David Light: Zantac recall due to cancer concerns – what you need to know

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better. I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now, the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you could trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time, and that is to create a subscriber model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you. Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is David Light, the CEO of Valisure, which is an online pharmacy and analytical laboratory that tests the drugs it dispenses. As some of you may have heard, on September 13th of this year, a citizen's petition was filed by David's company to the FDA requesting the immediate attention to and potentially removal of a very common drug called Zantac or renitidine from the market. Based on a lot of analytical horsepower that they had thrown at it, suggesting that Zantac, renitidine in its generic form was unstable and it decayed heavily into a carcinogen known as NDMA. The details of this obviously we discuss in the podcast, but they are quite staggering when you consider the magnitude at which this decay occurs and therefore the level at which people could be exposed. Now the purpose of this episode, of course, is not to scare people, though in the end I do something I rarely do, which is make a recommendation, which is if you are playing this through the lens of standard risk analysis, the better thing to do is to probably at least yourself stop taking this drug, even if the FDA, which at the time of this recording, has not asked for a withdrawal, either voluntary or otherwise. It's important to note that at this time, 30 other countries, including Canada, many countries in Europe, the Middle East, have done that, have gone to the step of saying, this drug is off the market until we clarify what these issues are.