What I Research and Why I’m Doing It

The title of my Masters dissertation was “Do you even lift, bro? Constructing and negotiating authority and expertise in online fitness and nutrition communities”. My PhD is jumping off from there, and I wanted to write something explaining what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

When I started work on my PhD, I knew that I wanted to look at how people decide what to believe on the internet. I’ve spent the vast majority of my life as a regular internet user, and I’ve personally often had to confront the challenges presented by the overwhelmingly large quantity of information (and its often questionable quality and provenance). What I didn’t know when I started was how I could go about studying this. How do people decide what to believe? It’s just such an insurmountably large topic.

Then the question became, “how do I limit this?” I needed to find a community that (a) was public enough that access wouldn’t be a massive issue (and nor would the ethics of reading people’s posts); (b) was large enough that it had a decent amount of material, but small enough that I would be able to keep up; (c) was in some kind of field where knowledge and expertise were strongly contested, because if there was just one totally dominant understanding of a subject then it wouldn’t be much of a case study in the negotiation of authority; (d) I had a reasonable amount of prior knowledge of; and (e) I wouldn’t die of boredom if I had to study for three years.

For reasons outlined in another post, nutrition and fitness have been something of a pet interest of mine since I was around 18. This meant not only would I be unlikely to get bored of reading forums where people talked about their TDEEs, their NSVs and their PPLs; but also that I have a decent working knowledge of the kinds of communities that exist and the cultures and rhetoric they contain. I wouldn’t have to familiarise myself with an entirely new jargon, and nor would I have to start from scratch in learning and understanding the scientific evidence and commonly accepted wisdoms of the communities I was looking at.

Moreover, nutrition and fitness are both expansive and highly contested fields. Fundamentally, there exists no consensus on (a) what we ought to aim for with respect to our bodies, either aesthetically or physiologically; or (b) even amongst those who share a common goal, how they ought to go about achieving it. This is for a number of reasons.

1. The studies of diet and exercise are reasonably young fields, meaning that whilst there has been a large amount of research performed, it has not always been of the highest quality and there have been relatively few longitudinal studies which enable us to understand the long-term effects of adhering to particular lifestyles.
2. Nutrition in particular is incredibly difficult to study through the medium of double-blind controlled trials, the “gold standard” of clinical medical studies which enables us to understand the effect of changing one variable in isolation.
   1. This is because it’s very difficult to blind people to the kinds of food they are consuming, unless you’re willing to put them all on a diet of Soylent or Huel for the foreseeable future.
   2. In addition, the effects of diet and nutrition often only show themselves over long time periods, meaning that in order to get meaningful results you’d have to perform extremely costly trials which would be almost impossible to get people to adhere to for the length of time required.
   3. You can only change one variable at a time. This means that in order to study the effect of, say, a change in the ratio of saturated to monounsaturated fats in the diet, you’d have to be willing to perform a large number of trials, in part because the particular type of monounsaturated or saturated fat also matters. You’d then have to repeat this for every other nutrient you could think of, and then you’d need to do so with combinations of nutrients, because this can affect the way in which they are metabolised (see, for example, antinutrient lectins or just the putative effects of caffeine on the absorption of creatine monohydrate).
3. Financial interests in fitness and nutrition are enormous. The weight-loss industry alone is worth, by some estimates, ~$600bn. There’s a burgeoning industry of personal trainers, fitness and lifestyle gurus, and supplement providers who want to help people get fit and stay fit; likewise, there’s an enormous amount of money to be made from “super-foods”, diet books, recipe books and the like. This means that a lot of the research in these fields is influenced (some would say tainted) by commercial interests.*
4. Our diet and lifestyle are deeply personal topics, which means that just on face it’s highly unlikely that people are going to be driven towards one diet or another purely by rational choice. This means that even if there were a wealth of evidence driving us towards one conclusion, it is unlikely that everyone would reach that conclusion because there are large epistemic barriers in the way. Much research suggests that when people are presented with evidence that conflicts with their worldview, they are more likely to question the validity or relevance of the evidence than they are to question their views. (A recent example: the photos of crowd sizes at Barack Obama’s and Donald Trump’s inaugurations, and the way that Trump supporters often denied that the obviously larger crowd actually was larger).
5. There just isn’t enough evidence to push us towards one conclusion or another. People in different nutritional camps will interpret the same evidence in different ways. For example, the failure of individuals on low-fat diets to lose weight is interpreted by people who believe in the “calories in/calories out” philosophy as evidence that those individuals either lied or were mistaken about their consumption, exercise or their calculations of their caloric needs. In contrast, low-carb adherents would argue that they didn’t lose weight because low-fat diets don’t work, carbs are intrinsically fattening, and the number of calories we consume or expend is secondary to the type of calories.

