RPM Tuesday Night Live: What's good science?

Rabbits, I hope you're very, very well. Um, here's what's happening this evening. Brendan, uh, has got an infection and he can't make it right now. And, um, uh, Brady, his— he was, he was here about 2 minutes ago and he was, um, just ready to come on, and he says— and his battery on his laptop, um, failed. So he's running around like a blue-ass fly, uh, because his laptop won't work. So I'm just going to say hi this evening. It's very nice to be here because I wasn't here last week. So Jane, great to see you as ever. Karen and Bianca is there. All our wonderful supporters, Heather and Cheryl and Gemma And Brady, hello. I'm just talking to the gang. We don't really need you, mate. We don't really need you.

We're getting on.

How's he been doing?

Has he been telling us— you haven't been telling any rude jokes or anything while I've been away? Did you ever see Wayne's World, Nick, where Garth was left alone on the TV channel by himself? He just starts looking around. I'm having a good time. No, you have to have seen Wayne's World. That's twice this week I've said that. Anyway, how are you getting on, Nick?

Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Sorry about last week. Let me tell you what happened. I was sitting here at 5 o'clock doing prepping and getting ready and getting excited and everything else. And my phone just died. I saw the white apple of death on the front of the screen. And nothing could get it to reboot. So I spent 2 hours in the Apple shop the day after, and, um, they managed to get it redone, and they managed to fix my laptop at the same time. So I was— yeah, all for free. I was— it was good. So sorry to disappear, but so today I'm upstairs and I'm in the warm and I'm indoors in the house. So no, we're not in the shed. And because I'm up door upstairs, I've got a very good 4G connection on here.

Lovely.

So ready to go. It's only taken 15 months to get a system that works, but hopefully that should, that should work. How about you? How was your week?

Very, very good. Yeah, good week. I had a new website that went live. We've been working on that for months. And so you release it, this thing's a monster, and you release this in its infancy and then they build on it for months. So that's been very exciting. And so yeah, so I've been totally distracted by that. And I did my first one, my first, I did a webinar where I just put up a webinar on the website and people could watch me talk for, turns out, 90 minutes, which is probably a bit long. I started off very carefully and slowly, pre-recorded one, but by the end I was flying along. I could see what people had to listen to and I thought, oh, that's hardcore. So anyway, Anyway, look, there was 100 and something people out of 120, 130 at one stage, and it was really good. So look, that's, that's a thing for the future too, because me and you don't get to do our seminars anymore, so I'm just going to move them onto my website. But look, what I want— I want to get straight into it tonight. Like, thanks, um, for putting up that, that link along the bottom. Uh, Brian is in the background, I believe, but patreon.com/rawpetmedics. As you saw me post today, guys, we've our podcast is up on 4 or 5 most platforms now, anywhere you get your podcasts, and that's been made possible through your donations on Raw Pet Medics. We have a sound engineer that looks after us and takes all our money and puts up podcasts. So cheers, Pete, because I know you're listening to this multiple times to fix things. So Pete's a legend. So thanks everybody for your donations to Raw Pet Medics. It makes things very, very possible. But in answer to your question, Nick, the most important thing that happened to me today is so very relevant to tonight's topic. So I feel like I should ask you, how have you got on this week, just in case you've got something interesting say before I launch into a bit of a tirade about what's been happening.

I've been watching, I've been watching a lot of amazing seminars with scientists coming together at the Senate discussing many important current topics, and that's been very much preoccupying my, my my work. Also, over the weekend, we are moving my business back here to my house. So I've still— yeah, I still got paint on my hands from— we're moving the children downstairs. They're getting their own bedrooms, Arthur and Ophelia. I'm going to be in the room behind us, uh, here, and I'm going to be doing a lot of virtual work, a lot of webinar work, a lot of uh, recording seminars and, and, you know, all this kind of thing from there because we get a decent reception. So I've been fairly busy. Yeah, that's really busy. But how about you? Tell me about your adventures this week.

