What's the Deal with Organic Food?

Emily: [00:00:00] So, Perry, today we're talking about organic food. Uh, and I want to tell you something that's really great and special about my life in Rhode Island. Rhode Island's, like, the best place to live. And one of the really great things about it is there is a really amazing organic farm down in Warren. For those of you who live in Rhode Island, it's called Long Lane Farm, and they have this amazing farm stand. And the produce is like just spectacular. They have like the greatest tomatoes, they have these amazing salad greens. And it's like during the summer, it's just this incredible delight of like amazing produce that we get all the time.

Perry: [00:00:36] It sounds great. It's so great. Yeah.

Emily: [00:00:38] It is organic though. But they do, you know, they wash it and so on. And the other day, a thing that I really like to eat is what I call a big salad. That's how I refer to it. I put it in like a mixing bowl. And I have like a lot of salad greens and chicken and like guacamole and maybe some hummus and like some other roasted vegetables and some tomatoes. And I mix it all up and it's like really big and it's a [00:01:00] big salad. And the other day I'm eating it and I'm like, huh?

Perry: [00:01:03] Oh, no.

Emily: [00:01:03] There's something like a little crunchier than I expected in this.

Perry: [00:01:08] Oh, no.

Emily: [00:01:09] And it's cricket. It's a cricket head.

Perry: [00:01:12] Okay. And head. I mean, it begs the question of cricket.

Emily: [00:01:19] No, half of the cricket was still in the bowl, and half of the cricket was.

Perry: [00:01:22] In.

Emily: [00:01:22] My in my mouth. And, uh. And, you know, some people would have stopped eating the salad, but honestly, I just took the cricket out of the salad and I finished it because it was so delicious.

Perry: [00:01:36] I think I think that's first of all, good protein. Um, yes, I.

Emily: [00:01:41] People eat insects. Someday we'll all be eating insects.

Perry: [00:01:43] I eat crickets in, uh, in Mexico with my wife. It was like a local delicacy. They were fried and salty and tasted like bacon bits. So I think it's a good option.

Emily: [00:01:52] Actually, what I'm what I'm saying is that organic produce is great. It contains extra Protein. Uh, and crickets, [00:02:00] uh, are crunchy. I'm Emily Oster. I'm an economist and a data expert.

Perry: [00:02:07] And I'm Perry Wilson. I'm a medical doctor.

Emily: [00:02:09] It's Thursday, October 22nd, 2026. And this is Wellness, Actually.

Perry: [00:02:14] Because you're getting a staggering amount of health and wellness information nowadays from every source imaginable. And some of it.

Emily: [00:02:22] And some of it is, well, actually bullshit. Fortunately, we're both people who know how to read studies, how to parse the data, and can tell you what's worth thinking about and what you can safely ignore.

Perry: [00:02:36] But before we dig in a note that this podcast is for educational purposes and should not be construed as medical advice. We don't know your unique situation, so talk to your doctor for personal health decisions.

Emily: [00:02:47] This week we're asking what's the deal with organic food? Perry and I will give the official smash or pass, and then we'll get to your question of the week. But first let's do the health news round up after the break. And [00:03:00] now for the health news of the week, Perry. There is a new article saying that doctors are writing mean things in my medical records. Explain yourself.

Perry: [00:03:22] Oh, gosh. It's true. Everyone. It's true. We write horrible things about you. The context here is that the 21st Century Cures Act made it way easier for patients to access their medical records, like read their notes you used to, of course, you could always do this, but it used to be that you had to go to the medical records office at the hospital and like, file something, sometimes pay money, and it would take months to get your records back. And it was a whole process. But now you basically get to see everything as soon as it comes up. And. And to be honest, doctors don't 100% love this. In particular, when it comes to certain lab tests or pathology results, where like you're [00:04:00] calling us about it before we've even had a chance to look at it and think through it and process it. And so, so there are some issues with this, but one of the issues that this article, which appears in Jama Network Open, by the way, this comes to us from Medpage today. Christina Fiore, who's actually one of my favorite medical science writers, was writing about this. But the study in Jama Network Open interviewed surveyed 500 adults, and 18% of them reported seeing disrespectful or judgmental language in their medical records. And the vast majority thought that that type of language would lead to worse care. You know we do, right? Doctors still don't have it in their heads that their patients are going to read every single thing they write, um, particularly older doctors like me. And so I think it's very, it's quite this doesn't surprise me.

Perry: [00:04:52] Basically, doctors will write things in the chart like, you know, the patient is an unreliable historian, which is, you know, our euphemism [00:05:00] for like, we don't believe what this guy is telling us. Right. The patient denies drug use despite urine toxicology showing cocaine. Right. Like there's things that we'll put in there that are a little bit snarky. I don't think it's entirely deliberate. But, you know, doctors are humans and have biases. And I actually think we I actually believe that like language does have power and you can color other doctors perceptions by the way you write notes and things like that. But I do have to say that as doctors have become aware of this, the notes have gotten much more sanitized. And by and large, that's good. But I do miss some of like the best all time notes. And I'm going to give you two great examples. First of all, the best notes in the entire hospital are the psych consults, because psych really writes, the psychiatrists are literary people. They've read their Freud, and they write these long, gorgeous notes about their interviews with patients who are having some kind of psychotic break. And the one that I remember, [00:06:00] I'll never forget. It's this long note. And the psychiatrist writes, you know, as the patient was describing, you know, how much he did not appreciate the food that was being served to him in the hospital. He started casually masturbating. And it just moves on, you know, because it's a psychiatrist, they just document everything.

Emily: [00:06:21] It's what's going.

Perry: [00:06:22] On. It's it's amazing. Um, the other one I loved was there was a patient and how do I say this without violating HIPAA? Let me think for a second.

Emily: [00:06:33] Oh my God.

Perry: [00:06:34] She had no good thing.

Emily: [00:06:36] We can edit this podcast.

Perry: [00:06:37] Yeah. No, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. Um, her first name was an emotion, a positive emotion. I'm not going to tell you what that positive emotion was. And my attending at the time, I was in training. She was having a tough time in the hospital and his opening line was like, this is a 67 year old woman with an ironic first name who presents with, you know, shortness [00:07:00] of breath, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like those those little things, I don't know, I, I appreciate the humanity in a, in a good medical note like that.

Emily: [00:07:09] I can only imagine what my medical notes during pregnancy were. It was like this crazy bitch. It's like, why does she have so many questions?

Perry: [00:07:18] We try to avoid crazy bitch that, um, we say.

Emily: [00:07:23] But I'm. I was a lot. So, uh, you know.

Perry: [00:07:26] Uh, you know, the, uh, patient seems, uh, quite anxious about multiple aspects of her care.