All of this means that, in the fields of nutrition and fitness, our decision to believe in government advice, or paleo, or keto, or low-carb, or the benefits of a raw vegan diet, is effectively decided by who we believe, rather than some logical chain of evidence driving us towards one conclusion or another.** This is important, because it means that we can look at a community which discusses these topics and look at who is believed, what they say and how they say it. I’ve long thought that the reason we decide to believe one person over another, particularly in domains with technical language or esoteric knowledge, is more to do with the people than the evidence. 

I settled on using a Reddit forum in part because it’s the format I’m most used to, and because they’re some of the more popular communities out there. But it’s also public, and that’s important because it assuages a whole raft of ethical issues with researching internet communities to do with presumed privacy and identifiability (I’ll be looking at ethics quite in depth in future posts). Moreover, archives are available and all posts are archived after 6 months, which means you can get an interesting snapshot of what a community looked like at a particular time just by digging through. That means that you can see how certain concepts become generally accepted, rejected, entrenched and contested over time. Users also post on a number of different subreddits, which means that you can track people’s activity in multiple different places and see to what degree there’s cross-participation, which you just can’t do with traditional bulletin board forums.

Initially I considered /r/keto, a subreddit dedicated to the ketogenic diet, as a site of research. The problem was that whilst it had quite a lot of subscribers, there weren’t a huge number of posts. In addition there wasn’t really the fitness aspect I wanted, as keto tends to be used as a means of weight loss, rather than as part of a fitness lifestyle.***

I settled on /r/paleo, the subreddit dedicated to “ancestral-style” diets, for a few reasons. It’s a reasonably large, active forum, which means I should be able to follow and participate in it for a decent period of time. It’s also small enough to be manageable – there are typically only 5 or so posts per day. More importantly, paleo is a really interesting site of a number of different discussions. The idea of “evolutionary nutrition” – that we evolved to eat a particular set of foods, and that we ought to get as close to consuming those foods as possible if we are to stay healthy – is fascinating, and the ways that people deal with the problems presented by modernity when it comes to trying to eat paleo are complex and nuanced. Paleo also seems to be quite a welcoming community, and one in which there are a plethora of different views and takes on the concept which people are happy to discuss at length. It’s also filled with people who really know their stuff, and there’s a lot of nutritional research which underpins and is utilised by paleo adherents. I’ll be discussing paleo at length in future posts, but essentially it’s a rich set of discourses which I think are under-examined and merit further attention. I’ll explain exactly how I’m going about my research in future posts.

That, then, is how I came to study what I’m studying. I’ll be working on /r/paleo for the next couple of years, and I’m really excited about it. I’m nervous about joining the community, but I’m hoping that its members and users will be open to talking about their beliefs, how they came to hold them, and why they decided to follow the diet they do. Fingers crossed.

 

*This is one of the reasons that these fields are so interesting. One of the things I’ve already noticed over the course of my research is that accusations of vested interests or the potential for financial gain are a key weapon in individuals’ discursive arsenals. They’re used to invalidate the arguments or advice of people, companies or institutions, and the claim that “I have nothing to gain from this” is a powerful way of persuading people of the sincerity (and potentially also the validity) of one’s advice.

**Of course, we might also just be exposed to a limited range of evidence. This is likely the case for a large number of people who have never explored or thought about their diet, but I’d contend it’s unlikely for the kind of person who frequents forums about nutrition and exercise.

***There are exceptions to this, including the group Ketogains on Facebook (and the /r/ketogains subreddit), which cater to people who want to build muscle or strength whilst on a keto diet (no mean feat).

Where My Diet’s At (and Why it Matters for my Research)

I’ve struggled with body image and eating since I was around 15. I used to want to look like a skinny emo band member, because I thought that was what people found attractive. I’m 6’4″. At my lightest I weighed 70kg.

Then I got into weightlifting around the age of 18, and I faffed around with programmes like Starting Strength whilst trying to take in all of the protein my body needed by consuming a solid 4 or 5 pints of milk every day. I learned – after one incident in which I shotgunned a litre and a half of milk in about a minute and then spent the rest of the day feeling profoundly ill-at-ease whenever the slightest hint of flatulence reared its head – that this probably wasn’t so great for my guts. 

