this is the wellness wild west

0:09Speaker 1:You were just looking for ways to be healthy, and all of a sudden you're getting gray market peptides from China and injecting them into your body. So it's a wild West out there and there's no real regulation going on.

0:23Speaker 2:Victoria's Song is a senior reviewer at The Verge. You might remember her from our episode about the Meta ray Bands. Recently, she's been writing about something that she calls the wellness wild West.

0:34Speaker 1:Basically, wellness is just anything that's not medicine, right, you know, stuff like breathing exercises or ag one which is athletic, greens supplements, supplements of all kinds, and online people be out here making some wild claims as wellness influencers.

0:53Speaker 3:I've honestly reverse aged myself using neuroscience and biohacking, and I've had testing done.

0:58Speaker 1:My biological age is eighteen, which was the youngest that the scale would go. You're four ways to biohack your body and truly feels superhuman.

1:06Speaker 4:So this little guy right here is called NAD plus and three days ago I started injecting it into my body.

1:14Speaker 1:Let me tell you why and what it does. And a lot of times what they do is they hawk a product, and then they will tell you something that's sort of an actual fact, put it next to something that's quite misleading. So you push a thought or an agenda, and that's how you get people. You know, they're just starting off with supplements and somehow they end up in fascism. That's just basically kind of how the wellness wild Blest works. You know, like you start off trying to eat clean, and then all of a sudden you don't believe in vaccines.

1:45Speaker 1:You start off just looking for sunscreen, and then all of a sudden, you're rubbing beef tallow all over your face.

1:52Speaker 5:You can eat your skinkcare, you should not be putting it on your face.

1:55Speaker 6:The biggest question I get asked is how long did it take to see results from your beef tallow? Because this is where it started in January and this is where I'm at now forty one.

2:03Speaker 2:I don't have any botox and fillers, no Guadalajara facelifts.

2:06Speaker 1:And it's very hard to tell fact from truth because oftentimes these influencers are blending facts or distorting them in a certain way. They're going to say this is scientifically backed, this is clinically backed.

2:18Speaker 3:At acre actually included the clinically studied amounts to be fully effective.

2:22Speaker 1:It's back by science. Okay, this is a twelve step Korean skincare routine and a capsule, and like, what does that mean? What does clinical testing mean for a supplement that is not regulated? What does clinical testing mean for a skincare gadget that is again not regulated.

2:42Speaker 2:It's not just influencers getting into this new wild West. Tech companies are making money here too. There's luxury shoe inserts, hormone testing, kits Ai enabled treadmills. If you can strap a device onto your wrists, or if you want to go more official, you could embed it under your skin.

2:57Speaker 1:The umbrella term for all of us is called longevity, and it just funnels into this, like I think culturally existential fear of dying, so we're gonna use our tech to optimize ourselves so we live as long as possible. And it's a very human desire. But tech do be taking it to some extremes.

3:16Speaker 2:And Victoria's also taking it to some extremes here too. She's not just reporting on it, she's actively testing some of this stuff on herself.

3:25Speaker 1:If you know anything about science journalism. If you know anything about health tech, if you know anything about the space, You're just sitting there and the internal screams just keep getting louder as you see, see it proliferate.

3:41Speaker 2:So, in keeping with the wild West theme on this episode, we're going to get into the good, the bad, and the good. Lord, why would you inject that into your body? Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas, I'm.

4:39Speaker 3:Goodbye.

4:44Speaker 2:Victoria writes a newsletter called Optimizer, and one of her recent installments was about the trip she took to this year's Consumer Electronics Show or ce S. So ce S is a big convention where companies announced all the latest gadgets that are coming out this year. I remember I used to look forward to this back in the day because I can find out what new video games are coming out. Needless to say, things have changed. Victoria's overall impression of this year's CES, as she wrote in her newsletter, was that it was quote a wash in bodily fluids.

