In this monologue, Lucas Wilhelm Hedenbäck critiques the current health‑influencer culture that obsessively warns about trace toxins such as seed oils, microplastics, heavy metals, and artificial sweeteners. He argues that while raising awareness is valuable, the resulting chronic stress and hyper‑vigilance create a larger health burden than the low‑level exposures themselves. Using the metaphor of a pendulum, he describes how the movement from initial awareness to extreme avoidance leads to heightened cortisol, hormonal disruption, impaired gut function, reduced microbiome diversity, and overall poorer vitality. Hedenbäck illustrates his point with client anecdotes—e.g., a client obsessing over microplastics in salt, a client stressing over seed‑oil content, and a comparison to an Italian grandfather who lives stress‑free despite smoking. He emphasizes a pragmatic approach: control what you can (choose glass over plastic, butter over canola when possible) but do not let uncontrollable exposures dominate your mental state. The talk concludes with a call to question whether the fear‑mongering serves genuine health improvement or commercial interests, urging viewers to prioritize mental calmness and balanced choices over obsessive avoidance.
Chapters
Okay, so something that I think deserves more attention in the health industry right now is the fearmongering kind of community that is going on. We have the people like Bryan Johnson, Paul Saladino, and all of these things that are just completely anti-absolutely everything. They're anti-sea oils, anti-microplastics. You have to avoid every single thing that can cause some slight bit of harm to the most amount of teeth, otherwise you're not going to get healthy. What you first initially think about this is maybe that this is good. And I'm actually a part of this as well because I talk about avoiding all these things, avoiding the toxins, don't get me wrong. But what this creates as a byproduct of bringing awareness, which you can think of this as, oh, it's good that the average person gets the awareness of all these things, the awareness of the microplastics, the awareness of seed oils, or the awareness of hormone-disrupting chemicals. chemicals in the sunscreen or whatever it might be, right? You can think that this is good, you know, people are getting more aware. But what this actually creates when these people are completely fearmongering all these things is not a healthier person, it creates a more unhealthy person. I'm gonna explain this more in detail, but we have to understand firstly that there's always gonna be this pendulum swing, you know. There's one side of the coin and then the pendulum swings to the other, or there's It's a swing up and then it swings to the other side. So you have this initial phase where people are starting to be a bit more aware and they're getting a bit more healthy, but then the other side of the pendulum comes in. And this is what we're experiencing right now in this day and age. You have all the likes of Paul Seddon, Bryan Johnson, whatever, all these people, right, as I just said, that talks about all these things and brings awareness to the average person. But instead of creating a healthier average person, it creates a more unhealthy average person because This person now ends up going around being stressed about microplastics, stressed about seed oils, stressed about something else. And being stressed about the thing is far more, or far worse for your health than doing the thing itself, right? And I want to bring some attention to this because this is actually something that I spoke to with a client where He stayed here for a couple weeks in Sweden with me, and in the beginning there was some instance where he was like, oh fuck, it was probably seed oils in this, or whatever, when it was something that we ate. And I was like, chill, like stressing about this and being absolutely delusional about avoiding seed oils to a T is actually the thing that is gonna make you— or it's gonna be worse for you than just consuming a slight bit of seed oils, right? Yeah. And this, we can prove this in a bunch of different ways. We have all these, you know, we have the pictures of the Tutu Passo, everyone knows this. I'll see if I'll throw a picture on the screen. The Italian grandfather that, you know, he probably smokes a pack of cigarettes every single day and this guy has no clue how bad cigarettes are or tobacco is or nicotine is or he has no clue what a seed oil is. But this guy is probably gonna live to 100 years either way. And how can this be then? As I just said, he's not even aware that the things he's doing are bad or good for him, which leaves him completely unstressed. And this is the secret. If we're scared of a seed oil, if we're scared of some microplastics, or we're scared of some artificial sweetener, or whatever it might be, we're gonna walk around with a constant stressor in our subconscious or our conscious mind. And Constantly have a bit of an elevated stress level. And this becomes very problematic because as a byproduct of this, your recovery is getting affected, your hormones are getting affected, your ability to absorb the food that you're eating is getting affected because your gut is getting affected, your mental clarity is getting affected. Every single function of your body is affected by this one thing and being a bit more stressed than usual. And this, once again, creates a bad response. And some of the most health-cautious people that I know, that I see online, are arguably some of the most unhealthy people. Because then you compare, you compare the likes of Bryan Johnson that needs to inject himself with 60 different steroids and peptides and whatnot every single day and looks like, like, like a ghost, to the Tutu Paso who just enjoys life and does whatever he wants and doesn't really care, you know. I know which version, which of those I pick every single day of the week. And this is something that I don't think a lot of people are actually addressing in the health space right now. Once again, everyone is just talking about avoiding this, avoiding that, and bringing awareness of all these things. But actually stressing about the things is the true thing that is making you more unhealthy than actually just chill. If we were to be absolutely delusional about this, you know, at the end of the day, you You should not even be able to breathe because there's gonna be microplastics in the air. You know, I'm breathing in microplastics right now being outside because there's cars driving on the street and their tires are getting slitted or damaged, whatever. It's like, it's microplastics everywhere. There's probably some heavy metals in the air as well. So if we're gonna be as dialed as all these people think, then, you know, you can't even live your life at the end of the day. So Don't stress too much about it. But with this being said, obviously it's still