A Pediatrician’s Unfiltered Take on Pharma, Research, and Real Health— Why Medicine Needs Transparency Now | Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh

Joel Gator

Dr. Brighten: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Dr. Brighten Show, where we burn the BS in women's health to the ground. I'm your host, Dr. Jolene Brighten, and if you've ever been dismissed, told your symptoms are normal or just in your head or been told just to deal with it, this show is for you. And if while listening to this, you decide you like this kind of content, I invite you to head over to dr Brighten.com where you'll find free guides, twice weekly podcast releases, and a ton of resources to support you on your journey.

Let's dive in. How do vaccines actually work?

Joel Gator: How do they actually work? So I think the way that I would think about it is it. A medical product that you're given to try to prevent a disease. So you're providing an antigen, a part of a disease, and there are different kinds of vaccines, so they all work differently.

But the basic principle would be you're exposing the body to an infection or the part of the infection, so that way your immune system gets a chance to learn about that part, [00:01:00] create antibodies, create a memory of that infection or the part so that way the next time you're exposed to it, you're better prepared to fight it off and hopefully fight it off before you ever have symptoms.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. And does that mean that if you get the vaccine, you'll never get that disease?

Joel Gator: It doesn't usually mean that if a, if a vaccine was worth working perfectly, then it might, and for some people, for some of the vaccines, you may never get the disease in your entire lifetime. Like some of the live vaccines tend to work a little bit better, just like if you get an infection and then in the rest of your life in general, you won't get sick again.

But that's not always true sometimes. The immunity can wear off. Sometimes the vaccines don't work perfectly. Many of the vaccines, they last for a year, a couple of years, maybe a decade, and it might wear off as you get older. Also, sometimes the diseases could change. Mm-hmm. So whatever protection you had from the disease might, uh, wear off or the disease mutates.

So not always. I mean, the goal would be to have a vaccine that works for a lifetime, but that's not really how it works in reality.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. [00:02:00] We're seeing measles is definitely on the rise right now. We've seen a lot more cases than we have historically. I think a lot of people are under the understanding that if you have the measles vaccine, therefore you child will not get the measles.

So child is vaccinated, they're not going to get the measles, however. There is a threshold of exposure in which a child could experience symptoms. I'm curious from your perspective in working with patients, are you counseling them on things like nutrition, lifestyle to also support their immune system?

Or is it a hundred percent reliant on vaccines?

Joel Gator: Alright, so that's a really good question. So I think there are two parts to that. Number one, no vaccine again is perfect. Mm-hmm. So just because you did get a vaccine doesn't mean that you're gonna be protected for a lifetime or you're going to be protected with the measles vaccine.

In terms of the statistics, it actually works pretty good in terms of its efficacy based on what we know, it's about 93% effective. Uh, if you get one dose, 97% if you get both. So in general, if you've been [00:03:00] vaccinated for both, you usually would not get measles. I mean, we've seen that measles really decreased over time.

So I think it's a pretty good working vaccine, but there's still a small percentage of kids that, um, could. Get measles just because the vaccine didn't work very well or maybe they couldn't get the, the vaccine. So I, I think that's part one of that question. But part two is regardless of measles or any disease, our health and nutrition matter.

So me personally, yes. I definitely try to counsel on those things because no matter what, whether you get vaccinated or not, your nutrition, your health status matters more than anything. I mean, that's what's so important. If you get exposed to all sorts of other diseases, there are many infections out there, most of 'em don't have a vaccine.

Uh, if you're gonna have a reaction to a vaccine, I'm sure your general health makes a big difference for that and minimizing your risk from, uh, a reaction from the vaccine. So I think it's really important. And one of the things that I've really tried to speak about more in the last, uh, six months to a year is, is really focusing on that.

It's not about [00:04:00] vaccines versus not vaccines. It's about broadening that conversation. 'cause I think during the pandemic, that's where we failed.

Dr. Brighten: Hmm.

Joel Gator: We were so focused on the COVID vaccine and we really didn't hear a lot of conversation around our general health, even though we knew that the biggest risk factor for serious disease was comorbidities.

Mm-hmm. And, and, and other lifestyle factors and, and that we weren't doing. And we, we basically did everything in the opposite. During the pandemic. We were keeping people from going outside. They weren't eating healthy, they were staying home. We were increasing their stress. Stress. And we know that all of those things make a huge difference for your immune system.

So yeah, I do counsel about both those things. I talk about it a lot and, and I've been really trying to push even on the news when I'm talking about measles, like we have to talk about both. Mm-hmm. And I think it's a great thing that RFK is doing, that he's getting some pushback, but he's talking about lifestyle factors and we need to talk about both.

They're both important. It's not one or the other. You don't have to be mad because somebody mentions vitamin A and say, oh, well you should just be talking [00:05:00] about the vaccine. No, it's fine to talk about both. Why can't you talk about everything?

Dr. Brighten: Yeah, and I agree with you, it was very problematic. During the pandemic, we were not allowed to talk about anything else, and I think that's important for people to actually understand that medical boards were sending out letters saying, you are not allowed to talk about anything except masking.

Just as social distancing and vaccines, we are not gonna hear it because there's no evidence about these other things. And yet we know that there is evidence for vitamin D, vitamin A, zinc when it comes to immune system health. It didn't have to come with a claim. And I think that is part of why the pendulum swung the other way is you saw people taking advantage of the pandemic.

To sell cures, which were not in fact cures and they were being predatory. And I think that was part of why it swung so opposite in the other direction. And I think anybody who was in the middle of the road, like we started to be seen as conspiracy theory or [00:06:00] like, you know, you, you just started getting put in boxes and I'm like, hold up.

I've always talked about nutrition. I have always talked about lifestyle in the face of a pandemic. I'm happy to integrate the new information, but the basics of being a human hasn't changed. So you brought up Vitamin A. World Health Organization recommends vitamin A in the treatment of measles. We don't hear it about on it on the media.

We are not hearing about it on social media, whether it's the major media, we're not hearing about that, we're not hearing about these interventions. And yet it exists on the WHO website. It's there to, for anyone to find. Why do you think that is? I,

Joel Gator: I think it's a few reasons. I mean, just like you said, there's such a bias towards pharmaceuticals in this country that I think it starts there.

We have a product, like for measles, we have the MMR vaccine. And so anything else outside of that is pushing people away from getting vaccinated in, in, I think their minds, and, and that's a problem for them because they just want everybody to get vaccinated. They want that messaging to get out [00:07:00] there.

Mm-hmm. And that misses the mark on humanity. It misses the mark on true life, true vitality. And it also misses the nuance that is really important. And, and I think to some degree it's, it's minimizing people's intelligence to some way. It's like we can't talk about vitamin A or diet at the same time as a vaccine and, and understand that both these things could be possible or true, and.

Because of that. It's just like, we just have one message. Let's have the singular message. We're gonna push this thing. And we saw that during the pandemic. And, and I agree with you that that is where they lost the public, I think.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: The main push for safe and effective lost people because you had any new product and you can't possibly say it's safe without knowing any long-term data.

You could have said, based on the research and data that we have so far, the benefits seem to outweigh the risks. We recommend it for these people. Here's why we recommend it. That's reasonable. You can say that you can't possibly know [00:08:00] long-term side effects in the long-term if it hasn't been. So nobody expects that of you.

