Maintenance Phase - Celery Juice

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Do you have viruses? Cysts? Cancer? Are you tired sometimes? According to Instagram, the  problem might be a lack of liquefied vegetables! This week, Mike and Aubrey take on a troubling taste test, meet a ghost with bad intentions and encounter the longest list of problematic celebrities we've ever seen.Plus, we start the show with an announcement: We're doing Patreon-only bonus episodes! Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/maintenancephaseSupport us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Anthony William on ExtraAnthony William on Keeping Up with the KardashiansCelery Juice Is the Perfect, Probably Pointless Trend for 2019 (Vanity Fair)Food Isn't Medicine. Here's Why It's Dangerous to Believe It Is. (Huffington Post)Is celery juice a viable alternative to nitrites in cured meats? (McGill University)Is Celery Juice a Sham? (The New York Times)Today's Diet Fads (Today's Dietitian)People think celery juice can protect you from COVID-19. Here's why that's categorically false. (Mama Mia)Support the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hello and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that takes fewer calories to listen to, than it does to chew it. Right. Like, the podcast takes away calories or something. This is like a Zen cone, right? Like, what does it take to chew a podcast?

I am Michael Hobbs. I'm Aubrey Gordon. And we have an announcement to make. I'm very excited about it. It feels fun. Your mother and I have been talking. You may have noticed. It's not that we don't love you anymore.

No, it's that we are going to start doing bonus episodes. Yeah, so we're going to start releasing bonus episodes on Patreon for our Patreon Patrons. And our first one comes out tomorrow and it is me explaining something that I know quite a bit about to Mike. And that is the Bachelor. Yes, it was so much fun. It's really, really, really fun. So we don't know exactly what format the bonus episodes are going to take. We're going to do like an ask us anything. We're probably going to do like an advice show. We're going to talk about like movies and weird old diet book clubs and just like random stuff that doesn't really fit onto the show.

Absolutely. At some point I'm going to make Mike explain to me his fixation on Elon Musk. Yeah, it's gonna be a four hour long bonus episode. So anyway, if you already support us on Patreon, despite getting zero anything for that, thank you from the bottom of our little hearts. If you would like to start supporting us on Patreon and hearing our little bonus episodes, go to patreon.com slash maintenance phase.

We'll see you there, team. And you can also not support us, and just keep listening, it's fine. Yeah, however to listen today, you have to hate celery for some reason. I know you don't have to hit or love it for anything. I have no idea how we're gonna fill a whole episode talking about celery juice.

Oh, buddy, just to wait, heavy against. I have no pre-existing relationship with this substance. Well, that cut off my first question, which is going to be Mike. What do you know about celery juice? I heard about celery juice two weeks ago when my friend in Portland, Aubrey Gordon, said, let's do an episode about celery juice. And I was like, uh, okay. Mike, I'm so excited for this episode now.

I know, me too. The fact that you're coming in 100% clean means that I get to blow your brains out of your head a couple of times here. No toxins on this end of the conversation, Aubrey, I need you to know. So I came in sort of knowing that celery juice was sort of a broad trend.

This is one of our most requested topics, by the way. How did I miss this? This may be where the dividing line of on Instagram versus not on Instagram shows up once again. Yes, because I am not privy to the juice discussions in our society. It is so Instagrammy. Vanity Fair wrote a piece called Celery Juices, the perfect, probably pointless trend for 2019. Quote, probably pointless trend for 2019. Quote,

Goop approved, vaguely virtuous, Instagramable. Is it healthy? It's not not healthy. What exactly does it do for you? Who knows? The important thing is that it looks good.

Carrying around a bottle of celery juice comes with an air of exclusivity. To drink it, you either need to own your own juicer or have easy access to a place like pressed Juicy which is currently selling a seven-day celery juice package for $60. Jesus. It's the perfect addition to an early morning No makeup selfie. It also goes well with a trip to equinox. Right. It is also being used as a way to signal the kind of Person that you are yeah, and the kind of health that you're invested in

and wellness that you're invested in. It's no accident that this has shown up on a social media platform and not only that, but the social media platform that is literally all about images. So do you wanna hear what people have been sort of saying about celery juice on the internet? Yes, take me into the world of celery juice claims.

So I'll say first of all, celery juice has shown up over the last three or four years in the biggest way. That's been sort of its peak. Lots of sort of like health and wellness sort of influencers. This has been big with like a lot of people who were on the bachelor. Oh, this is the Aubrey entry point. This is how she learned. This is not how I learned, but it is something I found out along the way. A suitcase of lunch meat, a suitcase of celery.

But when you talk about celery juice, people who are believers in celery juice believe that it is fundamentally different. The nutrition behind celery juice is fundamentally different than the nutrition behind chewing a stock of celery. Here are the things that they say that drinking celery juice can do. These are all big, expansive claims. They say that drinking celery juice regulates your gut microbiome. They say that it fights inflammation. They say that it cleanses your body of toxins. They say that it can cure addiction and mental illnesses,

including bipolar and PTSD. Jesus Christ. At least according to Miranda Kerr, who's a big believer, she put up an Instagram post, which she has since taken down, saying that celery juice, drinking celery juice, can protect you from contracting COVID-19.

