When I was growing up, back in the Eighties, charcoal was only really found in art classes and barbeques. More recently, activated charcoal has become a trendy addition to food, drinks and even toothpaste. Activated charcoal is simply regular charcoal that has been heat-treated to increase its surface area and improve the adsorption of toxins. The idea is that this activated charcoal can help detox your body, and in a way, these claims are valid (for a very specific definition of detox). Activated charcoal is often used in overdose and poisoning cases, where it binds to the chemical intoxicant, reducing its absorption into the body. But what about the toothpaste?
Making your own toothpaste has become a new health trend. This is in part due to various well-being fads, but also because of a genuine and rational concern for the environment. Toothpaste tubes have traditionally been non-recyclable, and we get through millions of tubes per year. The UK toothpaste market alone was estimated to be worth £541m in 2019.
A quick Google search shows countless recipes for charcoal or charcoal and bicarbonate toothpaste, but charcoal in toothpaste is nothing new. Historically soot was used to keep teeth clean (which sounds pretty gross, but is probably better than using urine). And because charcoal is a natural product, it avoids any of those nasty artificial chemicals, so must be a good thing, right? Let’s take a closer look.
Toothpaste is something that (most of us) use on a daily basis, but surprisingly few people actually know what we’re putting in our mouths. If we look at your standard tube of toothpaste’s main ingredients, we’ll find some key components.
A standard toothpaste will be water-based and contain a variety of detergents (usually sodium lauryl sulphate or SLS), flavourings, colours, preservatives and humectants. The SLS in toothpaste is what makes it foam, but sensitivity to SLS is becoming more common. If you’re having trouble with your toothpaste, you might want to hunt out one that’s SLS free.
The most important active ingredient is fluoride, usually in the form of sodium fluoride, although you may see sodium monoflurophosphate or stannous fluoride mentioned. Your toothpaste should contain around 1450 ppm fluoride for it to be effective in preventing decay. In addition to this, many toothpastes will have added desensitising agents such as zinc citrate or potassium polyphosphate.
Some form of cleaning agent, usually silica or calcium carbonate, is what actually cleans the teeth. These compounds are mildly abrasive and can compose around 50% of what’s in the tube. Charcoal toothpastes also add charcoal into the mix (obviously). Moreover, many of these toothpastes proudly claim that they’re free from fluoride.
Charcoal is more abrasive than the cleaning agents used in regular toothpaste. The concern is that the routine use of charcoal to brush your teeth will roughen the tooth’s surface, weakening the structure. This weakness, combined with the lack of protection from fluoride, could theoretically lead to a higher risk of decay. By routinely using a toothpaste with a high level of charcoal in it, you could be actively damaging your teeth. This is particularly likely if you have some form of previous damage from acid erosion, toothbrush abrasion (from overbrushing the teeth) or exposed dentine from gum recession.
In a surprising turn of events, most media coverage on charcoal toothpaste has been relativelynegative. Much of the reporting focuses on the lack of evidence for ‘detoxification’ of the mouth or any other part of the body. There is also an awareness of the potentially damaging effect of charcoal on the dentition.
Charcoal toothpaste has gained so much attention that the British Dental Journal published an article about them in 2019 (full disclosure: I write a regular ethics column for the BDJ). The researchers found that only 8% of the charcoal-based toothpastes that were readily available contained fluoride. Many charcoal containing toothpastes claim to be able to whiten the teeth. While the charcoal’s abrasive nature may remove any surface staining from the teeth, it’s not going to change the colour of the underlying tooth. The charcoal may even stain the edges of any white fillings. It was also found that, contrary to the detox claims, charcoal toothpaste did not affect the freshness breath in the long term.
If you’re thinking of making your own toothpaste, for environmental or health reasons, I would urge you to reconsider. Most of the recipes I’ve seen have seen contain just charcoal and a few other ingredients to make it easier to apply to the teeth and taste a little better. This is going to have precisely zero protective effect on your teeth and will ultimately damage them. There are now multiple alternatives on the market, some from big-name brands who are starting to make biodegradable tubes, as well as other smaller brands who make toothpaste tablets. You can now even Terracycle all your oral health products. Whatever you choose, make sure there’s the right quantity of fluoride in the product –1440ppm for an adult, less for children.
It’s a Sin, the TV show written by Russell T. Davies about the early days of the AIDS crisis in the early 80s, is a beautiful piece of television. For me, as a child of the 90s, It’s a Sin does an especially great job of portraying a range of emotions, beliefs and reactions that people living through those early days must have encountered as news of the illness sweeping predominantly through the gay community spread through the media and other sources.
As someone who has a special interest in how we communicate science and how that influences the reactions of people particularly when it comes to their health, I find that information vacuum especially interesting. In those days, of course, you couldn’t Google for information on the new virus that’s causing chaos. Today, during COVID, we see some of the problems caused by the ease of access to information, misinformation and disinformation and how that can lead to belief in conspiracies, yet It’s a Sin perfectly illustrates how a lack of information can also lead to the same belief in those conspiracies, with a monologue from Ritchie – one of the main characters – about how this disease can’t possibly exist because viruses can’t distinguish between sexualities.
In the 2020s, we can also correct our mistakes pretty quickly. Looking at the example of COVID, we now have widespread use of face masks, but you might recall early on in the pandemic, expert advice at the time was against face mask use. We’ve learned more, corrected the advice, and moved on.
When it comes to the HIV pandemic, our last most recent pandemic, it’s clear that correcting mistaken messaging from those early days has been much slower. Still, four decades later, we are left with misinformation and misunderstandings around HIV and AIDS.
So, here are ten myths relating to HIV and AIDS.
Myth 1: HIV and AIDS are synonyms. Truth: HIV and AIDS are related but different.
HIV is the virus. Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) has two known types: HIV-1 and HIV-2. When HIV enters the body it enters cells of the immune system and starts to make copies of itself. It also causes death or damage of those immune cells. If it succeeds in causing the death of a lot of immune cells, it causes an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: AIDS.
