#618: How Wellness & Optimisation Culture Can Commodify Science – Nick Tiller, PhD

0:00Danny Lennon: Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 618 of the podcast. You are very welcome. My name is Danny Lennon and today we're going to be talking all about how wellness culture, optimization culture, other pseudoscientific messaging that comes from health and wellness more broadly can use tactics that seem to be scientific but when you look at them are actually just a complete misrepresentation in order to sell us things or to grab our attention or to build followings etc and so to go through some of this i'm going to be talking with dr nick tiller who's an exercise science researcher and also has a deep interest in concepts around scientific skepticism and then also how we communicate science more broadly to the public and how we can try and make people aware of some of the practices that would fall under health and wellness, pseudoscience, or misinformation.

1:01Danny Lennon: He also looks at a number of the problems that happen upstream within science and research itself. So this can be where we have people publishing studies and misinterpreting them either intentionally or unintentionally. So studies that maybe have too low of a statistical power to actually make a certain claim, problems of p-hacking or publication bias, or a variety of other questionable research practices. that we should be aware of because otherwise we're starting from a basis of generating research that is already set on the wrong foot, that isn't being able to make accurate conclusions from and therefore lend itself well to being used by grifters and other pseudoscientific people within the wellness industry.

1:46Danny Lennon: And so we're going to go through a number of these concepts today with Dr. Tiller. If you go to the description box of this episode, you can click through to the episode page which will include some of the resources that relate to what we discuss including a couple of dr tiller's publications so one that notably we'll get into is one titled how skepticism not cynicism can raise scientific standards and reform the health and wellness industry and i'll also link to his other publications which you can freely read remember our sigma nutrition premium members will get detailed study notes to accompany this episode as well as hearing a key ideas round up after the episode plays as well.

2:26Danny Lennon: So if you are listening on the public feed of the podcast and are interested in getting more of these resources to help you learn more from these episodes, to retain more of the information, and to be able to go and revise it really efficiently, then check out our offering of a Sigma Nutrition premium membership. It is the direct way that you can support the podcast. We don't run ads or sell supplements, etc. And so your support is literally what keeps this podcast going so a big thank you to all our premium members so with that let's get into this conversation between myself and dr nick tiller

3:13Danny Lennon: here we are dr nick tiller thank you so much for taking the time to come and join me on the podcast today. Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, I think as I've mentioned to you in some of our communication, I'm very much looking forward to this, having read a number of your publications previously and also see the types of topics that you are bringing now to a broader population as well. But before getting to any of my questions, can you maybe let people know a bit about your work, your academic background, your research interests and anything else you think might be relevant for them to know?

3:43Yeah, of course. My career has this kind of, it's taken this very weird, winding, meandering path from when I started to where I am now. But basically, I come from a sports science background in the US. It's more broadly kinesiology. Did my undergraduate in sports science, my master's in exercise physiology with some nutrition aspects. And at the time, as most master's students typically do, I wanted to work in elite sport. I was obsessed with working with elite athletes. That's all I wanted to do. and I was one of the very few people that actually succeeded in doing it. I worked at the English Institute of Sport for a couple of years, starting off as an intern there and which for people who are not in the UK, it's essentially the service provider of choice for the Olympic performance programs.

4:28I worked with UK Athletics, GP Rowing, the Flatwater Kayak Squad and a few others. I realized then that I was more in love with the science than the sport so I went off to become a more robust scientist, I guess. Did my PhD in West London and had a couple of positions as an assistant, then associate professor in the UK. And then in 2019, I moved to the US to continue my research, did a postdoc and then became a research fellow. Probably since about 2015, 2016, I have been working more actively to try and bring the two worlds of health, wellness, human performance, close together with the world of scientific skepticism and critical thinking.

5:11Because the health and wellness industry in particular, as we're going to get into, I'm sure, is saturated with baseless claims, pseudoscience, misinformation. And I just realized that not enough was really being done to combat those harmful messages. So I've spent the last, pretty much the last decade, writing about, speaking about this very important subject, trying to bring those, trying to reduce the gap between those two worlds, writing articles. I've written a couple of books now, and essentially just trying to become a better science communicator to give people the tools that they need to make better decisions in health, wellness, and human performance.

5:50Danny Lennon: And that's led me to where we are today. I like how you frame it as these these two worlds because I want to get to those maybe even individually before we connect them especially we have one side even within science and academia there's many things that we could talk about of how to do better science how sometimes we have misinterpretations of what evidence is there etc but then we have this other side that is what is the more public facing side where people now have so much information around health and wellness or so much messaging let's rather than actually information. And so to start on that side, and maybe to start with the title of the book that you author on this, The Health and Wellness Lie, maybe a way into some of those topics is what precisely is the lie?

6:34Danny Lennon: What are we defining as the lie here that people maybe are being sold? Yeah, that's a great entry point. In a nutshell, it is that everything that we know or think we know about health and wellness has been dictated to us by an industry, a highly profitable industry that puts profits above people, essentially. So it's fine if you're an expert, if you're an exercise scientist or a health professional or a nutritionist or a dietitian, and you can see through the baseless claims and you can distinguish information from misinformation, but a lot of people can't. So it's this idea that we cannot be our best selves unless we're taking handfuls of supplements every day.

7:15It's this idea that there are magic exercise routines that will help to shred your abs and that the ice plunging is an absolute imperative if you want to suppress inflammation and boost your immune system. That alternative therapies are somehow better because they're natural. That this whole idea that natural is better. That there are gadgets and gizmos, those powders, pills, and potions that can expedite you to a health, wellness, or human performance goal. And that you have to be spending money in the industry in order to reclaim some kind of semblance of power and control over your health and wellness.

