Dr. Dan Wilson of Debunk the Funk joins us to discuss how he went from believing in conspiracy theories about “hidden” cancer cures to becoming a scientist, what led him to rethink his conspiracy beliefs, the crossover between the anti-vax industry and crunchy wellness spaces, how to think critically about common wellness conspiracy theories, and more.
Dan Wilson, Ph.D. is a molecular biologist who earned his doctorate in biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He currently works as a senior associate scientist at Janssen and spends part of his free time exercising his passion for science communication on his YouTube channel, Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson. His channel focuses on debunking anti-vaccine myths and disinformation using sources from the primary scientific literature.
Resources and References
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Dan’s series on the Disinformation Dozen
Dan’s episode of This Week in Virology
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Transcript
Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to provide a faithful rendering of this episode, some transcription errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the diet, culture, disinformation, dubious diagnoses and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary wellness culture and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true wellbeing. I'm your host Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietician, certified Intuitive Eating counselor, journalist, and author of the books Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, and The Wellness Trap, which came out on April 25th and is now available wherever books are sold. You can learn more and order it now at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Hey there. Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is Dr. Dan Wilson of “Debunk the Funk.” He joins us to discuss how he went from believing in conspiracy theories about hidden cancer cures, to becoming a scientist, what led him to rethink his conspiracy beliefs, the crossover between the anti-vax industry and crunchy wellness spaces, how to think critically about wellness conspiracy theories and lots more. This was a really fascinating conversation, and I can't wait to share it with you shortly. Before I do, just a few quick announcements.
This podcast is brought to you by my new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, Dubious Diagnoses, and Find Your True Well-being, which is available now wherever books are sold. The book explores the connections between diet-culture and wellness culture, how the wellness space became overrun with scams, misinformation and conspiracy theories, why many popular alternative medicine diagnoses are misleading and harmful, and what we can do instead, to create a society that promotes true wellbeing, just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book. That's christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap or just pop into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
Now you can ask me all your questions about wellness diets, how to spot wellness scams and misinformation, how to know whether you've gotten a dubious diagnosis or anything else I cover on this show. Just subscribe at rethinkingwellness.substack.com to get new answers every other week and a chance to ask your questions. You can also upgrade to a paid subscription for just a few bucks a month, which will get you special subscriber only q and as, plus bonus podcast episodes, early access to regular episodes, and some other great perks. Sign up now at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Now, without any further ado, let's go to my conversation with Dr. Dan Wilson.
So Dan, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you on Rethinking Wellness.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Hi Christy. Thank you for having me here. I'm excited to be here.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, so I'd love to start out by just having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to do the work that you do now.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Yeah, so my background is I have a PhD in biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, and while I was there I did a lot of molecular biology and since graduating with that degree, I moved on to work as a contractor for a biotech company called Eurofins, and just this past February, I moved on to a job as a senior associate scientist at Janssen. I do a lot of technical work in drug development, making sure that drugs are safe, meeting the standards that the FDA establishes. I call myself a pretty normal scientist. I don't think I have anything super impressive about my professional career, but during my free time, I try to exercise this little passion that I have for science communication via my YouTube channel where I like to debunk medical misinformation, mostly pertaining to vaccines and Covid related topics, and I started that channel coincidentally in January of 2020, so just before Covid really became a thing, but it's been a really fun outlet for me in the background of what I normally do.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean, so fascinating this timing, right? I think that's a really wild coincidence and good for everyone that you came on the scene when you did. I'm curious how you got interested in science communication and especially I've heard you talk in other places about how you were previously bought into some conspiracy theories, and so really curious to get into that and how you came to start believing in those and then how you began rethinking them.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Yeah, totally. So I think that my interest in science communication, definitely the fact that I used to believe in conspiracy theories is a big contributor to that. So about, I guess it was like 14, 15 years ago now, I was really sucked into the world of conspiracy theories. It first started where I would just watch videos on YouTube, these “documentaries” that are often really well produced and very enticing, but when you really dig down below the surface, they're, the information they offer is really shallow or just flat out lies. But to someone who like me back then who didn't really know how to question things properly and how to understand the Scientific process, they were just captivating. And so I totally got in and I believed a number of conspiracy theories. It started for me with 9/11, the idea that that was a inside job got totally sucked in and I would argue in YouTube comments and just be a total pain in people's butts, I'm sure, but it was kind of like a gateway for me to believe in all sorts of other conspiracies.
