How to be a Skeptic in Sports Science with Nick Tiller, PhD | Koopcast Episode 43

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we have a repeat offender coming to us all the way back from episode number 27 it's nick tiller PhD you all will probably remember that podcast as an epic one it was over three hours in length and it was all about nutrition for ultra running nick comes back to us today to discuss how to be a skeptic in this world of sports science i know that every day when you open up your instagram feed you open up your twitter feed or you hop on over to facebook you're inundated with all these different products nutrition products and recovery modalities things of the like that will purportedly improve your performance but it's almost impossible to ascertain fact from fiction which one of those products work which one of them don't which influencers actually use the products that they're peddling and which one of them are just taking the paycheck who knows it is really difficult to figure out what is going on and so what i wanted to do on the podcast today is to leave all of you listeners with a toolkit with which you can navigate this world and go through it and say yeah this is a reasonable claim this is not a

reasonable claim and i hope at the end of the day you can take the this toolkit look for those red flags and make choices that will ultimately improve your performance i started out this conversation with nick with a little bit of banter on how the KoopCast came to be and i decided to leave it in there just because it was fun so i hope you all enjoy it without any further ado let's get right into it here's my conversation with nick tiller i tell you what i was i did i had to film some video over at my house uh last night for a certification that i wrote some content for and um the guy who we hired to do the filming i was complaining i was complaining to him about how horrible i am at figuring out all this audio engineering and so there we go right there right given what you do well i mean i don't know i when i set this podcast up like actually one of my biggest fears was the amount of time that it was going to take because i'm not trying to monetize it i'm you know i'm doing it as a service and for fun and you know i get i get a lot of value out of it personally as well but i can't let it detract from coaching which is what i do and i've been really you know kind of really lucky that i've been able to

like minimize the amount of like output that i've kind of that i've put into this by like you know hiring somebody to do the post-production and you know bringing on guests to where i don't have to like carry the whole conversation and things like that but you know the downside to all that is is i'm still a freaking kindergartner with a lot of this stuff you see you know and it's for that reason that i've never started a podcast of my own because i know how much time it would take and i'm a perfectionist i imagine like you i want to do it properly as well i just don't have the time it's the same reason that i i no longer have a blog because i figured if i'm going to put that much time into writing something then i should probably be writing something that's going to be published or you know that i'm going to make money from i don't feel like i can justify putting in that amount of time just for just for the fun of it maybe that's my error but uh yeah it takes a lot of time though yeah and you can i mean you can do it several different ways right like the time investment that you put into it i mean it could literally be as easy as you know one person or one person and a co-host just recording their thoughts on something and there's value in that and there's a lot of entertainment value in that but each level of complexity that you start to introduce it just gradually choose and choose up more and more time so if you want to do in-person interviews

okay you've got to have a setup for that and learn how that works and you know take the time to like meet people and have a you know studio or whatever then if you want to record remotely that's a whole different thing and then if you want to have you know four people versus two people then that's a whole different thing and then if they're joining one person's remotely and then one person's you know in person and then you're in the same room that's another you know so it's just like i just can go like any additional layer of production for sure you add to it yeah you know you start using jingles and oh my god sound effects and stuff or it's it gets yeah can easily escalate i was really close to just having a format where it was just me or me and a co-host because initially i wanted to just like reduce i didn't want the time suck of like bringing on guests and things like that and uh you know i got pretty lucky that i got some i got some really good counsel like early on before i went too far down that path and they said listen coop like first off like you want to have this podcast where you can simultaneously speak your opinion but also bring on people that you can challenge and they can challenge you so you can't do that and like be your own you know kind of be in a silo you know essentially and the second thing he said he's like listen you you know you you know

what you know but you also know what you don't know and when you don't know something you'll figure it out this is somebody who's known me for a long time when you don't know somebody when you when you don't know something uh you'll figure it out but one of the big ways in which you figure it out not the only way but one of the big ways in which you figure it out is you reach out to other people that are smarter than you in that area and i'm like yeah you're right thanks for that advice i don't know why i think the final piece of it this is what sealed the deal for me he's like listen dude if it's just you like trying to wax poetic on stuff you're gonna sound like an arrogant prick because you don't know everything and i'm like yeah you're right that's totally right all right you convince me i'll spend a little bit more time like setting this up differently but that makes all the difference and that's what makes the good that's what makes the podcast of you know a good quality because people will see through that you know i i mean and everybody's got a podcast now the the industry is almost saturated i'm like come on are you really qualified enough to be doing this do you have the experience to be doing it yeah that's the shit i would have done when i was 25 years old like i told like i knew myself when i was 25 in fact i i'm actually gonna bring on uh the podcast um one of my really early mentors you might recognize his name is jt kearney yeah um he was really influential when i was like in my mid-20s and

i thought i fucking knew everything and just like kind of constantly like beat me down with this you know simultaneous like love and just being really hard and honest at the same time which is hard to do right and i had a lot of respect for him going kind of going into the situation which helps a tremendous amount because he could be hard on me and i wouldn't take it as his oh he's so mean you know he's cussing at me you know how people get nowadays and um i mean honestly for like seven years it was like fuck coop all right this is how we're gonna think about this like go back to the well here's you know i'll give you like this much resource and you've got to figure out that like you've got to figure out the rest of it but absent that i would have totally like because i had the personality and the you know whatever confidence or arrogance or whatever i could bring things to it and also had like the the entrepreneurship you know there's a little bit of that that goes into it you know like you want to you want to you generally want to contribute but i did not have the the insight to realize you know it's the dunning-kruger effect right i did not have the insight to realize what i what i didn't know and i would look i would look back on that and i have pieces of work that you could probably dig up from fucking 20 years ago but you know that stuff lives for forever you know had i done that i would have had all this

garbage out there that i would have tried to erase from the far corners of the internet and you should you should be recording this because the dunning i mean i wrote about it in the book it comes up dunning-kruger because part of the problem that we have in the health and fitness industry is people overestimating it or having too much confidence in their own ability and not being aware enough that they're ignorant of the reach of their own ignorance you know yeah and people overestimating their abilities and that's a big problem with the industry and the whole notion of expert knowledge is undermined you know because everybody's an expert on social media everybody's afforded this platform to you know disseminate information but not everyone deserves that platform you know not everyone should be given that platform and this is part of the problem why we have so much misinformation and and crappy science because everyone's just disseminating information um that they don't really know what to do with you know part of the problem but here's here's where here's what i want to come away with this podcast with is i want the listeners to have kind of a toolkit so to speak or some or or or a skill set i guess is a better way to think about it so that when those things do come out they can look at it with a skeptical eye and figure out how to like filter how to like filter through that because even even me and even our set of coaches that i i

hammer them all on this all of the time because they're just flooded with information and they're flooded with requests for answers right like this came out what do i do about it what should i think about this it's hard for them to keep track of it it's hard for me to keep track of it it's hard for other kind of professionals to keep track of it and for for a normal person normal athlete that's kind of like out there i trying to put myself in their shoes it's easy here here's the example i always give and this is this is going to be the start of the podcast since we've already gotten into it the best example i can come up with is every april fool's day all these companies come up with their like own iteration to kind of like fool the public and it's typically some twist on a current product lineup that they make just believable enough to fool some people and everybody does it um i remember last year the year before last like solomon did this really funny thing where they came up with a carbon fiber fishing rod and they said that killian jornay was going to retire and become a fly fisherman they had all this footage of him climbing up these mountains with this you know fishing rod that solomon designed it was really cute but the but the best the best example of this the best example of how bad our filters are actually comes from goo and they do a good job of these april fool's day pranks every every single year one year they had um uh one year they had all of these different