I'll tell you what happened. Um, I put up a post during the week, and it was a post, uh, published in 2016, conducted by Marge Chandler, who we know in our circles. She's a veterinary nutritionist from the UK. And 3 other veterinary nutritionists, and they surveyed 63 deans of veterinary departments in Europe, Russia, and that kind of area in between. So that was the premise of it, and it was all about nutrition because it's 4 nutritionists talking. And they asked the deans, okay, are you getting on with your nutritional lectures? And 41% of them were either very not happy or totally dissatisfied with the amount of lectures that they're students are getting. And they found out that on average they were getting 19 hours of lecture, of nutritional lectures, in 5 years of tuition. Now I put that up and said, yeah, that's not a whole lot. I do that, you know, virtually— I was going to say on the toilet, it's a bit crude, but I would do that over a weekend. You know, we would do that in 2 days of studying, and we would be— some people are neck deep in this. And I said, look, it's just not possible for these Legendary generalists, legendary to, to try to do every single biological scientific subject in every animal on the planet in 5 years as a kid. It's just ridiculous to ask anybody to do that when some people spend just all that time doing physiology or, you know, pharmacology or whatever. So you're trying to do all of it. So maximum respect, but impossible ask. So I was trying to touch on the fact that just touching each subject is part of the issue that we have where some of us feel that vets may not have been properly versed in nutrition. And of course, I didn't go down well with my followers but didn't go down brilliantly with some vets. Some vets came on and totally agreed, other vets did not. That's fine, okay? So this is very normal, very healthy. You engage them, you try not to be why would you be any other way? But you engage them and say, well, I'm just saying, this is the 19 hours. And their points were, well, we spent a lot of time outside of those times studying, and, you know, we literally books and all that kind of stuff. And the temptation is to say, look, it doesn't really matter how long you spend in the Ronald McDonald's School of Nutrition if you come out, let's say, in chips and burgers. It doesn't really matter how— and I didn't want to get into the— all these Freedom of Information requests that reveal The veterinary departments are hopelessly tied up with pet food companies. I have a whole chapter on it in my book, multiple Freedom of Information requests from the top veterinary departments. The vampires are given the lessons, so it's quite clear. Even the books they're reading, Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, but you can't get into all that on social media. Like, this is normal discourse, talking to people, debating in public, and this really is the center of science. It's why me and you get on so well, Nick and Bren, because we love getting into it. And people might see some of it as getting a bit heated, but like, you're just totally involved and loving what it is. And some points you win, some points you don't, and you come away going, shit, I think Nick was right about that. And then you look into it and you go, he was right, and now I know more. So I tried to be friendly and I thought, and but the vets did not like it, and it started getting more and more kind of negative. And then I descend because I'm not as as no saint. And next thing you know, Facebook has removed the post.

Yeah, censorship, censorship, my friends.

And I thought, like, you know, listen, I, I, um, I— this, this happens. I've written an article on vaccinations saying here's 10 great studies on side effects from vaccinations in dogs under 10 kg, very common in small dogs, removed by Facebook. Can't talk about vaccinations. Okay, this is being done by Facebook, and this is part of the problem. It's Like, who are Facebook to remove that post? I wasn't saying anything derogatory. I wasn't being bloody racist or sexist or some other ism, which I probably haven't even heard of. I was just talking about a study that had been published by their peers, veterinary nutritionists, that said you get 19 hours of lectures on average. Maybe your department gives you way more than that. Maybe there's some school in Idaho that's doing a whole course on animal nutrition. It's irrelevant. I just talked about this peer review study. So I just wanted to speak for just 5 more minutes, Nick, because I know I've already done 5.

I'll go and get a cup of tea, mate. Just tell me when you're done.

