Nutrition Science and Disinformation with Dr. Laura Thomas (S02 E02)

Synopsis

Dr. Laura Thomas, a London-based registered nutritionist and author, joins Rachel and Dan to trace how nutrition science gets warped as it moves from academic research through press releases and journalism into social media and, ultimately, into products for sale. Laura argues that framing health as a personal, individual project obscures the social and structural forces — capitalism, class, and gender — that actually shape people's ability to eat well. 

Interview

• Dr. Laura Thomas — nutritionist and writer behind the "Can I Have Another Snack?" newsletter
• @LauraThomasPhD — Laura's Instagram presence, where she writes about diet culture and nutrition misinformation
• Human Microbiome Project — the publicly funded 2007 research initiative Laura traces as the root of the gut-health boom
• Priya Fielding-Singh and Merin Oleschuk's research on "food work" — sociological framing of the domestic labor involved in feeding a family

Lenses

Lens 1: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Mainstream responses to health problems tend to focus on individual choices while ignoring that we live inside systems that constrain and shape our decisions. This lens asks us to notice when a "choice" is really an illusion.

• What is the environment allowing or disallowing an individual to do, and why?
• What judgment does the system cast on what counts as a "good" or "bad" choice?
• Is this a real choice, or does it just create the illusion of control — like an account "deactivation" button that doesn't actually delete your data?

Lens 2: Crossing the Streams
Information sometimes flows from a domain governed by rigorous norms — like academic science — into a domain built on entirely different incentives, like social media. When it crosses over, the information tends to take on the incentive structure of its new home, warping the content to align with the new environment.

• What incentive structure governs the space where this information originated, versus where you're encountering it now?
• Has the information kept the values of its source (accuracy, nuance), or adopted the values of its current home (clicks, sensationalism)?
• Whose job is it to bridge that gap — the platform's, or the person consuming the information?

Edited by Jared Landis <https://www.landispodcastediting.com/>

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Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

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Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Transcript

Laura 0:00

What is the effect or the consequence of us being so myopically focused on what is happening inside our own bodies? It obscures the larger social and structural determinants of health, right? It keeps us focused on our own individual guts as an asset for mining and extracting health. But what's actually happening is we are being mined and extracted for profit.

Sarah 0:31

You're listening to Unchecked, the podcast about the architecture of disinformation with Dan Brown and Rachel Price.

Dan 0:44

Rachel, it's my turn to ask you. This is the second nutritionist we have interviewed.

Rachel 0:49

Yeah.

Dan 0:50

You were quite keen to interview Laura in particular. What?

Rachel 0:53

Quite keen.

Dan 0:54

Why were you so excited to talk to Laura?

Rachel 0:56

Okay, I'm gonna try to answer this in the least fangirl way possible. So I'm gonna take a deep breath and a sip of my own.

Dan 1:04

Do not hold back on my account.

Rachel 1:06

Well, I don't want to embarrass myself.

Dan 1:09

Now is the time and the place to do it.

Rachel 1:11

Okay. I have been listening to Laura Thomas and reading her writing for several years. I came across her three or four years ago, around the time when I had a child and realized that, oh man, the world has lots of opinions about how you feed your kid, especially now. It feels like it's gotten even weirder. And there's lots of opinions in Seattle, especially. It's just like weird. There's so many layers to this. And I had no idea. Like I was not aware of this. And through reading people like Virginia Sole Smith and Christy Harrison, you know, some other people who kind of write in this space of like parenting and food and just all of the misinformation around those spaces and all of the social pressure around those spaces. I came across Laura Thomas, who I really appreciate because she brings another perspective. She's based in London. So she's not one of the American voices, which I always appreciate. She has her own struggles with like things she sees NHS doing and British celebrity chefs doing to try to shame all of us into eating better. And she's really vocal about calling out kind of the misinformation and the intentionally misleading framing that happens when you go from what was like well-intended kind of academic research about how food and bodies work, which is a burgeoning space that we really don't know a lot about, and how you go all the way from that to like TikTok influencers telling you to just, you know, be a protein girly or whatever. So I personally got a lot of great information from Laura. And as we've gone through this podcast, I think we started with misinformation as a thing. There are definitions for it. There are like actions people take. And then as you and I have learned, we've really kind of had this conversation about there's a lot of mythology involved. There's a lot of like subtle framing and kind of bigger, more amorphous situations that are also wrapped up in misinformation. And I think food, the wellness industry, wellness culture, diet culture, how you feed your kids, parenting, all of those are like really solid examples of how huge misinformation could be. And I think Laura is a person who's really good at talking about that and translating that for people who don't sit and think about wellness bullshit all day.

Dan 3:34

Right. I was excited to talk to uh Dr. Laura Thomas because it seems like she is outside kind of mainstream information space related to nutrition. Dr. Amelia Finaray was an academic, she's a clinician, she's very much in that space. She writes textbooks. So she's very much in that academic clinical space. But what Laura represents is sort of this expansion of the information ecosystem around nutrition, this idea that not only is there more of a downstream output to that information, but there are now people like Dr. Laura who are calling out the fact that these other channels where people get their information from have diluted the message, so to speak, or changed the message that's coming out of academia. Shall we talk to her?

Rachel 4:21

Let's do it. Today we have Dr. Laura Thomas, who is a registered nutritionist with a thriving clinical practice. She is also, in her words, disgruntled and disenchanted with a profession committed to upholding power and the subjugation of bodies. Over the past 12 years, uh, she's been unraveling everything about health, weight, and bodies. She has an active presence on Instagram at Laura Thomas PhD and has written two books, Just Eat It and How to Just Eat It. Laura, thank you so much for joining us today.

Laura 4:58

Thank you for having me. It's been a long time since anyone called me Dr. Laura.

Rachel 5:04

Well, you're the one who wrote it in your bio, so I'm just going with what you said. Okay, Laura, welcome. Thank you. That's better. Yes. Uh Dan and I are excited to have you here because we've done at least one, maybe more than one episode about health and wellness and misinformation. And this is just such a deep cesspool to room around. It's a rich, yeah, it's a rich text. And so I kind of want to start us off here by thinking big, right? So health and wellness information obviously doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not free from influencing forces. And it's not safe from those who want to exploit it. Can you start us off by sketching out the ecosystem of health science information?