gel uh flavors like uh it was almost like the uh jelly belly flavors that are like booger and grass and things like that they had like pimento loaf and uh liver and onions and they redid the packaging to like make it look like it was really really well done one year they came out with a new product on april fool's day and it was called derma charge and the concept of the product it was it was a transdermal carbohydrate application so it's a gel right rub on your skin and apparently it could deliver carbohydrate and they went through the whole thing like a normal product launch and they used all these fancy buzzwords like transdermal carbohydrate application and they had a fitness model smearing it all over them and on and on and on and on and there was this really good blend of of of humor with like scientific reasoning behind it and when it came out i looked at i'm like oh this is hilarious like this is like really freaking good but i get in the office that morning and i had maybe you know 20 emails from athletes that fell for it they like legitimately fell for it they're like hey what do you think about this and so so me i just kind of like i kind of like laugh that off i'm like listen it's april fool's day you idiots like come on did you really think this this could happen but i got an email from i'm going to anonymize this to protect the innocent i got an email from a friend of mine who's in the coaching and sports science realm who should know better and he sent it to me and said hey you know

what do you think about this and i thought initially that he was just trying to put me on and like get me to like fall for it so i'm like okay i'm gonna play along so i call him up i was like hey yeah i saw the same thing like what do you think about it so i'm like playing along with the joke and we get far enough into the conversation where i realize he's not trying to put me on he's also falling for it and this is somebody who knows better who's got a master's degree they does a lot of physiological testing works with athletes work with sports scientists and things like that and finally i get we get like 20 minutes on the conversation i'm like dude it's april fool's day you fucking idiot like are do you really think this and he felt so bad he's like oh my god i cannot believe i fell for this like i can't believe like out of all people me and i'm like i promise your secret is safe with me i might use it in an example like i just did but i'm not gonna release the day unless you know unless you do but i think suffice it to say like even even when companies are trying are intentionally putting out like cheeky information and they know that the information is false like people still don't have a good enough filter to figure out reality from fiction right now and that that's what i kind of want to get out of this conversation is is like what what can the what can the listener do when all these things authentically come out where people are trying to sell products and new things come out new technology comes out everybody wants an edge how do they cut through

all of that to figure out what's actually going to work and what's actually just total garbage sure yeah and it's not a there's no simple you know it's not like there is a simple kind of flow chart that you can follow it does require kind of this very systematic methodical approach but there are there are absolutely some things you can look out for there are um little red flags that you can try and notice you can think about the plausibility of the products you can then start to look at the evidence and there are options if you don't know how to look at evidence you know what i cover in the work is how to read a paper you know something as simple as how to read a journal article but beyond that it's like well if you don't have the time or the technical capabilities to read a paper then ask somebody who does you can defer right it's having the humility to ask somebody who knows more than you do so it's all of these things kind of integrated and um you know when combined it gives you the best chance of of getting to the truth of the matter and there are a few what i would say like really good examples of that that you point out in your book where you kind of go through here's what you know here's what everybody was claiming and what was purporting and even things that have been purported or at least twisted within the scientific literature and here's what's actually going on

i think to set it up a little further like just pick your favorite one i know there's like i know it's hard to pick a it's like picking your favorite child right because you had these examples there for for good reason i mean you've got like chocolate is a little bit of alcohol good for your health like things like that but is there was there one when you're researching this book that stood out to you that it was like okay like here's something that everybody can kind of identify with and here like here's what here's what happened yeah probably i like altitude training yeah it's a good example because it's quite complex there's there's no there's no short answer right so i like talking about altitude training because there's it's very plausible and there's loads of positive research on it but the reality of the way that it's been exploited and extorted in the industry for monetary gain doesn't in any way match the credibility of the literature so if altitude training for example is going to work we know that it's more than likely going to be a live by trainment strategy but there are very complex nuances that most people don't understand i don't i'm not an altitude specialist but i know enough to know that not everyone responds to altitude training it depends on what sport you're training for if it's an endurance type of sport you're more likely to benefit from altitude training if you're competing in a more explosive strength power high intensity dependent sport then

altitude training might actually compromise performance because you can't train at the intensities you need to to maintain the explosive nature of the of the sport of performance and like i said some people are just non-responders some people don't respond to altitude as well as others but even if you understand that you look at the way the altitude training has been monetized by the industry you have altitude training centers now that offer you 60 minute about 60 minute kind of training sessions in an altitude training tent or an altitude chamber and they sell courses of like six of these and you do you do one a week well even if you are generous and you say that the live high training strategies more than likely work and even if you account for non-responders and everything else there's no evidence absolutely no evidence at all the training for 60 minutes once a week in a low oxygen chamber this can have any impact on performance and they don't even talk about performance they talk about immune function and fat burning fat oxidation so we have this this core kind of scientific research that is very complex very complicated more than likely some altitude training in some capacity is going to be beneficial for performance but for a proportion of

people but the way that it's just been uh extrapolated and exploited by the industry doesn't bear any resemblance to the research that's actually been done so i like altitude because it's a very complex scenario well and the the origin of that if you go back and you want to pinpoint like the kind of the very first part of it is especially in and dirt on the endurance side of it is the kenyan dominance at the endurance events and all it is is observation it wasn't even you know the mechanism kind of you kind of followed the observation they just said okay all the kenyans live and train at 8 000 feet there must be something magic to this 8 000 feet and then they looked at the mechanism okay there's some sort of improved you know red blood cell function more you know higher hermetocrates and things like that and then the practice kind of followed that but you could have just as easily have said okay all the kenyans eat potatoes there must be something magic within the potatoes let's start feeding everybody potatoes but but for whatever reason because it was like altitude and it carried like a little bit of monetization uh to it that's what that's what everybody started to chase and so much so that i mean i've seen this on the elite side and we also see this in the commercial side as well is that the out the the altitude peak we've already i mean i don't know i'm trying to get out of the prediction business ever

since covet hit because i keep getting it all wrong but i'm gonna go out on a limb and say this anyway the altitude peak on the commercial side it seems like we've already hit and we're kind of coming down from that where the centers and the units and people using altitude training especially at a recreational level it's kind of like it's kind of like worn like like it's kind of got worn out by now and we're just starting to see it almost kind of on the on the decline even at the elite side you know i mean you go back to the 90s and the early 2000s where you know sport scientists like ben levine and in that group they you know they took people to high altitude camps and it was like the de facto rite of passage that you went to high altitude camp to train and it's still prevalent but it's not de facto yeah i think i'd agree with that it's still very trendy the trendy most endurance cyclists and endurance runners in terms of uh podium funded programs will have yearly altitude sojourns and you know every year they'll go and they'll do a training camp at altitude i remember when i worked at the olympic center this is going back quite a few years and we had a very nice sophisticated environmental chamber so we could do temperature extremes and altitude as well it was a um uh it wasn't a hyperbaric chamber it was a hypoxic chamber so you couldn't change partial pressure of the oxygen it was just manipulating the oxygen content of the air so

it simulated high altitude and i was working with a with a performance program and the coaches insisted that we get all the athletes into the environmental chamber to do some altitude training sessions so twice a week for a period and as a relatively young inexperienced sport scientist at the time i didn't really have the gravitas the weight to make any demands on the type of the training especially when you work with these world-class olympic coaches who have you know won multiple medals you know at various Olympic games but i tried anyway and i said look if we're going to do this we need to try and do it rigorously so that we know if there's actually a beneficial effect what we kind of need to do is get half the training after the team doing doing intervention the altitude training version the other half maintain normal training and we do some pre and post measures just a very basic scientific research study take some bloods and do some exercise testing before and after in both groups and we just see if it's effective that way we know one if we're wasting that time and money and two if it's going to have any negative impact on physiology of performance and that way kind of that that was status in good stead going forward but they didn't like that idea because it not it took too much time too much effort and it meant that half the group didn't get the altitude into there and they were already sold on the intervention they their minds were made up on this new newfangled kind of trend thing that everyone else was doing