I'll pass the mic back then. But like, in the book, when I go through like, you know, why dogs should be eating lots of meat and a bit of veg, who cares how much veg you put in, doesn't matter. Give them a good bit of fresh meat and bone. We all agree. And then why dry food might have many, many, many, many serious questions. Ultra-carbohydrates, very low protein, all this crap, terrible fats, chemically preserved, all this nonsense. And then you show some studies for fresh food and why it might be a good idea. And then it's like, why is the veterinary industry so confused in this? And so I go through it and I say, well, look, this is how many, what they're getting taught in college and by who. But before we get into how they've been confused and wrangled up, you need to understand what's going on in the human sector. And so everybody is getting more and more tuned into this. We've all been turned into scientists for the last couple of years, or, you know, armchair scientists. And it's interesting because it's fun and we like this kind of stuff. And it's very relevant to what's going on, isn't it? But we dare not mention the war. But the fact is, we have a major, major problem, particularly looking at the US, major problem with prescription drugs alone. So prescription drugs are drugs that have been authorized properly and properly recommended by doctors, and the third biggest killer in the US. And half of those deaths— they're killing about 120,000 Americans a year— and half of those have been properly taken, properly recommended by the doctor, properly taken by the patient, and they die. So the other half is a mishmash of people taking too many, or the doctor prescribing them incorrectly for the wrong person who shouldn't have been given them, whatever. So there's big issues, and there's massive rises. Like, for this prescription drug market in the US is growing at 10% every year. The number of people taking 5 or more prescription drugs has doubled in the last 6 years. Anybody that needs these studies, believe me, I have them handy. And, and on and on. We've got 1 in 10 Americans eating antidepressants as if they've got some monopoly on the blues. You know, we've got the opioid epidemic. If anybody hasn't seen Dopesick yet, or you haven't read particularly The Guardian, although I don't like to recommend them these days, they have done a good job on reporting on what went on with the opioid crisis in the US. But Dopesick— Michael Keaton did it— and highlights exactly what happened with this. They released the regulations in 1996 for cancer pain, and they just got into it with opioids, and they started hiding exactly how addictive they were, in full knowledge how addictive these were. The regulators got on board, believe me. The FDA come out very, very, very badly out of that show. And this would be the first time people have seen this from the FDA. We've got journalists here saying on the radio I think you can trust the FDA. So the FDA have major problems. They are more corporate-funded than they are public-funded at this stage. They have patents in some of the drugs that they adhere to. 1 in 3 of the drugs they produce are blacklisted within about 5 years of them coming out. There's major issues with the FDA that we don't need to get into conspiracy stuff, which is lovely label people to throw at things. Conspiracies are real things. This is why we have laws against conspiracies. Do you think it was a conspiracy in 2008 with the banks and the opioid crisis? Bloody hell, we're all still living through it. You know, the opioid crisis has killed more Americans than COVID. Okay, so it's killed 700,000, which I think they've got 750,000 COVID deaths, although you can question how a lot of them. So that was just the whole premise of if you want to understand how, why is it so bad in the veterinary industry, it's because this is what's going on in the human industry. That's all about a lack of regulation. These companies will do what they can using very, very dodgy, very flimsy science, use as little bad science to get there as possible. And then once they're on the market, you use— have to use a hell of a lot of good science to get that product off the market. Good science requires hundreds of really well-trained scientists, years, millions of dollars. Who do you think is going to fund that for every drug they bring out? There's 10, 20 coming out every day. 1 in 4 of the drugs they bring out today are an improvement on the drug that came beforehand. 1 in 2 of the studies published today are false, and they're the studies published in The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, our top medical journals. 1 in 2 studies are false because about 90% of them are produced by the pharma companies. So we have this mega bad science issue and it's polluting everything, and our doctors aren't even reading the studies. Massive reviews of doctors, they're not coming home after horrible long days. Young vets 12, 13 hours stressed at the grindstone. You think they're coming home and opening up, you know, to learn every single drug and every single skin issue and joint issue and joint drug and therapy and all the science coming out every day on each? Don't be silly. They can't absorb that much information. We can't stay on top of the nutritional thing. And that's the problem. It's a deluge, a tsunami of crap science and very poor regulation. And what we see in the animal sector, the veterinary sector, is it's with the brakes off. They are so busy trying to manage this ridiculous mess that we have that in the veterinary sector we have massive problems with no regulation in pet food, with no regulation in pet treats. We've got vets recommending, you know, for puppies that have been properly vaccinated for viruses, for them to be vaccinated every single year. They just took that on without a single study suggesting it was a good idea. So that was my bit of a rant. This is a mega, mega problem that they are experts at doing. They have learned the hard way. They've learned their bullshit science through the tobacco industry, through forging the global warming debate. Like, they are experts at sowing doubt. Merchants of Doubt is one of the big things that people should check out and read. If you want to read some proper horror stories, pick up anything by Ben Goldacre. Bad farmer, bad science. Jane, what are you doing about it? Oh, Jane, that's a big question. First of all, Jane, I have written a book about it to show people exactly where the bullshit science comes from and how a lot of the pet companies are doing it. So first thing is I brought that to the market. I can end on some very positive news, but at this stage I've been ranting for 10 minutes and I'm red in the face and I need to ask Nick, have I said anything that you feel has been unfair, or where are you with all this?

Where am I with all this? Well, you know what, I thought I'll take over for 5 minutes so you can take a little breather. Okay, so we are taught at college, and you no doubt taught the same thing, that there is a hierarchy of poor quality science going up to very good quality science, logically. Yeah. And at the very, at the very bottom, you've got editorials and expert opinions. So just Dr. A says, oh, I think that if we feed dogs like this, it might be a really great idea. That's an expert opinion. And that's, that's, that is on the pyramid, but it is at the lowest rung of the of the whole pyramid. Okay, above that you've got mechanistic studies whereby somebody says, I gave this rat DDT and it died. Okay, above that you've got case reports where you've got case reports and case studies. So case, a case report is, I say I changed this dog's diet and the dog did very well. A case study is I changed these 10 dogs' diets and they did very well. They're all on about the same level. Okay, above that you've got cross-sectional studies. So you say, right, we're going to look at 50 dogs who are 5 years old and are Labradors, and we're going to change this and we'll see what impact that has. Can you see that every time we go up a level, we are improving the scienciness of it, we're improving the rigor with which we analyze the data. Above that you've got case-controlled studies, which is where you will say, right, we've got all these cases and we're going to give them this drug and we'll see what the impact is. Cohort studies is where you take 1,000 people and you change their diet in this way and you follow them for 7 years or 10 years or something like that. Yeah, you notice that all of these, they're getting more and more fussy, they're getting more and more expensive, they're getting more and more difficult to do, and to get good numbers they have to have more and more people within them. The very— almost at the top of the pyramid is the randomized controlled trial where you have two groups and you give— you randomly allocate those two groups, and in one group you give them placebo, which is just a tablet with no activity in it, and the others you give an active tablet or an active intervention, and you then just see the difference between the two. If you cross those over and you give the null group the active and the active group the null, then you've got a randomized crossover trial. Okay, so even better because you've crossed over halfway through the trial to try and eliminate these, any confounding factors, that things that are happening that you can't see. And then right at the top, right at the very top, the epitome of the very, very best in science are systematic reviews, which is where you take a whole lot of, you look at a whole lot of papers and you You, you sift them for what they, what they generally all are saying. Or a meta-analysis is you take, for example, 10, 10 studies of 1,000 people and you put all that data together and you then got one study of 10,000 people, which has much, much, much, much more power. Okay. So that's considered the epitome of science. And, and I spent my entire college career and my entire, you know, early scientific life thinking, right, meta-analysis, that's where it's at, if we can get a good meta-analysis. And then in 2016, this amazing guy, guy called John P. Ioannidis, his American Greek, I-O-A-N-N-I-D-I-S. Any Greeks in the house who can pronounce that for me? Ioannidis, John Ioannidis.

