Budget Ozempic, Covid's Effects on Eating Disorders, and More
Today, in honor of Eating Disorders Awareness Week, we speak to Professor Bryn Austin. Our conversation covers a wide variety of topics: How the pandemic and social media have affected rates of eating disorders, how pharmaceutical companies are unethically marketing the new weight loss medications, the dangers of budget Ozempic, inequalities in the treatment and recognition of eating disorders, and how you, yes YOU, can create change by promoting public policies that protect our kids from harmful dietary supplements.
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The Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders
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Juna: Just a disclaimer to our listeners today. Our discussions will involve eating disorders. Welcome back to another episode. When I was talking to Eddie about what we should talk about this week.
Eddie: I said, it's Eating Awareness Week. Yes.
Juna: He said, Eating Awareness Week. We're going to do another Eating Awareness Week episode. And I said, Eddie, no, every week is eating Awareness week because you eat every week.
Eddie: This particular time of year, we have Eating Disorders Awareness Week. And this is the second part of, I guess, a little two part series where we dig deeply into eating disorders.
Juna: And I remember saying to Eddie, Eddie, are we going to bore everybody by having two episodes on this is nobody want to hear about this. But honestly, our conversation today was such a different angle.
Eddie: Until we.
Juna: Talked about last time. Like, this was so cool and so much what we talked about, I have not even heard about before.
Eddie: And what did we talk about?
Juna: Okay, what are we talking about guys? First of all, budget ozempic most important thing I'm just going. I'm just kidding. That's not the most important thing. To me, first of all, we had a really good discussion about do's and don'ts for parents in terms of what you do to not give your kids an eating disorder, as a lot of parents have asked us. And I thought it was actually like very, very detailed and very actionable, we also talked a lot about public policy and eating disorders, which is something I have never even considered in my life, like how public policy affects eating disorders.
Eddie: And I think my big take home from that, from Professor Brant Austin, who you'll hear in just a moment, is that each of us has a role in changing public policy and changing the environment within our homes and the broader community to change what's going on out there, which is just horrific in terms of the rates of eating disorders.
Juna: And then also we covered inequality and eating disorders, a topic that I feel like needs a lot more awareness. And then, of course, the effect of the pandemic and social media has had on rates of eating disorders. So a lot of very, very interesting topics. On today's episode, we're covering public policy, the pandemic Ozempic everything. Eating disorders part two. I'm Juniata.
Eddie: And I'm Doctor Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical.
Juna: School. And you're listening to food. We need to talk. The only health podcast that observes Eating Awareness Week.
Eddie: And Eating Disorders Awareness Week as well.
Juna: Welcome to another episode! Today we are joined by Professor Brian Austin, who is a professor at the Chan School of Public Health and Boston Children's Hospital in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine. Did I get that? All right? Yes.
Bryn: All right.
Juna: Yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you so much for joining us again. We want to talk about eating disorders in, I want to say in honor of but I guess was kind of in honor of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. And we're kind of taking a different angle than we took last time. This is more of a public policy angle, which, Professor Austin has assured us is just as personal as the personal income. So I'm really curious to hear about that. And, the first thing I want to ask you about is that we get a lot of questions for our listeners, because a lot of parents listen about basically not giving their kids eating disorders. I think a lot of people have grown up having parents that talk a lot about dieting or seem to be very preoccupied with body image, and so everybody's afraid of doing that to their own kids. But at the same time, everybody is also struggling with their own body issues and their own relationship with food. Can we kind of talk about striking that balance as a parent and how to handle that?
Bryn: Sure. We hear that a lot from parents, and there's some good recommendations out there. I mean, we all grew up in the society with that hyper focus on bodies and how we look and losing weight. But it's great that there's parents out there now are trying to, you know, stop passing that along to their kids and, and really make a change at home. I could say a few things that we say don't do. Clear ones don't do, don't talk about diets in front of your kids or be coming up with the latest fad diet and doing that in front of your kids. Don't talk about good foods and bad foods, especially younger kids can be really absolutist. It's all this, all that, and that can be scary for them. Don't talk about good foods are bad foods. Don't talk disparagingly about other people's bodies in front of your kids. Really at all, but certainly not in front of your kids. And it's not better if you're talking about your own body that's sending a message to your kids, even if you don't mean to. If you're disparaging your own body, they're learning that what you think is important, and that must be important for them, too. And then another point I like to make for parents is don't use those over-the-counter diet pills, and definitely don't let your kids use them. Many parents don't realize what's being pushed through their kids through social media. These companies are pushing these out hard toward teenagers and young kids. Even tweens are getting ads and influencers pushing these over-the-counter diet pills. But they don't work. They're not safe, and they can end up being on the path to an eating disorder. But I want to share some do's also.