so we went ahead and we did the intervention with the entire group we did no pre and post testing so we had no idea if it worked but the placebo effect you know is it's a powerful effect even if it works in the context of placebo alone that was enough for the athletes and that was enough for the coaches whether it actually had any physiological effect we have no idea well that was almost secondary yeah and also on the altitude side the way that most of them are set up it's set up as a camp so you go to a high location you rent out a house everybody stays there it's nice it's away from your family it's away from all the distractions and things like that and the athletes leave that camp fitter absolutely a hundred percent but it's hard to tease out is that due to the altitude or is it like a second order effect from the environment of the camp itself so the nutritionist that they bring in the fact that it's an isolated environment that you've got other training partners around that you're you know that you are kind of you're less distracted or distraction free or something like that like athletes will always say that they're better after the quote-unquote altitude camp and then that's how that myth kind of gets perpetuated because they're using the term altitude camp and not just training camp right when when in reality what is more likely to be happening is they're benefiting from all of these other second second order effects more than the actual altitude but a lot of people and this is

the more concerning thing most people don't actually care yeah if if it's the altitude that's having the effect or if it's just the training camp placebo effect is a real effect and for a lot of people have studied this most people don't care if they get better because of placebo they don't mind being deceived by their coach that they're using the placebo as long as the outcome is improved performance so i make an argument in the book that actually placebo mediated treatments might actually have negative outcomes on on various facets of society which we can talk about later if it comes up but um but but most people aren't really bothered as long as they feel like they're doing something if they're throwing money at the problems they're going on the training camp they buy some new some new running shoes they buy an expensive heart rate monitor they've already convinced themselves that it's going to have a positive impact on their performance and their training and for most people that's enough well you okay we're going to go down that rabbit hole because you you you you you you you you perked up my antenna on something that i've kind of like harped on harped on beforehand so you can throw away the outline as since you earlier we'll talk about the placebo effect because there is a notion out there amongst athletes amongst coaches amongst sports scientists that athletes and coaches should leverage the placebo effect and use these things intentionally knowing that there's no physiological effect that they're really just getting some you know some

some perceived effect from it and i've always looked at it i've always looked at that proposition and said one you can only lie to your athletes so many times before it stops working this is where i put my coach hat on right i'm like you you can get away with that like once or twice absolutely 100 hey listen we're going to do this you're going to be awesome afterwards there there's this notion that athletes and coaches should use the placebo effect to their advantage and when i put my coach hat on with that i always think that you can only lie to your athletes because that's what you're doing you can only lie to your athletes so much before the ruse is over and then the second thing is is there's stuff out there that works so why not use that like if you want to use you know a pill or training intervention or whatever there's tons of stuff out there that actually work why don't use that and you know it works and there's you know they think that it works so you get some sort of like compounding effect from the actual physiological benefit and the psychological benefit from it go ahead and do that path versus just pulling stuff out of thin air and saying oh yeah the red pill is gonna what is gonna you you know increase your oxygen consumption by by five percent so i don't maybe you can like help me understand i i i i fail to understand the rationale that is that is prevalent out there and i've seen a lot of really well known

coaches promote this i don't understand the rationale for intentionally using a placebo to get a training effect out of an athlete yeah it's a really interesting one because if you look at the research that's been done on the magnitude of the effect from using a placebo it's somewhere between one and three percent you get an improvement in performance between one and three and if you look at uh you know a number of well-known supplements you look at caffeine or carbohydrate during exercise the magnitude of the effect between one and three right so you can you can get a similar effect by not using anything just you can treat through the power of the mind you hit on an important point it's like how do you move this forward so i make a really strong pace in the book because i'm a little bit old school a little bit at one end of the spectrum when it comes to good science and being rigorous and evidence-based practice and i don't like using the placebo people who work in performance do like using them because they it does improve performance that's unequivocal but it in terms of moving that forward well like you say maybe we've got to use products that that work and have been shown in controlled studies to have a positive physiological effect on performance but also are associated with a strong expectation of an effect

on behalf of the athlete so caffeine is a great example because it actually works there are various mechanisms by which it can improve exercise performance depending on the exercise but most athletes if you told them that i'm going to give you a caffeine supplement they would be they would expect to work as well and they've probably got prior experience most athletes anyway if they use caffeine would have prior experience of feeling you know the stimulant effects of the caffeine or having an increase in concentration or whatever so you get kind of the double whammy of the placebo effect the expectation have low conditioning but you also have a real physiological effect but um i'm not in favor of the placebo at all of just using products that only work in the context of placebo because this is from slope and if you allow somebody to start using products that only work in the context of placebo then you've got to allow them to use anything that only works in the context of placebo that includes complementary alternative medicines alternative therapies um chiropractic homeopathy and we've got to remember that the world of sports performance is once in a year but it overlaps heavily with health which overlaps heavily with the clinical side of things so taking a sugar pill to improve your 5k run performance okay if the pill doesn't work then

it's no big deal right you don't you don't break the PR that day but if you give a sugar pill to somebody with a bacterial infection then that's a problem because if you have a bacterial infection you more than likely need antibiotics in order to get better you're not you may not get better unless you take antibiotics and there are lots of instances you know very high profile cases in the media where people have foregone traditional medical treatments in favor of placebos in favor of treatments that only work in the context of placebo and people have died and they're still dying and children getting very very sick and children dying because people are using products that only work through a placebo-mediated effect and if somebody is critically ill you know everyone knows intuitively that somebody's having an asthma attack probably shouldn't give them a placebo in order to treat the asthma attack right um but that's kind of what we're dealing with and if you allow it in one aspect to help the fitness industry in terms of sports performance it's kind of a slippery slope to the clinical side of things as well and that's kind of the argument we're making the book and the the real issue for the end users the athletes that are out there as i was alluding to earlier in the in our discussion was it's hard for them to ascertain the difference and the typical the typical scenario they get set up is they open up their

instagram feed and i'm sorry to pick on the heavy instagram users it's just the easiest one they open up their instagram feed and they see so and so athlete using such and such product and then they scroll down a little bit further and they see another athlete using a different product athlete a could be completely authentic meaning that athlete uses that product that product has efficacy the product helps the athlete situation b the company is paying the athlete the athletes never use the product the product doesn't work but those two situations to many if not most end users that are actually looking at it are indistinguishable in terms of the way that the person is observing the athlete using those products and also the effect that it's going to ultimately have on them and i have people i mean honestly nick like on a weekly basis what about this what about that does this work does that work and it it actually kind of becomes like a big part of like my work output kind of like every week is you know feel like filtering through this and most of them you know 95 of them whenever i've got pretty stock responses for because we've seen them time and time and time again five percent throw me for a loop and i have to do a little bit of research on but the rate that people are getting inundated with with this stuff it becomes hard so maybe we can start to work through like and i know that it's a that it's a skill that needs to be

home but maybe we can kind of like work through some things that people that are listening to this can go okay the next time i see xyz pop up in you know the popular literature or an instagram feed or whatever here's some things that i can go through to like provide at least an initial filter for it and not get duped on april fool's day by goo again i think the yeah if it's april fool's day just assume that everything you're reading is trash that's that's the first rule the second rule is that is that twitter followers are not credentials that's the second one it doesn't matter how many twitter followers somebody has or how many likes they have on a facebook page that does not make them an authority you know and and this this comes back i have a whole chapter on logical fallacies in sport and the the one that you just described is the argument to authority paying athletes or famous people to wear a product or to use a product or to be pictured or filmed using a product is as old as time itself right so as old as modern civilization and uh it all comes it's all about the money right if you can't distinguish what the athletes real motives are for using that product they're getting paid to endorse a product then even if they really believe in the product then the endorsement is tainted there's going to be an investment bias associated with it so for example i have no doubt that adidas predators are a really good football boot you know as in soccer yeah yeah