7:55That is the health and wellness lie. And I explore all of those things and more in the book and try and I start pulling at the threads that hold the entire industry together, including, as I've said, the baseless claims, the marketing, the marketing rhetoric, social media, AI, even bad science, as you alluded to at the start. Science also, there's good science and there's bad science, just as there are good and bad versions of pretty much everything. And bad science can also contribute to the spread of wellness misinformation. So I have a whole chapter trying to unravel that. So yeah, that is the health and wellness lie.

8:31And people sometimes need a little bit of help reclaiming some of the power over their, some of the autonomy over their pursuit of health and wellness.

8:38Danny Lennon: You mentioned the word control a moment ago, and I think this is a really interesting area because one of those ideas you talk about is this illusion of control that we're sometimes sold. And I think this kind of speaks to now, and I guess this is again one of the things you alluded to, that we have a variety of different types of, let's say, wellness influencers or kind of pseudoscientific messaging. One is maybe more on the obvious side. So anyone with maybe a bit of a scientific background can spot things like, oh, this is a product that is a detox tea that probably doesn't have anything behind it.

9:12Danny Lennon: It's got a lot of marketing. Now we have these much more difficult to spot for many people forms where you have people using a lot of scientific language. This whole movement around health optimization, I think there's many examples buried within this. And I think you really have touched on something with this illusion of control that is typical of that type of genre of content creation but also products that come after it within that space so if we think of something like the optimization movement or whatever people want to call it right now can you maybe speak to this idea that you discuss around this illusion of control that essentially is used within that messaging we're a species that has evolved for pattern recognition need for pattern recognition for economy and we yearn to understand things we yearn for control over things that we inherently don't have a great deal of control over.

10:02Which is why, when tens of thousands of years ago, when lightning bolts were coming down from the sky, we would invent some kind of explanation. It was the wrath of a couple of thousand years ago, it would have been the wrath of Zeus. If somebody became ill, it was because the gods were angry with them. We're very good at coming up with explanations for phenomena that we don't inherently understand. We yearn for this kind of control. And so we don't necessarily believe those things anymore, ironically, because science has actually come in and given us real explanations for natural phenomena. So we don't need to rely on these supernatural, these superstitious explanations for things.

10:37But just as we yearn for control, we always have done, in health and wellness, we love this idea that we can throw money in a problem and regain some semblance of control over our health and wellness. We all know that actually real health advice is kind of boring and it takes a long time it's about moving more exercising regularly eating well not smoking not drinking right we everybody knows this but that's not the kind of thing that sells and what fitness influencers wellness gurus even these science commodifiers are doing is selling people the illusion of control for profit that's essentially what it comes down to mentioned the difference there between science communicators and this term that I don't know if I've invented it, but I'm using it more and more recently as science commodifiers is that in their search for more control, people do want to use effective products and they are requiring science-based, evidence-based answers to things.

11:35And they want to use things that are proven. I'm putting this in air quotes now that are proven to work. The difference is that a science communicator is somebody who will look at a study, will pop the hood, will look at the mechanics, look at the machine working underneath the bonnet, and will help people to understand what's working and what isn't. Will actually help people to understand the mechanics of what's going on. Science commodifiers are more like the car salesman. They'll just shine the thing up. They'll make it look really nice. They'll tell you how fast it goes, and they don't care if the thing breaks down a mile from the car lot.

12:06So they are using science to actually, they're commodifying science. They're using it to expand their brands. They're using it to get more followers. And they're using this very beautiful science-sounding language, these very persuasive rhetoric, telling people that everything that they're doing is evidence-based and science-based. But actually, more often than not, it actually disagrees with what the real experts are saying. And so we have this very difficult-to-navigate convoluted space in health and wellness where you have people who are just overtly pseudoscientific, but you also have usually there are scientists or doctors or former academics who are using science as a commodity and for the average person who's not trained to understand the difference it's a really difficult industry to try and navigate safely.

12:54Danny Lennon: I mean there's so many examples of this now if people look around and as you note the problem is there are people who are genuinely looking for science-backed information that value science in some way and then are going to rightfully say oh well I will seek out people who maybe have certain credentials who seem to be respectable who talk about science and yet the problem is then they're having this maybe illusion of learning things when they're actually just being sold something that sounds good or is going to go viral or has a product behind it but isn't actually truly evidence-based for some of those reasons you discuss and can be really difficult to parse for a number of reasons one of them I I think, and I'd love to hear you speak to this, is how maybe some of that overt pseudoscience you mentioned often is something just completely outlandish that we could then go and say, well, look, this person said this certain claim.

13:45Danny Lennon: We can show straight away that this is incorrect. Whereas some of the more subtle messaging is often in things that aren't said, right? They'll say things that are kind of true, that in an isolated sense are correct, but all the nuance they're leaving out is the problem, right? and maybe there's examples that come to mind. For you, what are some of the things that you've seen over the most recent times that would be good examples of that, either within nutrition, sports, health more broadly, or anything that we can get to give people a clear example of where they might see this pop up? Yeah, there's a clear black and white example that comes to mind is vitamin D, because it's one of these areas where there is a lot of very important scientific messaging and clinical messages that people need to understand about vitamin D and that deficiency is no good.