Laura 5:51

Yeah, I'll do my best. Something that I've been thinking a lot about recently because I I've just written a piece about it, is the kind of ecosystem, if you will, surrounding gut health. So just for some background, when I was an undergraduate and part of my PhD was studying the gut microbiome. So this is like 2007, 2008 is kind of when I was starting that work. So it's a long time ago now. And it was a really nascent sort of science at that time. And what was happening is that people who had been studying ruminant microbiology started shifting to becoming really interested in the gut microbiome in humans. And so there are a couple of different things that were happening around about that time. So the main thing from a scientific perspective, for a long time in terms of microbiology, we were only able to understand what was going on inside the gut by way of what we could culture in the lab, right? So we'd take a stool sample and then we would put it on a growth plate, we would incubate it and see what came up. And we were only really able to cultivate in the lab a very, very small proportion of the bacteria that lived in the guts of whether it was animals or humans. And the conditions of the gut are really, really hard to reproduce, right? It's warm, it's damp, there's no oxygen, right? So it's really difficult to grow bacteria in an anaerobic environment. So this really limited our ability to understand what was going on in the gut. But then technology developed and eventually we got to a point where we could do this high throughput sequencing, which means that we could look at the entirety of a piece of RNA or DNA and be able to quantify and know exactly what genes and what bacteria and what species were in the gut. So we had this sort of scientific shift from what were called culture-dependent methods to culture-independent methods, right? So this completely revolutionized microbiology. And we it, you know, this is where we're getting into like metabolomics and just we need uh bioinformaticians who are like statisticians who are specialized in analyzing the these kind of data. So a huge shift in the way that science was being conducted. This kind of coincided, or I guess gave way, I suppose, to the human microbiome project, which was launched in 2007. So the human microbiome project wasn't just looking at the gut specifically, but characterizing the microbiome of the skin, the vaginal microbiome, just in all kinds of parts of, you know, in the whole human body. But because of the number of bacteria, you know, the largest proportion of bacteria are in our guts. So naturally, guts became a huge focus of attention. And there was $70 million or something worth of research funding coming out of the Human Microbiome Project. And something like 650 different scientific publications coming out of that, of that time period between like 2007 and 2014 to 16, somewhere around there. But you also get this explosion in data sets, right? So research, which is objectively is a good thing, right? Scientists have access to all of these data that are available as a result of the human microbiome project. And let's not forget that this was a publicly funded initiative, right? So the intention that behind that is for the greater good, right? To improve health and well-being, to lead to scientific discoveries, you know, this idea that rising tides uh lift all ships. Publicly funded, publicly available science and data sets. So you have this proliferation of publications. And then the way that I like to think about it, you know, in terms of this ecosystem, you have scientific publications, and then what comes alongside that are university press releases. And then what comes with university press releases, you then you'll get some, you know, really high-quality science journalism in places like New Scientist, for example. But you also get the less high-quality journalism, right? You get, you know, really sloppily reported on articles, clickbait articles in both tabloid and legacy media and and as well as social media. And then what follows that is, you know, when you when you get all the hype associated with that, then products enter the ecosystem, I suppose. So I was just in the US and I could not find a soda that didn't have like 10 grams of fiber in it. Oh, yeah. What is going on here? So, and I mean it is happening, it's happening here as well, but but there was just there was just everything had soluble fiber in it. And I'm on the fence as to whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing. But um, you have all of these products. We know all about the gut microbiome testing kits that are just yeah, everywhere. And you also have these experts kind of capitalizing, I think, on the hype on the science and kind of, I don't know, it's sort of this circular thing that sort of the scientists feed into the hype, and then the hype feeds into the gives the the scientists a bigger platform. So at the moment, I think I'm thinking of people like Tim Spector, right, who is a scientist who has studied the gut microbiome predominantly in twins, I believe, but then got involved in this Zoe startup, which is just like this venture capitalist-backed gut testing kit, which I was looking at a paper the other day that the scientific efficacy of these testing kits is really, really dubious. And people are paying hundreds and hundreds of pounds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars to test their microbiome at home. And this paper that I was looking at the other day basically it was just an independent analysis of various different direct-to-consumer testing kits that found that the results between these different kits had similar levels of variability between them as to if we were testing the variability between you and I in terms of our gut microbiome composition. So it really calls into question the validity of these tests and their ability then to predict our gut health. Yeah. And I mean, that's just kind of scratching the surface. But hopefully, what I've demonstrated there is charting how, you know, something that is a real, genuine, scientific, exciting field of science can kind of become warped and twisted and yeah, just just subject to neoliberal capitalism. Yeah. And then really be about extracting profit from people. When, as I said at the very beginning, that is a publicly funded scientific initiative. And it's not to say that it like went from the human microbiome to Zoe in like this straight line, but it's all part of, to use your verbiage, the that same ecosystem.

Rachel 12:48

As we're kind of playing out the broad strokes of this, right, going from public funding to academic research to headlines from various reputable sources or not, to like influencers to money, like products for profit. Do you have any thoughts on the human component of why this pipeline just goes this way so often for health topics? I'm assuming gut health is not the only example where you can see this pipeline happening.

Laura 13:17

Like, yeah, I think the ultra-processed foods stuff is another area. So, but you might not want to get me started on that.

Rachel 13:23

I do though. I really do. I guess what I'm kind of asking is like, why is the human psyche so vulnerable in like the health and wellness space for this kind of misinformation?

Laura 13:37

Well, I think one way to look at this is to think about what is the effect or the consequence of us being so myopically focused on what is happening inside our own bodies. It obscures the larger social and structural determinants of health, right? It keeps us focused on our own individual guts as an asset for mining and extracting health. But what's actually happening is we are being mined and extracted for profit. While, okay, to give you an example, Tim Spector himself, I found the other day when I was doing some research for this gut healthism piece, is authored on a paper that shows the links between socioeconomic deprivation and disrupted gut microbiome. But he's not talking about that. He's not funneling the profits of Zoe, as far as I know, into anti-austerity measures, into feeding children in schools, into, you know, making sure that people have adequate housing to live in. Not just adequate, but like good housing to live in.

Rachel 14:40

Yeah, because pushing for those things isn't profitable and doesn't have influencers by us.

Laura 14:48

Are we still talking about fermented foods? That's fine. I walked into my library the other day, my local library, and there was his a new book that right in front of me that it was like Tim Spectre fermentation. Yeah. So he's just released a new book about this, apparently.

Rachel 15:02

It's amazing how how long you can kind of tap some of these headlines.

