American Council on Science and Health Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. Just like the body becomes what we eat, the mind becomes what we’re putting in. It is important to listen to stories that not only gives you hope, but also inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast, we’re interviewing experts who will break down the solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. And I promise you, if you listen to this podcast, you’ll not only stay informed, but you’ll also feel more energy. Welcome to great.com talks with.

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Great.com is a philanthropic project where we’re trying to donate 100 percent of our profit towards the most effective co-stars like protecting the rainforest, funding, climate change technology and the topic of today is: in a society with so much information, how can I actually trust to get reliable information? So we’re going to talk about information and science today and to understand more about this. When we, the American Council on Science and Health and the American Council on Science and Health is a nonprofit organization who advocates for reliable information. And our guest here is the medical director of this organization, Charles Dinerstein. Welcome to this interview, did I pronounce it correctly? Close enough for government work. So I guess the tricky part here is to tell what is the truth there? I guess that is what science is at least trying to help us to understand better. So help me see what different forces are there out there who are trying to influence what is the truth on the spectrum? What are we talking about? For which forces?

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Well, the. There is no. Truth to science, I like to think about science in two ways. Science is a verb as in the scientific method, as in being curious, as in exploring things. And I don’t think that any of us would have a problem with that. I think that science has gone a long way towards improving our lives. But science, the noun is where there’s a lot of

yelling and screaming. Science in terms of the facts make a difference because science is predicated on the idea that the facts may change over time. I mean, you can take a classic example. It used to be that the sun revolved around the earth. That was a fact up until Galileo and Copernicus came along and said, well, maybe it’s not such a fact anymore and improved that that situation was different. The same holds true for a lot of the beliefs we have today, let’s talk for a second about air pollution and let me be real clear. We all want clean air.

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There’s not a question about that, but.

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Our science has been able to measure the pollutants in our outside environment, we can do that well and all the regulations pertaining to air pollution have to do with things we can measure. So at two point five pm, 10 of these numbers, these kinds of things are the things we can measure, they’re the things we can regulate. Over time, we’ve seen two things. One is that we’ve discovered that. Our definitions we’re lacking are definitions. The more and more refined over time, so things that we’ve regulated in the past, not necessarily with a problem. More importantly, we spend nearly 90 percent of our time indoors now and the outdoor air has a lot. Lower effect. On our lives then it may have in the past, because we live in buildings that are air conditioned with windows that can’t be opened with heating system, and so a lot of the indoor pollution, the things that we might associate with making us ill, come from things that we would bring in the house, cooking all the fragrances and all the cleaning products we use. Those are things that we could easily say we don’t want to have that would change to the level of quote unquote, pollutants in the air when you look across the world globally, the biggest source of indoor air pollution is the use of wood for cooking. Because India and China have such a large population that skews the numbers in terms of the facts of science, facts, the science, the noun is where a lot of the controversy.

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It takes place.

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And I think you see it today with all the back and forth with covid-19.

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So.

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You’re saying that, help me clarify, what would you say would be the message that you hear?

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Well, I think I think that our message. Is that.

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The facts that we have about science are all subject to change over time. There are best beliefs at the moment and we should take them as the best belief, but we don’t. They’re not immutable laws passed down from the creator or from the God of science. They’re all subject to constant review.

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And concern.

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And so, given that framework, it’s very tough to deal with people that are very dogmatic about it has to be this way. This is what it is, because that’s not in your heart and soul. The nature of what science is really about. Science is a way of explaining. It’s not, it’s not a dogma. When it works, it works very well.

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And so American Council on Science and Health would offer another voice, and in all of the different voices that I’m hearing as an individual American council is helping with that, we offer a voice.

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And I think one of the big differences for us is that our writing staff are all scientists. I include myself as a physician in science. I’m an applied scientist. We’re scientists. We’re not attorneys. We’re not looking for a regulatory agenda to push. We’re just trying to report what we’re seeing in the sciences that we look at. I have a longstanding interest in health. I have a big interest in the areas of frailty and how diseases impact our lives and how these diseases come and go. And so I find the articles and what I think are the cutting edge of science, and I bring them to our readership. I explain new concepts. In science, that weren’t there for me in medical school, let alone for somebody that just had a biology class and in college. So we explain those kinds of things and we share with them articles in the mainstream scientific health literature and share with them what other scientists are writing about and find in it that none of it is all none of it’s conclusive. But it does kind of fill in the gaps of what’s missing. Again, let me give you another example. This last week, Pew Research came out with a study on American opinions about covid-19 in vaccines.

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And they showed in the headline that was picked up by the mainstream media that 60 percent of Americans are now willing to consider taking a covid-19 vaccine, which is up from 40 percent from a few months ago. That was the big headline. But if you spend a few minutes actually reading their entire report, which very few people are going to do. There were a lot of other very interesting things in it, and in fact, probably the most interesting thing from my point of view was that the. The black American community is the most vaccine-hesitant of all the groups that they looked at, and they’re the group that’s probably the greatest risk and that’s going to become a problem in the next few months as we try to roll out vaccination, how are we going to reach into that community that has very legitimate reasons for being hesitant about some offering from the medical community? And get them appropriately vaccinated. That’s the kind of difference you get when you when you look at our writing, we get a little bit farther behind the headlines and share with you some of the science and the understanding behind it that you won’t get from looking. Necessarily on the Internet and Dr Google.