You don't have to say that. You know, you say, we don't know anything about long-term safety. This is what we know. But they didn't do that, that mixed with natural immunity where forever natural immunity counted. And yet, and during the pandemic it didn't, for whatever reason,

Joel Gator: And, and so a lot of people. they got frustrated with it. Now they just don't trust modern medicine. And that is a big problem. I mean, we look at the statistics, it was like 70 plus percent of people trusted medicine before the pandemic. Now it's like 40%. Um,

Dr. Brighten: that's actually outta the JAMA network.

Uh, so I'm gonna link to that study and I was going to bring that up. It's exactly that. 7 71 0.5% in April of 2020, but by of January 20, 24, 40%. And one of the main reasons that people cited is they felt that it was profits over people. They were not being given true information in the name of a good old dollar.

Joel Gator: Right. And, and, and I think we've noticed [00:09:00] a lot of people have noticed this to be something that's going on across the border or in, in many areas. And, and with the internet and social media and the decrease of censorship over the last. Year, two years, things have gotten out there. People are starting to question, which is good.

And I mean, even for me, for the topic of vaccines, I never spoke about vaccines outside the office just a few years ago. It was too controversial, it's too problematic. I still probably should have, but I didn't. Um, and, and I really just didn't feel comfortable doing it. And over the last couple years I got so frustrated with the system.

I got so frustrated with talking to patients in the office and not talking about these things anywhere else. And I felt compelled to really look into the data, look into what is actually written and what's in the scientific literature because I get these questions from parents every day. If anything online, I get most of the questions about vaccines.

And I felt like I really need to know more. And that's why I chose to write a book about it. Because I think it is just so important that we talk about it. And I feel like we're in a different place [00:10:00] now where people are more open to discussion. I'm not against vaccines. I think a perfectly working vaccine is fantastic.

I just think that we. Need to talk about the risks versus the benefits. We need to understand what the research is, and we need to be able to have debate about everything. And the word vaccine should not be something that you can't mention. We're giving a lot of vaccines to kids and we need to make sure that they're as safe as possible, working as well as possible, and we need to understand what we actually know.

Mm-hmm. And, and I don't think we do. I don't, I'm an, I'm a pediatrician and there is an integrated pediatrician, so if anybody should know some of this stuff, it's probably me. And there was so much that I realized through reading their research that I had no idea about.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. I really appreciate that you brought up the lack of trust in how we need to build that trust, because that, for everybody listening is exactly why I wanted to sit down and have this conversation with you, making things taboo, saying you don't question science, which is the opposite of what science is saying.

There's things that you just cannot talk about. Or you are a bad person if [00:11:00] you question it as if it's a moral failing because you have questions and you want to try to make the best decision. This has bred mistrust. This is why the doctor patient relationship is so strained and I'm hoping through this conversation we can start to rebuild that public trust and help.

We're gonna talk more for people listening about how do we navigate these conversations with our provider. I wanna bring up though, in your book you said, um, you open it with saying vaccines are treated like fight club. We don't talk about them. So why do you think it's still so controversial to talk about vaccines and as we've talked about in this, you know, trust paradigm, how do we start bridging that gap so that we can start having these conversations again and start getting patients to trust their physicians?

Joel Gator: Yeah, it's a fantastic question and, and I think even before I answer that, I should talk about my general perspective, which is I don't feel like. Anybody should be forced to do anything. I'm not against vaccines in my office. Uh, we [00:12:00] offer vaccines. We have some people that do the regular schedule, some people that do a slow schedule, some people that don't do any.

We have discussions around vaccines and I don't tell anybody what to do. I give them information and, and they make the decision that they feel is best for their family. And that's the way that I approach the book as well because every single book resource that I've ever found really has one perspective.

It's either like, vaccines are the best thing in the world, or vaccines are kinda the worst thing in the world, and there's really not much in between. Mm-hmm. And a lot of it is really trying to convince you of something. And I don't feel like we need more convincing right now. We need more discussion, like you said, and why we're not having the debate.

I think a lot of, because it was censored, I mean, I think there's a push to not have the discussion in the debate. Pharmaceutical companies don't want

Dr. Brighten: No, they don't. Discussions

Joel Gator: because any, any sort of discussion around side effects is gonna affect them in a negative way. Right. So they're, they mm-hmm.

They have it kind of perfect right now. I mean, there, there's no reason for them to look into their products, to make them safer, to make them better. Once you get [00:13:00] a vaccine on the children's schedule, it's just kind of given to everybody. And, and that's just the way that it is. And you have this army of doctors who so firmly believe in vaccines because it's what we're taught and.

That's where we are. And so any discussion outside of that, it, it brings up very strong emotions, uh, because I think without the data and the information, it's like, no, they're, they're great. They're perfect. They work. And you don't really have much more argument than that unless you shut it down.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Uh,

Joel Gator: because you do watch, if you do watch any of these discussions with mainstream doctors about vaccines and side effects, if you ask them the questions, they don't usually have the data to back it up to answer their perspective, other than to say it's never been proven. It's never been shown. Which in general, it's true.

It's never been proven. It's never been shown, because most of the time there isn't research on the topic or the question in the first place, which makes it really frustrating for a parent who has questions or who wants to understand what the long-term risks are or how it's associated to certain chronic disease.

[00:14:00] We just don't have that information. Mm-hmm. So I think the pharmac tentacles are so ingrained in, in everything in, in med school, in the journals, um, in research, in the news. So they push one. Narrative and that's all that we've been taught. And we don't get taught anything about safety in med school. Yes, we get taught what vaccines you give, what the schedule is, what the diseases are, how bad those diseases were, and how vaccines have done all this great saving of humanity and how we've decreased all these diseases because of vaccines.

But there isn't any class on why you shouldn't trust Pharma 1 0 1 or why you should question some of the research. It doesn't exist.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. It's very interesting because as soon as you start to question pharma, the first thing that will come up is people are like, oh, you're just Antip Pharma. The second thing is, oh, what about big wellness?

Big wellness is doing all of these things, which I'm gonna drop, um, studies for everybody. And, uh, also, um, lawsuits of what has happened [00:15:00] with pharma for people to see that, but. People not realizing that whenever they say big wellness, I'm like, do you know who's the biggest profiteer of big wellness? It's big pharma.

I'm sure big pharma is in there. So you've said, I saw that you said you, this was recently, all I was taught in school was pharma. I am not unbiased. Do you feel that pharma is influencing how doctors practice?

Joel Gator: Oh, for sure. I mean, there isn't any question. All of medicine is influenced by pharma because it's built from the ground up using pharma.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: I don't think that we realize that we're being influenced in that way. Because how would you, you're the schools, many of them are funded by pharma. Um, the research, the journals, the articles, they're funded by the ones who are making the products. They fund the news. So everything is funded purposely.

I mean, do you think that they're funding politicians to not have for no reason, like they're not funding. Uh, food in some other country, right? They're, they're funding politicians in the news. They, they know what that gets you, you know, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. [00:16:00] It's not necessarily overt all the times, but they're, they have their tentacles in everything to make sure that we, we do that.

I mean, when we're med school, we, we don't really learn about nutrition, right? You learn about nutrition diseases and what you could treat them with. You learn about how you identify disease and then what you treat that with. That's just the paradigm of medicine. It's been that way for a long time, ever since the Flexner report, um, which was in the early 19, or, you know, a hundred years ago plus now, where they basically, you know, if we go back, we had a lot of schools that were holistic, uh, and, and, and did practice integrated medicine before that and, and with Rockefeller and the flexion report that got.

Streamlined to be this more medical pharmaceutical paradigm. It's not all bad. I mean, it's good. We've done a lot of great stuff in science and medicine. I'm

Dr. Brighten: here because I have a thyroid medication I can take every day. Yes. I'm, I'm a fan, I'm a fan of drugs. But, and that's the thing,

Joel Gator: like it's, again, it's nuance.

