How the internet fitness world can misinterpret studies

Here is one thing that really grinds my gears about internet diet/fitness articles.

Authors often take mechanistic, acute data such as insulin response to a certain meal, lipolysis (fat breakdown) in response to a training protocol, or protein synthetic response (muscle building) in response to feeding in a certain time window after exercise and translate that to mean more than it does in terms of actual measurable results.

1) People often cite animal (rat) data and make the assumption that this automatically applies to humans. LOLOL.

2) Even if that data is collected on humans, it is still acute data and doesn’t show the total picture of what would happen if you took those people through 12+ weeks of the training/diet protocol and actually measured those results. Other factors may wash out the effect of that protocol when actually applied in the real world.

3) Sometimes researchers WILL run a training study to follow up an acute study and discover that there is a statistically significant difference between the muscle gained or fat lost between one group and another.

HOWEVER, statistical significance does NOT necessarily mean that the difference is VISUALLY significant. In other words, you may have a 0.2lb difference in fat loss over 12 weeks between one group and another. But to me, that isn’t enough of a difference to cause me to shift from one program to another. You have to note how much of a real difference there actually is.

4) Finally, people often read just the abstract of a study without looking at the methods and statistics and/or they cherry pick research to only cite the studies that support the claim it is that they’re trying to make.

If you know me, I’m certainly not against research at all. I am actually a research nerd at heart and would much rather read research papers than a novel. But you have to look at research for what it actually says and you have to consider the entire body of research on an area before you can clearly make a clear interpretation of what is known to date.

In most cases, the internet fitness world does not do that. It is rife with misinterpretations trying to make one thing look like the panacea of fat loss or muscle gain.

But I’ll let you in on a secret, there are no magic tricks and there is no panacea regardless of how much people try to science it up. If there was, everyone would know about it and everyone would be doing it.

Stick to the basics with consistency and patience and the results will eventually follow.