I'm not responsible for people's media literacy/competency. I'm also not going to take advantage of them myself, or promote people who do. Rhonda Patrick is probably one of the .01% of influences who, as far as I know, doesn't take advertisement money and is 100% merch + premium content including her online Genetic Report[0], which takes raw SNP data from companies like 23 and Me and provides you an extremely comprehensive report for all the SNPs in your report with every journal article publically available on that SNP and health outcomes associated. You can generate this report yourself if you know how with other genetics tools, but her tool is two clicks and much more value add than actual genetic companies like My23andMe's premium subscription. She routinely criticizes companies like Athlete Greens and other supplement companies, this is rare in the health-influencer sphere. Not to glaze her but I've only heard her mention brand names on the basis of their purity/lab testing and always points out when pop science studies are funded by these companies or other conflicts of interest that may distort the headline making journal articles. In fact, my journal comprehension has gotten better by listening to this podcast.
Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
You're right though, there's a billions and billions of dollars in marketing and misinformation aimed at the people who skipped that class in school (especially in the health space).
--- It was actually this report that highlighted that I might have a high likelihood for a weird genetic issue that causes you to have extremely low vitamin D. This caused me to go get testing for this as I would get bad seasonal depression in the winters. At the age of 27 my doctor told me that it was the lowest levels of Vitamin D she's ever seen including her elderly patients. This isn't something any of common mainstream genetic reports provide and they charge 10X more. You would need to generate a report manually through one of the databases to find those studies or manually look up individuals SNPs
That's great and all but as a content creator, she has an incentive to create sensational, viral content. Which also introduce bias like exaggeration of the risk. Being financial independent does not exclude this type of bias.
> Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
For every medical claim someone makes, you can find at least 3 papers published in reputable journals that claim the opposite. Knowing which papers are lacking and which aren't goes beyond what most of us were taught in high school.
> Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
If by "check a source" you mean look it up and read it, sure. But that tells you relatively little; you can verify that a claim appears in that source but actually weighing the validity of that source requires a lot more specialized expertise.
That you think a highschool course can teach all you need to reliably detect bullshit makes me think you're a lot more credulous than you seem to think.
The rest of your post is more or less about the heuristics you use in lieu of being a subject matter expert. And those heuristics are known to influencers and are routinely gamed. For instance, you're impressed that this influencer criticizes supplement companies. People peddling bullshit routinely trash talk their own or adjacent fields in order to gain trust, this is a textbook tactic. Used car salesmen trash talk used car salesmen, to make themselves seem candid and honest. Textbooks about sales and persuasion teach this tactic. Supplement peddlers trash talk homeopathy, homeopaths trash talk chiropractors, etc. Of course people who aren't peddling bullshit will trash talk bullshit too, everybody else does too so it's a very unreliable heuristic.
Thanks for the lecture on basic rhetorical strategies / fallacies. Once again, not special and concepts I learned in AP lit in 11th grade. You're acting like you understand something special, it's not. Thank you for demonstrating 11th grade media literacy,
Personally find it extremely easy to detect scams. You also don't need a degree or much more than a HS degree to check sources, this was taught to most of us in high school.
You're right though, there's a billions and billions of dollars in marketing and misinformation aimed at the people who skipped that class in school (especially in the health space).
[0]: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/genetics
--- It was actually this report that highlighted that I might have a high likelihood for a weird genetic issue that causes you to have extremely low vitamin D. This caused me to go get testing for this as I would get bad seasonal depression in the winters. At the age of 27 my doctor told me that it was the lowest levels of Vitamin D she's ever seen including her elderly patients. This isn't something any of common mainstream genetic reports provide and they charge 10X more. You would need to generate a report manually through one of the databases to find those studies or manually look up individuals SNPs