14:36And it's actually fairly common. And there are certain people in high risk groups of vitamin D. And if you are vitamin D deficient, and that's normally, I say, diagnosed with a blood test, you go to your doctor, they might do a blood test for vitamin D deficiency or just lump it in with a bunch of other labs. And you can actually determine your vitamin D levels and then there'll be a normal range. And your physician might then say, okay, your vitamin D levels are fine, or they're slightly lower than they should be. I recommend either changing your diet or going on a supplement regimen. And if you have extreme vitamin D deficiency, they might even recommend vitamin D injections over a short period of time.

15:13But again, these are clinical guidelines where a physician will make a risk-to-benefit assessment, right? And that is perfectly evidence-based, science-based, because having chronic vitamin D deficiency is no good for your immune system. it's no good for long-term health in general. The problem with that is because now there's this halo effect around vitamin D. There is this veneer of kind of scientific legitimacy, and people have got it into their heads that, well, if some is good, then more is better. And that's absolutely not the case. And now you have people claiming that vitamin D can improve all aspects of health and wellness.

15:50One example that comes to mind a couple of years ago, there was a paper on vitamin D and showing that essentially 60 days of vitamin D supplementation, it was like a moderate to high dose daily vitamin D supplement, improved cardiorespiratory fitness by 27 % over 60 days. Superficially, it was a fairly well-controlled study. They got something like 40 monozygotic twins and split them into two groups. So one twin went in the control group, and they essentially received no intervention. They received a placebo, but didn't change anything else. The other twin went into the experimental group. They were given this moderate to high dose vitamin D for 60 days.

16:29No other changes were made. They didn't change any other aspect of their diet. They were told to continue with their regular exercise program. And as I've said, the experimental group at the end of the 60 days improved their cardiorespiratory fitness assessed by VO2 max. So this is a gold standard test by 27%. And this paper was published in a relatively well-established sport and exercise science nutrition journal. I came across it because Rhonda Patrick tweeted about it. And within a couple of hours of her tweet, 60 days vitamin D supplementation improves your cardiorespiratory fitness by nearly 30%.

17:00She gave her hot take. It was liked and retweeted thousands of times within a couple of hours. And I looked into this and within, I would say 10 seconds of looking at one of the results tables, I knew something was wrong because this is what I'm trained to do. I'm an exercise physiologist by training, and I've spent my career distinguishing between good and bad science. And it just wasn't right. And essentially what it came down to, there were many things wrong with the study, but the straw that broke the camel's back was essentially that they'd seen a 27 % increase in absolute VO2 max liters per minute in the experimental group, but no change in relative VO2 max, so mils per kilogram per minute.

17:41So that's essentially divided by body mass. The only way that you can get the math to make sense is if the experimental group have put on weight. How much weight would they need to have put on in that 60-day period for the numbers to make sense? About 50 kilos, something like that. It's something obscene, right? Not physiologically plausible. And so I dug into it, wrote a letter to the editor. to his credit he launched an investigation asked for the raw data the author said sorry we've kind of lost the raw data couldn't provide it based on that and a few other things that were wrong with the study it was retracted but of course it already received a lot of the attention it's got a fairly high altmetric score which is a measure of online attention and the thing that I surmised is and I hate to pick on Rhonda Patrick here but she's got 1.5 million followers on Instagram, with great power comes great responsibility.

18:37Did she not read the study before sharing it? Or did she read it and not see the glaring errors? Because the errors were glaring, right? They were very, very obvious. And I don't know which is worse. It's one of those things, she either didn't read it, or she read it and didn't understand it. And I don't know which is worse. And that's one example of many, many hundreds that I could choose, where, like you said, you've got this, a lot of very good scientific evidence that being deficient in vitamin D is a problem, and that in some cases we should actually be supplementing, but now vitamin D has got this halo effect and it's being hawked to cure all kinds of things, to improve fitness, to suppress inflammation, to improve recovery from excess, whatever.

19:21And that's just one example of many that I could have chosen, but it's a pretty black and white one.

19:25Danny Lennon: And it highlights a number of things that are useful to dig into. One is that kind of clear distinction between what we might see a legitimate, let's say competent scientist or researcher do when they're trying to answer any questions someone might have about any type of nutrient would be to think about various different lines of evidence, the totality of that evidence, all of the things they know about that, maybe not over index on one study. And if they are going to do that, it should be pretty robust versus there's many incentives now for people who have online platforms to take something that is a new brand new study and then use that to create some type of hype or people make interpretations or recommendations off the back of that which is almost never how we would do anything in a reasonable sense but again it comes down to those incentives that are there to do that because that will generate more of that hype.

20:21Danny Lennon: And so it's also a great example of the issue you mentioned a bit earlier of you have someone who does have formal scientific training, who even within this area is something that is normally related to some of the work that was done in micronutrients. And then you have to wonder, well, how is this getting out to the public? What is the thing that is driving this type of messaging beyond either an error or just it's built into this is how you gain traction and it's very difficult for people to distinguish and I guess one of the things I've struggled with and maybe you can help me out here is given that there are these all these subtleties to discerning if that is a appropriate message or if something is evidence-based or not for people coming across information, is there actually a way to do this?

21:12Danny Lennon: Maybe there are things we can pay attention to, but just how plausible and possible is it for people broadly, if they, let's say, don't have scientific training, to be able to discern between these things that they're seeing online? Well, there are a few things to unpack there. To start with the last thing that you mentioned, the general rule of thumb, and it's a pretty good one, is that if somebody is offering you or suggesting to you some kind of biohack, a quick fix, a shortcut, some kind of metabolic shortcut to health, wellness, human performance, the odds are that it's nonsense. The odds are that it either doesn't work at all, or at the very least, it doesn't work in the way that it's being claimed to work, right?

