Ten Health and Wellness Fallacies Every Skeptic Should Know | Skeptical Inquirer

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If my recent work as a health and wellness skeptic could be distilled into a single message, it would be this: Marketing companies understand our biases better than we do. In a commercialist culture, saturated by big business and bad science, I believe this to be a fundamental lesson in determining objective truths and making sound judgements.

The average American is exposed to as many as several thousand advertisements and sales pitches every day. In an effort to cut through the noise and capture your limited attention, marketing companies often invoke the logical fallacy—an informal error of logic—in their sales pitch to exploit ingrained biases and convert potential customers into sales. Understanding the logical fallacy, and its potential to sway our decisions, was an integral component of Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit:

Refining your sensitivity to poor arguments is an essential skill for the critical thinker. There are hundreds of logical fallacies, each with its subtle nuances. In this month’s column, I’ve condensed Sagan’s list of twenty informal logical fallacies to the ten that appear most often in health and wellness marketing, with examples. In doing so, I pull together many of the arguments and themes addressed in previous issues.

One of the oldest fallacies to serve the commercial machine, it assumes an assertion to be true, or at least valid, because many people agree with it. Of course, mere popularity is not a sufficient reason to believe an assertion; in fact, it’s the absence of a reason. Would it be sensible to buy an activity tracker, some running sneakers, or a protein supplement purely based on the number of units that had been sold, or would doing so conflate popularity with efficacy? It stands to reason that the number of people using a product says nothing of its quality or effectiveness, because popularity can be influenced by marketing, creative statistics, political control, or a falsification of data. Resisting this and other fallacies is characterized by the classic conflict between intuition and intellect about, which Bertrand Russell wrote so articulately. If we follow Russell’s guidance and temper our intuition with intellect, then we see it would be far more reasonable to invest in products with proven efficacy.

Improving health and wellness requires the manipulation of bodily systems through exercise, food, and supplements—all practices influenced heavily by science. New products in these categories are therefore often sold alongside science-sounding terms and technical jargon that bemuse and mislead the consumer. For years, athletes and celebrities around the world wore the PowerBalance bracelet on the misapprehension it would improve their strength, speed, and vitality. Made with “holographic technology embedded with frequencies that reacted positively with the body’s energy fields,” the bracelet was wildly popular until 2011 when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) deemed the company to have engaged in misleading advertising. “Holographic technology” is a pseudoscience, and the notion that a hologram can resonate with frequencies of the body is not a physical phenomenon.

An array of brands and businesses, including Coca Cola, LiveScore, Free Fire, Nike, Herbalife Nutrition, and Tag Heuer, sponsor Cristiano Ronaldo to endorse their products through his Instagram account. Partnering with an online “fitness influencer” has become a fundamental part of brand marketing, because forging an affiliation with revered athletes tends to improve sales. Michael Jordan endorsed Gatorade; Mo Farah endorsed Quorn; Lance Armstrong endorsed cycling brands, nutritional products, and health clubs, among others. It isn’t just athletes and online influencers lending their popularity to commerce. Many pseudosciences proliferate because they receive the backing of contrarian medical doctors or high-profile scientists whose opinions do not represent the scientific consensus. To again invoke the words of Sagan: “One of the great commandments of science is: ‘Mistrust arguments from authority.’ … Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.”

Used with increasing regularity in the sports industry, the appeal states that an assertion is correct because it correlates with a past practice or tradition—a golden prior age when athletes were naturally trained and sport was pure. However, traditions are passed down from generation to generation, remaining intact often for no other reason than engrained behaviors or sentimentality. Two prominent examples in health and wellness are barefoot running shoes and the Paleo Diet, which encourage consumers to run or eat “like their paleolithic ancestors” as if the lifestyle practices of an extinct human species were something to which to aspire. Both practices stake a claim for efficacy, at least in part, because they are traditional.

This fallacy was described by philosopher Francis Bacon as “counting the hits and forgetting the misses.” Fad diets, such as Atkins or Keto, are quick to draw attention to online weight loss success stories and the glossy “before and after” images they engender. But twelve–twenty-four–month follow-up studies generally show fad diets to be ineffective for long-term weight management. In fact, a large proportion of individuals regain all the weight they initially lost, and sometimes more. Those aren’t the stories that make the headlines.