For example, I was very susceptible to the idea that there was some secret hidden cancer cure that pharma companies were just keeping from us. I was susceptible to the idea that fluoride was bad. All of those things were just really enticing to me. But as I started on my path to being a scientist, I started to learn how we know what we know and I got to do science and I got to meet some really great teachers and I'm really, really thankful for them because they helped me kind of leave that rabbit hole of realizing, okay, when I actually dig into these claims and I ask questions that a scientist would ask when trying to disprove these claims, I find out that these claims really don't hold any water. And there was more to it than that for me to get out, and it was a very complicated long process.
It didn't happen overnight. So I often will tell people if they're dealing with people who are into that kind of conspiracy or alternative health culture, that if you really want to change their mind, you kind of have to be patient with them, especially if it's a family member or someone you care about, and you're invested in them. It can just take time, because for me, it took months, many months to have those ideas chipped away at, and it wasn't just doing science and growing as a scientist and learning from scientists, it was also just being that pain in the butt in comment sections on YouTube videos or whatever. People would argue with me, and a lot of times they would make good points where I wouldn't be able to really address them. And of course at the time I would never admit to some random person they like, oh, you're right, nevermind I was wrong, but it would kind of chip away and next time I wouldn't bring up that point. That totally got smacked down by someone who took the time to write a thoughtful response.
Christy Harrison: That's interesting because you know, I mean there's so much in this story I want to unpack, but it's just really interesting to me to think about how I've been conditioned and told to sort of ignore the trolls and not get into debates with people online and that these sorts of conversations are often futile, and that might sometimes be the case, but it sounds like coming from the other side of it where you were the person making those comments, that it did something maybe not right away, maybe not in the way that the other person might have intended, but it was a little drip of information that sort of took you in a different direction.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Exactly. Yeah, and I totally want to also emphasize it's okay to ignore the trolls. I do a lot of that too, because you just can't respond to everybody and it's already hard enough to have a platform where you're getting a lot of comments and you can't be expected to deal with all the trolls. It would be way too much of a time sink.
Christy Harrison: If you did that, you would have no time to actually make the content, so
Dr. Dan Wilson: Right.
Christy Harrison: You sort of have to preserve your own mental health too. Preserving that I think is important as well.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Exactly. But I do like to just tell my story just as you said, maybe there are some people who a conversation or even just a podcast might plant a seed and maybe a few months from now or a few years from now, they'll be able to put these pieces together and realize like, oh, okay, maybe those beliefs I had back then weren't totally the best.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. So I'm curious, you know, said that YouTube was kind of where you started watching these documentaries. There's a lot of talk around algorithms and how they radicalize people in various ways, and I've definitely seen that and trace that in the wellness culture space. I think that algorithms are really amplifying extreme wellness content and taking people down these rabbit holes from, they come in searching for healthy eating or weight loss and then they end up with extreme diets and anorexia sites or whatever it is. So definitely seen that a lot in the wellness space. Do you feel like you sort of fell into that with YouTube or did you specifically seek out those videos and it wasn't so much an algorithm driven decision as your curiosity?
