Making It Awkward

What's Jessica's biological age and what does it mean?! Jessica was #gifted Dr. Mark Hyman's Function Health and got 100+ lab tests for free last year and finally took the time to look at the data! All of this happened after Jessica profiled Hyman in the Making it Awkward series on grifters. Mark has really needed Western medicine these days! Dr. Bethany Johnson returns as a guest to discuss Mark...

POOD?!?! Danger abound in the food-specific portion of Michaeleen Doucleff's book Dopamine Kids; A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child's Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods . Today Selena Salfen, MPH, RD and Jessica discus Doucleff's daughter's naming some foods "pood" and about how Doucleff affirms this and promotes it. Doucleff doesn't see that she,...

Selena Salfen, MPH, RD returns to the show to talk about Michaeleen Doucleff's book Dopamine Kids; A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child's Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods .  Selena shares her experience parenting a child who has ADHD, autism and different feeding needs than Doucleff's. Selena tried out one of Doucleff's parenting exercises with he...

As news outlets are being banned from the White House let's talk about the Democratic dark money funding influencers  positioning themselves as journalists. Actual Journalist Lindsay Lee Wallace returns to the show to unpack dark money in social media influencing, and the social media economy. Lindsay talks about the there isn't a code of ethics for influencers, people aren't required to be expert...

SPAM! Cultural traditions, recipes, the Hormel Girls and the history of SPAM.  Daphne K. Jenkins returns to the show to talk about the history, cultural relevance and celebration of SPAM . Daphne shares the different ways in which she ate SPAM growing up n Hawaii and her recent elevation of the iconic food to butter mochi magic .  The two discuss the need for shelf stable foods, especially when Ha...

HuffPost journalist Jillian Wilson joins the pod to talk about her article: More And More People Suffer From 'Chemophobia' — And MAHA Is Partly To Blame . She breaks down the history of the fear tactic and how it strikes  a nerve with both conservatives and liberals alike. She tells us how she approaches her science reporting which is as impressive as it is encouraging.  This episode topic was ins...

Cigarettes, bacon, raw milk, raccoon, pork, chicken and The Conscious Lee! Today's guest, medical historian Dr. Bethany Johnson , returns to the show for the first follow up episode following the episode with The Conscious Lee's . In addition to her analysis of what went down in that episode, Bethany covers a lot of ground! Our conversation includes raw milk with formaldehyde, the idea of "poor pe...

The Conscious Lee joins the show to debate the merits of his recent video about cured meats causing cancer and Jessica's video reply questioning the honesty of his presentation of the evidence.  Both of them reference the World Health Organization's 2015 report about carcinogens, and Jessica attempts to provide nuance to the carcinogen designation by discussing how substances are labeled as carcin...

Blake Flaugher, MPH and Caleb Haven Draper return to the show to review the horror film Leviticus from first time writer and director Adrian Chiarella. The film follows two queer teenage boys who live in an Australian town and are part of a small conservative church. In this review the three discuss the role that both fear and shame play in our lives and in society.  The three of them break down t...

Calvin Gilbert returns to the show to talk about self-medicating ADHD with exercise and the intersections with gender and disordered eating. Calvin talks about their all-or-nothing thinking, their history with alcohol abuse, and their experiences competing in two Iron Man races. We get into the multiple times they've come out to friends and family over the last 20+ years and their path to knowing...

Dietitian Sherene Chou and Jessica had a drastically different experience at the ADA Scientific Sessions than the researchers who were removed! Sherene may have been the first person to include a Subway Take at a medical conference. Today's episode continues the conversation about the ADA conference, one that started a few weeks back with journalist Lindsay Lee Wallace. Just last week, the medical...

Have you wondered how 5G conspiracies developed or what makes some people more vulnerable to conspiracy theories?  Today Jessica talks with Dr. Eoin Flaherty, assistant professor at Maynooth University to find the  answers to these questions and many others. The two talk about conspiracism and the post-truth era in which we're living.  Dr. Flaherty explains 5G and why some people believe it's dang...