Laura 15:07

Got health for me has been the most enduring health trend that I've seen in my almost 20 years of being in nutrition. It just won't end. Yeah.

Dan 15:17

Why why do you think that is?

Laura 15:19

It's a great question. I need to think on that some. Do you have any theories?

Dan 15:24

Uh this is a little bit of a departure, but maybe related. My veterinarian said to me, if we could teach dogs to poop in the toilet, I would be out of business. And I think I see a similarity here in that we are so connected to what we eat and how the things that we eat make us feel. But it's like I feel like we're so connected to how we eat that it gives us kind of a modicum of control. And yet the gut is something we can't see or an experience, right? We can see our the skin on our face, we can see moles, like we can see, we can participate in our health in that way, but we don't have a whole lot to go on with gut. It's so it's like this mystery inside ourselves that we're trying to unlock.

Laura 16:02

It was until gut microbiome testing arrived. Direct to consumer microbiome testing. And of course, there's a big question mark over that as to whether that's actually really telling us what's inside our guts. But there's the illusion there, right? And I think that that is very appealing. But the idea that there is some control over our own individual health and well-being, I think is very, very appealing, especially in an advanced capitalist society where everything else, like these big social and structural problems, just seems so completely overwhelming. Like it's so much easier, right, to focus inwards on yourself and your health and well-being than it is to organize, than it is to get involved in local politics or your local community in some way. And part of that as well is because we are all so burnt out and drained and exhausted from work and being part of that machine and part of that machinery, right? This is not to like make anybody, any individual person feel bad for like doing Zoe. But I know, Rachel, that you've had discussions previously about diet culture. I think it's really operating on the same plane as diet culture in that it's keeping us invested in body work to the point that we're distracted by, or maybe not even distracted by, but yeah, preoccupied with our own bodies to the detriment of collective well-being.

Rachel 17:30

Yeah, and I mean, probably shouldn't unravel this the whole way, or it'll be the entire rest of the episode. But the more you think you have control over your own body, the more you're probably kind of just being controlled by societal expectations and capitalist expectations of how your body is supposed to be and look. And so it's just this cycle of attempts at control within a system that's really attempting to control quite a bit more than I think any individual can really see at any moment.

Laura 17:59

Yeah.

Dan 18:00

Can I pursue a slightly different line of questioning? You walked us through that trail of information that happens. Rachel and I are really fascinated by how information changes as it moves through a pipeline. Is there any way you could characterize what kinds of changes happen to the information as it goes from kind of scientific paper to social media? Are things getting added to it? Are things getting subtracted from it? Is it getting reframed? Like what do you see happening? Is that a reasonable question?

Laura 18:29

Yeah. And without having given it too much thought, just it on a kind of very superficial level, virtually all nuance is lost. And because nutrition is obviously that's my area of interest. Nutrition is so contextual and so individual in many, many ways, in terms of the way we eat and how we eat, and the histories and the cultures and everything else that we're bringing along with us when we engage with food, that that all just gets kind of stripped back and you end up with this one size fits all approach to nutrition. So I suppose when I'm thinking about it in terms of how I work with individual clients, and they maybe they come to me and they'll say, Well, I heard that this is bad or this is good, this one individual food. And I'm like, Well, let's think about how that may or may not make sense within the context of you and your circumstances and your culture and your history and so on and so forth. I'm not sure if that's a particularly satisfying answer, but maybe you have a follow-up.

Dan 19:31

No, I think that's really my understanding of scientific papers, never having participated in one, is that they're very careful about specifying here are the conditions in which we made these observations. But a lot of that gets, as you say, nuance gets stripped out, and we start to believe, maybe somehow, that this one finding can be applied widely. Yes. That's what you're getting at.

Laura 19:53

Yes, absolutely.

Dan 19:54

And that it takes away all the not just the context of the scientific discovery, but any of the context that me as an individual brings to that finding too.

Laura 20:03

Yeah, of course, because in many, many situations, what I see is like an animal experiment or a cell culture experiment be extrapolated to a human, which is wild. But even in the best case scenario where we're looking at something like a randomized control trial, and we can be quite certain, which is very rare in nutrition science for a start. But even if we could, even in the best, most well-controlled studies, you're still comparing an experimental condition with real life, where we are subject to all kinds of variables that is very, very difficult, if not impossible, to control for. So what I see happen is those very specific conditions or very specific populations or the outcomes in a very particular population or disease state, then extrapolate to the general public.

Rachel 20:50

Yeah. I want to ask you a little bit about how you counsel patients on this. So I think the hard part about applying new lenses to our wellness ecosystem is that we're part of it, like you said. And we're also often responsible for doing the research ourselves. And we often get in these situations where, you know, we have something that's not feeling good about our bodies, some chronic condition, diagnosed or undiagnosed, whatever. And we're smart people who maybe have listened to a podcast or two and we're like, yeah, we live in a capitalist society. Like, oh man, like this is such a machine. And also, oh my God, my stomach hurts. And like, why does this keep happening? Right. And so I'm curious, like, how do you counsel? I'm asking for a friend. I'm asking for a friend. No. Um, how do you counsel smart people who want to follow the science who are also struggling to find real answers for their own particular situation? Like, that's such a huge gap.

Laura 21:46

Yeah. It's so hard. And I I'll share that I experience chronic pain in my pelvis from having a kid. And I have so much sympathy for anyone who is living with a chronic condition and is really struggling. To get answers. And I remember finding this really great physiotherapist and talking to her, like, just trying to figure out like, do you have any recommendations for other things I can try? Or, like, you know, is there stuff that I can do? And she's like, Well, I've heard that the anti-inflammatory diet is really good. And I was like, Facebook. Like, no. How could you do me dirty like this? Now I have to talk to you about this. No, now I have to do a deep dive into my newsletter going into because I was like, well, let's have a look and see what is the evidence here. And of course, beyond just like a generic eat more plant-based foods, eat more fruits and vegetables, there's very little. So all of that is to say, like, I don't want to be dismissive of anybody's experience or that sort of like real desperation to find answers. And so when I'm working with someone and they're struggling, I mean, the first thing that I will do with them is listen and try and empathize and be like, yeah, this fucking sucks. This real, this is really shit. And like we might not be able to figure this out exactly. People in my experience want to jump to the anti-inflammatory diet, want to jump to the low FODMAP diet, or they want something that they can kind of latch on to.