Dr. Dan Wilson: It happened a long time ago, so it's hard to remember exactly how much I think the algorithm might have played into it. I did a lot of seeking out my myself, but I do know that I ended up finding a lot of other stuff just from the website suggesting things to me. But I see it a lot today as well because even though I don't believe conspiracy theory stuff anymore, I have to seek out a lot of the anti-vaccine content that I end up addressing in my videos. So because I seek those out, the algorithm shows me a lot more of them to the point where me scrolling on Twitter or Reddit or YouTube or whatever, wherever I'm looking for stuff that I'm hearing about, it's just an entire wall of just pseudoscience conspiracy theories and junk because that's what the algorithm thinks I like. So I could definitely see it being a problem.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean that's so interesting too, given especially the social media companies have tried to crack down on it and the wake of the pandemic and it's like that's also been my perspective because I've had to look into this stuff a lot for the book I just wrote and was researching anti-vax and also a lot of out there alternative medicine theories and definitely got pegged as being interested in that stuff and had a lot of it served to me. And yeah, it doesn't seem like there's really been a lot of, even if there has been some effort to use AI to sort of moderate or weigh that stuff, it doesn't seem to have really changed in any huge measurable way what people get served when they express an interest in those things.
Dr. Dan Wilson: I think it's easy to fall into a feedback loop with that and it seems like a difficult problem for the companies to fix because they want people to keep scrolling, but if you're looking at inflammatory or harmful things while you're scrolling, then it just sees that as a good thing and it keeps showing you those things. So I don't know what the solution is, but it's definitely a problem that hopefully users become at least more aware of over time.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, totally. I mean, think it's definitely something for people to consider too, that if they seek out information about alternative medicine that they sometimes will end up in more anti-vax spaces. They'll get sort of funneled there or just anything that sort of crunchy people as Renee DiResta put it, I interviewed her for my book and she talked about how she got pegged as a crunchy person because of some of the things she was searching for and then got showed other things that the algorithm thought crunchy people liked, including eventually anti-vax content. And so I don't know exactly the solution either. I mean I think about policy solutions a lot and Section 230 reform and stuff at that level, but as an individual, I think just doing your best to stay private online and not let the algorithms get a lot of information about you might be helpful in that regard too. Even if you are researching some of this alternative medicine stuff, not letting it connect those dots to who you are and the dossier it already has on you to keep feeding you that content.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Yeah, that's interesting. I could see that. I could probably learn a bit about that by reading your books if I wanted to learn more about it.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I've become sort of obsessed with the tech stuff. I think it's really fascinating and one big key to helping stop the spread of misinformation, I think because those algorithms just amplify these really out there, kind of extreme forms of content and then drive people into these conspiratorial spaces. And like you said, I've seen research that shows too that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are more likely to believe in others. And it sounds like that was your experience, that you came in through the door of one and then all these others started to seem appealing to you.
Dr. Dan Wilson: It totally is. A lot of these communities do a lot of crosstalk on the internet. One conspiracy network will overlap a lot with another conspiracy network because I think the through line that makes them all seem so attractive is just their overall apparent simplicity because we come in, or at least from my experience, I came into those communities, those conspiracy communities with fear. I was afraid of what 9/11 meant for the world. I was afraid of cancer, I was afraid of health problems because I was seeing them in my family. And when those kinds of documentaries offer this really simple story, this simple solution to these really complicated life problems that we're probably all going to experience at some point in our lives, they're just really attractive and comforting in a way. For example, the cancer ones, this idea that a disease as complicated and as written into our DNA as cancer is can just be avoided or cured by eating certain things or avoiding eating certain things or living a certain way.
That's a very nice thing to believe. I would want to believe that, but it's just not true. But when you package it all into a nice documentary with experts who are saying things and suggesting products to you, it can give an audience member who is not equipped to critically evaluate those claims. A lot of comfort and it's easy to get sucked in and find a community and just deal with the fears of those genuinely scary real-life things that way. So it's hard. It's hard to not fall into them sometimes when you're exposed to them and if the algorithm is showing a lot of that kind of content to you and it's preying on your anxiety, then I can totally see how people get sucked in.
Christy Harrison: Absolutely. And it sounds like for you there was definitely that fear at the base of it that was looking for solutions, looking for help and sort of something to alleviate that anxiety,
Dr. Dan Wilson: Right? Because it's totally normal to have those feelings and how are you going to, when you're having those anxious feelings and you don't know the basic biology of how cancer works, and you have people with letters in front of their name who actually don't know what they're talking about, but sound like they do, telling you that it's just toxins or it's just this thing they don't want you to know about and all you have to do is just eat a certain way or buy my products or buy my DVDs and you'll be fine. And then they offer testimony from people who obviously have survivor bias and made it through their ordeal while there are many others who aren't around to tell us about how they didn't make it through. It can all just seem really convincing, but going on to understand the science and understand how hard scientists in both academic and biotech circles work to address these problems.
