“Pseudoscience fossilizes because it's got nothing new to bring to the table.”
Sigma Nutrition Radio · Food & Beverage · September 2026
Tiller had just walked through Clark Stanley's 19th-century snake-oil act — the infirm man with the walking stick who leaps up cured after a rubdown — to show that the anecdote, the emotive language and the bait and switch have not changed in a century. This is his explanation for why the pitch stays frozen while science keeps moving. The practical payoff, he argues, is that learning the pattern once inoculates you against the next thousand versions of it.
Transcript
…gurus, journalists who write about science but don't really understand it, and the science commodifiers who are more than happy to treat science as a way to expand their brand. And so I would encourage more experts, more scientists to communicate science, given all of these things that I've said.
…tend to use. And so if you can start to spot those, then you become or less reliant on the thousand of them that are going to be spoken next year. You won't have to have someone else go and debunk those. You can see, oh, well, look, this is the same pattern repeating itself over and over again. And
…that bait and switch, the emotional kind of payoff to see this previously unhealthy man suddenly jumping around, it's an anecdote. So it's like it's very personal. It feels personal. We can see ourselves in that old man. The baseless claims, the emotive language, the rhetoric, it's tried and tested. It's a tried and tested form. And it's exactly the same now as it was back then. Nothing changes. Pseudoscience fossilizes because it's got nothing new to bring to the table. Science is constantly evolving, but the patterns of the con are essentially unchanged. And once you understand the pattern, you understand the mechanics of the baseless claim, then you can apply the same kind of critical thinking to essentially any approach that somebody tries to sell you. And you must see that all the time in nutrition, right? Because nutrition is probably the worst of them…
Well, this is probably taken from a combination of many other people who are far smarter than I and trying to learn from those. But it would seem that the best point of contention in an individual conversation with someone like that would be to first understand why they are interested in a…
What you've just described there actually is another tip that I would give to the people who are interested in science communication is essentially what you did is rather than just tell them that this is wrong, don't do it. Sometimes it requires a little bit more patience and a little bit more of a…
And so to speak of that, I'm wondering, because oftentimes when you do try and correct certain types of claims, there's going to be a variety of different pushback, even from well-meaning people, right? Maybe they see something that you've discussed and they say, well, hey, it worked for me. That's…