The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this guy except what I've learned looking at the subreddit for a few minutes.
To me he pattern matches to the kind of guy who treats an observational study or one with dogshit controls (or, god forbid, an animal model) as something that should carry any weight (as long as it rejects the null, obviously). In some sense, I don't even blame him, because you can't put out multiple podcasts a week on for years on end about health interventions that are actually proven to work.
As for the supplements, I couldn't easily find a breakdown of micronutrients of CFUs in the product on their website, which makes me think it's bunk. It's probably not going to harm your health (unless it's got heavy metals) but spending $80 a month on a placebo is also a kind of harm. Bonus: the study they place front and center for benefits from the product is a single arm study with no control (see previous para).
As for momentous, it makes even less sense to me. AG1 at least has some special sauce. Momentous is just selling commodity supplements you can get from a million brands, except more expensive? I don't know how these companies stay in business.
Momentous' value add is supposed to be a focus on quality and purity above industry standard.
I'll offer anecdata: I bought the Tongkat Ali from them. I've used supps that claimed to have it before and noticed no difference. Using Momentos' I notice a BIG immediate difference in energy level, strength gains, and muscle/fat ratio when putting on weight. Maybe there's a cheaper source for pure stuff out there but idk where and I don't have time or energy to hunt around.
I do think he puts out quality content, but it's definitely too much content. For a normal human being, I'd encourage them to listen to one episode and follow it, don't try to do all of these things at once. His series with Andy Galpin was magisterial in terms of building a whole fitness program.
I'm glad it works for you, but tongkat ali is exactly the type of poorly studied supplement of dubious benefit that I'm talking about. If you don't miss the $50 a month then it's whatever, but for most people this is probably a waste of money.
As far as purity goes, I did not find any third party test results on their tongkat ali page, so I presume that the standards are probably about the same as other companies (otherwise they'd be trumpeting their results as other companies do).
I'm always torn on weightlifting and sports science studies. There are just so few really quality scientific studies done for weightlifting that even involves people at my pathetic level of skill. I'd love to only do what is scientifically guaranteed to work, but that just doesn't exist. Even the most basic bromides turn out to be based on pretty bad studies. I'm willing to be engage with anecdotal bro-science from people around me who are stronger than me, and guess-and-check to find what works.
Protein powder, water, sleep, healthy eating, lifting heavy weights often but not too often. There is no mystery to it. I was benching 1 rep max 350 as a 160 lb 6' dude in college using just this. Unless you're trying to win a contest you don't need to optimize. Helps to be a bit fat first and lose some weight.
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I think that's a fine approach, what gets my goat is the people who conflate that with science. Let a thousand tongkat alis bloom, but it's laughable to pretend that there's scientific backing or that these studies should be taken seriously. The venn diagram of "works" and "science based" is not a circle.
I'd love to hear an AAQC post from you on the topic. In theory, science should be able to prove anything that works, with sufficient resources and time. So it's the case that if it works, it is science that hasn't been proven yet. Which I think is where the confusion sets in.
I suppose there is some subset of people who are automatically fooled by Dr. BroScience having Dr. in front of his name, but Hubes generally does a pretty good job of going over his material and what is scientifically proven, the state of the studies. Is he perfect? Probably not.
But with everything in the Rogan-Verse, I'm reminded how profoundly stupid the advice a man got in 2004 or so happened to be. Nothing is going to be 100%, but the attempt to gather knowledge is so much more advanced. The average bro is so much more educated, and conceives knowledge as so much more important, today than in 2004. That trend is important.
I'm not sure I have an effortpost in me about this, but I'll give it some thought.
I'd disagree, science is fundamentally a process for discovering true facts. You can discover true facts via other processes, but that's not science.
It's true, but how much more do we know about e.g. tongkat ali today than 20 years ago? Probably 20 years ago no Westerner had even heard of it, but all we have now is a small handful of low quality studies. The attempt to gather knowledge is more advanced but at the same time there is so much more to gather knowledge about, and there are so many things on the fringes that we know practically nothing about.
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Eh... I was a bro in 2004, it was pretty much the same shit.
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