View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Nick Tiller, PhD is an exercise scientist at Harbor-UCLA. He is also the author of The Skeptics Guide to Sports Science, a columnist for Ultrarunning Magazine and the Skeptical Inquirer.
Episode highlights:
(9:09) Science communication: academics fighting back against media claims, Don't Be Such A Scientist, the importance of science communication, examples
(44:48) Identifying bad science: 28% increase in VO2max is a red flag, sedentary versus trained individuals, training and EPO example, unsubstantiated citations, statistical errors, absolute versus relative VO2max, retracting the article
(1:37:10) Inverse relationship between media presence and credentials: fitness influencers on Instagram, being a full-time influencer and capitalizing on sensationalization, science is incremental and rarely sensational
Additional resources:
You can find all of Nick’s work here, https://www.nbtiller.com/
Our combined Twitter list-
Louise Burke- @LouiseMBurke
Asker Jukendrup- @Jeukendrup
Brad Schoenfeld-@BradSchoenfeld
Guillaume Millet- @kinesiologui
Stuart Phillips- @mackinprof
Michael Joyner @DrMJoyner
Kristy Sale- @ElliottSale
Trent Stellingwerff- @TStellingwerff
Inigo San Milan-@doctorinigo
Marco Altini- @altini_marco
Sian Allen- @DrSianAllen
Stephen Seiler- @StephenSeiler
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Nick Tiller, PhD is an exercise scientist at Harbor-UCLA. He is also the author of The Skeptics Guide to Sports Science, a columnist for Ultrarunning Magazine and the Skeptical Inquirer.
Episode highlights:
(9:09) Science communication: academics fighting back against media claims, Don't Be Such A Scientist, the importance of science communication, examples
(44:48) Identifying bad science: 28% increase in VO2max is a red flag, sedentary versus trained individuals, training and EPO example, unsubstantiated citations, statistical errors, absolute versus relative VO2max, retracting the article
(1:37:10) Inverse relationship between media presence and credentials: fitness influencers on Instagram, being a full-time influencer and capitalizing on sensationalization, science is incremental and rarely sensational
Additional resources:
You can find all of Nick’s work here, https://www.nbtiller.com/
Our combined Twitter list-
Louise Burke- @LouiseMBurke
Asker Jukendrup- @Jeukendrup
Brad Schoenfeld-@BradSchoenfeld
Guillaume Millet- @kinesiologui
Stuart Phillips- @mackinprof
Michael Joyner @DrMJoyner
Kristy Sale- @ElliottSale
Trent Stellingwerff- @TStellingwerff
Inigo San Milan-@doctorinigo
Marco Altini- @altini_marco
Sian Allen- @DrSianAllen
Stephen Seiler- @StephenSeiler
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast. As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Coupe, and on the podcast today we bring back repeat offender Nick Tiller, who is a exercise scientist and researcher at Harbor UCLA. He is also a columnist for Ultra Running Magazine, as well as the Skeptical Enquirer, and he is also the author of the Skeptics Guide to Sport Science. If you guys don't have that book, especially for all you coaches out there, go and grab a copy of that book. It will be well worth your while.
Speaker 1:We bring Nick back on the podcast today to discuss just that. We discuss how we can navigate the murky and turbulent waters of pseudoscience that is gradually creeping more and more into our daily lives and more into the lives of how we want to perform as athletes, from both a training perspective and a nutrition perspective. And the way that we orchestrated this conversation is we wanted to move from the absurd to the plausible in order to paint the picture of how some of these things can actually have some common threads that are woven in between them, and at the end of the conversation, we want to arm everybody out there with a toolkit so that you can navigate these waters yourselves, because, at the end of the day, a lot of this is going to come down to the individual. You guys have to be your own filters in this arena. I always love working with Nick. I'm very fortunate that he has been a just a tremendous part of the team that I have put together here. He was a technical advisor on the second edition of my book, training Essentials for Ultrarunning, and he's also one of the primary contributors to our research newsletter, research essentials for ultrarunning.
Speaker 1:And I think throughout the course of this conversation, one of the things that is going to come out is why I have him on those team. His eye and his attention to detail and the fact that he does not care and will absolutely call a spade a spade when necessary and also brings out nuance within various scientific arguments is really unparalleled, and I've always appreciated his counsel over the years on various topics when they're when I have brought them to his attention. So with that as a backdrop, I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Nick Tiller on how to navigate pseudoscience and sports science. You ready to do it? All right, let's do it. Let's do it. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the very first podcast episode that we did was the ISS, was when you were the lead author of the ISSN's position stand on ultramarathon nutrition not related to what we're going to talk about today, but the reason I bring that up is that's still the most downloaded podcast that I've ever produced.
Speaker 2:It really it is amazing and you know what and which is really saying something. It shows how people find this subject so interesting, because that was over three hours long. That's a real heavy listen. So the fact that it's your most well, you know your most download it, download it, not just listen.
Speaker 2:Time downloaded that, which is pretty impressive. I you know I don't think that was quite early on in my podcast interviewing days. I wasn't really as articulate as I could have been. Maybe we should rerecord it. I think I can do a better job. We could probably get it down to 90 minutes.
Speaker 1:I don't know, you and I have a. I was actually trying to arrange a call after this, after we record this podcast with somebody else, and I told the person I was arranging the call with. I was like, yeah, this is supposed to end at 3.30. But Nick and I have a penchant for going into overtime with things, so I can't commit to that time. I'll ping you after we're done. It might be, you know, friday, or something like that.
Speaker 2:Will you like to get into stuff you know well science is. There are nuances to discuss, it's not. It's never cut and dry right. There's always a lot more to discuss.
Speaker 1:This is a that's actually a pretty good framework for what we're going to discuss, which is pseudo science, specifically in sports. But it's almost kind of like going back to almost your origins, because I originally became familiar with some of your work through your first book, skeptics, the skeptics guide to sport science, and then I brought you on the podcast and now that it's almost like full circle in terms of the topics that we're going to discuss.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a couple of years ago now, that was time flies, that was. I remember that very distinctly because that was right at the start of COVID I think, and we were sort of all in lockdown. I was in the UK at the time. I'd come back temporarily, so everything was shut down. It was a very unusual time for everybody and so that was kind of a nice breath of fresh air to be talking about something that wasn't COVID, that wasn't about, you know, possible vaccines and this kind of thing. It was just, it was a had opportunity just to focus on sport and science and nutrition and ultra and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:I've encouraged any coaches that get into the industry to initially take up that book as a resource and I think for the some of the newer listeners that might not be familiar with you and your work, this is actually a pretty good intro for you. Why don't you kind of go into how you got into, how you got into what you're known for now, or like the niche that you've kind of carved out for yourself now, which is being a skeptic in this arena?
Speaker 2:Yeah, be happy to. Well, I graduated as a sports scientist back in 2005. I got my undergraduate degree in sports science in the US and it is kind of more kinesiology more broadly and I did my masters and at the time I knew that I wanted to work in high performance sport. That was all I wanted to do, and I did that for a while and realized that I was more passionate about the science than I was the sport, but often did my PhD, and I was very fortunate that I got a funded PhD, which are fairly rare, certainly the time this is back in 2010, I started at Brunel University in West London and so, to earn extra money, I started to write for mainstream magazines. Just, you know, here and there, once a month, I would just write a couple of make, a couple of thousand words on a topic that I thought was interesting and they paid me, which is great as a student. And the first couple of articles that I wrote actually were on ultra marathon nutrition stuff. This is back in 2010. And a lot of that content eventually made it into the nutrition stand that we published in whatever it was 2019.
Speaker 2:But the other articles that I was writing was on myths and fallacies of sport science, and I don't really know how I sort of came up with the idea to look at this.
Speaker 2:I guess I was just so keenly aware that, as a sport scientist working in the industry, I knew that people were constantly being bombarded, every day, with these commercial claims and most of them were just completely unsubstantiated.
Speaker 2:And it really annoyed me because, as a scientist and somebody who comes from a sporting background, I see people falling for these kinds of baseless claims all the time and I just wanted to write about it. So these two articles that I wrote they were published in a magazine called Peak Performance, which I'm not sure it's even still running anymore, but they got some really good feedback. It generated a lot of buzz and I remember thinking at the time this is back in, as I said, 2010, 2011, that there's a book in here somewhere, because nobody's looking at this is a really big, really important area and actually it's not getting the attention that it deserves. So I focused on my PhD like a good student, but all the time I had at the back of my mind, just I kept on accumulating ideas and making notes, and then I eventually published Skeptics Guide to Sport Science, eight years later, but the I want everybody to pay attention to that, though.
Speaker 2:Eight years later, eight years later yeah, it was eight years of just building notes and thinking about the structure and just sort of, and also questioning whether because this I wasn't an author at the time I wasn't a writer. I was sort of a struggling academic and I wasn't sure that there was really a book in there. I didn't think that I could write a book. And then when I finally finished my PhD which was 2014, 2015, it hit me that actually I just written a book. My PhD thesis was 80,000 words.
Speaker 2:That's a book right there, and that gave me the confidence to go off and actually and write the thing. So a year or two after that I got a publishing contract and the rest is history, as they say. But now that the more and more I do have this stuff, the more I realized that it's getting more and more coverage. It was a that the idea of skepticism in sport and health and wellness initially got a lot of traction in the skeptical community, but less so from the sports science community, and now it's been wonderful the last year or so that the discipline is really starting to acknowledge this is a big issue and so that's wonderful to see it's getting more and more coverage everywhere.
Speaker 1:It's been interesting to see evolve, because you've, I would say, within the last like three or four years, you're seeing a lot, of, a lot more people in the academic space punch back in, kind of in the way that you know, do as well with your like skeptical nature, but also look at the scientific community in the mirror and say, hey, listen, we're not standing for this. You know this type of, these types of practices. And then also taking that into the what I'll also call like the lay arena, because that's something that a lot of academics don't like to. They just don't like to get in the mix, right, they, it's just they're not. That's not that it's bad, they're just not really cut from that cloth. But for whatever reason, I've seen this like tide of, you know, maybe a dozen or so people, specifically when, within the sports science arena, start to punch back against all of the social media claims and things like that that we see, and I don't know what to exactly attribute that to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon because I came from a very kind of old school PhD background and my supervisor is an excellent academic and very sciencey but actually would look, he didn't approve of me writing for mainstream magazines at all during my PhD, despite the fact that I was broke and I needed the money.