Rachel 23:24

Something they can do.

Laura 23:26

Yeah, something they can do. But in some ways, I think it kind of like cosigns, like there's something wrong with me, right? And so my my nutritionist has told me that I need to do this. Like there is something in that, I think, role of being like, look, I have this special diet, therefore that's kind of in a way validating.

Rachel 23:46

Yeah.

Laura 23:46

Do you see what I mean? Like in the same way that if we went to a doctor and walked out with a prescription for, I don't know, some heavy duty antidepressants or something, we'd be like, look, this is kind of validating in a way for me. So it can be difficult sometimes to have that conversation with someone to be like, this diet that you think is gonna cure all of your things is horseshit and it's actually not gonna help. And it could potentially make things worse, to be able to say that without inadvertently making things worse for someone. Yeah. And so, first of all, I think more than anything, my role as someone counseling someone with nutrition and diet is to establish relational safety with them, right? To build trust so that I can have those candid conversations with them and be like, this article that you sent me the other day about why you need to cut out all ultra-processed foods got all of these flaws and problems in it. But if I said that to them without having first established a relationship with them, they're just gonna go to someone else and be like, tell me what I want to hear, right?

Rachel 24:49

Yeah. Because the drive to find something, anything that will validate what I'm feeling and potentially help me, like that's so powerful.

Laura 24:56

Yes. And then for me, like oftentimes it's really bringing it back to basics with people. Someone who might come to me saying that they want to like try an anti-inflammatory diet. I'm like, let's first of all establish a meal pattern where you are actually eating three meals a day. Or it's more often than not, it's people with IBS who are just eating in this completely chaotic, erratic way. And I'm like, can we just get you eating three square meals a day, first of all? And then maybe throw in some snacks. And then, you know, down the line, once we've tried this kind of like lower-hanging fruit, we can think about if there is a probiotic supplement, if there is a dietary pattern that is going to help. But first of all, the let's let's cover our bases. Let's make sure you're eating when you're hungry and not going 16 hours without having a meal.

Rachel 25:41

Okay. You you just said two things I want to dig into a little bit here, which to me feels like a door opening to switching the thinking from my individual body and something that's wrong with it needs to be solved versus the system I exist in that has normalized skipping meals, that has normalized that it's good to feel hungry, right? It means you're succeeding at something, especially if you're a female. And yeah, so this looks like like from the outside looking in, you're describing this situation. And yeah, you mentioned this earlier, right? Like when we think about just what one body is doing and one, like when we highlight that as the place to fix things, it's easy to ignore the systemic stuff. But that thing you just described of someone like not eating three meals a day, right? That's a thing they didn't even notice on their radar because we live in a system that like doesn't really we don't talk about three meals a day. We prize being hungry and like skipping meals as like a sign of, I don't know, power or discipline or something.

Laura 26:46

Yeah. And also that we're just like so busy and that makes us feel important in some way. Yeah.

Rachel 26:52

So I don't really know what I'm trying to dig into here except to like highlight that moment of like you see like the system impacting the individual in a way that the individual can't always see in the moment.

Laura 27:02

Yeah. And and I think it's really important for me to have those conversations and name these systems with my clients. So the amount of time that I actually spend talking about food per se with clients, it's not a lot of time relative to how we're talking about anti-fatness and the way that that impacts our ability to eat neurodivergence and how that impacts our ability to feed ourselves and how the broader structures of racialized capitalism are intersecting with all of these things and then have such an enormous impact on the way that we eat and care for ourselves, or they can limit or constrain our ability to eat and care for ourselves and each other, because it's not a personal project.

Dan 27:49

Is it fair to say that they come in with one expectation, not necessarily as a rule, but maybe many patients that you see come in with an expectation that Dr. Laura is going to give me a diet plan to follow, like tell me what foods I should eat?

Laura 28:02

Oh no, Dan, I've been I've been shitposting on the internet for way too long for people to come into this like blindsided and be like, What? You're not gonna give me talk to me about capitalism?

Dan 28:15

So you really understand that when they're coming to you, they're having a conversation about systems and how they can take advantage or benefit from those systems or reframe their approach to food, not I'm getting a meal plan. Is that fair to say?

Laura 28:32

Yeah, I think um I always offer people like a call beforehand so we can suss each other out and make sure that I'm a good fit for them because I'm not going to be a good fit for everyone. But most people have maybe come across one of my books or my newsletter, and so kind of have a like a sense that I'm not going to help them lose weight. I'm not going to put them on a restrictive diet plan. I'm not going to be prescriptive in my approach. But one thing that I will clarify with them on that call is that I will meet them where they are and support them and guide them. And people are obviously at different points in their learning and understanding about the way that these systems impact, again, our ability to feed and care for ourselves. And for some people who aren't quite as far along, it will be a lot of building that foundation of supporting internal regulation of hunger and satiety cues rather than like, I don't know, outsourcing it to our phones or a Fitbit or, you know, something like that. So it's not that I'm not supporting people in a very, very practical way. Oftentimes I am, but you know, when that doesn't solve absolutely everything that they set out to solve and they've tried the low-fodmaps diet, they've tried the anti-inflammatory diet, they've tried the carnivore diet, they've done, they've done all of the things. There's like there's nowhere else to go. So it's sitting with them and being like, yeah, this is really hard. And also look at everything burning all around us.

Rachel 29:54

Of course, it's right, of course, it's hard.

Laura 29:58

Where are the places that we can find community and connection? And so I work with a lot of people, fat people in bigger bodies. And, you know, one of the things that I really encourage them is to find fat community, right? To to be with other fat folks who understand the lived experience of medical anti-fatness, of being a fat person in the world, of how difficult it is to move through the world, because that is going to be way more healing and way more supportive than any like diet project that I could give them.

Dan 30:28

So, what would you say is the biggest misconception that the folks that you work with in the clinic have when they come in? It sounds like they've tried everything else. So maybe they've had a moment where they understand what sort of lies are being peddled to them. Is there a misconception that people have about nutrition and wellness when they come to you?