Most published man on Earth.

You'll know the guy, he's brilliant, he's absolutely brilliant. And he has turned around and written a paper in 2016 called "The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis," whereby he says that there's only about 4% of these, the very best of science, are worth the paper they're written on.

And so that's damning.

Bloody, I'm feeling pretty— yeah, so better and better and better and better. When you get to the top, only 4% of those are worth the paper they're written on. I'm really, really— yeah, so I, I'm I'm a bit at sea with science. If we have a look, there's another couple of classic— and I have got some good news at the end as well— but there's a quote here from Marcia Engel, which I've got her saying, this is 2009: 'It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians and authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, which is the epitome of, of, of, of one of the world's finest, well, well-run publications. And Richard Horton, who was the editor of The Lancet— Lancet, even if you've never read a medical paper, you'll know that, you know, The Lancet— and he said, the case against science is straightforward. Much of the scientific literature perhaps half may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies of small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.

I was going to get that on a t-shirt. Yeah, and that is 2015.

And he knows a thing or two because he was the editor of The Lancet.

Yeah, they gave him that job, Nick, at 35 years old, and he's had it for 25 years. That's unheard of, 35-year-old to be running The Lancet. And the peer review thing is interesting. Can I address that peer review? Absolutely.

Oh well, peer review, which again, peer review on paper seems is a great idea.

You give—

I write a paper and I give it out to lots of other veterinary nutritionists so that they can criticized back to me to improve it, and only when everybody's happy with the paper will it be published. Yeah, yeah, in theory, great.

In theory, I went through peer review, so I have a doctorate, and so you do your 4 years of degree and then you do your 4 years— a doctorate essentially is just for the first time ever in college, you're given your lectures and you're given your things to think about, and you go off and you think about them and answer questions and tell them that I have I have learned what you taught me. So you're still being taught in college a lot, not exactly winding you up for critical thinking. You're given a lot of exercises in the background, fair enough, but ultimately the lessons you are given, you accept. I accepted 100% of the things I heard. I never knew to question. But when you get your doctorate, you're given a question that nobody has answered yet, and it's like, why is this happening? And you're like, I don't know. And they go, off you go. He's your supervisor, he'll help you. But ultimately you find out. So you have to address this question. From a myriad of ways. What does he think? What does she think? What did they say? What did they do? That doesn't agree with that. You have to get all the studies around it, amass them all in a horrible mess, and try and make sense out of it and go, right, well, this is the most likely, and this is the most like— I'm going to test these two in this population. That's what I did, okay? So that's why my book looks like that horrific lump, because I have to take a question— and science is not quick, it's not yes or no, it's not this polarized ridiculous world where you can get your answer in a meme. Science is complicated and you're not always right, and it's okay not to be right. So what peer review does is— this is how simple it is for my peer review, which I couldn't eat for about a week beforehand. I had 2 doctors, 2 supervisors that I knew, head of department and my supervisor who I got on very well with. So those 2 were of the 4. One guy that was their best friend, and one guy was brought in Cluttenbrock, who was a legend in our circles but very, very old at this stage. And they look at— they take the data that I produced and they didn't even look at it. They just looked at the stuff I'd written, talked to me about it, and I got my doctorate. I thought, oh, that wasn't so scary. Peer review for science has mega problems. Let's take the recent example, and we're not mentioning the big C, but let's take the recent example of Pfizer. And there's been a few whistleblowers and there's like— there's been a few issues with the data. And the British Medical Journal, the second most prestigious journal that's come out of the UK for medicine, uh, the associate editor says, I've got questions about your, uh, about your data, uh, give us a look, give us a look at your data. And Pfizer said, no, you can't see the data that we've collected. And people that, you know, that have heard this, that might be astounded at that, go, you think that's new? Do you think that they give their data to the journals? They don't. When they go for peer review the pharma company that produces the study, and they might have run 20 studies and picked their favorite one with the best results on the minimal amount of people. And they get that study and they look at the data, and then they do a summary of their own data, and they hand the summary in with their, with their, with their paper. What? Why wouldn't you show your data? Why indeed? What have you got to hide? Show us your data. In science, you've always had to show your data. That's the whole point of it. We— the whole point of science is that if you say A does B, I should replicate your study and A will do B to the same extent. If you say it does it 70%, it better be in and around that to the amount of standard deviations you said it would be. If I find it's 30%, you've been bullshitting. So the figure now today is over 70% of studies can't be repeated. So look, we're killing the point, I understand, but peer review has a mega problem. And one of the— the guy that does the most peer review in the UK, I'm not gonna be able to remember his name, he said, we get so many applications of good studies, and he said peer review is so weak that I might as well get these studies and throw them down the stairs and publish the ones that hit the ground first. That's his— there are his, uh, his words. So peer review has major problems. You can get things peer-reviewed, you can own the journal you're getting your stuff published in. So the top journals are hard to get into, but 1 in 2 of them after stringent peer review are utterly false. Not just they had made a mistake in the data. Ioannidis, in Nick's example, who found less than 5% of them were legit, he's a statistician, and all statisticians are to be feared because they'll make a fool of you no matter what you say. And so they, they will always poo-poo a study in, in what we would always be afraid to talk to them. But, you know, still, one in two. So the peer review thing is not a defense, and there's very little regulation after that. Once that study's out there, it hangs around like a bad fart, and they only need it there for a year or two. Do you remember Eukanuba, Nick? When they said Eukanuba helps dogs live 30% longer. And I was like, what? That's a huge statement.