Eddie: Some ways.
Juna: Yeah, but the good thing.
Eddie: Is I wanted to plead guilty to a few. Yeah, a few of what we just heard.
Bryn: Yeah, yeah. Well we we all do. We can't we we grew up in the society, but there's some really good things that you can do. And I was just mentioning social media. It's important to talk to your kids about what they're seeing on social media. What kind of products are being pushed to them, are they influencers are promoting, or what kind of fat shaming messages they're hearing? These are so common all over social media, and these can make kids feel bad. So it's important to check in with kids about how what are they seeing it, how is it making them feel? And as much as parents can help their kids set limits on how they engage with social media so they can feel better and something they can sustain, that's where parents can really come in and set an example there. At home, you can model keeping healthful food in in your food environment, in the home. That is what's on the table, in the fridge, on the shelves, and as much as possible, sharing meals together is great for families, you know, having and having time to connect positively.
Eddie: So I like the idea of the healthful meals and on the table. Maybe it's a bowl of fruit and there's cut of carrots in the refrigerator. A topic that my wife and I write, not talked about for only a few decades was, what about things like candy and sweets and treats? Like, do you not have them in the house that.
Juna: We had somebody recently talk about their Halloween candy strategy, and they said that, like, their kids can have whatever they want. Halloween. After that, all the candy is gone. How? And then other people said, like, that's so draconian that makes it such that makes it like binge and purge cycle. Like you shouldn't do that. So yeah. What's kind of thinking on that?
Bryn: Well, thinking about how do you best avoid having bad foods in good foods. And that's the kind of message that there there would be getting all year every day Halloween not Halloween. That's throughout the year. So trying to avoid the absolutist never this always that can help kids learn to navigate the real world where there's all kinds of foods out there. I think in general, it's not recommended that you never have any candy, any sweets, and often, you know, culturally in a lot of settings, some of that is part of celebrating together. We understand that. So it's about the balance. It's about the balance. And it's about modeling healthful ways of having food out what you serve at meals. What there's more of at meals, like the more helpful foods. All of that can be helpful. I want to mention being physically active. Awesome. This is another thing that's really helpful to model being physically active together for fun, for connecting, for seeing the world around you. Not for losing weight, counting calories or anything like that. When you can be physically active together as a family and then have your kid learn and find ways that they enjoy this, that can set them up to be physically active through their life and not have it be about punishment that is not about losing weight, not about, burning calories. That's when you can have a really healthy relationship with your body and enjoy it for what it can do for you. We all want to be able to enjoy our bodies for what they can do for us.
Eddie: And where does where does the just weave in the food part of being physically active? So just for new listeners, I think we within five minutes got to exercise, which is almost every episode. We come back to that. I personally and maybe with raising our, three now almost adult kids have really tried not to demonize food, not to have good and bad, although there are certain foods that are more acceptable if you're doing marathon training kind of stuff, like a concentrated sweet that I, if I ate on a an average day repeatedly would not be healthy for me. So there's I have I sent that the wrong message to say like, oh, those peanut butter filled pretzels. Those are fine if you're on a long bike ride. But, you know, let's throw them away and not be snacking on them, you know, in the middle of the football game. I'm just looking where I screwed up here.
Bryn: Oh my gosh, I'm sure there's no place that you screwed up here. Every parent's just doing their best. It's our society that sends the messages that it's our society that demonizes food. Often it's for somebody to make a profit off of it. It's, you know, sometimes it's the same company selling the diet products that are also selling, whether it's the peanut butter filled pretzels or the ice cream or whatever, they're selling these products because they want to, profit from both the demonizing or the making something feel like, oh, this is off limits. And then also keep people hooked on the diet pills and the the weight loss products and that kind of thing. That's where the society is really making it tough for parents. Now, if you're talking about athletes and training for athletes, I would just say make sure you're getting advice from, someone who really knows nutrition, someone who's trained in nutrition and knows what athletes need. Do not get this off of social media. Do not believe what the influencer tell you about training. This needs to come from, qualified nutrition people. If I.