Understanding the difference between these two terms is important.
A person with HIV can live a long healthy life with relatively few consequences. Of course, living with HIV is not easy: you must take medications, which may have some side effects, and you must undergo regular testing to make sure your treatment is working. And then there is the stigma. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of stigma for people living with HIV, a lot of it a hangover from how we handled things in those early days. But clinically, if you know your status and have access to medication, living with HIV is relatively straight forward. Many people with HIV will go on to live a long and healthy life.
AIDS, is a serious condition which increases the susceptibility to a wide range of infections and ultimately leads to deaths like those seen in It’s a Sin. Once the immune system is damaged so significantly, even the common cold can be deadly. It’s a Sin showed examples of people developing a rare form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma which causes brown spots or lesions to grow on the skin. Kaposi’s sarcoma is one of the few cancers we know of that is caused by a virus. It’s not caused by HIV, it’s caused by another virus, one that people with AIDS lose the ability to fight off.
Myth 2: you would know if you or someone else had HIV. Truth: most people living with HIV have no symptoms.
Even without treatment HIV infection has a stage called the latency stage. This stage can last a decade or more and in that stage the virus is active and transmissible but it is replicating at a slow pace and hasn’t overwhelmed the system. A person who has HIV in the latency stage feels pretty normal; they have no obvious symptoms.
Myth 3: you would have no indication if you became infected with HIV. Truth: different stages of HIV infection come with mild to moderate symptoms.
There are some things that can indicate HIV presence in the body. Firstly – when a person first encounters the virus, their body recognises the infection and starts to fight it off. In the first few days of infection a person might feel a little under the weather. This is called the acute phase and at this stage a person would have a lot of virus in their system and are very infectious. They might have flu like symptoms. They might feel fine.
Within a few weeks this stage progresses to the latent stage and the symptoms abate. But the longer you live with the virus the more likely you are to start to get little niggly symptoms of problems with your immune system. You might start to get some rashes and joint and muscle aches; you might get a fever or lose some weight. All symptoms that we all regularly encounter – there isn’t really a unique sign that points specifically to HIV infection, but it also isn’t totally invisible either.
Myth 4: you must stay away from people with HIV. Truth: transmission of HIV requires very specific circumstances.
In the early days when we first discovered the virus, we didn’t really know how it was passed on. But we did know other viruses could be passed on by contact or even close proximity, just like COVID.
We now know that the virus is passed on through bodily fluids. But not just any fluids. You can’t catch HIV just from being close to someone living with HIV, but you also can’t catch it by kissing them – even if you exchange saliva, nor can you catch it from sharing drinks or even just touching their blood should you need to help them in a medical emergency.
HIV isn’t an easy infection to pass on. Usually, it requires the contact of a fluid carrying the virus, either with a cut or wound on the skin of another person, or with a mucus membrane like the walls of the vagina or rectum which are thinner and allow the virus to pass through, or of course directly with the blood stream if you are sharing needles or receive blood.
Myth 5: once you’ve been exposed to HIV, there’s nothing you can do but wait and find out if you have the virus. Truth: acting fast post-exposure is important and can be protective.
Although we can’t cure HIV once it’s made itself at home in the body, if you act quickly when you think you might have been exposed there are medical options to help prevent the virus settling in. Post-exposure prophylaxis (or PEP) is medication that is taken every day for 28 days after HIV exposure. It doesn’t always work, and it’s more likely to work the sooner you take it after exposure – ideally within 24 hours and no more than 72 hours but if you think you’ve been exposed it’s an option.
Myth 6: if you have HIV you can never ever have unprotected sex ever again. Truth: risk management relies on communication and information.
The transmission I’ve discussed so far is transmission from someone who is living with untreated HIV, or treated HIV where the viral load isn’t fully under control yet. But these days, the goal of treatment is to get the viral load in the system so low that it is undetectable. We know the virus hides, and it never truly goes away (there are only a couple of known cases where the virus has 100% left the system and those rely on some pretty unusual circumstances) but if we can’t detect it, if it is undetectable, then it is effectively untransmissible.
Engaging in safer sex is always preferable because of the risk of other sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy, but if you’re in a committed relationship with someone or someones you trust then you can all make an informed decision together on how to engage with accurate information on the risk of transmission and personal information of your own circumstances and goals.
Myth 7: condoms or abstinence are the only ways to protect yourself from HIV. Truth: undetectable = untransmissible.
There is medication called pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP which can be taken immediately before sexual contact if you are at risk. Currentlyin England this is mainly available if your sexual partner is living with HIV but there is a trial underway that makes the medication available for people who might have sex that is at greater risk of transmission. Again, this has no effect on other sexually transmitted infections so you probably still want to use a barrier method of protection.
Myth 8: it only affects gay people. Truth: risk varies based on the type of sex, not sexuality.
There are some sexual activities that are at greater risk for HIV transmission if one of the parties carries the virus. That includes penis-in-anus sex which means that the highest risk group is men who have sex with men but penis-in-anus sex isn’t exclusive to men who have sex with men, nor do all men who have sex with men take part in this particular type of sex. Plenty of women are diagnosed with HIV infection each year and penis-in-vagina sex does carry risk of transmission. Sex between two women has the lowest risk, though there have been a few instances of infection this way recorded too.
Myth 9: people with HIV can’t have children by pregnancy. Truth: risk of transmission between father and mother, and mother and baby can be managed medically.
Although there is a transmission either between partners or from mother to infant at every stage of child bearing: conception, pregnancy, child birth and breast-feeding, we are now able to manage this medically to prevent transmission either between partners or from mother to child.
Myth 10: it’s better if I just don’t think about it. Truth: knowing your HIV status can save lives.
Best-case scenario, should you contract HIV, is that you know about it, and you know about it early. HIV is not a death sentence if you know you have it. It is treatable. With treatment your risk of transmission to others is hugely reduced. Decades of research have given us good medical options that mean many people living with HIV have long, healthy, happy lives.
