Unfortunately RFK Jr.'s Brain Worm Is Right About Health

Plus an app called SOAAK that soothes anxiety with sound waves.

Housekeeping:

1. HEAVIES got a little shout out in my local newspaper, the Wall Street Journal :)

2. ICYMI, the Feelgood Routine with Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed, a religious studies professor at Harvard who decided to take a Muay Thai fight at age 49, is downright inspiring.

3. I’ve been on a little bit of a podcast tear recently—so look out for those. I’ll promote them on my IG.

Little bloggy blog today:

The Right Is Kind of Right

Recently you may have seen a couple of clips floating around on social media from a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee called “Investing in a Healthier America: Chronic Disease Prevention and Treatment.” The event was designed to “bring awareness to the burgeoning obesity epidemic in the country” and to “help promote and advance policy-centric solutions.” It was hosted by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), chairman of the health subcommittee, who recently overhauled his diet after a health scare. The multi-day caucus featured presentations from a semi-literal Suicide Squad of health influencers and policy advocates, everyone from former Senate majority leader and surgeon Bill Frist (R-Tn.) to Jordan Peterson to New York Times best-selling author Vani Hari aka “The Food Babe.”

Goofy… but it gets goofier. The event was organized by RFK Jr. and his brain worm (who I like to think of as his Remy from Ratatouille) who is clearly positioning himself to take on some sort of health policy role in the event Trump wins in November.

A lot was discussed. But TL;DR: the American food system is designed to keep people unhealthy and eating cheap ultra-processed garbage, which isn’t so much a design flaw as it is a function of capitalism, a point I agree with. Here’s a cut of the Food Babe’s presentation I saw passed around by a few progressive friends:

danicawalkerenergy

A post shared by @danicawalkerenergy

RFK Jr. is a certified kook with cartoon-wolf awooooga eyes but the caucus was disorienting because, as the Food Fix notes, it felt genuinely bipartisan in that you couldn’t tell who was on the left and who was on the right. Which is maybe good? It reminded me of the time I interviewed Huberman for GQ last year and got all sorts of surprising DMs, including from politicos on the right who said the left cedes too much of the health space to the right and Rogan-adjacent when health should be for, y’know, everyone.

The wise homie Sami Reiss of Snake touched on this a bit in his definitive guide to raw milk, but nutrition isn’t inherently political. I’d argue that we’re probably going to look back at this era of ultra-processed foods the same way we look back at cigarettes. (I have a story related to this coming out in the Guardian in a few weeks.)

If it takes a bipartisan coalition to pressure Kelloggs to stop using potentially dangerous artificial dyes in Froot Loops or whatever—which are banned in the UK—then all the better. Now if we could just get everybody on board for universal health care….

An App That Soothes Anxiety with Sound Waves

I’ve been experimenting a bit with an app called SOAAK, which uses sound-wave therapy to trigger all sorts of physiological responses, from helping you sleep to inspiring focus. It’s expensive; $30 a month. (You can use your HSA on it.) But it’s backed by some hard science and is used by the Air Force. And I mean… I love me some sound bowls. What are we if not a loose collection of cells just vibing?

I’ve mostly been using SOAAK for the sleep setting to help calm my nerves before bedtime, which seems to lull me into a deeper slumber, and the focus mode is helpful for deep work like writing. But I’m skeptical of some of the bigger claims—I couldn’t find any literature to support the idea that sound-wave therapy might be useful for combating seasonal allergies—so I shot a few questions over to the team and got these responses back from Paul Harris MD and Lauren Widney. All in all: I like it.

Here’s what they said, lightly edited.

What is the methodology for discerning between the effects of different frequencies, for example, anti-anxiety vs. high-energy? What are the differences between those kinds of wave patterns? And how is it tested? 

The frequencies are rooted in different wave patterns based on decades of research….