The doctor who says to eat your ice cream (w/ Zeke Emanuel)

Chris Duffy (0:00)

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This is How To Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy.

If I'm being totally honest with you, I have never felt fully comfortable hosting a podcast with the title How To Be a Better Human. Part of that is because it makes it sound like I have all the answers and I definitely do not. But another reason is because there are so many shows in the self-help or self-improvement or wellness space that feel a lot to me like scams. They're filled with people trying to get you to buy something, a program, a pill, a retreat or something else. There's always something expensive. And there's always this idea that if you want your life to be good, if you want to be healthy and happy, you need to know some secret that is so complicated, you could have never figured it out all on your own.

And I think for the most part, that is total BS like 99% of the time. And so that's why I'm so excited that on today's episode of our show, we have a guest who is a doctor, a very accomplished and very reputable and who has a new book out about how to stay healthy. But his big message is, it's not that complicated. It's not a secret and it doesn't require you to spend a ton of time and mental energy or money. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is a breath of fresh air in a world filled with hucksters. To get us started, here he is reading a passage from his new book, Eat Your Ice Cream, Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life.

Ezekiel Emanuel (2:16)

For anyone wading through the torrent of health and longevity advice online, it can be difficult to know who to trust. The so-called must-do's online range from the medically unproven, to the wildly impractical, to suggestions so absurd they leave doctors like me baffled. Tessical tanning, peen blood transfusions, vaginal steaming, rocking hikes with a backpack full of weights.

Information is coming at us from a fire hose, increasingly spewed by hucksters and self-proclaimed sages, who have amassed millions of social media followers and dollars by promising supposed miracle treatments using medical sounding language. It's no wonder so many people are confused and frustrated.

Chris Duffy (3:07)

We're going to talk to Dr. Emanuel about the common sense things that every human should do to take care of themselves, and about why it is so easy and tempting to get sucked into these wellness rabbit holes online. All that and more after this quick break.

And we are back on today's episode. We are talking about how to stay healthy without getting scammed with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

Ezekiel Emanuel (3:38)

Hello, I'm Ezekiel Emanuel. I'm an oncologist, a bioethicist, health policy expert, author of 16 books, including Eat Your Ice Cream, and I'm a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Chris Duffy (3:51)

One of the things that I really was struck by in Eat Your Ice Cream, this book, was how you talk about the cost of all this conflicting medical and wellness advice that we get online, but you talk about it not just in terms of financial cost of people wanting you to buy their supplements or their expensive, very fancy, you know, yogurt brand, something like that, but instead you also talk about the cost in terms of our mental energy and our time. For people who haven't read the book, can you explain a little bit about how this is a real cost to all this advice being flooded towards us at all times?

Ezekiel Emanuel (4:25)