There’s always more we can do, especially to help vulnerable or marginalised groups but we’re in a strong place scientifically. The trick is to be informed and to get tested regularly.
Yesterday, news broke of a new clinical trial targeted at people who were overdue their cervical screening for cervical cancer.
The trial itself is fantastic. It is important and it is, as Dr Anita Lim, from King’s College London who is leading the trial puts it, a “game-changer”. However, the media coverage of this important trial leaves a lot to be desired.
The trial, funded by North Central and East London Cancer Alliance and supported by the NHS, is targeting people in parts of London who are behind on their cervical screening schedule. The goal is to provide access to screening for people who might otherwise miss it, for the varied reasons people delay, put off or otherwise miss their regular screening appointments. People who miss their screening opportunities are at a greater risk of developing cervical cancer than those who undergo their screening on schedule.
31,000 people will take part in this study, which involves providing participants (either through the post or from a GP practice) with an at-home swab, which they’ll then send off by post to be examined for the presence of a virus called HPV.
HPV and cervical cancer
Cervical cancer is almost always caused by infection with a virus called human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV is really common: most sexually active adults will encounter it in their lifetimes, some more than once. There are over 100 different types of HPV, of which 14 are linked to an increased risk of cancer. HPV spreads through genital contact including through the sharing of sex toys, or vaginal, anal or oral sex. HPV isn’t treatable, but in most cases, it doesn’t cause any problems and will clear up on its own within two years.
Simply having the virus does not mean you will develop cancer, but it does increase your risk of certain cancers. Think of how most floods might be caused by a leak, but not every leak causes a flood. The link is strong enough that testing for the presence of HPV can be a reliable screening tool to indicate the need for follow up testing to help prevent cervical cancer. If testing via cervical screening (either from a swab or from a smear) indicates that you have one of the high-risk for cancer types of HPV, further testing can be done.
Currently, in the UK, if you are due to undergo cervical screening you will be invited to make an appointment for a cervical smear test. There are some reasons why you might not be automatically invited for a cervical smear test when needed, including in some instances if you are trans. So, if you think you should be having a cervical smear test and have not been invited for an appointment you should contact your GP practice. You should have cervical cancer screening if you have a cervix and are between the ages of 25 and 64.
A cervical smear test is a test where a sample of cells is taken directly from the cervix and sent off to a lab. In the lab, the sample is tested for the presence of HPV and, if the person is at risk for cervical cancer based on that test, the cells are examined under the microscope for changes that might indicate early signs of cancer.
HPV swabs
Taking a swab of the vagina is another way to test for HPV. Similar to the swabs we take for COVID-19, in this case a swab is run along the inside of the vaginal tract and sent to a lab for testing. If the person is considered at risk for cervical cancer, they will be invited for further tests to identify any cell changes that might indicate early signs of cancer. Public Health England suggests that self-testing for HPV using swabs might be an option for non-attenders but that the implementation of this requires assessing. That’s the purpose of this trial.
Swabs aren’t smears
So, the swabs aren’t smears, but who cares? As long as people get tested, what does it matter what we call it?
“Smear tests: Women to trial ‘do-it-at-home’ kits for NHS” continuing to say that “About 31,000 women in London are being offered “do-it-at-home” tests to check for early warnings of cervical cancer, as part of an NHS trial.”
There are consequences to this messaging. Firstly, it gives the impression that what is to be conducted at home is a smear test, which this home testing isn’t. Smear tests cannot be conducted from home – they require cells to be scraped from the cervix, and it isn’t very easy to find your own cervix, nor is it easy to scrape cells from a cervix if you haven’t been trained to do it. It might not seem an important distinction – but examining those cells is how you tell if you have any pre-cancerous changes to those cells.
Detecting HPV in the vagina using a swab can tell you if you’re at risk of developing cervical cancer, but not whether you actually have any pre-cancerous changes. If people administering these tests are led to believe either that it’s the equivalent to a smear test or that it is able to detect cancer, what happens when they get a “positive” result? Do they then believe they have cancer? What are the potential consequences to that misunderstanding? At the very least we risk putting people under undue stress, anxiety and worry as they try to understand the result.
In reality, if you get a positive HPV swab result, it does not mean you have cancer, nor does it mean you will definitely get cancer. It just means there’s an increased risk, so you should get a smear test done as soon as possible.
There are other issues with the messaging too: if, as a result of these stories, people are led to believe that a cervical smear is so simple it can be self-administered from the comfort of your own home, there is a risk that people who would usually get their smear on time, but find it inconvenient and uncomfortable, instead decide to wait until the “home-smear” is available.
Might some people postpone their smear because they mistakenly believe self-testing is right around the corner? I hope not, but we do already know that there are lots of factors that play into delaying screening and I think it’s important to keep screening messaging accurate in order to prevent contributing to this.
This testing isn’t being made available for everyone – it’s currently being proposed as a solution specifically for people who are unable or unwilling to get a smear test. It is to catch the “non-attenders” who might otherwise go unscreened.
That is also important information. Many people are aware that there are issues of medical bias when it comes to health concerns that predominantly affect women, and this coverage has triggered concerns that this is a sign that the NHS is undermining women’s health care by transitioning to a screening option that relies on self-administration. This is absolutely not the case, there are no plans for self-administration for screening of cervical cancer to become the routine norm.
This is a contingency plan; a way to screen people who are not currently getting screened for cervical cancer.
A lot of summer vacations in 2021 seem very likely to be UK-based, as holidaymakers are thought likely to be put off by 10-day quarantines in a hotel upon their return from a trip abroad.
In case you’re wondering whether The Skeptic has been hijacked by Blackpool tourist board, I’ll admit also that Blackpool has suffered in recent years – or decades – and that a visit to the town can also give the visitor the opportunity to watch topless men in cowboy hats fight drunkenly in the street, outside seedier bars in parts of town that have seen better days.