Closing out Pride Month with a conversation about body image in queer men.  Blake Flaugher MPH returns to the show and joins Caleb Draper to talk about gym culture among queer men including a selfie-specific locker room mirror, peacocking among queer men, nudes, looksmaxxing, dating apps and body dysmorphia. The three of them got to be besties while playing kickball with Outloud Sports , stories a...

The American Diabetes Assoc . conference got spicy! But was that intentional? Did it have to? Lindsay Lee Wallace returns to the show to talk about her recent trip to the Health Journalism 2026 conference and the ADA conference where police escorted researchers out of the venue after they distributed paper copies of a published editorial . The researchers detained were not allowed back, including...

Happy Pride month! 🏳️‍🌈 50% off Ozempic for Pride!!! Jessica traveled to NYC in 2024 and got to investigate an ad for Ozempic. Kent Thosmas, MSW joined Jessica to talk about this ad and her visit to the clinic offering the deal, and what this means for gay men. Kent shared how his Christianity played into his eating disorder and the two talk about queer men, and how religion, queerness, and healt...

Spoilers! Meghan Cichy, trad wife Leslie Voorhees Means, Selena Salfen and Alison Pill are back on the show for Part 2 of a conversation about Yesteryear, a novel about a tradwife, Natalie, and her curated yet frightening life. Yesteryear offers the reader two lived experiences for Natalie. One in contemporary times, the other in the 1850s. The novel switches back and forth between these two lives...

No spoilers! Meghan Cichy, trad wife Leslie Voorhees Means, Selena Salfen and Alison Pill are back on the show for Part 1 of a conversation about Yesteryear, a novel about a tradwife and her curated yet frightening life. Each of them shares who, if any, of the characters they connect with. They also discuss trad wives and whether we can define them, the idea of family values and the valuing of wha...

Dr. Oz has made up a new description of American women: under-babied . So it was a good time to return to this conversation with Dr. Eoin Flaherty. The Trump administration has talked about using  awards , scholarships and cash as incentives to have more children. People see Elon as a leader in pronatalism conversations. Dr. Eoin Flaherty is back on the show to connect the dots between population...

People are hungry in America , in a country of billionaires, where food should be a human right, and the administration will no longer collect data on food insecurity in the US saying that it is "redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous" and that number is only going to grow as people attempt to renew their benefits and the work requirements for SNAP go into effect.  In this episode Meghan C...

Jessica attended the People vs Poison rally that was held in Washington DC on April 27th and Trampus Harmon comes back to the show to hear all about it. She shares her conversation with a Bernie Sander door knocker turned Trump supporter and the two talk about Alex Clark's speech, Cory Booker's appearance, and whether things were truly bipartisan at the rally.  Trampus also shares his thoughts and...

Jessica's UPF experiment has been in the news again! She invited journalist Lindsay Lee Wallace back to the show to see if the two could answer some questions: How has the ultra-processed food hysteria impacted politics today? And what the heck is happening with the news media?  The two talk about gender, the recent UPF coverage, who has been interviewing Jessica recently, the feedback she's gotte...

How much should we fear glyphosate ? We get drastically different answers depending on who you ask. Trampus Harmon, Making it Awkward's farmer in residence, returns to the show to provide us the facts, context and nuance that was missing from podcaster and Wellfluencer Courtney Swan's Realfoodology podcast episode about glyphosate. Trampus loves facts over fearmongering, and prefers nuance and com...

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is the original nutrition influencer. It has used the same alarmist language that gets traction currently used on social media for over 50 years. Sherene Chou returns to the show to talk about our shared experiences reading CSPI's Nutrition Action Healthletter , and how calories are the things that the org cares about. The two of them find multiple exa...

Today's ep is to wrap up the conversation about Jillian Michaels , phew! And will provide some brief initial feedback received on last week's episode with MAHA Mom Leslie Voorhees Means. Today you'll hear from two college students whose moms were influenced by Jillian Michaels and the continued impacts on their physical and mental health. You'll also hear a dietitian's path to her career via an al...

MAHA Mom Leslie Voorhees Means joins the show to talk about people, politics and making the effort to be curious and find humanity. Leslie is the wife of Calley Means , a  senior adviser for the Department of Health and Human Services.  Their conversation covers a lot of ground! The two chat about how they got connected, healthcare as a human right, food access, universal healthcare, MAHA wins and...