Speaker 2:He just didn't.
Speaker 2:He just thought it was beneath the scientists to be doing this kind of writing, which is completely the opposite of the sort of conclusion that I've arrived at now is that we need more scientists, more good scientists, doing this kind of communication.
Speaker 2:I'm reading a wonderful book at the moment called Don't Be Such a Scientist, by a guy called Randy Olson, and it's Olson has a PhD in molecular biology I think he's a retired professor and he, over the course of about 10 years, he became a filmmaker, and so the book is basically about bridging the gap between science and science communication, and there's a brilliant kind of excerpt that I'll paraphrase, and it's something along the lines of if scientists aren't willing to communicate with the public about this stuff, then it's going to be left to other people who, number one, don't have the nuanced understanding of the science and, number two, can spin the science into a story to suit their preexisting narrative, and that's what we're seeing all the time. And so I think, to try and answer your question, I think a lot of scientists now are getting a little bit fed up with people misrepresenting their science, misrepresenting their research, and if we're not going to write about the science and communicate it to the mainstream, then who else is going to do it?
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's kind of it's our job.
Speaker 1:Exactly Like I said, I've seen it. I've found it a breath of fresh air to see some people in the community to start to take up that, take up that mantle. And it has been more prevalent as of the, as of recent years, as opposed to, you know, maybe 10 years ago, where there would be nobody, that nobody would kind of stand up to the claims essentially, or very few people would kind of stand up to the claims.
Speaker 2:So there are two types like that. There are some people who have sort of got some low level qualifications and some experience but they've decided to become an influencer in the space, which I don't. There's nothing wrong with that, but everyone wants to be an influencer, so they try and bypass the whole academic bit in the middle and try and jump to the end point. But the real inspiring stuff is when you see people like Stu Phillips and Ascii Eucandrup and Brad Schoenfeld, who have the academic credentials and the experience and they've done the research but they're also very prominent on social media and you know guys like Tim Colfield and other brilliant academics who are fighting the good fight because they have the scientific credentials and the knowledge, but then they also are able to. They've got the social media following and the presence online as well, and so that's really inspiring to me to see those kind of those guys fighting the good fight.
Speaker 1:So what we're going to do today is we're going to kind of go through a continuum of pseudoscience, essentially from the most egregious offenders to the things that are kind of like misrepresented which is what we were just talking about a second ago and I think it kind of to set this up a little bit and a little bit in the name of the people that are listening to this and kind of rolling their eyes and thinking that Nick and Cooper are just going to start bashing everything. We do want to walk through it in a sequential, in kind of a sequential outline for the things that everybody at least should recognize as nonsense, the things that are plausible to things that have been misrepresented, misrepresented, and throughout that continuum, I hope the links start to show up to people in terms of what gets manipulated and what gets changed from each one of those steps. And then, at the end of the day, what we kind of want to leave people with was essentially a toolkit of sorts, or at least as big of a toolkit as we can build in this five hour podcast or however long we're going to stay on the air. However long that we can stay on the air, we can build. For that we can build this toolkit for these people so that they can take away and they can start to apply themselves, because at the end of the day, there's going to be more bullets dispensed than people can arm themselves and defend against.
Speaker 1:That's just the nature of social media. There's information flying at us a thousand miles an hour, a thousand times a day, and it's almost impossible to lean on all the fine people that you just mentioned right there to filter through it all, because they're only human and they can only handle so much. And at the end of the day, if we are more people with the right kind of like set of skills, so to speak, to navigate this, I think the better. So we're going to I'm going to hand it off to you. We've prepared some examples. We're going to start with the ridiculous stuff first, the kind of the most egregious offenders, the things that are kind of like completely implausible. So, nick, I'll turn it over to you. You kind of explain this category of stuff that we're going to talk about, and then that'll start to set the tone here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've kind of broadly split it up quite arbitrarily into you got this spectrum and at one end of the spectrum you've got, as you said, the completely implausible, the completely ridiculous stuff that violates the laws of nature. At the other end of the spectrum you've got actually just bad science stuff that has been peer reviewed, that has somehow slipped through the net, that if you read it it just looks like a normal peer reviewed journal article, but actually it's only when you start to pick it apart you realise that there are lots of flaws there. And then somewhere in the middle you've got these very interesting scenarios that seem to mix plausible and implausible claims. And look, everybody knows that magic infrared earrings that help you to lose weight are not a real thing. I mean not everyone, because they're still selling them. Some people are buying them, but most people know if you're a coach, if you've got any kind of science background, if you're in any way switched on to kind of a scientific perspective, then you'll know most of this stuff is nonsense. But it gets progressively harder to do that. So at one end of the spectrum then I've just picked out energy bracelets like these power band bracelets which we've spoken about a bunch of times before, and these are the things that, if you know anything about the laws of nature, you know that they're completely implausible. The power balance bracelets which, incidentally, they went bankrupt in about 2011 because they were hit with this very, very hefty fine from the FTC I believe it was. No, it was the Australian Consumer Commission, the ACCC, and they were making these completely unsubstantiated claims. That's essentially why they were given such a hefty fine and they went bankrupt, because they had to repay all of the profits, but before that, they were an industry that was worth tens of millions of dollars.
Speaker 2:This is literally a bracelet that you wore and it had holograms in it that resonated with the body's natural frequencies to improve strength and wellness and vitality. These sound very sciency to people who don't understand physiology. If you don't understand physics, this is a technique that we call blinding with science. When you're just throwing out this kind of science-sounding word salad, it sounds just about sciency enough to be convincing, but actually it doesn't mean anything. When you scrutinize the statements that kind of thing it's sort of appealing to the lowest common denominator. There's absolutely no scientific evidence to support the use of these things. It was studied in a few randomized controlled trials and, of course, it was indistinguishable from the effects of placebo. The main reason it was so popular is because the company very shrewdly sponsored a bunch of athletes and celebrities. It was worn by famous celebrities like David Beckham, who was absolutely huge at the time. Athletes like Roger Federer, Racing Drivers, Rubens Barrichello, Wasps, Rocky Football Club a lot of American baseball players and some D Dan soccer players.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah exactly A lot of American baseball players yeah, mlb, some NFL players were wearing it. They very smartly bypassed the whole scientific process, knowing full well that the thing wasn't going to be supported by the science, and instead they funneled all of their money into marketing. That's kind of a very easy example to look at. Another example that pops to mind is these bracelets or earrings or other bits of jewelry that apparently emits infrared radiation to shrink your fat cells. You can buy these things on Amazon for like $20 and I talked about it in a lecture I gave at Michigan State University recently and it got a nice chuckle from the audience because they're a scientific audience. But, as I said, some people are buying these things because they don't know the difference between the science and the pseudoscience. Can you think of any examples that you think might fall into this category that are just so ridiculous that they're so ridiculous, but people are actually still buying them?
Speaker 1:Well, the Power Bracelet one was the first thing that I came to mind when I asked you to kind of talk about this, and it was surely because of the prevalence within the league sports that we saw at the time. I mean, you saw every major league baseball player wear some version of this around their wrists, and there was also like a pendant as well. And I just kept thinking to myself that, first off, the economy can't be that that big to where the company is sponsoring that many major league baseball players because they have to command so much for an endorsement. So somehow they're getting word that this might work through some game of telephone throughout the, you know some sort of like cultural phenomenon right Within the clubhouses and within the kind of the band of players and things like that.
Speaker 1:But I think what a lot of those players fail to realize is just how impressionable that was on the general marketplace. People see that and they're like, oh, like, to your point, david Beckham was wearing this. I might as well, you know, wear it, there's no harm in it. And that was another thing that I wanted to kind of bring into the forefront, right, because that is a common criticism of hey, why are you knocking all this around Because there's no harm in it? Is there actual harm in some of these things that we tend to put in the most ridiculous category that we just mentioned?
Speaker 2:For the most part. No. You know somebody wearing a power balance bracelet thinking that it's going to improve their balance Superficially, particularly if they're wearing it for sport. Then you just assume. No, I can think of you know a couple of more nuanced examples. What if somebody bought a power balance bracelet for their elderly uncle, who's you know unstable and they genuinely believe? You know, maybe they've got some, you know, nervous system dysfunction or disorder of the nervous system. They don't have very good balance. They really believe in the power of the product. Then that's going to give them a false confidence.
Speaker 2:I think you could very plausibly see them getting themselves injured, you know, falling over, maybe going outside in adverse weather conditions when they wouldn't otherwise do that. So there's a very obvious example there for how it could be harmful Most of these things. You know somebody not being able to lose weight because they're wearing earrings that don't work right. These things are relatively benign. The broader message, though, is how harmful it is to just have this blanket endorsement of placebo products, right Products that don't have a real direct physical effect but work in the context of expectation and belief. Because, on the one hand, somebody that's selling you a magic bracelet telling you that it's going to improve your 5K running time or your marathon running time or whatever, and it doesn't work, okay, big deal. It's not really the end of the world. But, as I said, at the other end of the spectrum, some people are going to be wearing these things because they think it heals, because they think that it's going to cure some medical ailment, and sooner or later somebody's going to try one of these placebo products to cure something that needs a real medical intervention.
Speaker 2:And we see instances of this all the time in the mainstream media, in the scientific literature. You know people using naturopathic remedies, and normally people will say, well, what's the harm? They want to take it to make the cold better than what's the problem. But sometimes people are. You know, one case that comes to mind is parents who are naturopaths and they try to treat their child's meningitis. They had very potent meningitis symptoms. He needed to go to hospital. They gave him naturopathic remedies and the kid sadly died. And so that's the real harm of when you try to use placebo products to treat something that actually needs a real medical intervention. So you know, okay, fine, if we can isolate placebo products to sport, wonderful. But we can't.
Speaker 1:I just, I actually just realized one I don't want to spend too much time on this because we're going to take away from the meat of the whole discussion but the concept of structured water. So this kind of hits me really hard because of chemistry degree, about chemistry degrees. I actually know a lot about chemistry and I'll never forget in maybe 2005, 2006. I walk into our office one day and there's a pallet of water that just showed up out of the blue. We didn't know it was coming, showed up on our doorstep. We had to, you know, pull up the lift gates and, you know, get the, you know get some strong people to move all this water from the outside to the inside. Essentially. And this company had, kind of just unbeknownst to us, sent us a pallet of water that was, quote unquote, structured. They had somehow altered the chemical structure through this you know vortexing process and was claiming that it was war, that it absorbed better and was better for athletic performance.