It's not all or none. Pharma is not it inherently bad. It's just the, the way that we've [00:17:00] developed our medical paradigm, the how big we've let them get, how co-opted the groups that are supposed to be monitoring over them and, and regulating them have become, there's a back and forth between the industry and the regulators, and there's really no blurring of that line anymore.

Mm-hmm. And nobody pushing back. And especially when it comes to vaccines, these are products where they make a lot of money. They get 'em on a schedule that. Millions of kids and, you know, billions of kids around the world get, and they have no reason to give you accurate data. They have no reason to not show you the best information, that it's safe, that it's effective.

Of course, that's what they're gonna do. They fund the research, they're gonna show you the best possible thing. And then we just, we just run with it. We need people to push back

Dr. Brighten: mm-hmm. Uh,

Joel Gator: on pharma and say, well, you know what? Like, vaccines are not bad, but how many is too many? What kind of level of side effects do we feel is unreasonable?

What are all these vaccines doing together? What is our risk for long-term disease? [00:18:00] Who's monitoring these things over decades when they're in the market? Who's monitoring the synergy between the vaccines? Who's looking at vaccines and autism? Like, who is actually doing that? Nobody's doing it right now.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. I wanna get into some more of this, but I do have to point out, you know, to your point, you often hear doctors saying. No, we don't get paid by pharma. We don't get any kickback from pharma. I was was prepping for this interview. I actually have found the billions of dollars that pharma has been paying out because yes, they were actually directly influencing doctors.

It's interesting because there's been many studies, uh, that have criticized pharma for their research and development. Spending. Research and development is actually a lie. It's not what's going on. What they're putting it on is actually marketing. And to see the lawsuits that have gone on. Billions of money from pharma is being spent on things like sponsoring conferences and CMEs for doctors, sales reps with drugs in your [00:19:00] office, speaking fees to incentivize prescribing behavior and then ads.

We see a lot of advertising dollars going online and so I think that's important piece for people to understand because as you're talking about all of this. There's a lot of ways that pharma knows how to play the game, right? They're saying we're spending this in research and development, but when you actually piece it out, as it turns out, they're spending it in marketing and they are influencing many, many different facets of our life.

But also there are unfortunately providers who have knowingly been taking money from pharma to influence their colleagues, and I think that's problematic because these are some of the people who are sometimes the most vocal to say, you have no right to question this. You should not question this. You brought up the vaccine schedule over our lifetime, assuming you're close to my age, we have certainly seen.

Uh, an exponential [00:20:00] growth in the number of vaccines that children are being given. Speaking from the place of data and what the research says. What do we know right now about the combinations that are being given and the sheer number of vaccines that are being given?

Joel Gator: So I think the first point is about the number of vaccines.

So if you go back to the early 1980s, there were just a few, you'd have originally the smallpox vaccine, then that was taken away, and then you had the diptheria, tenus, pertussis, polio, and then the MMR Measles, mumps Rubella came out after that. Those were all before or around the early 1980s. And then you had the, the, the Vaccine Act, which basically took liability away from the pharmaceutical companies because there were a bunch of lawsuits and concerns, especially around the, the DTP vaccine and the Persis.

Portion of it in terms of, uh, neurologic complications, encephalitis never totally proven, but there was a lot of, a lot of concern around it, a lot of lawsuits. So a bunch of vaccine manufacturers left the market and there was concern that the [00:21:00] lawsuits would get so big that companies would all go bankrupt.

And so that's when that was put into effect. And after that point, they no longer really had liability anymore. And so you still have this explosion of, of new vaccines hit the market. And, and now we have a lot more. So it depends on, on, on, you know, some people call like 72 as antigens, but that's not really true.

And there's, there are more vaccines now. We have the COVID vaccine than RSV flu vaccines every year, but there are 30 to 40 pokes that you can get, uh, as a kid at this point. And some of those are combination vaccines with multiple in them. So it's a lot more than, than you used to get. No question about it.

And, uh, I mean, some part of that's good. I mean, we have protection against more diseases, so it's not all bad, but. We really don't have a lot of research, if any, research on what do these all look like together? How does this affect us long term? Because you would have to have some independent body doing that.

Mm-hmm. What we have in terms of our safety is we have the, the ves, right? So that's the vaccine adverse reporting [00:22:00] system. So anybody can go in, anybody can report, um, a side effect that they think might have happened from a vaccine. And so that goes in that system, but you have to think about it to actually put it in.

Um, we have things like the VA vaccine safety data link, so that is another, it's like a database with medical records, so that's also in there. And that's a pretty good system to look for things. So we do find some signals, like they did find the myocarditis signal. They did find intussusception, rotavirus, so it's not.

Completely useless. Like they certainly find stuff, but that's not really how you're supposed to do research to find long-term complications. You have to follow people forward. You have to follow vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids, uh, to really get a true baseline of safety. And we really need to do that for years, maybe generations.

How would you know if, for example, let's say you get the Hepatitis B vaccine and that's related to some sort of cancer, 15 years later, if you got, I don't know, knee cancer, uh, when you're [00:23:00] 10, you're not gonna think that was 'cause of my Hepatitis B vaccine when I'm a child. So you're not gonna go report that toves or any system.

The only way you would know that is if you were follow a whole bunch of kids forwards and you were like, Hey, how come all the kids with vaccines have knee cancer? Yeah. Right. That's the only way you would find those things. So we don't actually have any real way to assess that other than looking backwards and, and someone has to ask the question.

It's really difficult to do.

Dr. Brighten: Why do you think it is no, in no other facet of science or medicine? Would it be acceptable for us to say just self-report and even, you know, when somebody self-reports a vaccine injury, they're often not believed. Mm-hmm. They're dismissed. Their provider might not report it.

But why do you think it's, in this case, it is acceptable not to have long-term studies, not to follow cohorts and to rely on self-reporting.

Joel Gator: Well, I don't think it is reasonable. I don't think it's okay. Okay. But, but I don't think that I thought about that before. Okay. Right. So I, I think the biggest issue is doctors don't think about this.

[00:24:00] Right. It's not brought into your mind. You think that they're safe because you're told that they're safe. And if anybody says to you that they're not, then you, you call them crazy. And like vaccines are so ingrained into physicians that I think it's a part of the identity. And, and, you know, finances are not, you could give doctors $0, have nothing to do.

They would still give vaccines because that's what we're taught and that's what we believe in. That's what, what we feel like has saved humanity. And that's your job as a doctor, as a pediatrician to help kids to be healthier. And you so believe that that's what you're doing. And I think that's a part of it.

And any questioning of that questions, medicine questions, your training. Um, and I don't think that people actually know what the research is. I think you just don't really think about it because you're never really here. The whole story. I mean, un until recently did we have social media and you could listen to someone like RFK talk for three hours.

Right? Unless you went to a meeting, you know, I, when I was going through med school, the only thing I ever heard about RFK was like, oh, crazy crackpot, [00:25:00] anti-vaxxer person. Like, you don't hear anything else. So if anything comes up about him, oh, it's just a crazy anti-vaxxer guy. Right? But once you hear him speak for three hours, you're like, Hmm, wait a minute.

He makes some good points. Mm-hmm. And, and I, I don't think that that's happened for a majority of the physicians yet. They're kind of in their silo. They're so busy, they're doing what they're doing and, and they're not questioning vaccines. And it opens up a whole can of worms, I think. Because if you start to say, oh, it might be related to this or that, then what do we do with the whole program?