and i when i was a kid you didn't have a pair of soccer boots unless you had adidas predators they would they were just they were so cool and everyone had them because all of the professional footballers use them i'm sure they're very very good boots but the fact that these athletes got them for free or paid to be pictured wearing them means that the motive has been confused and if somebody is selling you something as in selling you for monetary gain then the motive has been contaminated by virtue of the fact that they're trying to get your money right so it's it's a little bit pessimistic to assume that everyone's trying to rip you off but if you start from that base that everyone wants your money in the health and fitness industry everyone's trying to make a quick buck then you can you can figure out ways to filter i like your expression in email or is it filtered through the the grit to get to the diamonds or something yeah yeah but if you start from that base assuming that everyone's trying to rip you off and then go from there that's probably a pretty good place to start a lot i'm laughing because not a lot of people are a lot of people want to look at the world through like rose-colored lenses like everybody has the best intentions and things like that but i mean i absolutely agree with you that in the health and fitness industry and i it's a whole like it's a whole nother conversation to go go down in terms of why

this particular industry is like that and politics is kind of the same way but you have to take you have you do have to start out with the orientation that this is fake i got to figure out what's real that's the way that i that's the way that i look at it i look at i look at stuff through the way when i'm evaluating that and it part of me hates to do it because i i am actually an optimist at the end of the day but i've learned and i've gotten duped enough that i have to look at these things through the lens of first it's fake and i got to figure out if it's actually real or not and it's just like it's sad that it's like come to that place how did we end up here well sure but but if you if you change the context right and think about it from in a different industry you're going to buy a new car and you go to the car lot right and you go and speak to the salesman and you say to the salesman okay sell me a car you wouldn't just believe what they told you you know they're going to show you even if they're showing you some used cars you're going to assume that there's some rhetoric in there you're not going to assume that they're being honest you're not going to assume that they have your best interests at heart you're going to assume that they're trying to make money and if anybody who's ever bought a car will know this because unfortunately used car salesmen don't have a very good reputation but there's a reason for that you know no offense to anybody who might be listening who is a used car salesman before you get emails i'm sure you're the really honest authentic one but but in most people's experience um they're trying to they're trying to shift cars

because that's their business and there's no reason why it would be any different in any other facet of society especially one like health and fitness which is confused and conflated with so much fake science and pseudoscience and false claims um it's very easy to make grand claims on very very weak evidence you can get away with it there's there's not really any regulating authority and there's kind of like a sliding scale of this where so where you'll see re in the research side of it where you'll see research that's intentionally designed to get a particular result you'll see research that is done kind of kind of unbeknownst to whatever company and then they latch on to a particular piece of it to exploit it and then i'm going in a random order here of you know degree degrees of error and then you see the stuff that that has been outright paid for by a company to produce not only just to produce the research which that has to happen like research needs to get funded that's not the worst error in the entire world but a lot of times it's they're paid to get a certain result that's where the error kind of comes it let's kind of go what i want to do is is now go down like the degrees of error right or the degrees of egregiousness and i'll start out with my personal example and then you can get into like

when you were actually asked to like personally bias your research um it in the kind of the early 2000s this this uh recovery drink with a four to one carbohydrate to protein ratio started to become extremely prevalent and kind of the first ones on the market was this company uh called endurox and they were ultimately bought by pacific labs which is a huge nutritional supplement company and the woman that initially did that research is a friend of mine she's one of our cts coaches who lives up in denver kathy's a watsky and i love kathy to death death and her and i have had many many many discussions on how this whole thing transpired so for those of you out there that think i'm throwing somebody under the bus i'm not it's somebody that realizes what has gone on so when she was a graduate student at the university of texas at john ivy's lab and the listeners nobody will recognize who john ivy is but he is very well respected in the sports science community when kathy was an undergraduate in his lab she designed this study comparing one drink to another and the first drink was an all carbohydrate drink and the second drink was the exact same drink but they added protein in a four to one ratio so four grams of carbohydrate to one what to one gram of protein the key with that and the way that i describe that is or the reason that i describe that that way is that the second drink was the first drink plus plus keyword the protein so she comes out with this

research oh my gosh this four to one you know carbohydrate to protein uh drink it had a greater effect on glycogen resynthesis that was the kind of the summary of the paper and this company and durox kind of latched onto it and made a beverage around it after the research had kind of come out and the gist of it was is a sport of one carbohydrate to protein you know ratio was magic did the lab didn't have anything to do with it in advance they you know the product came out afterwards it was untainted research and things like that but what kathy realized after the fact is that it wasn't the carbohydrate to protein ratio nor the additional protein it was just higher in calories that was the primary driver of this glycogen synthesis but this company and durox kind of latched onto it and ran with it and they built up a really big business kind of in the early in the mid and the late 2000s before other companies started to kind of catch on and this whole time kathy is like these people are using my research and it's not the way that it was intended you know but they could stamp this you know it's been validated by research and you know blah blah blah on it and we had a relation this is where the personal side of it came in so we are the company that i worked for we had a relationship with and durox and endorsement relationship where we were pushing this drink and yes it was superior to

a carbohydrate drink of lesser calories but the same carbohydrate content but it wasn't any better than any sort of other drink of the same amount of calories and it took me about i don't know like 18 months to like unravel all of the different you know all of the different steps of this and it's not a big deal to the athletes at the end of the day you know they're still getting a good high quality product it's not deleterious it's you know water approved and all that stuff but the the the client the four to one claim which was like the linchpin and all of the advertising personally i felt like an idiot for regurgitating that and i had to go back to a lot of people and say yeah you know we were wrong for this and blah blah blah and that i always point to that example of something that started out benign nobody's trying to fool anybody the company at the end of the day is just trying to make money they pick the sexiest thing out of the research to promote and everybody just kind of follows it and i raised my hand i was the sheep and i followed it as well kind of no harm no foul but it doesn't it's not always like that sometimes they go into the situation intentionally trying to dupe people well you know i i think i would say this is disingenuous i don't think they're necessarily doing anything wrong but but they're also not being sufficiently candid and um transparent because in that situation they're not comparing

like with like well that's what it comes down to it's not isocalorific so you have one product that just contains more calories than the other one so of course it's probably going to facilitate recovery better plus it contains protein you know and i've seen other examples of that there's a very very big uh nutrition company which i won't mention but they advertised several years ago an electrolyte product that compared to a carbohydrate product enhanced fat oxidation by about 40 percent so you take their electrolyte product compare it to a carbohydrate product that belonged to their closest competitor and it enhanced fat oxidation by 40 percent which is colossal right yeah so and that was the claim with that went with the product and it and it's true you know if you look at the studies there were controlled studies and they were relatively well performed and the conclusion is valid in that if you compare it against that carbohydrate product then fat oxidation or liquid oxidation is augmented by 40 percent but when you dig a little bit deeper you're comparing a a zero calorie drink with a carbohydrate formula right yeah it's you're comparing apples and oranges the carbohydrate formula is designed for one purpose to replace carbohydrate and to increase carbohydrate oxidation rate the other one is designed for a

completely different purpose so you're not comparing the you're not comparing like with like so the claim itself is not fallacious but it's not but it's completely disingenuous people are going to see that and they're going to think well if i use that that electrolyte formula then i'm going to max i'm going to augment my fat oxidation rates which is something that a lot of injurious athletes might might want to target in their training but if you compare the electrolyte formula to water the fat oxidation rates are probably going to be very closely comparable so i think that's a very similar example to the one you presented yeah technically they're not doing anything wrong but then they're also being a little bit disingenuous from my perspective and so take me through i want to hear the story personally i think the listeners will get a kick out of it you tell it in your book or maybe you can elaborate it a little bit more uh in an audio format when you were going through some of your was it your graduate research or PhD research my masters masters research you had a company approach you to basically fudge the data like they're going to pay you to fudge the data data yeah pretty much yeah it's not it wasn't um data fabrication that's kind of the the worst possible scenario in scientific research but it was pretty much as good as so i should predicate it by set by just setting some of the um some of the background so ideally what would happen in product development is