The redevelopment of Blackpool has therefore been a perennial topic ever since its heyday, and the most recent plans are a doozy: a £300m scheme featuring a Chariots of the Gods Entertainment Park.
Chariots of the Gods? (it lost its question mark in later editions) is a 1968 book by Swiss author Erich von Däniken, which claimed that ancient civilisations were visited by and influenced by alien visitors, who were responsible for ancient monuments like the Easter Island Moʻai, the Egyptian Pyramids and Stonehenge. Supposedly these interstellar visitors also inspired ancient artworks and encounters with the aliens formed the basis of many religions.
If these ideas are strangely familiar to you, but you’ve not read the book, that’s because Chariots of the Gods was – and remains – hugely influential, as can be seen in everything from fictional TV shows like The X Files to… fictional TV shows like Ancient Aliens, plus the most annoying scene in Prometheus and the whole of the Stargate franchise.
It is also completely and utterly debunked. The arguments within Chariots of the Gods? hinge on incredulity that ancient civilisations were capable of such advanced technological and engineering feats. Adherents to this theory claim that it was impossible to construct the Egyptian Pyramids using contemporary building methods, when in fact the methods were described in Egyptian texts, and some of the support structures are even preserved at the pyramid at Meidum. Von Däniken also claims that these monuments appear suddenly and without explanation, when there is in fact a carefully documented evolution of the tombs, monuments and pyramids constructed over the course of 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian civilization. Sudden, it was not.
These aliens must have been pretty sketchy cartographers, which is a surprise considering they managed to travel trillions of miles to get here in the first place.
There’s also a lot of outright nonsense, like the suggestion that the Piri Reis map couldn’t have been created without being able to see the Earth from space. This is a very peculiar claim as although it is undoubtedly an impressive map for the time, large parts of the map don’t look all that like the land would from space, including a North American coastline that little resembles reality. These aliens must have been pretty sketchy cartographers, which is a surprise considering they managed to travel trillions of miles to get here in the first place.
Beyond being bluntly incorrect, this nonsense is problematic for several reasons. As long ago as 1975, academics HE Legrand and Wayne E Boese were concerned that their students were more interested in pseudoscientific fabrications filled with exciting, easy answers, rather than the “dry and cautious language of scholars, rarely…noticed by the layman”:
“From the perspective of von Daniken, all “mysteries” of the past are solved, all religion is clarified, and the inspiration for much of ancient art, architecture, and mythology is revealed by referring to visitors from outer space.”
Expert opinion gathered through thousands of hours of painstaking research is thrown aside for easy answers, and a society that prefers exciting fictions to cautious, dry evidence is probably not going down a good path.
A belief in these easy answers – aliens did it – has another problem. We are not giving sufficient credit to the skills of our ancestors, in an act of chronological snobbery:
“The presumption, inherited from the Enlightenment and given a scientific gloss by Darwinism, is that our technological sophistication somehow indicates our superior position in the eternal upward climb from barbarism. We today are superior technologically, scientifically, and—skipping over a number of premises—therefore morally.”
Given that humans have been anatomically modern for 300,000 years and behaviourally modern for perhaps 50,000 years, this is obviously nonsense. People were not stupid just because they lived in the past – or in a different country. This latter point is important with regard to Chariots of the Gods?, which in particular does not give credit to our forebears from outside the Greco-Roman world. Put more bluntly, these theories are pretty racist.
To be charitable for a moment, Chariots of the Gods? does briefly mention Stonehenge as one possible alien-influenced construction in Europe, among endless speculation about Egyptian, South American and Australian monuments. Alien influence is not suggested as the provenance of Classical Greek or Roman edifices, however, as Professor Chris Riedel notes:
“That’s what the ancient aliens theory does: it discredits the origins of civilizations, and almost entirely of non-white civilizations. People may suggest Stonehenge was built by aliens – but do the[y] suggest the Roman Forum or Parthenon were? No.”
Questions are raised by von Däniken as to how the creators of the Nazca Lines in Peru could – 2,000 years ago – form images that are so striking from the air, speculating that they are perhaps landing strips for alien spacecraft. Curiously, however, he saw no reason to doubt that Greek polymath Eratosthenes, in approximately the same era, found a way to measure the Earth’s circumference to 3% of the true value.
Such beliefs are not without consequence: pseudoscientific archaeological claims about Native American history, for example, were used to justify forced migration and the Trail of Tears in 19th Century America.
As palaeontologist Julien Benoit notes on these pseudoscientific beliefs:
“What’s the harm? Actually, there is great harm: firstly, these people try to prove their theories by travelling the world and desecrating ancient artefacts. Secondly, they perpetuate and give air to the racist notion that only Europeans – white people – ever were and ever will be capable of such architectural feats.”
It is a widely held view among academics that the ancient aliens theory is racist in practice, but is this enough to condemn Chariots of the Gods? and von Däniken himself?
Consider these quotes from von Däniken’s 1979 follow-up, Signs of the Gods:
“The evolutionists say that man descends from monkeys. Yet who has ever seen a white monkey? Or a dark ape with curly hair such as the black race has?”
“Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?”
The whole concept is steeped in racism, from the author’s own words, to how these concepts play out in the real world. Even Wilhelm Utermann, the German language editor of Chariots of the Gods, was a contributor to a Nazi newspaper in the 1940s.
What, then for Blackpool?
I am all in favour of any redevelopment of a fine town and tourist destination, but it is very hard to be enthusiastic about plans that carry quite so much baggage.
If the compulsory purchase plans are successful and the Chariots of the Gods park goes ahead, Blackpool Council might wish to take heed of the ultimate fate of Jungfrau Park in Switzerland. Another ancient aliens theme park, designed by Erich von Däniken himself, it was opened in 2003 and closed, due to lack of visitors and financial difficulties, just three years later.
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Whenever I’m working, or doing household chores, or popping to the shop or out for a run, it’s rare to see me without earphones in, listening to people talking about things.
