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Alex Hutchinson has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge and a resume that includes quantum computing for the NSA and competitive distance running on Canada’s national team. These days, however, Hutchinson spends most of his time trying to explain the science of fitness—‘sweat science,’ as he calls it—to the masses, on his blog and in newspaper and magazine columns. His first book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? Fitness Myths, Training Truths, and Other Surprising Discoveries from the Science of Exercise, came out in May. We talked to Alex about health research, reporting and propaganda— and how you can tell the good science from the junk.
How did you get started writing about the science of exercise?
The science of exercise is the perfect meeting point between my background as a research scientist and my career as a long-distance runner – it’s basically the topic I’ve spent my whole life preparing to cover! It’s also a topic where there’s an unbelievable amount of pseudoscience floating around, so I was able to convince a newspaper in Toronto that they needed a regular column sorting out the good from the bad fitness advice, starting in early 2008.
The fundamental reason (for switching career paths) was pretty simple: I wanted to spend my life doing something I was really passionate about. There were lots of things I really enjoyed about physics research, but the physicists I really admired had a passion that I didn’t. We’d all spend long days in the lab, but then they’d go home and read Physics World and come back the next day with new ideas about our experiments. With journalism, I’ve found something I’m passionate enough about to spend long days on and still be hungry for more.
What do you think about the way health, nutrition and fitness are covered in the press?
There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of very, very bad health and science journalism out there, poorly researched and cheaply sensationalistic. The classic problem is the press-release-generated “new study” report—“Scientists prove that eating three walnuts a day will lower your risk of macular degeneration!”—presented with no context, no background, and no assessment of the quality of the research. If you read one of those articles every day for a year, by the end of the year you’re either eating 365 different “magic foods” every day, or you’ve stopped believing anything the stupid reporter writes.
But even with good health reporting, you have to accept the difference between journalism and the New England Journal of Medicine. In print publications especially, you have a very limited amount of space, and readers expect to get all the information they need from skimming your article in two minutes. You have to make tough choices about what to include and what to leave out, and generally that means you don’t have room to trace the complete history of macular degeneration treatments from the time of the Ancient Greeks. In the end, because there’s such a broad spectrum of readers, it’s inevitable that you’ll have some people saying “I can’t believe you didn’t mention X, Y and Z, you moron,” while others are saying “Too long, didn’t read – yawn…”
How do you think fitness myths and health misinformation gets so widely propagated?
The basic problem is that as humans, we like simple answers but have complicated bodies. That means we’re always suckers for someone promising that their “magic” workout technique or exotic new superfood is going to solve all our fitness problems with minimal effort (for just $19.95, if you order now!). That’s just human nature.
But to be fair, the other half of the problem is that even scientists don’t really have any final answers. Should we lift light weights or heavy ones? Eat carbs or fat? Stretch before or after exercise, or not at all? Whatever answers scientists come up with tend to have lots of nuances and possibly conflict with other studies, instead of providing simple rules. It’s like that Einstein quote: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” It’s just not possible to say “Here is exactly what exercise everyone in the world should do today, and what they should eat.” At least, it’s not possible for scientists to say it – it’s very easy for people on infomercials!
What’s your advice for your average consumer on how to make sense of all the studies? Or sort through all the promotional claims?
First of all, follow the money: understand who gains if you follow the advice. Second, consider the source: who performed the study? Who funded it? Where are you reading about it? Finally – and this is the hardest part – understand and accept that there are many shades of gray in health research, not just black and white. If one study says vitamin C is the best thing in the world, and another one says it’s the worst in the world, chances are the truth lies somewhere in between.
What’s your favorite fitness myth?
The best thing I learned while researching Cardio or Weights? was about stretching – that the latest research suggests that it doesn’t do anything at all to prevent injuries, and it actually makes you slower and weaker if you do it before a workout. I’d spent years and years stretching every day, and I always hated it. It turns out stretching is one of those habits that just got passed on for decades with no real evidence. I haven’t stretched now in several years, and I haven’t had any injury problems – and I definitely don’t miss those agonizing minutes trying to touch my toes!