that there is a rich body of research on a particular area and then some scientists that's got you know had a spark of creativity or innovation would see the literature is very robust body of evidence on the on the literature and then create a product off the back of it so the research is already in place and the product comes later and there's there are examples of that is very very few and far between they're very very sparse in in sport science but some products are based on this pre-existing body of literature but what happens in most cases is that the product is developed and either nobody bothers to do any research on it anyway because they don't need to because they can pay athletes to endorse their products or they've got other sophisticated marketing programs so they don't need the scientific research or they then retroactively perform some scientific quote-unquote scientific research to fill the gap to fill the void in in the literature and that more often than not that's what happens and that's you know it's not the best way to do science but it's probably better than nothing so in this instance uh i was working during my master's with so my master's was actually funded it was interest industry sponsored by a sports nutrition company my master's was based around carbohydrate supplementation

but more specifically carbohydrate metabolism during endurance sport so i was interested in different rates of carbohydrate oxidation and fat oxidation during exercise in athletes of different abilities and how we could manipulate that with carbohydrate supplements now at the time this was back in 2005 2006 the whole industry of kind of uh carbohydrate supplements was it was still quite novel at the time i think it's it's fairly well established now the carbohydrate supplements are you are beneficial for long-term endurance type sports for marathons and triathlons and so forth but at the time this was relatively novel research and i was testing different carbohydrate formulas in my masters and this company approached me because they'd seen the work that i'd done and they were retroactively doing some research so that they could start that research alongside this new product that they developed and it was a carbohydrate caffeine formula and they were doing right they'd hired this professional cyclist a big name in the industry to do two time trials one time trial was going to be i think it was a 40k time trial in the lab using their carbohydrate caffeine supplement and the other one was a was a a similar product from their closest competitor and they asked me to test these two products

and in the first trial they they wanted me to test the product from their closest competitor and in fact no i tell a lie it was actually testing it against the placebo so it wasn't even a fair trial that that was another instance where where we were testing two products like for like this was actually their product against a uh zero calorie zero caffeine placebo so we weren't even comparing like with like so that's the first red flag but they asked me in the first trial when the athlete is going is doing the trial it's 40k effort just let him get on with it yeah just tell him that he's you know using using using some placebo product whatever let him get on with it don't give him any encouragement and you know if you maybe if you can just have him facing the wall or something in the second trial when when you're going to use the carbohydrate caffeine product you know really try and sell it to him tell him that he's using this cutting-edge product tell him that his performance is going to be enhanced tell him that we've done preliminary trials when performing performance effects have been like 10 percent or something and really you know give him as much encouragement as you can and i was kind of thinking back now i was a bit of a crossroads in my career because i was relatively inexperienced as a physiologist i was young i was broke as well because i was a student and i was

really tempted to take this on and they were going to pay me a lot of money to do this but i had the foresight to know that this is it's not even bad science this is just this is completely this is pseudoscience because not only are we not pairing like with like but it's not a fair trial and they're conducting the trial just so that they can say in legal documents that they've done a trial with this physiologist at this university and for a lot of companies that's enough yeah that's enough that that's enough to on which they can base a whole line of products i'm glad to say that i didn't take them up on the offer and i i sidestepped that one they went to a colleague of mine who did take it on him and the company ended up in some legal problems because of the claims that they made around the product oh wow wow so it was a happy ending all around not so kind to get on but but this is what you're dealing with in this industry is that when when you have science that's being done for the sake of science so that companies can say that they've made the effort you know this token effort it's um it's crappy science and it's crappy data it's it's not worth the paper that it's published on okay so that's a hilarious story and i did not realize the extent of it the most incredible thing about that nick is the scenario like i can get okay you're going to compare product a to essentially water right flavor non non no calorie water like that happens quite quite regularly in in nutrition in

nutrition trials and it's hard to figure out at least for most consumers it's hard to figure out when their research validated uh research validated product has that kind of manipulation going into it but the the environmental manipulation like okay have this boring environment on one side in this super exciting environment on the other side i mean that's why they double blind most of these trials so the per the people conducting the tests themselves and you've been in threshold and vo2 max tests like you want to try to get the most out of the athletes or yelling and screaming at them you usually have a script you know that you have to kind of go by to make sure that it's standardized every time and whatnot you go to great lengths to standardize the environment the fact that they're asking you intentionally to go to great lengths to manipulate the environment like total that's the most incredible part of it in an end of one as well with a single subject you know there's not one thing about that scenario screamed good science everything was wrong with it you know i i remember working with uh about the same kind of time i was involved in a few different trials looking at carbohydrate supplements and we we tested like i don't know 20 different athletes they were all very well trained cyclists and one of them for whatever reason i think there was a glitch in the system but uh he ended up performing like 40 percent better in one trial than he did in another and it was a complete outlier it was you know artifactual we all knew that something had gone wrong with with a piece

of kit but the next month uh the company that we were doing this testing for had a full a four page advert out in a in a big triathlon magazine saying perform 40 percent better than the nearest competitor data so not only had we not done any stats we hadn't published the data it was one subject who had done this this kind of random anomalous trial that we knew uh that we knew wasn't technically accurate and they'd kind of taken this one result and just run with it uh and so that's that's another example of how these these data can be manipulated so let's kind of go back to the tools and i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna lead you a little bit and if we go off the wrong track you bring me back because you're the expert here so the the first tool is to inherently realize that people are trying to rip you off like i'd laugh at it because people are going to be like coop you're such a pessimist but i don't know i've kind of gotten to that that place as well like view things when you see an athlete endorse a product when you see that advertisement in the triathlon magazine in the trail running magazine or whatever look at it like okay what's wrong with this not oh wow this is great like look at it okay how you know what are they trying what are they manipulating here look at like start from the skeptical side not from the accepting side i i i think that the second the like another tool that people can use is to be wary of

of the sexy ways to improve performance that have been adulterated and you touched on one right at the very beginning of this and that's altitude we've started to see this with the respiration masks right the altitude mask which went through this whole saga right so so for everybody who's who's uninformed who's listening to this it's uninformed there's this company out there that produced a mask that you could wear while you're exercising and the name of it was the altitude mask and all it did was restrict the amount of oxygen flow that you could intake and so it was literally making you breathe harder but what they were claiming is that it simulated altitude they were taking the sexy thing altitude and they were trying to adulterate it into a cheap product that they could sell to the masses they actually had to rename that product the fcc made them rename that i don't know if that's true in the uk as well but in the us the fcc made them rename it to the training mask because it was blatantly kind of blatantly false but i use that as an example as as another thing that people can do to try to cut through some of the clutter and like find the diamonds if a company is taking something that has a lot of sex appeal to it and i'll bring out a few examples altitudes one fat burning is an uh is another one and um oh god what was the last one that i was just trying to come up with i had it off the tip of my

tongue um we'll just leave it at those two altitude and fat burning and they're using something some products some concoctions some some piece of equipment to exploit this area that's when your antenna should go up yeah i i 100 agree with that if they're taking some kind of something that's trendy something that a lot of people are talking about and can work and can work that's the other thing is that in some cases like that that word or whatever can actually work yeah and it's and it's extrapolating it so that the claim that they're making doesn't necessarily so altitude is a great example uh you can look at compression garments as another example so compression garments there is some research to suggest that it might have some kind of role in recovery if you're if you do some kind of very extreme high intensity or long duration exercise that damages the muscles and that can create soreness and then you're going to be sitting sedentary for a long period of time maybe you're traveling or you're sleeping then maybe if you wear some of these full lower body compression tights it might help to facilitate recovery in some way the research is is a little bit equivocal on that but okay let's be generous but there's a whole range now of compression tights and compression anklets that you can buy and they always when you look at the website selling these things they cite the literature