Emily: [00:07:33] A lot of questions.

Perry: [00:07:34] Okay. Uh, Emily, we might now have an answer to the age old question that, uh, any couple trying to conceive, trying to get pregnant is asking, which is how long should the man euphemistically hold off before attempting conception? And I had heard back in the day 2 to 7 days. [00:08:00] That's what I heard. What do we know now?

Emily: [00:08:02] Yeah. So people ask about this all the time. And the question is usually, you know, like in order to get pregnant, you need to have sex right around ovulation. There's kind of a two, two, there's like a sort of six day window, but it's kind of typically two days of the month that are really like, you really want to hit it on those days because that's the, the high end day. And so people are sometimes told you should only have sex every other day because when you store up the sperm, there's like more of them or they're better or something. It's a little bit ambiguous. Like what exactly you think is happening as you store the sperm for, uh, for longer. But that's the canonical piece of advice.

Perry: [00:08:44] Yeah.

Emily: [00:08:45] Of course, this is actually a little complicated because if you're not exactly sure when ovulation is, you really should just sort of be having sex every day. So now you're trading off like hitting the day of ovulation against this like arbitrary sperm storage planning. Good news. There's a new meta analysis [00:09:00] in the proceedings of the Royal Academy B, which is a journal that yes, there's also an A they took a bunch of studies with a large a large number of men. And I would say on the whole, the evidence suggests that actually it's better to have more ejaculation than less that actually sperm is, has sort of slightly less DNA damage and better motility if it's, you know, fresher, I guess.

Perry: [00:09:30] Yeah.

Emily: [00:09:31] Makes sense. And so, but more or less like the, I read these as relatively small. And so from my taste, I would say less abstinence and more of an effort to hit the days of ovulation if you are attempting pregnancy.

Perry: [00:09:44] Yeah. So daily in this study seem to be associated with a lower sperm count like less. You're right that.

Emily: [00:09:53] You don't build them up, but.

Perry: [00:09:55] They're better, but they're better. Higher quality.

Emily: [00:09:57] They're better. And you have so many sperm, right? It's not like.

Perry: [00:09:59] Yeah, yeah. [00:10:00]

Emily: [00:10:00] Yeah. You're putting out a lot of sperm. So, you know, I would trade off for the better sperm. Of course, there's an interesting other study that one could do, which is, you know, have people like have sex every other day versus every day or hold off for a long period of time and try to hit the ovulation timing. You know, my guess is this matters like almost not at all. Let me tell you another thing, Perry. The other really big question people have here is about whether you can influence the gender of your the biological sex, let's say, of your child by when you have sex, people think that the male sperm is faster, but it doesn't live as long. So if you want to get a boy, you want to have sex right at ovulation. And if you want to get a girl, then you have sex a longer time before, but then not right at ovulation. I cannot emphasize enough. No, this does not work. Okay, actually, this has been tested and the answer is no. So don't know.

Perry: [00:10:59] Okay. No, [00:11:00] it seems like it seems like it would have to be. No, because otherwise I feel like we wouldn't have such an even distribution of sexes. Right? Because like, you would just get more boys, right?

Emily: [00:11:13] Yes, I agree. Given that like, yes, I totally agree. And also just this actually has a name. It's called the Shettles method. But I don't know who Shettles was, but he was wrong. Okay. He could have been a she, but let's be honest, it was presumably a he.

Perry: [00:11:25] Um, all right. So in any case, uh, people are trying to get pregnant, um, just for that. Have sex a lot. Um, guys, uh, feel free to share this with your, with your significant others.

Emily: [00:11:36] Okay, so speaking of things about men, uh, we're also going to be talking again about testosterone. So we've talked a few we've talked a couple of different times about the military's ridiculous plan to measure testosterone. And now they did it. So not in a uniform way, but in a research oriented way. And now we know what would happen if we did this. What happens?

Perry: [00:11:59] So what [00:12:00] happens is that you find some men in the military have low testosterone levels, uh, which shouldn't surprise anyone if you listen to our testosterone episode. So this is appearing in Jama. It's a research letter. 479 military men ages 20 to 60 got their testosterone levels measured once. And, um, just to put some numbers here, the sort of American Urological Association criteria for low testosterone is a level less than 300. Um, the CDC pegs that a little bit lower 264. A quarter of the men these military guys tested were below that 300 cutoff and 15% were below the CDC cutoff of 264. You were more likely to be below these averages as you got older. These actually mirror the US population. Like that's pretty similar to what you see if you test any men. But there's a big difference here because [00:13:00] both the AUA, the American Urological Association and the CDC established those cutoffs in the context of screening for symptomatic problems. Right. So generally sexual dysfunction. So in the context of sexual dysfunction, a testosterone of 250. Yes. Might indicate like, oh, you should be treated because you have a problem and you have a level that's on the lower side. Let's try treating. That is not the case for just broad scale population screening, which no one is recommending except Pete Hegseth. Once again, we talked about this in a in the testosterone episode, but testosterone levels Within a man are wildly fluctuant fluctuant fluctuating. They fluctuate.

Emily: [00:13:42] Wildly a.

Perry: [00:13:43] Lot. They move around a lot. And so all the guidelines you have to measure multiple times actually. So you can easily get like a 251 day and a 500 the next day just based on random variation. So just depending on the luck of the draw, when they happen to catch you, a bunch of these guys are going to have low levels that are completely meaningless. [00:14:00] If we did, you know, take these percentages and scaled them up to the entire military, approximately 100,000 military men would need further workup, at least repeat testing, which obviously will have expensive and has no clear benefit. So there we are.

Emily: [00:14:19] I think this is like all of the kind of like, let's do more testing. Let's do like, okay, but then you're going to end up doing something after that, which is expensive and disruptive and has other, you know, potentially negative knock on. So before you start testing everybody for something for no reason, you really have to like, ask yourself, what's the reason? Yeah.

Perry: [00:14:40] Which is what all the societies started with. They were like, you have a reason to test. And then here's how you should interpret the results of the test. Right. Like that's a broad, broad scale population screening is reserved for a very limited number of things that we have good evidence, you know, saves lives like mammograms. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Emily: [00:14:58] So that's it for the health news of the [00:15:00] week. Now, what's the deal with organic food? All right. Perry, so I, we spent a lot of time in this episode thinking about organization because I think the question of organic food and pesticides, you can very quickly go into like a chemical rabbit hole, which, uh.

Perry: [00:15:19] Which is why everyone's here. And I'll spend the next 30 minutes talking about deep biological chemistry.

