00:03:13.460The important thing is that it looks good.
00:03:15.960Carrying around a bottle of celery juice comes with an air of exclusivity.
00:03:19.900To drink it, you either need to own your own juicer or have easy access to a place like Pressed Juicery, which is currently selling a seven-day celery juice package for $60.
00:05:14.520At 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.
00:12:12.620Much less elevates it to some sort of medicinal tonic.
00:12:15.480I 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.
00:12:24.140Yeah. All it really does is strip out the fiber. Fiber is a really, 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 sugary way of consuming vegetables, basically.
00:12:48.120I 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.
00:12:58.360It's like, no, no, no, you have to distill it down to only the essence of what makes it good for you.
00:13:05.460It's like everyone wants to avoid the really obvious conclusion that is just like eating fruits and vegetables is good, y'all.
00:13:11.700Yes, 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.
00:13:29.160I'm just imagining, like, walking around and seeing somebody in a wheelchair, like, eating a stick of celery and, like, slapping it out of their hand.0.60
00:24:41.240So you noted 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.
00:24:52.860Is that because he's not Medical Rare or Medical Well Done?
00:24:57.900So he says that he does not speak to the dead as other mediums do, but to a single spirit.
00:25:04.400He just calls that entity Spirit, capital S Spirit, who gives him medical advice and information that is, quote, decades ahead of research and science.
00:25:26.320So here is the story, the sort of brief story.
00:25:32.000Anthony Williams says that Spirit first spoke to him when he was a child.
00:25:37.880He was about four years old, and Spirit told him that his grandmother had cancer.
00:25:43.620She was not symptomatic at the time, and she was diagnosed shortly thereafter.
00:25:48.020He also says that there was a family member who had a back injury after falling down the stairs when he was like seven.
00:25:56.580And he told that family member based on advice from Spirit to drink celery juice.
00:26:03.880And their recovery started that night and they were able to walk the next day.
00:26:09.480What'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.
00:26:18.820Like he's not saying the kinds of conditions that we normally allow, quote unquote, Western medicine to cure, right?
00:26:26.400Like 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.
00:26:34.520Funny that you should mention Marianne Williamson.
00:27:21.940So he would juice celery at the store for customers.
00:27:25.560He 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.
00:27:34.640And they'd be like, I don't have a juicer.
00:27:36.540Let me go juice it for you and would bring it out to them.0.99
00:27:39.500Imagine walking through the grocery store and somebody hands you one of those like little free sample cups of this fucking foul juice.0.94
00:27:46.360It'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 Hachimoto's thyroiditis.0.96
00:27:59.000I mean, yeah, I my first job was in a grocery store.
00:28:03.540And I mean, people do tell you weird stuff when you work at a grocery store.
00:28:06.340But that seems like the kind of thing that happened once.
00:28:17.820He told these customers, if they didn't have a juicer, which most of them didn't, that they could put celery in a blender, which is what I told you on our text thread.
00:28:25.720I was like, if you don't have a juicer, you could just put it in a blender and strain out the pulp.
00:28:30.160If they didn't have a blender, he advised them to chew celery and spit out the pulp.
00:28:37.960Or you could just eat the fucking celery.1.00
00:28:41.440Why is that better than just eating it?1.00
00:28:43.340It will not surprise you to learn that this guy is a regular contributor to Goop.
00:28:48.220Each column starts with this disclaimer, quote,
00:28:52.040Editor's note, we trust that you'll quickly understand that this medical medium is operating well outside the bounds of medicine and science.
00:28:59.800But to avoid any confusion, our in-house PhDs want to remind readers that his claims cannot be substantiated by science.
00:31:31.460The other person always goes, no, but okay.
00:31:34.200I need that. We need to make content. So as a person, no, I, I love the window into your soul.
00:31:43.000That's like, oh, this is slowly but surely killing my soul.
00:31:46.920You're giving me an ulcer for which I will drink some celery juice.
00:31:50.780So according to science based medicine, he has claimed that food additives that are labeled as natural flavors, quote unquote, are all really just MSG.
00:32:01.960and he believes that MSG is a neurotoxin.
00:40:50.360And 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.