It’s a medium I love, and one I’ve quite a lot of experience in: idly totting up shows the other day, I realised I’ve recorded nearly 500 shows, over a span of 12 years. In that time, podcasting has changed a lot. In 2009, it was something niche enough that you had to explain to people what a podcast was; now having a podcast has passed into being a cliché, especially for white guys like me.
That explosion in popularity over the last decade has seen something of a gold rush, as people who would otherwise have sought an audience through more mainstream publications set up their own show – hello Alec Baldwin, Megan Markle and Prince Harry – while mainstream publishers themselves arrived into podcast-land and declared it theirs faster than a 19th century British general stepping off a boat in India. Where once the iTunes podcasting charts were filled with independent shows by makers you’ve never heard of, recording in bedrooms on cheap headsets, the charts now are filled with podcasts from the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times and NPR.
With any gold rush, what you really need is some gold. For a long time, that gold when it came to podcasts was simply ears – the number of people you could reach, and how many iTunes stars you could persuade them to give you as a rating. When you accumulated enough stars… well, nothing happened. Monetisation was a long way off – at best, you could sell them a T Shirt or a mug. But then, in 2013, Patreon came along and allowed listeners to make small micropayments to finance the shows they love (and, indeed, the publications they love – check out patreon.com/theskeptic if you’re enjoying our work!).
Patreon isn’t the only source of income for podcasts – as avid listeners will be aware, running ads on podcasts has become commonplace. These come in several different formats: the pre- and post- ad, where a clip of audio is inserted at the beginning or end of the podcast; the mid-show ad, where your podcast stops for a moment and plays an audio clip; and the copy-read ad, where your favourite podcast hosts stop talking about the thing you like them talking about, and start talking about products and services instead.
A necessary evil
To be clear, this isn’t an anti-advertising article: I’m someone who spends a lot of time reading about and talking about how the traditional media works, and how it is (just about) financed, so I understand that ads are often a necessary evil, and equally keeping the lights on is a very reasonable thing for podcasts to do. Some people make their living doing podcasts, and advertising I’m sure is a decent chunk of that. I get it. I personally find ads in podcasts annoying, but I also find ads annoying when I watch TV, and when I read newspapers, but in all cases I’m willing to accept it as a necessary trade off to get access to the content I’m interested in.
Where things get more ethically dubious, as I’ve covered elsewhere, is when the article you spent time reading was actually provided by a commercial company rather than written and edited by journalists – that’s native advertising. Native advertising undermines the trust you place in your newspaper, because you can no longer be sure whether something was published because it is a genuine story, or because a company paid the paper to pretend it is a real story.
In my opinion, copy-read ads are the native advertising of the podcast world, and they get way too little scrutiny.
I was recently listening to an episode of Pod Save America, from Crooked Media. It’s a political show in which several former staffers in the Obama administration talk through the latest political news from the US. Under Trump, there was always a lot to talk about, and I’ve been a regular listener for a few years. I’ve therefore lost count of the number of times their political analysis would pause for a moment for them to talk about the underwear brand they’re wearing, or where they got their mattress from. It’s incredibly jarring, because these people who were just talking authoritatively and informedly about how the American political system works and where it is breaking down are now slipping straight into infomercial mode, reading ad copy about how wonderful a company paid them to say it is.
It’s possible they really believe what they’re saying. It’s entirely possible that they really do eat Hello Fresh every night, and sleep soundly on a Casper mattress, and maybe they really do hate going to the post office and so find Stamps.com a godsend with its free digital scale. I’ve honestly no idea what their opinions on those services are, because it is a fact they’re paid to say they’re great. That transition from trusted expert to door-to-door salesperson is jarring, and it’s bad enough when they’re promoting things that are uncontroversial, like mattresses… but it doesn’t stop there.
Magic spoons and bee supplements
“Magic Spoon cereal is high-protein, low-sugar, keto-friendly, gluten-free and GMO-free” Pod Save America told me recently, before talking at length about how great this cereal is and how it comes in so many flavours. In doing so, they joined the ranks of influencers who rave about Magic Spoon for money, including testimonials on the Magic Spoon website from Kelly Leveque, the holistic nutritionist and wellness expert; John Durant, author of the Paleo Manifesto; and Katie Wells, founder of WellnessMama.com. As they promote the cereal, there’s no question from Pod Save America’s hosts about whether it’s actually a good thing that the cereal is GMO-free, or whether it’s so important for people to eat gluten-free. In the place of such scrutiny, we hear personal experiences about the product – because that’s what the advertisers have paid to for the hosts to share. I imagine a personal experience like “anti-GMO is an anti-science position, and you don’t need to be gluten-free unless you have coeliac disease” is not what the advertiser is looking for, and sharing it would mean the end of that advertising partnership.
The show regularly reads ads for the Noom dietary program, which claims to use psychology-based evaluation to determine the right diet for you. It’s a weight-tracking app that costs $25 per month. The hosts say they love it. They also tell us they love their Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee, the organic drink that supports your immune system.
And boy do they love to tell you about Athletic Greens, your “Daily Dose of Nutritional Insurance”, which are “paleo and keto friendly” supplements designed to “support immunity, energy, digestion and recovery”. They are apparently “filled with superfood complex including adaptogens and antioxidants”, plus “more than 75 vitamins and minerals”. Are these products actually good for you and worth buying? Your favourite podcast hosts are willing to say yes to those questions, for money, so that should put your mind at rest enough to spend £90 on a 30 day supply… or you could use the discount code for 10% off your first purchase that’s the discount code for 10% of your first purchase.
On a recent show, I heard an ad for Beekeepers Naturals, during which the hosts told us, “Beekeepers Naturals is on a mission to reinvent your medicine cabinet with clean remedies that actually work. It naturally supports immune health and contains powerful antioxidants making it your daily dose of defence when it comes to naturally supporting your immune system”. It got worse, the hosts went on to explain that Beekeepers Naturals also sell “B LXR Brain Fuel”, which is “a productivity shot that supports clear thinking, with science-backed adaptogens”.