5:11Speaker 1:It's because there was a lot of bodily fluid tech that was at the show. Like I saw a taint zapper, which was a wearable that men put in their chaint to help them delay premature ejaculation.

5:24Speaker 2:Yes, sorry, we went right there. We went right there, didn't we. I was gonna warm up and maybe talk about that later. I was thinking, like, oh, let's save that for the fun part of the end of the episode. No, okay, well, let's go right into it. A taint zapper, please elaborate.

5:40Speaker 1:It's a wearable band aid with an electrical component that zap's you there to delay ejaculation. And is there scientific proof that this works? I don't know. The FDA has cleared it, so it's not going to harm you. They did testing on rabbits to make sure it wasn't going to rip off any sensitives down there. So cool. That's one example of the wellness wild West. Another would be like hormone testing gadgets. I wrote about this, like hormone egg called mirror, and you basically pian a stick and then you stick it in this little egg shaped machine and it reads your hormones and you can not diagnose, but it can like flag whether you show signs of perimenopause or other various things.

6:32Speaker 2:And that thing that you did right there though, where you said diagnose wait a second, not diagnose flag. That's kind of a hallmark of all of this stuff, right, is that it really feels like medical devices. And of course they have the little disclaimer at the bottom, this is not meant to treat or diagnose any disease or anything like that, but I think people just kind of ignore that. People look past it. You know. It's kind of like looks like a duck, talks like a duck.

6:58Speaker 2:I think it's a duck.

6:59Speaker 1:So there's actually like a legal reason for that, and it's because if anything is diagnostic or could inform your medical treatment, that is a medical device and it requires FDA regulatory oversight. Wellness does not. The definition legally is that a wellness device is just for fun. It's just for your education. It's for your entertainment so that you know something about yourself. It's not diagnosing you with anything. So that does not require FDA oversight. And the process of FDA oversight is lengthy. It requires expensive testing. It has to be hippocompliant. If it collects any data and transmits it to your phone, all of that has to have appropriate data security protocols. They have to test for different skin colors is very expensive. Like I'm going to use the tt zapper as an example. I first saw it in twenty twenty. It didn't get FDA clearance until like twenty twenty five, I believe, and they had to go through two rounds of fundraising for millions of dollars because the FDA was like, you're going to need clearance for that, because that is a sense area that you're proposing to stick a device onto. So a lot of

8:05Speaker 1:times with the wellness space is you have companies who are trying to circumvent that. And a really good example that happened recently, I think last summer was Whoop, which is a fitness tracker company. They had this beta feature which would kind of give you an estimate of your blood pressure.

8:23Speaker 2:The all new Whoop is here, get the most advanced view of your health with blood pressure insights right from your wrist.

8:31Speaker 1:Now, the FDA was like, hold up, wait a second, this requires FDA oversight, and Woop was like no, no, no, no, no, no no, this is a wellness feature. And what was in contention was like this beta feature you had to kind of calibrate with a blood pressure cuff and then once you calibrated in the app, it would kind of give you an estimate of your systelic and diastolic blood pressure and tell you whether it was high, medium, or low. And the FDA was like, that is very close and consumers could be you know, ostensibly misinterpreting those results as a diagnosis of hypertension of being told that they have high.

9:11Speaker 2:Blood pressure if it's as high.

9:13Speaker 1:Yeah. Right, So, like the design of that feature fits in this very gray area that wellness devices kind of live in at the moment, and you know Whoop was saying, like the no, no, this is the same as us telling you what your respiratory rate during sleep is. And you know, they had the appropriate disclaimers there. They had disclaimers saying this is not medical, this is not a diagnosis. But I believe for the average consumer, they're going to look at that and they're going to say, oh, no, it's telling me I have high blood pressure. And because it was calibrated with a cuff, it must be accurate.

9:45Speaker 2:Yeah, because that feels and looks probably just like the same exact thing that you use at the doctor's office.

9:51Speaker 1:Yeah.

