A,
p r I three letters? Are they the same thing? ABC, NBC,
(45:51):
H S W WHOA no one is safe? No one,
no one is safe? And wait all of our initials
or three letters, But what about std W y t K.
We're the loan outlier, the loan outlier. The names sounded unwieldy,
but finally, several years in, you know why we chose
(46:15):
that approach. So additionally, you know, you can see reports
we're scientists during the Barack Obama presidential administration, we're begging
the government to prevent managers at the FDA and other
industry insiders from forcing the spin data or suppress results. So,
in conclusion, yes, there is a chance that you are
(46:39):
eating things that the rest of the world considers dangerous, unhealthy,
and possibly some extreme cases terrifying. Uh. It also seems that,
whether you're ascribed to one particularly conspiracy or another, something
fishy seems to be happening at the f D A
and more and more people are asking is the FDA
(46:59):
looking out for you or is it looking out for
an industry. Yeah, the cynics, i would say, probably myself included,
are really starting to view the FDA and a lot
of a lot of other regulatory groups and administrations within
the United States government as just a part of the
game that you have to play if if you want
(47:20):
to be a part of an industry, whether it's food
or drugs or arms, or you know what, whatever, name
your industry and your regulatory body, they seem to be
more of gatekeepers than anything else. Oh and then last thing,
it's just just knowing that Europe, most of Europe, and
(47:40):
a lot of other countries say no to most of
the things that we listed out today, It just it
really does make you worry. Well, when I went to
Europe for the first time, the thing that that surprised
me was that they have breasts and they're advertising here.
That's where we draw the line. But yoga, mat chemicals
and our bread. Okay, buddy, that's a good point, it's true.
(48:03):
But no nipples. No, no nipples are still a hard
no in the United States. Poor choice of words. So
so we hope that you enjoyed this episode. We're only
scratching the surface and pointing out the contrast between what
one government considers fine and dandy and another government considers
(48:26):
dangerous and troubling. However, this does not end our show.
It's time for a very special corner. Okay, guys, you
know how on shout out Corner we usually do a
couple of emails, right, Okay, Well, I found I found
something that's a little different. I hope you like it.
(48:47):
This is gonna be a surprise for all four of us,
and I've been hiding it behind my back the entire time.
We've been recording. We got a package. Uh so this
comes to us from Nathan Suh and you taped it
up really well. It's about the size of a CD
(49:09):
container you want to describe compact disc container, but it is.
It's got that packing tape all over it. I am
seeing what appears to be a disc maybe or hold on,
Oh my gosh, do you think it's full of government secrets?
I don't know. Let's let's pull one of these out early.
When I said there was a surprise, no, you would
asked me if it was like a poisonous chemical additive.
(49:31):
I said, I don't know. What is it? Matter? Have
passed this around? It is? It appears to be a disc.
I think it is. I can't open it right now,
but it's titled Missouri Loves Company Presents Leck Concert Infernal EP.
It appears to be some sort of heavy metal record,
not the kinds of things that would poison your food,
but the the rock variety. Um, we've got a track list.
(49:53):
That's the Concert Infernal l EP, Scandal in Wait, Misery
Loves Company, Borderline Obsessives, Hounds, Shepherds, and may Day. Um,
so we're gonna you know, I don't I don't know
if I have a way to play this. We have
three copies, though I'm streaming and vinyl only today these days, guys,
I can listen to this in my car on the
way home. And that's what we're gonna do. Alright. We we
(50:14):
we report back on the next episode. Yeah, absolutely, So
this was a surprise out of the blue for us,
and we're going to check it out. I I think
I also am going to listen to the cin a car.
I need some good road music. I'm driving around doing
some completely non shady things after this, I want to
play on my PS four right yeah, yeah, Oh, hey,
(50:35):
we have a note you guys. Oh please, yes, read
we're supposed to. I was hoping for a note, Nathan
says Ben Matt Noel, Hey, guys, I just wanted to
say that I'm a big fan of the show. It
keeps my skeptic side nice and aware that things aren't
always as they appear. I've sent a few of my
band's EPs to say thanks. I know Noel as a musician,
and Ben and Matt have some good taste, so I
hope you dudes enjoy. By the way, I'm a musician too.
(50:59):
I'm horrible taste. Yeah whatever right hunch today, Nathan says,
it's just a little d I y c D. But
it's the least I could do for the hours of
free entertainment you guys have given me. We should have
an an LP done this year, so if you like
the tunes, we can send that one. It's all done
to keep up the good work and keep shining a
(51:20):
light on this stuff they don't want you to know. Well,
maybe we can. You know what we should do. We
should rip one of these tracks and and play it out,
play play the episode out on one like a little
sample of his music. What do you think. I think
that's a fantastic idea. Thank you so much, Nathan s
This concludes our but not our show. We will be
(51:43):
back very soon with another episode of stuff they don't
want you to know. We hope that you enjoyed this one,
and we hope that you will drop by your platform
of choice toss us a review if you would like.
You can also find us at other places on the Internet,
and we do this social meds to to take a
page out of the Chuck Bryant book. We are conspiracy
(52:05):
stuff at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We are Conspiracy
Stuff show, and we have a brand new Facebook group
called Here's Where He Gets Crazy. You can join us
there if you haven't already. You can join discussions about
each episode. You can send all kinds of cool messages
that we'll get to see and discuss things with your
your your friends and family basically like us who listened
(52:27):
to the show, and we're actually we're also actually on
this page and active, so do check it up if
you want to find out where it gets crazy. There's
one more thing though, for everybody who despises or lows
the social hullabaloo that is the what was that social meds?
The social meds? You can write to us directly. We
(52:48):
are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com and without
further ado, friends and neighbors, Missouri Loves Company down
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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