What happens if people start to question it? That you would start to see some of these diseases potentially come back and be problematic? Mix that in with pharmac pharmas incentive to not have people question. So I think we have this mix of pressure and anytime that somebody questions anything they get.

Shut down as a, you know, crazy crackpot and just like you said, it's like a mom who brings their kid in to get a vaccine who has a bad reaction and then questions the vaccine. That is not someone who's an anti-vaxxer. That's someone who's so trusted medicine. They took their kid to get a vaccine and then [00:26:00] they now believe that there's a problem.

They have no reason to lie. That's what they believe. They might not be. Right. They could have had a situation where you got a vaccine today, you had a heart attack this afternoon, and it has nothing to do with it. That happens too, but we have to listen to parents and say, well, this is data, this is information.

This is someone who believes that the vaccine caused their issues. Let's research that. Let's figure out if it's true and if it is true, how do we minimize it? I, I think if we came at it from safety perspective, then that would be a lot better. I think doctors are so afraid that vaccines are just gonna go away or people are just gonna stop doing it.

That it's easier to just stop that conversation. Totally. Which is not. The reality of where things would go. We want things to be safe. If there is an ingredient in vaccines that is related to asthma, let's figure out what it is. Maybe something on the schedule could be changed to minimize that risk.

Maybe that ingredient could be taken out. That's not anti-science, that's what science is. We should have better [00:27:00] vaccines in a decade from now than we have now. We should have lower side effects than we have now. But we can't do that unless we admit that they could have side effects. And it's like, no, they don't have any side effects.

They never have a problem. It's never because of the vaccine. You, you take an antibiotic when you're sick with the virus and you get a rash right away. Doctor's like, oh, it could be an amoxicillin, uh, reaction. That could be anaphylaxis. Don't ever take amoxicillin again. A kid has a seizure after getting a vaccine.

They're like, no, it can't be because of the vaccine. It's like such a weird double standard that we have with the vaccines where it's like it can't be because of the vaccine and it doesn't make any sense. Everything has reactions for some people, and if you're vaccinating. 2030 vaccines, even if it's a small risk, that risk adds up over time when there are many different reactions that are possible depending on your genetics and your environment and the vaccine, and whether the vaccine was made perfectly, whether it was stored perfectly, whether it was given perfectly.

There's so many reasons why there could be a reaction in a small, most kids [00:28:00] get vaccines and are fine mm-hmm. But they're, it's not gonna be true of every kid. There's a whole list of, uh, reactions that we do agree upon that happen. So why couldn't some of the other things also be caused by vaccines sometimes.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. I hear a lot coming from you that the fear is that people won't get vaccinated if we talk about these things openly. I think the data is now showing that it's been quite the opposite and the more legislation pushes to force people to do things. We saw this with SB 2 77 here in California. The more it makes people not want to, I think this is like pretty human nature though, to be like, don't tell me what to do kind of situation.

So I'm wondering with the fears in mind of I'm being forced into something that might not be the best thing for me for my child and the other camp, which is that if we talk about it, people won't get these vaccines. Vaccines will go away. How do we start to move forward? Bridging that trust, [00:29:00] having these conversations, and still maintaining the herd immunity that we need to protect our most vulnerable?

Joel Gator: The first part of that, I think there's two ways to look at it because there is a lot of research and data that shows if you kind of force things upon people, if you put in legislation, it does increase the vaccination rates to a degree in the short term. And I think that's probably true because if you're forced to do something to go to school, you will do it.

But it doesn't breed trust in the system. And I think without question, we're seeing an erosion of trust. We're seeing the the highest rates of kids. That have never been vaccinated at all. The highest rates of kids are not fully vaccinated. The highest rate of exemptions, the lowest rates of trust in the system in general.

And, and just personally, like the more people coming in saying, I don't trust anything with medicine. I don't wanna do anything anymore. Yeah. So I, I, I think that's happening and it's really interesting and crazy to think, but the one thing that medicine is trying to do, preventing hesitancy, they're actually creating and they're creating the hesitancy that they're trying to avoid by not talking [00:30:00] about it.

And, and the long-term solution is not to force people to do things. It's to get the research and the data, give people the information and have people want to do it. Have them com feel comfortable doing it. And if people are uncomfortable because they feel like certain information is missing, they need to figure out what that information is that people feel like is missing.

And then they need to go and get that research and data. I think if people felt, if parents felt that the medical system was hearing. Their concerns and was addressing it, they would feel much more comfortable doing things. We, again, we don't know what we don't know. We don't have a crystal ball. We don't know who's gonna be the one kid to have a reaction from a vaccine or the one kid who's going to, uh, die from measles.

Right. We don't know who's gonna be that child.

Dr. Brighten: Do you feel like at this point though, we could have done more research to understand, to have a better informed consent? Oh yeah.

Joel Gator: Of course we could. We haven't done, we haven't done so much of the research. If you go back and look at the research, the, the [00:31:00] original studies on a lot of these vaccines are not that good.

Right. They're, they're from many years ago when we don't have the standards that we have today. Mm-hmm. So they weren't randomized, they weren't blinded, uh, they weren't large trials. They weren't very long. And then all of the studies after that are vaccine trials against the old vaccine. So you're studying the new vaccine against the old vaccine, not against the true placebo, iner.

Placebo. And so you don't actually have a baseline study of safety, like, for example, the whooping cough vaccine. The newer vaccine is studied against the old vaccine, which was taken off the market. Because of safety concerns.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: So you're saying that it's safe in comparison to the other one, but the first one wasn't so safe?

Dr. Brighten: Yeah.

Joel Gator: So that doesn't give you a true baseline. And when people say, well, I wanna see how these affect our total health, how they are vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. There, those studies don't exist. And, and there are ethical complications around doing vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies. Mm-hmm. Um, because of the concern or the theory that if there is [00:32:00] a treatment or preventative, like if there's a vaccine for something, then the standard of care is to give it.

So if you don't give a kid a vaccine, then that's not ethical. So there's an ethics around that. But these studies weren't done in that way originally, and now we're in this position where people feel like we need to get more. We talked about long-term studies, that hasn't been done. It could be done, it just never was.

And. People would be more willing to do it if they felt like we were working towards that. Mm-hmm. And we were acknowledging that, okay, maybe they do cause some reactions. Let's figure out what, let's figure out why, let's figure out how, let's make them safer. Uh, no one expects things to be perfect. You get a cancer medication again, and, and, and it's like we know that you could lose your hair.

It could affect your immune system. It's gonna affect your immune system. You might get really sick, but it might save your life. We, we know the risks and the benefits. You choose to do it or you don't choose to do it. That's the way it should be with vaccines and everything else. And we should know the risks and the benefits, and we shouldn't assume that they're perfect.

They're not, and nothing is. And we should make them better, but we won't make them [00:33:00] better. If the companies have all the power. Are we gonna have a thousand vaccines? Are we gonna have 5,000 vaccines? How many vaccines are we gonna have before we say, maybe it's too many. Maybe these things are causing a reaction.

Maybe 10 vaccines on a day is too many for. A one day old. Mm-hmm. I mean, now you could have three, you could have three different things on the first day of life or two days of life. You get a hep B, you get an RSB, you get antibiotic Ironman, you can get vitamin K all within a day or two of life. Mm-hmm.

So what if we, what if the CDC says, oh, you know what, you could actually give all 20, you could give 20 vaccines on the first day of life. Go for it.

Dr. Brighten: Yeah.

Joel Gator: Right. Like, there, there, there has to be a point where, or, or maybe you do that research and it shows, no, those kids do way better. Mm-hmm. That's good to know too.