21:57Because that's just not how the body works. If you've got any experience of changing your physiology, let's say you've lost weight, that didn't happen overnight. it takes a long time it takes six months a year two years five years and especially if it's going to be long-term weight management that is not something that you can expedite you can't turn up and run a marathon on six weeks well some people do but they have a long day of it and they're generally not very good for their bodies but to do it safely and to fulfill your potential you have to put in the time and it takes i don't know six months a year to train for a marathon and it's the same with whenever you're manipulating your physiology and that's essentially what it comes down to.

22:35If you want to lower your blood pressure, lower your cholesterol, improve your cardiorespiratory fitness, lose weight, build muscle, it doesn't matter what it is, you're manipulating physiology in some way. That takes time. So the red flag is when somebody is claiming that they can expedite this process. More often than not, it's BS. The other kind of couple of things to dip into here is the fact that not everyone who claims to be an authority in a particular area is necessarily a real authority. We operate essentially in cyberspace because pretty much all the information we get is online. Most people get their health, wellness, nutrition, fitness advice from social media.

23:16And social media algorithms work essentially in an opposite way to how science works. Science is very tempered. Again, it takes time. You would never find one particular study and then start making bold claims off the back of it. You would look at all, you would look at the totality of the evidence, and then ideally somebody who understands the evidence would then, or a group of people would come to some kind of scientific consensus. Social media works in a completely opposite way. It rewards confidence, it rewards sensationalism, it rewards emotional content, anything that triggers an emotion, whether it's a positive one or a negative one division.

23:56Social media rewards all of these kinds of shortcuts and hacks. And so when people are sharing information, the stuff that is more popular online will tend to be less scientific, less valid, less coherent, and certainly not the kind of thing that a health expert or an exercise professional would typically advocate. So I just think generally just understanding how social media works and how the algorithms generate content because the whole basis of that process is to keep you engaged. If all the content online was exercise regularly, eat well, don't smoke, don't drink, you wouldn't get much engagement online.

24:34You certainly wouldn't get one and a half million followers. It all comes down to cherry picking studies, misappropriating data and making things sound much more sensational than they really are. That's the opposite of science. That's not science communication, that's science commodification.

24:50Danny Lennon: One thing I really wanted to touch on is some areas around scientific skepticism. And this is one of the papers of yours I came across quite a while back and really enjoyed some of the ideas in it. And the reason why I think it's most relevant is that particularly for listeners of this podcast, they are very well informed. Most of them have some degree of background or understanding of health and nutrition science or are scientifically literate are able to spot many of these things. But I think it's a really interesting line, even for myself to consider sometimes, of this distinction between that skepticism and cynicism that you outlined there, and what is the appropriate way for us to practice scientific skepticism to allow for not only better scientific standards, but the way we interpret studies when we're reading them for ourselves, and then maybe if we're going to share or communicate that to other people.

25:41Danny Lennon: So how do you think about scientific skepticism and what that actually requires in order for it to be beneficial for us? Yeah, I love the question. And the paper that you're referring to, in case anybody wants to find it online, it's called How Skepticism, Not Cynicism Can Raise Scientific Standards and Reform the Health and Wellness Industry. It's an editorial that was published in the International Journal of Sports, Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism in 2023. and it's open access so you can just download it for free. If you can't find it, just link through my website and you can get the PDF there.

26:15But essentially, yeah, I talk about, firstly, I start by talking about the difference between skepticism and cynicism because in terms of like its modern colloquial use, they're sort of synonyms for each other. But scientific skepticism is a term that was coined by science communicator and astrophysicist, cosmologist Carl Sagan back in the 70s, it essentially means applying robust standards of evidence to everything that you come across, whether it's when you're talking to somebody, if you're reading in a book nowadays, if you're finding it online, it's not to automatically assume that something is nonsense or to dismiss something out of turn.

26:53That's to be a cynic. And it's very difficult in this day and age when you're bombarded with so much nonsense online. And I see it in the health and wellness world, that 99 % of the stuff is nonsense. It either doesn't, as I've said, doesn't work at all or doesn't deliver on the promises. It's very easy to become cynical, but to be a true scientific skeptic is to stay open-minded. So when somebody claims that they've invented this kind of new supplement that can strict body fat and improve focus and performance, you look at the scientific plausibility and it's probably not very scientifically plausible.

27:27Well, okay, show me the data. I've heard these kinds of claims before, but I'm willing to look into it. And you don't automatically dismiss it. That would make you a cynic. But then you look into it, look at the evidence, look at the scientific plausibility. More often than not, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Or like a real product on Amazon, these earrings that you can buy that emit some kind of infrared energy and shrink fat cells. And they literally just clip on earrings. And there are these lovely color images of the earrings emitting something that looks like a Wi-Fi signal and the fat cells shrink and it improves the function of the liver.

28:00And you can see, of course, it's nonsense. There's no evidence to support these claims. But again, you have to apply the same standards of evidence to everything. So you don't automatically dismiss that kind of thing. Look into it. Probably it won't even take you five to 10 minutes to learn that that kind of claim would violate all of the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. So then you can be a little bit more dismissive. So that is essentially the difference between being a skeptic and a cynic. A cynic just dismisses things out of hand. We try never to do that. A skeptic keeps an open mind, but not so open that their brains fall out, to quote Richard Feynman.

28:40And I think we could all do... No society has ever come to harm by being too skeptically minded when you define it that way.