Juna: Nutrition. My training for the past seven years has come from Instagram. I'm just kidding. Yeah.
Bryn: No, I know there's so much out there and that's what the kids are saying, but they're getting the wrong messages.
Juna: And the crazy thing is, a lot of the time with Instagram, you are basically basing your opinions off of how people look in the sense that like, if somebody looks the way I want to look, I'm like, oh my gosh, their training, their diet must be so good. And if they don't look where I want to look, then I'm like, I'm not going to do their training. And I've noticed that a lot of those people have looked like that their whole lives. Like they just a lot of them have really good genetics, like I've seen photos of them before they even started working out. So I'm like, it's really not your training or your quote unquote diet program that's making you look like that. But that's the thing that sells the product.
Eddie: But you're focusing on I mean, I'm listening to what you're saying. You're focusing on how they look. So is that are we already getting into the trap of.
Juna: Yeah, but that's how they're selling it. Like that's how they market. The thing is like, look like me if you train like me. And I think that's why people buy a lot of the time, right? Yeah.
Bryn: And that's exactly why we're so concerned about those messages coming through social media. Because even like being a healthy athlete gets redirected into appearance, being a good athlete has nothing to do with how you look. Nothing to do with that. I did want to just say one other note I always say to, to parents is show your kids that you love them for who they are, not for what they look like or how big or small their body is. It's their character, their integrity, their care for the well-being of others, for their family, for their community. These are what matter, not their body size.
Juna: And I think that can sound really obvious. Everybody listening, they're like, of course I love my kids for who they are, but a lot of the time there's a lot of subliminal messages you're sending when you give somebody more praise, when they're skinnier, like you're sending the message that I value you more when you're skinnier. So I do think that message gets sent out a lot, regardless of whether people are intending to or not. Yeah.
Bryn: And you never know how it is. Somebody lost weight if someone did lose weight or is thinner, you don't know how they got there. They could be sick. They could be using, illicit. Drugs that are really dangerous for them. They could be developing an eating disorder. You're praising them. You're praising the disorder that's sending somebody down a path for a real dangerous living.
Juna: Can we talk about what role inequality plays in eating disorders? I personally have not thought about this that much. So when I saw this was an area of your research, I was really interested to hear more about it because I definitely know I have neglected it in my own research.
Bryn: Eating disorders affect people of all ages, starting as young as five and people over 80 years old. They affect people of all racial ethnic groups too. But an important thing is that people of color with eating disorders are half as likely to be diagnosed or receive treatment. Why is this? Because of stereotypes, stigma, barriers to healthcare access. This combination is deadly. All genders are affected with cisgender girls and women about two times more likely to have an eating disorder than cisgender boys and men. We now have emerging research showing that transgender and gender diverse young people also have higher rates of eating disorders. All sexual orientation groups, all body sizes, are affected now, something that emerging now in the research, we know that some of, difficult experiences like, financial hardships, food insecurity and discrimination, all of these disproportionately affect communities of color and other marginalized communities, and they all increase the risk of developing eating disorder symptoms. But this message is not getting out to the public. It's not getting out to policymakers and for that matter, it's not getting out to health care providers. I'll give you an example. We have known for decades that for boys of color, they are more likely to have eating disorder symptoms than white boys. And this is true for almost all groups. This has been found in study after study year after year. But I can probably count on one hand the number of pediatricians who know this. We have a real gap between the myths and misinformation about eating disorders that are out there, and then the truth about eating disorders. Everyone, all groups are affected.
Eddie: And this goes across cultures to other countries. Or is it is this a more particular American or Western European issue?
Juna: You know, people.
Bryn: Thought for a long time that that eating disorders were more of something affecting Western countries, but that probably had to do with the researchers who were doing the research and publishing the research. They were studying their own countries. But we now know they're eating disorders all over the world. There's a growing body of research coming from Asia, South Asia, East Asia, in the Middle East, and then in Latin America. Also, we're seeing eating disorders across the board and in some places probably getting worse.
Eddie: Wow.
