How Wellness Culture Commodifies Science

In the late nineteenth century, a traveling showman named Clark Stanley used to bring an old, stiff-jointed man up on stage, rub snake oil into his knees, and watch him bound around like a boy. The crowd gasped. They bought bottles. The trick worked because it felt personal: here was proof, right in front of them, that something worked. Exercise physiologist Nick Tiller, author of the book The Health and Wellness Lie, thinks the trick has never really changed. "The pattern of the con is unchanged for millennia," he says. "Pseudoscience fossilizes because it's got nothing new to bring to the table. Science is constantly evolving" (35:03). Only the stage has moved, from a wagon in the Old West to an Instagram feed.

Tiller's case is not that health and wellness advice is uniformly false. It is that a highly profitable industry has learned to dress marketing in the clothing of science, and most people cannot tell the difference. "Everything that we know or think we know about health and wellness has been dictated to us by an industry... that puts profits above people," he says (06:53). He draws a distinction between two kinds of people who talk about science in public. A science communicator, he says, pops the hood and explains the mechanics underneath. A science commodifier is a car salesman:

"They'll just shine the thing up. They'll make it look really nice. They'll tell you how fast it goes, and they don't care if the thing breaks down a mile from the car lot." (Nick Tiller, [11:35])

A Study, a Tweet, and Fifty Kilograms That Never Happened

Tiller's clearest example involves vitamin D, a nutrient with a real and boring truth behind it: deficiency is common, it is bad for long-term health, and a doctor can fix it with diet, a supplement, or in extreme cases an injection (14:41). None of that is controversial. The trouble starts when a nutrient with a real halo effect gets recruited into bigger claims. A study a few years back, run on 40 monozygotic twins split into a control group and a vitamin D group, reported that 60 days of a moderate-to-high dose supplement raised cardiorespiratory fitness, measured by VO2 max, by 27 percent (16:05). Rhonda Patrick, a health information personality with 1.5 million Instagram followers at the time, tweeted the finding, and it spread within hours (18:27).

Tiller says it took him about ten seconds looking at the results table to know something was wrong. The study reported a 27 percent jump in absolute VO2 max, liters of oxygen per minute, but no change at all in relative VO2 max, which is the same measurement divided by body weight. The only way both numbers can be true at once is if the subjects gained an enormous amount of weight during the trial, something like 50 kilograms in 60 days (18:03), which is not physiologically possible. Tiller wrote to the journal. The authors could not produce their raw data. The paper was retracted, but only after racking up a large "Altmetric" score, a measure of how much online attention a paper gets, and after Patrick's post had already been liked and shared thousands of times (18:27). "With great power comes great responsibility," Tiller says. "Did she not read the study before sharing it? Or did she read it and not see the glaring errors?" (18:49).

The lesson he draws isn't just about one tweet. It's about a mismatch in incentives. "Social media algorithms work in an opposite way to how science works," he says (23:23). Science moves slowly and rewards caution; a single study is never supposed to settle anything. Social platforms reward the opposite: confidence, sensational claims, and anything that produces a strong emotional reaction.

This is where Tiller wants listeners to draw a line between skepticism and cynicism, terms people often use as synonyms but that mean very different things. Scientific skepticism, a phrase coined by astronomer Carl Sagan in the 1970s, means applying the same demanding standard of evidence to every claim rather than dismissing anything unfamiliar out of hand. A cynic just says no. A skeptic asks for data, looks at whether the claim is even physically plausible, such as clip-on earrings marketed to "shrink fat cells" with infrared light, and then decides.

"A cynic just dismisses things out of hand... A skeptic keeps an open mind, but not so open that their brains fall out." (Nick Tiller, [28:30])

When it comes to actually correcting someone who has fallen for bad information, Tiller's advice runs against the instinct to mock. People spreading wellness nonsense are usually not stupid, he says; they were given bad information, and everyone is vulnerable to that (30:15). Effective correction, in his view, explains the mechanism of why a claim is wrong and offers something to believe instead, rather than just tearing down the false claim and leaving a void (31:18). He also blames a quieter problem: legitimate scientists often avoid talking to the public because doing so can hurt their academic reputation, a phenomenon named after Sagan himself. "There is this stigma that somebody who communicates with the public is somehow a worse scientist," Tiller says (32:43), even though the two skills have nothing to do with each other. He quotes science educator Shirley Malcolm on what happens when scientists stay quiet:

"If you don't tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you, and you may not like how they do it." (Nick Tiller quoting Shirley Malcolm, [33:03])

The Problem Starts Before the Marketing Does

The second half of Tiller's argument is less about influencers and more about the research they cite. Bad science, he says, is rarely the product of villains fabricating results, though some do. More often it comes from ordinary researchers misunderstanding their own tools. Statistical power is the odds that a study will detect a real effect if one actually exists; researchers generally aim for a power of at least 0.8, meaning an 80 percent chance of catching a true effect (44:04). A meta-analysis of more than 40 studies on high-intensity interval training found an average power of just 0.14, a 14 percent chance (43:13). Small samples studying small effects produce results too noisy to trust, no matter what the abstract claims.

Funding compounds the problem. Studies backed by industry money are six times more likely to report positive findings than independently funded ones (44:27). And an unpublished survey of exercise scientists in the UK and US, still under peer review at the time of this conversation, found that 4.2 percent of respondents admitted to falsifying or fabricating data outright (48:20), 50 percent admitted to "p-hacking": running multiple statistical tests and reporting only the one that gives a favorable result (48:43), and 35 percent admitted to publishing the same data in more than one journal (49:09). Tiller thinks these self-reported numbers are almost certainly undercounts. He connects the pattern to academic publishing's "publish or perish" culture, where journals prefer positive, exciting findings and researchers are pressured to produce them. "It's a garbage in, garbage out scenario," he says. "So the responsibility is with us to make sure that we are publishing good data" (47:58).

Tiller's closing advice has nothing to do with supplements or biohacks. Asked for one daily habit worth adopting, he picked reading, not to sell his own book, he insists, but because sustained attention has become rare. "Having the ability to actually dedicate your attention to something in this day and age is like a superpower, and it's increasingly rare," he says (54:03). Thirty minutes a day, phone off, spent on a book, a puzzle, or an instrument, is less a wellness trend than a quiet rebellion against an economy built to fracture attention in the first place. It is also, in its own small way, the same skill the rest of the conversation demands: the patience to look closely before deciding what to believe.