that is relevant only to full lower body or whole body compression garments and so the literature has been the research has been done on full lower body tights and it's not relevant for an ankle length or a knee length sock they're not the same thing but the latter will invoke the research for the former so it's the same thing they're cashing in on something that's trendy that may have been shown to work but if we can i'll let's take it a step back because before we get to that point i would say that any product that claims to offer you rapid results that should be a red flag there you go because you know i'm not a coach i'm a scientist but you as the coach you you know better than anyone and i'm sure most of the athletes listening to this will know that anything that is worth while in health and fitness and performance has to be labored after you have to toil after it it doesn't come in a week or two weeks it's something that you have to invest in it takes time and discipline and determination to slowly develop fitness to increase your strength to reduce your body fat to improve your fitness these things take time okay and anytime somebody tries to sell you a product whether it's a supplement or a diet or a or a compression garment or a pair of running shoes that claim to offer you very quick rapid simple results that to me is a red flag because most of the valuable things in exercise and performance

don't come rapidly they have to be earned with time they're chronic adaptations not a exact ones yeah 100 i'm with you there um i've also one of the things that i also use to like filter through this stuff when there are scientific claims associated with whatever whatever is going on is i'll go and i'll look up the research and i think you gave a little bit of indication to this earlier where is it comparing the product to the actual research or are they extrapolating that to a certain degree like in the crush in the compression garments where the research is based on whole body compression and they're just saying well you know this calf sleeve is pretty close to whole body compression which is which is a big leap i mean it might not seem like a big big leap to you know the lay consumer but in the research world it is the other thing the other thing that's related to that when we're looking at scientific claims and this goes along both products and uh supplements and nutritional interventions is who is the audience that they're researching and i'll immediately skip to the participants and if they're normal people not athletes almost all of the time they're very very rare exceptions to this almost all the time i'll throw that away because as we know it's really easy to get an adaptation or a positive response from somebody who doesn't exercise and we're talking about the exercise world it's

easy they'll adapt to anything because they're coming at such a low level if you're talking about trained or elite athletes they need so there's a higher burden of proof i guess uh is what i'm saying on the intervention side but a lot of companies will just think that everybody's not going to like read that part and so they have a piece of equipment they have all these like recreational or even people who don't exercise sometimes it's even an obese population that uses the pieces of equipment or the intervention and all they improved by 50 60 100 in some sort of metric and it seems amazing and athletes look at that and go oh my god if i improve 50 of my 10k time i'm the world record holder but what they don't realize is they're looking at an obese population and not an athletic one so that's like the second one i go to is the pot like who are the participants in the study that the study is citing i know a lot of the research you know if you look at the stuff on ketogenesis for example a lot of the early research was done in rodents right and there were people already making selling diets and making claims based off of rat and and mouse literature it's only kind of more recently that there's been more stuff in humans but looking at literature is is very difficult because not everyone has the time or the capacity to to read literature and it does take us it does require a certain understanding of the exercise science and that can be learned for sure but there are a number of things you can do before you even

start looking at the studies and looking at the research there's a bunch of things you can do and i think in chapter five i kind of talk at length about these three different stages that you can go through to really evaluate if a product is likely to be worth your time and money the first stage is looking to see if there are red flags if the if red flags kind of crop up that make you go kind of something that doesn't quite sit right and we've mentioned a few of those already so does does the product offer rapid results that to me is a red flag is the product that's being advertised particularly pertinent or trendy are they cashing in on something that is just in the media is it very current so that's another kind of red flag you can also look at whether the product is being marketed on what we call a logical fallacy and there are kind of between eight and ten logical fallacies that that are used really commonly in in the health and fitness industry but i'll give you a couple of examples one we've already mentioned is the product being sold on what we call the appeal to authority so is a famous athlete or a famous celebrity i guess celebrities are famous by definition but it is an athlete or a celebrity being paid to be pictured or filmed wearing the product or using the product more often than not they are okay but

just because your favorite soccer player or your favorite runner or a famous cyclist is pictured using the product that doesn't necessarily mean that it that it works you've got to remember they're being paid to wear it right but the thing about the motive lance armstrong was sponsored by nike for many many years and they very quickly dropped him when they when they found out you know what he'd been up to but uh but just because an athlete is sponsored by a particular brand that doesn't mean that the brand itself necessarily has any merit the product's got to be judged on merit and merit alone another example is the appeal to um appeal to popularity just because a particular product sells in a particularly high volume again that doesn't necessarily mean that the product is efficacious in its own right so you can look at protein powders let's say i develop a protein powder called tillers protein and i advertise it with the with the slogan over a million products sold worldwide well just because a million products have been sold worldwide doesn't mean that the thing actually works it just means that a million it just means that a million people have bought it and a million people can be wrong you know believe it or not maybe i've just got a very sophisticated marketing strategy uh maybe i've fudged the sales statistics so does the product actually work is a different question to how many products has the has

have actually been sold so these are all red flags marketeers like do i'm gonna let you keep going but i want to like break in just a little bit that's an intentional um marketing strategy by a lot of companies is to saturate whatever space that they're playing in the endurance space bodybuilding space whatever to saturate it with product like almost literally flood it with product product so it makes it seem as if everybody's using it they'll get a bunch of capital behind them go out to their investors and things like that and an intentional very deliberate strategy is taking advantage of this logical uh fallacy the appeal to popularity that everybody is using it and really all they're doing is they're just flooding the market with free stuff i actually i know coaches who have done that i know people like in the coaching industry that when they first get started and i can't kind of blame them for the strategy because you got to start somewhere but they intentionally just try to get as many people on board as possible at a free or super low price point in order to like seem as if everybody is partaking in kind of kind of in their services but it's it's really i think it's really fascinating that you mentioned that because i can i've seen and i've talked to people in marketing departments i'm not going to reveal their names i've talked to people in marketing departments where they've they've admitted they're like this is a strategy we use we want every we want everybody

to think that everybody else is using our product we want as much of it in the marketplace so that it seems like the next greatest thing that everybody's using but there are two things to unpack there firstly you're referring to something called the exposure effect and i'm going to read directly from the from the book here this bias pertains to the visibility of a brand which in turn results in the inference that's on behalf of the consumer that it's a superior product just by the fact that you see it a lot and um and it links in with the appeal to authority where athletes and celebrities are wearing the products just by very by virtue of the fact that you see the product everywhere you just assume that it's a high quality product and you don't take the extra step to test if the product can be valued on merit alone the other thing to consider is that again i don't want to paint too much of a negative picture but marketing campaigns are designed to exploit our ignorance and our insufficiencies in in our cognitive decision making processes so we we have evolved reason and logic for um basically for navigating hyper social groups and we have an ingrained economy in our brains we are hardwired for economy that is called heuristic problem solving and this served us very well when we were hunter gatherers 10 000 years

ago when economy was very very important for survival our genetics haven't changed a great deal since that time but modern society modern culture has and we haven't been able to adapt with sufficient speed and there are actually websites that are run by marketing companies that will actually um um how can i put this that they're designed to help companies to design marketing strategies and advertising campaigns specifically to exploit those cognitive biases there are even websites dedicated to helping companies to single out which specific athletes they should target in order to make the product visible to a particular population um and because this is the way that products are sold nowadays and that they are they are sold specifically to exploit the cognitive biases and the insufficiencies in our product knowledge because this is big business the health and fitness industry is a multi-billion dollar industry so we have to be familiar with the way that it works and the first step at least is is being able to identify when some of these red flags are being sprung we've cut we've covered several of them and that's the best place to start is this really nick in your opinion