Laura 30:45

I think this is kind of tricky because people are coming to see me for one-on-one individual support, right? And there is absolutely a function for individual level counseling. And I think that applies across the board, whether it's like therapy, whether it's nutrition and dietetics, there is a role there. And one of the questions that you'd sent me ahead of time was like, well, what is the the big lie, right? Yes that related to my field. And I think it's that nutrition and well-being and health are a personal project, right? So yes, there are things we can do on an individual level, and and yes, like that can be supportive. And if you have, if your stomach is cramping and you've got diarrhea, like and you have IBS like symptoms, let me help you with that, right? There are things that we can do. And there's also, I'm very aware that there is a limit to my ability to help people unless we can change things systemically and structurally. And so my hill that I will die on is in nutrition, we have this kind of mentality of if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he'll feed for the rest of his life. This is a very like biblical thing. I don't know much about the Bible. But and I think that this is a this is just really rooted in neoliberal ideology, right? Of pull yourself up by the bootstraps, thatcherism, like get on with things. But in nutrition, we're like, let's teach people how to cook. Let's teach people knife skills, let's give them a nice recipe, and off they go. And so, I mean, there's a whole other conversation to be had around that. But ultimately, I think that is the wrong way to think about solving nutrition problems because we just end up in this place where we have to take personal responsibility. When, as we've just been talking about, there are so many structural and systemic barriers to being able to feed ourselves. So if we were really serious about improving people's nutrition, we would feed them. That's the whole tweet. We would feed them. We can do that in so many different ways. In the UK, in London, where I am, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has instituted free school meals, universal free school meals for all primary school age children, right? Do that more. Feed children. We also have the national government fucking around making microscopic tweaks to the nutrition standards in school when I'm like, this is diminishing returns at this point. Just feed people. We've had nutrition standards. Nutrition standards are great. I'm all for nutrition standards, but just tweaking them here and there is gonna do nothing compared to if we just feed kids. Just feed them. It's as simple as that, right? Obviously, it's not just as simple as that, but we do have infrastructure. And something that I talk a lot about is how in the Second World War in the UK, we opened up what were called British restaurants. Okay. So they were like World War II era IKEA canteens, right? They were cheerful, they were bright, they had flowers on the table, they had gramophones, they had a piano that people could play, they had books, they were community spaces that you could go in and they were subsidized by the government and you could pay the equivalent of what is two pounds now for a full, hot, nourishing meal. Wow. Right? We have the infrastructure, maybe not everywhere, but we have church halls, community centers, schools, all sorts of different public buildings. Like my kids' school is a two-minute walk from where I live. They serve 600 restaurant quality meals every single day to children. And I when I say restaurant quality, I am not fucking about. They hired an Ottolangi chef to design the school menu, right? Because it's a whole thing. It's a whole thing.

Dan 34:36

It wasn't because they knew you were coming, right?

Laura 34:38

No, this was way before, this was way before my time. And actually, the food is it really appeals to a very like middle class sensibility. And my kid doesn't eat any of it. But that's another story, right? This is a separate. Okay. But the point is there's infrastructure there. Why are we not then sending families home with a meal package at the end of the day? Why are we not then feeding the people in the community? I'm not saying it won't take investment. I'm not saying that that we wouldn't need to build on the existing infrastructure, but you could easily double the number of meals or even like send home a side that families could have with their meals. So I'm not saying that we would have to have good unionized workers, right? Who were being paid well. We would need to have lots of funding and subsidizing and all of those kinds of things. But I just think where we put the emphasis on nutrition policy is fundamentally rooted in a kind of pull your bootstraps up, Reagan Thatcher, right? Like a neoliberal personal responsibility narrative. And it's even when we gesture towards moving the responsibility away from the individual onto more systemic problems, like the big thing in nutrition at the moment is the industrialized food system and the food environment. And it's not to say that there aren't bad actors in that space. Of course there are, absolutely. But all the talk about changing the food environment in particular, although it ostensibly on the surface seems like we're talking about shifting blame and responsibility away from the individual, it actually reinforces the personal responsibility narrative. Because what it is saying is if we make the food environment pristine, right? And reduce the price of vegetables, reduce the price of fruit, you know, get rid of ultra-processed foods and you're still fat and you're still chronically ill and you're still disabled, then that's a choice you're making. Yeah. Then that's that's on you. You know, I'm not here to like lobby for the food industry in any way. And it's not to say that we shouldn't be paying attention to the food system and, you know, particularly making food more affordable, more accessible, and so on and so forth. But do that not with the intention of like shrinking people's bodies. Do that with the intention that that is good for everyone, but also feed people. It just comes back to my original. We have a national health service in the UK for now. Why not have a national food service, right? Where we're providing, you know, low cost or cheap food at the point of access.

Rachel 37:15

Okay, so this gets to something uh that we haven't named yet. But in our pre-interview, you taught us about a concept, and I want to make sure well, I want to make sure we get to it because I think it's invisible and I want to name it. Yeah. You're talking about like understanding where the work is, and you call this food work. Can you teach us what is food work briefly? And then it kind of help us understand food work and its role in society today.

Laura 37:42

Yes, absolutely. So, food work is not actually a concept that I came up with. I mean, we can trace its lineage back to Marxist feminists who talked about the invisible domestic labor and reproductive labor that props up capitalism. But more recently, um, the sociologists Priya Fielding Singh and Marin Olschuk, that's maybe how you say their name, defined specifically what family food work is, right? So this is the work involved in feeding a family. So it's all the household practices that support eating, like meal planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, budgeting, going to different grocery stores, thinking about storage, thinking about like food waste, all of that kind of stuff. And they say that it's a multifaceted and demanding form of domestic labor. So I think there are two points that kind of I want to make on the back of that. So nutrition inequalities and outcomes are in part produced through food work, right? Okay. So if we don't prepare fresh food and we're only eating from like a drive-thru all the time, then that is going to have consequences for our health, right? However, and this is the part that I was talking about before, where nutrition interventions are aimed predominantly at like giving people cooking skills and giving people nice recipes to use, right? All of those things completely ignore the fact that food work itself is a product of social and structural inequality, right? So if you are poor, if you are disabled, if you are racialized, your capacity and ability to perform food work are compromised from the get-go, right? And so the second point to make off of that is that food work is kind of central to capitalist accumulation and exploitation, and it reproduces gendered, classed, and racialized oppression. Does that make sense? What I'm saying?

Rachel 39:43

Yeah. I I almost said it sounds like performing perfect food work is only possible with significant privilege. But then the other side of me is like performing perfect food work as the most privileged person means you're probably not actually performing the work. Someone's performing it for you. So like a little bit of both.