Speaker 1:And it's been really interesting to me since then to see all the different permutations of this kind of crop up, and it goes all the way from products that you can buy on Amazon, which you can buy, anything on Amazon now which will structure your water. It's just a little vortexing machine like any. You know chemistry lab has Until now. I just saw somebody. Somebody sent me this the other day. My younger brother actually sent this to me as a joke to pick on my younger brother, but he sent this to me the other day. It's actually a wand with what this person was calling a magic wand, with mother water in it, and so you'd stir, you have to say apricotapra, apricotapra.
Speaker 1:But the whole thing is based off of this premise that somehow, if you reorient the molecules in a very particular way, the water molecules in a very particular way, that it is better for your health, for your athletic performance and things like that. And this is persisted. This is why I'm bringing up this example. It is persisted it's at least in my knowledge, and it's probably before this since 2005. And it keeps coming up in both the health and wellness circles as well as the athletic circles.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a great example, and actually I try to. And just one more example and then we'll move on. But I think the first chapter of my book first or second chapter actually did an exercise. It was a thought experiment and I remember writing it.
Speaker 2:I sat down and tried to come up with, try to invent three of the most ridiculous sports science products that I could think of, and the whole point of the exercise was that these products didn't have to be real products. They could be as ridiculous as I wanted, but there had to be some kind of nugget of plausibility in there. So there's something on which you could sell a premise. And so I came up with the three most ridiculous ideas that I could possibly conjure up in the depths of my mind and then afterwards, when the research on it, I found that these products were already on sale.
Speaker 2:People were already making money off of these things. I might be due to the punch. If you can think of a product, somebody has already done it and they're already making money of it. Because that's how little regulation there is that people can come up with these things, that can make whatever claims they like. I mean, if you don't believe me go and look for weight loss earrings on Amazon and you'll see some of the most egregious pseudoscience claims that you have no idea how low, how unscrupulous these companies are and the claims that they make.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, people still buy them. Okay, we're going to move off of that into the maybe slightly more plausible maybe slightly more plausible category. I'll let you set the tone for this, because this is the one that sits in between the two end points that we're eventually going to talk about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we're going to slide along this pseudoscience sliding scale and we end up somewhere in the middle where the plausible claims and the implausible claims tend to overlap. So the example that I always give here and this isn't necessarily one of the products that I was going to talk about, but yoga is a great example because yoga is so beneficial for so many different things. If you just think of a list of benefits that people can get from doing yoga, it's core strength and flexibility and people can use it to lose weight. It can help with the deep breathing, the meditative aspect of it. It can help with relaxation and anxiety lots of good research on this stuff. But some people also suggest that yoga can promote healing and it can promote energy flow. I've done yoga a number of times over the years and I was once doing bichrom yoga, which is hot yoga, and I was in this stretch where you're just sitting down. Obviously the room was super hot and I'm sitting down and it's just the stretch for your glutes, where you're hugging your knee towards your chest and the yoga is walking around the room in this very calming voice and he says this stretch is excellent for the lower back and it's very good for your gluteal muscles and it's good for your liver and it's going to help to detoxify your blood as well. And I'm thinking to myself okay, I was with you on the lower back and the glutes but you lost me on liver-squeezing stretches. But it's a wonderful example of very plausible claims and real benefits getting undermined by the nonsense stuff. And so yoga is a great example of this, and I just think if people just focused on all the wonderful aspects of yoga then it wouldn't be such a problem.
Speaker 2:We could talk about cupping or acupuncture. These are both excellent examples because they're both mainstream practices that have been used all over the world. Lots of physiotherapists very good physiotherapists will use acupuncture. I've seen a number of physiotherapists over the years and a lot of them have suggested to me for superficial muscle injuries that I might want to try acupuncture, and so there's this perception among the mainstream. When people go and see an acupuncturist or a cupping therapist, they don't even realize that it's alternative because it's become so integrated into mainstream culture it's just kind of snaked its way in there.
Speaker 2:Cupping, you know, if we focus on cupping specifically, this is an ancient Chinese therapy. It's based on the premise that if you have some kind of ailment or muscle injury or soreness, you place small glass cups on the site of the injury. You create a suction inside the cup using either a suction device or a heated mechanism, and the idea originally and this is where it gets interesting, because originally this was based on, as I said, it's an ancient Chinese therapy. It was based on it's an energy medicine. Acupuncture is an energy medicine, cupping, reiki, homeopathy it's all based on this sort of idea of a universal life force, something that we might call Chi, and this is something that I grew up believing in. I thought it was a real, tangible force because I did martial arts from a very young age and in martial arts you're taught about this universal life force, chi, and it's something that you can actually manipulate. And this energy flow can be manipulated to help with healing, to help with energy and to and the idea is that if you have these body meridians and if the body meridian gets blocked and it stifles the flow of energy, that's what causes the medical ailment or the injury or soreness. So you have the acupuncture or you have the cupping therapy to unblock that body meridian and sustain the flow of energy. Now, based on what we know about how the body works.
Speaker 2:Chi energy has never been measured.
Speaker 2:It's not something that's ever been quantified.
Speaker 2:This is not something based on modern science and modern medicine or evidence-based medicine. This is not something that actually exists. Now, the normal kind of rebuttal that I get to that is well, maybe it exists and science hasn't found a way to measure it, which is that's a superficially sound argument. And I was actually posed this very same thing at a talk I gave recently with somebody who believed in Reiki, which is healing hands, the idea that you can use your hands to redirect energy, and I gave him the Carl Sagan example of the invisible dragon that sits in my garage. If I said to you, I've got an invisible dragon that lives in my garage, the dragon is completely invisible, it makes no sound and it can't interact with anything. What's the difference between an invisible dragon that makes no sound and no dragon at all? Right? If it doesn't affect, if it doesn't have any physical effect on the world around you absolutely no effect that can be measured then how do you know it's even there, right? And I use the same idea to tackle this idea of energy medicine.
Speaker 2:Okay, it might be there. We can speculate and hypothesize that there's some kind of invisible universal life force in existence, but there has to be some kind of system or structure for the things that you're going to base your beliefs on, Otherwise you're going to believe everything and then the other kind of. I guess the complicating factor is that a lot of cupping proponents and acupuncture proponents have now realized that people are getting less and less on board with this idea of energy medicine. It's sort of it's quite an antiquated belief and it's not necessarily, shall we say, it doesn't really fit with modern scientific standards. It's not really a scientifically congenial explanation for anything.
Speaker 2:So proponents of these practices are now replacing the words energy flow with blood flow. So cupping now isn't, it's not done to stimulate energy flow, it stimulates blood flow. And we don't do acupuncture to unblock body meridians. We do it to increase blood flow to the area, and blood flow, for some unknown reason, is supposed to be a. If you increase blood flow, that helps to heal or something. But as far as I'm concerned, we're still left without a valid mechanism for how the thing is supposed to work. So this is something that we see a lot with alternative therapies is that people are trying to move on from the antiquated claims and retrofit more science sounding terms. But if you know anything about how the body works, it doesn't really fit Mechanistic morphing, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but the yeah, you can use it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, Arie.
Speaker 1:That is one of the things in my toolkit and I don't have nearly as good of an eye on this stuff as you do, nick. That's why I come to you for counsel on all this stuff. But when I see the mechanism, the purported mechanism, in a modality, in a, in an intervention and a supplement or whatever go from A to B over the course of time and we've seen this timeline happen a lot, especially in sports nutrition it's not that I'm automatically going to discard it, but I have a lot of my antennas go up whenever that's the case. Whenever you say this supplement and I'm picking on the supplement companies kind of intentionally, because they're usually pretty hardcore fenders of this this supplement works because of this, and then five years go by or five months go by, no, no, it doesn't work because of this, it works because of that. That's when, because then you're just trying to justify the product use any kind of any way you can right Versus what you originally kind of what you originally intended for. I came up with two examples as you're going through that and it was really related to the first example that you went through where we have a lot of, we have a lot of modalities that work in certain instances or under certain use cases, but have expanded upon their initial scope of practice.
Speaker 1:And two of them are actually quite prevalent right now and that's cold plunging and intermittent fasting, to where, if you just took those modes and you use them as they are supposed to work, they're quite effective at what they actually do.
Speaker 1:If you want to reduce, if you want to reduce your sensation of pain and cold plunge, that's a pretty reasonable way to actually use cold therapy.
Speaker 1:If you want to use it to kind of try to control your breathing, that's a reasonable way to actually do that. Now, whether that has an end effect or not, that can be debatable, but it's the same thing for intermittent fasting. If you want to use that as a tool for weight loss amongst all the other tools that are out there. If you want to use intermittent fasting to reduce the window that you can eat so that you're trying to lose more weight, great freaking go after it. If that's something that you can adhere to, that's a completely reasonable use of intermittent fasting. If you're using it to cause cancer or to prevent cancer or something else, that's when it becomes either much more debatable or completely implausible. I bring those two up as examples because there's just so prevalent in our society today, particularly with a lot of the influencers out there, because there's sexy things to do not eat for 20 hours or stay in ice cold water or take a dip in the Arctic for 10 minutes or something like that.
Speaker 2:Well, and these things are particularly popular because they're very quick, they're very easy and they're extreme. Also, People like the idea that you can atone for extreme lifestyle with yet more extreme behaviors. If you go out on a binge or drinking binge, for example, the idea that you can just go on a 24-hour detox and atone for this long drinking binge with yet more extreme behavior is we love that idea. It's the quick fix. I don't know if you saw Dana White recently who blocked me on Twitter, by the way.
Speaker 1:Oh God, don't get me started on this. Don't get me started on this.
Speaker 2:Block me on Twitter, which I'm kind of proud about that.
Speaker 1:Can we wait? I want you to. I kind of talked over you there, Dana White. He blocked me on Twitter. Yes, that's actually. You win for the best block.