There's one dog.

Yeah. And there's like, can we see your data? And they mess around and eventually the Federal Trade Commission sued them or whatever. And they said, actually, no, it didn't really happen. But they had been up on veterinary walls for 2 or 3 years. Job done. There's your $100,000 fine. Push through millions and millions and millions of euros of pet food sold. So bad science is at an all-time high. And it's definitely a concern because people now say trust the science, and I'm saying trust the science. The science is the least trustworthy thing out there. It's a brilliant tool, a tool I adore. But it's trustworthy? Are you, are you mad? 1 in 2 in the best journals. Mars owns its own journals. That they publish studies in that they wouldn't get published in higher journals. Particularly in pet food, we've got that problem. So like, you know, they've got like the Waltham Science Institute, and they've got— they wrote the Small Animal Clinical Nutrition via the Morris Foundation. That was Colgate-Palmolive. Like, it's just so incestuous, and it's a big, big problem. And so, you know, there's my second little bit of a rant after that. But like, Nick, what do you do for good info? What's the Let's move into something a bit more positive because we can see this. What, like, you get, you get good stuff out. How do you know what you're reading is good? How do you find that out? What do you— what's the thought process?

I think, I think the thing to do is that don't trust the science because science is not one thing. Science is the evolution of ideas, and what we talk about now is going to be different from what we talk about in 30 years' time. And so, and good science evolves. Good science is actually a debate. If you take any, any, any aspect of biological science, because if you're talking about physics, it's, you know, the speed of light is this, the speed of sound is that, the, you know, this is pi and this is this, that, the other constant. Okay, there's quite a lot of constants there. When you're dealing with biology, pretty much everything is a variable. And if we think that, you know, sending a spaceship to the moon is complicated, that is nothing compared with getting up, having a pee, and having breakfast. The complexities of that overshadow a moonshot about a trillion times over. It's just that we do it every day, and so we just get used to it. But what's trying to analyze those things is very difficult, especially within the food space. It's analyzing nutritional intervention is very, very difficult because as soon as you change one thing, let's say we drop the fat within a diet to see what happens, you will automatically have to put in something else. And so doing this, the classic double-blind trial where you just change one drug to one group is impossible with nutrition, nutrition studies, because of this idea that if you, if you take all the fat out of the food, the people who are eating the fat-free food will absolutely know that, and that's going to have an impact into how they feel about it, how they eat, and, and, and that has a major impact. So I think that I've been debating this all day. How do we guide people with the good science? I think trust the debate. And if there ain't no debate, I would be very, very, very worried about that. Within, within, within food, at one stage from about the mid-'70s, it was fat is bad for you. There was debate in the— from the '50s, there was, is sugar good for you? Is sugar bad for you? That's the healthy argument. What about you? Where would you go if you're trying to guide people with how to get good science?