Clean remedies? Naturally supporting your immune system? Brain Fuel? This is the language of Goop and Infowars, and it’s coming to you directly from the voices you trust and have affinity for.
Beekeepers are a supplement company who sell products like the $75 “Beegan Pharmacy Kit” (note, that’s Beegan, not ‘vegan’ – their products are not vegan, merely associating with the goodwill their target market has towards veganism), which includes some superfood honey, a throat spray, and their brain force plus – sorry B LXR Brain Fuel. They market that with the claim “Fight jetlag, defend your immune system, and get energised”.
They sell an Immune Rescue Kit for $80, and a Family Immune Support Essentials pack for $83 which includes four throat sprays (which the founder of Beekeepers Naturals, Carly Stein, told Business Insider can be used to “prevent any sort of illness or recover when you have a sore throat, cold, or the flu”) and a bottle of cough syrup. The sprays contain bee propolis – a kind of waxy resin created by bees. There’s no good evidence it has the health benefits claimed by the company, as best as I can see – certainly not for being able to “fight jetlag”, or “support clear thinking”, whatever that means.
This is wellness nonsense – mountains of it, entire Goops of it – promoted to you by the very people you listen to regularly and trust.
Undermining credibility
This is an issue, I believe, that all podcasts who run copy-read ads need to think long and hard about, and it isn’t just reserved for the claims which are obviously pseudoscientific. Some of the most popular skeptical podcasts out there today aim to train their listeners to think critically, and by extension those hosts become people their listeners trust and respect, people whose word listeners are inclined to believe. Those shows will transition directly from sharing their expert opinion on an issue of science or skepticism, to, in the very next breath, telling their audience how amazing their investment-tracking app is or how life-changing their new mattress has been. The ethical concerns here should be pretty clear, and the only thing clouding them is that seductive income stream.
Full disclosure here, because I don’t want to be a hypocrite: I regularly appear on God Awful Movies, a podcast that runs copy-read ads, and I take part in those ad reads. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about, as it’s a show I dearly love doing, and I came to the conclusion that I feel comfortable with their ads, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the show vets their ads for pseudoscience, and doesn’t take ads that are questionable – they even run potential advertisers past Dr Alice Howarth, Deputy Editor of The Skeptic, for her opinion on the science. When in doubt, they refuse the ad.
Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently, their copy-read ads are always, 100% of the time, presented in sketches and skits. Partly that’s because it’s more interesting to listen to a comedy bit than it is to sit through someone giving you an opinion they’ve been paid to pretend to have, but it also enforces the barrier between editorial and commercial. Ads are read by characters the people on the show play, and not the real people. It’s clear to all that the opinions expressed in the ads are part of a script, because we all recognise and inherently understand that sketches are scripted; that’s not necessarily the case for those ad reads on Pod Save America. When I’m on God Awful Movies, they go out of their way to make the line clear between the times I’m giving my opinion and the bits where I’m playing a character in a sketch they wrote.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution, or that there even is a perfect solution here, but I do think it’s something podcasters need to give some serious thought to – especially if their aim is to educate their audience and to encourage critical thinking. It’s hard to do that while segueing into an untrue story about how wonderful your new toothbrush is. At the very least, all podcasters need to have a strict vetting process on who they advertise, and what they’re being paid to say they believe.
Right now, podcast advertising is an area that’s less than a decade old, and the advertising offers often end up being pitched to people who started a show in their bedrooms because they were passionate about something, and an audience found them. Even the most worldly of podcaster in that situation might not be fully equipped to understand when and how to push back against the demands of their advertisers.
But if podcasters who care about their integrity set clearer lines, they have the opportunity to shape the rules and norms of podcast advertising. Without those clear lines, the advertisers will take as much as they can, because that’s what advertising does – the value, for them, is in the hosts’ reputation, and voice, and the trust they’ve built with their listeners.
If those hosts don’t work hard to protect and preserve the trust of their audiences, nobody else will. When it’s gone, it’s gone… and even the advertisers won’t want them any more.
In his now-classic 2016 book on the use of science denial as a political weapon, ‘Lies, Incorporated’, American journalist Ari Rabin-Havt stresses the role of denialism as a cue for inaction: as long as there is uncertainty, and as long as “the science is not really settled”, there is “no reason” to act against, say, climate change, second-hand smoking or – bringing the issue closer to our present day – COVID-19. After all, what do we really know about those dastardly lockdowns anyway? Wouldn’t it be wiser to let people carry on as usual until we have more information, so we don’t cripple the economy for nothing?
The answer, of course, is no – as soon as it became clear that the virus is transmitted via saliva and mucus droplets, things like masks and social distancing become no-brainers. However, as Rabin-Havt aptly shows, the main goal of the denial-monger is not to be right: what they actually want is to stop us from acting, or, more to the point, to stop the government from taking action to regulate anything. Keeping the controversy alive preserves the status-quo. Nobody wants to be unduly harsh under uncertainty. Let’s just stop and wait.
About the role of scientific denialism and even outright lying about science in the United States during the last decade, Rabin-Havt wrote in his book that “our democracy has been hacked, manipulated by political practitioners who recognise that as long as there is no truth, there can be no progress”. This equation between denial and public policy paralysis seems to hold quite well in several fields (here in Brazil, for instance, denial of rampant deforestation in the Amazon keeps the destruction going unpunished), but the current pandemic has highlighted at least one field in which denial seems to equate with calls for action: health. More precisely, the use of unproven or useless treatments for a variety of health conditions.
The Brazilian government’s love affair with hydroxychloroquine has been noted all over the world, but the association between denial of evidence and action in healthcare goes beyond the present crisis. The “what’s the harm” argument so often used by proponents of alternative therapies can be construed as a form of proactive denialism.
