Category: The Skeptic’s Guide to Sports Science
The Skeptic’s Guide to Sports Science column scrutinizes the health and fitness industry through the critical lens of scientific skepticism.
From the Lab to the Layperson: A Pioneering Initiative to Improve the Translation of Science
“If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you, and you probably won’t like how they do it.” —Shirley Malcolm, American Association for the Advancement of Science. We know that complex life likely evolved from single-celled organisms. As soon as microbes emerged from the primordial soup, they were shaped by …
Why Are We Still Ice Bathing?
David had always found ice bathing after exercise intuitive. After all, people had been putting ice on their injuries for decades, and the RICE principle—rest, ice, compression, and elevation—had been a mainstay in the management of injuries since he’d learned it at school (despite questionable supporting evidence for efficacy). He’d also seen athletes on social …
Telling True Stories: What Can the Anti-Science Community Teach Us about Sci-Comm?
Most readers won’t be familiar with Clark Stanley. And yet, to those who lived in the Old West, he was a household name. In the aging half of the nineteenth century, Stanley’s theater company was one of several that toured rural towns selling magical health elixirs. For the townsfolk, seeing a Clark Stanley convoy kicking …
Festive Fitness Fads to Know about This Holiday
Christmas is a time for giving. For the snake oil salesmen of the world, however, it’s a time for taking. The holiday sees capitalism, the pressures of gift-giving, and dietary excesses coalesce, creating the perfect storm for consumer exploitation. The commercial world swells with baseless claims and pseudoscience. After a year covering political ideologies …
Testosterone Supplements: Summoning the Specter of Tucker Carlson
I wasn’t expecting the New York Jets vs. the New York Giants game last month to trigger a traumatic flashback. A commercial for Nugenix’s “total testosterone-boosting formula” appeared during half-time, sending me spiraling through space-time to April 2022. It was the day Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men received its inaugural trailer. The …
Phelps Dives Deeper into the Pseudoscience of Cupping
The world watched in awe as Michael Phelps—the most decorated Olympian in history—added another five gold medals to his record-breaking tally at the Rio Games in 2016. This he did with conspicuous purple bruises across his back and shoulders, caused by cupping therapy. Today, it’s so common for an elite athlete to fraternize with pseudoscience, …
My Healthy but Waning Skepticism of Weight Loss Drugs.
“Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” —Richard P. Feynman The Gila Monster is North America’s only venomous Lizard. The reptile can grow to twenty-two inches and has a vicious bite that’s as toxic as that of the western diamondback rattlesnake. While studying the lizard’s venom in the 1990s, …
Novak Djokovic and the Pseudoscience Grand Slam
When it comes to Grand Slam titles, Novak Djokovic has eclipsed every other male tennis player in history. He’s the only man to be the reigning champion of all four majors simultaneously across three surfaces, and by securing his twenty-third trophy at the French Open 2023, the Serbian national perhaps cemented his place as the …
Magic Jewelry and the Irony of Ignorance
The plot for the epic fantasy series Lord of The Rings centered on, well, a ring. Not just any ring, but a magic ring. The “one ring to rule them all” bestowed immense power on its owner: the power of invisibility, the power to dominate the wills of others, and power over the bearers of …
Ozempic and Wegovy for Obesity: Landmark Therapies with Forgotten Flaws
How desperate to lose weight would you have to be before you’d let a surgeon slice a hole in your abdomen and remove three-quarters of your stomach? This is called “sleeve gastrectomy,” a common bariatric surgery that reduces the stomach’s size and decreases appetite by blunting the release of ghrelin—a hormone that stimulates hunger. More …
Inside The UFC’s Pseudoscience Crisis
It’s hard work beating people up for a living. A professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter typically trains year-round, fusing fighting disciplines such as boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, and Brazilian Ju Jitsu with concurrent resistance and endurance training. They must carefully balance stress and recovery to bring improvements rather than injuries and infections, and then, during …
Electric Muscle Stimulation: The Devil Is in the Detail
I used to be obsessed with martial arts superstar Bruce Lee. I watched all his movies, read his books, and studied his moves (quite ineffectually). Aside from his martial arts skills and philosophies, it was Lee’s physique that distinguished him from other action heroes of the time. Standing five feet seven inches (172 cm) tall, …
The Physical Toll of Your Smartphone Addiction
The least-used app on my phone is “phone.” The diverse functionality of the smartphone—texting, talking, video streaming, gaming, social networking—has changed the way we work, play, and communicate. I still wonder if Steve Jobs, when he introduced the iPhone at the Macworld San Francisco Keynote Address in 2007, anticipated the influence Apple’s revolutionary creation would …
Barefoot Running: Conspiracies and Controversies
All doctrines have demons, some more literal than others. What I mean by this is that ideologies tend to endure because they’ve a common antagonist against whom proponents can rally. For example, the Abrahamic religions brandish the Devil; politicians demonize members and policies of the opposing party; athletes and supporters unite against an opposing sports …
Health, Wellness, and the “Quick-Fix Fallacy”
Health and wellness scams have endured the ages by exploiting (1) scientific naiveté and (2) our innate desire for simple solutions to complex problems. The Mesopotamians made substantial contributions to science and technology. They were the first to use irrigation in agriculture, the first to forge tools from bronze and iron, and the first to …
The Liver King, Lies, and Logical Fallacies
The media backlash was swift and severe. More severe, in fact, than if an Olympic athlete had tested positive for a banned substance. For years, Brian Johnson—a.k.a. The Liver King—has marketed his brand on the core values of primal living founded on his self-derived “Ancestral Tenets.” Primarily through viral social media coverage, Johnson purportedly made …
The Backward World of ‘Retro Walking’
In terms of medical knowledge, the ancient world was primitive by modern standards. It had no germ theory to prevent the spread of disease, no anesthetics to pacify patients before surgery, and no evidence-based medicine to counteract the belief that “humors”—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—influenced the body and its emotions. The ancients were …
Is Sport A Breeding Ground for Pseudoscience?
