Food Contamination is On the Rise. Here’s What History Can Teach Us About How to Stop It.

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Abdul El-Sayed.

As I literally sat down to take this episode, I got an alert on one of the public health networks I'm a part of as a county public health official, it read. And I quote certain cinnamon applesauce puree pouches recalled due to high levels of lead lead in applesauce in the United States. In 2023, we assume that the food we eat is safe and secure. That in the richest, most powerful country in the world, the stuff you put into your body won't make you sick. But food recalls because of contaminants, whether rocks and cookies or insects in broccoli and cheese, soup is on the rise. And that should be really unsettling.

After all, the Food and Drug Administration is 117 years old. And we've had laws on the books that should be protecting us from leaded cinnamon applesauce since then. But laws are only as good as their enforcement, and there are a whole bunch of reasons why enforcement has become such a challenge. First, we routinely underfund the F.D.A. and agencies at the state and local level. Just like it, meaning they lack the resources to fully inspect all of the facilities under their purview. Instead, food manufacturers are left to self-inspect and report their findings. What could go wrong?

Worse still, the food sector, like almost all of the economy, is consolidating. That means that little companies are being gobbled up, contaminants and all by the big guys. Think about it. If you analyzed 4 out of 5 of the most common groceries, only 4 companies control the market for more than half of them. Along with market power, our porous firewall between politics and the economy means that those companies also have political power.

Their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures allow them to manipulate. The kinds of laws that get passed and the kind of funding allocations that the agencies that enforce those laws have to enforce them collectively. There's been an erosion in the food regulatory space, and the consequences have meant more food recalls, or, worse, more food poisoning. But this isn't the first time we've faced this kind of thing. In fact, there was a time in this country where it wasn't simply that food regulations had eroded, but that there weren't any food regulations at all. It was a time when food companies put formaldehyde, you know, the stuff we use to embalm dead bodies in milk to keep it from spoiling just a little longer.

When dyed, corn syrup passed as maple syrup and burnt wood passed as pepper. No, get me started on the meat. If you're interested, go read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle for a description of what slaughterhouses in that era looked like. It was the turn of the 20th century. And a team of scientists at the fledgling USDA was working to understand exactly what all the additives they found in America's food supply could do. Science would never have passed an ethical review board. But the broader purpose of their inquiry was clear to inform Americans about what they were eating, or, probably more appropriately, what they were being fed.

Leading the team was one Dr. Harvey Wiley, a name that's been lost to history, but a public health leader whose work led to the creation of the F.D.A. In the first place. Hounded by the food industry and beloved by the public, his work back then could teach us a lot about what it should look like to protect our own food supply. Over a century later, I learned about Dr.

Wiley from a couple of books by science journalist and author Deborah Blum. Her books, The Poisoner's Handbook and The Poison Squad, tell the story of Dr. Wiley and his team. And the audacity of the industry they took on. She joined me to explain what America's food supply looked like in the late 1800s, how Wiley and his team worked to fix it, and what that should teach us. Today, here's my conversation with Deborah Blum.

Can you introduce yourself for the tape?

Corporations can sometimes corrupt the things that we would like to consume to make us healthy. And I really, this is the first time I've come across what is a really, really rich history about? A moment in time when a lot of the modern day regulatory infrastructure that we take for granted came to be. So, I've got to ask you, you know, what got you interested in writing about the history of poisonous chemicals in food and the way that that infrastructure came to be?

And I stopped at that moment and I thought, Well, why would you do that, right? Why would you feel so desperate? That? The only way you could figure out to get at an issue was to deliberately feed poisons to people you worked with? And that led me backwards into the 19th century, before we actually started regulating any poisonous chemicals, we had no regulations for drugs.

We had no regulations for what in our foods, we had no regulations for medicine. The U.S government was completely hands off about what corporations did. And so I wanted to start there.

What was it like before We had regulations, what were we actually eating, how safe was it out there? And that really got me on the journey, I think.

And they did, in fact, take advantage of that, especially for people who couldn't afford to sort of buy higher quality things. So, as an example, my story was really built about around this chemist, Harvey Wiley, who came to the U.S.DA in 1883. And he just said, Why don't we take a look at what people are eating? Let's look at the food supply. He and his chemist.

And they're a tiny division, right? Maybe a dozen chemists in the entire United States responsible for this at the federal level. They start picking apart the food supply, they look at dairy, they look at milk.