Doctors expect – and are expected – to treat people. That means caring for them, giving advice, and of course, prescribing treatments. With time, prescribing took on more and more prominence, and so some patients came to feel cheated if they left the doctor´s office without a prescription for a pill or treatment. This over medicalisation is not exclusive to mainstream medicine, of course: it is a main component of alternative medicine, in the form of sugar pills or healing energy. But the important take-home for the patient is that the doctor / healthcare provider / psychic healer is actually ‘doing’ something.
If the doctor just sends us home, and tells us to get some rest and drink plenty of fluids, we feel frustrated… and so does the doctor. They also want to ‘do’ something. They feel powerless if they don’t. Unfortunately, this can lead us to widespread use of all sorts of useless health interventions and pills. This became clear throughout the pandemic with the hydroxychloroquine hype – doctors felt better prescribing it, just in case. They didn’t want to be held responsible for omission in case the treatment proved to work.
Surprisingly, the notion that it could harm the patient didn’t seem to cross their minds. The same happens with alternative medicine. And even when skeptics try to explain that these practices do not work, there are plenty of people to point out that even if it’s just a placebo, what’s the harm? The worst that could happen is nothing.
Sadly, that´s not true. The worst that could happen is death, and it happens more often than most people think. Several studiesshow thatuse of alternative medicinesincrease risks of complication and death. Edzard Ernst, in his book ‘More Harm Than Good’, states some examples: alternative medicine has the potential to actually kill diabetic patients, advice given to asthma patients by chiropractors has the potential to do serious harm, and anthroposophic doctors often advise patients not to get vaccinated, and can cause serious public health crises, such as measles outbreaks. As we are seeing right now especially, anti-vaccine advice can have serious consequences.
Studies published in JAMA Oncology also show increased risk of death for cancer patients who use alternative medicine, usually because they abandon, totally or even partially, regular treatment.
Unproven and disproven medical treatments for COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, nitazoxanide have been widely prescribed in Brazil during the pandemic, because doctors want to prescribe something, and end up prescribing anything. And they probably truly believe that if it does not help, at least it will do no harm.
Just as in the general case of alternative medicine, it’s not true. These drugs have the potential to harm the patient directly, because of side effects, and indirectly, for creating an illusion of safety. The person is medicated, and feels safe to meet with family, forgets about masking and other preventive measures.
All in all, being proactive can be a good thing. But doing nothing is better than doing something stupid. It’s even an old trope in medical wisdom: first of all, do no harm. That’s the real “traditional knowledge” we need right now.
To understand what happened at the Capitol in Washington on the 6th of January, I need to tell a story that starts even before the November 3rd election. As the election results came in, and it started to become clear that Biden would be the 46th President of the USA, the narrative of the conservative sphere had already been primed with a simple belief: that Donald Trump won the election and that any results that disagreed were proof that the election was stolen. What’s more, this fraud would be so evident and undeniable that the courts would immediately grant Trump his rightful win, and the Democrats would be shown to be the corrupt party Trump’s supporters knew for sure that they were.
The seeds of this conspiracy narrative were visible to all who knew where to look – they were present in the talking points of the Trump campaign, in repeatedly emphasising how untrustworthy the mail-in ballots were, and in rushing to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat with conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett, a mere month after Bader Ginsburg’s death.
That was the narrative in many conservative spaces, including from conservative twitter personalities such as Candace Ownes and Charlie Kirk, senators like Ted Cruz and Ron Paul, and news networks such as OAN and NewsMax: that the election was stolen, the proof is just about to come out, and the courts would confirm Trump’s win. This belief was characterised by crowds changing “Stop the Steal”, which soon became a popular hashtag.
Notably, not all conservative media was in lockstep with this narrative: Fox News, equal parts cheerleaders and bulldogs for the Trump regime, officially recognised Biden’s victory… but even then, many of their hosts such as Lous Dobb, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo pushed #Stopthesteal narratives to spread false accusations of voter fraud.
It’s important to remember that the Republican party essentially fracturated itself on this question: some were focused on pushing Trump’s narrative of election stealing, while others backed Biden’s legitime win. For the most part, the party decided to stay silent – a silence that can perhaps be attributed to the imminent Georgia Senatorial run-off elections, which would crucially decide which party would have a majority in the Senate. The Republicans wagered those vital races were much more likely winnable with Trump’s support.
This perhaps should not have been a surprise: conspiracy theories and their believers often attempt to deal with reality by changing it. In this way, real events are transformed and misrepresented to suit what the conspiracy theorists want, but sometimes events are too stubborn to be changed, and they pop the conspiracists’ bubble. In this case, the believers’ narrative depended on Trump’s victory being confirmed; when, on December 14th, Biden was confirmed by the electoral college as the President of the United States, that narrative was broken.
Biden’s confirmation left an entire group of people adrift; failed by the media they trust, the personalities they follow, and the politicians they adore. Despite the big build up, #Stopthesteal didn’t happen. Instead of shifting back to reality, and being faced with the need to process and understand why they lost, the coalition of conspiracy theorists found a new date to look forward to, guided once again by Trump: the electoral vote count, on January 6th. This obviously overlooked the fact that the count is just the confirmation of the results, a mere formality; the election was already over.
From December 14th to January 6th, the biggest names in the conservative sphere, including the then-President themself, were echoing and amplifying a single narrative: the 6th was the day when the steal would be over and Trump would be reelected. All people had to do was to appear in Washington DC to show that they were there, to support their President. Some promised that on January 6th the Republican senators would have time to show the evidence of fraud, prompting a recount which would give the victory to Trump.
During this period, the Democrats won the Georgia run-off elections, taking a slim Senate majority. At this point, the narrative of the 6th shifted a little, refocusing on forcing the election to be decided not by the election results, by a system of electors, where each state would get one vote as a result of the irregularities… which believers were confident would lead to Trump winning. This plan found little support in the majority of the Republican party, who were already preparing for the transition of power, but who mostly stayed silent to avoid angering Trump or the passionate conspiracy theorists in his base.