Probably the most widely committed fallacy in all of health and wellness, the appeal to nature posits that something is “good” because it’s natural and “bad” because it’s unnatural or synthetic. Every product advertised as being made with “all-natural ingredients” commits this fallacy, as do advertisements for foods or cosmetics that are “free from chemicals.” The organic food industry, for instance, makes a claim for relevance partly based on this fallacy and the notion that consumers would generally prefer to consume “natural foods.” But consider two glucose molecules—one synthesized in a lab and one found in nature. Both have the chemical formula CHO, both appear as identical under an electron microscope, and both will have an identical effect on the body when consumed. That most people would prefer to eat the “naturally derived” sugar over the synthetic one speaks to the ubiquity of the fallacy. Our inherent bias for natural products is pervasive in the health and fitness industry; another exploitable flaw in cognition.

When engaging in logical discourse, the language used should have a conventional meaning, otherwise you will be talking at crossed purposes—analogous to playing a game of football by two different sets of rules. But in health and wellness advertising, language is often deliberately misleading or vague because it makes claims easier to defend. For example, the word “fast” means “moving, or capable of moving, at high speed.” If a running coach sold you a new program to run a “faster marathon,” you could consider their claim on the basis of the accepted definition. But what about less explicit terms such as “recovery,” as used in the sale of supplements, recovery shakes, massage therapy, stretching, cryotherapy, ice bathing, among others? It has no definitive operational definition or end point. Does it reflect a return to baseline function? Is it specific to the musculoskeletal system? And what about recovery of immune function, hydration, or psychological wellbeing? By itself, the term is ambiguous and cannot pertain to all body systems. Even “wellness” has no agreed-upon meaning and can be interpreted to serve any number of functions from person to person. And that’s the intention.

Humans are pattern-seeking animals. Our ability to spot trends in the environment once served an important survival advantage and proliferated due to positive evolutionary pressure. But seeking patterns can bias our opinions, because, in contemporary culture, we are terrible at distinguishing which patterns are meaningful and which are not. The post hocfallacy is committed when one observes two events occurring in sequence, one after the other, and then assumes that the first event must have caused the second. A colleague of mine once committed the post hocfallacy when his partner’s back pain spontaneously improved after he applied acupressure to the balls of her feet. To assume a physical connection—that the one action necessarily resulted in the other—without objective evidence, is post hoc ergo propter hoc. Failing to consider alternative explanations for the outcome of events leads to erroneous conclusions, such as Michael Jordan’s insistence on wearing his University of North Carolina shorts under his uniform while playing for the Chicago Bulls because he thought it brought him “good luck.”

A particular diet, supplement, or exercise program may be presented as your only option for achieving long-term weight management. Vendors of one product might even demonize others as being ineffective. This is a false dichotomy, because there are many ways to achieve health and wellness. There is growing evidence, for example, that yoga is effective at evoking long-term weight loss. Does this mean that yoga is only means of achieving this aim, or that it’s inherently “better” than other methods? No. In fact, there’s research showing that weight loss and good health can be achieved with regular walking, running, weight training, swimming, team sports, spinning, and gym programs—basically anything that increases activity levels on a consistent basis. Dietary changes alone may even be sufficient to improve overall health, although a combination of good diet and exercise is considered most effective.

An anecdote is a short narrative of an individual’s experience. These personal accounts are accessible and trigger emotion and empathy. Moreover, they contrast sharply with empty messages from large data sets of cold numbers and statistics. But because anecdotes trigger an emotional response without necessarily representing the mainstream opinion, they can evoke tremendous bias in the decision-making process. Health products are often sold alongside customer testimonials and “before and after” images—visceral accounts of recovery from injury or dramatic weight loss—to compensate for a lack of scientific legitimacy. We see ourselves in those images, desperate to believe that such rapid transformations with minimal cost could also happen for us. But meaningful outcomes require careful planning, commitment, and many months or years to materialize.

Understanding the logical fallacies is a skill that extends far beyond the world of health and wellness. There are individuals and groups lurking in all walks of life who would have us making impulsive decisions on intuition alone. But being a valuable and responsible member of society means familiarizing ourselves with logical rhetoric, and its pitfalls, so that we can mitigate bias and make rational and informed decisions that benefit ourselves and those around us. Sagan said it best: “When applied judiciously, [logic] can make all the difference in the world—not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.”