Juna: I do think weight seems to be treated differently in other cultures. I just know my family is Albanian, and I feel like it's totally acceptable to comment on people's weight not being, you know, and it's like not here for the most part, at least as far as I can tell. I don't know.
Bryn: You know, that's a really, really interesting point. And I was just having a conversation about that idea with a colleague who's based in Malaysia. She's Malaysian, she's lived in Singapore, also lived in Canada. And one of the distinctions she's made, she made the exact same point. It's really common to talk about weight and for parents to comment on kids weight or other family members to comment on weight. But something else is different, at least in her cultural context, is that the the relationships within family are so tight, and the emphasis on building, sustaining, and reaching those family relationships is so strong that even when some of these kinds of comments are made with the person, making them might not mean to be critical, they might be heard in a way that's less damaging. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. If you if you imagine if you have if someone has a parent or family member who they don't trust, they have a lot of conflict with. Their ties are not strong. And that person makes negative comments about your weight. That's so much more cutting than if you have those strong family connections. And it may be her different, but we need we need to really understand this better about cultural phenomena, because certainly we know that fat shaming and weight stigma are happening all over the world, including where my colleague is working, other parts of Asia and in lots of other parts of the world. And this can have a damaging effect. We're hearing this from young people who are developing eating disorders, and we know the companies selling these snake oil diet pills are pushing you down in social media, in Asia, in Latin America, all over the world, just as they are doing in the U.S. or in Europe.
Juna: And if you want to hear more about that, we're going to be doing a bonus episode all about the snake oil diet pills and muscle building supplements with Brian over at the membership. And the link will be in our show notes. Following up on inequality, I really I apologize to every guest for bringing this up because I know people like, don't want to talk about it, but I just I think this is an important inequality point, which is Ozempic is like this massive diet, medication, whatever. And it's so expensive. And so many health care providers don't cover obesity medication. How does that impact the inequality of all these things? And also how does ozempic impact eating disorder research?
Bryn: Well, from an eating disorders perspective, there's a few ways we're really concerned about Ozempic and the other similar drugs. And from an inequalities perspective we're really worried about that. So we know that these medications can be helpful for diabetes. That's how they started. That's what they're intended to be used for. Then it was discovered that they also are leading to weight loss. And that's when things just took off and really got out of control. These companies are making massive profits because the profit margin on the drugs or selling is so huge and it's so huge. What that's doing is, let's say if this is a helpful medication, big portions of the US population cannot afford it. Their insurance won't cover it, or they won't keep them on it for very long. And they're just priced out from the get go. But we also know with these medications that they haven't been studied in the long term. For some people, the effects of these drugs can be dangerous and very debilitating, and they can't take it. The drug does not work unless you're staying on it for the rest of your life. Now, who's paying for that? And who are the people who can afford it or can tolerate it? That's another question. Just the very idea that a pharmaceutical company or companies are going to change our entire relationship around bodies and food, and everything that has happened to this date is really, misdirected thinking, and it's really misdirected money going into these products, thinking that that's going to be feasible on a mass scale. It would bankrupt even the US economy and many others.
Eddie: But but it goes beyond just the cost, because even if they cut the cost by 90%, then you still have the issue of like who chooses to use this? I spend precious little time on social media, so when something hits my it's my email. It's worth noting. And one thing recently was an article about some influencer with 800,000 followers and their area of influence was overcoming, body stigma, fat shaming, and the person then reveals to their influences. Is that a word? That they're now on ozempic themselves. And I thought, oh my God, what a message for all these people who are struggling. So my question to you, Doctor Austin branding is, is this screwing up like any effort or any progress that we've made, overcoming sort of fat shaming and then stigma?