Emily: [00:15:26] That's what I'm concerned about. Uh, and so I think for, for my taste, I think basically there's like three things we want to understand here. One is just literally, what do we mean by organic? Because for many of us, and I would put myself in this category, like organic is like fancy. Yeah. And so understanding, like, is it the, it's like a, it's like a fancy vibe. Like it can get pajamas, like the bamboo organic bamboo pajamas. And you get these like it's, it's fancy. You get whole foods. Ooh, fancy. Uh, but actually this has a more formal meaning.

Perry: [00:15:58] So there are rules. There, [00:16:00] are there rules.

Emily: [00:16:01] And then within the organic space, there's like two really big claims that, that people make. I think one is about health and the other is about the environment. And those are probably both worth visiting once we understand what we're actually talking about. But let's start, I'm going to let you start because this story is really great, and I'm going to give you the opportunity to tell it. Please tell me more about nerve gas.

Perry: [00:16:25] I'm always happy to talk about nerve gas. The year is 1936. We have Gerhard Schrader in Germany, which is, you know, has undergone nazification, although we're still prior to the start of World War two. And, um, this is a guy who is trying to synthesize, uh, insecticides, chemical insecticides to spray on crops. He doesn't, he accidentally creates a chemical called tabun. Tabun is the first [00:17:00] chemical weapon, the first nerve agent chemical weapon. Uh, Germany would go on to stockpile a bunch of tabun in World War Two. We don't actually have evidence that they used it, but it was used in the Iran-Iraq war. This class of nerve gas are known as acetylcholine. Organophosphate acetylcholinesterase inhibitors is the same class that sarin and VX nerve gas are in two. This makes for those of you who are faithful listeners, I think the third episode in a row, that nerve gas has gotten mentioned, right? Because I think we talked about it in Botox. I'm sure we talked about it in Botox as a poison that's less poisonous than Botox. And I feel like we talked about it last week for some reason too, but you guys can check me on that. In any case, he invented nerve gas. It was subsequently used, although not in World War Two. And you know, this is the same. Eventually we get to insecticides that work in a similar fashion. We have [00:18:00] a variety of different insecticides now. So knowing that, you know, maybe it's not surprising that people are like, should we be spraying these things on our crops when, you know, spraying them over cities kills a bunch of people. And that seems like a good argument for organic food to me.

Emily: [00:18:17] I agree. I mean, I think this whole thing is sort of overlaid with a lot of, uh, a lot of feelings, but also a genuine concern that these are the goal of, of a lot of the pesticides that we use in farming is to kill things. Literally to decide the pests. As a result, they might decide other things. That we might, that we might like or us. And that's like the that's the fundamental thing here is the question of like, are the ways that we're doing conventional farming dangerous because of these chemicals?

Perry: [00:18:52] Yeah.

Emily: [00:18:52] Which leads me to what I think is an important thing to, to note, which is what is the legal definition of [00:19:00] organic farming. And so the US and again, this is going to differ I think across places. But for, for the US there is a legal there is a legal definition of organic farming which involves no genetically modified, no GMOs, no radiation, no sewage sludge. That's, it.

Perry: [00:19:25] Seems, seems like a good idea.

Emily: [00:19:26] I think Synthetics from something called the National List, which is a list of synthetic things that are used, for example, glycol phosphate. So this is a thing people will think all about all, all the time, which is like roundup, which we will talk about more. More specifically, organic farms cannot use these things. Basically, they cannot use anything, anything that is as synthetic pesticide.

Perry: [00:19:55] Yeah. I think this is where the first distinction between the vibes [00:20:00] and the reality come to light. So the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements, which is this major regulatory body in this space, has their quote, which makes.

Emily: [00:20:11] By the way, this is iPhone.

Perry: [00:20:12] Iphone, iPhone, iPhone, um, not the iPhone.

Emily: [00:20:16] Iphone.

Perry: [00:20:17] This is their quote, which makes organic sound pretty amazing to me. Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems, and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects. Organic agriculture combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved. That sounds like sunshine and rainbows to me.

Emily: [00:20:47] Yeah, look, that pitch is what people have in mind, which is like the organic farm is like the smallholder farmer, you know? It's, you know, ballerina farm or something. It's like we're, we're [00:21:00] rotating our crops through the, you know, like the beans and then are feeding the nitrates in the soil. And it's all like working together in this, in this complicated way. And we're living in, in harmony with the, the bugs. But actually it doesn't that could be, that could be a description of an organic farm.

Perry: [00:21:20] Are certainly farms like that.

Emily: [00:21:22] There could also be a description of a conventional farm that has those features. The difference is more specifically in this question of pesticides and actually in the difference of what kind of pesticides. So typically any farmer needs to kill pests. Everyone wants to decide their pests, whether they are organic or not. The question is what you are using to do that. And organic farms are restricted to using natural pesticides. That most common one is pyrethrin, which is actually from chrysanthemums. There are also synthetic versions. There's boric acid, copper sulfate, sulfur. There. There [00:22:00] are some natural substances you can use as pesticides, which are allowed in organic farming. And as we have said on this podcast many times, just because something is natural doesn't mean it's good for you. Do you want to tell us about Raton rotenone? Rotenone. Yeah.

Perry: [00:22:18] Um, rotenone is a natural substance. It came from a root of some legume. It's some kind of extract that was permitted, I think, as to to be used as an insecticide for organic farming. And um and then some data came out that suggested, although to be fair, it's not clear cut, but that it might be associated with Parkinson's disease. Um, and it was subsequently largely banned, at least in the US. Yeah. Natural doesn't mean safe. The most toxic thing on the planet is botulinum toxin, which is a natural substance that comes from Clostridium botulinum, as we talked about in our prior episode. And yeah, the idea that, you know, just because you're spraying [00:23:00] something that comes from a Chrysanthemum as opposed to spraying something that gets synthesized in a lab to kill pests, makes it somehow safer, has a name. That's the naturalistic fallacy. There's plenty of things in nature that will kill you very quickly. The other thing I want to highlight here is that to get that coveted organic label, that sticker does not mean that you have to be a small family farm who's in touch with the earth and feeling the grass every day and like breathing in the fresh mountain air. There are gigantic factory style organic farms, huge billion dollar industries. Um, and all they have to do is meet these, you know, checklist requirements. Did you use roundup? No. You know, did you use ionizing radiation or sewage sludge? No. Check check check. And then you can get to that organic label. So we really do. I mean we'll talk about whether it makes a difference in health, but we do want to separate the idea of organic as local, fresh and [00:24:00] healthy from the reality, which is it's a set of practices that have a definition. Um, and, you know, people are financially incentivized to meet that definition because you can sell organic produce and organic food for a higher price point than you can sell conventional food.