And it, it's just the problems are just so complicated to address, but we're trying so hard all around the world every day to make problems like cancer, easier to deal with, and also realizing how much progress has been made can totally change your perception. I mean, just the fact that most childhood cancers, around 80% of childhood cancers are now treatable. Children go on to live normal lives the majority of the time. I mean, that's amazing. That's an amazing step of progress that science and medicine has made in the past few decades on dealing with childhood cancer and certain cancers are practically curable altogether. Those aren't things that I think the average person with the average understanding of biology really has, and that's not their fault. The average person also doesn't know how to fly an airplane and that's fine, but experts do, and we have a lot to learn from experts.
Christy Harrison: Oh my God, absolutely. There's so much denigration of experts I think in the culture in general right now, and I get it, wanting to think critically about people who are holding themselves up as having expertise. And yet I think you're right that in so many spaces, in so many ways, it's important to allow expertise to have real influence and to guide our decisions and not sort of reflexively question everything. I'm curious how you got from this place of believing in those conspiracies, especially the sort of idea that scientists were and big pharma or whatever, were trying to hide a cure for cancer from people and that alternative medicine and eating a certain way was the cure getting from believing in that to becoming a scientist yourself. And that's such an interesting sort of transition, I'm sure.
Dr. Dan Wilson: It was a long multi-stage process. I think for me, I remember a big revolution in my mind happening when I learned more about how science was done because when I believed those things, I think I viewed science as this kind of nebulous black box where certain mysterious elite characters were saying things or doing things, and that's just what everyone believed. And I didn't really know how it all worked, but going through the process of learning how it's actually done, how science actually works on a community level where there are graduate students and undergraduates and post docs and professors working in labs and research scientists also helping. And one lab talks to another, and those labs talk to labs in other universities and universities and other countries and all around the world, and they're all trying to answer particular questions that science has and the findings that led to the understanding that allows them to even ask those questions is built on decades of people just like them who also worked to answer questions in that field.
And these people are so dedicated. They're working, they're working such long hours with little pay. I think people don't realize, a lot of people don't realize how little money scientists actually make during their graduate careers and their postdocs, and even as professor, as a professor, it's kind of precarious, which is one reason I didn't want to go that route since I was having my first kid as I graduated with my PhD, but it's a whole world that I just not many people talk about because I think scientists aren't really in the spotlight in media, much scientists, personal lives and their career paths. It doesn't get flashy headlines, but learning that, learning how much science really is a communal effort and how if people are doing shoddy science, others are going to eventually, or fairly quickly, find out that it's not really great because their own work is going to depend on your work.
If you have findings that you contribute to a field and you say, this is an important step forward and this is what we found, and then other people are also trying to take another step forward, their step might depend on yours being authentic, and so it'll fall apart eventually if we're taking incorrect steps. So that's kind of a, I guess rudimentary rundown of how science on a communal level works. I think you could talk about it for a very long time, but in my mind that those were the things that really helped me realizing that science is a community and it's made up of people who are working really hard to answer questions.