9:52Speaker 4:The twenty first Century Cures Act makes it very clear that wellness intended features are not supposed to be regulated by the FDA.

10:01Speaker 2:That's the CEO of Whoop in an interview with Bloomberg explaining why he thinks his device does not need FDA approval.

10:07Speaker 4:And the FDA is intended to actually just regulate medical devices that are diagnosing something. So then the fundamental question becomes does blood pressure have wellness intended use cases? We believe it does.

10:22Speaker 1:Once you understand the legal framework of what is an FDA cleared medical device versus a wellness gadget, you can start to see it and that in the features that these tech companies will release, like for the Apple Watch, they'll never give you a direct reading of what it thinks your blood pressure is. It'll tell you where you're trending. So in truths, by not giving you the reading and saying you're trending this way, that's a wellness feature. So it's the very difference between flagging something and diagnosing you with something.

10:54Speaker 2:This medical versus wellness gray area is a big part of how this entire industry is even able to function. And the biggest trend right now is well trends. See in the past, you could get some simple devices that would give you a basic number, like say a step counter, We'll just tell you how many steps you took during that day. But now it's all about getting as much data as possible and putting all that data into a phone app that'll show you a graph and then interpret that data for you. It can't show you a diagnosis, because legally that would be a problem, but it can show you a trend, which means that analyzing your health is no longer dependent on a doctor. Maybe you think that's a good thing, maybe you think it's a bad thing, But it also means that you're going to be handing over a lot of information to some company and you just got to trust them.

11:41Speaker 1:It's your blood, it's your sweat, it's your hormones. They want to track all of these things like blood tests like AURA and WHOOP for example, will now partner with Quest Diagnostics, so you can upload your blood test results tracing. However, many biomarkers into their platform. When you start doing that, when you start taking a withvings at home, PP lab in installing it in your toilet so it can tell you.

12:09Speaker 2:Pause PP Sorry, yeah.

12:12Speaker 1:It's called the U scan. It isn't at home. Your analysis lab. It has cartridges in it, and it can tell you your hydration levels or your like vitamin C levels and you know it EPI it. Yeah. And for some people who have specific conditions, like maybe you have polycystic overy syndrome and you kind of want more information about your hormones so you can talk to your doctor. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's when you get to the sense of marketing and telling everybody you need to do this. Everyone needs to have an at home lab on them at all points in time. And like the kind of the umbrella term for this what I call the wellness surveillance state, because I find it very invasive that these companies want not just your activity data, but your blood and your blood sugar and your metabolic data and your urine and your sweat, and they want to know about your cycle. You know, once you give these companies your data, who's reading the data privacy policies?

13:14Speaker 1:Right when you have wellness versus medical device, where does that fall under HIPPA? Which is grossly outdated for health tech in the state that we're in right now, it's very murky because let's say you trust Apple with your period data. And then you sink Apple period data with Aura. Well, you've just given that to Aura, so now you have to agree to their privacy policies in terms you have to so it's not one device you trust them. It gets very murky very quickly. You know. The very dystopian fear is that corporate wellness programs start putting these things out to give you discounts on healthcare and then finding oh, will raise your premium but not the other person is premium.

14:00Speaker 1:There's no evidence that that's happened yet, but that is the fear, right, This is.

14:06Speaker 2:A legitimate fear, and companies seem to at least be aware of this. In the case of Whoop, their privacy policy states, quote, we never sell our members personal data. This is our promise end quote. And yet they're currently facing a class action lawsuit from a user who claims their data was shared with a third party without consent, and a peer reviewed study found that Whoop exhibited quote substantive deficiencies and privacy protection in quote despite having the longest privacy policy in the study, coming in at over twelve thousand words for reference. That is longer than the transcript of this entire episode. So just think of that as you listen to the rest of the show.

14:45Speaker 1:The more invasive these things get, the greater the fear as to like, well, how is that data being used? And can you trust these companies to protect your data? Like Aura had a bit of a backlash last year because they announced a partnership with Palenteer.