Emily: [00:24:15] We should also talk about the rules on Fertilizer. So in organic farming, you can use things that fertilize. So typically you. They cover the crops outside the growing season, which fixes nitrogen in the soil. And then there's animal manure, blood meal, bone meal. There's like stuff from animal bones that can be used as fertilizer. Conventional farming uses synthetic fertilizer, which was developed in the early 1900s. And we can come back to this, but the development of synthetic fertilizer has saved hundreds of millions of lives over the course of its period. So I, you know, it's potentially has things one might be concerned about, [00:25:00] but what's called the Green Revolution, which was spurred on by the development of fertilizer by something called the Haber-bosch process. Yes, I will let you describe it in a minute, has been just like totally transformative for changing hunger in the, you know, modern, modern era. Now, I'll let you do chemistry. Perry, please explain the hyper bosh process to us.

Perry: [00:25:24] The haber-bosch. Um, I mean, what you need to know is that, you know, an important component of fertilizer is nitrate. And prior to the haber-bosch process, which was developed in 1909, um, the way you got nitrate was you either mined it from nitrate deposits in very specific parts of the earth or from guano like bird and bat guano. So there are these islands where like the seabirds land that basically got completely strip mined for guano, um, in the late 1800s to add nitrogen to soil. Uh, Haber, who interestingly enough, also worked on chlorine gas development for Germany during [00:26:00] World War one. I don't know why so many German chemists keep trying to kill people while also developing agricultural products. In any case, that's an aside. The air is 79% nitrogen. So it's a very reasonable question to be like, wait, there's all this nitrogen everywhere. Like, why can't we get that into the soil?

Emily: [00:26:19] Why are we looking at bat poop?

Perry: [00:26:20] Right? Like, why do we need to mine all the bad poop? And the answer is that nitrogen gas N2 is very stable. And what you actually need in the soil is nitrate. And turning nitrogen gas into nitrate is not easy. It requires a lot of energy. And this special process, which Haber developed and subsequently won the Nobel Prize for and. But then you basically this is called bread from air. Like it basically meant, okay, we no longer have to go out and mine nitrate or mine guano. We can just use natural gas as the energy source and turn the nitrogen in our air into fertilizer. And you're right. I mean, it's it's very hard to argue that this didn't save millions, potentially hundreds of millions [00:27:00] of people from hunger. And also probably estimates I saw around 18 to 27 million hectares of land from agricultural development, because you could grow so much more on less space. But that's all part of conventional farming, like the nitrate that is generated from the Haber process cannot be used on organic farms.

Emily: [00:27:22] Yeah. And so this sort of happens early in the like the sort of green revolution is a is a long period. But in the the 1960s in particular, we start getting what I would describe as a backlash against pesticides. There's this book, Silent Spring, uh, which describes, you know, the possibility of kind of all of the birds being killed. This is partly a response to widespread spraying of DDT, not across crops, but literally like across neighborhoods. Really good at getting rid of mosquitoes. Also turns out to be like bad for birds. Uh, that was eventually [00:28:00] banned. The Organic Foods Production Act, which set some standards for this, started in 1990. By 2002, the USDA has an organic seal. And so we sort of edge into this environment where. Perhaps it's a reaction to some of the fear that people have. We then get this new kind of like, well, here's the better, here's the better version, here's the thing that moves away from this fear. And, you know, as a result, perhaps organic food tends to be more expensive. So people are paying more for organic. And then I think the question for consumers, for the world is, you know, is that better for you individually or is it better for the is it better for the planet?

Perry: [00:28:40] Right. Absolutely. And before we move on to talk about health, I think, uh, in case I haven't made this clear enough that that label is worth something, that organic label, and we'll get to people's perceptions of food. When we talk about health based on just seeing that label, people will cheat like all things. Uh, so between [00:29:00] 2010 and 2017, uh, farmer named Randy constant sold grain from Nebraska. It was conventional. It was, you know, the standard run of the mill Nebraska grain, but he labeled it as organic and took in an excess of $140 million by that sort of fraudulent claim, was arrested like was was found guilty. And that subsequently led to, uh, a 2023 enforcement rule that sort of tightened how organic farms are monitored here in the US. But I think it's always worth remembering, you know, not to fully trust, uh, anything, no matter how nice the package looks. So we will move on to health, but after a break.

Emily: [00:29:55] Okay, so we're back. We're going to talk about organic food and [00:30:00] your health. And I want to start by saying the placebo effect is real. And in this case, people really think organic is healthier. And there's a really fantastic study by two social psychologists from about 15 years ago involving Oreos. And the sort of short version of this is they took, as social psychologists do, a bunch of college students, and they showed them labels for Oreos, and half of them had it say, you know, they were made with organic flour and sugar, and the group and half of them did not get that label. And the group that thought that this was organic rated them lower in calories. Just to be clear, organic food is it's not lower. Like growing your corn with organic methods does not lower its caloric intake. But there was this perception of like, oh, it's organic, it's healthy. The beginning of this article actually has like a starts with a quote, mom, look, organic gummy bears. Yes, [00:31:00] I see no more sweets, mom, but they're organic. And then it's signed, as overheard by one of the authors in the checkout lane of a natural foods store. And this is like, this is like where researchers get their ideas. That guy was like, Norbert Schwarz was probably in line at the organic force. He was like, I should study that totally. My point is that if people think the food is organic, and this is particularly true for students who are more pro-environment, they thought that the Oreos were better for you. And I would say that's a general. Yeah, that's generally true. Um, of people.

Perry: [00:31:32] Yeah. And this has been replicated across multiple food, multiple food stuffs, you know, blind trials, organic bananas versus conventional bananas. And some of them, they lie to you and they're, they, they're both the same. And, but they tell you one's organic and some there really is one that is organic and one conventional. Typically, if these are appropriately blinded. So you actually aren't told which one is organic people rate in terms of taste and texture generally [00:32:00] pretty similarly. Um, the one exception I found is there did tend to be people found organic food, even if they weren't told it was organic to be slightly sweeter and maybe juicier. So if you care about that taste, maybe that's that's real. But once you tell someone something is organic, then it's like, oh my gosh, you're off to the races. It tastes so much better, it feels better, you feel better after you eat it. And that is a lot of, uh, that's a lot of placebo and a lot of marketing placebos.

Emily: [00:32:29] It's the best effect. Um, in practice, if we look at, you know, that's a bad taste. If we look at the like nutrient features of this, they are very similar. There's like one meta analysis which said maybe organic foods had more antioxidants and less cadmium. There's another meta analysis that said there was no meaningful difference. Not really even clear. Like, well, okay, what do you mean less like there, it's all safe. I don't know, it's not obvious why you would care about this. And in general, the most important features of foods like your macronutrients and micronutrients [00:33:00] are very it does not matter how you treated the pesticides, how you treated the food with pesticides.