Bryn: You know, it's interesting you give that anecdote because, in fact, this is a deliberate move on the part of the company selling these products. They realized that the the so-called body positivity movement might be a resistance point for using these products. So what they've started to do is invest in social media promotion, short films, interviews and buying off influencers to try to thread that needle. Yeah, we're pro, size diversity, and we will make sure money is spent on these products and we'll use them to the companies are paying for this message to get out there. You know, there's there's the bigger issues though around it's not just the so-called body positivity movement, which is in a way, I mean, it's important around social norms, but it's a bit shallow when we think about what's affecting people's lives day to day. Some of the things that are most, harsh in the lives of people living in larger bodies is the frank discrimination that happens based on weight. There's only one state in the U.S that actually has a prohibition on weight based discrimination, and that's Michigan. It's been on the books for 50 years and they don't particularly enforce it 5050 years. Washington state has some protections from their Supreme Court of the state, but it protects only people at the highest weight. Then there's seven cities in the U.S. that have protections against weight discrimination. I did the math on this, and we have around 93% of the US population lives in an area of the country where they have absolutely no protection against weight discrimination. They could be fired tomorrow by their boss, and their boss can say, I don't like you because you're this weight and fire them. You're too fat. Fire them, and they would have absolutely no legal recourse for that. That's what's happening on the ground in this country. People have so little and often no protection against weight discrimination, and they know that it could mean that they're docked pay, that they don't get a promotion, that they or if it's a consumer facing kind of, workplace, they may put in the back, which is lower paid, less job security. These are real hard ways that wage discrimination is affecting people's lives. The pharmaceutical industry is not going to fix that.
Eddie: We're speaking with Professor Brian Austin from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and we'll be right back. Welcome back. And we're going to talk a little bit now about something I had not heard about budget Ozempic sounds like what is your winner?
Bryn: Oh my gosh. When the Ozempic craze took off and it was pretty quick that people figured out there's a lot of people who can't afford this. They can't be using this drug.
Eddie: We're talking about $1,000 a month at least. Enormous for the rest of your life.
Bryn: At, yes, enormous costs, enormous guacamole. And then, of course, there some people are worried. Well, it's a pharmaceutical. Could it be dangerous, which is smart to have that fear about that? Well, that did not hold marketers back. Social media just took off with this idea of so-called nature's ozempic. And this is where influencers and supplement companies selling berberine, claiming it will lead to weight loss, really push that out and they use the marketing.
Eddie: What is berberine?
Bryn: Berberine is a kind of dietary supplement. People have claimed it leads to weight loss and that it's healthful, but in fact, there isn't good evidence that it's going to have make any difference. And it could have toxic effects depending on how people use it. But that doesn't stop the influencers, and it's gotten a ton of play on social media for people who are thinking, oh, well, I can afford this. Or maybe it's safer. But it's definitely, if anybody is using it out there, please tell your doctor, tell them, talk about it with them. They need to know if you're using this. I encourage you to stop. The other issue are really concerned about it. And this really plays to the the inequality issue is social media also lit up with the so-called budget ozempic. This is the one where social media influencers are pushing out that people use laxatives for weight control, buying over-the-counter laxatives for weight control. This does not work. It does not work.
Eddie: We're into eating disorder territory now.
Bryn: Absolutely. This is an eating disorder behavior. It does not work. It's dangerous. And it can actually cause electrolyte imbalances and dysfunction in the digestive system. That is basically to stop the digestive system from working. Normally if you're taking a lot of laxatives and for a while. So this was such a big promotion on social media that last summer there was a run on laxatives, and there was actually a shortage in the US on over-the-counter laxatives because of these claims that it was budget ozempic so, so dangerous. This is not something anyone should use for weight loss.
Juna: And this just goes to show that it's like an obsession with the scale, because it's like if you're losing weight because you're pooping, like, newsflash, you're not losing fat. Like, I'm just it's so confusing to me. So I'm like, it's clearly not whatever weight loss they're trying to achieve. So it's like just to see a lower number on the scale, like, yeah, let's cut off an arm. Then you'll weigh like 10 pounds lost two. Do you know, I mean.
Eddie: Can I, can I just sort of reflect and restate my commitment to doing this show with you? You know that I don't listen to a lot of influencers or spend very much time on, what's, you know, the TikTok thing and, and Instagram me and all of that. And it's like what we're striving to do here is talk to real scientists. Thank you, professor.
Juna: Thank you, Brian.
Eddie: Austin, for coming in. And, just for the listeners, Brian is here in the studio with us. Which is a delight, makes for even better conversation. And just that there is a real science to what we need to do for ourselves. It's pretty simple, but we keep on getting distracted by, you know, snake oil and and these false promises. And I just I'm just doubling down on my commitment to keep on talking to people and writing and training other clinicians about it. Just I we know what what we should be doing. Let's support each other. Let's support our kids. Let's follow common sense and not be pulled into, oh my God, I have to get skinny. So I'll take a laxative.