Oh, good stuff. Topical. There is a huge list of conditions that celery juice is supposed to cure. The first one in the list is viruses. Cool. It cures viruses. It cures Hashimoto's thyroiditis, it cures rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, acne, eczema, Lyme, gut problems, brain fog, weight issues, migraines, bloating, vertigo psoriasis, cysts, fatigue, PCOS,

fibroids, UTI, endometriosis, and autoimmune disorders. God, it's funny that none of the ones on there are minor. No. I have dry eyes, and I'm like, I have to use hydrops. But like, that's like a very minor irritation to me. It's not like MS, or these like much more significant conditions. On that list, it is fascinating how many of those conditions are sort of multifactorial, and scientists don't know all that well the way that they start

or how to treat them. Many of them are sort of perfectly structured for this kind of snake oil bullshit. Absolutely. So the creator of this sort of craze, there is a single person who sort of created this craze will get into him in a minute. Bob Celery.

The juice actually has nothing to do with the vegetable. I'm sorry. It's his. Bob Celery. The juice actually has nothing to do with the vegetable. I'm sorry. It's his name is Celery Juice. Oh my God. He contends that this is not a health trend because health trends are propelled by big money and advertising and promotion. Oh, here we go.

And millions and millions of dollars. And this is popular and it's like affordable, it's accessible, anybody can get celery juice. This is like sort of an every man's wellness approach. What do you even say anymore? It's always the same stuff. It's always this like sort of, it's, you know, for the people, it's a way of pushing back against elites.

There's something so interesting that as income inequality has become objectively a bigger concern, all of these diet, fad, promising miracle, cure bullshit, they've all sort of put themselves into that funnel now. Like they're, they're glomming on to these real concerns that people have. Well, and that stands in contrast to what we sort of see and know about wellness world, which is that it is often a major marker of wealth, right? That if you think about who's going to equinox,

who's drinking moon juice, who's subscribing to Goop, all of that sort of stuff is really coated with middle class and upper middle class and wealthy class codes, and it is also deeply coded as a very white space as well. So it's just odd to sort of try and take on this kind of populist tone to an industry that is in no way populist. You know?

Also, you made me go to PCC and buy some celery juice. And it was like $4.99. It's so much money. And even like buying celery and juicing it, I guess, is like cheaper than that, surely. But also, juicers cost money and also cost time. Yes, and the further you get into the world of juicing, as I now know, as I am taking several dives into juice world,

the more judgments there are about essentially like, cheaper kinds of juicers being not as good and extracting the juice incorrectly and what you really need is a masticating juicer, which are like hundreds of dollars bubble, blah, blah. When I was a kid, I remember my parents saying, if I masticated, I would go blind. Is that what that word means?

So I'm just gonna start straight off the bat with sort of debunking of those claims. Every single source that I found that was not the sole creator of this craze was like, this is utter bullshit. It's not bad for you, but it's not gonna cure fuck all anything. It seems like juices are fine

if you wanna drink juice, drink juice, but it's not gonna do anything magical for you. Exactly. I think there's also this thing that they talk about, which is like the hydration effects of celery. They're like, it's the best hydrator. So, it uses the single best hydrator. And nutritionists and doctors and dieticians are all like, yeah, I mean, it's 94% water. Yeah, but so are you. So am I. Everything is mostly water.

Celery juice is 95% water. Regular water is 100% water. Yeah, but so are you. So in all, everything is mostly water. Celery juice is 95 percent water. Regular water is 100 percent water. You know, there's more efficient ways to get water, such as water. There is a very specific protocol for drinking celery juice, and that is you are supposed to drink 16 ounces of freshly juiced celery on an empty stomach, and then you don't eat anything for about 30 minutes, 15 to 30 minutes, then you can sort of go about your day and eat what you're gonna eat and what have you. Wait, what, why? Try to be ritualizing it to this level.

That seems so weird. It's not a medication, just eat it when you want it. Why do we have to make a right way and a wrong way to do this? Mike, I feel like you're like wasting your outrage too early in this mess. I'm whining for you because you're the messenger. I'm like, Aubrey, because they get stuck. Also, like, listen, I don't want to spoil this for you,

but I'm going to spoil this for you a little bit. After we talk about celery juice, there's a big twist coming up. Yeah. Celery juice is real. No, no. No, this is real road workers used to rub it on their joints. It's happening to be again.

How dare you? So I'll tell you this, like, there's no research into celery juice in particular, which people who are pro celery juice say, aha, how do you know then that it doesn't work? And people who are sort of skeptical of celery juice go, well, because there's no research, why would, like, there's plenty of research on celery,

there is not research on celery juice in particular. But that's also, that's getting the logic wrong, because I can go and write an article on medium right now, saying that hopping on one foot for five minutes every day will prolong your life expectancy. Like, I can just write that and put it out into the public bloodstream, right? And then when people say,

there's no evidence that hopping on one foot has any benefits. I can say, well, where's your evidence that it doesn't have benefits? Yeah, totally. It's not up to the no-celery people to prove it. It's up to the yes-celery people. Yeah, yes. There are some up to the no celery people to prove it. It's up to the yes celery people. Yeah, yes. There are some good things that celery juice really does.