Laura 40:02

There's there are two things. And this is what the sociologists that I mentioned, Priya Fielding Singh and Marin Olschuk, talk about in a paper that I can I can share with you if it might be interesting to the readers. But our ability to perform food work adequately is kind of central to our construction of the good mother, right? And I should also say that in our current sort of parenting environment, there is this real scrutiny on our ability and the adequacy of in which we perform food work. There are really, really intensive feeding standards around, for example, things like baby led weaning and the kind of like the solid starts of it all. And then, you know, if you if you open parenting Instagram, you're just gonna get inundated with the ideal way that you should feed your child, right? Absolutely.

Rachel 40:54

They should train you for that when you get pregnant now, by the way. That's my in hindsight.

Laura 40:59

Yeah, it's it's really, really intense. So we have these really intensive feeding standards, and we also get scrutinized, parents get scrutinized on our ability to comply with mothers in particular, get uh scrutinized based on their ability to comply with these intensive feeding standards. So, what you have is this is where the kind of class dimensions come in. You may have a middle class white mother who is really anxious about performing motherhood, right? And so she will follow these standards really, really closely. But the only way that she is able to do that is on the back of the labor of working class and racialized other women, right? Off of the back of their labor. So what I mean by that is that middle class white mom, she might be doing all of the food work, right, to meet these intensive feeding standards. She's probably running in circles, like tying herself in knots with it, right? And the only reason she's able to do that is because there is a racialized or working class woman looking after her children. You know, it's the ballerina farm of it all, right?

Rachel 42:06

Yeah.

Laura 42:06

You have Hannah, what's her face, making all of her sourdough bread and milking her cows and everything, but there's someone looking after the kids in the background, right? And it's probably a far less privileged woman than she is. And so then what happens is that that setup has direct consequences for that woman's ability to perform food work for her own family.

Rachel 42:29

For her family, yes. And then it just keeps going down and down.

Laura 42:32

Yes. Yes, exactly. Nothing is simple, is it, Laura? I asked. No, but I think, I mean, it's really important that I think that we talk about the kind of the gnarly side of all of this.

Rachel 42:45

I think naming this stuff is huge because when you exist in this system, it's really easy to be blind to it, especially if you've been in the same role or floating in the same space your whole life. It's really, really, really easy to be completely blind to a lot of this stuff. And I think it's important. Even if we can't solve it, I do think it's important to try to hold up a mirror and look around at it.

Laura 43:06

Yeah. And one final thought that I will say on but you just kind of sparked this thought, which is that what I try to do in my work on kind of another snack is kind of look at the underlying ideology behind, you know, whether it's food work, whether it's gut healthism, whatever it is. And for me, one thing that feels really important to name, particularly in light of the Maha moms and the, you know, the trad wives and the like the kind of this real preoccupation with feeding our children perfectly, is how that requires us to intensify our food work and nutrition work, which is a term that I came up with, which I think is slightly different from food work, but it's more cognitive and emotional, which, you know, is all of the research and the, you know, trying to figure out how to prevent your child from becoming a picky eater or reverse picky eating or whatever. It is. So I don't think it's a coincidence that at a time where we are seeing an onslaught on the bodies of women, trans people, black people, racialized people, where we're seeing far-right politics all across the globe, that we are also trying to redomesticate women through the project of food work. It's not a coincidence. And I think it's really important that we name that the underlying ideology is fascism and this project of redomesticating women.

Rachel 44:30

Yeah, I think what you've really illuminated for us today is food, nutrition, wellness is an intersectional system that exists and is like deeply, deeply, deeply influenced by so many other forces that have nothing really to do with what's going on in your stomach. Thank you so much, Laura.

Laura 44:52

Yeah, you're very welcome. It's been a pleasure to talk to you both.

Rachel 45:01

Okay. So what's top of mind for you coming out of that?

Dan 45:05

I really appreciated the tension that Laura is dealing with between the information that's out there about nutrition and how so much of it has been corrupted, let's say, to support a capitalist enterprise. And yet there is still useful information to be had that she needs in order to counsel her clients. And I came away feeling like I didn't have a clear picture of how she made that separation. And this is definitely not a knock on Laura. I think it is challenging to be in a profession that deals with both legitimate scientific research that can actually help people who need help, that is also engulfed in, surrounded by, you know, lost in a bunch of misinformation about nutrition that has been created to support a money-making machine. And I think trying to separate those two things is complicated and hard and probably could have been an entirely new, separate interview.

Rachel 46:07

Yeah. I feel like I get kind of coach vibes where you have this person who can see the system you're operating in. Like Laura is a person who is also a human living in this world, being pressured by the system. And she sees the system, sees the mechanics, has thought about the larger system at play and is trying to help individuals who are stuck in this system. Some of them may be being crushed by it. Yes. And the thing I walked away thinking is like, I am so impressed that her sanity is still intact.

Dan 46:42

Right.

Rachel 46:42

I mean, I'm honestly left thinking that about most of our guests. I'm so humbled by their ability to crusade in these oppressive mechanics and not only like stay alive, but help other people like thrive thrive. Yeah. And I don't think it'll surprise you or anyone who knows me. Like the thing I'm really sitting with is like, man, oh God, we are just all cogs in a machine. There's just so much systemic stuff at play that we're constantly asked to take individual responsibility for.

Dan 47:18

Well, I mean, here's a metaphor that popped into my head as you were talking, which is you and I are now dealing with the frenzy around AI. There's severe cognitive dissonance in our daily professional lives. On the one hand, we're like, we see this technology and understand it and the marketing around it like a cancer. It is potentially very problematic, not to be a doomsayer, but it is potentially very problematic. And we need to be actively thinking about how to make sure it is well integrated into society. And yet, we are all facing pressure at work to make use of this technology. And so we need to make the best of the fact that we need to use it and need to find the best way to integrate it into our day-to-day work. And we have to hold both of those truths in our minds at the same time.

Rachel 48:06

Yeah, absolutely. Well, before I speak, does this take us into your lens? Are you giving is this like a No. No?

Dan 48:13

This is not a preamble for my lens.

Rachel 48:15

Great. Because it is a preamble for my lens. What is your lens? Between a rock and a hard place. Oh, I like that. So Laura talked about how individuals are blamed for their health instead of looking at the system that creates the situation that we find ourselves in. Most solutions proposed by most mainstream channels and people are about changing an individual's choices. She writes about this extensively too, around children and the quote-unquote obesity epidemic of children. The solutions mostly proposed are ways to limit those kids from having access to food and teaching children to stop putting food in their mouth, you know, to stop feeding themselves. I'm paraphrasing. She doesn't write it exactly like that, but it makes me mad. So I'm going to paraphrase in that way in an exaggerated way. And this really touches on a thing that has been central to how I've started to understand misinformation is this dissonance between the system in which I exist and the individual actions that are within my control.