Juna: Oh, yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, that was. No, thank you, thank you. But that was a beautiful comment I haven't read. I might as well. No, I just I really wanted to ask this question. I don't want to run out of time. I wanted to ask you about the pandemic. So I remember when the pandemic was first happening. It made me very nervous that I would have a relapse. Like I was like, oh my God, I won't be going anywhere. I'll be at home and like next to the kitchen all day long. And it would just seemed very scary. And then I read online and heard on NPR and stuff that there was an increase in eating disorder rates through the pandemic. Can we talk about what happened during the pandemic and why you think that happened, and what we can do about it?
Bryn: Well, within months of the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic, we saw signs of trouble with eating disorders. The pandemic brought a perfect storm of social isolation, fear, disruption of normal routines in care access, extreme stress and uncertainty in a. And many, many families experienced financial hardship and food insecurity. All of these experience are linked with depressive symptoms, anxiety, suicidality, and eating disorders. And this same perfect storm, especially around the disruption of normal routines, brought a hyper focus on weight gain and the media and the social media influencers. They did not help their hyper focus on weight gain during the beginning of the pandemic. Really was a dangerous mix for folks out there. What this brought was intense fat shaming, pressure to restrict eating, pressure to reduce weight or to keep from gaining weight. Then that's when we saw the skyrocketing rates of eating disorders among teens. And it was not long before the need for care far outstripped the capacity of the health care system to treat them. Within about a year of the pandemic starting, that's when the research started rolling in with really clear data showing that in that first year of the pandemic, the caseload for eating disorders at children's hospitals right here in Boston and all the way across the country, in San Francisco and everywhere in between, the caseload for eating disorders doubled or tripled in the first year of the pandemic in children's hospitals across the country. And then the federal centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed that up with a report showing that in emergency rooms across the country, they saw nationwide, they saw a doubling of the eating disorders cases in teen girls. So it was specific to teen girls, a doubling of the eating disorders rate in emergency departments all across the country in that first year. So why did this happen? I talked about some of the pieces that relate, especially to what the pandemic was doing. The other piece is that the pandemic, through young people, online schools, closed down all their ways of of social networks, how they got stayed in touch with friends. It had to happen online because of the isolation that was required to reduce transmission of the virus. But those same changes also put major mental health pressures on kids and serve them up, basically for the influencers and the companies online to prey on them. So we know that kids now a third of teens say they were on social media almost constantly. My God, the minutes per day that kids spend online, younger kids and then teens spent online during the pandemic increased substantially.
Eddie: We're not quite past the pandemic, but it's we're coming out the other side. Is it better now? Are they spending less time online? Is is are there less teen girls showing up in the children's hospitals across the country?
Bryn: We really tough thing about eating disorders is that it's they don't just come and go. When an eating disorder serious it really latches on to somebody. It can be years of treatment before they are in recovery. All those young people who developed eating disorders during the pandemic, they are still faced with a hard road ahead. Many of them and their families, their support networks. This can continue on and on. I don't think there's any sign that the use of social media has gone down, that if anything, it continues to go up because these companies find every which way to latch on to.
Juna: So on that note, I have never really thought of public policy as a vehicle for eating disorder prevention, to be honest. To me, it's always been like, we have to stop, like following people just because of how they look in the data. So I'm really curious what your research shows about preventing eating disorders through public policy.