15:01Speaker 5:People are throwing away their or rings because Aura just signed a deal with the US Department of Defense and Palenteer. Palenteers. Kind of like those movies where they scan someone's face and all of the person's information pops up, That's what Palenteer does.

15:16Speaker 1:They were working with Palenteer and the DoD for a specific set of enterprise use for their ring. They were saying that they kept that data separate from consumer data. But to the average consumer, that's just like, well, what the hell does that mean? You keep them in separate data silos? Like do you trust that company?

15:33Speaker 2:But hold on, speaking of which I've seen you move in your hands, Is that an AURA ring?

15:37Speaker 1:Yeah, this is an Aura ring. It is I do have to test it for a living. I have come to terms in peace that my data is out there, Like I cannot test wearable tech and not have it out there. I just live with that.

15:51Speaker 2:Talk to me about that, though, because a lot of people say that exact same thing, which is to say, my dad is already out there. If they want it, they can come get it. But you're actively going out and finding this stuff that is the most privacy invading possible, and you're saying, cool, sign me up. It's for your job. But what a job? Does that make you nervous at all?

16:11Speaker 7:Uh?

16:12Speaker 1:And my mom really nervous when she was alive. She kind of begged me to find a different line of work. But uh, really, yeah, she did. She was very concerned about it. But I have limits as to how invasive I will be willing to go. Like I'm not ever going to test a BCI, which is a brain computer interface like neurrolink. I'm not doing that. Like that's a little too invasive for me. It's a conversation I have with my editors too. If it feels too invasive for me, I am just not going to do it.

16:42Speaker 2:Victoria has a pretty high bar for it too invasive, So if she won't touch it, I think that's saying something. On the other hand, there are people who will inject gray market substances into their body because somebody on TikTok told them to do it, And honestly, some of the comment sections from unsatisfied customers get pretty weird. After the break, Victoria takes us into the affiliate influencer code industrial complex. So, in terms of the wellness wild West, we've talked about wearables a lot. Not everything you're putting on your body.

17:21Speaker 2:Some of you are putting in your body. Tell me about ratatoui.

17:25Speaker 1:Oh okay, So ratitui is kind of a code word that wellness influencers and fitness influencers use for Reta True Tide ret A True tide is. It gets real technical, but it is kind of the latest if G LP one medications for Pokemon. This is the latest evolution of the Pokemon char Charizard.

17:50Speaker 2:This is the we gov chars are we go ament?

17:53Speaker 5:All right?

17:55Speaker 1:Yeah, so you know Ozambic will go v that's the Charmander, right. Then you have Munjaro and zep found that is the Charmelion, and Reta truetide is Charizard. It is also unapproved. It is currently going through Phase three clinical trials. The only way to get the bona fide Reta truetide is if you are part of a clinical trial run by Eli Lilly. That is the only way. While the influencers are out there like I'm on Ritta, I'm on Ratatu. Wee, here's my crazy insane wellness results.

18:32Speaker 7:Update that nobody asked for.

18:33Speaker 5:I just finished my fourth week of Ratatu week, and I say this, it's amazing.

18:37Speaker 7:Twenty five pounds in four weeks. My strength is basically the same. I've lost zero muscle and I did this while eating pizza and canes and drinking alcohol every day, so safe to say it works.

18:52Speaker 4:Today is actually my first official day working out on Ritta.

18:56Speaker 1:It's like insane. I'm fastard right now. I had so much energy, I got all my cardio done. Like literally, just get on it. You have nothing to lose. And they will say it's past phase three clinical trials. No, no, no, no. There are like I believe seven or eight clinical trials that are ongoing in phase three and they've completed one of those trials and we don't even have the full results of that particular trial yet. We have the top line results of it. But you know they're out there saying it's totally fine. It's safe, and then they'll say something that's true, which is our healthcare system sucks and that the insurance companies are charging a crap ton of money for these JLP one medications that could really change your life. They don't want you to have it.