I mean, it's like the juice from celery. Celery's pretty good for you all the time, right? So good. So is lit. But it's also not an especially nutrient dense vegetable, which is what makes this so interesting. Oh, roasted. Jerry.

Jerry. There's also no evidence that shows that juicing celery somehow enhances its nutrition. Yes. Much less elevates it to some sort of medicinal tonic. I mean, all of the evidence shows that juicing something, there's all this sort of desire to believe that juicing something makes it somehow like magical. Yeah. All it really does is strip out the fiber. Hmm. Fiber is a really, a really good thing for your gastrointestinal tract, generally speaking. And when you strip out fiber, what that does is increase the concentration of sugar in

a given fruit or vegetable, right? And fiber slows down the digestion and processing of that sugar. Right. It's a sugarier digestion and processing of that sugar. It's a sugarier way of consuming vegetables, basically. I mean, we keep coming up against the same weird drives in this kind of rhetoric that it's not enough to eat celery because it's a vegetable and has stuff in it that's good for you.

It's like, no, no, no, you have to distill it down to only the essence of what makes it good for you. Yep, it's just a weird drive. It's like everyone wants to avoid the really obvious conclusion that is just like eating fruits and vegetables is good, y'all. Yes, and I think particularly given the claims around curing a series of chronic illnesses and mental illnesses, like it is particularly playing on the like aggressively shitty treatment by medical systems, often of people with chronic illnesses.

I'm just imagining walking around and seeing somebody in a wheelchair eating a stick of celery and slapping it out of their hand. No, it should be juice. You better be spitting out that pulp. I'm not kidding, mister. So there is some evidence that celery can help bring your blood pressure down. They say according to the Cleveland Clinic, quote, to get that benefit, you should eat roughly

four stocks or one cup chopped. And that's all you really need to do. You don't need to eat a whole head of celery and you certainly don't need to juice it. Also, I'm kind of against this thing of like picking specific vegetables that you should eat. If you looked into any individual vegetable, you would find benefits like this. Sure. There's probably other things which give you the same benefits of celery.

It's not like you have to go out of your way to have celery every day. Yeah, there's actually, I'm going to skip ahead to it. There's a quote that I was like, oh, this is like Michael Hobbs' vindication. So this is from a great reported piece from Huffington Post called Food Isn't Medicine. Oh, hell yeah. Essentially, the argument of this piece is, we know that diets that include whole grains, fruits,

vegetables, dairy, lean proteins, nuts and seeds. All of that can help reduce someone's risk for heart disease. We know that lower sodium diets can help decrease blood pressure, but those things are not a guarantee that you won't get any of those health conditions. You can do all of those things and still get colon cancer and still get heart disease and still have high blood pressure. And it sure is shit isn't a treatment for those conditions.

And that seems to be a little bit of what's happening here. Is this like kind of ass backwards situation, which is like the thing that you can do to prevent something is the same as what you need to do to treat it. Right. There's a lot of specific fruits and vegetables out there and there's a lot of specific health conditions out there. And whenever we draw a line between, you know,

blueberries and like prostate cancer, there's thousands of chronic conditions that could strike you out of the blue. And so it's just very weird to be linking these specific foods to these specific health outcomes as if we really have any control over the giant cluster of things that might happen to us. So here's the quote that is like Michael Hobbs vindication. Ooh, give it to me. So they talk about sort of, here are the ways in which we have evidence

that shifting your diet can reduce your risk for specific health conditions, like hypertension, heart disease, colon cancer, like a handful of things like that. And then they say, quote, beyond this, there's really no evidence supporting any one food or any specific diet will be the magic bullet to the prevention of all maladies. Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy and maybe you won't. Totally, totally, totally. So before we pivot into the backstory behind celery juice, which is where I think this really takes off, but I can't wait. Shall we do our

little taste test of celery juice? Yes, I have it. Okay, so we're going to take some celery juice. Mike, I have a question for you, was your celery juiced within the last 12 to 24 hours? This is a thing, is we talked about this, we were supposed to record this last week, and I had celery juice. I told my boyfriend, oh yeah, we had to postpone. And then my boyfriend's like, no, you need to drink the celery juice now

because that shit goes off in like 15 minutes and it was rotten. And so I didn't wanna ruin this, I didn't wanna like spoil myself and drink the celery juice that I bought. So I made my boyfriend drink it and then I went to the store yesterday and got another bottle.

Wait, can I ask what your boyfriend's reaction to it was? He said it tastes like fucking celery. I was like, oh. So again, this is like, there's a specific way to do this. We are not doing it in this specific way. Mike and I have both already had breakfast. You're supposed to have it on an empty stomach. Okay.

Both of us are drinking bottled celery juice. Oh, is that bad? It just means it wasn't juiced with in the last 12 to 24 hours, so that means that some additional properties have significantly decreased. Can I describe my bottle to you? Yes, please do. I have failed you. I was not able to get celery juice. I have celery and lemon juice.

