From The Heart #23: How To Spot Bad Science In Wellness Claims

Headlines shout, ads glow, and reaction videos roll their eyes, but your heart health deserves more than noise. 

We take a calm, from-the-heart look at omega-3 supplements and why the research appears to clash, then trace the real reasons studies diverge: who gets studied, how long they’re followed, what dose they take, and which outcomes actually matter. 

No hot takes here, just clear thinking you can use the next time a confident voice tries to sell you certainty.

We start by disentangling observational research from causation, showing how healthy user bias and social determinants of health can masquerade as supplement benefits.

From there, we break down randomized controlled trials without the halo effect: short timelines and low-risk populations are a recipe for “no difference,” even when an intervention might help in the right setting. By zooming in on higher-risk groups and adequate EPA/DHA dosing, we explain when omega-3s can reduce cardiovascular events and why broad, general-population trials often dilute that signal.

You’ll also get practical guidance to steady your routine. We outline simple, plant-forward ways to meet daily ALA needs, flax, chia, walnuts, hemp, and how supplementation can serve as a backup when diet falls short. 

Most importantly, we share a five-question checklist to stress-test any health claim: incentives, design, duration, population risk, and meaningful outcomes. Use it to cut through influencer drama, affiliate pitches, and curated “debunks,” and make choices that fit your risk profile and values.

If this helped you think more clearly about omega-3s, and about evidence itself, share it with a friend who’s tired of nutrition whiplash, subscribe for more grounded conversations, and leave a review with the next claim you want us to unpack.

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Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules 

Transcript

Section A

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yo, plant-based buddies, welcome to a new segment that I'm calling from the heart. Of these are bonus episodes, there's no script, no plan, just honest conversations and lessons that come straight from real patience and real life. And most of the time I just hit record and I speak. So what you're hearing is raw, it's unscripted, and it's intentional. But if you're ready for something a little bit more spontaneous, this is from the heart. Look, I really despise misinformation online, and I do my best to try to provide evidence-based information here for everyone. I want to make sure to not rain on anyone's parade, but I also want to make sure that we get our facts straight. And I can't imagine how difficult it must be for a lot of people to scroll through social media feeds and see contradicting information and now trying to figure out who is telling the truth or not. It seems like the most credible voices are the ones typically who speak the loudest, or that just look confident online or on screen. And that's probably why I want to offer something different. My video videos here are not edited or not they're not scripted, they're literally filmed in one take, and I'll I have I found a small piece of cardboard which I wrote down some notes of things that I want to make sure to get my point across, just in case I forget. That's my script here. A little post-it, a little post-it that I have. Anyways, where I'm going with this is a lot of the information that we see online are people's reaction videos. Reaction videos meaning they're here and in the corner, or I should say the video that they're watching are in the is in the background, and the influencer or whoever's on the video is on in the lower left corner and commenting, and you see that they're reacting to the video of the other person and grimacing and rolling their eyes when they're making false claims, pretending like it's the first time that they watch that video. Everything is so curated and rehearsed online that it just gets on my nerves. And so, but I do understand that a lot of this information is great and it is great, and I do follow a lot of these people, so I'm not knocking them. But I I really never wanted to make my own platform about insulting, mocking, or debunking other people's videos. I really try to get away from that as much as possible. I do do it here and there, I'm sure I've done it before, but I've never made a reaction video. I mean, at some point I may do it because it seems like the only way to get ahead on the online world is to take off your shirt, to mock other people, or to dance in front of the camera. I've not yet done any of these things. But yeah, never ruling these things out. I'm joking and making bad jokes. Anyways, what I want today is to really explain to you why and how it is very easy