I don't— it's a tough one. Like, I think you touched on something there that you have a great line, which is like, there is no trust. Trust in science. No scientist ever said that. You know, that's something a politician says, or, you know, Big Pharma. Trust the science. There is no trust in science. It's the whole point of it. It's about investing. Trust is only cold, hard data. That's all there is. Test us. Show me the data and I'll test it. And it's great. You know, so there is no trust at all. That's the whole point of it. We're all skeptical, which is natural. It's cynical. It's like, oh, it's bullshit. Homeopathy is bullshit. What do you know about homeopathy? Tell me what you know about homeopathy. To be skeptical was like, 'Hmm, geez, I'm not sure about homeopathy. Can you prove it to me?' 'Yeah, let's have a chat. Sit down there and talk to Nick and Brendan and ask to see some of the recent stuff. It's very interesting.' So that's a really healthy thing to do. And in a way, as I keep saying, all raw feeders are skeptics, and because they've all tested on their dogs with proper science and they've seen the difference and they made a leap because it's, you know, that's just basic science. So where do I go? I found it very hard. I don't know if I'd ever write that book again. I was naive starting it off. And it was only near as I started looking into the whole veterinary industry stuff and seeing this, the like virtually zero science behind high carbohydrate diets for dogs, virtually zero science behind minimum protein diets, like in these huge books. And it's like, but where's the studies to show this is okay, safe, let alone healthy and beneficial? Forget that, there's none of that. But safe, you know, not linked to the obesity crisis, pancreatitis, high and there's nothing. So once I started seeing that, I thought, this is very wrong, and I started going very dark, and I surfaced in 2020. So my point is, where do you go for solid science? I honestly don't know. But the exact same thing you said there— if I see people up and debating and talking about science, and instead of just talking about science, they're actually using studies, if I see them reference a study, I mean, that gives me solace that they can stand over that study and it makes sense. And I don't mean in some rotten rag like thejournal.ie or some other rubbish in the comment section. I mean scientists that have been trained. If Nick says something, he publishes a link, I kind of have faith that this scientist has looked into this. And so that gives me a bit of solace and something to work with. Now I can see the science. When the politicians say it, they say, well, we trust the science, we're guided by the science, the science told us. It's like, you know, I keep thinking of these gray-haired people handing them down on stone tablets and they get the science because the church is gone now, so we need some other bullshit to fill the space. And so the science is now handed down by the high priests, which are the scientists who were not allowed to see. Your chief of science, you're the guy that sat on the headboard of Dominic Cummins, the biggest spin master there is, and he was taking the message from your independent scientific committee and handing it to the boss man. So like, we have— it depends who's saying it, but if they say it and give a study, you know, that gives me solace because then I look at the study and go, that's a very interesting study, you know. And so that gives me a bit of solace. I don't trust anything I read in newspapers anymore. I don't trust anything.

Yeah.

That's said to me, uh, flippantly, I just go, yeah, okay, there, that's interesting. I don't trust it just because the health service said it. I don't trust it. Just, I want to see what you base that on, and let me see, and let me, let me, let me kick that around and see if there's any other contrary opinions. But I'm a scientist and I'm trying to do that, so I get a buzz out of doing that, and I can spend hours doing it, whereas other people have jobs. And it's like, Jesus Christ, if we can't trust our health service— you know, I'm not saying you shouldn't trust your health service, by the way, guys, unbelievably brilliant at a lot of things when things go, uh, wrong. Jesus, of course, I'm not saying that. But, um, yeah, so I'm not sure if that's pretty— is there— what's your best news, Nick, that you can give us, um, about this? Well, you said you had some good news. I've got a bit of good news about, uh, ways that things are going to be changing soon. Uh, but have you any good news about this, uh, darkness?

Just a couple of things. Uh, generally speaking, most journalists, unless they're highly trained Scientists know absolutely nothing about science. Their job is to write pretty words to sell magazines and websites.

Get my eyes.

Yeah, that's okay, and they're very good at doing that, but unless they include a reference, and when you follow that reference it takes you to some science, then that I think is even lower on the evidence scale than what Professor So-and-so thinks on when he's, you know, scratching his head on a Sunday afternoon. So the first thing, journalists, be very, very careful, and you need to be able to see a range of information from a range of places which is not always agreeing. You know, if you just see 10 papers and they all say exactly the same thing, I'd be a little bit worried about that because Because scientists, as you say, Conor, scientists are— they always want to try and— every lab is trying to get the jump on the next lab. And so they'll always say, that was a great study, but we can go a little better. Yeah, they will say, that was a great study, but it was only preliminary study. We're going to do a better study and we're going to take it off in a slightly different direction for their own ends, but also to test the science, look at it from, from, from different perspective. So if you're not seeing, I think, multiple sources of information from credible scientific sources— what is a credible scientific source? So I would say a university. You can't check every source, you know, who's getting paid by who and who's doing whose grant is being paid by whom and whose cafeteria is being put up by which corporation and that kind of thing. It happens. If you want to read a book about this stuff, then the one to read is Unsavory Truth by Marion Nestle. Yeah, Unsavory Truth, Marion Nestle. And that's, that's amazing. You've mentioned Bad Science and Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, who hates homeopathy. Yeah, but I think he also has a massive go at science and a massive go at the pharmaceutical industry, so he can't be all bad.