When the day of reckoning arrived on January 6th, Trump addressed the huge crowd, alongside other guest speakers. Repeatedly, speakers reinforced that the decision to be taken by Congress that day was key for the future of the US (even though there was no decision to be taken – the count was a formality), if only the Vice President, Mike Pence, and the other senators play their part. The speakers at the event, including Trump, knew that wasn’t going to happen – they’d been told as much by Mike Pence.
For weeks, the people who came to gather in Washington had been repeatedly told that the election was stolen, that the wrong would be corrected, and that Trump would become president. They had been told that the 6th was their last chance to save America from Biden, who they had been told was an evil “globalist communist” that was determined to destroy their country. Then Trump told them he would be with them for their march on the Capitol, and that Mike Pence had refused to contest the election results.
So, what exactly was supposed to happen? An entire mass of people persuaded of the false belief that the election was stolen, and that it would lead to the end of their nation, along with – in their eyes – the best president they ever had. Agitated for weeks with stories and narratives reinforcing this belief, what were they supposed to do? Go back to their homes and allow the ‘evil’ to win? Let the steal be completed?
For many in the crowd, they did the most logical thing for the position they had been led into: they marched to the big symbol of DC, the Capitol, and stormed the building. While the events of the invasion have been amply covered elsewhere, it is worth looking at what these people did once they got into the Capitol. Some stormed the offices of political figures they didn’t like, to smear or even steal items of supposed important information. Some tried to locate specific politicians to arrest. These are actions doubtlessly driven by conservative media and conspiracy theorist media, which had repeatedly built the narrative that dozens of Democrats were criminals.
The rioters who stormed the Capitol had no stable plan or clear objective, and took the centre of democracy in America – just like they had been told to do, by the figures they trust and the media they followed. “We the people” had shown up in force to Congress… yet the stealing didn’t stop, and Trump didn’t get to be President. Once again, the bubble in which they lived came crashing against reality.
That was January 6th. Looking back, it was inevitable something would happen. The narratives driven by the misinformation which had been pushed for months all came to a head the only way it ever could have. But though the 6th has come and gone, the beliefs that led to that day are still out there. Biden, to them, is still an unlawful president who took power by a coup and stole the election from them. The conservative media has never really de-escalated this narrative; instead, they’ve re-written history to pretend they were never part of building it, and effect an outrage whenever they are accused of any responsibility.
The forces that made January 6th inevitable are still around, and all it will take is another point of focus for it to explode again.
Back when it wasn’t politically-incorrect to have a ‘village idiot’, there was a village idiot.
People would gather to watch their local twerp being offered either an old penny (which was quite large) or an old thrupenny (which was smaller). The halfwit would take the larger coin every time. What a fool!
One day, a passer-by asked: “Why don’t you take the thrupenny? It’s worth more!” To which the simpleton replied: “How often do you think they’d offer me free money if I did that?”
The meaning of the apocryphal story is clear – the ‘fool’ was cleverer than the delighted dullards he regularly entertained. He had intelligently calculated the value of his trick.
Calculating value is a beneficial ability and, according to all the –ologists, it’s probably something we do naturally. We have an idea what things are worth and we regularly exchange them. We reciprocate.
Like-for-like is easy – you give me one kilo of flour and I’ll give you one kilo back next week when you have none & I’ve made extra. But we can do it with other stuff too. Things can be more valuable because they’re more potent or concentrated, when they’re more difficult to collect, when there has been risk associated with their acquisition, when there has been a manufacturing effort invested in them …
The evolutionary benefit of social animals being able to calculate value is clear. We live in social networks where we support others in their hard times and they support us in ours. Freeloaders could vampirise the whole system if we didn’t have a mental note of who owes what and how much. So you’ll probably invest a nominal stake while opening a relationship with an untested human. But you won’t continue to give if your investment isn’t repaid. In the words of the Bard*: “We won’t get fooled again”.
People are also able to use ‘tokens’, objects that are symbols used to request specific rewards.
And so can apes and primates.
Studies that demonstrate this have been in the lab, so their validity could be challenged. But what if there were a population of primates who had learned the use of tokens and also had a concept of a scale of value, this time in the wild?
A fascinating study by Leca, Gunst, Gardiner and Wandia, published by the Royal Society comes close. A group of long-tailed macaques at Uluwatu Temple in Bali, Indonesia are free-ranging animals accustomed to humans. For a long time, it has been observed that they steal items and barter them back again for food.
This study goes beyond the already-known anecdotes to quantify the behaviours and the demographics of the individuals exhibiting them. This can “provide insights into the cognitive underpinnings of economic behaviour”.
I was very interested in the fact that the stolen tokens which had a higher value for humans eg. a mobile phone as opposed to a flip-flop, were traded for food that carried a higher value to the macaques (bear in mind that you don’t get your iPhone back until you accept their terms.)
The study importantly also revealed that success came with age. Older individuals were both better than younger ones at acquiring human belongings to, er, ‘borrow’ in the first place, and also at preferentially selecting those higher value items. So this is a learned skill.
The macaques understood the advantage of conducting the process near an experimenter or one of the Temple staff – somebody who knew the rules, in other words. They also returned items in good condition having, one supposes, learned the lesson that a dead iPhone is no better than a paperweight.
Back to people: we don’t just attempt to exchanges with people, but with god/s too. What other sense does a sacrifice make? Gods own everything, so you can’t give them anything other than your own deprivation; whether that deprivation is a tax to the temple, your own self-restraint from pleasure, or the forfeiture of an item that you would otherwise find useful.
This is your opening move in what you hope will be a transactional relationship. Maintaining faith necessarily involves some conceptual gymnastics when the reward from your God(s) of choice doesn’t appear.
At least when you trade with monkeys, they seem to know the rules.
* Pete Townsend, of course. Although other bards include David Bowie, Roger Waters and David Gilmour.