to be not misinformed, but confused, and why you can actually see contradictory information online about the same subject. Now, the example I'm gonna give to you is a simple example, uh, so I think it paints a good picture. I get this question quite often, so this is how people can scroll online and find different conclusions to the same question. So if you're asking the question, does supplementing with omega-3 supplements prevent heart attacks? I think that's why most people want to consider taking omega-3 supplements because they are related or foods that contain omega-3s are related to reducing cardiovascular risk. So people want to know if I take supplements, will it do the same? Now imagine this, okay? Imagine that we're doing a study to try to answer this question, or you, as a social media consumer, goes online and you Google do omega-3 supplements lower cardiovascular risk or improve health or prevent heart attacks? Now, chances are what's going to happen is you are going to find the first hits on your feed are going to be omega-3 supplement companies that have paid to appear at the top of your feed, or is going to be wellness blogs or wellness influencers that actually benefit or profit financially from you buying omega-3 supplements. So, what happens then is that most of the content of these influencers will be about fear-mongering that other supplements aren't pure and they contain heavy metals and that heart attacks are your top killer, and so you should buy my supplement. Or even better, it'll be anecdotal evidence because emotional stories they tug at our heartstrings a lot more than the scientific literature. So you'll have someone who says, I reversed X, Y, and Z condition because I took omega-3 supplements. That's typically how these videos go. Now, if you actually look at the evidence base, it gets even more confusing because you'll also have a lot of contradictory information there. So let me give you an example. Alright. So if you really want to answer the question, do omega-3 supplements prevent heart attacks and save lives, you would say, well, how about we just look at people who've lived the longest or who are older and have never had heart attacks or strokes, and then we'll check to see if they actually have taken omega-3 or not. Well, that's called a retrospective cohort study, and it shows associations, it cannot prove causation because there are just too many co-founders, confounders. What I mean by that is that if you look at people who take omega-3 and they tend to live longer, you could also say, well, people who take omega-3s are people who can afford it. And so they're probably more financially well off and more educated. And we know that these two social determinants of health are really related to living longer and healthier. So that's a possible confounder right there. Then you could say, well, people who are taking omega-3s are probably people who care about being proactive about their health, and so they're probably people who are generally more active, more physically fit, they exercise more, and they're more educated. And so here are other confounders. So with retrospective studies, cohort studies, is pretty much impossible to know for sure if it's omega-3s that are helping these patients live longer. Or you could look at prospective cohort studies, simply instead of looking into the past to see if they're consuming omega-3 supplements, look into the future. Pick out a thousand people, and if half of them are using omega-3s and half are not, look at them throughout the next 10 years to see who has heart attacks and who doesn't. But if you've already seen this content in some of my videos, these prospective cohort studies have the same confounders. Maybe people who take omega-3s can afford it and they live longer and healthier because they also go to the gym and are more physically fit and educated, etc. So these same confounders exist. So you could now say, Jules, you've already said observational cohort studies cannot prove causality, but we can do clinical trials. We can do randomized controlled trials to try to answer that question. So a randomized controlled trial is basically you randomize people to a group that takes omegas and a group that doesn't, or takes an omega, an omega placebo, an with non-active medicinal ingredients, like a sugar pill, for example, and you compare the group taking the omega versus the placebo. That also can be quite confusing because what happens if you say, well, we're gonna follow people for six months and see if the placebo group has different levels of heart attacks or strokes than the omega or intervention group. Now, these studies have been done and they show no association or they show no causal link because they show no significant differences in cardiovascular events.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

