A few years ago, a friend of mine started carrying a little flask of apple cider vinegar in her purse. Not for salad. For sipping—a swig before meals to keep her blood sugar from spiking. She was dependent on this tiny bottle, distracted and fretful in its absence. All this because someone with a ring light, a book deal, and a citation-shaped graphic had promised it would change her life.

Important to note: this friend is a smart woman.

And that’s the thing about the bullshit we swim in now—it doesn't come for the gullible. Rather, it arrives dressed as science, pitched at exactly the people who think they're too sharp to fall for it. Volume and urgency grab our attention, and since the middle 20-teens (perhaps even earlier), media's volume of bullshit has been compounding.

I've been worrying about this publicly since 2014, and I realize, of course, that I'm part of the problem. Any of us who have "created content" in the last couple of decades is likely to have contributed to it, really. We learned about the curiosity gap, did the 25-headline Upworthy Challenge, and set to work birthing flotillas of leading titles that promised more than they offered in the service of getting clicks.

I can't help but think again about Edward Bernays (god, I love having a favorite scapegoat) — that nephew of Sigmund Freud in great part responsible for wrenching the midcentury ads apparatus from needs-based sales to emotion-based. He caused the advertising vibe to shift from, "You might require something like this in your daily life, dear consumer," to something more like, "Anyone who's employable, attractive, worthwhile, and fuckable is doing THIS. So are you in or are you a loser?"

Hyperbolic? Maybe. Effective? To this day!

Bernays is perhaps best known for the 1929 Lucky Strikes campaign in which he paid women to smoke the brand's ciggies during New York City's Easter parade. This high-visibility astroturfing stunt lent smoking the sheen of female equality and badass rule-breaking that would launch a gazillion smoking careers and at least half as many biopsies.

Then there was Bacongate. The Beechnut Packing Company—the US's largest producer of bacon—panicked that its bacon sales had trickled away to the thinnest possible render. They called in Bernays, and he tapped a medical doctor on his payroll to recruit other doctors in his community to attest that a healthy breakfast was "scientifically desirable"—especially one consisting of bacon and eggs. The virtues of a big ol' bacon breakfast got published in magazines, in papers, and on the radio, and from there it was only six months until bacon sales fired right back up.

Bernays and today's viral creators aren't so different: they plant a dubious fact—or a flat-out, profitable lie—in a trusted environment, like a known media outlet or the mouth of an "expert," and let it bloom into an alternative, more profitable reality. One that sells cigarettes, supplements, skincare, and diets to generate wealth or cultural capital, not to help anyone make a good choice.

We all know instinctively that this is happening. But because screaming headlines and seeming-experts are so very convincing, it can be hard to catch the moment when we're being marketed to more than informed.

As a corrective to so much of the loud bullshit we see today, there's this week's guest: Nicola Guess.

As an Oxford nutrition scientist, certaintly Guess qualifies as an influential voice in the field of diet and blood sugar, but she is neither loud nor bombastic. She operates at a lower frequency and higher scientific research rate to autopsy the bullshit claims that are shaping modern wellness discourse. We spoke this week for Simplify, and I asked Guess to mythbust some of today's loudest and most popular nutrition fads and re-orient us toward being able to identify the quieter, more durable truths.

We got into the cortisol cocktail (homemade Gatorade with a marketing degree), the glucose goddess and her apple cider vinegar, whether creatine will really sharpen your mind, and the one supplement Nicola actually keeps in her own cupboard. Some of it holds up. Most of it evaporates like a runny sports drink the moment you expose it to sunlight.

Bernays built his empire on the back of a doctor who'd tell you what the client needed you to hear. Nicola is what happens when you flip it: an expert whose entire method is volunteering the inconvenient half. When she told me plant-based meats are low in saturated fat, she said it in the same breath as but some of them are high in sodium—because the "but" is the part someone selling you something always leaves out. That, she says, is the tell:

Ninety-six years after Bernays put bacon on America's breakfast plate, the fix turns out to be almost aggressively simple. Go looking for the missing but.

More soon,
Caitlin

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