They look at canned vegetables, they look at coffee and tea and wine and beer, and they find two things consistently one, they find an insane amount of fraud in food. So if you were sprinkling cinnamon over your cinnamon toast, you were likely sprinkling brick dust instead of, you know, peppering up.

The chemist actually used to call this pepperette. But they would use charred bone and pepper. They would use ground shells, they would grind up coconut shells, they would char rope. They would mix gypsum, you know, gypsum from Wal-mart in flour.

They would fake coffee beans with wax and dirt, right? There's just an insane amount of fraud across the food supply, and then the other part of that is there's a really dismaying amount of toxic chemicals going into the food supply. So part of it is just crazy fake. All of that is legal.

And part of it is crazy, dangerous, and probably my favorite example of crazy dangerous is milk. I mean, milk was dangerous anyway because we didn't pasteurize and there was no refrigeration. You know, especially in a time that where a lot of people didn't have electricity. But so milk would rot, and to counter that, the American dairyman would put formaldehyde in the milk.

And so, yeah, and so. If you actually look at newspapers of the 19th century, you can find what they called embalmed milk scandals, in which children are dying because there's so much formaldehyde in the milk. I mean, it was kind of, there were no standards, there were no safety standards.

There were no labels, right? Aside from anything else, you never knew what was in your food. So they could put formaldehyde in the milk without telling anyone. And you just get people saying, Hey, if a little goes a long way, a lot, right?

And in one summer, I think, was 1898, in Indianapolis, 400 children died of formaldehyde poisoning. And it was 100 percent legal, no one was prosecuted, right? So that's really what it was like.

And that's where you start to see Harvey Wiley and some of his allies, especially state food chemists, starting to say This has got to stop. We have got to figure out a way to convince Congress to regulate this right. People are dying, the food supply is incredibly unsafe.

And he, as part of that, he launches this series of experiments. Formaldehyde was one of the things he tested. Borax, which you see in the cleaning supplies now 20 mutine borax salicylic acid, which is the compound in aspirin that makes the liming of your stomach bleed. He's looking at all of these different things which are in the food supply, and he's testing them in this very. It's a very primitive but fairly controlled experiment in which they're adding it to food.

Right, and comparing the young clerical workers who are eating the food with the contaminants to ones who are just eating untainted food and looking at what happened.

And this is a chemist who realizes that this is a moment for science and action. Who is he? Before he? He comes to public light, he becomes this sort of, you know, public service hero.

His father was a itinerant preacher and a conductor on the underground railroad in Indiana, where he grew up. He, you'll hear him talking a lot when he gives speeches about the importance of science in the interest of good. And so when he went into chemistry in Indiana, which was where he was from, he. He really was focused on this missionary sense of science that had to do good in the world. And so he was the first professor of chemistry at Purdue University when they had a faculty of six. I mean, this is very early on in the history of the university.

And while he was there, he started investigating fraud in the food supply, he was looking particularly at honey and syrup. They were starting to fake maple syrup with dye as dyed corn syrup and calling it maple syrup. And they were so elaborate in their corn syrup honey frauds. They actually created fake honeycombs and floated them in the dyed corn syrup. So that was one of the first reports he did in Indiana.

And that work brought him attention of this tiny bureau of chemistry at the national level. And so when he went to USDA in 1883, sort of the pump was already primed with him. He already had a sense that there was dishonesty, and he had this missionary sense that he was there to actually try to do good. And and he was a total consumer first kind of warrior, right?

So as you see him, as he starts to discover more and more dangerous things in food and beyond the things I was telling you about, you know. Arsenic was used to color candy green, lead was used to make cheddar cheese more orange. There's just this insane use of poisonous things in the food supply. He gets more and more determined that he has to make this change, and he becomes more and more of an advocate. And he makes a lot of enemies along the way.

But he does eventually become part of a successful push. He wasn't the only hero here in getting us our first consumer protection regulations.

What does that look like? And you know, you know, on the one hand, this is a great good for the public, and on the other, like one one starts to appreciate why. We have very rigorous scientific ethics these days. How did that go down?

And he picked them because he knew there was some risk involved. So he thought I'll get the strongest, healthiest specimens, thinking in the terms of the day that I can. And if they're affected by these compounds, then think of the risk to children or sick people, or elderly people, but also, they're less likely to die. Even so, he had them sign a waiver, right? acknowledging that they were at risk.

