David Epstein

Yeah, I'm glad you asked me about this because I don't think many people are going to ask me about this part of the book because it's a little complicated.

But as you said, it was all these major, whether it was drugs, supplements, before 2000, most of the results were positive that were funded in these studies.

And then starting in 2000, they're almost all negative.

Supplements aren't working.

They're not outperforming placebo anyway.

Drugs aren't working.

And so it looked like all of a sudden medicine stopped working in the year 2000, like millennium bug.

what really happened was that researchers started facing more constraints in their work.

So they were forced to do what's called pre-registration starting in 2000 for these big supplement and drug studies.

Pre-registration means you have to say what you're actually testing.

What do you think this drug or supplement is going to do?

How are you going to measure that?

How are you going to analyze the data?

And that's counterintuitively, that's what caused positive effects to stop

popping up because what had been happening was researchers would make a hypothesis.

They'd guess how some drug or supplement was going to improve health.

They would analyze the data and they would see their prediction was not right, but they had all this data.

So then they would start looking through the data for some other correlation.

Thinking, well, okay, maybe it didn't drop blood pressure, but maybe it improves cholesterol.

Oh, what do you know?