Yeah, listen, I don't care if he's got a problem with homeopathy. I'm not going to take 100% of anything anyone ever says to me. I don't give a damn what his opinion is on some things. But when you read those books— I read one on holidays, which was a terrible idea, and it was like every paragraph I had to stop and go, I am struggling. He goes through all the latest scandals and it's like it's the same stuff over and over. You know, it's the same scandals. And here we are thinking, well, it won't happen this time. You know, we've got crazy scandals here in Ireland going on all the time. They've just said this new one down in Kerry, this poor doctor was overrun. He was a psychiatrist and he was just medicating every kid that came into him. And people are like, this is terrible. What are they doing? My best friend, one of my very close friends, shouldn't be too explicit, you know, had a very bad time mentally, very bad time. And out of nowhere, out of the blue, hit 40. You know, it happens to a lot of people. Goes to the doctor, and the doctor within days has him on anti-anxiety meds, antidepressants, 2 sleeping tablets, and he's hooked on them. And he got so stressed because he couldn't sleep without them. Now he's on 4 meds for what was a little wobble. He needed not a 15-minute interview with his doctor. He needed someone to sit down and go, what the, what the shit is wrong with you? Let's just sit down and talk about this holistically and have a look at everything. But if a doctor only has 15 minutes, and now that time's been reduced because the amount of COVID stuff that they have to do. Like, people need time. And like, you know, when you're doing a consult, I now have to spend about an hour and a half with people just to get the information into them, another half an hour writing an email tailored to them to just start them off on the right path, you know. Like, and I'm not a doctor, but this is what you feel you have to do for these people because they're so stressed and wound up, and the first 15 minutes is them just dumping on you. So anyway, here's some good news. Look, We know that we have some big problems now with big tech silencing us and Facebook removing posts and Twitter, big problem. We've got the chairman of the board of Reuters, Thomas Reuters, which is one of the biggest journalistic organizations in the world. The chairman of Thomas Reuters is also a director of Pfizer, if you can believe it. So financially invested in both companies. And Thomas Reuters were given the job of seeing what is misinformation on Twitter. So we have mega problems with big tech coming in here. And like, you can't expect Facebook to understand what's going on in any of these science arguments. So they just do whatever they're told. Okay, the FDA says that, we'll get rid of that. So the good news is that I believe that all this latest couple of years, what it's going to do is I think it's going to bring it to a head because everyone is going to be sick of this. You're going to look back, not right now, because I know 9 in 10 people are listening might be on the same page as me, and that's okay. It's totally healthy. I'm somewhere on the other side and you might not be. We're all okay. We all care about our grannies. We all care about our kids. We're not different. They want to sow that kind of, you know, anger. We read so much negative shit online because that's what our brains are wired, okay? So reading negative shit keeps you alive for longer, you know? I mean, so we're just hooked on negative tweets, negative Facebook, and media just give it to you. So we're just in this negative place. The good news is that there's now people taking very serious actions how to correct this, because we now realize we've got these amazing tools. There's Smart? That's not a phone. That's a bloody— well, I don't even know what to call it anymore. It's an incredible device, but it's not a phone. Who bloody talks on it anymore? And what they've started doing is they've started monitoring big tech back. So big tech make their money from selling us their advertising platforms. That's what they do. They make money from us. We're the product. You hear all that all the time. So what this guy in Berkeley, professor in Berkeley, started doing, he says, well, what we're going to do— he started getting lots of investment— is that we're going to monitor Google. Because what Google do is they give you whatever information you want to read and in certain ways, and Facebook will tie you up in YouTube algorithms and all that sort of stuff. And what they do is when something insidious is going on via one of these big tech companies, such as Russian influence and all this other stuff that goes on, they monitor the phones to see what people are being fed. And if something looks wrong, because they've got their own algorithms, they can highlight it. And when Google found out it was being monitored in one of these states in the US, I think was Oregon, when they were— where they did it, they stopped doing the nasty stuff that they were doing because they realized the information was being collected and being fed back to them. What this guy from Berkeley was kind of highlighting was that you can very easily regulate these companies. It's all about regulation, whereby you monitor the stuff that they're doing and then you highlight it and go, well, actually, no, you are feeding shitty discourse into that kind of subpopulation of people and that kind of stuff. So I believe science is going to go the same way. I think people are going to realize that we've been sold a bit of a pup here, uh, that there is, you know, science is in disarray. It's now a tool. It's being used to sell us crap, and the crap that we're taking is not helping us live longer, okay? We've got chronic disease exploding, and that's the way that you think there's no cure for obesity and diabetes. Stop eating shit. Well, it's very hard to stop eating shit, so they should regulate this shit. So like, there is solutions to it, but we just don't get it. So I think there's good news, Nick. Don't you feel that, that like 5 years we'll look back and go, whoa, that was like the opioid epidemic on steroids, you know?

I think that— I think something will rise out of the ashes, but I think there is going to be a conflagration before— it's beginning to start, but I think the whole thing is going to go up in smoke, and it's only the the really solid, proper, well, well thought through science, which is going to make it, make it through. So I think it's possibly a good thing, but I think a lot of people are going to get burnt, unfortunately. The other thing I was going to say is if you see people up on any platform who seem to be speaking sense, and that, you know, that's a very subjective thing, But if they seem to be speaking sense and they're immediately, within 36 hours, they are banned or they're censored, I'm very scared about that. I think almost everybody should be able to talk about almost everything. There are certain subjects which I would say were off limits, but in 99.9% of stuff, I think it should be self-limiting. If you're speaking rubbish, you will eventually— people will just stop listening to you. And I think that's the way it should be. But censorship through the media is really scary.