Perry: [00:33:07] Yeah, totally. I mean, the one, uh, kind of nutrition study I saw that rings a little bit true to me was there was a, um, a study that suggested this is a meta analysis that is coming to us from the Annals of Internal Medicine. And they found that conventional chicken and pork were about 33% more likely to carry antibiotic resistant bacteria. And that does kind of make sense to me because, uh, organic chicken and pork, you can't use antibiotics on. And so it would seem less likely that you would develop antibiotic resistant bacteria. Obviously, you should be thoroughly cooking your chicken and pork no matter what. To kill bacteria because you don't even want non antibiotic resistant bacteria in your body. And there was no difference on that metric. But you know, there might be some some small differences on that side.

Emily: [00:33:56] Yeah. And these were all below less people come away from this thinking [00:34:00] that your chicken is going to kill you. Like in, in that study, everything was largely below maximum allowed limits. So I do not want people to leave thinking they cannot eat chicken.

Perry: [00:34:12] Yeah, yeah. Eat your chicken, cook it, cook your chicken.

Emily: [00:34:14] Just make sure you cook. Yeah. Don't eat raw chicken. Um.

Perry: [00:34:19] This highly insightful and actionable health advice from wellness. Actually, this is why we're on top.

Emily: [00:34:25] Having said that, having stay on topic. Uh, so having said that, there is a difference between these two products, which is one of them uses pesticides and one of them, uh, one of them does not. And in fact, we can see that if you, that when you are consuming non-organic foods, you are consuming typically small amounts of these pesticides. We can talk about how you can, you can get this off with washing, but even with careful washing, on average, we see this in a study of some adults in Australia. They had people eat mostly organic food and indeed they saw their organophosphate [00:35:00] organic organophosphate markers go down over the course of a week because of what they were consuming. It's not obvious why that matters.

Perry: [00:35:11] It's nerve gas. That's why it's okay. You might as well be in the trenches in World War.

Emily: [00:35:17] One for you, that the EPA has set limits on exposure to these things. And even for the sets of foods that people most worry about, pesticide exposure for what the like, people have termed the dirty dozen, which is the foods with the highest level of pesticides. You would need, need to eat a tremendously large number of these foods in order to have any danger of hitting the EPA limit, which is itself set, you know, 100 to 1000 times below the effect where we don't see effects in animals. So I don't know. Okay. I'll give you a sense.

Perry: [00:35:59] So [00:36:00] So the EPA takes a mouse and gives them, you know, ever escalating doses of a pesticide, you know, by injection or whatever. They observe the smallest dose at which there is any physiologic effect on the mouse, not that the mouse dies. Just like, oh, we see something like, I don't know, their heart rate goes up or whatever. They then divide that dose by 100 to 1000 to set the maximum limit on humans. And then we can look at, okay, like the dirty dozen currently is strawberry spinach, kale, grapes, peaches, pears, nectarines, apples, bell and hot peppers, cherries, blueberries and green beans. So those are the crops that require the most pesticide. Or they get the most pesticide now. And we can actually ask like, okay, how many apples do you have to eat cumulatively to hit that exposure threshold that the EPA has set, which is still 100 times less than what you would need to show any effect in a mouse? And the answer back the envelope here is you would have to eat 22 apples [00:37:00] every day for the rest of your life. To hit that threshold. You would hungry for apples.

Emily: [00:37:06] You would be so sick. That's a lot of apples. It's so much fiber.

Perry: [00:37:10] It's 5700 strawberries per day for the rest of your life. Uh, I believe that kills the human. And then 6500 cherries per day for the rest of your life. And I didn't do the math for the other ones, but they're all. They're all, uh, an insane amount. Tamar, our producer, says she could eat that many cherries.

Emily: [00:37:30] Just to be clear, if you ate 5700 average size strawberries, that's about 23,000 calories. And I don't.

Perry: [00:37:40] Much worse for you than.

Emily: [00:37:42] That would be bad. The problem with eating that much, you would hit your limit of like stomach capacity like long before you. And other problems. I don't think someone could consume 23,000 calories a day.

Perry: [00:37:57] It's an awful, I bet. I mean, I wonder if, like Kobayashi, [00:38:00] like the hot dog eating guys. I know they don't really digest all that. But anyway, we can, we can.

Emily: [00:38:04] We can, we can talk about it. My point is that, uh, the dose makes the poison and these doses are very, very small. And if you are still like, okay, but I'm still super, super worried about this. If you rinse and rub with 30s your produce, that removes basically all of the pesticides or almost all of it. And you could also soak it in baking soda, but for 15 minutes, although people aren't going to do that.

Perry: [00:38:35] And the organic food also has pesticides, they're just not these pesticides, right? Like pyrethrin, which comes from chrysanthemums, is still poisonous at a high enough dose. Like that's, you know, like all things are poisonous at a high enough dose. Emily said the dose makes the poison. For those of you playing the wellness actually drinking game, it's time to do a shot Ah.

Emily: [00:38:55] I don't usually get to be the one who says that, so I'm very excited. So [00:39:00] related to that dose poison point, there actually are some concerns about health impacts of these pesticides, um, that have been raised in many settings. And I want to talk about the, the roundup, the roundup question, but I think one of the real concerns here has to do with people who are living near or especially working in fields in which these pesticides are used. So our evidence on this isn't very good at this point. I don't think we have a lot of very compelling evidence in one direction or the other, but there is potentially more reason to be concerned about farm workers and their exposure to pesticides than about your average American eating strawberries.

Perry: [00:39:49] 100%.

Emily: [00:39:50] The grocery store. Yes. And I mentioned this because I find this aspect of the discussion honestly somewhat upsetting, because it feels like we are sort [00:40:00] of over here in one space being like, oh, I'm terrified about eating these strawberries, feeding my kid these strawberries, and like, let me do everything I can to avoid my child's potentially minute exposure to one itty bitty piece of pesticides where maybe we could focus that attention on like, let's improve conditions for farm workers who are being exposed to very high levels of these pesticides, and think about what are the protections that we might potentially want to have in place. So without going like too off the rails here and without saying that we have strong evidence that that there are problems, I think that there's more to be done there, that that is being missed. That's what I'll say.

Perry: [00:40:37] I think that's very well said. And so let's dive in then. Um, to the concerns about some of these, um, you mentioned roundup. I'll just, I'll just say the other big one, in case people have heard about it is Pyrophos, which some studies linked to exposure to chlorpyrifos, which is a conventional pesticide to [00:41:00] lower IQ in the children of farm workers that were working on farms that used, uh, used that pesticide. Epa banned that pesticide in 2021. The ban was overturned in 2023. It is now used for some crops. But again, that's the environmental exposure, not the intake on food. But roundup is the big one, right? Like roundup is kind of an amazing story because it ties together like corporate greed, our own feelings of like helplessness at the hands of the oligarchy and then possible, but not actually very strongly documented health effects of a synthetic chemical. So can we dive in? Rfk oh, and.