That was the only thing they had at the store. I have the same thing, which also means that it is modestly useless. And it has the thing that's been sitting in the fridge for a day now. It has the thing where all the green stuff has sunk to the bottom. So there's this like foul sludge in like the last inch of the bottle. And the top of it is basically just clear-ass water.

Well, should we take a taste? Alright, we do it. I got a shake mine for freshness. Okay, you ready? Three, two, one, drink. Oh, fuck! Oh, Jesus! Oh! Oh!

It tastes like the pants I go running in! Oh! I was not expecting it to be that bad. Holy! It tastes like the pants I go running in. Oh. I was not expecting it to be that bad. Holy shit. Really, I really, really thought it was just gonna taste like celery. It smells like part of a bloody Mary, which I was like, all right, I'm in. Oh, I cannot believe how bad that tastes.

It tastes so different than it smells. Oh, I know. I mean, it really tastes like what I imagine, like sweat. Oh, God, it has like a salty, rancid saltiness. Oh, it's like a haunted swamp. It's like something a witch would make you drink to like cure the spell that she cast on you. Oh, hang on, mine also has eye of noot in it.

That's probably not great. I am genuinely shocked at how terrible this is. So here's the other thing. This bottle is 15.2 fluid ounces. You're supposed to drink 16 full ounces on an empty stomach. Oh, can you fathom getting through this whole bottle and a little bit more? Couple tablespoons more?

Aubrey, I'm not gonna finish those. No, I took one sip and this is going, like my plants are gonna get watered. This will be put to use. It will not be put into my body, no thanks. I feel like there's something about sort of these medicinal foods, sort of half the taste bad,

because then it's easier to convince yourself that they're good for you, right? Like it has to go down, like some horrible medication, because then it's like, oh, well, you know, it's stopping the aging process or whatever myth you're buying into from Instagram. It's almost like we can't have pleasure and health in the same little bottle, which I find very strange. Not only does it mean that it's working, but it also makes you more virtuous for soldering through how bad it tastes for your own health. Ah, boy, that, I have taken a couple of sips of water and that is not going away.

It tastes like a hate crime. I feel discriminated against. Someone is like a targeted name. If you drink it and you like it, keep drinking it. If you drink it and you feel better, keep drinking it. That's totally fine and great. I am not anti-celerary juice at all. What we're about to get into is where I do have some beef, which is the origins of the celery juice craze. It came from a man named Anthony William, from Sarasota, Florida. William is not a doctor, a nurse,

or any kind of certified healthcare provider. He doesn't have any formal training in anything in the world of physical or mental health, but he does have a massive following, 2.9 million on Instagram, and 3.5 million on Facebook. There is nothing more depressing than finding like a straight-up health grifter and seeing how many followers they have. It's so upsetting. So I have a

little clip for us. Oh, I'm going to send you this first clip, which is Anthony William talking about celery juice on extra. He's taken the world by storm with his books on helping people overcome illness and disease with me now, Anthony William. Hi. Hey, good to be here. Good to see you again. I mean, every time I see you, I feel like a gazillion more people are talking about celery juice. Yeah. You have started this total phenomenon. Congrats. You know, it's a single most powerful healing remedy there is, and that's why it's, this movement started at grassroots. I started a long ago, and it's built up, built up

because of a storm of people healing, getting better, reversing their exome psoriasis, their acne, their gout, their diabetes getting better, things that are getting better, when they were already doing healthy things, but nothing was moving in the needle. And they brought in the celery juice, the 16 ounces on an empty stomach, and they brought that in every single day, every single morning, and it's turned the tide.

It's like getting people out of that stuck mode. It's pushing them forward, like never before in history with a remedy like this. And it's natural, it's just celery juice, but it has to be celery juice by itself. That's a mistake made all the time. Okay, I wanted to ask you because a lot of people are putting lemon in it. Does that change? Yeah, it changes it. It stops it from working because there's something in there that science of

research hasn't discovered yet. It's called sodium cluster salts and they get neutralized when you put things in there in the wrong way. So basically it diffuses the power this holds. Has to be fresh, has to be by itself. It can't have all this different stuff in it, can't have products in there, like it can't have collagen in it,

can't have apple cider vinegar, you can't put lemon in it, you can't put water in it, you ruin it. Oh my God. There you go. Okay. I was trying to keep all the red flags in my head. I was like, that one, that one, that one,

and then I'm starting to forget the early ones now. So tell me your impressions of seeing this guy talk about what he calls the global celery juice movement. It's, I mean, as a media ethics person, not that I expect much from extra, but like, don't put people like this on your fucking TV shows, man. We didn't really get into this all that much

in the Masterclin's episode, but I think that this has a similar structure where you're saying this has all these medicinal benefits, but only if you do it in this very specific way, right? You have to have these really narrow parameters and that way when people say, hey, I've been drinking this for two weeks and my gout isn't cured, you can say, well, you must have accidentally adulterated it or you must have not been drinking it before eating, you must have not waited 30 minutes. Like you have to design these essentially unreachable parameters. That way it's never the product that failed. It's always the people that failed.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and we'll get into this. So Anthony William Road an entire book about celery juice that I read for this episode. Oh, Aubrey, I'm sorry. God, it helped me. Oh, my God. Mike, it is the first time in this podcast

in research for this podcast or for anything I have written up to this point that I've gotten so frustrated with a source that I wanted to stop before it was done. Oh, yeah. That is one of six books that this guy has written. Most of them have landed on the New York Times bestseller list. No. Aubrey.

