Probiotics, cleanses, leaky gut, worms — science or scam? Jessica Wynn digests the truth about your microbiome this Skeptical Sunday!
Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Jessica Wynn!
Your gut is a genuine marvel, with 500 million neurons chattering up the vagus nerve to your brain. But "marvel" got rebranded as "malfunction" the second the wellness industry smelled money. The gut-brain axis is real science; the $62 kombucha is not.
"Scientists discover the sadness bacteria" sells. "We found a correlation we can't explain yet" doesn't. Depressed people do have different gut bacteria — but no one knows which is driving the bus. Correlation isn't causation, a lesson the internet forgets daily.
Those "parasites" in cleanse videos are mucus casts — your product coming back out, shaped like worms. "Leaky gut," "mucoid plaque," rope worms: catch-all diagnoses for being alive. The cleanse creates the problem, then sells you the repair kit. Perfect loop.
The pitch targets women for a reason: IBS hits them twice as often, and medicine spent decades calling their symptoms "just stress." Wellness says "your doctor won't listen, we will." That distrust is earned — but a real grievance doesn't make the $79 capsules work.
The good news is that your microbiome isn't broken, so stop trying to fix it. Eat a wide variety of real, whole and fermented foods, move your body, sleep, manage stress — and take real symptoms to a gastroenterologist, not TikTok. Boring, cheap, and it works.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Jordan Harbinger. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Jordan Harbinger och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