Emily: [00:41:46] It's got Roundup's got everything.

Perry: [00:41:48] It's got everything. Let me start with just what round up is. I mean, you've seen it like you've seen roundup on your, uh, in the hardware store and stuff.

Emily: [00:41:58] Yeah. Home Depot.

Perry: [00:41:59] Yeah.

Emily: [00:41:59] So right there. [00:42:00]

Perry: [00:42:00] Glyphosate, uh, is the, is the chemical name glyphosate. Um, blocks an enzyme plants use to make aromatic amino acids. Um, animals don't have that pathway at all. So unlike the nerve gas stuff which kills insects and humans if you give them enough roundup is a plant aside, it kills plants. And in fact, basically every plant will die if you spray roundup on it. Enter roundup ready crops, which are genetically engineered crops that were created by Monsanto to have a change in this enzymatic pathway that make them roundup resistant. What that means is that you can spray roundup on your roundup ready crops, and they continue to grow. But everything else, all the weeds and stuff just dies because they don't have that genetic resistance roundup ready. Crops like this is where you get into the sort of corporate greed oligarchy. The way this works for farmers is that they sign a licensing agreement with Monsanto. I think Monsanto and Bayer, I think Bayer owns Monsanto now. Check [00:43:00] me on that. But whatever pharmaceutical company and a major agricultural company, they sign a licensing agreement to buy seeds for these special crops. They cannot plant their own seeds. They can't harvest the crops and use the seeds from the plants that they harvest to, um, to plant the next season.

Perry: [00:43:19] So they're like locked in contractually with these people. And it essentially has become the most used herbicide on earth. Uh, only recently have weeds started evolving resistance, which you would expect, right? Like life finds a way, you know, just by natural selection, you're going to get some weeds that, um, do have some resistance to roundup Monsanto. You could do a whole episode about this. This company. They are one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange, another herbicide that was used extensively in the Vietnam War and probably has some particularly bad health effects. And then [00:44:00] we have to talk about the litigation around the health effects of roundup. This is really hard. Okay. Because we try to look at the data here and like, give you a nuanced approach and what people claim is a huge variety of health effects from roundup ranging from cancer to a bunch of other effects, which has been, frankly difficult to prove, like the data is actually not that compelling, that it has crazy health effects in humans. Um, the one thing that has stood up a little bit in subsequent studies is the, an increased risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, again, in people with high exposure, typically farm workers. And even then I see you shaking your head, even though.

Emily: [00:44:45] It's not really like it's just really hard. This is like observational data on very high levels of exposure. It's difficult to know. Like certainly there's nothing randomized. There are differences across these groups. But again, even in that, I think the groups we're talking about are farm workers with high levels [00:45:00] of exposure, which is a very important space to understand and is different from what people consume it.

Perry: [00:45:09] Exactly, exactly. Um, so I'm not even sure if the NHL signal is causal. If there is a causal health signal, that's probably it. I guess I'll say it that way. And again, in pretty much in farm workers, but Monsanto's behavior was bad around this. They released a paper in 2000, a glyphosate safety review, basically a large paper saying, okay, here's everything we know about the safety. And it said, oh, look, it's lovely and safe and it's great. It subsequently came out under litigation in 2017 that people at Monsanto were like, let's just write this paper ourselves and have respected scientists sign their names. We'll just pay them to be co-authors and they'll sign their names. And, you know, they were totally astroturfing this paper, it was actually retracted in 2025. So 25 years after publication, that safety paper was retracted again, not [00:46:00] because we know that like, oh, it's not safe, but because this was gross and done in an academically dishonest way. And there's there's a difference there. There's been a lot of litigation. In 2020, Bayer set aside $10 billion to settle potentially 100,000 class action claims against, uh, you know, for people who, who typically people with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma who are claiming exposure to, to roundup, there is a proposed $7.25 billion class action settlement, uh, that has not been fully decided yet.

Perry: [00:46:37] But there is a big wrinkle here. So all of this litigation was based on failure to warn like the glyphosate glyphosate label doesn't say like, be careful, like might give you non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in February, sorry. In June of 2026, the Supreme Court heard this case and actually came out 7 to 2 in favor of Monsanto, saying, well, the EPA doesn't say that roundup [00:47:00] has this problem. And if the EPA doesn't require a cancer warning, states can't either. So it's like an individual state isn't allowed to say that there's a failure to warn. It has to be national. And the thought is, I'm not a lawyer that this might end most of these remaining suits. Uh, glyphosate was removed from roundup that you buy in the hardware store in 2023. It's still used on crops, but like the roundup brand no longer contains glyphosate that you can get at home. Emily, can you tell me where RFK Jr comes into all this? Because this is just maybe the like, piece de resistance of roundup glyphosate nonsense.

Emily: [00:47:38] So RFK Jr was actually on the environmental side of some of these lawsuits before he became the health secretary. But then as the health secretary, he has been on the Pro roundup team, uh, because the Defense Production Act, uh, in February of 2026 actually was intended to boost glyco phosphate [00:48:00] glyco.

Perry: [00:48:01] Glyphosate, glyphosate, sorry, glyphosate.

Emily: [00:48:04] Glyphosate, uh, production obviously was not very happy with him about this. I mean, stepping back, I think there's like so much in this story, it is incredibly complicated. I think the two big takeaways are, one, even if we are talking about potential harm or potential lawsuits or potential evidence of of harm, it is in high levels of exposure, not in, you know, people who eat Cheerios for breakfast. And the maybe the, the second point is that all of these things are very complicated and they are. There are many threads people can pull on you. Early on in this. There was a person, a computer scientist at MIT, who said that this was going to cause 1 in 2 kids to be autistic by 2025. That obviously didn't come to pass. It was also an insane thing to say at the time. So this whole conversation is really, um, pretty, [00:49:00] uh, confusing.

Perry: [00:49:02] Yeah. And it's like rational not to trust the people in power about this. I think that's why like conspiracy theories take root is because, you know, why would you trust Monsanto to tell you that this thing is safe when we already know that they, like, tried to white paper their way out of this in in 2000? Honestly, why would you even trust RFK Jr, who is on like the defense team for this $290 million verdict, the first big verdict for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from roundup and then like backed Trump's order to increase glyphosate production through the Defense Production Act.

