How to Handle Bizarre Wellness Claims, Plus the Real Scoop on Seed Oils

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comHealth-misinformation researcher and science communicator Timothy Caulfield returns to discuss his new book THE CERTAINTY ILLUSION, why being too certain about anything makes us vulnerable to misinformation, how intellectual humility can help protect us, why science is sometimes “full of shit” and how to be a critical consumer of it, and more. Behind the paywall, we get into why it’s so hard for public figures to show intellectual humility, whether being smart makes people less intellectually humble and more vulnerable to misinformation, the role of narcissism in misinformation belief, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and why so many researchers lie about their work. Plus, Christy asks Tim for advice on how to navigate an alternative-medicine recommendation for IVF, and whether refusing to do it is a hill she wants to die on.Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Timothy Caulfield is a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. He was the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy for over 20 years (2002 - 2023). His interdisciplinary research on topics like stem cells, genetics, research ethics, the public representations of science, and public health policy has allowed him to publish almost 400 academic articles. He has won numerous academic, science communication, and writing awards, and is a Member of the Order Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He contributes frequently to the popular press and is the author of national bestsellers: The Cure for Everything: Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness (Penguin 2012) and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash (Penguin 2015), and Relax, Dammit!: A User’s Guide to the Age of Anxiety (Penguin Random House, 2020).  His most recent book is The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters (Penguin Random House, 2025; Bookshop affiliate link). Caulfield is also the co-founder of the science engagement initiative #ScienceUpFirst and has written, hosted and produced documentaries, including the award-winning TV show, A User’s Guide to Cheating Death, which has been shown in over 60 countries, including streaming on Netflix in North America.If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it! Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore.If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comChristy answers an audience question about the “adrenal body type” and unpacks the weight stigma, ageism, and pseudoscience embedded in this twist on the dubious diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue.”The full version of this episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to the first question here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the rest!Get full show notes and references here.Ask a question of your own for a chance to have it answered in a future episode!Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold. Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comParent coach Oona Hanson joins us to discuss how going to a physical therapist for back pain led her down a wellness-culture rabbit hole, why dietary restrictions to “fight inflammation” just ended up harming her relationship with food and her body, how she got the dubious diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue,” and more. Behind the paywall, we get into how she helped her child heal from an eating disorder (and how that process changed the course of her career), how parents can help their kids navigate pressures from diet and wellness culture, why smart and science-minded people can still fall for wellness misinformation, her experience with perimenopause and wellness culture, and more.Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Oona Hanson is a nationally recognized parent coach who supports families navigating diet culture and eating disorders. She is passionate about helping parents raise kids who have a healthy relationship with food and their body. A regular contributor to CNN, Oona has been featured widely, including on Good Morning America, The Washington Post, USA Today, US News & World Report, People, and Parents Magazine. Oona holds a Master's Degree in Educational Psychology and a Master's Degree in English. She writes the Parenting Without Diet Culture newsletter and will publish her first book in 2026 with Cambridge University Press. She is a mother of two and lives in Los Angeles. Find her at oonahanson.substack.com.If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it!Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comChristy discusses vitamin D for blood-sugar control and preventing diabetes (part of our series on commonly used supplements). If you spend a lot of time in online wellness spaces, you’ve probably heard a lot about how supplementing with vitamin D can supposedly regulate blood sugar and prevent diabetes. Even some mainstream diabetes organizations promote this idea, based on a small number of studies that seem to show a benefit. But what does the overall body of evidence say? Is this another case where the hype outpaces the science?This episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to a free preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!Get full show notes and references here.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comPhilosopher and medical ethics professor Arianne Shavisi joins us to discuss why alternative medicine isn’t the answer to a patriarchal healthcare system—and why in many ways it’s even worse. We get into the common misconception that alternative medicine is feminist, how alternative medicine differs from scientific medicine, the role of values in people’s attraction to alternative medicine, and more. Behind the paywall, we discuss why true patient autonomy and informed consent are impossible in alternative medicine, her thoughts on how to improve scientific medicine so that people aren’t drawn to worse alternatives, how she responds to claims that criticizing alternative medicine means discounting “non-Western” cultural knowledge, and more. Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Arianne Shahvisi is a Kurdish-British writer and academic philosopher. She studied astrophysics and then philosophy at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and now teaches applied philosophy at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, where her research focusses on gender, race, migration, and health. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and her essays have also appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, and the Economist. Her first book, Arguing for a Better World: How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice, was published by Penguin in 2023.If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it! Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comChristy discusses how to tell whether your symptoms are related to perimenopause or something else, what perimenopause has in common with dubious diagnoses (even though it’s a real condition), and what the best available evidence says about hormone therapy, weight gain, and more.This episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to a free preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!Get full show notes and references here.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore.If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comAuthor and activist Amanda Martinez Beck joins us to discuss her experience of taking Ozempic for diabetes while also working to accept her body and break down anti-fat bias in society. She shares her history of dieting and disordered eating, how chronic conditions including diabetes as well as fibromyalgia and post-Covid syndrome have impacted her relationship with food and her body, why she started taking Ozempic in the first place, how diet culture is a new form of religion, and how her actual religious faith has influenced her eating-disorder recovery. Behind the paywall, we get into the tricky landscape of Ozempic and eating disorders, how Ozempic has fallen short of what the ads and influencers promise, her take on all the GLP-1 hype, and more. Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Amanda Martinez Beck is a fat activist, educator, and the author of More of You: The Fat Girl's Field Guide to the Modern World. She runs the Instagram account @your_body_is_good, where she combines her love of hand lettering with her vision of fat liberation. Amanda lives with her husband and four kids in northeast Texas, and she writes a weekly Substack called The Fat Dispatch. If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it! Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore.If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comIn this bonus episode, Christy shares some personal thoughts on how anxiety impacts the gut, and how to handle digestive distress that’s triggered by stress without getting pulled down wellness-culture rabbit holes—particularly if you have a history of disordered eating. The full version of this episode (with 9 tips for coping) is for paid subscribers. Listen to a free preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.  

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comReturning guest Amelia Hruby—who is now our very own podcast producer, as well as a podcaster in her own right with a PhD in philosophy—co-hosts this special episode for the 2-year anniversary of Rethinking Wellness. We discuss how Amelia’s thinking about astrology and tarot has shifted since her first appearance on the pod, why the spirituality-to-QAnon/MAGA pipeline is still going strong, how editing this podcast has changed her relationship with science and medicine, and more. Behind the paywall, Christy shares more about the origins of this podcast in a way she hasn’t before, including why she shifted her focus to wellness culture and how researching the harms of social media changed the tenor of her work. She also discusses some of her favorite things about this new platform, why she thinks it’s so important to do science communication without a side of fat-shaming, what she’s dreaming up for the future of Rethinking Wellness, whether there might be another book in the works, and more.Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Amelia Hruby is a writer, educator and podcaster with a PhD in philosophy from DePaul University. Over the past decade, she’s been a university professor, a community organizer, and a radio DJ. Now, she is the founder and executive producer of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio that supports women and nonbinary small business owners in creating purposeful, powerful podcasts. Since leaving social media in April 2021, she’s also launched Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. On the show she interviews business leaders and former influencers, and shares stories, strategies and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it!Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comDietitian and diabetes educator Janice Dada joins us to discuss why there’s so much stigma and blame on people with diabetes, the wellness-culture belief that people can “reverse diabetes” by restricting foods and taking a bunch of supplements, why people don’t “give themselves diabetes” by eating too much sugar, the myth that people with diabetes can’t eat sugar or carbs, her new book on intuitive eating for diabetes, and more. Behind the paywall, we get into the myths about diabetes and body size, the harms of trying to lose weight with diabetes, issues with the “prediabetes” label, the GLP-1 craze, and how to practice intuitive eating with diabetes.Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Janice Dada is a weight-inclusive registered dietitian with a private practice in Newport Beach, CA. She is a certified intuitive eating counselor, certified diabetes care and education specialist (CDCES), and certified eating disorders specialist (CEDS). She is passionate about simplifying and destigmatizing the nutrition- and weight-based discourse around diabetes. Intuitive Eating for Diabetes: The No Shame, No Blame, Non-Diet Approach to Managing Your Blood Sugar is her first book.If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it!Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.