Speaker 2:I have no. I've had no direct interaction with him over the years. I have no reason to think that he even knew who I was. But I wrote an article a few months ago called inside the UFC pseudo science crisis. He must have read it, or at least come across it, or perhaps read the headline. He blocked me. The only reason I know that is because I was trying to find something he posted on social media a few weeks ago.
Speaker 2:He did something like an AT something hour fast. He called it a water fast, but I think what he actually meant was he took in nothing but water. The other day I'm a big UFC, I'm a big MMA fan and I was watching the fights at the weekend and they interviewed him and he said if you do this thing twice a year, it will reduce your risk of cancer by 70%. That's exactly what I'm talking about, Exactly A word for word. This is a claim, and this guy is very famous, very influential. This is exactly what we're talking about. If you want to use intermittent fasting, as you said, as a tool for weight loss, If you need to intermittent fast to reduce your calorie intake over the course of the day and that's something you can do in a healthy way and you can do it sustainably.
Speaker 2:Fine, Go ahead do it All right, but then you go to the other end of the spectrum. You've got people who are saying that it can prevent cancer or cure cancer, and that's the slippery slope, that's where it starts to do harm.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're going to move on, if I can bring it back to you. Yeah, I was trying to move on because I didn't want to get involved in the day in a white thing, because I'll just start going off on it.
Speaker 2:But we can stay in as long as we don't go back there. I'm just going to say one more thing about cupping, actually, because in the last couple of years there have been a bunch of studies published in an effort to provide some kind of validity to this mechanism, a more scientific mechanism these studies have. Now they're doing cupping and then they're looking at localized blood flow. They're using nears, they're nearer for a spectroscopy to look at the actual blood flow to the areas that are being treated with cupping. They're showing, amazingly, that cupping increases blood flow to the areas where you apply the suction device, using this as some kind of proof of concept that cupping is somehow good for recovery.
Speaker 2:Again, I've written about this recently. First of all, it's the idea that, well, even if you increase blood flow, muscles only extract oxygen to the extent that they need oxygen. The implication being that if you have some kind of soft tissue injury, that it's because of a lack of blood flow or lack of oxygen doesn't make any sense. There's no reason that if you increase blood flow to the area, that it's necessarily going to promote recovery. The other thing is an increase to the local area of the skin where they're actually applying the cups. That doesn't reflect muscle blood flow. You can increase local skin blood flow by getting a hickey or by getting in the shower.
Speaker 1:Don't give people hickeys to improve their recovery.
Speaker 2:To prove the point. This is what I'm saying. There are lots of ways that you can increase local skin blood flow. It's not necessarily going to have any. Of course, you're going to increase skin blood flow, you're applying a suction to the skin, but that doesn't necessarily have an impact on the condition of the muscle. There are a whole string of these studies that have been published recently to retroactively validate the more scientific sounding mechanism, but I'm still not convinced.
Speaker 1:Once again, there's a big leap from the mechanism to actually seeing an improvement in performance or an improvement in recovery or anything like that. You can always find these mechanisms and there's always a big leap between the two.
Speaker 2:Moving on then.
Speaker 1:now we get into the, let's get into our third category before we start to get too into the weeds of intermittent fasting Right.
Speaker 2:This is a little bit of a tougher subject to try and address, because I guess you can think of the first two categories as pseudoscience type one and pseudoscience type two.
Speaker 2:They all fit into this category of interventions that are doing an impression of science but really when you start to tug at the threads, the whole thing unravels. At the other end of the spectrum you've got just bad science. This is stuff that is real research coming from real labs and it's usually published in peer review journals sometimes very good peer review journals. If you don't have the training to be able to unpack some of these things and to look at the statistical analysis and to determine if the methods are appropriate for the research questions that are being asked, then you might read the abstract or you might even just read the title. You'll start sharing it and you might even base training or coaching on some of these things. But actually sometimes you're looking at a study that is just overtly bad science and we've got a couple of examples of that that we can talk about you want to start out with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess that the one that I was going to bring up was a paper that was published in 2022. I think it was towards the middle or end of last year. Let me just look up the full title, because I want to give people the opportunity to go and look it up in their own time.
Speaker 1:I'll leave a link to the full paper and the show notes as well while you're doing that, Nick.
Speaker 2:The full title is Association of Vitamin D Supplementation in Cardio-Respiritory Fitness and Muscle Strength in Adult Twins. As I said, that was published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, which is a pretty good, fairly well-established sports, nutrition and metabolism journal. Even though the title is not very concise, very free to give you an abridged overview. This was a twin study. They got what else I got at twins. These are identical twins and they split the twin pairs into two. One group would a control group. They just did nothing for 60 days and they tested them before and after. I'll tell you the test that they did in a moment.
Speaker 2:The other group the other twin member, was the experimental group and they were given vitamin D a moderate dose of vitamin D every day for 60 days, two months. There were no other interventions, and they were specifically asked to keep your diet the same, keep your regular physical activity and exercise training the same. These were sedentary people, so untrained. Then, before and after the 60 day intervention, they did a muscle test which was basically a very rudimentary test. It was a hand grip dynamometer. They got people to grip this dynamometer as hard as they can. It's used as a very crude measure of upper body strength. It really is just forearm strength, whatever. Then they did a VO2 max test on the bike. Their main finding was that after the 60 day intervention period the vitamin D group improved VO2 max by 28%.
Speaker 1:Say the percentage again, just so it sinks in for everybody, because that's important.
Speaker 2:After 60 days of supplementation of moderate dose vitamin D, the experimental group improved VO2 max by 28% To eight 28%.
Speaker 2:This thing has been peer reviewed and it's got passed all the regulatory filters that we have in place. It's been published in a reasonably good journal. It's been shared online and it had a pretty good old metric score. The old metric score for those who don't know, is the old metric score collates all of the times that the article has been cited, if it's been referenced in the media, if it's shared online, it consolidates all of the different citation metrics. I saw it online because it was published by Dr Ronda Patrick, who is a PhD in, I think, biomedical nutritional science. I can't quite remember, it doesn't really matter, but she's got half a million followers just on Twitter. She's very influential in the space and she shared this abstract.
Speaker 2:I saw the table in the results section and it took me maybe 12 seconds to see something that I wasn't happy with. First of all, 28% is colossal. That's a huge increase in VO2 max. If you don't know about VO2 max and you're not really familiar with what maximal aerobic capacity is and what is a normal increase, then that's not necessarily going to ring any alarm bells. But 28% is huge.
Speaker 1:Even for a sedentary person, that's big over that timeframe.
Speaker 2:It's big for anyone. Really You'd expect to see bigger improvements in somebody's sedentary. If you saw 28%, I suppose you could look at it both ways. But if you saw 28% in a trained person in absolute terms, that'd be even more concerning. I suppose somebody who's untrained has got more reserve to improve their fitness. But I guess the point is, once you put it into context, if you do a training study so you get untrained people and you train them for two months, for 60 days, you might get a. If you're fortunate you might get a 15 to 20% improvement in VO2 max. If you're lucky, if you give somebody EPO so that's an illegal performance enhancing drug that stimulates red blood cells to improve oxygen uptake, you might get 10 to 12% increase. What they were claiming here was a 28%, let's say 30% one third increase in VO2 max after 60 days.
Speaker 2:That is, by anyone's account, an extraordinary claim. That's one red flag. The fact that it's an extraordinary claim isn't a problem. You don't just dismiss that automatically. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Speaker 2:The biggest there were all sorts of problems with this paper and I actually wrote a letter to the editor. I urge people to look it up. It's very simply called comment on, and then the title of the paper was published as a letter to the editor in the same journal. I highlighted a whole bunch of problems with the paper. For example, whenever they cited other studies to support claims that they made, the citations didn't actually relate to the statements they were making, so they were making claims that were unsubstantiated. There were problems with the statistics. They hadn't corrected for multiple comparisons. So every time you make a comparison between two groups, there's a chance that you're going to get a false positive. The more tests you do, the more chances there are that you're going to get a false positive. They didn't account for that in their analysis and that the most egregious problem was that they found an increase in absolute VO2 max so liters per minute but no increase in relative VO2 max, so mills per kilogram per minute, and the only explanation for that is that the group, the experimental group, have increased their body mass. That's the only way to consolidate those two findings, and when I did some basic math I found that they had to have put on about 45, 50 pounds over the course of the 60-day supplementation protocol. So it needs us to say there is something very dodgy going on here.
Speaker 2:Credit to the editor credit to the journal. They launched an investigation. They asked the authors for the raw data so they could do an independent statistical analysis, and wouldn't you know it? The author said, sorry, data is not available. Somehow it got deleted in the process. That was enough to convince the authors that there was some kind of major fabrication or some other issue going on here, and the article was eventually retracted. So that's a wonderful example of a paper that superficially looks sound and it was published in a mainstream journal, but once you start to tug at those threads and you scrutinize the details, the whole thing completely unravels. And it's now. A lot of people have contacted me. They're using it now as an example, as a teaching tool in research methods classes for undergraduate and postgraduate students on how to dismantle a published paper.
Speaker 1:And that was no offense to your work, nick, which is brilliant. That was pretty easy because even me, with a relatively untrained eye, I went through. I remember when this paper came out and I remember when Rhonda Patrick shared it, everybody went berserk, all of the pro vitamin D people. Because you got to remember the time right. I was right during COVID and there was this big vitamin D link with COVID and so it was just popular and just popular everywhere. And I remember very distinctly when she read it, the very first thing I said 28% increase in VO2 max. Like I would be coach of the century if I were to get that across the board with people, if all I needed to do is just get people vitamin D to get that type of improvement. Shoot man, why am I sitting here prescribing intervals and stuff like that? I'm just going to tell them they quite a vitamin D.
Speaker 1:And then I took the second step and I did the very basic math division of where is this improvement coming from? Is it absolute, which is just the leaders of oxygen per minute, or is it relative? And why is it absolute? And what would happen, like what would have to happen, to see the mathematical anomaly that you're looking at? That's, you know, almost high school level stuff to answer with. That.
Speaker 2:It's long hanging fruit, but there are a few things to unpack because of that. First of all, it just goes to show that most people read the headlines, or they read the abstract, and they don't ever go into that and read the rest of the paper.
Speaker 1:Even Rhonda.