Emily: [00:49:36] That's another topic, Another topic. Okay, let me say two other things about health. And then I want to move on to the planet. So one is that for sure, you can find all kinds of correlations between eating organic food and having a lower risk of cancer and heart disease and, and whatever. There's plenty of studies that will show that that's because organic food is expensive and rich people have better access to health care. And we don't have to go over why [00:50:00] we don't like those kind of studies. The second thing is the other, another like thing in this space people worry about is heavy metals. And that has nothing to do with organic food. So eating organic, organic baby food, organic food is not going to address concerns about heavy metals, which largely come out of the the soil. And so if you are looking to this to like fix your heavy metal exposure, look elsewhere, because that's not going to work. Okay. Should we talk about the planet?

Perry: [00:50:31] We should talk about the planet. We care about the planet. Is it better for the planet?

Emily: [00:50:36] I think it's really complicated.

Perry: [00:50:39] Man. We just finished something complicated. Let's do something simple.

Emily: [00:50:44] I think this one is complicated in a way that maybe is simpler to to explain. So there's kind of one obvious win here, which is that, you know, relative to like per acre relative to conventional farming, organic [00:51:00] farming has lower nitrogen losses. You aren't burning natural gas to make fertilizer. There's less nitrous oxide. So it has a sort of greenhouse like a positive greenhouse gas footprint. Any per acre sense. However, the yield on organic farming is much lower because your crops are getting eaten by pests, because your pesticides are not as good and because your fertilizer isn't as good.

Perry: [00:51:28] Like you can't grow as dense.

Emily: [00:51:29] Yeah, yeah. Like conventional farming is the most efficient per acre approach to this. And so actually like per unit of food, it's a. Emissions are about the same. And organic farming has more land use because you are growing less per acre. So it's actually like, not like the trade off is not at all obvious, I think.

Perry: [00:51:56] Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing that too. And we have [00:52:00] some simulation studies on like, well, we have simulation and a real study, but on, on a countrywide level, for example, there's a study by Smith in 2019, which took the hypothetical of like, okay, if England and Wales went 100% organic. So they just converted all their farming to organic, um, the emissions, like again, greenhouse gas emissions and stuff would drop by about 6% in those countries. But as you point out, there'd be a bunch of missing food because you can't grow as much on organic farms as you can on conventional farms. And so they'd have to grow that food abroad, which would take. They estimated about five times the land. And their final conclusion was that net emissions would actually go up. So like a whole country switching to organic, even though they don't have to use the Haber process to use natural gas to create fertilizer from thin air, it might actually be worse. I don't know, maybe the take home is that like, we'll end up being a wash? [00:53:00] I will say that good crop rotation can increase the yields of organic farms. And so if you have organic farms that are really like doing crop rotation nicely, maybe it wins out in the end, but it's not a slam dunk. And you'll certainly hear people say like, organic is so much better for the environment. It's just like, it's not that obvious that it is.

Emily: [00:53:17] Yeah. And I think from, you know, from an economic standpoint and from a feeding your population standpoint, there are real considerations here. You know, 2001, Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertilizer. Their rice yields totally collapsed. It had terrible impacts on the economy. It had other very bad impacts. They had to reverse the ban because fundamentally they were not now, they were not equipped to not have conventional fertilizers, fertilizer.

Perry: [00:53:44] Yeah. I mean, the green revolution that we talked about, again, like.

Emily: [00:53:46] It was a revolution, really saved a lot of people.

Perry: [00:53:48] Saved people. If we were to undo all of that, we a lot of people would die of starvation, which again, it kind of gets to the point about like, are we caring about ourselves? Are we caring about the farm workers? Are we caring [00:54:00] about the population of the earth writ large? Because it's like, sure, I can eat organic. You know, I can have a little farm that is is making me organic food, but we can't have everyone eat organic or like literally people will die. And so then it's like, why do I get to eat organic and no one else does? I don't know.

Emily: [00:54:16] Okay, I want to end Perry by before we get to smash or pass by talking about the phrase biodynamic.

Perry: [00:54:25] Oh my God, I'm so excited. I love biodynamic.

Emily: [00:54:28] Biodynamic is crazy. Biodynamic is the craziest thing I.

Perry: [00:54:36] Are you a wine person? Am I? I don't know if we've ever talked about this. Okay.

Emily: [00:54:39] I certainly I like I mean, I, I don't drink biodynamic wine that's for sure. But I have I did one time, one time someone did I do go to a party where someone brought some biodynamic.

Perry: [00:54:48] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emily: [00:54:48] It was like full of sediment, I don't know.

Perry: [00:54:50] We do love a good sediment. Um, biodynamic, for those of you who are unaware, is like, take organic, like multiply [00:55:00] it times ten and then add magic that and then you get and you get biodynamic. So biodynamic agriculture was coined actually in 1924 by a guy named Rudolf Steiner. And it predates.

Emily: [00:55:12] He was a German who worked on nerve.

Perry: [00:55:14] Gas, who also tortured kittens. Like it's always, um, I believe he was German, but I actually don't know that he was trying to kill his fellow man as aggressively as the other German scientists that we've discussed today. So he comes up with this term biodynamic. It actually predates the term organic. So maybe this is the OG. And he had a lot of strange beliefs. Some are just like I think sound very nice. So the core belief is that a biodynamic farm is, is a self-sufficient entity. So everything you use in that farm has to be grown on that farm, even the fertilizer. So a biodynamic farm, like a biodynamic vineyard that's making biodynamic wine has to have animals that like eat the grass and poop. And then you use the poop to make the wine. Like you can't import anything. [00:56:00] So that's why I say it's like organic times ten, which to me sounds kind of nice. It's like, oh, it's all self-sufficient and sustained. And then there's the magic, which is like he wanted, you know, you had to, you use astrological signs to determine, you know, when you're planting and when you're, when you're harvesting and what house the moon is in and what Mars is in. And then you plant these like cow horns filled with different things. These are called preparations. There's like preparation 505, which is a cow horn filled with manure that you plant one season, and then you dig it up and you crush it up and you spread it over the crops. And then there's preparation 504, which is like a cow horn filled with quartz crystals that you then crush up and spread over the fields. There's kind of a lot of like, woo! But people, particularly wine snobs, go sort of crazy for this stuff. And obviously it charges, it costs a premium and if not adequate, like if you tell people that one wine is biodynamic and one isn't, [00:57:00] they will definitely tell you it tastes better. And then if you blind people, they can't tell the difference.

Emily: [00:57:04] Yeah. This is I mean, I feel like this is true of like so much wine, right? It's true. This is like almost all wine. It's like, you know, you give people like the fancy, like probably fancy wine. People can tell between the box wine, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other one. But like fundamentally.