19:44Speaker 2:It is your reminder that REDDA will be if I proved by twenty twenty.

19:47Speaker 4:Seven, So find a way to get it now before they start charge thousand dollars for a one supply.

19:56Speaker 1:Here's my affiliate code. I have vetted this particular lab that's selling research grade Red A True Tide.

20:03Speaker 4:Check the link in my bio.

20:05Speaker 2:You can get yourself some or shoot me a DM we can talk about it.

20:07Speaker 4:I've done a ton of research on it.

20:09Speaker 7:If you're struggling to lose weight, I highly recommend you look into taking Red A True Tide. If you want to pick some up from a trusted source, I have link in my bio.

20:17Speaker 1:You can buy it on TikTok in five minutes. I did. I bought a vial and like five minutes to prove a point, I had a ten percent influencer affiliate code discount.

20:28Speaker 2:And you actually bought this, and so this is something anybody can be doing.

20:31Speaker 1:On TikTok's something anybody can do. On TikTok, you'll find influencers going like, here's how you reconstitute rehdta, because they're not selling it to you. When you get actual GLP one prescriptions from the doctor, you're probably getting pens where it's pre mixed and you just like inject it. It's the appropriate dosage. You are going to see a doctor every month to talk about your levels and py trading your dose, talking about side effects and managing those symptoms with rehta. Right now, you're geting some guy on TikTok who's not a real doctor saying like, yeah, you should use two point five grams, and here's how you use an online peptide calculator, and here's how you reconstitute Amazon link in my bio to buy syringes that I use.

21:17Speaker 4:You just got your ratitude and you're confused on how to reconstitute it. I'm going to break it down as simply as possible so even your grandma could understand this.

21:25Speaker 3:I just opened this individually wrapped in slin syringe. I pulled some airback into it, and I am going to puncture the top of the backwater and then push some of that air in. And by the way, this is not medical advice. This is for research and entertainment purposes only.

21:48Speaker 1:They are buying syringes off of Amazon. They are buying bacteriostatic water off of wherever, which is sterilized water, and they are mixing these things themselves, and they are injecting it to their bodies. And then you read the comments and they're like, I got like a huge rash from the injection side. Is that normal? I'm vobbiting my brains out because they didn't dost properly. Are they actually injecting reta true tide into their bodies. I've talked to pharmacists, I've talked to doctors and anercrinologists, and they're just like, ain no fucking way, excuse the French, ain't no way that that's the real reta true tide. You do not know what you are injecting, you don't know what it's cut with. And they're saying, like, get third party testing to verify. Well, why how are you trusting a third party lab when there is no Like usually pharmacists and compound pharmacies have like a sheet that kind of tells them here the active pharmaceutical ingredients, here's the sourcing. FDA have come out and said we don't have those available for reta true Tide. There's like a warning letter that

22:51Speaker 1:was put out, so I don't know that these people are actually injecting retitrue tide into their bodies. And you have really irresponsible wellness influencers out here who are just like, here's why you need to mix tures appetide and read a true tide. Chirs appetite is majaro and z that bound. Here's how you mix them. Yeah, here's how you mix them. You microdose with this and then you microdose with that. And it's sort of just like, no, oh, that's so easy to find on TikTok. It is not hard to find these videos.

23:21Speaker 5:Why I'm taking truzetpetide and read a True Tide together, guys. And actually this picture last year was just truzepetite, So can you imagine how much better this is about to be?

23:30Speaker 2:Speaking of what's easy to find on TikTok, though, I want to hit you with a counterpoint from the TikTok comments, which is a sentence I thought I'd never say, but let me just read some of the comments. So here we go. The FDA needs to keep an eye on the disgusting ingredients that they put in food and on artificial food and leave GLP alone. Another one our food is straight out poisoned. So it's not about safety, it's about competition. And the last come out I want to read is that's fine, China got us covered because a lot of these peptides are coming from China. Not that I'm advocating that, Oh, it was much better when we were all just really xenophobic and terrible and racist, but it's kind of wild to hear that somebody trusts a random influencer who is selling them stuff from a place that they don't really know much about, rather than the FDA.

