Episode 94-Robyn Openshaw-Influencers Who Sold Their Soul

·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

Robyn Openshaw says the vitamin industry was invented by the pharmaceutical industry.

Robyn Stebbins opens the episode by introducing Robyn Openshaw and setting up a conversation about vitamins and supplements. The tone is plain and direct right away. Openshaw says she has been questioning the whole supplement narrative more and more for years. She explains that her skepticism grew as she wrote long blog posts and social media posts, and as about six women told her they felt much better after going off their supplements. She is careful not to tell anyone to do that herself. She says she would never tell somebody to take or not take any particular product because that could be considered practicing medicine without a license. From there, the conversation shifts into her own vitamin D story. She says she took vitamin D, later went back after taking it only spottily, and found she was below the optimal range for the first and only time in her life. She says she has been back in the optimal range since she quit taking the little pressed white pills that they said are vitamin D. That experience becomes one of the things that made her wonder more. She also describes trying three times over the course of several years to talk to her doctor, whether on Zoom, at an office visit, or by email with one of her blog posts and references to meta-studies. In her telling, each of those attempts was brushed aside, and the email she sent was the only one her doctor ever ignored. Openshaw then says the doctor sold the practice to a young nurse practitioner. She does not claim to know exactly why, but she says she wonders whether the doctor may have started to feel less good about what the practice had become. The episode leans into that suspicion. Openshaw argues that when a practice is built around making money from selling cholecalciferol, it would be hard to expect the system to admit the product may be harmful. She says the money is too good and the incentive structure is too strong. The conversation stays personal, but it keeps widening. It becomes a story about trust, sales pressure, and what happens when wellness language gets fused with profit. The tone stays urgent and plainspoken throughout, with the guest arguing that listeners should pay close attention to their own experience as well as the official script.

As heard by us

A skeptical conversation about supplements, trust, and what people notice when they step away from them.

Robyn Openshaw takes a skeptical look at supplements and the way health advice gets sold. The episode stays close to her own questions about the supplement story, the reactions she has seen from people who felt better after stopping their supplements, and her refusal to tell…

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Why you'd press play

If you question supplement culture, this conversation goes straight for the nerve.

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