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Dr. Google, if that really helps that example to understand what it is that you’re doing, you’re saying that you have a lot of you have a lot of those scientists who are doing this as a full time work to just, you have?

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Well, I wish there were a lot of people. We have three full time writers that are producing direct content on a daily basis. We have two to three hundred member board of scientific advisors who also contribute articles. So there’s probably 10 or 12 writers that are providing this kind of content over the course of a week.

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We probably would think we probably have five hundred original pieces over the course of a year. Looking at various aspects of science or, again, regulatory policy, nutrition, we try to cover a large range of topics that we think are important to the general public.

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Give me some examples of what would be controversial standpoints where, like people might disagree with what you have actually found from science.

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Ok. I think that. There is. No evidence that organic growing is more nutritious. OK, I pick my words carefully, more nutritious will some people feel that it’s safer. Yes. Am I going to fight with them about it? No, that’s their choice. I understand that. I don’t think that there’s a great deal of evidence to show that it’s far safer. But I recognize that that’s a difference of opinion and it’s their comfort level. That’s fine. But there’s no science to show that it’s a more nutritious version of a tomato than one that’s grown in a different setting, maybe more tasty, but not necessarily more nutritious and then you have to ask, do you want to pay the premium to have an identical food? That that would be one of the things that we would we could wrangle about, but that I think that science stands and says, here’s what.

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They’d show. Again, this whole area of. GMOs and.

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And this is the statistic that I like to say to the same group of people that feel that science backs up the claim that the climate is changing, which it does. It’s the same group that says science says the GMOs are bad, but when you look at the organizations, that science is talking about it. Ninety eight percent of scientists feel that climate change is related to our behavior. Ninety nine percent of scientists believe GMOs are OK. So they’re picking and choosing. What science they want to believe. You’re picking and choosing the science of nouns, not science of verbs. And so I can understand the argument about why certain GMOs would bother them, especially the ones that were created when you use them bacterial and animal vectors to get the DNA into this into the crop, I can understand why they would have some concerns about that, but I don’t think that those concerns have been borne out. I think that the newer techniques using CRISPR. Are going to get around those points and it’s worth looking at whether GMOs have a legitimate place. And in our society today, especially if. If you believe all the science that seems to be coming out about how warming weather will change the content of our products. Then GMOs may be a way to mitigate some of those changes. And I. Again, you don’t have to fully agree with me, but I’d like you to listen to hear the argument, to understand the science about it, so that we can have a conversation so that we don’t talk to one another. And Sloggett. And I think that’s that’s the important part of having that relationship that’s back to that doctor patient. Now, I’m not, I’m not talking past you, not talking past me, we’re talking about what’s important to both of us. We’re looking for the commonality and seeing whether we can go from, you know, that we’re expecting. In terms of explaining it.

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So to summarize, the functions of society are based on policymakers decisions and policymakers decisions are based on the information they have. So you help to provide a bigger picture of the information.

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I guess that could be how we try to get that information to the policymakers. And more importantly, we try to get that information to the public so that they understand how and why these policies are being developed, because all policy tradeoffs. And we tried to be a little bit less agenda driven in terms of what we think the policy should be.

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And thanks for clarifying, I’m sorry if we go for what you would like for people to. When they hear this interview, what would you like people to do after hearing this interview?

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Ok, we have two very simple tasks. First one is to come over to the website and read some of the things that we’re writing about. Come sample what we’re talking about where dogma is and read it, if you like, what we have to say if you find it. Irritating, but at least thought provoking, then the second act is going to always be to help us out in terms of donation. Like all the other nonprofits this year, covid-19 has been a real hit to everybody’s revenue stream. We are a small organization. And so and the preponderance of our finances come from small donors. So you like what we have to say. Consider donation, I probably write. 20 single spaced pages a month, so I figure I’m worth a cup of Starbucks coffee or whatever that costs in terms. So those are the asks, but I think people would find what we write engaging at times and using and always educational.

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How can I tell if I read something?

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If it’s reliable or not, we’ll have to have advice.

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That’s an interesting problem that’s been with us for a long time. Scale is made that. Difficult, you know, it used to be when you lived in a small village, everybody knew the village idiot and you ignored

them because they are nice guys or nice people, but you could ignore them. But in today’s world, that becomes a much more difficult thing to do.

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I take.

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My approach from one of my favorite webcasts, 99 percent invisible to talks about design, and it says, always read the plaque. If you’re looking at a building, always read the plaque that’s affixed to the building, meaning go to your primary source. And that’s our approach. Every one of my articles is sourced to an article in the literature. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can go and look that up. And I think that that’s what makes for a trustworthy institution, but, you know, you got into a real key dilemma in terms of things and the other way to inoculate yourself against that is to read or to look more widely. It’s important to look at the contrary. View and see whether there’s something in there that that’s worthwhile, that has a kernel of truth to it. You know, I rarely come across them. Work where there wasn’t something in there that was interesting or new or different curiosity, maybe the antidote for lack of trust.

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Curiosity would be the antidote for lack of trust. Hmm.

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