Christy Harrison: I mean, I think that's so huge coming from a conspiracy mindset where it's like this sort of shadowy cabal or elites who are somehow completely different than you or something that are completely different from the average person. And this idea that they're doing these nefarious things, cooking them up and then sort of conspiring to keep them silent, which people are so bad at keeping secrets and so bad at not letting things out that I think that's impossible anyway, but to sort of recognize how human it really is and how there's so many real people behind the science and that it works on that community level. I had never really thought about it in that way. It sort of intuitively makes sense based on what I know about science and research, but to think about it like that, where it's almost like you're building a path together or something and being able to step on the next stepping stone requires the one before it to be anchored properly or whatever. And if you slide out of the way when you're trying to take a step on that, it's like, okay, well that one was bad. Rethink that one, or let's anchor that one better or something.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Yeah, I could tell specific stories of how exactly that kind of thing happened. Even in the little field of molecular biology that I worked in as a graduate student, there were stories of people working in this system who look at one part of it and say, okay, this part based on our findings isn't necessary for the system to work correctly. And then that gets published and then a little bit later, another lab tries to confirm that finding or is doing another set of experiments that rely on that result, and they find, oh wait, this part of that actually is really important, what happened there? And of course, you go back and see that a mistake was made, and there's so many stories like that. It just really highlights how, again, yes, science is just a, it's a community and we all work together to bring answers to fundamental questions that ultimately work toward bettering human health. I mean, that's really the dream goal of any biologist working on biological problems.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean it's such an interesting contrast to the anti-vax industry and organized movement and the disinformation that's there because I think it's also a community, but it's like this twisted sort of community, where it's not necessarily about working together to build truth, but more build profit. I think when you think about the Disinformation Dozen, at least in the profit based machine that a lot of anti-vax content is a part of, I think it's a really interesting contrast. And I often think too, people who are really wrapped up in conspiracy theories will sometimes attribute all this nefarious intent to scientists or pharmaceutical industry or whatever, but not turn that same skeptical lens on the community of anti-vax or alternative medicine or whatever it is. And I just think that's really important to keep that in mind.
Dr. Dan Wilson: That is an interesting juxtaposition there. And when I look at those anti-vaccine communities like the Disinformation Dozen and compare and contrast them with what I've learned and who I've met in the scientific communities, I think the big difference is that in the anti-vaccine communities, they already have their goal kind of set. Their goal is to demonstrate or to convince their audience that vaccines are bad, that they're not safe, that they're causing all these issues. Whereas scientists, if you look at the history of vaccines, we have a lot that work today and are very safe and are given regularly, but there were also many that were pulled from the market because we found that they're not very safe and there are even more that never made it to market because they weren't ever effective enough. So we have standards in science that we want to meet, and we go with the data.
If the data say that the oral polio vaccine is not as safe as the inactivated polio vaccine and we can give either one in America, then we're going to go with a safer one. And that's what happened. Or if this vaccine is not meeting FDA quality standards, then too bad pharma company, even though you put in millions of dollars into it already, it's not meeting standards and you got to go back to the drawing board. And then that pharma company says, well, we made it this far and still no luck and we don't want to spend more money doing investigation, and this other company is already moving forward with their product, so we're just going to scrap it and cut our losses. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that happens all the time. You look at that relatively data-driven community and it's not perfect by any means, but it is very much data-driven and compare it to a community of anti-vaccine advocates who are pretty much saying the same messages that they said decades ago, even a century ago. It's the same kind of fear based talking points that are really based on misunderstandings of how vaccines work. They haven't really changed. It seems like they haven't learned anything. And I don't want to be part of a community that doesn't make progress, doesn't really learn anything in a hundred years. I'd like to make progress and make steps forward in discovering new things about human health and new ways to approach making it better. And that's what science does.
Christy Harrison: That's a really great point. I'd love to turn towards those, the Disinformation Dozen, which is the 12 people most responsible for spreading anti-vax content online according to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Specifically thinking about the members of that group who are in the wellness space, like Joseph Mercola, Sayer Ji, Christiane Northrop, Kelly Brogan. I remember when I was deeply bought into wellness culture myself around 15 to 20 years ago, I would look up things on Mercola's website and take those as authoritative or as at least good jumping off points. And I was a journalist, I was already a journalist at the Time covering food and nutrition and health, and I remember I worked at an environmental magazine and RFK, Jr was a speaker at one of our events in 2005 or 2006, and we were all really excited.
He was a big get, and I think that was kind of right around the time he was starting to pivot to anti-vaccine content. And so it's just interesting to think about that, to think about the sort of proximity to anti-vax rhetoric that I was steeped in at the time and for whatever reason didn't end up going down that road. But I feel like I could have easily fallen into it, especially if the algorithms that exist now had existed back then. So I'm just kind of curious to hear your thoughts on why there's so much crossover between the anti-vax movement or industry and crunchy wellness spaces like that.