28:48Danny Lennon: Yeah, I think there's that thing where we need to be very strict on those lines and evidential standards that we want. And then maybe where there's differences in how people communicate that. And there's maybe better or worse practices. And maybe many times we make mistakes in how we try and, let's say, communicate the problems with certain pseudoscientific messaging. Because of course, it can be very frustrating and annoying. I find myself a lot of the time frustrated and annoyed with that. And it's important to think about how we want to communicate something across to people. And I'm wondering, do you see that there are better and worse practices?

29:26Danny Lennon: And particularly I think of, is there a risk for people who want to maybe have good intentions to debunk problematic narratives or incorrect claims, but can also maybe have the, there's a trap of falling into the same things that some of these wellness influencers are doing of just solely creating content that is built around negative emotion to, to go viral with forgetting why it was being done in the first place. So with that said, in your role as a scientific communicator, if you were to give advice to others who want to do that, who want to challenge and correct these claims that are problematic.

30:03Danny Lennon: What are some of the better and worse ways of going about doing that? There are some established guidelines on what to do, what not to do. It's definitely not a settled science, but there are certain things to do and not do. So first of all, try not to mock, try not to get angry, don't tell people they're dumb, because for the most part, people are not dumb. There are some dumb people, of course, but usually somebody who's falling for misinformation, wellness misinformation online or some diet or some whatever, whatever the product is, it's because they've just been given some bad information.

30:37They're not stupid. They've just been misled. And we've all been there. It can happen to anyone. So don't scold, don't criticize, don't tell people they're stupid. Be compassionate, be understanding and be kind. There's not enough kind. Again, this sort of stuff doesn't fly on social media. It's not a space that is developed for those kinds of qualities. But I think that's kind of the first thing, is trying not to argue. The next thing is to, yes, debunk by all means. The technical term is to administer corrective messaging. So if you see some kind of baseless claim, yes, by all means, you can highlight why it's wrong.

31:14You can say that it's wrong, but more importantly, you've got to explain why it's wrong. So actually break down the mechanics of what's going on. Don't just say, this is bullshit, this person's an idiot, and if you take their advice, you're an idiot too, you actually need to, okay, say this is incorrect. Here's why it's incorrect. Here's the evidence. And here's an alternative. You actually have to provide some kind of alternative belief pattern, if you like belief system. Otherwise that corrective messaging isn't going to work. But I think there is a bit too much of a dependence on debunking stuff.

31:44And when people have referred to me in the past as a wellness pseudoscience debunker, I actually dislike it because it's very reductionist. What I try and do and what I try and encourage other people to do is to, yes, a little bit of debunking is fine, but explain the mechanics of the con and help people to understand how to make better decisions for themselves. So they're not just dependent on somebody like you to debunk the next bullshit wellness trend. They can actually develop the tools to debunk that stuff for themselves and just make better. It's a cliche, but it's a trope, but it's this idea of teaching people to fish rather than giving them a fish.

32:24And lastly, it's to encourage more legitimate scientists to do more public-facing science communication. There is this sort of stigma called the Sagan effect after Carl Sagan, who was denied certain awards and accolades because he was considered to be a popular scientist. And at the time, certainly in the 80s and 90s, and it carries on today, there is this stigma that somebody who communicates with the public is somehow a worse scientist. They're not academically as credible. And it's obviously false. And you can do both. And I would encourage real scientists, real experts to do more science communication.

33:03Because to quote Shirley Malcolm, if you don't tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you and you may not like how they do it. And that's essentially how we've arrived at this situation where we are today, is that scientists and real experts, by refusing to communicate with the public, they've created this huge void that has been very, very quickly filled by fitness influencers, wellness gurus, journalists who write about science but don't really understand it, and the science commodifiers who are more than happy to treat science as a way to expand their brand. And so I would encourage more experts, more scientists to communicate science, given all of these things that I've said.

33:46Danny Lennon: I really like that concept around pattern recognition that if you are describing the mechanics of these false claims or problematic narratives, over time people will start to see that oftentimes they're very similar in how they're done, right? It's almost the same formula many of these grifters tend to use. And so if you can start to spot those, then you become less reliant on the thousand of them that are going to be spoken next year. You won't have to have someone else go and debunk those. you can see oh well look there's the same pattern repeating itself over and over again and the pattern of the con is unchanged for millennia you know you can go back to the snake oil salesman of the old west clark stanley was the most famous one of them all and he would he had this traveling stage coach show and some old infirm man with a walking stick would come up on stage and then they'd rub snake oil into his joints and all of a sudden he's jumping around and bouncing around and he's miraculously cured.

34:41And that bait and switch, the emotional kind of payoff to see this previously unhealthy man suddenly jumping around, it's an anecdote. So it's like, it's very personal. It feels personal. We can see ourselves in that old man. The baseless claims, the emotive language, the rhetoric, it's tried and tested. It's a tried and tested formula. And it's exactly the same now as it was back then. Nothing changes. Pseudoscience fossilizes because it's got nothing new to bring to the table. Science is constantly evolving, but the patterns of the con are essentially unchanged. And once you understand the pattern, you understand the mechanics of the baseless claim, then you can apply the same kind of critical thinking to essentially any approach that somebody tries to sell you.

35:24And you must see that all the time in nutrition, right? Because nutrition is probably the worst of them all. Everybody likes to think that they're an expert in nutrition. And within nutrition, you have supplements and all sorts of things as well. So maybe I can throw a question back at you. I'm curious to know what your approach is.