Earlier this year, the world’s most successful male tennis player, Novak Djokovic, was deported from Australia—not for misconduct on the court or for doping, but for violating Australia’s border policy that mandated COVID-19 vaccinations.1 Djokovic is one of many professional athletes who have refused the vaccine, a list that includes Czech tennis player Renata Voráčová; …
Ten Health and Wellness Fallacies Every Skeptic Should Know
If my recent work as a health and wellness skeptic could be distilled into a single message, it would be this: Marketing companies understand our biases better than we do. In a commercialist culture, saturated by big business and bad science, I believe this to be a fundamental lesson in determining objective truths and making …
Kinesio Tape: A Magnificent Marketing Machine
Kinesiology tape, also known as Kinesio Tape, KT Tape, or just K-Tape, is made from 100 percent cotton fiber and “specialized elastic cores” that stretch in length but not width, allowing it to move and flex with muscles and joints.
Social Media Fitness Influencers: From Pseudoscience to Psychopathology
He is one of the most talented and recognizable athletes on earth. He is also one of the most well paid, earning £25 m ($30 m) per year playing soccer for Manchester United. Yet by endorsing an array of brands and businesses, including Coca-Cola, LiveScore, Free Fire, Nike, Herbalife Nutrition, and Tag Heuer, on his …
When Medicines Go Rogue, Part 2: Oxygen
When the ancestors of modern reptiles emerged from the water and committed to air breathing, they triggered an approximate .300-million-year evolutionary journey that led us to the wonderfully complex network of tubes, membranes, and muscles we presently call the human respiratory system (West, Watson, and Fu 2007). Its primary purpose: the movement of oxygen (O2) …
Ten Health and Wellness Buzzwords Every Skeptic Should Know
The word rhetoric, derived from the Greek noun “rhetor” meaning “speaker,” was once considered the art of verbal persuasion. Up to the late nineteenth century, rhetoric played a prominent role in the western education of orators, lawyers, counselors, historians, statesmen, and poets (Conley 1990). In fact, rhetoric originated in a school of pre-Socratic philosophers, thereby …
When Medicines Go Rogue, Part 1: Methylene Blue
The notion of an “exaggerated health claim” is as old as the wellness industry itself, but only in the past few decades have health claims benefited from being periodically shared by the world’s social media “influencers.” The exposure they afford a product is invaluable, amplifying the marketing claims, and occasionally conceiving new ones, to millions …
Using Fear to Sell Fitness: The Health Trends that Are Preying on Our Insecurities.
“Fructose is a poison,” he said repeatedly. “You gotta’ stop eating fruit.” “I don’t understand what you mean,” I replied. “In what way is fructose a poison?” “Well, it causes disease and … it’s a poison!” It quickly became clear that he could not articulate what he meant by “poison” or, indeed, how fructose supposedly …
Intravenous Nutrient Drips: An Expensive Solution to A Nonexistent Problem
On the ground floor of a shopping mall in southern California, nestled between a kiosk selling hot pretzels and another selling mobile phones, customers relax in carefully arranged leather sofas while drip bags containing clear liquids drain slowly through veins in their forearms. These “treatments,” which cost between $200 and $500, are increasingly popular, with …
How To Use Critical Thinking to Inform Better Health and Fitness Decisions in 2022
Making and breaking New Year’s resolutions is a long-standing tradition of Western Culture. Starting with a clean slate is appealing because it allows us to erase errors of the past year and instill a sense of hope for the new one. Most New Year’s resolutions revolve around health and fitness, with “Doing more exercise,” “Losing …
Can You Breathe Your Way to Better Health? The Science and Pseudoscience of ‘Training Your Lungs’
The respiratory system has long been a target of the commercial health and fitness industry. This is due to several reasons, the most recent being the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has focussed attention on respiratory health and the means (proven or otherwise) to enhance it. We’ll get to that shortly. Even before COVID-19, chronic respiratory …
Diets, Detox, and Other Delusions
We’re in the midst of a pandemic! No, not that pandemic. I’m referring to the rapidly increasing worldwide prevalence of obesity, defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a condition of abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health. Obesity is a serious problem. At the last assessment in 2016, obesity …
Cryotherapy: The Cold, Hard Truth
The health and wellness industry is worth an estimated $4 trillion. This extraordinary valuation encompasses the sale of health club memberships, exercise classes, fad diets, supplements, alternative therapies, and thousands of other products and practices, all vying for our attention. In this, the inaugural article in “The Skeptic’s Guide to Sports Science” column, I chose …