Dr. Dan Wilson: I think the reason goes back to something we talked about a little earlier, which is the through line through a lot of these conspiracy ideas, and that's the fear of something bad happening to you in terms of your health. If bad things happen to health, just generally, which we know happens, for example, we know that autism can just happen in children for a variety of reasons that we don't fully understand. That's something that some people might be afraid of. And if people are telling them that vaccines cause them to become autistic, which is utterly untrue, then that can scare them. That can scare them to the point where they will not only avoid taking vaccines, but they will also buy products that they are told will help increase the health of their child or prevent autism or even treat autism. And that's what a lot of these Disinformation Dozen people do. I mean, I think all of them, those 12 people have some sort of grift. All of them are selling supplements, selling products, selling DVDs or retreats or whatever to their audience in an attempt to get them to not take things like vaccines or conventional medicine and instead take their products. So I think that they kind of bleed over into each other because they're all health-based fears and the people who know that they can influence their audience also know that they can sell them things.
Christy Harrison: That makes a lot of sense. I also see a lot of purity through lines too. This idea of not putting toxins in your body or needing to avoid other medications, not just vaccines, but other things that are made by the pharmaceutical industry and framing supplements is somehow more natural, more safe, even though it's sort of ridiculous because supplements are largely untested and unregulated in the United States. But I think there's not a lot of public awareness of that. And so the message that supplements are safer or more natural or more gentle resonates with a lot of people, especially I think those in crunchy spaces who are already looking for more natural things in general and sort of wary of the modern environment and what goes in our food or what goes in our bodies in various ways or in some cases or around our bodies like home products or beauty products and clean makeup and stuff like that. So I think there's that piece too of the preying on those purity fears that people might already have coming into it.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Yeah, totally. I mean, you probably know a lot more about that kind of perspective that people have on wellness than I do since you do a lot more of these topics in the nutrition and wellness space. But I see it totally applying to the anti-vaccine community as well. They do tend to favor things that are natural and will be susceptible to buying things that they perceive as natural and avoiding things they see as unnatural. And I think it's easy to expect that a lot of people will consider a needle with things that they don't understand, and it is unnatural. And that's really unfortunate because really introducing something to your immune system in order to have it learn and develop and mature certain components of itself to a point where it's going to be able to fight off an illness without you getting sick is very natural.
But a lot of people just don't see it that way. And I think that it kind of speaks to this fact that scientists have always, I think, been playing catch up to people like the Disinformation Dozen when it comes to public messaging and communication. I always think about this story going back to the polio vaccines where it was Albert Saban and Jonas Salk. Albert Saban had produced the oral polio vaccine, and Salk had produced the inactivated polio vaccine. The oral one was taken through drops in the mouth and the inactivated one was injected into the muscle. Both turned out to be pretty effective, one turned out to be safer. The inactivated one is safer. But there was this whole, I guess, beef that Saban and Salk had where Salk was kind of a media man. He was always ready to talk to the magazines. He was already always ready to talk to the media.
And because they had kind of competing products against each other, different takes on how polio should be vaccinated against, Saban was very against that. He thought that scientists shouldn't be talking to the media, they shouldn't be talking to the magazine. They should be spending their time in lab. And I feel like that attitude that Saban had was more pervasive than just Saban. I mean, I encountered it myself when I was getting my degree. There were people who thought that it's totally not even worth doing this kind of communication that your time is better spent in the lab. And I think that's ultimately hurt science in its ability to communicate what is actually going on in a lot of these different products that alternative wellness communities and disinformation does in people are telling you are so bad. Whereas scientists are spending a lot of their time in lab and also trying to find time to figure out how to communicate their findings effectively. The disinformation doesn't. People are spending practically all of their time trying to message effectively. And so it's a really tough game to play for scientists, but those tropes of natural is good and pharma medicine is bad. Just stick a lot better when scientists aren't able to or aren't trained to put in the time to message properly to a media that might not understand how to report their findings properly.