Would you like to know where Anthony William gets his information? His own brain? I don't know. So, you noted his, the name that he goes by on social media and sort of publicly and it's the beginning of every title of every book that he's written is medical medium. Is that because he's not medical rare or medical well done? I'm sorry.

So he says that he does not speak to the dead as other mediums do, but to a single spirit, he just calls that entity spirit, capital S spirit, who gives him medical advice and information that is, quote, decades ahead of research and science. Oh my God. So what I'm not interested in doing, I'm gonna, we're gonna go into this a little bit.

Mike is gonna hyperventilate. I know. I'm preemptively hyperventilating like where are we going? So here is the story, the sort of brief story. Anthony Williams says that spirit first spoke to him when he was a child. He was about four years old and spirit told him

that his grandmother had cancer. She was not symptomatic at the time and she was diagnosed shortly thereafter. He also says that there was a family member who had a back injury after falling down the stairs when he was like seven and he told that family member based on advice from Spirit to drink celery juice and their recovery started that night

and they were able to walk the next day. What's actually interesting about that, because one thing that stood out to me from the list of conditions that he's promising celery juice will cure, is he's not saying like, sprained ankle and stuff. Like he's not saying the kinds of conditions that we normally allow, quote unquote,

Western medicine to cure, right? Like even the sort of Marianne Williamson's of the world are fine with Western medicine when it's those kind of acute accident style things. Funny that you should mention Marianne Williamson. Oh no, oh no. Well, Anthony William brings a dimension to medicine that deeply expands our understanding of the body and of ourselves. His work is part of a new frontier in healing

delivered with compassion and with love, says Mary Ann Williams. No, she blurbed the book. There are so many blurbs, like we will get into this. Oh, no. Oh, buddy. How many people am I gonna have to cancel? So he says that Spirit told him about celery juice.

He started recommending it to customers when he worked as a stock boy in a grocery store in the late 80s and early 90s. This was before juicers really took off as sort of a home appliance. So he would juice celery at the store for customers. He said that customers at this grocery store would start talking to him about their health problems and that he would then go, you should drink some celery juice

and they'd be like, I don't have a juicer and he'd go, well hang on, let me go juice it for you and would bring it out to them. Imagine walking through the grocery store and somebody hands you in those like little free sample cups of this fucking foul juice. It's even weirder than that because he's saying that customers who were grocery shopping were going up to him as an employee of the grocery store and going, you know, I have this Hatchimoto's thyroid itis. I mean, yeah, I my first job was in a grocery store And I mean, people do tell you weird stuff when you work at a grocery store.

But that seems like the kind of thing that happened once. Yeah. And then he's turned it into like, customers were always coming up to me. Right. Like, turning it into this pattern. Yeah, the demand is so great. He told these customers, if they didn't have a juicer,

which most of them did, that they could put celery in a blender, which is what I told you on our text thread. I was like, if you don't have a juicer, you could just put in a blender and strain out the pulp. If they didn't have a blender, he advised them to chew celery and spit out the pulp. Uh, science. Or you could just eat the fucking celery. Why is that better than just eating it? It will not surprise you to learn that this guy is a regular contributor to Goop. Each column starts with this disclaimer.

Quote, editor's note, we trust that you'll quickly understand that this medical medium is operating well outside the bounds of medicine and science. But to avoid any confusion, our in-house PhDs want to remind readers that his claims cannot be substantiated by science. In-house PhDs, come on PhDs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. What's the point of having a PhD where you're like, but anyway, disregard any of my expertise in favor of this random dude

who's just gonna tell grocery store stories. Like, what's the point of having in-house PhDs then? Okay, so are you ready to hear who the celebrity endorsorcers are? Oh no. I'm just imagining like which celebrities do I know are like weird anti-vaxxers. So like Jim Carrey, Robert De Niro, definitely Gwyneth. Okay, so you nailed it with Gwyneth. Yeah. You nailed it with De Niro. Sylvester Stallone, Fererell Williams, Rashida Jones, Calvin Harris, Deborah Messing, Scott

Backula, Alexis Plidel, James Vanderbeak. Okay. That is just scratch in the surface of the number of sort of celebrity endorsers. This is a list of skinny women and sexual harassers. That's just, if I asked you for that, those are the names you would have given me. But do you know something that's not back yet? I don't know. No, I have no information about any of those men.

I'm just I know. All I know is Robert De Niro came up on our Vanessa Williams episode. Yeah, not great. So he has a medical medium diet, surprise, surprise. Of course. Which focuses on what he calls the Holy Four foods. Oh no. Which are fruits, vegetables, herbs, and what he calls wild foods. So two of those are like totally ungettable, like they're not even foods. He also has an unforgiving for. Oh god. Here's the unforgiving for

an unforgiving for? Oh God. Here's the unforgiving for. Radiation, heavy metals, the viral explosion, and DDT. What? You can understand why I was excited to share this part with you, yes? Please don't even make any sense. Ha, ha, ha.