Truthfully, you know, the other thing we do, I hope better today is sort of full disclosure of risk. When we put people in experiments, and I don't think these guys knew how dangerous it was, right, so the first experiment he did, this is what would happen. They built a model test kitchen in the basement of the Agriculture department.

They built a dining room with white tablecloths and oak chairs, right? They would seat a dozen of these young men at one of two tables, basically, and all the food was wonderful. They hired a professional chef.

It was farm, fresh food, no preservatives in the food, right? Just fabulous, wonderful food, but they could only eat in the USDA dining room.

And half of them had to take these capsules in which he had put these different compounds. And as the week went on, or the two weeks of the experiment, he'd increased the dose in the capsule. So the first experiment was with Borax. And he actually said he thought that it was harmless when he started testing it. Because, and this is the other thing. When I was doing the research for this book, I keep going. Where are these studies?

Right, and just public health is so primitive at this time, toxicology is so early at this time.

The toxicology that existed mostly focused on homicide. They weren't even thinking about food, right? So there are no real experiments there. You'll see. There was a guy at the University of Pennsylvania who put a little formaldehyde in his milk one day to see how he felt.

Those were the kind of experiments that were out there. So one of the things Wiley was trying to do in this very primitive way was to have a group and a control group where I have some bigger numbers. To make it more systematic, all of these guys had to be blood tested and weighed and their urinalysis and every possible analysis, right?

And so he's trying to create what looks to him like a professional experiment. I mean, aside from the fact that, you know there's not really informed consent here. And these are dangerous, untested compounds that he's giving to people. People got really sick, they had to call the formaldehyde experiment, even though my personal opinion, everyone knew formaldehyde was terrible. I mean, children have been dying.

They got their testes, became so sick, they just had to call off the whole experiment, right? But none of them died in the course of the experiment, right? So you have to give them credit for at least picking sturdy people.

I want to ask you, you know, what was the public's response when he come out with these reports? What, what? What were the implications here once this happened?

Very Victorian. The Post called them the Poison squad. And they had one reporter who did nothing but tell these stories and lurk around the dining room and grilled the chef behind Wiley's back. And make this whole sort of dramatic telling. It ends up in newspapers coast to coast, and I think for the first time.

And and I think this in part because when you look at the newspaper coverage coast to coast, every single newspaper is saying. These people were eating poison, right? These volunteers are saying poison is part of your daily diet. And they would tell the kinds of things that these things were in, right?

Formaldehyde and malt, borax and butter, salicylic acid in your beer and your wine. You are getting poisoned on a daily basis and so you start to get at this period. I think he started these about 1902 and they ran and all till about for a couple of years. This sort of simmering public anger as they realize that everyone's getting systematically poisoned and they can't protect themselves. Because there's no available information as to how much is going into their food and when.

There was a great deal of public reaction to the stories of these poison quads studies.

And what a fraudulent scientist. He was, right? I mean, it was in their best interest to make him look as bad as possible, and that was their primary reaction, right?

Was just to try to destroy his reputation and to damage his standing in the U.

S government. It was pretty ugly, actually.

What, what was some of the regulatory change that, that, that that came in the form of the Wiley Act?

I will say that there was so much industry opposition to the 1906 Food and Drug Act, the Wiley Act, that it was not a perfect law. You know, it had some really cumbersome problems in it, which is why in 1938 we ended up getting an update, the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. But, and one of the things about that law is that if you were going to try to force a company to withdraw a compound, you had to sue them in court. Right? And so.

And the burden of proof was on the government. And there still wasn't complete requirement for the companies to do safety testing, right? The government had to do the safety testing, so the law was both a first step.

Let me say this about that law, because I think it's really important that law was an absolutely essential first step in consumer protections in the United States. It was the first time in American history that the U.S government had said part of our job is to protect consumers in their everyday life. I sometimes think of it as that clause in the constitution promote the general welfare.

It was the first time that the government said. And what does that mean? It means we take care of you when you're just trying to live your life, right? Eat non-toxic breakfast.

Right, drink some non-poisoned beer or whatever. And that's actually our job. Our job is to look out for you that protecting American citizens is, more than, you know, arming our borders, essentially.