Like, you know. Yeah. If someone's concerned about vaccines and autism, give them the research that they want. If that research doesn't show it, they're gonna be more comfortable doing it. That that's what science is. You shouldn't be afraid to do the research because you might not find what you want if you don't find what you want.

Do you think that doctors wanna be harming patients? Mm-hmm. Doctors don't wanna [00:34:00] harm patients. If you were giving a vaccine to a child and you knew that it was increasing the risk of dying. Would you want to do that? They would not. Yeah. But they have to have that research and data to show that that's happening.

And right now it's like, no, no, they're perfect. They're great. They're saving lives. And I don't think that most people actually have any idea what the research is for. Sure. They don't have any idea what the autism research is. Mm-hmm. That's the thing that shocked me most

Dr. Brighten: so intuitively. I think when people hear like, just trust a pharmaceutical trust without question, intuitively, I think people are like, no, absolutely not.

And so to your point, I think every pharmaceutical that's out there. We know it comes with risks. We know that there are side effects. Vaccines seem to be the one exception to that, where it's like it saves lives, don't question it, don't talk about the side effects. And I do think that's where people get uneasy and they get uncomfortable and especially when they go to their pediatrician to ask questions and the pediatrician says, oh, what are you an [00:35:00] anti-vaxxer?

You're gonna be outta this practice if you don't vaccinate. Mm-hmm. They trusted you to have this conversation with them, and in my clinical experience. The majority of people that I, vast majority that I've come across that have vaccine questions are interested in getting the vaccine. Mm-hmm. And they want to get the answers.

They can alleviate their concerns. They're in no way, like, I don't want vaccines at all. And when I have talked with people who are incredibly anti-vax, 'cause those people exist, often something has happened in the doctor patient relationship that really, it wasn't a seed, it was like a grenade that blew something up in their life.

And I think that's where we have to be really mindful in having these conversations. The other concern that comes up is many parents feel like the exemption is too narrow. What are your thoughts about that?

Joel Gator: I, I agree. I personally agree. I, I think that it's very, well, it depends where you are. I [00:36:00] think that's the first step because exemption rules are different everywhere in the world and, and very different in every state, even in America.

Mm-hmm. So. Some places you can have a personal belief and you can just get an exemption and that's, that's fine. And other places they're religious exemptions and, and everywhere has medical exemptions. The problem with medical exemptions is they're very narrow. Mm-hmm. It really doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance and it doesn't acknowledge anything that might have happened that you see with your patient that you're like, well, I can't prove that that was from the vaccine.

Because it's really hard to prove that something's from a vaccine, like if something happens to a kid three days later, could just be coincidence. It could be from an infection, it could be something else. Um, but it's really hard to prove definitively that something's from a vaccine. Um, so you, you feel as your gut as a physician, like those things are related.

I don't think that kid should get a vaccine anymore, but you can't give them an exemption in places where it's very strict because it has to meet the CDC standards, which are very narrow. The CDC standards are like a severe [00:37:00] anaphylaxis and allergy to an, uh, an ingredient that's just really. It other than if they have like an immune deficiency, like HIV or something like that.

Mm-hmm. So there's not a lot of wiggle room for this kid is very sensitive in my opinion, and they've had this kind of reaction, or they had a lot of reactions in their family before, and so we want to go slower or they don't want to do it. And it's an odd thing that we would take that kind of decision making away from parents when there is a reasonable risk, right?

Mm-hmm. If there is a reasonable risk that someone has a good reason for why they think that they should not give their kids vaccines for, for whatever reason, that should be the decision between the doctor and the parent, not an outside, uh, body. Uh, I think, uh, I think it's good to have guidelines to help people to understand what, what you should be looking at, but at the end of the day, if you've had a bad reaction to a vaccine, it's not unreasonable, I think to.

Allow that family a little bit more leeway to go slower, to be a little bit more careful, to be a little bit more [00:38:00] cognizant because a lot of these diseases are quite rare. Mm-hmm. We're very lucky that they're quite rare these days. And so for the kid that's more sensitive, had a reaction, has a lot of other stuff going on in their life, uh, autoimmune conditions, those are probably the kids that are more sensitive.

And so the parents should be able to decide, do I wanna get my kid vaccinated or not? Because the flip side of that is maybe the more sensitive kid is more sensitive to the diseases and they're more at risk on the disease. So you have to weigh those for yourself and then decide if you feel comfortable getting vaccines or not.

And if you don't, because you've had a bad reaction, there should be some room there to allow a parent to make that decision. And, and it might be the wrong decision. Maybe they're gonna die of a disease you could have prevented. That's part of life. But that's, that's how we do everything else. And it shouldn't be taken away from parents, I think.

Mm-hmm. And that should be a decision that, that parents get to make. And, and you had a question that shouldn't really answer before, which is, what do we do next? Um, in terms of. Discussions. I, I, I think we just have to talk about it. I, I think doing this is the first step and that's why I wrote the book.

And, and that's why I go back to, I didn't have any [00:39:00] sort of goal with the book in terms of convincing people to do anything. I don't tell anybody what to do. I don't mm-hmm. Say like, you should vaccinate. You shouldn't, I wanted RFK beside Paul Offit. I wanted discussions about Sun Infant death syndrome and, and autism and chronic disease, and like, what actually is out there?

Here's the information. Let's move forward with discussion and debate and do this. If we can't even talk about it, we're never gonna have any changes. So I think the first thing is we need to have discussions about it. We need to have debates. I would love to see big debates between really smart people on both sides of the fence in, I don't know, in universities on big shows where they, where they talk about like, RFK needs to sit down with Paul Offit, and they need to have a discussion and say like, okay, here are the things that are going on.

Uh, why do I think this? Why do I think that? Where is the concern? That would be very helpful. It's never happened. Mm-hmm. We don't have vaccine debates and we have people that say wildly different things. They can't both be true. You would look at, you know, Paul Off's book versus, [00:40:00] uh, like Neil Miller's book and you look at Hepatitis B and they're like two different products.

Yeah. So you need to have these discussions and say, why do people think on both sides? And then we can start to work towards, okay, well maybe we are missing some information on long-term complications. How do we go do that?

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. Maybe

Joel Gator: the science on autism's not settled. Totally. Maybe we could do this kind of research to give people a little bit more information.

Not to say that they do cause a problem, but let's look into it. Let's not assume that the science is settled. 'cause that doesn't make any sense. Nor has most of these things even really been ever studied. We're just repeating things over and over again. And I think doctors repeat what they've heard, but they don't know because I did not know.

Mm-hmm. I did not know what the research was. I was repeating what I was told. And it's not actually, it doesn't actually exist. Mm-hmm. A lot of this research that we think it does, we think it's so robust. We give kids hepatitis B on first couple days of life based on three and four days of safety research.

Mm-hmm. It doesn't make sense.

Dr. Brighten: Yeah. You know, what you brought up I think is so [00:41:00] important, and it was actually a conversation that I was having earlier this morning in that people who have opposite beliefs and ideas don't often come together and have a discussion, a civil discussion. And something happened really in the last 20 years where that stopped being modeled for us.

It was, if you believe or think different than me, you are bad. You're in the other camp and I'm gonna yell at you about it. Mm-hmm. And so we don't really see that behavior modeled so much among people who disagree that we can sit down and we can have this discussion and. There's almost this, uh, idea that you should never be able to have your mind changed, which I just find really odd in the context of science.

