After 2 Years of Interviewing Health Experts, Here’s What I Actually Believe

Alex Clark (0:21)

I have now interviewed enough health experts and read enough books to confidently report that nobody agrees on anything.

SPEAKER_2 (0:29)

No readout yet if the air is breathable, and there seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere. Hello?

Alex Clark (0:35)

Oh, yeah!

Get morning sun, but also the sun is aging you. Take supplements. Actually, most supplements are expensive. Urine. Watch your cholesterol. Actually, cholesterol is essential, and the number your doctor is dramatically circling may not tell you nearly as much as you think. Avoid toxins, but don't become so obsessed with toxins that you start hyperventilating because someone handed you a polyester napkin. Eat more plants. Plants are trying to kill you. Eat more meat. Meat is trying to kill you. Apparently, breakfast is either the most important meal of the day or an elaborate psyop invented by Kellogg's to keep you from beating off.

And I could keep going. For the past two years, I have sat across from doctors, researchers, scientists, practitioners, authors, farmers, mothers, fathers, patients, and several people who have made me suspicious of objects that I previously considered completely innocent. My mattress, my sunscreen, my leggings, my receipt from Whole Foods, nothing is safe anymore. Not even the paper proving that you bought the unsafe thing. There are things I believe two years ago that I no longer believe. There are things that I barely thought about two years ago that I now consider incredibly important. There are things that guests told me that sounded completely insane, and then three PubMed rabbit holes later, I was whispering, oh no, to myself at one o'clock in the morning.

And then there are subjects where, you know, after multiple interviews, several books, and dozens of hours of research, I am somehow more confused than when I started. That is why today, for the first time, there is no expert sitting across from me. It's just me, a microphone, my stinky feet. Woo, careful, free feet. Don't give wiki feet, free feet.

SPEAKER_2 (2:21)

Have you ever seen a foot with four toes?

Alex Clark (2:24)

And strongly held opinions, as well as the lingering possibility that this episode ends with all of us needing a medically induced coma. But before I tell you what all of these experts have changed my mind about, I need to tell you why this episode feels emotional for me.

Over the life of this show, we have received thousands of messages from listeners describing what happened after an episode gave them a new question to ask, a different doctor to seek out, a habit to reconsider, or just the courage to believe that feeling terrible did not have to become their permanent identity. I have heard from women who struggled with infertility for years and later wrote to tell me that they were pregnant, families who completely changed the way that they ate and lived, people who lost 50, 100, even hundreds of pounds, listeners who were able to come off medications that they once assumed they would have to be on forever, and men who listened because their wives sent them one episode and said, you have to listen to this, only to become the most intense person in the family about ingredient labels. We got him, ladies. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

One minute he's drinking blue Gatorade without a care in the world, the next he's standing in Costco holding a bag of granola like it contains classified documents. What is maltodextrin, Jessica?

Welcome to the resistance, sir. These messages never get old. All of us are claiming our health and freedom together. And I am profoundly humbled that something said in this room may have become one useful piece of someone's story. And none of that is because I possess some secret vault of health wisdom. You are about to hear ample evidence that I do not, despite what hater comments on YouTube might say, it is because remarkable people have sat in this chair, doctors, scientists, researchers, mothers, patients, farmers, authors and practitioners who were willing to share what they had learned, sometimes after decades of work and sometimes after surviving something that completely rearranged their lives. I ask the questions, they bring the wisdom. You carry what is useful into your homes. That is the chain. I think of myself as a conduit in that chain. I have been given this strange, beautiful opportunity to sit between people who know something valuable and families who desperately need to hear it. And I never want to become casual about that. I never want to treat your trust like a download number or your testimony like marketing copy. When you tell me this show, whatever blank episode helped my family, I feel grateful and honestly a little terrified in the healthiest possible way. Because it reminds me that words spoken in this room travel into real kitchens, real marriages, real doctor's offices and real decisions.