But you could say, Jules, don't fool us.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

An intervention trial that just lasts a few months is not long enough to see events like cancers or heart attacks or strokes, these things take years to happen or to develop. So you see, even in a gold standard randomized control trial, this factor of simply duration is important and can actually kind of make or break your study. The other thing that we need to consider is who was being studied. If the group that was being studied is a group of 20-year-old women, even if you follow these for two years, 20-year-old women don't have heart attacks or strokes. So you'll have a null finding, you'll have no difference in heart attacks between the omega group and the placebo group. Where I'm going with all of this is that even in a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard to prove causality and to show if omega-3s are associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular events, if your study is not long enough, or if the population that you're already studying is not the high-risk group, you will likely see no difference. But when you're scrolling online and you see multiple studies that show that omega-3 supplementation doesn't reduce heart attacks, are you reading the study to see how long it was? And are you reading the study to see what population this study was done in? So when people tell me I've done my own research, that's the problem. When people do their own research, I feel like most people doing their own research are not well educated and informed on how to analyze and interpret research correctly. I'm a medical doctor, I'm not a PhD researcher that does clinical trials. And so even I still have a lot to learn. So when someone tells me I do my own research and they're really super confident in a conclusion, that actually is a red flag for me and it rings alarms in my in my brain because I've been a medical doctor for 20 years, involved in research and trained to analyze and interpret research findings, and still there's so many nuances that need to be considered. So four omega-3 supplements to really show whether or not they really impact cardiovascular risk, you would probably need to study a high-risk population, either patients that have already a ton of risk factors for cardiovascular disease or have already suffered a heart attack or stroke before. Patients who are at higher risk are the most likely to benefit from an intervention. So studying older, more high-risk patients and comparing placebo and omega-3 in this population is much more likely to find something than to give it to someone who's 20 and in good health. The second thing is you need to study for long enough. You would need that randomized control trial to last long enough so that events actually happen in the placebo group so you can compare with the number of events in the intervention group, in the omega group. But as you probably know, creating a randomized control trial that lasts for 10 years costs a fortune. And who is gonna pay for that? Private investors, or you could say, well, the supplement company makes millions, even billions of dollars, they should pay for it. And I agree. But most supplement companies don't want to have these studies done because they would need to design a very well-conducted and highly costly study. And then what happens if the study shows that their supplement doesn't work? Now, these supplement companies they exist because they exist in a world where their claims are based on fringe or poorly done science or on anecdotes and emotions. And a lot of these companies, their conclusions will never be 100% known for sure. Because who wants to run a study if you're making millions out of a supplement that has minimally proven benefits? Now, where the confusion stems from is that you can literally today go online and look at omega-3 supplementation and find studies that have contradictory conclusions. A lot of studies show no impacts on cardiovascular disease because they are not studying a good population that's already at high risk or they're not studying for long enough. And a lot of these studies are either retrospective or prospective cohort studies, and they have so many confounders like healthy user bias, healthy people that are more educated and financially stable are the ones who typically are able to afford hundred dollar supplements on a monthly basis. And though typically these are the ones who are promoting these things. I know it's confusing, but what I wanted to do with this video is just simply show you how if you do your own research, you are likely to Google things that show exactly what the supplement company wants to show. They will show you data that it works, that is linked to anecdotes or healthy user bias, or you'll just be left feeling confused by not understanding that a randomized controlled trial, even if it's the gold standard, if it's not well done in the right people for the right amount of time, if it's not placebo-controlled, it's really difficult to draw conclusions that are really going to be game changers. Now, when you look at a lot of omega-3 studies that combine a lot of primary outcomes like heart attacks, strokes, all-cause mortality, they don't seem to show much difference. But when you zoom in and you look at high-risk patients that are taking the adequate doses of omega-3s, and you see these patients and you see their cardiovascular outcomes, the risk of heart attacks when compared to people not taking omega-3 or against placebo, cardiovascular events are actually reduced with people who take omega-3, but they're reduced when you're supplementing people who are already at higher risk. And that's why, in the general population, studies are really not able to tease out an effect. Whereas when you do it in a high-risk population, you tend to see some benefits. Does that mean that everyone here should be taking omega-3 supplements? I'm not sure. There's no real data supporting that. So what I do is I take omega-3 supplements when my diet has not met my dietary requirements. So I try to make sure that have at least four or five grams of ALA. That's the omega-3 that comes from plants, because that's the one that's going to be converted to longer chain omega-3s, DHA and EPA, which seem to have these benefits. 5 grams of ALA, even considering a poor conversion rate to longer chain omega-3s, would mean you take like one or two tablespoons of flax seeds, a few tablespoons of chia seeds, a handful of nuts, avocados, cashews. Simple foods to include to your diet. So that's why it's confusing to navigate the online world. And if you are doing your own research, just be careful. Because if you don't understand the difference between a systematic review, a meta-analysis, a randomized control trial, a placebo control trial, a blinded trial, retrospect retrospective, prospective cohort studies, petri dish studies that show mechanistic implications, case reports, anecdotal evidence. If you don't know the difference between all of these terms, it's going to be very difficult for you to understand the weight of the evidence and if these conclusions drawn by these studies are the right ones or not. And even if you are well versed in the name of these studies, even looking at gold standard research, which is typically randomized controlled trials, even inside of a randomized controlled trial, if you're not studying the right population for the right amount of time, still you can have contradictory information drawn from these studies. I don't blame you for being confused because that's where people who create problems and then sell you a solution, that's what they want you to feel. They want you to be confused and they want you to be scared so that you can impulsive buy some of their solutions, some of their supplements or courses or voila. I hope this makes sense. Sorry for the very long video, but I felt it was really worthwhile explaining these things because the confusion is real and the contradiction, the contradictory claims, contradictions are real. Cool. Anyways. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you like seeing these types of videos because I don't just want to make videos that say, hey, iron rich foods are lentils and pumpkin seeds. I want to make sure that you also develop critical thinking skills because they're really important for navig navigating online information.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Cool. Have an awesome day. Let me know what you think. Peace out.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Hey everyone, go check out my website, plantbased drjouls.com to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr. Jules Cormier and on YouTube at Plantbased Dr. Jewels.