Speaker 2:Patrick Right, Exactly, and I actually emailed her and sent her a very nice email, but I was like, listen, if you wish to share something, you got to read it, Because I'm sure if she'd have read it she should know She'd have noticed them at the errors, and credit to her. She did then follow up with another tweet saying you know, last month I tweeted this. It's since been retracted. I just want everyone to know Credit where credit is due. But the follow up tweet got, like you know, one-tenth of the engagement of the original one, because it's less sensational. So the harm was already done, is what I'm saying. So that's the first problem is that people are just reading abstracts or reading headlines and then sharing something because it conforms to some pre-existing narrative that they like. The other thing to note here is that this is happening all the time.
Speaker 2:This is not just one isolated case. There are lots and lots of studies that are very low quality that people are just missing because they're not doing the due diligence to actually scrutinize the paper. Look at the methods. Forget the discussion. I don't care what they, what they conclude, the only thing I'm really. I'm not interested in the rationale. I don't care about that. So show me the methods and show me the results and particularly the statistics.
Speaker 2:And this is a little bit more concerning is that I did a little bit of online research and I found that this study was actually salami sliced from a much bigger investigation. So it would be. It's a lot of work. You think that they recruited something like I don't know 40 monosagotic, identical twins and then allocated they didn't just do that for a vitamin D study. This was a sub-study from a much larger investigation. The other investigation was actually a genetics study that was published in nature. So this same group who have made these really fundamental errors in research design and statistical output and interpretation have published some of their work in nature and that study is still available. So I'm not suggesting that that other study is no good, but the point is you have this group who are clearly able to make some very basic errors, and that the work is out there.
Speaker 1:Okay. So now we're going to move into something where it's both bad science and extremely relevant to our audience. Getting down to the sports specificity side of things, it's another study that you and another co-author Esker Jukendrup in this case commented on dealing with oxygenated water. So do you want to go through this particular study and then your comment and critique of that later, and then, once again, we're going to kind of like, at the end of this kind of wrap all this up for in a toolkit for people to take away with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this was another study that was published even more recently it was a couple of months ago, actually earlier this year and the title of the study was a double blind, randomized, placebo controlled pilot study.
Speaker 1:We've got all of the words, all of the. That's how you want to design a study right All the words right at the very beginning.
Speaker 2:Examining an oxygen nano bubble beverage for 16.1 kilometer time trial and repeated sprint cycling performance. Apart from the fact that it's a real mouthful and you've looked, folks, get better at titling your papers, because that's just, that's no good. So, as you've probably guessed from the title, this was a study that looked at the effects of oxygenated water on two types of cycling performance. One of them was a 16.1 kilometer time trial on a stationary bike in train cyclists. Why 16.1 kilometer time trial? I have no idea. It's just it seems a little bit random, but that's the least of the problems here.
Speaker 2:And they also looked at how it affected performance in a series of Wingate tests. So this is four times 30 second maximal sprints. So you've got in the 16 kilometer time trial. You can kind of think about that as a maximal kind of aerobic endurance type task. And then in the Wingates, you've got I guess we can think of this as a test of anaerobic capacity and their main findings were that in the shorter, in the 16 kilometer time trial, there was an average improvement in performance of 2.4%. So this is the when the group were given oxygenated water this drink containing oxygen nano bubbles, which is supposedly this new technology improved performance by 2.4% and over the in the Wingate tests it improved peak power output by just over 7%. So can I jump in real quick.
Speaker 1:I just want to recap this for the audience, because I think there's a couple of things that are materially different from the last study that we talked about that make the analysis of this slightly.
Speaker 1:The context is a lot different.
Speaker 1:First off, it's trained athletes, right, or what they're calling trained athletes, and normally the burden of proof for any sort of improvement is much, much higher in a trained athlete versus an untrained athlete when you introduce any sort of intervention, because they're closer to their peak performance than the untrained person, and then so therefore, the intervention has a higher burden to jump over.
Speaker 1:The second thing is these are more real world tests. You're going in the time trial, you're going from a start to a finish line, and that's just like any real world race, and that's always the highest burden of proof that we have in the coaching world to see if an intervention works. It's just the athlete actually go faster. The Wingate test is a very close surrogate to that how much power can you produce in 30 seconds? And the reason I'm lining that up is that when you have trained athletes and you show a market improvement in performance not just in biomarkers or anything like that when you show market improvement and performance, those are things you have to pay attention to as a sports scientist and as a coach, because that meets all of the kind of the gold standard criteria that you're looking for to say, I might need to look at this supplement, this intervention, this training routine, kind of whatever the study is actually looking at.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and especially with performance tests, you can partition the effects out into statistical significance. So okay, 2% may or may not be statistically significant, but 2% over a 16 kilometer time trial is definitely going to be meaningful in a performance set. 7% over a Wingate test in terms of peak power output is going to be the difference between gold and silver or gold and bronze, for sure. So, yeah, these are findings that make you pay attention. And just to be clear, this was a randomized, controlled study that the group acted as their own control. So they came into the lab on multiple separate occasions. On one occasion they were just given normal water and then on the other occasion they were given this oxygen nanobubble beverage. So we're seeing these again, these really impressive outcomes here, and it wasn't so much the outcomes that sort of flagged this as an issue for me, but the first thing that drew my attention was that this is actually an area that's been well studied.
Speaker 2:There are lots of studies that have investigated the effects of oxygenated water on sports performance and they've shown absolutely no performance enhancing effect. Studies that have looked at the effect on exercise oxygen uptake no effect. There are sort of four or five studies that look to that. Exercise performance at sea level. Exercise the altitude that they've looked at. There have been reviews looking at this. There was one review that was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that concluded, and I quote here ergogenic claims for oxygenated water cannot be taken seriously.
Speaker 1:That's rather strong. I was not listening to his words here.
Speaker 2:So the fact that they've found, for the first time, these very impressive performance enhancing effects was surprising. Now, just like with the vitamin D thing, we don't immediately just go well, that's bullshit, throw it out. All it means is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and if you don't have the extraordinary evidence, that's when you're going to get yourself into trouble, so you can make these claims. It's the whole idea of keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. And so I decided to look at the methods a little bit more, a little bit closer and yeah, I wrote this with Professor Aske Yukindrip, who's a legend of sports nutrition and he's been following this research very closely and what we found was that the particular concoction of oxygenated water that they use in this study you do a little bit of basing math that it was found to provide an extra 15 millilitres of oxygen, the idea being that if you drink this solution that contains extra oxygen, it bypasses the pulmonary system and you can, in theory, absorb oxygen through the gastrointestinal tract and it gets into the blood that way. So it's a way to increase oxygen uptake or increase oxygen availability in the blood, which then gets delivered to the muscle. It's plausible enough because a few different studies have shown that it is possible to absorb oxygen through the GI tract, so there's no problem with that. But 15, 15 millilitres of oxygen, of additional oxygen, doesn't sound like very much, and actually when you do a little bit of I guess metabolic math, it actually turns out to be an inconsequential amount when you contrast it with the oxygen that's inspired through the respiratory system. So again, just looking at the data that they presented, we calculated that in the 16.1 kilometer time trial, given the average duration of the exercise, we estimated that the individuals would have breathed in something like 75,000 millilitres of inspired O2. Okay, so that's 75 liters of oxygen over the course of the time trial, and so, or maybe even more than that, was a conservative estimate. So when you think about the additional oxygen that was being provided in the oxygenated beverage, it comes out to 0.01% of the O2 being delivered via the pulmonary system, which is negligible.
Speaker 2:But we can actually take it a step further. We know that the healthy respiratory system is generally considered to be overbuilt for its demands. It's not thought to be a limiting factor in most people for a maximal exercise. And you can express it another way if one liter of oxygen yields between 4.85 and 5 calories, depending on substrate use, and you can look at research from Eucandroup and Wallace in 2005, they actually did these calculations. We can estimate that 15 millilitres of oxygen yields just 0.07. To 0.075 calories and during 60 minutes of exercise which is again the approximate amount of time that it took them to do this exercise this would lead to an additional 0.091 watts Okay, whereas the difference that they reported in the study was 10 watts. So they're getting an extra 9.9 watts from somewhere.
Speaker 2:It's not mathematically, it's not coming from the oxygenated beverage. So we broke all this down in a letter and we articulated it a little bit better than I've done here. We sort of talked about what the possible explanations could be, and I always like to talk about Occam's razor, which is this often misused and misquoted principle of parsimony. It basically suggests that the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is normally the correct one, and the only rational explanation for these published outcomes is placebo is that the individuals were not appropriately blinded to the fact that they were getting an oxygenated beverage. Now I'm open to hearing other explanations, but I'm not buying the fact that it's coming from the oxygenated beverage, because the math just doesn't add up.
Speaker 1:Well, in the very first line in the paper I'll just read it to put a pin on it they're assuming that somehow you're able to increase the amount of oxygen that you can uptake through the beverage itself, through the gastrointestinal tract. And very specifically it says there's emerging evidence to suggest that the gastrointestinal tract may provide a gas exchange surface or oxygen uptake. And there's a citation in there for what it was. And, once again, absolutely plausible. Yeah, you can do that, but not to the extent that could explain the improvement in performance. Not even close. And that's the point that you are making is. Well, yes, this might actually be true. It's not even close to the extent that you're actually purporting it to be true.
Speaker 2:Right and the difference on this. That's completely ignoring the fact that over the Wingate test they found an extra 60 watts. So there was on average 60 watts higher peak power with the oxygenated beverage. That's an anaerobic test. That means without oxygen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's all.
Speaker 2:How can an extra 15 milliliters of oxygen improve Wingate performance by 7%? It's bullshit. It's bullshit. Come on, folks, we've got to do better than this.
Speaker 1:That was my first one too. I was like Wingate it's an anaerobic test, or whatever term you want to use for anaerobic that people get all wrapped up.
Speaker 2:It's specifically designed as a test for anaerobic capacity, but again, it's published, it's been peer reviewed and it's got through the filters, and part of the problem is that academics don't have they don't get paid to do reviews. There's an ongoing argument whether they should or not. Some people think they shouldn't. That's another discussion entirely. The fact is, academics are already busy. They're drowning under the data that they've got, they're drowning under papers that they need to grade and they're teaching load and people. Just they just don't have time to actually do diligent reviews and really dig into the weeds on these things, and that this is why these sort of papers slip through the net more frequently than they should.