Boy, oh boy, DDT showing up in a diet book. I didn't see it coming. The DDT one bugs me because I feel like most people don't know that DDT was banned in the 1970s. The fact that people are still invoking a pesticide that hasn't been used for 40 years just indicates like how rigorous all of the information behind this is. Would you like to hear some other truly wild claims that this guy's made? No, but yes. That's always the answer, too.

Do you want me to do the next part? I know. The other person always goes, no, but okay. I need to make content. No. As a person, no. I love the window into your soul that's like, oh, this is slowly but surely killing my soul. You're getting me an ulcer for which I will drink some celery juice.

So according to science-based medicine, he has claimed that food additives that are labeled as natural flavors, quote unquote, are all really just MSG and he believes that MSG is a neurotoxin. Come on, man. He claims that cancer has only been around are all really just MSG and he believes that MSG is a neurotoxin. Come on, man. He claims that cancer has only been around since the industrial revolution

and that everything prior to that that was described as cancer were just benign tumors. Okay. So one of the things that he barked out in a goop column about cancer, he said, quote, here's the real equation, virus plus toxins equals cancer. He claims that most cancers are caused by Epstein bar, which is one type of herpes.

There has been quite a bit of study on this. There are a few types that are linked to Epstein bar, but for the most part, we don't actually have any evidence. The idea that it all boils down to this one single source is a really tempting thing to believe, right? But that's not borne out by data. It's like Whedon started the fire. He's just like bucking out stuff. Leonard Bernstein. Whedon started the fire. Yeah. So his own website, he has a disclaimer that says, Anthony William Incorporated,

DBA Anthony William Medical Medium, is not a licensed medical doctor, chiropractor, osteopathic physician, naturopathic doctor, nutritionist, pharmacist, psychologist, psychotherapist, or other formally licensed healthcare professional practitioner, or provider of any kind. Despite that disclaimer, you can book a consultation.

Would you like to watch a consultation? Oh, shut the fuck up, there's one online. Mike, it's so much better than you even think it's gonna be. Oh my God. Wait until you see who is getting consulted. Oh no, oh no. We're gonna cancel spree. Okay. Get cute on up, buddy.

Okay, can't be like. Oh no. No. No. Okay. I am looking at a YouTube page with the headline, Kim Kardashian consults the medical medium for helping her out with control for her SS.

So I'll tell you this, Sariasis is no fucking joke. I have a friend who has Sariasis, it has like fucked with her life in so many goddamn ways. What is Sariasis actually? It's a skin condition. It's a skin condition. So basically you get these sort of like big flare ups

of angry red, they look kind of like big flare ups of angry red. They look kind of like bumps or rashes. Okay. They don't totally know what causes it. They don't totally know why it exists. It's just one of those sort of chronic conditions that people have to manage. It's perfect celery juice stuff. Absolute perfection.

Yeah. So, we are going to watch, I believe believe just the whole rest of this clip. I am all about mediums, I'm so obsessed. Anyone that knows me knows I love connecting to the spirit world. So yeah, if you can tell me anything about my surises and how to fix it, I'm down to see what happens. Hey! Hi! How are you?

I'm Kim. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I've had really, really, really bad psoriasis flare up slightly. And when I hear someone's name more than once, I think I have to check them out. So your name came up from like my cousin

sending me like screenshots of your Instagram. And then other people just sending me your name. And then I'm like, OK, what has it heard? I'm going to try it. And then we de-empt. And I'm like, okay, what has it heard? I'm gonna try it. And then we DM'd and I was like, oh my God, it's meant to be. You're in LA, but I don't know much about you. Are you a real medium?

Yeah, I'm the medical medium to doing this forever. I mean, since I was a kid. But yeah, I'll take a look at you. Have you stand up for a minute? Are you okay with that? Yeah. My worst skirts you could see all my psoriasis. Yeah.

That's my big spot. And now it's like that size and now I'm just getting them all over. Yeah. And now I'm on my face. When it gets to my face, there's a problem. We have to get rid of that. There's no question.

I'm just gonna take a look straight here. I'm talking to spirit. So, it's going through every organ, looking for the problem. With you, it's definitely the liver. You have a really high deposits of copper. I know price sounds so far. That's right.

No, I believe in it. Heart looks good. Brain looks good. There's nothing in there. Nothing I'm worried about. Take a deep breath. Hope I'm not scaring you. No, right. Yeah, you can sit down. I had you up for a long time. So what's happening is you've got these deposits of copper

inside the liver. That's a dermatoxin, so that's a poison that's floating to the skin. So celery juice is going to neutralize that copper. Your psoriasis will start going away, and that's why I want you on it. You have got to be kidding me with this shit. That was another one where when I found that clip, I was like,

oh, Michael Hobbs. Okay, so people cannot see this, but he just did like a consultation with her where he just sort of waved his arms around her body. And looked away from her. Yeah, while sort of staring off into the distance. And then I'm sure there's some editing involved, but he comes up with this diagnosis of her in like three seconds. Yeah, it's copper in your liver.