24:21Speaker 1:Yeah, that's kind of where this is so insidious, because you know, you have something that's very true, right, which is that Eli Lilly Norvoonordisk they have basically patented these DLP ones and they want to charge what they want to charge for it, And the insurance companies are like, these are hala expensive. We're going to put very restrictive conditions onto who can get these. But you know, you have a lot of people who could potentially benefit from these medications. There's a lot of research being done about that.

24:53Speaker 1:And so we live in a fat phobic society, and you have a lot of people who are just very desperate who could benefit from the medications, who are being told, for arbitrary reasons, you can't get it or you're going to have to pay one thousand dollars a month for it. So there's a grain of truth there that they're digging into. But then they go and say, oh, yeah, so the FDA doesn't care about you. The FDA exists because people died all of these regulations, and the drug approval process exists because people died in the past when we didn't have these regulations. But you can see how insidious it gets because you take something that is very true, that is very emotionally true, that is just like in capitalism, very true that these drug companies want to make money and our healthcare system sucks, and we're going to put it with you shouldn't trust healthcare institutions. And this influencer is here and you have a parasocial relationship with them.

25:47Speaker 1:They're using words like science backed, clinically backed. You're not thinking about the fact that they are profiting off of selling these peptides to you. They get a cut from the affiliate code. It keeps me up at night. Honestly, it's tough. It's tough to watch it happen. And you know, I write about it, and then I get called the big pharmachell like you're defending the big farmer companies, Like yeah, yeah, I've had commenters tell me I am a big Pharmachelle and it's like, no, I just don't want you to put an approved drug sourced from God knows where into your body. I agree with you that the affordability thing is a problem. I think it's wrong, and there does need to be regulatory overalls, and the pharmaceutical companies do need to be held accountable for being so greedy. But for God's sake, can we have like critical thinking skills and not inchect something that you bought dubiously offline into your bodies using sypringes. When I challenge you, I challenge you to find an influencer who is properly disinfecting everything the surfaces, using gloves, washing their hands before they disinfect things.

26:54Speaker 1:When they teach you how to reconstitute these gray market peptides because I asked a pharmacist and she was like, oh no, they are missing several steps. So oh no, yeah.

27:05Speaker 2:Okay, we should probably acknowledge why this wellness wild West exists in the first place. Part of it in the US, at least, is the high cost of healthcare. If you're worried about being able to afford to see a doctor, you might also want to look for an alternative. There is also another factor here. People want to be liked, and there is money to be made and telling people that we would like them more if they just looked a little younger, or a little thinner, or a little prettier.

27:32Speaker 1:And I think we don't talk about it a lot because regardless if you lose weight for whatever reason, people will praise you. So you could have lost weight through very toxic behaviors, but many people in your life meaning well will say, great job, keep it going.

27:50Speaker 2:We've been talking about doing stuff to your body. Victoria has gone far enof down this rabbit hole. To know what this stuff can do to your mind, begin into that after the break. So just to be clear here, influencers aren't just recommending weird injectables to their followers. One trend is based on actual, tested, legitimate medical technology. It's just that technology isn't really meant for consumer use. I'm talking here about a continuous glucose monitor or CGM. So these are small devices that are inserted under the skin, and they're originally developed for people with diabetes to monitor their glucose levels. But now you can just buy these things over the counter, and wellness influencers are encouraging people to use them to track their metabolism.

28:41Speaker 1:There's influencers who will tell you that you have to optimize your metabolism, one of them being a potential Surgeon General candidate, Casey Means, who co founded a CGM company and has a book called Good Energy about metabolic dysfunction being the root cause of all everything in your life.