35:39Danny Lennon: Well, this is probably taken from a combination of many other people who are far smarter than I and trying to learn from those. But it would seem that the best point of contention in an individual conversation with someone like that would be to first understand why they are interested in a particular thing. Where do they come across it? Why do they want to try a particular supplement or a diet? What is intriguing to them about that? They're looking for information. They've heard it somewhere. It sounds convincing. and then we can have a discussion about well here's some of the things to know about that and if they're open to a discussion around that evidence that can be discussed and then ultimately it's still a decision for them to make because oftentimes people still want to try something and again it depends on a risk reward ratio if it could be something that might be not harmful but they're going to waste their time and they're dead set on it you can maybe only help them do it in the safest way possible.

36:29Danny Lennon: But at the same time, you can say, well, here's what we have evidence for. Here's an alternative of what might be a better way to go, based on my experience. What would you think about that? And ultimately leave that kind of open question with them on a practical level. And so that would seem to hopefully tick a number of those boxes. What you've just described there actually is another tip that I would give to the people who are interested in science communication, is essentially what you did is rather than just tell them that this is wrong, don't do it. Sometimes it requires a little bit more patience and a little bit more of a sophisticated approach where you just plant the seeds of doubt.

37:02So rather than just telling them outright, this is nonsense, don't do it, especially if they're really invested in it, maybe they're already trying it and they, through some placebo effect, they feel better. You can just introduce the seeds of doubt, explain to them, well, you know, some people have tried it before and think that it works, you know, maybe you can try it and, you know, Here's where the science maybe isn't so confident. And a lot of what I do is, especially with things like very politically divisive health topics, rather than talking extensively about vaccines or even things like peptides now, which seem to people are either on one side of the fence or the other, just talk about general principles rather than just talking ad nauseum about experimental peptides.

37:46We don't know anything about them and it's a silly idea to take them, even though that is what I think. rather than harping on about that you can actually just talk about the principles of evidence-based practice safety data drug approval and just get people thinking for themselves because as i've said most people are not stupid but if you just nudge them in the right direction often they'll come to the right conclusions by themselves and that's kind of exactly what the process that you've just described when you're working with a client who maybe is trying something that isn't particularly evidence-based a more kind of subtle approach is sometimes they're the best strategy you catch more flies with honey than with shit i think that's the phrase here and so to speak of that i'm

38:26Danny Lennon: wondering because oftentimes when you do try and correct certain types of claims there's going to be a variety of different pushback even from well-meaning people right maybe they see something that you've discussed and they say well hey it worked for me that's one of the most the the anecdote is one of the classic things that keeps many of these wellness things going right that well it worked for me or I know someone who told me it worked for them what way do you go about explaining to someone that whilst that may be their perception or might be the anecdote of a friend of theirs that is not something that we can necessarily use to confirm that this thing actually works yeah and you hear it all the time and I speak to colleagues of mine sometimes who have master's degrees some of them with PhDs and you'd think that they would understand the scientific process a little bit better and they say well I tried this and it worked for me you know I felt better when I was taking it and this is where the long form approach the investment of the time really pays off because if you've if somebody just comes to you and they and they tell you that they're trying something and you say that it doesn't work or they've got a personal experience that is much more convincing than somebody who they don't even know telling them that some scientist in a white coat somewhere is contradicting them and and that placebo effect which is essentially what it is, is that this experience that it worked for you is based on prior expectation and belief more often than not.

39:51And it's been extensively studied. You know, you can give somebody a sugar pill with no active ingredient and they'll say that it reduced their lower back pain or it made their headache better or it gave them more energy. That is the basis of the placebo effect. So it's been extensively studied, but it's extremely powerful. The placebo is an extremely powerful psychobiological phenomenon. It should never be just dismissed. But that's where it comes in that you have to help people to understand their own biases. They need to understand how everybody is at risk of bias. We all look at the world and interpret the world through a number of different filters based on our own experiences, how we were brought up, the TV shows we watch, the books we've read, the people we've spoken to.

40:33And being a good critical thinker and being able to make good decisions is about understanding those biases. And it's not something that happens overnight. It takes time and you've got to invest in the process in the same way that you wouldn't expect to wake up one morning being fluent in another language or being able to play a musical instrument. You've got to invest the time to become better at thinking. And so there is an investment that is required there, but ultimately it's an investment that is really worthwhile. So if there are people listening to this who are working with clients or working with patients, it's not something that happens overnight.

41:07You've just got to help people to understand their own biases, know when they're committing a logical fallacy. And over time, people just become better at making those decisions for themselves. And they'll understand that it worked for me is not a valid argument. Because even though it worked for you, it didn't work for somebody else. How do you explain that? Usually they can't.

41:25Danny Lennon: One final thing before we start wrapping up here, Nick, that I really wanted to ask about, and it's particularly related to academia. And there's a number of people listening that are involved in academia to some degree. And one of the points that you made that I remember reading related to that, while we often think that much of the problems come from those influencers and the pseudoscientific nonsense that's on social media, and that is correct, there's often problems that are going to originate within science, within academia itself. And so particularly if we're thinking about exercise science or nutrition science in those fields, can you maybe speak to what you feel are some of those upstream research practices that are most likely to cause the greatest downstream risk of misinterpretation, misinformation, or problems down the line.