Christy Harrison: Scientists are just not part of the conversation in a lot of ways. I think as someone who's covered science as a journalist, I think journalists aren't necessarily trained in science or science reporting either. I didn't get my degree as a dietician and my Master’s of Public Health until after I'd been working as a journalist full-time for six years and frankly doing a lot of damage in terms of how I communicated about nutrition and food. Cause I think I was just parroting some of what was popular at the time, sort of Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle who have done some good work. But also, I think that that type of idea of eat food, not too much. Mostly plants don't eat food with lots of chemicals in it. Don't eat processed food, eat local, sustainable big food is bad, basically is kind of the message. I was really seduced by that messaging and for my own reasons, my own sort of disordered eating and disordered relationship with wellness.
So I think it was easy to sort of adopt those lines and not really talk to people who were doing actual science, not think about the food industry as based on good evidence. Just thinking of it in that way of that kind of conspiratorial way of these are nefarious people out to harm us for profit or whatever. And of course there's issues with the food industry for sure. Issues with the pharmaceutical industry. There's high profile scandals we've had and Oxycontin scandal or the way in which the pharmaceutical industry has pushed weight loss drugs that end up causing harm and being pulled from the market and that stuff. I certainly understand people being skeptical, but I think it's important to really be more balanced and be more aware of how science works. And I think even journalists reporting on science often don't have that kind of a awareness. And then scientists themselves, like you said, are so busy there's probably not enough time to really communicate their findings and the kind of layperson language that needs to happen to really reach a broad audience.
Dr. Dan Wilson: And on top of that of not really having time for most scientists to spend time of communicating effectively to media and journalists, it's also hard to find training for that in a lot of graduate programs. My program did not have specific criteria or curriculum for us to become better science communicators. We would have what we call journal club where students, graduate students would take turns talking about their research every week. So you know, would put together a PowerPoint slide with all your data, present it to the department, they would ask questions and that's it. But I realized after a few years that you really have no concept of how much of the audience actually understood what you talked about. Because what happens is you give your presentation and then the few people who know your field really well in the audience are the ones who are probably going to ask you questions and say, Hey, great talk.
But then what about the rest of the audience? And I've actually talked to some people at other programs who tried to implement feedback mechanisms into these programs where people fill out anonymous forms on how much they actually understood the talk. And I've talked to some people who went through that, and they were surprised to see that over half of the audience really did not understand the point of their talk. And it was really eye-opening for them, and they realized they have to really make their information more accessible even to just colleagues who are in a different focus or concentration or a field.
Christy Harrison: These are other scientists, this isn't just the lay public.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Right? So if you can't get peers to understand your work effectively in a 45-minute talk, then how are you going to get a journalist to report on it accurately who is not an expert?
Christy Harrison: Oh my God, seriously. That is so interesting. And I guess part of it just comes back to what people's skillset is science. I think it's probably harder to be someone who is science-minded and has that sort of way of thinking and also has the sort of capacity to communicate to a mass audience than to just be one or the other. I feel like it's probably a rarer thing to have someone who's really skilled at both of those areas. I mean, you do it very well. Oh, wow. And especially despite not having had specific training in science communication in your program, although I don't know if you've done ongoing training and continuing education and stuff, but I feel like you're very good at it and sort of a natural at communicating with the kind of empathy and meeting people where they are versus talking down to them.
Dr. Dan Wilson: I really appreciate that. But I wouldn't say it was naturally given to me. It definitely took a lot of practice. I had to seek out a lot of resources on my own in grad school. I had to fight for doing things that would help me become a better science communicator. Like taking Saturdays to go to an all-day workshop, spending time outside of the lab tutoring or showing lab techniques to high school students, things like that. I really had to try to do a lot to become a better communicator. And even when I first started my YouTube channel, I think my first set of videos were not great. So it took a lot of practice.
Christy Harrison: I can relate to that as anyone who's listened to my early episodes of my first podcast 10 years ago and probably agree. But yeah, no, it takes practice to communicate in this way and even just to learn a new medium too. I think learning what works on YouTube or on a podcast or whatever, that also takes some practice.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Yeah, definitely.
