This time around, we have an experimental format, featuring the first episode of a brand-new podcast launching next week, Drug Story. I rarely feature episodes from other shows, but I think this one is well worth your time. It changed how I think about allergies, especially as someone who carries an EpiPen and has wondered: why on earth have food allergies seemed to skyrocket in the last few decades?
Drug Story is a podcast that tells the story of the disease business, one drug at a time. Each episode explores one disease and one drug, and it kicks off with EpiPen and food allergies. A quick teaser: What if I told you that a well-meaning medical recommendation may have caused millions of kids to develop food allergies?
Make sure to subscribe to Drug Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also simply go to DrugStory.co to learn more.
The host is Thomas Goetz. He is a senior impact fellow at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, and much earlier, Thomas was the executive editor at WIRED, which he led to a dozen National Magazine Awards from 2001 to 2013. His writing has been repeatedly selected for the Best American Science Writing and Best Technology Writing anthologies.
P.S. To help you kick off 2026, I recommend checking out Henry Shukman, a past podcast guest and one of the few in the world authorized to teach Sanbo Zen. Henry’s app, The Way, has changed my life. I’ve been using it daily, often twice a day, and it’s lowered my anxiety more than I thought possible. For 30 free sessions, just visit thewayapp.com/Tim. No credit card required.
Please enjoy!
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Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Many thanks for providing these details.
When is the No book dropping?
Sorry, but I couldn’t make it past the fake French accent and teasing the lede on this one. For me, this one ranks at the bottom of episodes, just above the “interview” with one of the Koch brothers.
Food allergies, gut damage, and weird diseases sky rocketed after the childhood vaccine schedule was amped up from the early 1980s. If you compare problems from children in the 1960s vs the 1990s, you can see the damage. It is likely overall destruction of the human immune system. The logical solution is to roll back vaccine and pediatric medications to 1960 levels, before this damage ramped up.
To say not feeding peanuts to children caused peanut allergies is ridiculous. The peanut industry is trying to save itself by pumping out this damaging PR message. The US peanut industry uses peanuts as a rotational crop for GMO, heavily-pesticided cotton, which means the peanuts are poisoned. Add to that the fact that the peanuts are very moldy. The harm of mold to the human body has been well-documented in the National Library of Medicine since at least the 1950s.
Do you know about the whole Israeli peanut candy thing? Israeli kids eat these peanut candies, then studies show they have fewer peanut allergies. But the thing is that the Israeli peanuts are sourced from a Latin American supplier (peanuts need moisture, it’s a bad crop for Israel), the supplier has DIFFERENT mold thresholds for different export markets. Since the US has virtually NO mold controls, we are the destination and source of moldy crops, ranging from peanuts to coffee and grain.
This is an old story, but it gets conveniently overlooked by the peanut industry.
Instead of profiting off of childhood (and adult) allergies and immune diseases, the medical industry COULD try to fix the problem. But they never will.
Pediatric medicine is full of this crap. If you don’t hunt down the whole story, you’re doomed to repeat it as you age: statins to dementia, derma steroids to organ failure, antibiotic damage and the rise of super fungal infections. You could just avoid the whole cycle by removing the medical causes of the problem.
This mother deserves a read: effectivelyjettisoned (at) substack. She writes about the recent death of her son. Her mistake was to follow the standard pediatric schedules and advise. When her son could no longer digest food, she went to the pediatrician who prescribed drugs, instead of helping her restore her child’s gut, which was wrecked by the pediatrician. Instead of sauerkraut and yogurt, she was given drugs that killed the boy.
The detailed information is fascinating. Personally, I was distracted by the music and various character voices and unable to understand some of the words of the Frenchman and grandma. I would have stopped listening if I didn’t have relatives with lots of food allergies. Thanks for the education.
Great episode! Thanks Tim 🙂