And and that precedent, the precedent established by that law, and a law that was went into law with the Meat Inspection Act. Those lay down the precedent for every consumer protection agency that follows the EPA, OSHA, right, the F.DA itself. All of them are based on the precedent of that law. So imperfect as it was, it changed the story.

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Obviously, there's been so much effort put into consumer protection, although a lot of folks, including myself, would argue probably not enough. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, fast forwarding? Almost a century from the passage of, or more than a century from the passage of that law to the present? What would you say about about the current? The current system of regulation that governs and protects us from being poisoned in in our daily lives?

If you actually look at the number of people get sick, however, it starts to be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. And that tells you that the system is better, but it is far from perfect. So if I was going to pick a couple of things that I would like to hammer on hammer, you know, sort of, you know, argue for, well, one thing. We have some much more modern, decent rules that we don't really enforce well.

Right, and our enforcement of those laws went backwards somewhat in the Trump administration, as an example, with food under Obama, they passed the Food Safety Modernization Act. To really start using much more current technology and start looking at contaminants that you know a part per billion level. And figure out where the sources of contamination came from. And look at things like contamination of the kind of water used with crops.

All of that rolled back during the Trump administration, and all of that is being gradually restored. But when you start to see things like Romaine, Lettuce recalls, right? And you really look at what's going on there, you can see that. Some of the problems we have today with those kind of food poisoning episodes have to do with the fact that we're not fully enforcing the laws. We have right, and we're not really funding them. Well, and that's the other problem.

We have a pretty good regulatory apparatus in place that we just don't put enough money into. So the F.DA, for instance, gets, I think, about a billion a year for food. Inspection of pretty close to 100,000 facilities, right? And some of those facilities, as I remember from the last time I talked to someone about this. Sometimes on their rotation, they only have enough people and enough money to inspect every several years, right?

So obviously that, too, is not working in our favor. And finally, you know, do we see companies? Let me back up one more minute, really quickly, you know, I pretty much hammered the food industry of the early 20th century. There were some exceptions.

There were the cannery group, which was really worried that people were no longer buying canned goods. In part, right? Really came forward for the Food Act and some of the big manufacturers. Henry J. Hines is the most famous of the manufacturers who really came forward and advocated for, you know, better, food and safety standards. So I don't want to just say everyone was a bad actor because that wasn't true, and I don't want to say that today either.

Right, not everyone is a bad actor. But I've given a lot of talks at the FDA. I know there's a lot of industry and political pressure on the FDA, right? So I, and I think that shows in a lot of regulatory actions as well. That government industry handshake that we saw behind our backs in Wiley's time is just as strong today.

Right, I don't have a doubt about that.

And then what happens is, even if they're not, even if they're not meeting their requirements, rarely is there a situation where they're actually going to get shut down. So what happens is you end up having this like ratcheting down of the actual regulations because of the poor enforcement by the agency. You see this in the environmental space, you see this in the public health space, and certainly you see in the FDA.

And then the second piece that you talked about is just that there's been so much growth in industry, right? At least at that time, a lot of the market share in food products was smaller. Mom and pop shops today, right?

Right, you have a few like mega major, gigantic corporations that have consolidated their space, you know, we talked a lot, a lot about this last year when it came to inflation in the price of meat, for example, because you only have a few meatpacking corporations who still do this. They do this on monstrous scales, and so if any one of these corporations were to actually get cited. They've got so much power through the way that they can invest in our elections process. That, and they're all giving to committee chairs for the relevant committees that they're worried about regulating them.

And so, like you said, there ends up being this sort of handshake deal and we don't really pay as much attention to it. And you know, in this country, we've taken for granted that there was regulatory oversight of the food that we eat. For so long that, you know, we sometimes don't appreciate the amount of erosion that sometimes has taken place. And and I just, you know, it's worrisome because you're right, like, we talk about E. coli outbreaks and bagged lettuce, right? Or or contamination of a certain food product. And we all kind of look at that and be like, Oh, well, that's odd.

But when it happens more and more and more, just like when you know the electricity goes out and you're like, Wait, why is this happening all the time? Now? One has to step back and look at the system. And, you know, I want to ask you, like, as we think about where we'd like to see this go, what are some of the things that, that that you really think we need to be paying attention to? And that ought to be done in the regulatory space to upgrade the degree to which that we can count on the safety of our food.