I tried calorie counting. Every time I went on a bulk, I ended up gaining what I thought was a disproportionate amount of fat, getting scared, and stopping. When I cut, I was miserable the entire time because I was so hungry. More importantly though, I couldn’t stop thinking about food. Trying to estimate my Total Daily Energy Expenditure and then plan a diet around it was debilitating. Every moment of the day was consumed thinking about how many calories I’d already consumed and how many I still had left, how many grams of protein I needed to get inside me, how hungry I was, when my next meal was going to be. 

Recently I discovered the concept of intuitive eating, through my girlfriend*. I’ve also been spending a lot of time reading up on nutrition in order to try and ensure that my research can be as high-quality as possible, and had decided to try and cut back reasonably drastically on my sugar intake. Richéal (the aforementioned partner) advised me not to think of sugary foods as a substitute for meals, but instead to consider them as things that you eat when you really feel like you want them – not just when you feel like you ought to (like at the end of a meal, which you’d habitually follow with dessert) but when you think about how they would taste and feel, and the way you’d feel afterwards, and you genuinely think the pleasure of the experience would outweigh any of the guilt or negative body feelings you’d suffer as a result.

Intuitive eating markets itself as a method of creating a “healthy relationship with food”, and whilst the linked page provides ten different principles, the underlying premise is that the body is exceedingly well-adapted to homeostasis (that is, to regulating its internal conditions regardless of external inputs) and therefore if we eat based on intuition rather than based on some conception of what we think we ought to eat, then it’s difficult to go wrong.

I’m uncertain that this is always going to be true, particularly given that it’s common wisdom that sugar in particular is highly addictive. But combined with an attempt to cut back on sugar as a means of sustenance, I think it’s something which is working for me. I essentially try to listen to hunger signals, and then eat until I’m full, without worrying about how many calories are in the thing that I’m eating. I try not to consume too many refined carbohydrates, based in part on the general consensus which seems to exist in the nutritional literature that they are literally Satan, but also because I’ve noticed that since I cut back on them I’ve had far fewer problems with feeling bloated, gassy and lethargic after meals. 

As part of my research on primary texts in low-carb movements (and paleo in particular) I’ve been reading Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories (The Diet Delusion in the UK) and Why We Get Fat. I admittedly went in with some preconceptions: I expected to find quite a lot of fetishisation of the scientific method as a trans-historical arbiter of objective truth, a lot of idolisation of Karl Popper and falsification, and some reasoning that I would likely find fault with. I found all of the above, but my mild annoyance was tempered both by a lack of surprise and also by my discovery that the books were really good.

Taubes’ argument effectively says that the nutritional and medical establishments made a wrong turn in endorsing the “calories in/calories out” theory of weight gain and loss. This, combined with the fact that fat is twice as calorically dense as carbs and proteins, as well as Ancel Keys’ influential propagation of the idea that dietary fats (and saturated fat in particular) directly increased the risk of heart disease, means that we’ve ended up with a situation in which people try to lose weight by cutting calories, and they do so primarily by cutting fats. The problems with this are multiple: fats appear to suppress our appetite after consumption (though this is not something which Taubes appears to mention)**; carbohydrate intake stimulates insulin production, which sequesters fatty acids and literally fattens us; and chronic overconsumption of carbohydrates leads to insulin-resistance, which means that we can’t remove glucose from the bloodstream but that fatty acids continue to be sequestered in cells at an ever higher rate.

Whilst I’m uncertain as to the primacy of insulin in the fattening process, his argument is certainly compelling with respect to the deleterious consequences of disproportionate carbohydrate consumption. I intend to look into the former claim further, but suffice to say his arguments have pushed me epistemically towards believing that a lower consumption of carbs is, ceteris paribus, likely to make it easier to eat intuitively without having to worry about overconsumption or undesirable weight gain.

I think this is the first time in many years when food – how much of it I’m eating, when I’m going to eat it, whether I’m getting the right macros, when I’m going to be able to cook it – hasn’t been constantly in the back of my head like a stone in my shoe. Moreover, I’ve noticed that my weight has become quite stable since I started eating in this way. In spite of the fact that some days I will literally consume an entire packet of nuts containing around 1000 calories in addition to all of my other meals (which are not insubstantial), I’m still maintaining weight at around 91-92kg. I’m doing strength training ~5 days a week, and this should hopefully mean that the bulk of any weight I do gain is likely to be muscle rather than fat, but the fact that eating good food until I’m full seems to be allowing me to maintain weight without much anxiety is a huge relief.