Speaker 1:So people are now wondering, nick, after we've kind of gone through this, because once again both of these studies have this aura of authority associated with them. We went through one where it was proliferated by a number of very popular and well-intended social media figures that you would assume had vetted it much better. We have another one, just within the title, and I'm going to reread the title again and put my emphasis on it just to kind of drive home this point A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled pilot study examining an oxygen nanobubble beverage for a 16.1 kilometer time trial and repeated sprint cycling performance. The beginning of it is laced with everything that you want, right. You want a study to be double-blinded, you want a study to be randomized, you want a study to have a placebo control.
Speaker 2:This is the gold standard of research design.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And so you have these two examples that, at least from the surface, look like they should be gold standard types of studies, and yet they end up being garbage. So what people are wondering out there, nick? Is it all just a house of cards, or should they trust any of it? Let's just get that out of the way. First, can we look at some of the science out there and look at it and say, yeah, we can draw reasonable conclusions from it. It's done well. There are good statistics behind it. We can dig into this one.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 2:So let's be clear the fact that the peer review system is not perfect and the scientific publishing model is not perfect. An imperfect system is a hell of a lot better than no system at all, and if you speak to somebody who is into homeopathy, for example, which is a widely discredited alternative therapy, they'd love us to do away with peer review, because it's peer review that actually it does catch 99.9% of the bullshit out there. It's just that there's such a high volume of published output, there is so much pressure and so much emphasis on publishing. This is how academics move up the career ladder. This is how they get promotions. This is how they get raises. This is how they raise their scientific credentials.
Speaker 2:There's the whole notion of publish or perish, which is something that was drummed into me even before I finished my PhD, and so there is such a high volume of output that stuff is going to slip through the net. But an imperfect system is much better than no system at all. So we do. We can put our faith in the system to an extent, but it just means that we have to be our own content regulators. So when it comes to scientific literature, it means just taking the time to do your due diligence when it comes to the commercial world. Don't expect the FDA to do the work for you. Don't expect social media platforms to crack down on misinformation, because it ain't going to happen. You've got to be your own content regulator and be better at spotting the nonsense when you come into contact with it. Distinguish the science from the pseudoscience.
Speaker 1:That's a really tough ask and I'm kind of speaking from. I mean it is for even us and in particular me. I mean I'll tell a humbling story that's equal parts relevant to this conversation and also I'll use it as a pseudoplug for our research essentials, for an ultra running newsletter. Every week we sit down and we discuss a different paper and I would say that I give it a cursory review. I think that's an accurate way of describing the level of scrutiny that I put on it. I look at it, I breeze through it. Is it interesting, is it relevant, and does it at least have something to stand on in terms of the results and maybe the methods?
Speaker 1:It's not the finest tooth comb or the finest filter, but at least it serves as an initial filter. And then, inevitably, once we get into the meeting with you and me Steph Steph Howe and Jim Rottberg is a primary author on it we end up finding all of the moles and hairs, and maybe half of them. We end up banging our heads against the table because there's some egregious error within the methods and or the statistics. And that's me going through it with not an expert but at least an experienced eye, maybe not even a trained eye, but at least an experienced eye where I've looked at this stuff for 25 years. I might not have the academic credentials and have that type of academic background, but I'm at least used to applying that filter and I use that as a little bit of a case to set up the fact that don't feel bad. Don't feel bad that if you saw something and you took it as whatever and then five months down the line Nick Tiller shreds the nano bubble article to tears after you've already bought five cases of it, because that kind of stuff is going to happen, it's very hard to weed through this.
Speaker 1:I want to take the remainder of the time with this podcast to try to arm people with things that they can actually do as they're navigating this whole landscape. And the whole landscape starts with the scientific papers themselves but then also ends up in the people who are proliferating them, whether it's on social media, whether it's a colleague or whatever. And I think you and I can both go through some kind of like practical pieces of advice and even workflow that we use to really like navigate these waters that really anybody can kind of take and at least be an initial course filter on some of these things and then as you develop that, the skill behind looking at these, that course filter hopefully gets a little bit tighter and a little bit tighter and a little bit tighter. So I'll turn it back over to you, nick, again what can people do to help themselves be their own filter in this arena?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a really important thing because we want people to be able to have some kind of toolkit, a simple. I've got four points that I'm going to talk through very shortly. That is just a way for people to look at what when they're being confronted with a claim, with some kind of assertion, somebody's trying to sell you something, and it might be that they're trying to sell you something in terms of a monetary exchange, but other times they're just trying to convince you of a point of view. They're trying to sell you an idea or a premise, and there are four steps that you can take to give you a reasonably good idea as to whether this is a valid claim or not. Now, once we get into the more detailed side of things, like reading a journal article you've got to have there's no getting around it you have to have a reasonably good understanding of statistics. I think unless you have a pretty good understanding of research methodology and statistics, you're really going to struggle to understand the nuanced aspects of a research paper. I rejected a paper this morning only earlier today that was submitted to the journal and they just made all these fundamental statistical errors and it had a statistical power of 15%, which basically means that if you find a significant result, there's a 15% chance that it's a real result, and normally we expect a threshold of 80% at least. And because they had a very small sample size and a very small they were looking at very small effect sizes we decided that look, we're not even going to send it out for review. So I rejected to even send it for review.
Speaker 2:This is coming from within the academic community, so don't give it, as you said, don't give yourself a hard time because you don't understand the nuances of scientific research. But even before we get to that point, there are several things we can do. So first thing is to look at the claim that you're being faced with, or the assertion, and just look to see if there are any red flags. So what do we mean by red flags? So if it's a marketing campaign or some kind of commercial claim, you can look to see if they're trying to manipulate your biases in any way. So, for example, are they talking to you about how popular the thing is? America's most popular whey protein, over a million units sold worldwide. This is an argument to popularity.
Speaker 2:They're trying to exploit this bias that we have for assuming that something that is popular is necessarily effective, when, of course, the two things are mutually exclusive. Or it could be the appeal to nature. We see these labels for all natural ingredients free from chemicals now stamped over all the foods and the supplements that we look at and various diets, and again, this is a bias. We have this natural, ingrained bias for natural produce. There's no reason why that should be the case, but that's a bias that we have.
Speaker 2:And whenever somebody is trying to manipulate your biases this way, they're trying to make up for the fact that there's no actual evidence, there's no scientific evidence, because if something is evidence-based, they're going to leave with the evidence usually. But if they're throwing out all of these what we call logical fallacies, they're trying to cut to the core of your biases. They're using an emotive argument, or if it's a fear-based marketing, something called direct response marketing then there's a good chance that there's no evidence to support the thing. So that's your very first step is look at the claim being made and just have a look and see if it's trying to exploit, trying to manipulate any of the biases that you have.
Speaker 1:Are you going to go on a logical sequence or are we just going to ping, ping, ping back and forth? How do you want to do this?
Speaker 2:Just go through them one, two, three, four. But if you want to interject or if you want to comment or unpack anything I've said, then feel free to do so.
Speaker 1:I didn't know if you were going to crescendo into something and I didn't want to ruin the arc of everything.
Speaker 2:No, that's fine, I'm just going to go one, two, three, four, perfect. So that's your first port of call. The next thing to do then is, once you've identified if there are any red flags, just look to see if the claims themselves are extraordinary, based on your understanding of the area. So you might be an athlete, you might be a coach, you might be a scientist. Just use your experience to determine is this an extraordinary claim? If it is an extraordinary claim, or if it's something that you've deemed to be extraordinary, then there has to be extraordinary evidence to support. More often than not, if something is making an extraordinary claim and it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Speaker 2:Very rarely do we actually have some kind of monumental breakthrough in sports performance. It might be something like a new supplement or a new running sneaker, carbon-plated sneakers, but even carbon-plated sneakers, they improve running economy by between 2% and 4% probably, which is quite big. Certainly the elite level it makes a difference, but for most people that's quite a small percentage. If they were saying 10% improvement in running economy or 15% improvement in performance, these are extraordinary claims. So that's when we're going to be a little bit more suspicious. But with supplements, even the effective supplements might improve performance by what? A couple of percentage points, that's the range that we're expecting to see with these kinds of interventions, but if a product is making a claim that it really sounds too good to be true, then it probably is, so I think that's the next thing.
Speaker 1:I add a different layer onto that. It's the same thing, it's just thinking about it a little bit differently. I think about the ratio. I think about the ratio of benefit to how much it not monetarily costs but costs in terms of effort. So if you have something and the shoe is actually a great example, it's a $250 shoe and you might get 3%. I mean that's actually kind of reasonable when you think about it. That's a big intervention, like nutrition or otherwise, to get a 2% or 3% gain. If you're going to take vitamin D and improve your VO2 max by 28%, that is a disproportionate ratio. Those are where my alarm bells start to go off, and so I like to take both sides of that coin.
Speaker 1:Is not only the claim, because, as you mentioned, a lot of people don't have the best lens on what is an implausible level of improvement for whatever. That's hard, I mean. I have a hard time looking at that, like, am I going to get 2%? Am I going to get 8%? Am I going to get 10% or whatever? And so I understand people not having the best fix on that, and so I think when you compare it to the effort that you have to put forth, it starts to contextualize it a whole lot better.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to get 2%, but it's going to take me six months. Right, the intervention length was six months. Or I'm going to lose 5% of my body weight if I did this intervention, but it took me a year to do it. Okay, that's plausible. Okay, now it's a week. Okay, then something kind of fishy is going on. So I've always found it handy to kind of look at both the cost from an energy, effort, monetary perspective, as well as the benefit or the improvement side of things, taking those in tandem to evaluate that piece.
Speaker 2:I think that's a really nice way of looking at it and the premise being that if something is very easy to implement but gives you this huge outcome, then again we don't just automatically dismiss it, but that's a red flag.
Speaker 2:That's why the premise for barefoot running shoes was pretty good, because they were saying that it could reduce injury rates. But there had to be like a four to six month transition to the shoe and it was probably good if you did some kind of strength training. Probably the people that didn't do that ended up with these horrible injuries. But the whole thing was kind of wrapped up in that it was a plausible benefit given all the effort and time that you would have to put into doing it. The fact that the evidence shows now that it doesn't reduce injury rates is very interesting in itself, but this is fundamentally why so many people are very concerned and justifiably so about this new wave of anti-obesity drugs, glp1 agonists. I know it's slightly off topic for the talk today, but the point is that they seem to be able to help overweight people lose 15 to 20% of their body weight, which is colossal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that seems implausible, right, Great example.