Christy Harrison: Well, what would you want people who are listening who maybe have heard some of these kind of conspiratorial ideas about big pharma or vaccines and sort of the related wellness culture beliefs about food and supplements and other practices, what would you hope people can take away as maybe a few ways or one way to think critically about these ideas?
Dr. Dan Wilson: I think that a takeaway would be that if you have a question about a topic in wellness, whether it's related to vaccines or pharmaceutical products, I can guarantee you that a scientist has already thought about those questions and tried to, if not already has answered them. So those answers are out there or being actively explored by people who are incredibly smart, and you can probably find their work for free to read. So try not to go for the simplest answer that you find in say the first 10 minutes that might go against the established Scientific messaging that you may have heard. I have humility going into thinking critically about these questions, and if you can't make things make sense to you, that's okay. We don't have to be experts in everything. But understand that the Scientific process while not perfect, is very, very good and has gotten us very far. If you're really interested in this stuff, then try your best to find an expert that knows what they're talking about and listen to them or read their work for viruses and vaccines. I always point people towards a podcast called This Weekend Virology Run by Virologists or People of Relevant Expertise. I think they're great. So that may be a bit a bit, but that's hopefully a concise takeaway.
Christy Harrison: That is super helpful. And I think just this idea of that we're not able to be experts in everything. I talk about that in my book too. There was a, Tressie McMillan wrote an interesting piece about that in The New York Times about how thinking we need to be experts in everything and the sort of attendant idea doing your own research. So especially such a buzzword in the anti-vax world, I think really opens us up to misinformation and scams because scammers can tend to prey on people who are overconfident. And there's interesting research on that that sort of overconfidence makes us vulnerable. And so yeah, like you said, having humility, having an awareness that scientists study this stuff for a living and that a lot of these questions, like you said too, have already been addressed years or decades ago that the anti-vax movement hasn't really moved on from some of the concerns it was bringing up back even centuries ago. And yet science has really evolved and answered a lot of these questions since then. So yeah, I really like that. And we'll link to that podcast in the show notes too, for people to check out. I actually heard one of your episodes, an episode that they did with you that was a really great interview too, and sort of expanded on some of the stuff that we talked about here. So I'll link to that as well in the show notes for people to check out.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Appreciate that. That was a highlight for me.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, they asked some really good questions. I was really, really digging it. Well, thank you Dan, so much for being here. It's really a pleasure to talk with you. Can you tell people where they can find you online and learn more about your work?
Dr. Dan Wilson: Online on YouTube, my channel is Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson. I try to produce content at least once a week. Hop on over if you want to check it out.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, we'll put links to that in the show notes as well so people can check it out. It's really useful for debunking specific things, and I had wanted to get into, but this is such a great conversation. We didn't have time. Maybe on part two that'll be another hour long. We can delve into it. But you did some great work around debunking claims around Vitamin D and Covid and some other Covid claims sort of beyond just vaccines. So I think that's really interesting too, for people to check out. So thank you again so much for being here. It was a pleasure to talk with you.
Dr. Dan Wilson: Well, thank you for having me, Christy, and congratulations on your book. And yeah, we can talk again sometime in the future.
Christy Harrison: Absolutely. So that is our show. Thanks so much to our amazing guest for being here and to you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this conversation, I'd be so grateful If you could take a moment to subscribe, rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. You can also support the show by becoming a paid subscriber for just a few bucks a month with a paid subscription. You unlock great perks like bonus episodes, subscriber only Q & As, early access to regular episodes and much more. Sign up now at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com. If you have any burning questions about wellness trends, diet fads, or anything else we cover on the show, send them my way at christyharrison.com/wellnessquestions for a chance to have them answered in the Rethinking Wellness newsletter or even on a future podcast episode.
And if you're looking to heal your relationship with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. You can learn more and enroll now at christyharrison.com/course. That's christyharrison.com/course. Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer. And administrative support was provided by Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual. Our album Art was created by Tara Jacoby, and our theme song was written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Thanks again for listening. Take care.