So we actually need clear and transparent information. We need labels to be a little less opaque, right? And this, again, is a good example of an industry government kind of handshake. Like, if you see the term natural flavorings on a label, it doesn't mean natural.

Right, these are almost all synthetic chemicals. And some of the food advocacy groups have actually forced the F.D.A. to withdraw a couple of these so-called natural flavorings because they're suspected carcinogens. So we need the information that goes to the consumer to be much more transparent. If we're going to put all this weight on the consumers, then let's arm consumers.

Right, I think that's part of it and the other thing that I want to bring up because I. So, you've probably heard the fact that if you look at food, drugs and cosmetics, there's about a thousand compounds that are banned in the EU. That are permitted here. Overall, right?

And the big difference there is that in the in the EU. They use a kind of protective precautionary principle that, you know, studies show that this is dangerous. And until we can prove it safe, we're going to pull it right. Whereas here, we use something I think it's actually on the F.D.A. website, called Generally Recognizes Safe the grass principle, and it says something like this. And I just saw this come up recently.

Titanium dioxide, you know, which is a compound in sunscreens, for instance, and a whitener. In paint, is also in a lot of candy and food, and because it is never killed people by having it in paint. It's generally recognized as safe and it's accepted that food companies can put titanium dioxide into the food supply, even though there are studies that show this is really a risky thing to do, right? So that principle, and that principle again was hammered out as a kind of convenience to industry, right?

Instead of forcing you to test all of these things, the American people become the guinea pig. It's generally recognized as safe until we actually start seeing problems. And I'm trying to remember it's a. It's brominated, hydrogenated, brominated, brominated compounds in bread that are banned in the EU and permitted here. The F.D.A. is just now starting to say, Oh yeah, you know, those really are suspended carcinogens, and maybe we should pull them.

Right, so, I would also advocate, not entirely optimistically, between you and me and the room, I would advocate. That. We should take another look at the generally recognized as safe principle, right, that we should adopt more of a rigorous. There's a lot of evidence that shows this is risky.

Let's ban it until we can. It's proven safe, kind of approach that they use in the EU. I think we'd be safer.

And you know, that's, that's a it's not, it's not something we need to do or should be doing. But for the system of politics. That leaves us biasing the interests of a corporate bottom line over the well-being of people who live in our country. And you know, you see it across the board, industry by industry by industry, and this is just kind of how it shows up in in food.

And you know, it's a pretty scary thing to think that you buy a product you really don't have any clue of what's in it. I mean, all of us, you know, I have a Ph..D. and a medical degree, and I'll be honest with you. Like, when I get down to the bottom of an ingredients list. There's a lot of stuff I don't know about and would have to spend some time looking up. Now, I have access and know where to go to figure out some of the toxicological findings.

And that's a difficult thing to do. And so we could tell people they should be informed consumers all day long. But what does that even mean, particularly when you're thinking about foods that you like to feed your kids?

Then you're not going to get a continued exposure of one particular thing. Having said that, as I don't practice it, I drink coffee every day, right? and other things, so it sounds good, but it's really hard to do that. I agree with you, I think, you know. We're asking way too much of consumers without giving them access to the kind of information that they can use to make healthy, intelligent choices.

And I'm disappointed in us on those grounds.

Now I shudder to think how much canned tuna I ate. But you know, these are choices, if you can make them, you should make. But you know, for so many people, our country, those are not choices that they can make. And you know, when we allow industry particularly right for the cheapest foods, I mean, this is the thing about it.

If you're eating at whole Foods, right? or by buying your groceries at what my medical school professor used to call whole paycheck. You know, you are much less likely to be exposed to some of the things that may find themselves in the cheapest versions of food. But the cheaper it is, the higher the probability that you're talking about foods. Where less attention is paid to how wholesome it might be, and there's a higher probability to, you know, add additives that may increase the volume to decrease the price. And and so this, like almost all the issues we talk about on this podcast, end up hitting the lowest income people hardest.

And again, that's targeting the lowest income people. And again, that was definitely true. In Wiley's time, you know, the worst of the fraud, the worst of the fakery went to people because that was all they could afford. Actually, it really ticks me off, and, you know? And then, finally, we and we do false advertising of the healthy quality of some of these foods.

Right, but people believe that they're getting whole grains and products which are so processed that they actually aren't right.