Something happened during the pandemic that everybody's minds got muddled about what science actually was. And I mean, for me, the moment people started saying, just trust the science, I was like, that's a red flag. and I'm like, always question the science.

Trust the data we have right now, but trust we will probably find something wrong with it in the future. And I think people need to understand that nuance and what you're saying is so, so important. We have the data, we have right now, we're making the best decisions we can right now based on this data.

And as you were saying, you know, what was it in the eighties when the pharmaceutical companies basically got a free pass of like, oh, you, you make 'em, no one's ever gonna hold you accountable for them. It did a, a lot of harm in terms of actually moving the science forward and our [00:43:00] ability to ask more questions.

And, you know, for people who are listening right now, I, I can understand where there's people that are like. My child is going through chemo. If other kids are not vaccinated, that could risk my child's life. Very valid concern. You just brought up autoimmune disease. That is not an exemption for the CDC.

However, for people to understand anything that you get, whether it is a vaccine or a naturally acquired virus that triggers your immune system, can activate autoimmunity. I bring this up as a parent who has a child who has pandas, the pandas and pans community. For people who dunno what it is, roughly one in 200 are going to get it and roughly like 90 something percent of doctors won't believe it.

Uh, I'm making up that 90%, but that's the mom experience of like. Doctors do not believe they're like a little better

Joel Gator: now. It's like 80%, probably,

Dr. Brighten: probably 80% more people believe it though. So my son, um, he developed pandas seven years ago. [00:44:00] And I mean, even doctors who didn't know me online when I talked about it were like, you're spreading misinformation.

Why would you be talking about this? How dare you talk about this? Like, you're making moms hysterical. And I'm like, how are you sleeping at night right now? Like, I'm telling you what I'm going through and you are telling me this is So, my point is I know within that community, moms talk about it, about how their specialists advise modified schedules.

Not saying don't vaccinate this child at all, but when your child's in a flare. You. So for people who don't know the immune system's attacking the brain, they literally lose their ability to walk, talk, be able to go to the bathroom on their own. And with that they'll get this, they'll be told like, let's do a modified schedule, let's change.

It's all on the hush. And the doctors are like, I can't write to an exemption. I can't do that. Even though clinically my best judgment is this is how we do this with the child. And I think it's so unfortunate that the [00:45:00] doctor using their clinical judgment with this, with this disease that hasn't been studied extensively enough for us to truly understand it feels like they have to keep that secret.

And they're telling the parents like, we're gonna do this thing. Okay. They're not anti-vax. They're not saying, don't get vaccinated. What they're saying is, your child's health in this moment. This is what we've gotta prioritize and this is how we have to do things. Do you see any hope of that changing in the near future?

Joel Gator: I hope it changes. I mean, I think it's a very uphill battle, but I think if there was ever a time to see it change, it's now the people who had very strong oppositional voices all of a sudden are in power of health, which is weird. It's a weird, it's a weird, it's change that, you know mm-hmm. RFK at Del Bigtree or like running health for where they were before.

But, you know, they were very vocal about their positions on, on certain things. And whatever you feel about them, they, they say what they feel [00:46:00] and they wanna push for discussions and debates. So I think there is, um, a movement towards that. I think social media has changed a lot. So debate and discussion are, are willing to happen.

And I think that with the pandemic, like you said, for me and for a lot of people, it opened up our eyes to the reality of how science is working right now to some degree and how much. Control pharma has over the media and the agenda and things that just made no sense that could possibly make sense were happening.

And that had to be a point where we say, wait a minute, look at our health. What is going on? Look at our kids. They're not super healthy. Not like we're all dying. We're 40 a hundred years ago. So not all of science is bad, but you know, life expectancy is going back down. Chronic disease rates are skyrocketing.

So maybe not everything that we're doing is exactly perfect in the last 20 or 30 years. And maybe there's some nuance in some middle ground and maybe there's some room to to talk about this without having two camps of anti-vaxxer versus provax. 'cause like you said, your experience is similar to mine.

Most people wanna vaccinate. Most people [00:47:00] do wanna do it. They just wanna feel heard. They want to talk about it. They wanna know that you care. They wanna know what you've seen. 'cause everybody's read the story of the kid who gets a vaccine and then their parents feel like they got autism because of the vaccine.

Or they had a terrible reaction, or they had a terrible reaction to a COVID vaccine. And so now they're concerned and they want to hear. What you've seen as a doctor, when you've seen thousands of patients, what you feel like they should do, what your concern level is and what's being done about this, that's all reasonable.

That's what a good parent should do. Mm-hmm. Good parent should not just give their kid 40 vaccines. They should have questions, have discussions, and do what they feel is right. That might be to do all the vaccines on the regular schedule. That's fine. I think it would be very, um, arrogant to say that I know better than the CDC.

Right. Or something like that. I think there are a lot of smart people that have studied these things for a long time and they have come up with the schedule that they think is best and, and that's what you should defer to if that's what you're gonna defer to. I can't tell people what to do, but I think asking questions [00:48:00] is important because.

Right now we're not trying to make them better. Mm-hmm. And I think we can make them better if we have discussions about it. And there are studies out there to show that not very many, but like a few studies from different countries that, oh, if, if you delay a certain vaccine, you decrease your risk of asthma or you decrease your risk of like, these are the kind of questions we should be asking.

It's not like the American way is the only way. Mm-hmm. There are many different vaccine schedules out there. MMR is given at very widely different times. Not everybody gives hepatitis B at birth. We have a very high risk of infant mortality in America. Not everything that we're doing is amazing here.

Mm-hmm. So let's look at that. Let's be realistic. Let's look at our autism rates or look at our chronic disease rates and let's say, alright, well what can we do to make them better? Everything should be on the table, including vaccines. And if there are things in vaccines or things that we are doing with vaccines, we should be open as a profession and as a society to say, look.

We gave all these vaccines 'cause we thought they were helping [00:49:00] and we realized that it's actually increasing your risk of something else. I don't think that the vaccines don't work. Mostly they work, I think a lot of these diseases are, are, are decreased. But the question is at what cost?

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. At

Joel Gator: what cost?

If you get an MMR, is that gonna create some sort of other reaction? Does it prevent you from measles? Yeah, it probably does. So that, I don't think that's the big question. The question is, if you get that vaccine, well what are your risk from anything else? That's what we need to know. That's what the question of someone who has questions is.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Brighten: And

Joel Gator: that's not an unreasonable question to have. The answer might be no, it's really beneficial as a net positive. Great. But the answer might also be, well. We did all these studies in Africa looking at DTP and the kids had an increased risk of dying, which is out there. Like there are several studies from Guinea Basa, which show that kids that get the DPT vaccine have fivefold increased risk of dying.

Twofold, risk of dying, not from dip theory, pertussis and 10, but from other diseases. These are the kinds of things [00:50:00] we should be asking.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. To

Joel Gator: look at the net positive, because if you give a vaccine and it increases your risk of dying overall, that's not a good thing. Yeah, right. Of course we could all agree on that.

Doesn't mean that's what's happening. But that's not an unreasonable question to ask. But nobody's asking that question because we just say they're great.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. They're

Joel Gator: perfect and everybody should do it, and we have to protect the other kids, like you mentioned. Yeah. We do wanna protect people. We don't want anybody to die, but we want to look at things for the best possible health for our kids, and if you can't question something, you need to ask why we can't question it.

Mm-hmm. There has to be somebody or something, or many things pushing us against asking questions. Why? We have to figure that out. That out.

I don't think parents need to be forced to get vaccines.