Bryn: Well, we talked a little bit about what parents can do, what people can do as individuals thinking about, you know, their life, their home, their family. But it's even more powerful when we can take collective action together. So we're still acting as individuals, but we're joining forces, bringing our voices together to change not just the environment at home or in our school, but much more broadly, change what's happening in our culture. And we can do that when we work together. And I should say a word about what I mean by environment. Usually when we talk about the environment, we're thinking about air pollution or pollution in the water or climate change. I mean, that's all true, but that same term, we can use it in our world in thinking about our social environment. And that might be the consumer environment. So what we see in stores or sold on in the Instagram store, Amazon Air could also mean our laws and policy, and it can mean the discrimination people may face in the workplace can really be broad in that way. So just in the way that when if we want to protect against air pollution, we don't just try to make kids more resilient or people more resilient, give them all gas masks. We wouldn't do that if we had to. Sometimes we tell people, stay. Indoors, wear a mask. However, we also at the same time are cleaning up the air. Cleaning up the water to create a safer environment. That's exactly the kind of principle we need to bring around these toxic influences of diet culture in our society. We don't want to just make kids more resilient. We want to change the environment, to make it healthy for everybody so all kids can grow up at home in their own bodies. A few examples in one where my program striped the strategic training initiative for prevention of eating disorders. We're really focused on creating safer environments, and we've taken on the diet pills industry for this. We don't sell tobacco to kids. We sell them diet pills. There's no reason why any kid should be using these products. Yet if you walk in any corner store or look online, they are everywhere. They are everywhere. And on social media, they're being pushed out to kids hard through influencers, through ambassadors. That's where the companies hire other young people or young adults to go and say, hey, this is cool. Don't you want to use these like I do? They're doing this around supplements in particular, and I know that's something we're going to talk about more. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you a little bit about how we've gotten together with people, with parents, with kids to share their stories with lawmakers. So the idea that policy is just something that's done off in the, you know, the halls of Congress or statehouses. That's not quite how it works, actually. We live in a democracy, and it's our right and our responsibility to tell our leaders what we want, what's happening in our lives and how they need to respond. And they listen to stories when we bring those stories to them. So with with my program stripe, what we've done is we've organized a whole cadre of high school students across the country to share their stories with lawmakers in states to take on this issue, take on this issue about what do they need to do to make stores safer, online environment safer, and make the world safer for young people around body image?
Eddie: Are there resources from striped that we can share with the listeners? I was just on the show notes.
Juna: Yeah.
Bryn: Striped has created a whole Out of Kids Hands campaign. This is our grassroots advocacy campaign bringing young people together, families and the scientists together to talk to lawmakers about how to take on this issue of these toxic, deceptive, over-the-counter diet pills. On our website, we have a lot of resources around why this is an issue and what people can do to share their story and get involved in our campaign. We're working in states all across the country. We just had a big victory in New York last year in October. Governor Hochul of New York signed into law a bill based on our research and that the youth we work with advocated for to ban the sale of toxic over-the-counter diet pills and muscle building supplements tickets to people younger than 18. Those stores, the online retailers, can no longer sell these toxic products to kids in New York State. The law takes effect in April of 2024.
Eddie: So congratulations. Can I give a sort of a personal Boston tea story that supports what you're saying? I live and have raised our kids and need a Massachusetts, which a number of years ago introduced within this small town of 30,000 people the idea that tobacco could not be sold until you reach age 21. Lot of controversy. It's never going to work. They'll just go to the next town over. Well, the next town adopted the same thing. And then the states. And now there's multiple states across the country that have pushed for tobacco 21, and it's simply started in a town hall meeting in a small town. And it could happen anywhere. And then just the the rest of the story I heard just recently, I thought, what a legacy. Now they're talking about tobacco free generation, where there's some people talking in other towns in Massachusetts that I'm familiar with where if you're born after a certain date, let's say it's 20, you know, 2010, that you're 14 years old now when you hit 21 and beyond, like that group will never be allowed to buy tobacco. And it's it's going to hopefully work its way through. And I'm so thrilled that New York State has taken on this, and hopefully it will through striped and advocacy and people seeing that we do have power, that it can be spread to other, other municipalities and states and maybe the whole country.
Juna: So cool. Well, thank you so much for coming in today. This was so fun, and I can't wait to have the more in-depth discussion on diet pills on the membership.
Bryn: Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you both.
Juna: Thank you so much to Professor Brant Austin for coming on today's podcast. If you want to hear our bonus episode, we are talking all about dietary supplements and muscle building supplements and why they're so dangerous and how the ingredients are not regulated. It's like very scary. Head over to food. We need to talk.com/membership or click the link in our show notes. We will also be linking to the program she talked about like the striped program in our show notes and on our website. If you guys want to learn more about that. You can find me at the official uni on Instagram and on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie.
Eddie: It sounds a little wonky, but I'm going to figure out how to help promote public policy to get the world healthier. Wow. That's where you're going to find me.
Juna: Oh, such big dreams. Fast food. We Need to Talk is produced by me and is distributed by PR.
Eddie: Our mix engineer is Rebecca Seidel.
Juna: And we were created by Carey Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie: For any personal health questions, please consult your health provider to find out more. Go to food. We need to talk. Com. Thanks for listening.
