Health Wanted: CRISPR

The Episode

In the mid 2010s, “designer jeans” became a topic of conversation not just in the fashion world, but in the world of medical intervention as well. This week on Health Wanted: CRISPR was supposed to be the gene-editing tool to end all disease, so where has it gone? Host Laurel Bristow also talks to Dr. Ben Hurlbut about the ethics of curing disease through CRISPR.

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The Listener Questions

Do vibration platforms help with lymphatic drainage and muscle tone?

Vibration plates or vibration boards have all sorts of health claims around them: That they can help with lymphatic drainage, lipedema, and lymphedema; improve bone density; and, of course, burn fat.

There’s no evidence the devices help with lipedema, which is hard to burn fat deposits, or lymphedema, which is a severe build up of fluid. They could potentially help remove some fluid from the legs.

As for any other claims, the evidence is not great. One study had older women stand on the board for 20 minutes a day for a year and found they had just as much bone density loss as women who did not get vibrated. A meta analysis of studies on the use of whole body vibration for fat loss also did not find a significant reduction and included fewer than 200 participants across all studies.

The effort to stabilize yourself on the platform might burn a small amount of calories, but the effect is likely best in people who don’t get any other exercise.

The plates are probably fine for most people, just a harmless waste of money. But you should still always read the warnings. Some aren’t recommended for people with heart conditions, pacemakers, or other medical conditions.

Does aluminum in vaccines cause peanut allergies?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that we need to look into adjuvants in vaccines because they could be responsible for the increase in peanut allergies in kids, saying that the rise in peanut allergies happened at the same time as the rise in the use of aluminum adjuvants.

Except that’s not true. We’ve been using adjuvants to stimulate a stronger immune response, which increases the efficacy of vaccines while using fewer antigens, for hundreds of years. And peanut allergies have really only been increasing since 1997.

In 2017, the guidance was officially changed from recommending parents avoid exposing their infants to foods that have common allergens, to recommending they do expose infants early on. Since then, peanut allergies in kids under 3 have dropped 43%, while we still use aluminum adjuvanted vaccines.

I know it might sound scary to think that we use aluminum salts in vaccines, but the amount of aluminum exposure in the vaccines a baby gets in the first six months of life from vaccines is less than what they get from breastmilk or infant formula. A massive study from outside the U.S. of over 1.2 million children over a 24-year period found that the use of aluminum adjuvants was not tied to an increase in autism, allergies, asthma, or other chronic illnesses.

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

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