The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is to professional mixed martial arts what the NFL is to American football, the NBA is to basketball, and the MLE is to hot-dog eating: the world’s premier organization for hosting and promoting the sport. In fact, in the past three decades, the UFC has had more influence on the evolution of mixed martial arts than any other organization. In an article I wrote for Skeptical Inquirer last year (an article that got me Twitter-blocked by UFC President Dana White), I explored the organization’s penchant for alternative therapies— specifically how cupping, cryotherapy, and acupuncture found their way into the UFC’s Las Vegas performance institute. Like a father dealing with his kid’s night terrors, I thought I’d put it to bed. I was wrong. Alternative therapies are just the tip of the UFC’s pseudoscience iceberg.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/back-inside-the-ufcs-pseudoscience-crisis/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bryan Johnson has spent tens of millions of dollars on a highly publicized quest to reverse the aging process. The tech millionaire follows a strict diet and fitness regimen, stacks multiple dietary supplements, obsesses over sleep hygiene, and subjects himself to a litany of medical tests to track his biological data. Harnessing his newfound celebrity, Johnson has become a false authority in the wellness space, touting supplements and alternative therapies and selling his own brand of olive oil.

This article isn’t about Bryan Johnson. Rather, it’s about how Johnson could easily have been the muse for a new longevity initiative recently launched by luxury fitness chain Equinox. Their Optimize program, a lite version of Johnson’s vision, harvests biological data from its clients (via blood tests, fitness and strength assessments, and wearable sensors) and uses it to create personalized fitness and nutrition programs. The program has been described by Equinox as “the definitive approach to health optimization” that’ll “unlock the peaks of human potential.” But priced at $42,000 a year, the program is making headlines for the wrong reasons. Is Equinox’s ultra-premium service worth the membership fee, or is it another cash grab in a wellness industry that’s made longevity its latest plaything?

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/health-club-equinox-puts-a-price-on-longevity-just-42000-a-year/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I was contacted in 2023 by a journalist writing for a major news outlet. In her email—which was written with the terseness that only journalists and famous people seem to get away with—she asked me to comment on a new study that had made a “major breakthrough” in the best time of day to exercise to elicit optimal health. It’s a subject that resurfaces periodically whenever the well of fashionable supplements or celebrity fitness trends runs dry, which it rarely does. I obliged and offered the kind of dispassionate and understated interpretation that scientists love and journalists hate. She didn’t print my response; she didn’t even reply to say thanks. I’ll tell you what I told her.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-best-time-of-day-to-exercise-another-media-fail/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you, and you probably won’t like how they do it.” —Shirley Malcolm, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

We know that complex life likely evolved from single-celled organisms. As soon as microbes emerged from the primordial soup, they were shaped by natural selection, ensuring survival of the fittest. Eventually, though not inevitably, evolution would lead to great complexity. After microbes came the Cambrian explosion—a rapid diversification of complex life. The seas became populated with soft-bodied fish, and after a few billion years, the vertebrates emerged. Bony fish eventually found the sand from the sea. Through intermediate forms, fins produced limbs. Hominids eventually came to rule the Earth with color vision, grasping hands, and brains able to fashion tools such as typewriters and laptops we could use to oversimplify complex scientific phenomena.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/from-the-lab-to-the-layperson-a-pioneering-initiative-to-improve-the-translation-of-science/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David had always found ice bathing after exercise to be intuitive. After all, people had been putting ice on their injuries for decades, and the RICE principle—rest, ice, compression, and elevation—had been a mainstay in the management of injuries since he’d learned it at school (despite questionable supporting evidence for efficacy). He’d also seen athletes on social media lowering their lean, muscular bodies into tubs of cold water and claiming miraculous benefits. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for him. Soon he’d be sharing his own #icebath stories on social media.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/why-are-we-still-ice-bathing/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most readers won’t be familiar with Clark Stanley. And yet, to those who lived in the Old West, he was a household name. In the aging half of the nineteenth century, Stanley’s theater company was one of several that toured rural towns selling magical health elixirs. For the townsfolk, seeing a Clark Stanley convoy kicking up dust on the horizon would have been an exhilarating sight. After unloading their carts and setting up their makeshift stage, Stanley and his crew treated the crowd to a thrilling show. Acrobats flipped, magicians tricked, and mustachioed musclemen bent bars and rods. Their only job was to whip the audience into a frenzy for the main event: the medicine man. And Clark Stanley was the most famous and revered of them all.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/telling-true-stories-what-can-the-anti-science-community-teach-us-about-sci-comm/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Christmas is a time for giving. For the snake oil salesmen of the world, however, it’s a time for taking. The holiday sees capitalism, the pressures of gift-giving, and dietary excesses coalesce, creating the perfect storm for consumer exploitation. The commercial world swells with baseless claims and pseudoscience. After a year covering political ideologies in professional sports, the health consequences of smartphone addiction, and my skepticism of anti-obesity drugs, I opted for a lighthearted transition into 2024. In this month’s column, your resident pseudoscience Grinch brings you some festive fitness fads to look out for this holiday. And wouldn’t you know it, there are five of them.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/festive-fitness-fads-to-know-about-this-holiday/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I wasn’t expecting the New York Jets vs. the New York Giants game last month to trigger a traumatic flashback. A commercial for Nugenix’s “total testosterone-boosting formula” appeared during half-time, sending me spiraling through space-time to April 2022. It was the day Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men received its inaugural trailer. The Fox Nation special, written and starring the network’s former news host, is a homoerotic jaunt through an alternative reality where low testosterone is the cause of America’s imminent decline and testicle tanning with infrared light is the solution.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/testosterone-supplements-summoning-the-specter-of-tucker-carlson/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.