So could we do? Are we better off than we were in the 19th century? A hundred percent, right? Could we do a whole lot better?

A hundred percent again, we totally could and we should actually do that.

Why are we leaving so much more progress and opportunity to improve situations on the table? And in the end, it almost always comes down to some quarterly bottom line for some very large corporation. And their ability to make sure that they, but they buy themselves access to policy and policymakers. We really appreciate you sharing insights on both our history and and our current situation, and for your leadership. Our guest today was Deborah Blum. She is the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT.

Her books include The Poisoner's Handbook and Poison Squad, and we encourage you to check them out and check out her Pulitzer Prize winning work. Both in the past and hopefully again, someday in the future.

Now, UnitedHealthcare is facing a class action lawsuit over the alleged use of an algorithm that the lawsuit says denied rehab claims for those beneficiaries. The allegations center around a program called NH-Predict, which you can't make this up, had a 90 percent error rate, and the lawsuit alleges that, per the findings of a Stat news investigation. UnitedHealthcare pressured employees to use NH-Predict to predict the patient's length of stay in rehab, and to deny coverage for any stay longer than what NH-Predict's algorithm predicted. We'll keep you posted. According to the CDC, over 3,700 infants were born with congenital syphilis in 2022..

That's 11 times as many as a decade ago. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection that can go dormant, meaning lots of people who are infected don't know that they have it. But even when it's dormant, it can pass to infants, causing blindness, deafness, stillbirth or death. Which is why it's routinely screened for and treated simply with a shot of bisulin in pregnancy. But here's the problem.

40 percent of cases of congenital syphilis occurred in pregnancies where there was no prenatal care. Another 20 percent of those who did get prenatal care never got screened. That highlights a profound disconnect that pregnant folks feel from the health care system, in large part owing to the fragmentation of our system. The ways that underinsured and low-income patients can be treated as second-class health care citizens, and the way that bias against those folks, disproportionately black and brown, can show up in a clinical encounter. But beyond that, there's just more syphilis these days than in the past. And that highlights a broader consequence of the disinvestment in public health.

Just a few decades ago, there were armies of nurses who could contact trace any syphilis infection, identifying from whom that individual may have contracted it and who they could have given it to. The networks they identified were all offered treatment, stopping syphilis in its tracks. But we slashed public health funding over the past decade, and those teams are a shell of what they used to be. And during the pandemic, they were all focused on contact tracing another disease, Covid.

Congenital syphilis is completely preventable because syphilis is completely treatable. Our failure to prevent and treat it, that's an indictment on the way we've allowed our public health system to deteriorate. Over the past several weeks, Israel's military has been laying siege to hospitals in Gaza. Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest in Gaza, where 700 patients, 400 health care workers and 3,000 displaced people were subject to an Israeli raid last week.

The hospital has been without ready access to clean water, fuel to operate, sensitive medical equipment or reliable electricity. Hundreds of people who had been sheltering at Gaza's largest hospital evacuated on foot. Dozens of critically ill people, including a number of premature babies who cannot leave, will remain there, with a handful of doctors and carers. Israel argues that Hamas is using tunnels underneath the hospital to attack Israel, rendering the hospitals into human shields. Here's the thing about it.

International law is clear that hospitals and health care workers are not to be attacked. There are not exceptions to this rule. Here's WHO Secretary General Tedros Ghebreyesus.

I know fewer still who've worked in hospitals that have been the targets of active war themselves, simply for showing up to care for the sick and injured. I can't imagine what it's like to know that you're there to save lives, while others so clearly discount your own. The only way to stop this violence is to stop this violence, and that starts with an immediate ceasefire. I'll leave you with the words of Dr.

Hamam Alou, a physician at Al-Shifa Hospital.

America dissected is a product of crooked media. Our producer is Austin Fisher, our associate producers are Tara Terpstra and Emilic. Frank Asilis Fotopoulos mixes and masters the show. Production support from Ari Schwartz.

Our theme song is by Takao Sazawa and Alex Uguiera. our executive producers are Leo Duran, Sarah Geismar and me Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, your host.

This show is for general information and entertainment purposes only. It's not intended to provide specific health care or medical advice and should not be construed as providing health care or medical advice. Please consult your physician with any questions related to your own health. The views expressed in this podcast reflect those of the host and his guests, and do not necessarily present the views and opinions of Wayne County, Michigan, or its Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services.