Doomed Health Fads and The Law of Speedy Gains

Remember the height of the barefoot running craze when just about everyone bought a pair of glove-shaped shoes called the "Vibram 5 Fingers" so they could get in touch with their ancestral roots during a trail run?  Those pretty much died out once people realized that 1) they looked ridiculous and 2) other types of footwear did the job just as well. Every year new health fads capture the world's consciousness and take off before the science has a chance to catch up. Inevitably most of those fads die out.

In this week's video I look at 8 past, current and up coming health fads that I'm pretty sure are doomed to fail.  When I posted a short on YouTube a few days ago saying that mouth taping is almost certainly going to be one of them, I got a slew of messages from health influencers (some of whom seem to run their own MLM breathwork clubs) who told me, in various ways, that I was dead wrong--just another corrupt journalist angling for a headline. The thing is that the faddish-ness of a health craze usually relies more on emotion of than it does science. To-date there are only 3 small studies on mouth taping, and the results are far-from-conclusive.  

That said this isn't necessarily a bad thing. You almost certainly know that I'm a huge fan of the placebo and adherence effects. I noted in my podcast last week, the mere act of switching between different health protocols is likely to provide beneficial results. Being a fad just indicates a level of excessive popularity. Over time the world tends to move on to other things. 

The Law of Speedy Gains

What happens when you think about The Law of Diminishing Returns from an entirely different angle? Instead of realizing that mastering a new skill requires ever-increasing-amounts of effort, maybe try the opposite approach. Try lots of things and get reasonably good at all of them. This week on Scott Carney Investigates.