29:02Speaker 6:What's really important for people to realize is that metabolism is actually the foundation of all health. It is the core foundational pathway that drives all other aspects of health. And so one thing that the glucose monitors for us is just give us more awareness and agency into what the trends of our glucose are over time, as opposed to a literally one data point snapshot once a year in the doctor's office, which is what the majority of us are used to.

29:36Speaker 1:So you know, they are saying like, oh, if you're an athlete, you could use the CGM, or if you're trying to lose weight, there are weight loss CGM startups that are like, oh, this is the easiest way for you to lose weight is to monitor everything you eat and see how it spikes your glucose.

29:51Speaker 6:I want to share with you some of my worst offenders, my worst glucose offenders.

29:55Speaker 1:Calm the magnesium drink.

29:56Speaker 6:I drink that every single night.

29:57Speaker 3:It spiked my glucose significant Also, what spike my glucose by melatonin.

30:02Speaker 1:Guns And then you know, you kind of fall into this mental trap of wanting your glucose to stay within this range when it's perfectly normal. I have talked to many, many, many endocrinologists and diabetic experts who are like, it's perfectly natural and normal for your blood glucose to spike above that level and then it'll fall back down into the normal level. But you have influencers out here who are kind of gamifying staying within a specific range at all time.

30:35Speaker 1:And is that useful? I don't know that that's useful. Like I've used them. I found out that I had fatty liver disease through the use of one, but not before I got really scared that I was diabetic because my results were not looking the way that they should. And it took me, i want to say, about a year and a half at a very long time. So did I have a positive experience from using a CGM and testing them through my job. I think the experience was really mixed because it made food eating very contentious for.

31:10Speaker 2:A while for me.

31:11Speaker 1:What do you mean, I'd be at Thanksgiving and I'd be like, oh, can I eat that in this order? Or will it spike my glucose That's very kind of borderline disordered eating thoughts. It's not the end of the world if you're glucose spikes. Like I know all of this stuff already. That doesn't mean I wasn't prone to falling into those mental traps if I was using it too often.

31:33Speaker 2:You know, I recently interviewed a philosopher who studies games and also gamification, and this optimization thing comes right into that because SAE, even not as far as you know, glucose monitoring, let's say, just weight loss tracking, sticking to macros or you know, calorie counting can be productive for some people, but it can also get you into a point where you're not enjoying anything you're eating, or where you're just literally like eating pizza or eating prepackaged food because you know the exact calories that are in it, because you're starting to focus only on the numbers. And this is something that I find really interesting about the wearable tech that you talk about so much and that you cover, is that there's a way in which we've kind of been sold the idea that the more you track, the better it is. You know, what's measured gets managed. Right, Yeah, sure that's not untrue, but there's a way in which it can kind of make you sick in another way, incredibly maybe mentally.

32:46Speaker 1:Oh, health anxiety and wearables, it is the dark side of it. There was a study done and they found that this elderly woman did like nine hundred kg readings in a year because she got so scared. And that's hm, that's more than one a day, right. I think about that study all the time, because I actually write about it quite often at the verge where I say I have mandatory wearable breaks if I find myself getting two into streaks. If I find myself falling into these habits of perfectionism, I will take a break. I'll talk to my editors and be like, I'm going to focus on a different type of product for a little bit because it's impacting my mental health that way. And I have found those techniques for like ten years of covering this space, and so I hope to share that wisdom with people, but it is anxiety inducing. I do find myself falling into some traps at times, and perfectionism type a personality.

33:46Speaker 1:What say you, I think a lot of us have that. I think it's very human to be that way. And let's be real. You are the product in a wearable life. It's not just health, it's also AI. The reason why they are pushing this concept of AI wearables right now is that you don't take a wearable off. They can collect so much data on you. They can say it's personalizing your health feeds into this optimization longevity narrative, and what they're really doing is profiting off of all the data that they're collecting on you. Because you are the product.

34:20Speaker 1:You make the AI better because you're wearing it, and the AI learned so much more about you because you're wearing it.

