Asked what he would flush away forever, Hickle tells a story from medical history. Kellogg was the most famous doctor in America and pushed auto-intoxication, the theory that the colon poisons the body, which led to unnecessary colon removals and, he argues, to today's detox and cleanse culture.
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I want to know the answer to both, but I just had to use the flush away pun. So please tell me one thing that you think people should do today, and then please, please tell me one thing that you'd flush away forever.
Okay. All right. So I'll start with the flush away forever because obviously poop is gross. Like, let's just be honest about that. Nobody, and that's part of what makes testing stools so difficult, right? Like, people don't like collecting stool tests instead of taking it off to a mail. That's one of the pieces of magic about what we've built: that you don't have to. But this is more like a historical story that I think just mind-blows me. So, John Harvey Kellogg, the founder of Kellogg's cereal brand, was like the Andrew Huberman of 1900. He was the most famous doctor in the United States. And he was a huge promoter of this theory called auto-intoxication that basically said that the colon was poisoning the rest of the human body because it contained waste. And what that led to was like through the 1930s, people, like otherwise healthy people, would get their colons removed that didn't need to. Yeah. Yes. Like, and so the whole idea that your colon is dirty and like detoxes and cleanses literally can be traced back to this idea promoted by John Harvey Kellogg at the turn of the century that your colon was dirty. And I think the opposite is exactly true, which is that your colon is a beautiful piece of machinery that's operating exactly how it was intended to. And it is not dirty. It is a filter that's cleaning your body and helping the rest of your body function better and more healthy. And so that's one of those that I think about a lot. It's just like amazing to me how 180 degrees off modern medicine was 130 years ago.
That's wild. I've never heard of that.
I'm obsessed with the history of medicine and healthcare. And that's just one of those stories that like blows my mind. Like, I think about it more than I should. And then a piece of advice. I, that's a tricky one for me just because I'm a huge believer that health is deeply personal and should be individualized. And what works for me probably won't work for everyone. And that's one of the biggest challenges in health is giving generic advice. Everyone's heard all the generic advice there is to give. What matters more is like understanding what works for me personally, right? Like every, and maybe not, I'll say this. I won't give a piece of advice, but I'll share a perspective or my view on the world, which is that the way our biology works is we all fall on a bell curve, right? And like the example I'd love to give is like we all know we need to sleep for eight hours a night. That's the middle of the bell curve. But there are some people who only need to sleep for five hours a night. There's other people like my mom who need to sleep for 10 or 11 hours a night. And if she took the general advice to sleep for eight hours a night, she would walk around genuinely miserable. And if she doesn't get 11 hours a night, she is miserable. And so much of the challenge of health is listening to our bodies and understanding what is right for me. And again, going back to like caveman days, all of that was more intuitive. Right? You went to sleep when you were tired. You woke up when you woke up. You foraged when you were hungry. And now we have fallen into these rhythms that society kind of impresses upon us, right? Like we start waking up for school at 6:40 a.m. when we're children. We're in class by 8 o'clock and we're out and when you know you're asleep when you turn the lights off because you have artificial lights now. Like it is actually much harder to intuitively know what's good for you and what's bad for you. And I think that's a huge cause of chronic disease is people are just like blinded to their natural body's desires. And it's really genuinely difficult to understand and like listen to your body, so to speak. And that's one of the you know one of our missions is to help make you more in tune with what your body wants.
I love that. I think that your product definitely does that. Even the charts that you showed me when you were showing me your app make it seem very easy to digest the information and make action from the data. Scott, it's been so much fun to have you on here. I know that our community loves poop. So I imagine that people like anytime I make a poop post on socials, people are here for it. So I think that a lot of people will love to listen to this. Where can people find you and where can people find Throne? I would love to get all those details and we'll, of course, always include them in the show notes. So