He just like waves around and he's like heart, no brain, no boom. Copper, liver, go. Colonel mustard in the study. And then to her credit, Kim Kardashian looked a little skeptical. Like she did the look on her face while he's doing the scanning. Is like what? He's sort of waving his hands around her in this sort of like almost like a scanner kind of way, right? But he's doing it very quickly.

Yeah, she looks nervous that his hand is going to collide with her at some point, which I would also be nervous about. Absolutely. Yeah, I also think that Kim Kardashian said something interesting in that clip. Tell me. It's not clear sort of how convinced of this whole thing she is. She's a little furrowed brow while he's doing his arm waving thing. But then at the end of the clip, when he suggests celery juice,

she says, eh, it can't hurt. Yeah. And I think, like, that's a big part of the scam here. Is it like, it's true. It can't hurt. You know, it's four bucks. And like, it can't hurt, you know, it's four bucks. And like, it's not really, you know, we're not talking about fenn-fenn here. This isn't going to harm you.

And I think sort of weaponizing that, like, is a big part of these wellness influencers, scammers, however you want to put it, that it's like, a lot of this stuff is pretty harmless and is expensive by the standards of like, of fruit juice, but is cheap by the standards of fruit juice, but is cheap by the standards of medicine. Absolutely. So part of how he does this, which I find really fascinating and challenging

and also boring at the same time, is that he says that he communicates with spirit about individual people's individual health concerns and about sort of macro level solutions for large populations of people. He says that spirit is giving him information from the future that science has not yet researched. So it's from the future. So of course you can't debate the efficacy.

Now of course we don't have the information, right? Right. So it sort of builds in this defense. You know what? I hope the scenario is. What he is not lying, he really is speaking to a spirit from the future, but the spirit from the future is scamming him. He's actually the victim of a con artist. Tell him about the sodium clusters again, spirit. He's like, oh, I got this guy on the phone.

This is the thing we don't talk about enough is like ill-intended ghosts. It's actually an Instagram influencer from like 2100 who just has a channel where he scams people from the past. It's a prank video, just a series. So Anthony William also has the medical medium 28 day cleanse. It's mostly just eating almost entirely fruits and vegetables, mostly raw.

According to his website, the 28 day cleanse quote, build up a virus's bacteria, toxic heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, and everyday chemicals like perfume and conventional household cleaning products. And quote, we'll break down and eliminate leftovers such as rancid fats that have been sitting in the lining of your digestive tract.

Oh, lester, he should be giving people a lester. Like it actually will detox. Yeah, absolutely. A number of doctors, nurses, dieticians, and other healthcare providers have responded to those sort of claims and they're all really clear. One, there's no cleanse that will get rid of,

quote, all the toxins in your liver. Two, your liver is the filter for things your body doesn't need. You have a liver, you have kidneys. If those are working, you are filtered. Look at that. And three, any quote unquote cleanse that's mostly fruit and vegetables will send you to the bathroom often because it's much higher in fiber

than most of us are used to. So because people are pooping so much, they assume that they're quote unquote cleansing, not just like actually eating fiber. He'll also say it can't be confirmed or denied because the research isn't there and he's right. There is not research into celery juice. There's also not anything that would indicate that this needs to be researched, right?

Right. And also, if there was a study on this that didn't find an effect, you know what would happen. People would either ignore it, or they would quibble with the methodology, which it probably would be true, right? Like we quibble with methodologies all the time on the show, and most diet research is extremely bad.

Oh, buddy. So even if there was a study out there showing that it didn't work, like people would find ways of discrediting that. So this is actually the perfect segue into the actual celery juice book. Ooh, did I, I love it when I transition us. So he actually preemptively does exactly that. Quote, we always have to remember that as honorable as the pursuit of science is, it doesn't exist on a plane above humans.

Science is a human pursuit, not the fully independent impartial process we sometimes idealize it to be. Come on, you. To run studies, labs need money, and that doesn't always come from the most honest or impartial sources. Funding invested interests can affect outcomes or interpretations of results. I hate how right he is. All of that is true.

And that does not mean that celery juice is going to cure your cancer or PTSD or anything else, right? Yeah, I mean, it's like when the NRA accuses left wing groups of being like a special interest. It's like, yes, special interests have captured politics and it's bad. But you are also like special interest. It's like, yes, special interests have captured politics and it's bad. But you are also a special interest. He's right that like the scientific process around these things is not perfect. But also he's trying to fucking sell you something and he's selling a book. So he's trying to sell you something and he's succeeding. I mean, part of what I found so frustrating about this book is that he vacillates between things that are proven scientific fact,

things that are established by one study that hasn't been replicated, and things that he says he has learned from spirit, and he doesn't always tell you which one he's speaking to, and there are no citations in this book. The old Dr. Oz Shuffle. Make it look good. Boy. He also sort of cautions readers about bringing

too much skepticism to his book. Of course, he says, quote, looking at celery with disrespect translates to disrespecting your healing process. And that's not fair to you. What? We're taught to have respect for ourselves and others. It's part of life in this world. The ultimate respect we can show is to this miraculous powerhouse

herb, because doing so is saying, I want to heal. Fuck you, man. I'm allowed to ask whether the treatment you're prescribing and selling me is effective. That's not like not being true to myself. It's really something. That one hit me hard where I was like, come on. I will also say like throughout the book, this book is littered with quotes of Anthony William by Anthony William. We love those. Quote, for the billions on the planet who have suffered with any kind of health challenge this one belongs to you It is your right to be heard be taken seriously and have the freedom to heal quote attributed to Anthony William medical medium Aubrey should we start writing down quotes like your zingers from the show to put your next book and the contractors

This is the best Aubrey Gordon. Before a very thoughtful history of the BMI. So he also goes into how and why he thinks celery juice works. Okay, so I'm going to read kind of a long quote and it's really something. A glass of celery juice is saturated with information. It's saturated with intelligence. It's saturated with ample amounts of trace minerals and sodium cluster salts.