00:40:59.940so because people are pooping so much they assume that they're quote-unquote cleansing not just like
00:41:05.880actually eating fiber he'll also say it can't be confirmed or denied because the research isn't
00:41:12.960there and he's right there is not research into celery juice there's also not anything that would
00:41:18.440indicate that this needs to be researched right right and also if there was a study on this that
00:41:26.360didn't find an effect you know what would happen people would either ignore it or they would quibble
00:41:31.680with the methodology which it probably would be true right like we quibble with methodologies all
00:41:35.960the time on this show and most diet research is extremely bad oh buddy so even if there was a
00:41:41.440study out there showing that it didn't work like people would find ways of discrediting that so
00:41:45.980this is actually the perfect segue into the actual celery juice book oh did i i love it when i
00:41:53.640transition us so he actually preemptively does exactly that quote we always have to remember
00:42:00.920that as honorable as the pursuit of science is it doesn't exist on a plane above humans
00:42:06.480science is a human pursuit not the fully independent impartial process we sometimes
00:42:11.620idealize it to be come on to run studies labs need money and that doesn't always come from
00:42:17.820the most honest or impartial sources funding and vested interests can affect outcomes or
00:42:22.980interpretations of results i hate how right he is all of that is true and that does not mean
00:42:29.420that celery juice is going to cure your cancer or ptsd or anything else right yeah i mean it's
00:42:36.060like when the nra accuses left-wing groups of being like a special interest it's like yes
00:42:41.920special interests have captured politics and it's bad but you are also a special interest
00:42:46.040he's right that like the scientific process around these things is not perfect but also0.90
00:42:51.580He's trying to fucking sell you something, and he's selling a book.0.52
00:42:54.620So he's trying to sell you something, and he's succeeding.0.99
00:42:56.820I mean, part of what I found so frustrating about this book is that he vacillates between
00:43:02.860things that are proven scientific fact, things that are established by one study that hasn't
00:43:10.940been replicated, and things that he says he has learned from spirit, and he doesn't always
00:43:16.940tell you which one he's speaking to and there are no citations in this book the old dr oz shuffle
00:43:25.100make it look good boy he also sort of cautions readers about bringing too much skepticism to his
00:43:31.520book um of course he says quote looking at celery with disrespect translates to disrespecting your
00:43:39.440healing process. And that's not fair to you. What? We're taught to have respect for ourselves
00:43:46.560and others. It's part of life in this world. The ultimate respect we can show is to this
00:43:52.440miraculous powerhouse herb because doing so is saying, I want to heal. Fuck you, man. I'm allowed1.00
00:43:59.800to ask whether the treatment you're prescribing and selling me is effective. That's not like not
00:44:05.780being true to myself it's really something that one hit me hard where i was like come on i will
00:44:12.260also say like throughout the book this book is littered with quotes of anthony william by anthony
00:44:19.280william oh we love those quote for the billions on the planet who have suffered with any kind of
00:44:25.540health challenge this one belongs to you it is your right to be heard be taken seriously and
00:44:32.580have the freedom to heal. Quote attributed to Anthony William, medical medium. Aubrey,
00:44:37.540should we start writing down quotes like your zingers from the show to put in your next book
00:44:41.120chapters? This is the best poop episode. Aubrey Gordon. Before a very thoughtful history of the
00:44:47.900BMI. Yeah. So he also goes into how and why he thinks celery juice works. Okay. So I'm going to
00:44:56.700read kind of a long quote, and it's really something. A glass of celery juice is saturated
00:45:03.260with information. It's saturated with intelligence. It's saturated with ample amounts of trace minerals
00:45:10.360and sodium cluster salts. It's not even just that, though. The hydro-bioactive water in celery juice
00:45:17.560is organized in such a way that it uniquely suspends those life-giving nutrients and
00:45:22.400phytochemical compounds so that they're ready to be delivered to your body. This water is alive and
00:45:28.780has a system to it, one that will be studied in the years to come. The water that's inside your
00:45:34.140blood is different from the drinking water we pour into a glass, too. The water in your blood
00:45:39.540is an organized part of your life force. As part of your blood, it's not just water anymore. That's
00:45:45.740how celery juice is. We have to see the water content of celery juice as the life force of the
00:45:51.480celery plant, just as our blood is the life force of us. That life force from celery juice is made
00:45:59.100to mix with our life force, our blood, and become one. Because we're living organisms, if we consume
00:46:05.620this living water, it's more beneficial to us than consuming regular water. The hydro-bioactive
00:46:11.520water in celery juice even goes beyond living water. It's life. It's lit. This is just like
00:46:19.060Jordan Peterson stuff where it's just all this philosophical mumbo jumbo about like the man is
00:46:24.900the dragon and the woman is the unicorn and the unicorn bests the dragon. And it's like it's not
00:46:30.340actually related to anything measurable or perceptible. It's just like you making up stuff.
00:46:35.980He says that celery juice contains a compound that hasn't yet been discovered or researched
00:46:41.460by scientists. They're what he calls sodium cluster salts. Wait, what?
00:46:46.160He 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.
00:47:14.980See, this is totally ruined for me because now I'm imagining Spirit in the year, like, 3535, sitting in his bedroom, scanning the walls like Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, just like, uh, sodium salts.
00:48:13.900It's like understandably very tempting to believe in something like celery juice, but that doesn't mean it's like effective at all.
00:48:21.260I 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 phytocaisines or whatever.
00:48:33.980As opposed to like, you should probably find like fruit and vegetable based meals that you like.
00:48:40.240If 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.
00:48:46.400But like, if you don't like celery, you don't have to eat celery.
00:49:42.120So, you know, for the most part, when I research these episodes, I get like more excited and jazzed by like, oh, check out this wild thing.
00:49:51.160And this was the first episode that I researched that was like, it's just getting worse.
00:49:56.620Yeah, but you know what's a really good treatment for low energy levels, Aubrey?