Laura Murphy, “Adam Ruins Everything (Season 2, Episode 13: Adam Ruins Wellness)” (2017)
Once again gatecrashing the most unlikely places – like right in the middle of a steaming sauna session – comes Adam Conover in his latest crusade to dispel popular misconceptions about everyday issues. Here he tackles health fads such as detoxification methods and colonic irrigation, the truth about monosodium glutamate, and the power of the placebo effect on human health. His latest victim is cute blonde bunny Julia who has to write a magazine article investigating these and other trendy health crazes. Not surprisingly Adam demolishes the whole detoxification trend by demonstrating that many techniques and methods that claim to draw “toxins” out of the body through the skin only draw out perspiration or dirt already on the skin’s surface. Colonic irrigation in particular gets quite a bucketing from a guest gastroenterologist who warns that the technique can actually be harmful to the gut. Adam concludes this segment by showing that the body already gets rid of unwanted substances through the lungs, liver (and into the colon) and kidneys.
Next, Adam explains the history of the discovery of monosodium glutamate and how one letter written by a doctor to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968 set off a train of events and hysteria that all but damned MSG as a suspect ingredient that caused headaches. Julia protests that she does get headaches from eating Chinese food (which often has added MSG for taste) – this is more likely due to the food having been cooked with too much salt and oil making it heavy and greasy. Unfortunately any physical reactions will be attributed to MSG which may or may not be present: this phenomenon (of attributing an effect to a wrong cause when there is only a correlation between consuming food with MSG and suffering headaches afterwards) is known as confirmation bias. Adam states that MSG is a naturally occurring substance found in many foods like tomatoes and that the body itself makes it.
The rest of the episode is taken up with an explanation of the placebo effect and how it can affect results of medical experiments as well as people’s overall health.
Each topic tackled in this episode is worthy of a deeper and longer investigation and the segment about MSG could be extended into an inquiry into how all too often a mildly positive correlation between two items or events is mistaken for cause-and-effect. Indeed the whole narrative of how MSG was demonised on the basis of one report, how that demonisation birthed an industry profiting from people’s fears, and what the unproved connection with Chinese restaurant food implies about the news media’s agenda in stoking racial prejudice (especially prejudice towards a country regarded with suspicion by the US government, as was the case with China back in the 1960s when the MSG demonisation began), is worthy documentary material in its own right as an illustration of the role Western media plays in creating and fomenting propaganda.
As in other episodes of “Adam Ruins Everything”, the companion chosen for Adam is too thick-headed to be plausible. The show’s format and its slapstick comedy presentation are becoming more annoying and trite than funny and make the show ripe for parody. This would be a sad state of affairs as much of the information the show presents is worthwhile and can rarely be found on other, more serious television programs.