relevant, don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm sitting here and saying that you can eat all the Cheetos and eat all the microplastics in the world or whatever and be fine. It's still relevant and we want to control what we can control, but we also don't want to stress about it. If I have a bottle that is plastic, I don't care. But if I'm able to choose I'm gonna put— I'm gonna take a glass one, right? If I'm eating out and I can decide if I want my steak to be fried in butter or canola oil, I'm gonna choose butter. But if butter is not available, I'm not gonna stress about it, right? This is the point that I want to get across. We still want to do the right thing, but we don't want to stress about it if it's not possible. So we want to control what we can And just don't stress at all about it if we can't control it, because then it's out of our control. And at the end of the day, this is what I told my client Frank as well. I told him like, do you want a bit of microplastic to beat Frank Jr.? Are you gonna let a tiny, tiny piece of microplastic beat you? That's not health, that's not vitality, that's scarce, that's fearmongering. And we're doing all these right things to build a more resilient body. That's what we're doing. When you're completely fearmongering and you're doing all these things, you're dialing everything back, you're restricting super, super much, what ends up happening is usually that you create a more unhealthy body, right? And more unhealthy or worse health because you're restricting the food so much, so your microbiome diversity absolutely goes down, which means that you end up not having a healthy gut, and which means that everything else gets affected because our health works as a domino and it's a whole symbiosis, it's a whole ecosystem. It's not like separate entities. A whole puzzle piece together. And yeah, it's just important to think about, don't stress too much about these things and be very aware that all these people— let's take another example. Let's take salt. So one of my clients, he was like, he told me, ah, I showed him the salt that I'm using, that I'm recommending to all my clients. And he was like, oh, it has some microplastics or it's some heavy metals in it. Yes. Because heavy metals and minerals are 2 ionic materials. Where you find one, you're gonna find the other, right? Or like, it's in the water, of course there's gonna be some microplastics there. And he was like, oh, I can't have this, I have to find this brand that is absolutely free of microplastics and it's tested. And then he went to pick some brand up that Paul Saladino recommended. He had to wait 3 weeks for shipping, he got it, and then— The The first thing that happened when he opened up this package is that he found like a little strip of some plastic in the bag. And he told me, he was like, Lucas, you're right, like what am I even doing here? And I told him that there is what, like stressing about the microplastics is more dangerous than eating the good salt with a good mineral profile. That yes, it has some microplastics in it, but it also has a good amount of all the trace minerals and all the things that we actually want, right? Stop focusing on the negatives because you can find negatives in everything. You can find the negatives in meat, you can find the negatives in water, you can find the negatives in salt, but that's not what we want to focus on. We want to focus on the positives. And once again, stop being absolutely obsessed about these things and be aware that this fearmongering that is going on right now and bringing too much awareness to you is arguably worse than being completely unaware and just living your life and stressing less and just controlling what you can control and trying to make your best when you can. Because that's true health and true vitality. And that's also a life I like. I don't want to live a life where I walk around and I'm scared of the things that I'm eating, or I have to second think and ask the waiter, what, what have you put in this meal? And all these things. Like, this is a terrible life to live, in my opinion. I just want to enjoy I want to have what I want to have. If I go out to a restaurant, I just want to pick a meal that I think looks nice. I don't want to stress about it. I don't want to think, is there some seed oils in this? Is there whatever? If I can make the good choice, of course I'm going to do it, right? I'm going to control what I can, but I'm not going to stress about if that's not the case. And I see this time and time again with clients as well, where when we've gone through this, this was something that we spoke a lot about on my retreat as well when we were in person. The example that I usually make is like, if we're having an example of someone eating a McDonald's, but you're eating that and truly genuinely believing that this is good and healthy for you, and you're eating it chill, you're not stressed, you're outside, you're grounded when you're eating it, compared to eating the perfect meal, the grass-fed steak, the organic potatoes, the sauerkraut, but you're eating that stressed, rushed, between meetings, whatever it might be. Like, I'd pick the McDonald's every single day of the week. Every single day of the week without fail. Because the environment and your nervous system state is more important than the actual inputs and the actual food itself. So it's a very interesting topic and I think it's something that a lot of people are not talking enough about. So I just wanted to make this video to go through it. Be aware of the fearmongering. Don't let it consume you. Don't let this spark some sort of fear amongst your everyday life for you because that's gonna create worse health as an outcome. It's not gonna create better health. And be aware of the pendulum swing. Be aware of all these things and all these people that are bringing awareness to you. But is that actually for the good or for the better? Is it actually to push their own products or to actually help you? Is it actually to make you fear things so that they can sell you the solution? I don't know. It's up to you to decide. But this is my view on it. So stress less. Easier said than done, but that's usually the solution to absolutely everything. So I hope you enjoyed. Would love to hear your thoughts about this as well, on this topic. What do you think? Have you noticed this yourself? Have you experienced this yourself? And if so, tell me, because this has absolutely been the case for me. In the beginning, I was like, I was avoiding everything to a tee, and I was just stressed about it. And that's when I was looking like a blown-up balloon also. And then when I stopped stress and just controlled what I could and just focused on, on, on, on that, well then everything changed. So I hope you enjoyed. Let me know your thoughts and if you have some own experience on this, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.