when we're when we're looking at that's my dog sasha she makes an appearance on the podcast every once in a while um is this it when we're trying to evaluate well first off i'm gonna ask that question at the end why is it the nutrition industry that at least over the last maybe decade is it's like particularly problematic like what why is that i can't put my thumb on it but it just seems like that industry tends to be more exploitive than the rest of the ones that i have to deal with well it's it's two or three things number one nutrition is important to everyone whether whether you want to whether you want to lose some body fat to get into your swimsuit in the summer you're going to look to nutrition if you want to improve your exercise performance you're going to look to nutrition if you want to gain muscle mass you look to nutrition so nutrition is important for exercises and athletes are like that's the first thing the second thing is that most people are relatively naive to the basic tenets of nutrition okay most people understand the basic tenets of nutrition but they wouldn't know enough to be able to to design a really comprehensive periodized program the third thing is that it's completely unregulated anybody can refer to themselves as a sports or performance nutritionist you don't need any qualifications you don't need any advanced degrees it's different to if you want to call

yourself a dietitian you have to have a degree in you know an associated degree you have to have a master's and you have to have completed a minimum number of hours in a clinic as a dietitian okay and it's a protected term in most countries of the western world it's protected it's a it's a government term so you can't call yourself a dietitian unless you have the appropriate qualifications but you can do a weekend course in you know healthy eating or performance nutrition and you can set yourself up as a sports nutritionist so what you see more often than not is that undergraduate students who have degrees in sports science they set themselves up as performance nutritionists and they can get away with it because it's not a regulated term so the combination of all of those things that public are relatively naive to it everyone looks to nutrition and anybody can call themselves a nutrition guru that's a recipe for pseudoscience and a recipe for for bad advice and misinformation i should add a caveat that's not to say that the sports nutritionists cannot be excellent nutritionists some of the the best nutritionists i know have come from a sports science background many of them have advanced degrees and are members of you know um different nutrition governing bodies and have many many years of experience and you know published lots of research it comes back to this basic idea that

each individual must be judged on merit but you know some of the most famous sports nutritionists in the world have very few credentials very little experience but they have a lot of twitter followers you know i'm not going to mention any specific names but uh they they set themselves up as nutritionists or nutrition experts they get a following and they make and they've been writing books and uh as as is more as is so common on social media particularly twitter is people that have most of the followers are the ones that probably deserve them the least the real the real experts are the ones that you know um have a much harder time getting their message out there it's hard man i i i get that question asked uh of me a lot is is like who do i follow on twitter for the right information it's and it's hard like i i i have a hard time with it and i try to keep track of it a lot um and i can imagine somebody without you know without a reasonable background trying to trying to do it as well that just wants the right information because they're just a subject to the oh well this person has a lot of followers they must know what they're doing otherwise all these people wouldn't have followed them what's crazy is is like they're we're also starting to see some people who have been like you know have really outstanding careers and then for whatever reason start going off the deep end and i have no idea who you're talking

about well i mean i i mean i don't i don't mind mentioning this because i do think it's a i do think i do think it's a learning lesson the the one that like comes to mind to to me the most that i think you're laughing about is tim noakes and i have bought to set this up so tim noakes is is a sports scientist out of south africa and when i first started like managing and mentoring coaches the lore of running which is his like capstone you know book that he that he produced i've probably bought 60 or 80 of those books to give to new coaches it's one of four or five that that that i bought routinely when we had a new coach come in or i knew when i knew somebody would get uh was getting into coaching i'd buy him this little gift package and a law of running was one of them and everybody had a ton of respect for for this person and he had you know a huge following and whatever and then just recently for whatever reason and he and he i should set this up even even even further in an effort of full transparency he was actually on a board of advisors at cts for a while and um this is this is very early uh when the company started and and so he and so he and i would have to have some professional interaction at some you know level level or another but anyway over the course of years for whatever reason he started taking up all these conspiracy theories and you know vaccines cause this and it just started

kind of like going off the deep end with all this but because he had amassed this huge impeccable reputation people followed him with that as well people followed him on all of this other salacious stuff that it's just quite kind of quite frankly bizarre and it's hard like if if you're relying on somebody for advice and this is the position i was in right i was relying on him for advice i followed him i gave his book to you know probably 100 coaches now that i'm thinking about it over the course of years years when that person that you're relying for on advice all of a sudden is not giving good advice out that's a hard thing to actually sift through you know and that can happen that can absolutely that can absolutely happen and it's i don't know it's it's been one of those things that runs in parallel with the with the twitter followers it's hard to like actually cut through when that uh well when that happens yeah this from a critical thinking perspective there's there's a lot to unpack there there are three things i just want to quickly touch upon firstly tim is an md he's a medical doctor so he's a sports scientist now but he comes from a medical background and is pertinent because he's obviously um sort of one of the linchpins of this low carbohydrate movement and i have no intention of weighing in on that argument or the evidence associated with it that's another podcast that's

not a podcast that i'm never going to be a part of but but i but i use this as a great example because it's a really important teaching point for for anybody who wants to learn about critical thinking in this industry because it's a great example of an ideology or or an inherent bias because there are two sides of this argument low carbohydrate high carbohydrate high fat low fat and there are people on both sides who have already made up their minds despite the fact that it's a contentious issue despite the fact that the evidence is inconclusive a lot of people have already made up their minds now i've always reserved making up my mind on that topic because i haven't read enough of the literature to really be as informed as i'd like because i'm prime my my main job is in respiratory and exercise physiology this isn't quite a bit i don't have time to learn about everything but i know more than most about this topic and i'm reserving judgment there are people who have read a lot less than i have who have already made up their minds and have decided which camp they can sit in by definition that is an ideological position and that's an inherent bias so it's a really important teaching point that if you're not a true expert you don't really know all of the literature just reserve judgment it's okay to say that i don't know you know those three words are really important as a

scientist and as anybody trying to learn anything about the truth of how the reality really works it's okay to say i don't know the second thing is you know specifically with tim is that nobody is immune to giving bad advice i'm not saying that it necessarily is or isn't i don't want any emails but you know i think as an example medical doctors are put on a pedestal in that if you get advice from a medical doctor um then it's it's considered to be good advice but you know very often you have medical doctors who are also practicing homeopaths and homeopathy is a widely discredited alternative therapy that has been shown not to work it has no plausibility in that it it cannot work and it's been started and it does not work yet you have medical doctors who are prescribing homeopathy to patients comes back to the placebo effect so you know not all authorities um in fact no authority no individual should just be um assumed that it will always be right you've always got to take your advice and test it and question it nobody is above scrutiny and no idea is above scrutiny the last thing to mention quickly is is you know you mentioned the tim's running book you've given to all these different people you know the book itself is still an excellent work yeah and whatever you think

about him as an individual the advice in the book is still sound and it's still robust and you've almost got to separate the individual from the advice because you can launch an acronym attack on an individual oh so-and-so is an alcoholic you can't trust him or so-and-so is uh you know has gone off the deep end and you can't trust the advice well look at the advice itself is the advice we get in evidence-based practice can you judge it on merit to be sound advice and the book is it is and always will be an excellent book so i think you're safe and still disseminating well and that's how i've had to pivot my counsel so earlier my counsel was here's this book go ahead and follow all the other stuff that this sports scientist is doing to now here's the book take the information for what it is if you're following the rest of it look at it with a skeptical you know through us through a skeptical lens it's just a really bizarre example that i've brought up to a number of of people recently and i think it's one that enough of the listeners out there will kind of know some of the background on that there's a learn there's kind of like a learning lesson in um i want to come back to a question that i was going to ask earlier and then i got interrupted with the with the brantley on the sports nutrition industry we'll give them a little bit of of of of kind of a break for now but i presented this to you in the email as like sift as you mentioned sifting through the dirt to to find the diamonds is it really a