Speaker 2:It's very clinically important. It's going to reduce people's risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes seems to have all these beneficial effects and so far the only side effects seem to be kind of gastrointestinal increased stomach aches, stomach cramping, maybe vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, that kind of stuff which it sounds nasty. But actually to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes and certain cancers and to reduce your body weight by 20% on average. This is crazy. So people are justifiably very concerned because they're like this just sounds too good to be true and we are lacking long term safety data on that. So I like the way that you kind of framed that in terms of the trade off between the two and then. So number three then is plausibility. Looking at prior plausibility, how plausible is it that this thing, whatever the claim is actually going to do, is actually going to deliver on what it says on the tin? So this requires a little bit of, I guess, subject specific knowledge. So if it's a supplement that claims to be able to improve your fat metabolism, you have to have some kind of prior understanding as to what is a reasonable adjustment in fat metabolism, and so there's a little bit of subject specific knowledge required there, but I guess slightly less. So just to again pick the very, very easy example of homeopathy Homeopathy is an energy medicine and it's based on the idea that the more you dilute something, the more potent the concoction becomes.
Speaker 2:Now, if you have any understanding I mean, you're a biochemist if you have any understanding of the laws of chemistry and physics, you know that this is nonsense.
Speaker 2:That's not how things work, and so the only people that are using homeopathy are literally people who have no basic understanding of science, or they literally believe in magic, or they don't really understand what homeopathy is in the first place, and once you explain it to them, then they're like really that's what it is. I'm going to stop using that. But the whole point is that the thing doesn't have any prior plausibility. So you've got to kind of evaluate if that's the case, and sometimes these things will have pretty good plausibility, like the case of, you know, vitamin D, for example. If somebody is deficient in vitamin D and then they change their diet and get more vitamin D or you supplement them appropriately, they will get a small increase in cardiorespiratory fitness. Because if you're deficient, that is going to affect your aerobic capacity, it's going to affect aerobic enzymes and so forth. So it is plausible actually that if you're deficient and then you supplement with vitamin D, you might get an increase in cardiorespiratory fitness. So you've got to know, kind of, the boundaries of the plausible and the implausible claims.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of that can come back down to knowing the mechanism of action. I'll just give a chemistry example. We talk a lot in chemistry about what is the rate limiting step and whatever reaction is going on. And if you can affect the rate limiting step, you can affect the entire flux of the transaction. And the reason that this is relevant is in substrate oxidation. So we're burning carbohydrates, fat, maybe a little bit of protein as we're exercising and we're always trying to manipulate the ratios of those substrates being burned to suit whatever purpose. If we're doing a high intensity exercise, we want to flux more carbohydrate through the system. If we're doing low intensity exercise, it's probably favorable to flux more fat oxidation through the system.
Speaker 1:And there have been any different number of supplements and training regimens and nutrition things that you can do to try to manipulate those two. And I always boil it down to do any of those things. That whole concoction of things actually affect the rate limiting step within those metabolic processes. And it's very specific within the nutrition side as well where there's been all of these nutrition things that have been purported to increase your fat burning rate or increase your carbohydrate oxidation rate or whatever it is. And if they don't have a reasonable mechanism of action on either one of those rate limiting steps. That's where you can come in and say you know what? It probably doesn't, and probably definitely doesn't affect the entire chain of things, because it doesn't matter where you affect the other pieces of the puzzle as long as you're not affecting the rate limiting step of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I totally agree and that's why the oxygen nanobubble study is so interesting, because it somehow made it to this scientific, or at least superficially scientific, study and they put time, effort into doing the thing and it was written up and published and peer reviewed. And actually at a fundamental level it was completely implausible because there's no way that 15 milliliters of oxygen is going to have a meaningful effect on performance. So actually if you'd have just studied the prior plausibility of the thing, the study would never have made it to peer review. When I was teaching at the University in the UK, every year you'd get I don't know 30 or 40 undergraduate students coming to you with ideas for their undergraduate dissertations. So in sport and exercise science you would do your individual modules and in your final year you'd have one class, one module, that was dedicated exclusively to doing a project sport science project and it's basically like doing a mini study. They have to recruit subjects and they have to do some kind of scientific investigation into something. More often than not they're looking at supplements because it's a relatively easy study design. They can just get two groups, or they can get a group to come to the lab on two occasions and they give them a supplement one time and a placebo the other time, and it's all you know.
Speaker 2:It's pretty straightforward research design, but the number of times I had to tell students actually no, you have to come up with a different idea and nudge them in a different direction, because you'd have people come into you wanting to study things that were inherently implausible. People wanting to squirt lemon juice into water and seeing if it led to an alkaline effect in the body, or people wanting to study the effects of low altitude on exercise performance or something like this, and based on our understanding of physiology, it's like well, this is going to be a waste of your time. It's not without risk, because you're doing maximal exercise tests on people, and whenever you do a maximal exercise test, there's a 1 in 8,000 chance that somebody's going to suffer a cardiac event and for what we know is going to be no meaningful outcome. This is we can't justify it. So you get pretty good at looking at whether something is inherently plausible or not, and so that's a really inherent part of the process. So the last step on this flow chart, if you will, is to look at the evidence, and it's the very last step because there are all of these things that you can do before you even get to that that we've covered. But ultimately, if there's scientific evidence for something, that is the litmus test, and more often than not if it's something that has any chance of improving performance, it will have been studied by someone somewhere and then we can get a pretty good understanding. If the research is of a reasonable quality, we can look at how many papers are out there, which journals they're published in, the sample sizes of the studies.
Speaker 2:And again, this bit is a little bit more complicated because it requires some understanding of research design and you might need to defer to somebody who knows the research better than you do. If you're a scientist, fine, easy enough. If you're a science enthusiast, or if you're a coach who has a keen eye for the science, then that's great. Sometimes you might just have to defer to somebody who knows the science better than you do, and that's OK, that's fine. But the point is that you can't just read the headlines and you can't just read abstracts and assume that what you're reading is necessarily true.
Speaker 2:There has to be an extra layer of scrutiny, Otherwise you're just going to because you can find a study to support any kind of intervention that you want to apply, any kind of supplement, any kind of whether it's acupuncture or cupping, all of these things that we've talked about as being inherently pseudoscientific. There are lots of positive studies showing that cupping is effective for various things, but they're low quality studies and if you look at the high quality studies, the ones that are actually placebo controlled, the ones that are actually randomized controls, they have a decent sample size. That are good statistics that show that it doesn't work. So that takes a little bit of subject specific knowledge. But hey look, if I can learn this stuff, anybody can learn it, and so you don't have to have a scientific degree, you don't have to have a PhD to learn these skills. Anybody can learn to play guitar. Anybody can learn to speak a foreign language. Anybody can learn to read a scientific paper. You've just got to put in the time to acquire the skills.
Speaker 1:I want to riff a little bit on one of the aspects that she just mentioned, and that is, go to somebody who's more knowledgeable in the area, and this is actually a question that I get really commonly asked, and it gets asked in a number of different formats, but the most common one is who do you follow on Twitter?
Speaker 1:I get a ton of great information on Twitter, but it's only because I have a very well curated list and I don't always bat a thousand percent on that.
Speaker 1:I've put people on that list that I shouldn't have and I've removed them since then, but it has been something that I've done very deliberately over the course of my career and it's hard to weed through who actually you should be listening to and whose opinion you should probably not take as seriously.
Speaker 1:So I'm wondering if we can just expand, like in the remaining time. We have just expand on that just a little bit, because we started this conversation off with this concept of being inundated with all of this information coming from a lot of different sources, and a lot of people sound like experts when they in fact are, when they in fact are not, and a lot of experts who should be experts actually mess up every once in a while. We're all humans and that actually happens. So, in terms of finding who the experts are, I kind of want to know what some of the guide posts that you actually personally use, because we've talked about this a little bit. What do you personally use when you're trying to figure out who the expert in such and such or whatever topic actually is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, a pretty good way to gauge it is if you're following somebody who seems to spout stuff that goes against the grain. Now, there's nothing wrong with going against the grain, because we've always got to challenge ideas, but if, let's say, you're following 50 people, 50 scientists, and one of them is coming up with stuff that the other 49 people disagree with, that should be an indication that this is what we call scientific consensus. If you have 50 scientists and 49 of them agree on something and one of them disagrees, well, you've kind of got to pick a side. Now you can either pick this the one person who's giving you the sensational contrary advice or you go with the majority of experts. If you have to choose, you could go with the majority of experts, because this is not an appeal to popularity, because these people are not just guessing. These are experts who have made their careers on understanding a particular area of science.
Speaker 2:So Tim Nokes we talk about him a lot. By all accounts, he's an expert on lots of different subjects and he's got this huge body of work behind him. But when you see him talking about spouting anti-vax rhetoric and climate change denial and low carbohydrate stuff and pretty much all the experts disagree with what he's saying that. Right, there is your indication that maybe he's not the best person to be taking advice from on all matters. He's another one who's blocked me, by the way. Tim Nokes is my celebrity block too.
Speaker 1:Not quite as rich as Dana White, so I'm not at that level yet, but Tim was blocked. Well, I mean again, just to be clear.
Speaker 2:I had basically zero interaction with him, but it's the fact that I pick people up on when they start spouting bullshit, so I think this is a preemptive block on his behalf.
Speaker 1:A lot of them are trying to curate their feed because they don't want a lot of the sentiment against whatever they're purporting to show up in their feed. That's an intentional tactic that they're taking in terms of blocking the people that are going to present some sort of counter view whether that's the majority or view or not to their actually viewpoints. So it's a deliberate curation tactic for their social media presence.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, and it kind of works. I guess because they're creating this echo chamber, they only get exposed to the ideas that they're more inclined to.