Crazy.

So beware anybody who's getting censored. You know, really keep a close eye on what they're doing, I think is a good idea. That's a simple— I mean, how do you find your way? How do you find your way with all this stuff? And that would be a simple way. Yeah. Look at all the people, the people who are getting censored and just see what exactly are they saying.

Isn't it crazy that you even had to say all this, you know? But like, you know, the thing is, I am potently not anti-vaccine. I said I believe that this vaccine is fantastic for people that need it and all that kind of stuff. All those caveats— I am one of those people. Call me anti-vaccine is ridiculous. And thank God my grandmother had something. I just believe that there may have been other things too, because we have these randomized controlled trials after all, and lots of them on certain medications that we don't talk about. So I have a problem with that because it's like, that science is okay and that science isn't? Ah, come on now, we've got a lot of different types to sign. So I'm just waiting for the debate, and I do believe we're going to look back and going to go, hmm, okay, this is what happened. And it's not— I don't believe there's a whole evil lizard people controlling it all, but this is just what companies do when there's very little regulation. They're going to take the piss and they're going to do what they can to make money. And that's what happens with the veterinary industry as well. We've got the corporate buyout of the veterinary industry. The Daily Mail of all papers— Karen, if you're listening, could you pop up that link to the Daily Mail piece Not often I will link to the Daily Mail, guys, but published 4 days ago, and it's just talking warning about the corporate buyout of the veterinary industry. Mars owns 50,000 vets now, okay? Why do you think this candy company, world's second biggest pet food producer, owns 50,000 vets and all the diagnostics in the US, you know? So we have big, big problems, one and two. The veterinary clinics have been bought out by, by biggies, and these companies are owned by shareholders. So they have to maximize profits. And there's articles in the Wall Street Journal, in Bloomberg, saying the high cost of modern veterinary care is a big one by Klenfield in Bloomberg that just showed how much money they're trying to extract from customers year on year. They've got to make more money from their clients. So, you know, vets are being told these are the things you must recommend. Now, a lot of that stuff is over in the US, but when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. And I do believe it's like an infiltration of shitty lessons in college. They're overworked vets. They're not all driving around in Porsches. These are really hard-working kids that loved animals, worked their arse off to get into college. We need to have a bit of kind of compassion for them. But at the same time, still, something needs to change. And I kind of believe that all these raw feeders are choosing now vets that are, you know, they're not picking up what conventional vets are putting down, so they're going towards more naturally in vets. And maybe that's it, it's the shift of the market towards the people that you you do support. So I think things will change in the veterinary industry for sure, and I think all this stuff lately will change, and we'll learn as we go along. I don't think it's insidious as people think. I think that's just business, and that's what happens when we don't regulate the shit out of business, you know. That's, that's what happens. Do you want to knock it on the head there, Nick? It's 10 to 8, and I feel like— I think, yeah, I think we're doing well to clear of the dark stuff.

I think, I think we could go on for quite a long time about this stuff. Yeah, very much so. I hope we don't get censored. Okay, so I'm not sure what we're doing next week, but guys, Bren is off in the sidelines. He's there, he's listening to everything what we're saying and probably cringing. He was sounding a lot better today than he was yesterday, so he's probably going to be in good form for next week. So I think let's have a little chat during the week this week and we'll find out what we're going to do. If anybody has got anything that they think would— they'd really, really like to go through, or people to get on, guys. We had, uh, Patrick Holden, who has scored many, many, many brownie points with many, many people on this RPM. You know, people, people just absolutely love him. Um, so anybody else you think that you know of, you've seen on YouTube or wherever Then that will be good. Caroline is saying leptospirosis. Maybe we should do—

Caroline's right, we said that last week that it was bad info, InfoWars this week, and then next week we're gonna do leptospirosis. I think we've done a bit of it before, but it's a hot topic and people want to know about it, so we might as well do it again. I'd love to know more about it. Brian's got a few juicy bits on that there as well. So yeah, okay, so we'll—

yeah, we'll look at leptospires. They're a very interesting little beast. And the vaccine and, uh, yeah, and treatments and all that stuff. Yeah, okay, cool, great. Hey, look at that, we did that in 5 seconds. Very good. Okay, fabulous.

We're Raw Pet Medics. You'll find us on patreon.com. Every little bit helps. And if you can afford the price of a cup of tea or coffee, we really, really appreciate it. patreon.com/rawpetmedics. Other than that, you will see us next week. Our shows are always free to listen to, and they'll be up on podcast as well. So thanks to everyone for coming in tonight, and thanks for joining us, and thanks for all your comments. We'll go through them afterwards as we always do, and we'll see you all next week at the same time, same place.