Dan 49:18

Yes.

Rachel 49:18

We can pretend all day long that every choice I make all day is my choice and that I have autonomy. And I don't. We don't. We make choices within a given environment. And that environment is determined by the systems in which we exist. And those systems are bigger than us. So especially when it comes to food, there's also a lot of morality assigned to those choices, a lot of shame, a lot of judgment. I mean, it's a pretty broad lens, but I think this lens is asking us to look at, like in a moment where we are assessing an individual's choices, what did they do and why? We really need to be also assessing what is the environment allowing an individual to do and why. What is it disallowing? And what judgment is it casting upon what is a good choice or a bad choice? I think if we went back through all the episodes, we would see I probably like hit this tone in my lenses like every week. Cause I feel like this is so central to how I've personally like grown a lot in the last five years and understood a lot about the misinformation I was living with, the myths I was telling myself about, how to be a good parent, how to be a good pregnant woman. Holy shit, there's so much opinion on that. How to be a good caregiver, a good person who feeds other people. You know, there's there's just so much of this there. And I think your note about cognitive dissonance also kind of lights up there, like this quiet, persistent dissonance between me trying to make the best choices, but then feeling like I'm struggling anyway. It's because you have to look at the environment that you're in and what choices are even allowed to you.

Dan 50:55

Just building on that, the notion of between a rock and a hard place also has this implication that you have an illusion of choice, right? That the system is presented to you in such a way that you can make a legitimate choice between these two things, but like a magic trick that's, you know, where a card is forced upon you or any kind of oppressive system, that choice is just an illusion. And the way I would use this lens in designing systems is to make sure that the choices that I'm actually offering users is a real legitimate choice and not just one to give them the illusion of control, not one that is just trying to make them feel like they're empowered without actually empowering them, trying to make them feel like we're treating them with dignity without actually treating them with dignity.

Rachel 51:44

Like when you try to shut down your Facebook account, I think there's like one button that does it. It was years ago I did this. And then I realized, no, if you actually want to remove all your stuff from Facebook, you're gonna spend about eight hours pulling all your data and pulling all your media and pull, you know, and that this is a thing where like that's such a subtle, quiet thing. I think when we talk about a lot of anti-patterns, this is kind of what we're talking about, like, oh sure, I'll let you unsubscribe. But then you click on that unsubscribe link. And am I really letting you unsubscribe? Maybe not. So I think you see this and like really concretely and things like that. You see it very abstractly in the ways like the language we use in interfaces, misleading labels, misleading button titles, things that make it seem like you can undo a thing when you can't, or you should be able to delete a thing and you can't do it. I'm thinking of really tactical examples.

Dan 52:36

I like to hear deactivate the account example because the false choice ends up being, you know, even if I know this one button is not gonna deactivate it and that what I really need to do is spend eight hours cleaning out my account. That's not really a choice because humans are maybe inherently lazy and they're like, well, I could spend eight hours doing this, or I could just ignore it. And that compelled trade-off is really not fair to our users.

Rachel 53:02

Yeah. Uh, Dan, what was your lens?

Dan 53:04

I was really intrigued by her talk about parent Instagram or food Instagram. And it is not something because my kids were born before Instagram that we we didn't really get that entrenched in that thing. But what occurred to me as she was talking is it's sort of the collision of two different domain spaces, if you will. It's sort of like the academic science journalism side of nutrition, and then this other space of let's call it social media or entertainment or whatever. And what we're seeing is this weird intersection between these two domains and what happens to information when these two domains intersect or collide. I actually just thought to call it crossing the streams, right? We've got this kind of one stream of academic scientific information. And maybe the natural end to that is mainstream journalism, where there's still a science journalist at the end of that stream who's not getting into all the details, but not reporting the information in such a way that they can then parlay that into a money-making scheme. And then we have this other stream of people who are their incentive system is clicks and likes and subscriptions and all of these things. And now when you intersect that with food journalism, with nutrition journalism, you are getting people who are making changes to that information who are not reporting it completely or accurately or factually because what they want to do is take your money.

Rachel 54:39

Yeah. And it's just so rife. And this isn't new. For some reason, this makes me think of snake oil. Right. And like going all the way back to like whenever that term kind of sprang from, not this century. I think it's it's an exploitation of one of the ultimate vulnerabilities, right? Yes. I think mankind's ultimate vulnerability is the most like we want to live forever, right? We don't want to die. And so that's really easy to exploit. And then when money gets involved, holy cow.

Dan 55:10

What happens to the one domain is that it shifts the incentive structure, right? It ends up adopting the incentive structure of the other domain. And if I spent more time thinking about this, I'd be interested to find other places where crossing the streams has happened. But it always feels like it's the kind of continuation of an information flow from more legitimate sources to less legitimate sources.

Rachel 55:35

Well, because and if you think of it like shit flows downhill, right? And so you think about where the bar is higher and the filters are stronger and the expectations are higher. And then like naturally we're gonna sink to the lowest. Right. The lowest bar.

Dan 55:50

I think also people who participate in each of these streams have different expectations about the participation. So if I'm participating in nutrition science, the value there is truth, right? The value there is we are at least learning something new or validating a hypothesis or right. That's the structure of the inquiry there. With Instagram, whatever we may think of Instagram, the structure, the value is different. It's sensationalism, it's clicks, it's excitement, it's entertainment, right? It's all of these other things. And we participate in that space thinking we are going to get informed, but that is not what that stream is for. I mean, they would say it is. And a lot of kids, you know, a lot of folks get their news from these, and I get news from Instagram, but it wasn't wasn't designed to do that.

Rachel 56:39

Okay. So here's the question though, is like it wasn't designed to do that, but people are using it for that. So which one matters more? I think in this case, like impact is prevailing over intent.

Dan 56:50

Yes. And my first thought is people should go in with their eyes open, but that sort of undermines the fundamental premise of this whole podcast, which is we shouldn't burden the consumers with having any predetermined knowledge, any knowledge about what the space is supposed to do, what the intent of the space is supposed to do.

Rachel 57:08

Yeah.