What does this mean for my research? I probably need to be careful not to become overly credulous towards claims made by low-carb proponents, but by the same token hypercriticality is also unlikely to be helpful. I was initially concerned about dishonesty, because I didn’t want to enter or write about a community from the perspective of someone who was detached but skeptical, because that skepticism was likely to wax cynical. Overall, I think this is likely to be a positive development, because if I find the claims made by this one particular author persuasive enough to contribute towards me changing my mind, then an analysis of the kinds of claims he makes and how he makes them should be helpful in understanding how people decide who to believe and who to call an expert.

 

*This is a bit of a lie – I’d previously encountered intuitive eating in places like fat acceptance blogs, but I’d always thought of it as nonsense because I believed the “calories in/calories out” paradigm to reign supreme, and intuitive eating seemed to fundamentally hang in tension with this theory, so I discounted it as in conflict with an important belief I held about the world.

**It’s worth noting that this is contested, as with almost everything in the field of nutrition science. Some studies have found that fats exhibit the weakest effect on satiety when compared to proteins and carbohydrates, and therefore posit that passive consumption of fats is likely to lead to overconsumption and therefore obesity. The problem is that studies on the effect of fats on satiety are few in number, and the latter studies in particular don’t appear to have controlled for palatability and energy density. Moreover, the presence of lipids in the small intestine appears to suppress later appetite (the claim I am making above). The fact that even a simple claim like “fats make you feel full” is so deeply problematic is part of what makes the field of nutrition such an excellent topic for the exploration of the attribution of authority and expert status.

Steroids, Lies and Natural Limits

This post was originally published on January 21st, 2015

One of the main things I have to do this term is produce a 5000 word research paper on some topic in the History and Philosophy of Science. For those who aren’t familiar with HPS, it is, frankly, vast. Our department at Cambridge has staff and students working on everything from the history of visualising embryos to the question of whether there can be a science of human nature to the narratives of sperm. It’s a wonderfully stimulating environment, but much of the time I find myself confused and quite ignorant of the subject matter of other people’s research.

For my part, I’ve studied (though not done any research in) modern history of science, technology and medicine, metaphysics and epistemology (fancy ways of saying ‘what stuff is there in the universe?’ and ‘how can we know about that stuff?’) and the ethics and politics of science. The last of these fields is the one that I really love, and that I’m hoping to be able to do a PhD in, but even this is a huge field, encompassing far more subjects than one person could ever hope to fully study and understand in a lifetime.

Last term I did a literature review on how laypeople might be able to discriminate between experts and non-experts, or between experts who say conflicting things. It’s a real problem which faces a lot of us, a lot of the time: the news has two ‘experts’ in international relations on to talk about the latest developments in the Israel/Gaza conflict – who should we believe? You’re browsing Wikipedia and you come across a subject that you’re unfamiliar with – should you just take it at face value? It also has a lot of relevance in policy-making: if scientific experts give conflicting accounts of what the evidence says, how can politicians and bureaucrats figure out who to believe without having to become scientists themselves? In courtrooms, we specifically appoint expert witnesses on both sides of the cases, asking them to give accounts which deliberately conflict with each other – but at the end of the case, the judge or jury have to decide who is right, and they’re hardly qualified to assess forensic evidence directly.

Instead, in most of these cases we rely on indicators which don’t have much to do with the evidence itself, but with the people giving it: do they give good arguments? When their opponent challenges them, are they able to come up with a swift and unhesitating rebuttal?  Do other experts agree with them? Do they have qualifications which suggest they might be experts? Do they seem a bit slimy, a bit Nixon-ish? There are all kinds of ways in which we decide who to trust in these kinds of situations, and it turns out that most of them have very little to do with the evidence in front of us. This has implications for really important topics, from climate change denial to the possibility of imprisoning people for crimes they never committed.

That’s a little bit of what I did last term, without the really detailed stuff about different accounts of knowledge and the reasons that trusting someone’s qualifications or the agreement of other experts might not be a good idea. What I really want to talk about right now is the research that I’m working on this term. Our course says that you have to do research in at least two different areas, and because I did ethics-y, politics-y stuff last term, now I have to do something different. One of my main hobbies is going to the gym, picking heavy things up and putting them down again. It’s something that I do most days of the week, and I’ve been doing it on and off for quite a while – though you probably wouldn’t know it to look at me. When you get involved in a hobby, you inevitably end up reading about it a bit, and so I’ve spent some time lurking on fitness forums and reading around the topic of weightlifting.