process of elimination that you have to go through like this is bunk that is bunk this is terrible okay now we've gotten to the final one is i mean are do we really have to go through that hope that whole this whole rigmarole this whole circus of a process of elimination to figure out what works or is there something that we can just like look through to say yep that's it that's where i can go he's probably more the former there's no hope if you look at the the range of products that are available thousands and thousands i think there are something like at the last count i can't remember if it's five or ten thousand different supplements oh my god i think it's something like ten thousand different supplements that are and that's just one aspect of a much broader industry right and the supplement industry there's a little bit more regulation in terms of products and practices there's little to no regulation so anybody can come up with a new product or a training program or a diet it doesn't have to be proven as far as the fda is concerned it only needs to be shown to be safe and actually there has to be evidence that it's harmful before it be taken off the market so it doesn't even have to be shown to be safe it will it will remain on the market until somebody can prove that it's not safe which is a completely backwards way right i know right as far as um so the vast

majority of the of products that are available on the market have no evidence for efficacy and probably don't work so yes it is it is probably a case of just assuming something doesn't work until until proven otherwise that's probably the safe way to approach things but you know you don't always have to just okay if you see a product that you're interested in and then go through and okay look at see if there are any red flags and then check if what plausibility of the product is and then start looking into the literature ideally that is the process that you would follow and i go through that in the book but you can also speak you know deferred if you're not sure just deferred to somebody who knows a little bit more than you do speak to an expert sports scientist speak to somebody who's trained to evaluate literature speak to somebody who's been working in the area for like you know an academic for example or an expert coach or somebody with many years of experience as a sports nutritionist who's appropriately credentialed you know these are all shortcuts that you can take that are more likely to give you positive results you don't necessarily have to go through every single product and by a process of elimination try and find you know the two in 100 that are actually going to benefit performance you can ask people that have probably done heavy lifting for you and you know that is that is a way of doing it and i talk about a lot of products in this thing

many of which don't work but some of them do and i try and provide you know very concise literature reviews on many different sports science products so that i've done heavy lifting for you i've looked at the independent studies i've read the the meta analyses and the systematic reviews and then i try and provide a nice concise concise summary on okay these are the positive aspects these are the negative aspects of the of the product and i've tried to do that for some of the more popular products that are available but um there are just so many it's you know there are books and books worth of literature reviews there that uh but you know that's the other thing look at systematic reviews you don't just have to look at individual studies look at systematic reviews and meta analyses who have come to the conclusions for you already and they've done the heavy lifting on on your behalf okay so here here's the nickel version of everything be a skeptic especially when we're talking about nutrition products and i would say to a lesser degree about equipment things be a skeptic it's okay to have that skeptical lens when we're talking about influencers there are absolutely people that wholeheartedly you know find benefit from the products that they're endorsing but those products should be those products should be evaluated on merit not because of the endorsement that uh that they receive there are some gems to find at the end of the tunnel and you can

leverage the experts that have done the heavy lifting for you in order to find those gems those are like my top three well and i guess the fourth one i guess is look for the red flags because i think most people can like look and say okay this is kind of weird and if it's kind of weird then you can probably throw it in the trash bin those four things i think are the summary highlights yeah i'd agree with that that's fair enough and i would add to that by saying that critical thinking skills just like any other skill has to be trained and it has to be honed you can't just expect to intuitively know because we have rolling we have all ingrained cognitive biases and it takes time and practice and training to learn how to you never can eliminate bias but you can mitigate it as much as possible and you just got to practice and train your critical thinking skills read books read articles speak to experts and you will get better at doing it you won't just learn how to do it overnight it won't happen overnight but it will happen you just have to invest the time because as we said earlier anything that's worth obtaining is in what is worth investing time over and that's what you need to do yep okay so i think to leave the listeners i'm going to do two things if you're up for this first off in the show notes i'm going to link to the ioc's consensus statement on supplements since we just spent like an hour and a half throwing the nutrition industry

underneath the bus because it's i really like their recent consensus statement that came out because it's easy for most lay people to read and it gives you the top i think there's like five or six like things that like actually work you okay with that put that in the show notes okay yeah that's the first thing and i'm also going to link to your book that we kept referencing you okay with i plug it instead of you plug it plugging it go ahead well okay so next book that's a lot man we'll see if you trust me after this so nick's book is the skeptics guide to sports science confronting the myths of the health and fitness industry and this is how nick and i got to know each other is through this book and i have bought it through amazon i paid my hard-earned money nick didn't send me a free copy his publishers didn't send me a free copy or anything like that i read it and i personally like it and it is going to be one of the books that i used for our coaches that come in to give them a little bit more of a critical eye it's i have found and this is compliment to you nick that it blends the practical and the scientific world very well you come up with real world real world examples some of which are recent and some of which are like a hundred years ago which is hilarious of examples in um in the in the sports and the nutrition uh field where products have been put out there that don't meet the claims that uh that they say that they're going to and kind of people have been duped and sometimes that duping is um can can result in uh can result in death as we mentioned earlier and sometimes it's just

you know you have the wrong product and like no harm no foul except for the integrity which is a big thing as well i'll link to that in the show notes as well i hope people go check it out it's a cool book you have anything else to say about it nick as far as reviews go that's a pretty good one i appreciate it yeah absolutely it's a good book man i appreciate it all right man uh nick as always where can people find you on social you're also a good twitter twitter follower as well or twitter follow as well i always appreciate the stuff you put out there it makes me think you can find me on twitter at nb tiller and i tweet about ultra marathon and science and exercise physiology and all the stuff that i'm interested in you can find out more about the specific work that i'm doing on my website which is nbtilla.com and uh that's all i have to say you guys just did a real cool study on rock climbers is that out yet yeah we just published two actually one looking at blood pressure responses and one looking at general cardiometabolic responses we stuck a metabolic car like a gas analyzer on a bunch of elite rock climbers and got them to do some some indoor bouldering and it's the first published study to actually quantify the cardiorespiratory demands of of climbing it's a neat study um you can find a link to that on my website type of leaf cool go check it out and also we've got just one other thing we've got a really nice study that that um is hopefully going to be published soon

it is uh basically asking the question of females predisposed physiologically predisposed to ultra endurance sport and we're tackling this age-old question that has been um it's been attempted a bunch of times in the mainstream media never very well if i'm honest i decided enough's enough let's get some experts together and actually tackle this question and it's blowing out of a portion now it's the article's getting bigger and bigger as you'd expect but uh watch this space and uh there'll be more on that to follow oh i can't wait till that comes out that's gonna be like so good for eating popcorn and watching people comment on it use the comment section that's it just turn off comments i can't wait you know there's like two things that have like historically like gotten me into a little bit of hot water one is this the whole diet tribes of you know the low-carb people and the high-carb people that you know that should go without saying just because everybody's kind of used to it right now but the other one is is will women eventually outperform men past a certain distance and yeah well that's the funny thing is again it comes back to the theme of our discussion is that a lot of people have already made up their minds on this right without knowing anything about the literature yeah you know to reserve judgment yep until you know a little bit more i'll reserve judgment maybe i can cajole you into the early release of it but i'll reserve judgment until it comes out then how's that all right you got it all right man appreciate it as always nick a lot of fun thanks for having me

yeah and there you have it there you go much thanks to nick for being on the podcast today really appreciate it in an effort of full disclosure i bought nick's book with my own hard-earned money i thought it was a great investment a great value and i will leave the link to his book in the show notes i encourage you guys check it out you can even rent it for a period of time on amazon it's a pretty easy read so go check it out really appreciate nick coming on podcast appreciate everybody listening if you have not had the chance skip on over to apple podcast and give this podcast a rating or a review really appreciate reading those ratings and reviews as they come across my desk and as always we will see you out on the trails