34:26Speaker 2:This is your job, Like you're actually in the trenches testing just about everything. I mean, you're basically running like a twenty four to seven experiment on yourself. Yeah, all of these different things. What would you say to somebody who is thinking about picking up that or a ring, or who's thinking about subscribing to that service where you get blood tests and you send it away, or who's thinking about getting some other kind of wearable or wellness device.

34:59Speaker 1:All anyone wants is to live a healthy life. That It's very simple, right, What are the keys to a healthy life? Every doctor will tell you it's the same three things, the same three things. No one's going to want to hear this, but it is the same three things. Sleep seven to eight hours a night, eat balanced meals, exercise multiple times a week. That's it. That is what is in your control. But nobody likes to hear that, and we all want shortcuts. So it's a very like I joke that my beat is the cursed beat, the dystopian beat. But you know, I initially got into it because I do was trying to live a healthier life.

35:36Speaker 1:And then I do live a healthier life. I do. I'm pretty much in the best shape and health I've been ever. But it's not to say that it didn't come at a cost. It did come at a cost, a lot of cost to my mental health. I talk with a therapist very frequently anytime I think of myself just kind of going off the deep end with these devices, and then she'll be like, I think it's time you take a break, And I'm like, you're right. Let me go talk to my editors about that. So what I would say to anyone who is thinking about it is to really go in with a strong why, Like why do you want it? What is the goal that you're trying to achieve. If your goal is that you want something to help you be more active, get the minimally viable thing to help you get more active. If you think a or a ring is that for you because it has no screen, you just want to do your general fitness tracking great, try to limit yourself to checking once a day. You know, don't get too invested in these numbers. It's about seeing baseline trends over a long period of time. If you feel yourself starting to change your life to fit the ring, give yourself permission to

36:51Speaker 1:take breaks from it. Like at one point, I was like, I got to close these rings. It's eleven forty five. Let me do jumping jacks at forty five pm so I can get the ten calories needed to close a ring. You need a break, You need a break. I know people who have done this. I know people who have been like I have COVID. Do you think I should go outside for like a fifteen minute walk so I can close a ring? And I've had friends say that to me. Do you like, do you think I should do this? And I'm like, no, you need to rest, Like that's insane.

37:26Speaker 2:I haven't used one of these enclosed the ring. It's like finish your numbers for the day or something.

37:30Speaker 1:Yeah, So the Apple Watch just you have three different rings for like how many exercise minutes you get during the day, how many minutes you stand up, and how many calories you burn in the day. First of all, I'll also say that calorie burn and calorie metrics are wildly inaccurate, So don't get too obsessive about any of these numbers. These are tools meant to help you. It's just you know, you got to have a good support network. You've got to have a very strong reason why and kind of stick to that reason why and use the minimally viable methods. You do not need more data. Like I said, the three tellers are two sleeps, eight hours tonight, eat it all balanced meal most of the time, and exercise like.

38:21Speaker 2:That's it, all right, doctor song, All right, doctor.

38:23Speaker 1:I'm not a doctor, but I am telling you that all doctors will tell you to do that.

38:27Speaker 2:So yeah, big thank you to Victoria for coming back on the show, and thanks to you for listening to kill Switch. And by the way, we talked a little bit about peptides in this episode. If you want to know more about what exactly peptides are and where they're coming from and who's using these things, we got a whole episode about that and we'll link that in the description. Or if you want to know something else, you can email us at kill Switch at kaleidoscope dot NYC or on Instagram. We're at kill Switch Pod and wherever you're listening to this, it would be amazing If you leave the show a review. It helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. And this thing is hosted by me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sena Ozaki, dar Luck Potts and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by Me and Kyle Murdoch and Kyle also mixed the show.

39:14Speaker 2:From Kaleidoscope, Our executive producers are Ozwalashin, Mangeshati Gadour, and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E.

39:24Speaker 3:Tour.

39:24Speaker 2:Catch on the Next One, Goodbye,