Perry: [00:57:22] We used to every year do a statistical wine tasting at my house, where we had ten wines. You'd like the same ten wines, ranging from the cheapest I could find to the most expensive I could afford. And all, you know, in exactly the same container. And people just had to put them in order by price. Like they just had to say like, okay, what do you think is the most expensive and the least expensive? And it was super fun. And it won't surprise you to hear that. Like, yeah, no one can do this very well. Yes. The $1 bottles that I was able to like scrounge up, people tended to rate pretty low. But like once you get to 15 bucks or so, like no one can tell.

Emily: [00:57:58] Fun fact, Perry, we also do [00:58:00] that activity in my family at the holidays. That is also an activity in the, uh, Oster fair household with my, with my dad and my, and my brothers. And my husband is like, weirdly good at it, even though he doesn't drink at all. And I think it's because he doesn't really enjoy it very much. So he's just like really good at putting himself in the mind of other people. Oh, interesting. I don't know. So he's like, so maybe that's the that's the secret to winning that game.

Perry: [00:58:28] Um, before we get to the very end, I want to ask you an economics question because for some of us with a food budget that is fixed and not necessarily can expand to whatever we want, as we pointed out multiple times, organic is more expensive. And so, you know, we haven't presented any incredibly robust data that organic is better for you or for the environment. But there are certainly signals, and I think from some small organic farms and things like that, maybe just the, the effort associated the, the thoughtfulness [00:59:00] that goes into the farming might be something people desire. But if I have a fixed amount of money, is it worth it? That's an economics question.

Emily: [00:59:10] I would say that if you're asking a health, if we're just asking an individual specific health question, the biggest problem people have in their diets is that they are not eating enough vegetables and produce in general. And I would worry about allocating money towards organic versions of produce, rather than just increasing the total amount of produce that people are consuming. So I that's how I think that.

Perry: [00:59:38] Spend your money buying more produce and you can buy more conventional.

Emily: [00:59:42] I think people should spend their money on having more whole foods and more produce, rather than having a smaller amount of those things, but having them be organic.

Perry: [00:59:54] Okay. Well, so with that in mind, em organic food smash or pass.

Emily: [01:00:01] This [01:00:00] is a very hard one. I. I'm gonna say pass because I think that although it's a perfectly reasonable choice and I probably consume a fair amount of organic food, I worry a lot about the global sense of this. And so I'm. I guess I'm a pass. I soft pass. Soft smash I don't like is there a middle. I'm I'm concerned I.

Perry: [01:00:33] Don't think I have a middle ground. Uh okay. Great. Let me say I I'm going to pass and what I think uh, again, assuming assuming money is no object, so are taking that. I think that your economic argument is actually quite reasonable. If limited food budget just got used as much as you can to buy as much produce as you can. Seems reasonable if you're not that worried about your food budget. Um, I think I'm a pass on organic and like what I'm a smash on is like [01:01:00] local, smaller farms. Like if you're going to spend extra money on food, let's not give it to the giant corporations who, yes, may be organic, but are still broadly doing factory farms and like, let's get our food from farmers that you can drive past like the one you have in Rhode Island. And I don't care so much what kind of pesticide they use. I care that like they are in it to grow great food that tastes good. So I'm kind of passing on organic and, and smashing on like farm to table and crickets in your salad.

Emily: [01:01:35] I love it. Uh, yeah, I agree with that. Good middle ground. Okay, that's it for organic food. Your question of the week after the break. Perry, uh, I have a question from a friend of mine. It's I'm asking for a friend here, and it's about kidneys and urine. And [01:02:00] so I'm asking you because you're the nephrologist. I have the most access to get ready. Okay, here's the question. After a hard workout, sometimes there's blood in my urine. How concerned should I be?

Perry: [01:02:17] Mhm. Okay. This is something that certainly happens after a long, hard workout. Um, certain workouts predispose this more than others, particularly ones where you're jiggling, like impacting up and down. Horseback riders are probably the ones who we see this most in. But I think, you know, real endurance runners could do this too. That being said, it's probably worth someone who has what we call hematuria recurrent hematuria after exercise to just get checked out once to make sure their kidney function is normal. There are certain genetic conditions that can predispose to blood in the [01:03:00] urine that would be worthwhile to know about and monitor. And then the thing that kind of itches the back of my brain is this condition called rhabdomyolysis, which is muscle breakdown leading to You coloring of the urine? Actually, not with blood, but with myoglobin, which has a sort of similar color, maybe a little more rust brown than, than bright red blood, but certainly after very vigorous exercise. Again, people with certain genetic predispositions can have muscle cells dying and releasing all their evil humours into the body. And that can be somewhat nephrotoxic. So don't stress out too much. It is normal. I'd have like, talk to your PCP about it, get a kidney function test once and make sure things are things are good. Um, one, one thing to know just so people don't get totally scared is a tiny drop of blood in your urine turns it quite pink. Like, um, if you add a drop to a cup of urine, if you just add a drop of blood to a cup of urine, it's like red, like it's a, it's a very strong dye. So I [01:04:00] think people often freak out more. They're like, oh my God, the toilet bowl is bright red and it's not as much blood as you might think, but it's worth a kidney function test just to make sure there's nothing going on.

Emily: [01:04:11] Okay. Thank you. That's it for us today. Stick with us next week, just in time for Halloween, when we will ask, what's the deal with Living Forever or Perry's title: What's the deal with death?

Perry: [01:04:24] What's the deal with death? Spooky effect.

Emily: [01:04:28] See you next week. Wellness, Actually is produced in association with iHeart media. Our senior producer is Tamar Avishai. Our executive producer at iHeart is Jennifer Bassett. Our theme music is by Eric Deutsch, and our content is for educational purposes only.

Perry: [01:04:46] If you like the show, help other people find us. Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice and help us spread the word about the show. You can follow us on Instagram at pod. And don't forget, we want [01:05:00] to hear from you. Head over to wellness.fm and leave us a question for our mailbag or suggest a topic for a future show.

Emily: [01:05:07] We'll let the influencers have the last word.

Influencer: [01:05:10] So this is my $924 grocery shop trying to eat as organic and clean as possible. Heaps of zucchini, cucumbers. We go through tomatoes like hotcakes, potatoes, the berries I will wash because they're not organic. They're not in season. And the herbs. I'm gonna try and grow a herb garden because I'm over spending money on herbs. Um, beetroot. Others. Oh, these grapes were on sale, so I got two of those. Um and then this yoghurt. I've never tried this one before but it's organic so we'll see. And it's whole milk. See how it goes. Heaps of apples, heaps of plums which is awesome.Some pears, organic ones. Mandarins are insane currently [01:06:00] heaps of sweet potato. And then everyone was obviously having a dig at me for giving them white bread...