42:14Yeah, absolutely. I said at the start that bad science contributes to the spread of wellness misinformation, health, wellness, human performance misinformation. And that bad science is not always something that usually it's not done deliberately. It's not done malevolent people who are hell-bent on corrupting the research process. There are some of those who will literally fabricate data and will violate their ethical integrity. But more often than not, it's just a misunderstanding of the research process. Not using the right statistics, people not even realizing that they're p-hacking, using multiple statistics tests and then reporting the one

42:50Danny Lennon: that provides the most favorable outcome. It's having a poor understanding of why sample size is important. Because if you have a sample size of, let's say you've got 10 people and you're studying small effects, then your statistical power is going to be extraordinarily low. We published a study a lot of people didn't like because it told them things that they didn't want to hear. But there was one meta-analysis, for example, on HIIT training, high-intensity interval training. It was more than 40 studies, and the average statistical power in the study was 0.14, I think. And essentially what that means is that the studies, on average, had a 14, 1.4 % chance of finding a real effect where one exists.

43:29And so, you know, in this particular meta-analysis, they determined that high-intensity interval training was more effective at improving VO2max than moderate-intensity continuous exercise. That may well be the case, but essentially most of the literature in that area was made up of very small sample sizes studying small effects, and when you have the combination of those two things, you have most statistical power. And in human subjects, the ideal threshold is at least 0.8. so it should be 80 % chance of detecting a real effect where one exists and the average was 0.14 14 % and it is not is not special here you know you see this in all kinds of areas of exercise science research you see a lot in nutrition research supplement research you know a lot of industry funding is funneled into supplement research and those studies that are supported by that are financially supported by industry are six times more likely to report positive findings than studies that are not supported by industry.

44:27The whole thing is laced with bias, and we've just got to do better as scientists at minimizing bias or mitigating it. You can never eliminate bias, but doing what we can to minimize and mitigate bias at every step, not allowing those confounding variables to disrupt our data, to be more honest and authentic with the results that we get. And this comes from the whole research process. The journals are much more likely to publish studies with positive findings. so there is a pressure on scientists or researchers to produce interesting positive findings when i was an associate professor and i would mark dissertations every year and i would have students come to me handfuls of them every year and they would honestly ask me they would pull me to one side and kind of look around make sure nobody was listening do i get marked down do i get lower grades if i don't find significant results in my dissertation I mean, what a question to ask, right?

45:22Well, of course you don't. You're being marked, you're being graded on the process, right? You're being graded literally on your ability to come up with a good research question, design the methods that are appropriate to test the question, and then honestly and authentically report the findings. That's what you're being graded on. But you can't blame them for thinking that because there is this huge publication bias towards positive results. I've submitted papers to journals and I've had them desk rejected because the results were not significant. I had the emails saved. I had them archived. And they literally, in black and white text, it says that you didn't find anything interesting, anything statistical.

46:00But the fact that it wasn't statistically significant, that's the finding. And that's what we should be publishing. Even like creatine, which is if we could, as people who understand exercise science and nutrition, if there was one supplement that we could kind of hang our hats on and said that this thing probably works, it's probably beneficial for athletes. It almost certainly is. I take it myself. Fine, no problems with that. But if you look at various meta-analyses where they've done funnel plots to assess for publication bias, there are a bunch of data points that should be there that are not.

46:33So in other words, what we're seeing here is this enormous bias towards creating research that is positive and it should be way more balanced. there should be way more negative creatine studies than there are. And they're just not being published. They're being stored away in somebody's file drawer because nobody wants to publish negative creatine research because it goes against the grain. So even something like creatine, which we can say with some confidence works, it's beneficial for lots of athletes under certain conditions. Even that is subject to this enormous publication bias. But to go full circle then, as scientists, as exercise scientists, as nutritionists, we have to do a better job of making sure that the data that we publish is as valid and coherent and as authentic as possible.

47:21Because if the stuff that's entering the information ecosphere is flawed in any way, then those flaws are going to be amplified at every step of the process. Because something that is not great science gets published. It gets picked up by the mainstream news media who are more interested in likes and shares and clicks and retweets than they are in authentic science. And by the time it gets to social media, where you've got the fitness influencers and the wellness gurus and the science commodifiers who are more than happy to misappropriate data and cherry pick studies to enhance their brands. So you get error accumulating at every stage.

48:00So it's basically a garbage in, garbage out scenario. So the responsibility is with us to make sure that we are publishing good data. And we've actually, we're about to publish a study where we conducted an anonymous survey of exercise scientists, but mostly in the UK and US, but there were other countries that were represented as well. It's still under peer review, so I won't go into loads of detail, but essentially we found that 4.2 % of our respondents admitted to falsifying or fabricating data. And that's an anonymous survey, sure, but that's almost certainly an underestimation, right? But even if we take it at face value and we round it down, 4 % is outrageous.

48:434 % of people who admit to fabricating or falsifying data, 50 % of the respondents admitted to p-hacking, which is, as I've said, performing multiple statistical tests and then reporting the one that just tells you what you want to do. to hear. I think 35 % of people admitted to publishing the same data in more than one place, in more than one journal, right? So these are what we call questionable research practices, and we've got to do a much better job of minimizing those QRPs. And essentially, it comes down to these perverse incentives in academic publishing, where everybody is told that it's publish or perish, you've got to publish as much research as possible, it's got to be as high impact as possible.

49:28Otherwise, you're not going to ascend up the career ladder. And so somehow, I don't really have the answers, but somehow we've got to shift the emphasis away from quantity and back towards quality. It's going to be a long process, but essentially, that's kind of what we have to do.