Dan 57:09

The space needs to take responsibility.

Rachel 57:11

Yeah, I'm sitting here thinking about the conversation we had with Claire Wardle many months ago and our discussion with her about how, like you said, like in the academic space, it's official, it's one way, it's a broadcast. And then in social media, it's interactive, it's conversational. And one of the efforts that many people in the scientific community and the academic community are trying to do is be like, hey, this one-way broadcast isn't working. We need to adapt our communications to these conversational spaces. Right. And so, in that sense, right, like it's not a bad thing that Instagram is conversational. And I don't know that I have a conclusion here so much. Like it is what it is. Right. And information's gonna come across. And we can't where I'm not in the camp of saying like the answer is for every individual to improve their information literacy to the point where they can be hyper conscious of every exchange of information going on that they experience in Instagram. And at the same time, people communicating information, I feel like I'm like, I want good actors to know how to use Instagram better, but that's almost still just like as useless.

Dan 58:17

We've been picking on Instagram, but other conversations that we have had with scientists have highlighted the weakness of the more formal information space too, that it is extremely high friction. It is extremely difficult, is not accessible. And you've pointed this out before is that although there are mechanisms for corrections, mechanisms for retractions, those mechanisms are not very robust. And so even if something incorrect is published in those more formal spaces, it takes a tremendous amount of effort and energy to quash that misinformation.

Rachel 58:52

Yeah, it occurs to me, like where I'm as I think through like a formal space versus an informal space, to me, I'm using that as a proxy for trust. Right. So I think like, of course, experts can be informal and still tell the truth. I'm sitting here thinking about how I, in the olden days, I would have sat with a professor at their desk and like had a cup of coffee and they, you know, and like it wouldn't have been a formal delivery of a thesis, right? We I probably would have learned some very interesting things. I did. And this was just conversation. But because I trust this person, like I knew their credentials, I knew the institution they were coming. There was so much context around, gathered over months or years and physical place that I chose to trust the information coming from that person, even though it was a highly informal exchange. Right. And when we're talking about formal versus informal or like how you're vetting information, I'm kind of taking this off topic here, but I feel like all of these things are proxy for can I trust this information coming from this source? Right. And I think the podcast is over. I don't know how to fix it. I've just talked myself back to the pilot of this podcast.

Dan 1:00:03

We're gonna start over again. It's funny. I was having this thought, uh, if we were to start this today after everything that I've learned, I would think I would take a different approach. We've landed on this question that we ask folks, which is what is the big lie in your domain? And I really like the question. And I really think we could kind of create a whole conversation about the big lie in your different area. Because even within nutrition, each of the folks that we spoke to has a different perception of what that big, big lie is.

Rachel 1:00:36

Well, you know what? We're capable of iterating.

Dan 1:00:39

We can change.

Rachel 1:00:40

There's no rules here, Dan.

Dan 1:00:42

All three of our listeners are gonna be so disappointed, though, that we're changing.

Rachel 1:00:45

There's at least four.

Dan 1:00:47

Four.

Rachel 1:00:49

Uh okay, so I want to kind of put a bow on this conversation. We didn't ask Laura this time what leaves her hopeful. Oh, yeah. Which we both regretted. So instead of asking her, I'm gonna ask you after talking with Laura and thinking through some of this stuff, which I know some of the concepts were new to you, and that was really fun to actually witness, like the food work discussion we had. Like that was cool.

Dan 1:01:13

Oh, yeah. I'm giving everyone in my house a much harder time about the amount of food work that I be responsible for.

Rachel 1:01:20

Yes. So, well, you're not allowed to. No. You don't have that privilege, Dan. After talking to Laura, what leaves you hopeful?

Dan 1:01:28

So despite the lens that I volunteered here, and despite my sort of grumpy skepticism about how streams are being crossed, I don't think we can prevent streams from being crossed. It's just the nature of envisioning information spaces as ecosystems. They are things that evolve. And we as participants in and products of and members of these ecosystems are also evolving. I watch my kids interact with these spaces and being far more mindful and responsible about engaging with them so that they probably, I think folks who grow up in this space, these spaces have an understanding that they just can't simply take one person's, you know, one polished video's word for what's right and what's cool. My younger son's default reaction to anything we show him is that's fake. And I mean, yeah, it's a fine line between that and cynicism, but at the same time, we are creating a healthy skepticism too in this generation that I think will make them far more mindful about the way they take in and process and search out information.

Rachel 1:02:43

I love that. That is hopeful.

Dan 1:02:46

It was a little cliche, but I do feel like it is I I can't help it by watching them interact with these things.

Rachel 1:02:51

Yeah.

Dan 1:02:52

And you? What's hopeful for you?

Rachel 1:02:54

So specifically, I think that talking to people like Laura brings me hope just because she is standing up in the face of pervasive, pervasive, almost invisible because it's so pervasive, misinformation and just unhealthy beliefs about bodies and food and wellness. You know, there are many topics in our society that fall along party lines and thus are more acceptable to kind of fight about or bring up. Talking about, you know, bless Michelle Obama, I really do love her. But having a conversation about my plate and how it's just another extension of the food pyramid, which is just another extension of kind of misinformed beliefs about food and wellness and who has access to what, and it whitewashes everything and it erases food work and it is fat phobic and all these things. Like that's a much harder conversation to have with most people because we're so steeped in it. And because it doesn't fall along party lines to be afraid of being unhealthy and to be afraid of being perceived as fat and making bad choices about and not taking care of yourself. Like that is such a moral line that no one wants to cross because it's so deeply ingrained in our cultural identity that I really appreciate anyone who's willing to go on the record to say, actually, that's bullshit. And like, let's talk about why. And truly, I can't even believe I'm going on the record talking about it. This has been like a long arc for me to have these quiet thoughts to now actually recording myself saying these words. And I'm able to do it because people like Laura also do it. And she's way smarter about this stuff than I am. She knows way more. Uh, so that's what leaves me hopeful. That's great. Yeah. On that note, until next time. Until next time.

Dan 1:05:01

And that was Unchecked. Thanks so much for listening. We really want to hear from you. If you've got ideas for topics or guests or stories, drop us a line at unchecked at curious-squid.com. If you made use of the lenses that we described today in your practice, we want to hear about that too. Hey, check the show notes for any of the links that we talked about today. And it would really mean a lot to us if you shared this episode with a friend and rated and reviewed us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.