I don't think anybody should be forced to do. Anything that they don't want to when it comes to a medical procedure, uh, especially for routine things. [01:03:00] Um, and, and we should be asking the questions as a profession, why are people hesitant? Okay, let's get the research to make them less hesitant.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: That's what we should be looking for, not how do we convince them to do the thing that they don't wanna do.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. So you've been pretty honest about your own fears of facing backlash, uh, losing your platform. We've historically seen examples made of any doctor who speaks up about vaccines or questions them in any way.

What made you decide to speak out to write this book and to start talking about this?

Joel Gator: I just feel like we need to, I mean, I've seen so many people step up it, I was just very curious about the topic. I feel like it's the right thing to do to talk about it. I feel like I'm in a good position to do it because I don't really have a specific position or a reason to kind of push things from one side.

I don't have like a pharma backing or anything like that. It's just this is what I'm getting asked all the time. This is what I'm getting asked online. This is why people [01:04:00] are coming to my office. This is the information that people want. And, and I didn't have any sort of real resource to send people to.

All I could say to people before was, well, if you're gonna read a book, read two books. You gotta read one, one on the pro side, one on the anti side, and kind of learn, learn what they say. There's not a good website in the middle. There's there nothing like that exists.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: Right now. And, and that's not helping.

What I think is the majority of the parents at this point, and the majority of individuals who are in the middle and they're not against the. Medical products totally. But they are hesitant and they are aware and people are asking questions. Um, and, and I think that that's a good thing. And there's a platform to get this information out that didn't exist before.

If you were to try to get a book or this information out five years ago, where would you go? Mm-hmm. I mean, you, you would never get, you would never get on the mainstream tv. You would, you would not get on anything. You'd get shut down from social media, so it'd be useless. No one would hear it. But now alternative media's bigger than regular media.

You [01:05:00] don't have to go on the news or on a, you know, late night talk show or whatever to get a book out there and get information out there. So I think it's the right time because people are talking about every kind of controversy. And, and this shouldn't be controversial. I mean, it's part of my job. I should feel comfortable giving vaccines and having all this information, and I should be able to get the questions answered that I have.

Mm-hmm. And stuff doesn't exist like the, the conversation about autism. You don't have to agree. People don't have to agree with it. If they can find different information, send it to me. I said that in the book. I'm like, here's, I wrote out every single thing that I did and where I found it and what the research is, and if somebody finds something different, send it to me.

I'll change my mind. I don't have a position. I just think we should be able to talk about it and not talking about it doesn't help our kids. I mean it's 'cause I'm a dad too, you know? Maybe that changes things and changes your perspectives. You want a better world for them. Maybe I'm just farther onto my career.

Mm-hmm That I feel like I felt compelled to do it, but I dunno. There's not a specific reason. I just think that it's the right thing to do. [01:06:00]

Dr. Brighten: You've also been stepping into the arena, lobbying against artificial food dyes and the food system in the us. I'm curious what the data says in terms of how it affects our children's health and their behavior.

Because there's certainly a lot of people who say food dies are the least of our concerns.

Joel Gator: Yeah. So. That goes back to, I think, the bigger picture of chronic disease. And one of the big reasons why I got into this in the first place was chronic disease rates are skyrocketing. I think our kids are more sick than they were a decade or two ago, and we need to do something about that.

And I think that that sentiment is echoed and why it became a part of politics this year, which is weird 'cause I've been talking about kids health for a while. Never really a part of mainstream anything. But then it really became political this year and the Maha movement and you know, whatever you wanna call it.

But it's not political, it's health. It's our kids and it's, it's really important that we do talk about it. I agree that probably dies are one of the most, the least important [01:07:00] things in terms of our health in general, but it's something that, that people could get behind.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. Uh,

Joel Gator: it's something that was a part of catalyzing the movement.

It's something in our food that has a lot of evidence that it has. Side effects and concerns in terms of, um, your mental health and your behavior and endocrine disruption and mutant disruption. We have a lot of evidence about that at this point, and there is no medical benefit to it.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: So it's a pretty simple thing to get behind in terms of this is almost certainly not good for us.

There's no major benefit to it. Let's get it out of our food. It's a much bigger discussion, but it has to start somewhere. And you have to take one step in the direction. You're not gonna change the entire food system in a few weeks, but you can change some of the laws and you can change some of the ingredients.

And that's a first step. Uh, there is a lot of pushback on it. It's like, oh, you know, it's just a bunch of people that don't get it. And taking out dyes doesn't really change anything. It doesn't, it doesn't really it, but it, it moves things in a, [01:08:00] in a direction. It gets people talking. It brings awareness, but it's a much bigger discussion about food that needs to be had.

And it's, it's starting, it's just beginning and you're starting to see the discussions around formula, starting to see the discussions around school lunches and, and, and different rules. I mean, that's why I started trying to get involved more in California with, um, Jesse Gabriel, who is a great, uh, politician here who's pushed some of the, those really boundary pushing laws around dyes and now they're working towards getting ultra processed food out of schools.

So like, these are the steps that we can take. It's gonna take many years, but you have to start with what you can do now, and then you can start pushing for bigger, bigger things. You're not gonna have a garden pop up in every area next week. You're not gonna have fresh food available to everybody tomorrow.

But if we can't agree that there's a problem, then we're not gonna be able to get to the bigger thing. So I think it's one step at a time, and that's where I get it, is frustrating sometimes when people. Call that out and it's like, okay, I think [01:09:00] everybody gets it. It's not about food. D totally. You know, it's still junk food without a food dye.

Uh, but it's junk food that's a little bit better. And how is that bad? Let's pick and choose what we can do and let's start to change things. And especially with things that have been changed in other places, and let's at least try to get our food to be the healthiest possible within reason. Uh, and I think we could do that.

We could do it over the next 10, 20 years.

Dr. Brighten: What do you wish parents knew about ultra processed food in terms of how it affects their children's health?

Joel Gator: I just wish that parents understood that you are literally built of what you eat. And if you're not eating the nutrients that you need to thrive and you're not giving your kids real fresh food, then there's no possible way that they're gonna be healthy and thrive.

Most kids are eating. The vast majority of their calories from ultra processed foods. Mm-hmm. And even in the best case scenario, a lot of our fruits and veggies are shipped from some other place at this point. They're sprayed in all sorts of chemicals. They're still not ideal, um, because you lose a lot of the nutrient density [01:10:00] from mass production, but it's, uh, better than, than mass, than mass produced ultra processed foods.

So I think we have to start making steps and strides towards getting back to more fresh local produce that's available for everybody.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: Um, but we just need to understand that that starts with the ultra processed food and we've been marketed to for so many years about faster, cheaper, easier. And we have to shift that back to taking time, family cooking, local produce, like those are, these are things that we have to value.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: And then work together to have. Societal change towards valuing those things, bringing the price down for, for fresh food, having that kind of food available for our kids at schools, it's not impossible. You look at school lunches in other countries and they have much better food than what we have here.

So it can be done. It's not simple. Mm-hmm. But it's important. And to go back to your point about like the bigger picture, it's not about food diets, it's about the food in general. But we have to acknowledge that our food [01:11:00] is pretty crappy and a big part of our chronic disease epidemic and why we have a third of kids with diabetes or pre-diabetes, and why more than half adults are overweight or obese.

Like, these are things that matter. And if we start to have this conversation and move things the other direction, it'll make a big difference for our kids. We won't see those same levels in 10 or 20 years. It's not about dyes, it's about food.

Dr. Brighten: Is infant formula as problematic as people are making it out to be in the United States?