It's not even just that, though. The hydro-bioactive water in celery juice is organized in such a way that it uniquely suspends those life-giving nutrients and phytochemical compounds so that they're ready to be delivered to your body. This water is alive and has a system to it, one that will be studied in the years to come. The water that's inside your blood is different from the drinking water we pour into a glass, too. The watering your blood is an organized part of your life force.

As part of your blood, it's not just water anymore. That's how celery juice is. We have to see the water content of celery juice as the life force of the celery plant. Just as our blood is the life force of us, that life force from celery juice is made to mix with our life force, our blood, and become one. Because we're living organisms, if we consume this

living water, it's more beneficial to us than consuming regular water. The hydro-bioactive water in celery juice even goes beyond living water. It's life. It's lit. This is just like Jordan Peterson's, uh, for just all this philosophical mumbo jumbo about like the man is the dragon and the woman is the unicorn and the unicorn bests the dragon. And it's like it's not actually related to anything measurable or perceptible. It's just like you make an up stuff. He says that celery juice contains a compound that hasn't yet been discovered or researched

by scientists. Oh my god. They're what he calls sodium cluster salts. Wait, what? He says that those sodium cluster salts quote, neutralize toxins as they're floating through the bloodstream and organs, and therefore make the body less toxic.

Love it. He says that if you get a blood test that shows high sodium levels, it'll pick up not on the sodium from celery. He says that's healthy sodium, but it'll pick up not on the sodium from celery. He says that's healthy sodium, but it'll pick up on the toxic sodium that celery juice sends out of your body. So he's like, oh my God.

Sodium levels will go up. That's a sign that it's working. See, this is totally ruined for me, because now I'm imagining spirit in the year, like 35, 35, sitting in his bedroom, scanning the walls, like Kevin Spacey in the usual suspects, just like sodium salts.

Yeah, that's it. George Glass. So that's all I wanna say about the celery juice book. Again, it was so immensely frustrating to me to read. Yeah, it sounds like a journey through Mordor. It was 200 plus pages of that. Woof, woof, woof. There are a couple of things I'm gonna start bringing this in for a landing.

Ooh, okay. This has come up in a number of our juicing episodes, and I was telling Mike, I'm gonna like take a little break from juice space. Stuff for a minute, because we've done a few of them. I know, we need to get you back into solids. I just... Um, it feels like presenting these kinds of miracle cures, quote unquote, really like plays on the deep needs created by a shitty system.

Yeah, yeah. It's like understandably very tempting to believe in something like celery juice, but that doesn't mean it's like effective at all. I think that sort of my beef with this kind of rhetoric is that it seems to entrench this idea that eating vegetables is like some sort of chore that you should be doing because they have like phyto chaisines or whatever. As opposed to like, you should probably find

like fruit and vegetable based meals that you like. If you like eating a snack of celery sticks and that's something that's like sustainable for you and you enjoy it, then like yeah, you should do that. But like if you don't like celery, you don't have to of celery sticks, and that's something that's sustainable for you and you enjoy it, then you should do that. But if you don't like celery, you don't have to eat celery. Yeah, totally. This idea that you have to eat something that you don't like

because it has these magical properties, it's like, don't eat celery if you don't like celery. I also think few of us are going on a detox or cleanse from a raw, foodist, vegan, organic diet, right? Most of us are like, oh, I gotta do something. I gotta change how I'm eating because I feel bad, because I've been eating stuff that is like, makes me feel bad when I eat it. But overwhelmingly, that's not gonna be a bunch of cruditeys.

Yeah. Well, I gotta cleanse with some celery juice. I'm gonna eat it all this celery. You know, I need some celery juice. Yeah. Yeah, well, I got a cleanse with some celery juice. I'm gonna eat a go of this celery. You know, I need some celery juice. Like, oh. It's proposing technical solutions to social and political problems. That's what feels like to me.

Like, these are complicated phenomena, and we're not gonna solve them with like a magical hate crime juice. Oh. Hate crime juice. You know? So, you know, for the most part, when I research these episodes,

I get more excited and jazzed by like, oh, check out this wild thing. And this was the first episode that I researched that was like, it's just getting worse. Yeah, but you know what's a really good treatment for low energy levels, Aubrey. Uh-oh. What? Drink yourself some fucking celery juice.

God dammit, Mike. No COVID vaccine. Just green sludge. Celerage you strong. Straight into your butt muscle. Thank you.