There are a few things I’ve noticed through this reading. One, a lot of people lift weights. Like, a lot a lot. It’s probably one of the most common things for young men, particularly at university, to do. There’s an interesting (though fundamentally flawed and quite classist) article on Vice which touches on the gym culture in modern Britain, and it does seem self-evident that there are more people going to the gym than ever before. Second, steroid use is widespread. It’s much more common than you’d ever think, especially at the upper levels of bodybuilding and weightlifting. All of the men with incredible bodies you see on the covers of Men’s Fitness?

 

Yeah, steroids. Steroids combined with an awful lot of hard work and likely a strict diet, but steroids nonetheless. One of the biggest cons in the fitness industry (and it is an industry) today is to sell men the idea that they can achieve naturally (and quickly) what can usually only be achieved with steroids, or at least many years of lifting.

Third, and this is the real problem – people lie about steroid use. There are massive disincentives to admit to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. One, they’re prescription-only, and much of their use is at least nominally illegal. Two, they’re illegal in nearly every kind of athletic competition, but there are a lot of ways of getting around drug tests. Three, a lot of the elite bodybuilders and fitness models rely on sponsorship from supplement companies and other businesses in the fitness industry for their income, and steroid use doesn’t sell. These companies want men to believe that these bodies are achievable without the use of drugs, without having to inject testosterone or dianabol into yourself every day for eight weeks at a time, with the minimum of effort and discipline and, most of all, with the use of the particular fat-burning/muscle-building drug that they’re selling.

 

It is nearly totally impossible to achieve the kind of physique in the picture above without the use of performance enhancing drugs. But bodybuilders either refuse to admit to steroid use, or just outright lie about it – this guy for example:

 

This guy, Kali Muscle, claims that all you need to get as big and strong as him is Pepsi and Instant Coffee.

Given that it’s really easy to beat drug tests in competitions, and given that large numbers of strength and physique athletes make false claims to being ‘natural’ – to not using steroids – how can we tell whether they’ve actually used performance enhancing drugs?

The short answer is we can’t – not definitively, not in every case. But there is what many consider a good indicator, and this is where my substantive research starts to come in.

BMI, as you likely know, stands for ‘Body-Mass Index’, which attempts to give figures for a ‘healthy’ weight based upon a calculation of your weight in kilograms divided by your height in metres squared. Doing this with various people at different heights and weights creates a graph like this:

 

This index attempts to classify people’s bodies as ‘underweight’, ‘normal’, ‘overweight’, ‘obese’, and ‘morbidly obese’. It was devised by Adolphe Quetelet in an attempt to measure the health of populations, and it was never intended to be used as a diagnostic tool for individuals. However, it is used for this purpose – or at least, for telling people that they may be at increased risk of developing certain conditions.

BMI is notoriously inaccurate for athletes. Muscle is denser than fat, and it is perfectly possible for an athlete to develop enough muscle that they are considered overweight, or even obese, on the BMI scale. This means that the scale simply doesn’t work for them as a diagnostic indicator. It fails to take account of the difference between muscle and fat.

Enter FFMI. FFMI stands for Fat-Free Mass Index, and it’s calculated by taking the lean body mass of an individual – that’s all of their mass, excluding fat – and dividing it by their height in metres squared. For maximum accuracy, this is then manipulated slightly to reflect the average height of a man at 1.80m and the fact that there’s a slight positive slope on the lean body mass of individuals as they get taller due to the fact that they also tend to get wider and thicker. This index was first devised in 1990, and was intended to be used to establish the nutritional status of individuals. However, in 1995 a paper was published which compared FFMI in users and non-users of anabolic-androgenic steroids. The findings were particularly interesting: they suggest that there is a ‘natural limit’ at around 25.0 on the FFMI for non-users of steroids, and that figures above this strongly indicate that a person may be using, or have used at some point, steroids.

My research is about how this index came into existence, and how it came to be used to construct the concept of a ‘natural limit’ to the muscularity of the body which is used to police the boundaries between steroid users and non-users, as well as how this limit is negotiated and pushed by people working in the fitness industry now. The idea that there is a limit to what can be accomplished naturally with a human body is fascinating, and there are many other areas in which these kinds of limits have been constructed and imposed – in the ratio of testosterone to epistestosterone as an indicator of steroid-use, in the negotiation of the hormonal and chromosomal boundaries between sexes in sex tests, in the creation of diagnostic criteria for gigantism and dwarfism, and in countless other instances within medicine. It’s a fascinating area, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to try to contribute to it – and to share the results.