“We have a several trillion dollar a year wellness industry globally that everybody's putting their money towards. And researchers look at it and be like, can I just have 0.1% of that? That 0.1% would revolutionize what we know about health… People aren't asking for evidence. So that industry is not generating evidence. People are just add to cart despite the lack of data.”
Discovering Nutrition with Cronometer · Food & Beverage · October 2026
Context
Asked how nutrition science can learn anything reliable about humans, the dietitian and researcher says the field is underfunded, and that product sellers have little incentive to test their claims unless customers ask for evidence.
Transcript
…a single trigger. But most of the chronic disease prevention type stuff that people are really interested in, like it's small effects all around. And doing all of them regularly for the most part is really what adds up to being like the true impact of nutrition that we can actually see and measure.
…day I think chronometer or maybe not chronometer, but like nutrition tracking will look like there's like some device in your body that is actually like measuring like your own intake. You know, like if I put on my hat and my future forward hat and think about what it will probably look like. Yeah,
…trillion dollar a year like wellness industry globally that everybody's putting their money towards. And I'm like, you know, researchers look at it and be like, can I just have like 0.1% of that? Like that would 0.1% of that would revolutionize what we know about health. But unfortunately, the sort of the wellness capitalism or whatever you want to call it is not the standard right now. And people aren't asking for evidence. So that industry is not generating evidence. People are just add to cart despite the lack of data. And I think if there was a collective shift, and this is me totally dreamcasting here because this is never going to happen, but like if everyone really were to start asking, like if the comments were full of, hey, do you have a randomized controlled trial to show that this product works for hormone balancing and improves symptoms of my hormonal menopause or endometriosis or whatever, like…
I think it's just not sexy. And that's why it doesn't fly, if I'm being honest. Like, I did a nutrition science course, just a small, small course through Stanford a couple of years ago. With
Chris Gardner's course?
Yes.
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