49:44Danny Lennon: Yeah. And like you say, a big, complicated topic that we could spend a lot of time discussing because there are multiple layers to this. There's the role of journals themselves. There's the role of the institutions. And then we get into individual departments and the incentives within those. And yeah, academia is facing a number of challenges within those that maybe we can discuss at another time point. Well, and it's a real shame because science and academia and research is the best tool that we have for actually determining what works and what doesn't. And people turn to scientists and physicians and medics and nutritionist dieticians for the answers.

50:19And we always rely on, we point our nose in the direction of the research. Let's see what the evidence says. But if the evidence base itself is not telling us what we think it is, then that's a real problem. So yeah, we've got to do better. And I devote a whole chapter in the book to bad science. It's called Friendly Fire, How Bad Science Contributes to the Period of Wellness Misinformation. So what I've given you essentially is just a very condensed version of kind of the major issues. But yeah, it's absolutely paramount because I guess I'll close by saying that yes, it's a flawed system. Some people would argue that it's a slightly broken system.

50:51It's still better than no system. So keep that in mind. And in health and wellness, broadly in the commercial world, there's no system at all. It's the Wild West. So just keep that in mind as you navigate the space.

51:03Danny Lennon: Yeah, I think people misunderstand that when we say that science is the best tool we have, and absolutely is. And usually their qualms about it is more in relation to individual practices by people who are trying to do science and are doing it incompetently as opposed to the actual process as intended would be great if we could stick to that. Nick, before we get to the very final question we finish on, maybe let people know where they can find you on the internet, any of your work, anywhere else you want to divert their attention to and let them know where they can get all that stuff. Absolutely.

51:34Well, the new book is The Health and Wellness Lie, Exposing the Hype, Hacks, and Hidden Agendas of the Wellbeing Machine. You can buy it wherever you buy your books. It's yet it's US and Canada release in late October, I believe. You can find out more about me and my work on my website, nbtiller.com. You can link to my column in Skeptical Inquirer, where I talk about health, wellness, fitness nonsense and misinformation. That's, I think, pretty much every article on there is free. You can also find all my papers on there as well under the research tab. You can download all the PDFs. Probably shouldn't be able to, but you can.

52:11There are no paywalls there. and reach out to me on social media. You'll find me if you're interested. And I talk about essentially everything that we've discussed today, health, wellness, human performance, information, misinformation, and how to make good decisions.

52:26Danny Lennon: So for everyone listening, that will all be linked in the description where you're currently listening right now. Please do check that out. With that, Nick, we get to the final question that I always end the podcast on. It's quite a broad, open question to do with anything, even outside of what we've discussed today. It's simply, if you could advise people to do one thing each day that would have a positive impact on any area of their life, what might that one thing be? Well, I don't want to give the obvious ones, you know, exercise every day, healthy eating, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to go with read and not just because I've got a new book out.

52:57And the reason being is that for me, it's one of the best antidotes to this stream of data that we're bombarded with every day on social media. We're in an attention economy and And everybody is competing for just slivers of our increasingly shattered attention spans with social, with internet, with social media, with reels. Everything is short and sharp. We're not, we're no good at concentrating on anything anymore. And I think for me, reading, even if you just dedicate 20, 30 minutes to doing it every day, not only can you learn a lot from the books you read, you can expand your vocabulary. You can become a better writer, a better speaker, everything else.

53:37but you're just training your attention and it might not be through reading maybe you'll do it through maybe you'll do a puzzle you know maybe you'll uh practice a musical instrument but just turn off the devices put your phone down and just for 30 minutes a day just do this one thing and focus on it and and give it all of your attention because we're in the modern world our attention is being pulled out in every single different direction and it and having the ability to actually dedicate your attention to something in this day and age is like a superpower and it's increasingly rare so i would say yeah find some time every night even if it's just 30 minutes to just give your attention to something for me it's reading for you can do whatever you like but that would that would be my tip to do something every day brilliant with that dr nick tiller

54:26Danny Lennon: thank you so much for the information you've given us today and for the wider work that you do it's very much appreciated thanks for doing this that was great thanks for having me cheers

54:47Danny Lennon: before you go i just wanted to remind you about sigma nutrition premium our subscription for those of you podcast listeners who want to significantly deepen your understanding of nutrition science and become truly confident in your knowledge so what's the idea of this subscription. Essentially, it was created with the goal of allowing you to more deeply understand the material you're hearing on the podcast episodes themselves, to be able to retain more of that after you've finished listening or reading through the notes, and then be able to easily and efficiently revise over that so that in the future you can be able to remember that information, to be able to reuse it, to be able to create your own content or ideas using things that you have learned and how do we go about this well there's a few different ways but at the core of the subscription is our detailed study notes that you get to each episode that is full of all useful descriptions background context diagrams charts etc to allow you to more deeply understand some of the concepts that were mentioned throughout that particular episode as well as in linking them back to previous episodes you also get these segments at the end of each episode called our key ideas segment where I recap certain key ideas.

56:00Danny Lennon: You get episode transcripts. You get then a number of premium only episodes. So you have your own premium podcast feed that appears on whatever app you already use and you get these extra premium only episodes. Some of them might be ask me anything sessions where we answer your questions that you submitted directly or they could be a variety of other episodes that you may have seen previews to in the public feed. so for full details on this then check out the link in the description box wherever you're currently listening right now or just go to sigmanutrition.com and you can see all the details there and of course your support is what keeps sigma nutrition going we don't run ads we don't sell supplements anything like that so your support is what allows me to continue to do this so thank you for that i hope you do come back for the next episode regardless and until then have Have a great week.

56:53Danny Lennon: Stay safe and take care.