Speaker 1:Here's how I started it. Honestly and I don't profess to say that this is the most surefire tactic it's certainly taken me a lot of work to do it, but I actually like it because it's an engaging thing is I initially started, when I started to build this list up, with the people that I knew were the people that I could count on the most the Asker, jukin Drupal, who we just listed earlier, the Louise Burks, the Stu Phillips, who we talked about earlier. There was maybe eight or 10 of them that I started out with. And then I started to look at who was referencing and whose work they were admiring and I spiraled the list out very carefully, spiraled the list out from there. And then I spiraled the list out a little bit more very cautiously maybe one or two people every month or something like that that I would initially add to it.
Speaker 1:And I don't know what some people will think about that really critically and say, well, now you have your echo chamber of six people that you kind of initially introduced, and now all you're getting is kind of like the same thought process.
Speaker 1:But I don't know. I mean it's kind of served me well because every once in a while I'll get in some of those contrarian opinions, but now I have a consensus essentially built across all of those people to say, okay, should I pay attention to this contrarian opinion or not? But the fundamental proof point is I started with the people that were have been kind of the bed rocks in their particular domain the Roger Krom and the biomechanic side, or even Valter on the biomechanic side, people on the nutrition side like Louise Burke that I just mentioned and I just gradually drew out the bullseye circles from that kind of from that very center point and I don't know. Like I said, it's just been something where I think I've not that I've got the perfect formula, but I think it's something where it's served me. It's served me really well at least.
Speaker 2:Right, and. But also, if you want to understand about new developments in sports nutrition, you follow qualified sports nutritionists like you Louise Burke, like you, steve Phillips, like you can trip. If you want to know about developments in strength and conditioning, you follow Brad Schoenfeld. You follow these kinds of all.
Speaker 2:Steve Phillips again, if you're looking at and this is when you start to see a lot of health and wellness influences Huberman, for example, who is an expert neuroscientist and he started off talking about neuroscience stuff but now, to get more and more engagement, he's had to sort of stray from his lane and now he's talking about that. Now, if I want to get advice on new supplements, I'm not going to go to a neuroscientist. I'm not going to go to a neuroscientist influencer. I'm going to talk to dietitians and nutritionists who understand this area very precisely. If I want to understand about protein metabolism, I'll go to this person or this group of people. And if I want to know about ultra endurance type physiology and that kind of stuff, then again there are specific experts that you can call upon.
Speaker 2:I wrote a whole article for Skeptical Enquirer some months ago about health and wellness influences and I actually ended the thing with a list of actions that you should put in place for deciding if health and wellness content is worth engaging with, and one of the things that I suggested is to filter out superficial content.
Speaker 2:So if you're following someone who number one is constantly straying out of their lane, then that's a red flag. The other thing is, if you're following a fitness influencer, for example, and their content is essentially them in workout gear with some quote that needs to be on a coffee cup, then that's the kind of stuff that you can ignore. If somebody's giving you real, tangible advice and it's within the wheelhouse and it's evidence based, so they're supporting their statements that are being made, then that's stuff that you can be a little bit more comfortable inviting into your inner circle. But we've just got to be a little bit more conscious of how much misinformation there is out there and start to curate our feed so that, okay, if you're going to follow somebody, there's got to be a good reason to follow them.
Speaker 1:Well, and normally those people are the people with the smaller followings and they're producing the content that doesn't trigger the algorithms, like the professional content creators actually do, deliberately, because that's not their lot in life there have been. There are exceptions to this, obviously, people who create fantastic content and have very popular followings, but those are the exception versus the norm. You're going to find far more people with a million Instagram followers or a million Twitter followers that are of the like of how you just mentioned they're always in workout gear and they're constantly straying out of their lanes and things like that. Versus Louise Burke, who might have 50,000 followers or something like that, she deserves 5 million followers. 50 million followers there's no number that could actually calculate that.
Speaker 2:She's got like 14, 15,000 followers and there was a study actually published from South America the other year by Maricoglu and colleagues, and they looked at fitness influencers on Instagram and they found an inverse correlation in that the more followers somebody has, the fewer credentials they had for the particular area, and vice versa.
Speaker 2:This is kind of intuitive to me, because if somebody has loads and loads of followers, there's a good chance that they are a full-time influencer. They put all of their resources into this thing and the reason that they have so many followers and they have so much engagement is because they're constantly spouting the very sensational contrary stuff, the stuff that is going to be favored by the social media algorithms and our own internal algorithms. We're going to share stuff that's sensational, we're going to share stuff that goes against the grain, because that's the stuff that is so intriguing, whereas the experts number one they're much more likely to have full-time jobs that has scientists as coaches, as whatever, as educators, but also they're much less likely to want to share sensational content. Because science, day in, day out, is very dull. It's incremental advancements, it's nothing sensational. Now and again you'll get a big breakthrough, a big discovery, but day-to-day science is relatively mundane, which brings us back to this idea that if something is very extraordinary, very sensational, just be inherently skeptical of it right off the bat.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot here, nick. Once we're talking about this, let's give the listeners a seed to work from. We'll both put it in the show notes, you and I. After we finish recording this podcast and before it comes out, we're going to come up with a list of five people in four different domains that everybody can go out and follow on Twitter. Tomorrow, luis Berks is going to be both of ours, so we're just talking I just looked it up 16,000 Twitter followers, which is a tragedy Everybody who listens to this podcast. We could double that number pretty quickly. Go follow Luis Berks on Twitter. But my point is is we'll take five experts across the fields of physiology, strength, nutrition and biomechanics. I'll find all their Twitter handles and things like that. We'll post it in the show notes and then I'll give everybody a seed. You down for that.
Speaker 2:Yes, can I add an exercise? Psychology, exercise, psychology, perfect. That's what it's going to be. You can probably guess it too, but no, I think that's a really nice way to do it. And then, as you say, I liked your method of starting with this core group and then see who these are, individuals that don't just take our word for it. Look at their credentials, look at their experience, look at their history, look at the stuff they tweet and how little.
Speaker 2:Twitter followers and then you gradually expand your circle based on the individuals that they are referencing, that they are cited, that they are engaging with, and you can just slowly start to curate your followers and you can be a little bit more confident that the information that you're seeing on a day-to-day basis has some kind of scientific validity to it. And I guess the ultimate rule is that followers are not credentials.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a perfect place to leave it. Nick, Even though we're going to give Luis about 10,000 more followers after this podcast, that's a little modest contribution to it. Nick, I'm going to link up your website. The book, some of your work from the Skeptical Enquirer Is there anywhere else where people can. What are your social handles? People can find you and your work and what you're all about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, reach out to me on Twitter, at nbtiller. I'm on Instagram, nbtiller, and all of the work that I do is all cataloged on my website, which is nbtillercom. You can link to all of my papers free of charge on there and I update it whenever I do something new. Lots of cool stuff in the pipeline and let me say it's always a pleasure to be on the Coupcast. I've had to turn down so many requests for podcasts and interviews recently because I don't have the time, but I always have time for the Coupcast because I always have time for this guy.
Speaker 1:Thanks, man. I really appreciate that and your contributions. Man, I was going to tell you this earlier, at the beginning. It's been really cool to see your career develop just in the short time that you and I have been working together. Both on the outcome side of it, right Outcomes always matter the most. I'm a coach. I kind of keep going back to that. But then also your writing is so much better and it started out pretty darn good in the first place, like your initial writing was really good and now your writing's in Skeptical Inquirer and in Ultranet Magazine I'll leave some links in the show notes to that. It's just great. So it's been cool to see.
Speaker 2:Of all, I appreciate that and you know what it's, because I've worked on it and I've kind of felt that my writing has improved. And like I've got I mean you can look on my shelf here I've got books about writing and I've got let me show you these two new ones that I've got Steven Pinker's book, the Sense of Style, and the classic Strong and Wide, the Elements of Style. This was published in the 70s I think, and this is like the go-to handbook. But the point is writing is a craft, right, and communicating is a craft, and if you want to do something you have to work at it and get better at it. It sounds a little cliche, doesn't it? But you don't just. You can't just be a good writer in any way that you can just be a good guitarist or speak another language or be a good critical thinker. You have to put in the time to learn the skills. So anyway, I appreciate the kind words. It means a lot.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming on the podcast man. This is great. We will have you back. Since, apparently, I'm the only person that can book you, I'm going to keep a lock on it, you and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Everyone else can do it Very rare, very rare. I did, man. That's a compliment in and of itself. I appreciate it, man. We will see you on the next one, okay, Anytime, take care, all right folks.
Speaker 1:There you have it, there you go. Much thanks to Nick for coming on the podcast today and also as a personal shout out Nick, thank you for being such a great colleague over the years. Hope we can keep you part of the team as you get more and more popular out there in the world. That don't have to compete with Neil deGrasse Tyson to bring you back on the podcast, because I will certainly, certainly, certainly lose that if ever it comes to a head. Links will be in the show notes to Nick's website. I'm going to leave it at that, because his website is a fantastic encapsulation of all of his work. Y'all go and check that out. Be sure to check out his monthly column and ultra running magazine. He always does a really good job with that each and every single month, and also in the show notes to all of you listeners out there. As a bonus, we have our curated Twitter lists. So if you want to start a special list on Twitter just for this type of stuff and go through that some of the exercises that we went through, I would start there. I think we've got a really tremendous list of people to follow who might have flown underneath the radar for far too long for many of the listeners out there, so y'all go check that out. It's in the show notes.
Speaker 1:If you want more of Nick's work, even more than that, check out our research newsletter research essentials for ultra running. It's one of my favorite products that I put out every single month Myself, nick Tiller, stephanie Howe and the co-author of my book, jim Rupperg. We sit down every single month and we pour over three different individual research papers, all of which pertain to ultra running, and we go and we scrutinize them, we put them through a fine tooth comb and ultimately come out with very practical, pragmatic recommendations for runners to take that doesn't over sensationalize the research and really presents it as it is. I mentioned earlier, I'm really happy with this product, and one of the reasons I am happy with this product is because we don't really pull any punches.
Speaker 1:We just present it as is, and if it's good, we'll point it out, when it's bad, we'll point it out, and we don't have to come out with the latest, greatest thing on every single piece of research that we put together. It's through the conglomerate of many research papers that we can start to draw a lot of conclusions, and I think that this newsletter strikes the right balance between all of that. There'll be a link in the show notes to that, as always, so y'all go and check it out. I appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners and, as always, we will see you guys out on the trails.