Joel Gator: Yes and no. I I, I think it's important that we understand that. Of the food that we have. Formula is one of the most regulated. So there actually are a lot of regulations. And even with that new consumer report, nothing was above the level of actual safety concern. Like the, nothing was above the level when you're

Dr. Brighten: talking about the heavy metals.

The

Joel Gator: heavy metals. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So they were still below the level that were set, but they were there. Uh, obviously we want to have as minimal as possible. It's really hard to make products these days it seems, that don't have any sort of trace metals in them 'cause they're in the [01:12:00] environment. They're mm-hmm.

They're normally in the environment, but then they're also abnormally in the environment from water contamination, agriculture, the manufacturing. So I, I think we have a bigger problem in terms of the metals and the contaminants in our food that needs to be discussed. 'cause it's pretty pervasive. But at least from those studies, I mean, it's good 'cause we want them to be as safe and nutritious as possible.

And we have high, high fructose current syrup as one of our first ingredients where other countries don't. And that's probably not a great thing. Mm-hmm. Um, we had some metals in there. That's probably not a great thing. We don't want arsenic in, in there. It is not that the levels were so high that we need to be super scared.

It's just that they're there. And when we're talking about our infant formula, which is something that kids who are on formula are gonna have that maybe exclusively for six months. We wanna set up our kids for success. And so we want better formula in a decade than we have now. And if we, again, allow companies to just kind of run the show, and you just have a couple of companies that are so big that have most of the formula, which is the way that it is now.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Joel Gator: They [01:13:00] have no reason to make their products better, we have to do that. Mm-hmm. And that's why I'm really happy about that. Not to say that the formula is specifically so problematic right now, but it's such a vital thing. It's the only thing a baby's eating. So to put extra standards on them, to put more checks and balances to watch over them to try to make them better.

How is that possibly bad? Mm-hmm. How is it possibly bad to want them to be. Better always. They're better than they used to be. Let's make them better moving forward. There should be no argument there. Let's make it better. Mm-hmm. For our kids, whatever that means, it's, it's not the best formula we're ever gonna have as humanity.

Dr. Brighten: I think it's important for people to understand that as you're talking about these big corporations who are involved in this. You know, Nestle has never done something out of the goodness of their heart. They are actually probably the one who can take the credit for why we don't have maternity leave in the United States because they've lobbied against it for so long to ensure that moms are completely stressed out, they lose their milk supply and that they're [01:14:00] then having to use formula.

We need formula. It is very, very important. There are women, for whatever reason, are not able to breastfeed. It needs to be available. But to your point, I do believe. Nestle is definitely one of the top country com companies that needs to be kept in check and that we do need to be making sure that there are really strict guidelines on what they're doing and what is going into our infant formula.

I saw a lot of pushback online where people were saying, oh, they're focusing on infant formula now, but they're like, you know, deforestation is about to happen. Fracking is coming, and like that's a bigger problem. All of these are a problem. They are a big

Joel Gator: problem. There's lots of problems in the world,

Dr. Brighten: and when it comes to the current administration, there is no denying there are absolute contradictions happening.

Every single day that are literally driving my mind bonkers. Because on one hand [01:15:00] there's this focus of cleanup, infant formula, we've gotta talk about, you know, SNAP program and cleaning up our food supply. And on the other hand, the head of the USDA is the biggest lobbyist for processed food that ever existed.

We see we're losing EPA protections in our environment. And so I think a lot of people find those contradictions are hard to reconcile with and it's very easy to say, well, all the bad things they're doing here, this can't be any better.

Joel Gator: It's so complicated. There are so many things, but I think what we can unite around is the love of our kids and the future health of our kids.

And to me, anything that seemingly pushes. That health forward, anything that's aiming towards healthier, better products is a good thing. Uh, there will be contradictions, there are many other things that you might prioritize or this other person might prioritize or maybe is actually more important than the thing that is getting done first.[01:16:00]

RFK is gonna have his, you know, his marching orders is gonna do what he wants to do. Whoever else is around him is gonna do what they wanna do. But at least my hope would be that with the individuals that are in there now, they're not as tied to a lot of these companies as they used to be. And we can start to unravel that a little bit and we can start to put some checks and balances back in.

And, um, you know, if somebody's worried about deforestation or those are legitimate concerns too, so you shouldn't fight against. The momentum that there is for health. I think that's a good thing. And there are some people that are online that just trash, you know, people on Maha or people on whatever, and they say, well, they're doing this and this is the one sentence they said, and that's ridiculous.

They should be talking about this. Sure. There are lots of things to be talking about. Everyone needs to unite. That's the best way to do it. I mean, if you disagree with something that's going on or you feel like something else is more important, then hopefully those people can get involved and push for change in that arena too.

Uh, [01:17:00] it's so not black and white on everything, all of these topics, and we want it to be black and white and it's not. Mm-hmm. And, and at least we're seeing change. I mean, change is good where we're going in the wrong direction. And I think that you have to give a little bit of time. It's not like every single thing is just gonna be fixed overnight.

Or these bigger issues like food deserts or whole foods or the cost of foods are gonna be changed in, in, in a month. Like, that's not realistic. It's gonna take decades Problems that have. Been created in decades, they're gonna take decades to change. And I think we have to go after some of the things we can actually change in the short term to gain a momentum.

Just like you hear all the, you know, the lifestyle bros or the people that are, that are working with, with individuals who, who go to the gym or have unhealthy lifestyles. It's like getting those early wins. It builds momentum, you know, for those people that are obese, getting those early wins, working towards something, seeing that weight coming down.

Those first kind of [01:18:00] steps make a big difference to giving that momentum, to put you in that other direction. To eat healthier and to live healthier. And I think, and I hope that's what we're seeing right now, which are some early wins or some early discussions about some of these things that we can actually make some changes over.

So it's a part of the news. It has to be something that people wanna vote for, has to be something that people care about. Um, when we see what, what, what happens, I mean, we see what, what was able to be done from. A group of people that were health conscious, uh, for better or worse, I mean, it, it really can affect politics if there is a movement behind it and, and actually makes a difference if you, most of the politicians don't know anything about this.

Mm-hmm. They don't know about health. They're not doctors. They're not nutritionists. Why, why do they know? Why do they care if a bunch of people that are constituents care about a topic, they're gonna learn about it? It's amazing now to realize how many, even experts just don't know the research on their own topics.

I could for sure say that I didn't know most of the stuff [01:19:00] on vaccines, and that's the thing I talk about all the time. Mm-hmm. It's just the reality. We just, there's no reason to look at the, the baseline research and data and spend all that time unless you're kind of pushed to do it. Um, and you just do what you think is correct based on what you're told.

And you don't realize What you're told is based on what someone else was told, what someone else was told. And that message just keeps going until somebody opens up the information and says, well, here's what the actual data shows. Oh, right. Oh, that's what it shows that that's not great. Let's, let's, let's look at that.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. Well, thank you for taking the time to share all of this with us. To be brave enough to navigate this conversation in an unbiased way, and to be able to hopefully help to build trust among patients that they can have conversations with their provider, and that we can move forward in a society where everyone's health is kept in mind, but also fears are alleviated.

Joel Gator: Yeah. I think that's really the main goal is, is really [01:20:00] to partner up because doctors and patients are not adversaries. Right. We're all on the same team, especially when it comes to our kids. So let's come together, let's work together. Um, and, and it's okay to ask questions. I think that's a good thing.

Dr. Brighten: Thank you so much for joining the conversation. If you could like, subscribe or leave a review, it helps me so much in getting this information out to everyone who needs it. If you enjoyed this conversation, then I definitely want you to check out this.