Brian Wansink: Guess Who’s Conning to Dinner | 146

During the early 2000s Brian Wansink made his mark as a “food psychologist” with quirky studies backed by the USDA and Cornell. His research led to the 100-calorie snack pack, the side plate for dinner, and the idea that Elmo stickers led kids to eat healthier. But one tone-deaf blog post led a pack of scientists to dig into Brian’s data. What they found was a hunt for bite-size takeaways, a lack of ethical rigor… and a whole lotta junk science. Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletter Listen to Scamfluencers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/scamfluencers/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Hagi?

  Audible subscribers can listen to all our episodes of Scamfluencers ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

• 0:14Sarah Hagi?

  Sachi, even as a very esteemed journalist, do you sometimes get caught up in believing something because you see a headline that says, "Studies Show"? I love "Studies Show." It means nothing and everything. I love to say it. I love to read it. I love "Studies Show" when it's always about, like, cheese. It's always like, "Studies show that eating 4 million pounds of cheese a year actually means you're super healthy and very cool and everybody likes you." And it's always like, "The dairy lobby paid for this study." That's exactly it. If I saw something that was like, "Studies show eating hot dogs is good for you," I wouldn't question it. I'd be like, "Yeah, of course it is."

• 0:52Sarah Hagi?

  Well, today, Sachi, I'm going to tell you about someone who took extreme liberties when it came to the results of his own studies, and how he changed how Americans consume food for the worst.

• 1:07Sarah Hagi?

  It's 2015, and John Becker is reading an email. And the more he reads, the angrier he becomes. John is in his mid-30s with spiky brown hair and a square face that matches his squared-off glasses. It's not the email that has John so upset. It's the attachment that came with it, the comic strip. But John isn't laughing because this cartoon is trashing his family's legacy. John's great-grandmother, Irma Rombauer, is the author of "Joy of Cooking," the beloved cookbook first published during the Great Depression. Since then, the cookbook has been updated eight times, almost always by one of Irma's descendants. And now, it's John's responsibility.

• 1:50Sarah Hagi?

  John is proud that his family has helped generations of home chefs. But not everyone shares this view. A few years ago, a research paper blasted The Joy of Cooking for contributing to the obesity epidemic. The study came from a leading voice in the nutrition industry, Ivy League researcher Brian Wansink. Brian's study found that in each new edition of Joy of Cooking, the classic recipes contained more and more calories. When Brian comes out with studies like this, people pay attention. He founded Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, wrote a book called Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and spent time as a White House-appointed head of the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.

• 2:34Sarah Hagi?

  When his Joy of Cooking paper was published, The LA Times ran a story with the headline, "Joy of Cooking or Joy of Obesity?" In response, John and the Joy team quickly put out a statement defending their work. But they didn't feel brave enough to deny Brian's claims. After all, he's a respected Ivy League researcher. They figured he might know something they don't. Since that mini-scandal, John's been busy working on the latest edition of the book and has mostly put the article behind him. That is, until he gets this email. When John opens it, he sees a cartoon. Sachi, can you describe it? Yeah, it's two books. It's two versions of Joy of Cooking.

• 3:17Sarah Hagi?

  One is the older one and one is the 2006 one. The 2006 one is obviously bigger and he looks like a jock. He just sort of looks like an asshole in like a 80s movie. And the other one is smaller and more academic-looking, and he looks a little confused. And the bigger one is saying to the smaller one, "I have 44% more calories per serving than you do." It's such a strange, pointed message about something so dumb. Yeah, it is really stupid. Also, this is the zillionth time that someone has sent John this cartoon. Today, he's had enough. He decides he'll check Brian's work for himself. And once he does, John gets even more pissed off.

• 4:02Sarah Hagi?

  In his study, Brian claimed the new cookbooks have higher calorie counts than the old ones. But John learns that Brian made a crucial error. He counted one recipe as one serving size, even if it's meant to serve multiple people. On top of that, Brian only examined 18 out of the thousands of recipes in the book. Brian presented this small number as an indictment of the whole cookbook, which is so misleading, it borders on slander. John can't believe this paper was ever published, let alone reported on by so many major outlets. This is precisely the kind of mistake I would always be afraid of making as a reporter because I'm so bad at math.

• 4:43Sarah Hagi?

  I know I would do some calculation poorly and fuck up like this, and then people would have to tell me I was wrong. While the difference is that you do not have a lab at Cornell, now, John and the joy of cooking are victims of Brian's academic negligence. And they're not the only ones. Because in Brian's line of work, the more studies he publishes, and the splashier the headlines, the more attention and money he brings in. In academia, the goal isn't always intellectual study. Sometimes, it's getting tenure. And in pop science, the goal isn't always wellness. Sometimes, it's engagement. Brian has been lying to get both. And for years, he had the country eating right out of the palm of his hand.

• 5:28Sarah Hagi?

  But John isn't the only one taking a second look at Brian's science. And soon, he'll have to face his just desserts.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I'm Lauren Malloy, the host of the podcast My Mom's Murder. For 30 years, I thought my mom died of natural causes. That's what everyone told me. That's what I believed. Until one day, I got a phone call that changed everything. A woman claiming to be my mom's best friend told me my mother was murdered, and that no one had ever investigated it. So I did what the detectives wouldn't: pulled the threads, knocked on doors, and confronted the contradictions. And what I found... It's worse than I imagined. Something happened to my mom. Someone killed her. And I won't stop until I find out who.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  The system may have given up on my mom, but I never will. Listen to My Mom's Murder wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all 10 episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 6:40Scaachi Koul?

  I'm Gemma Whelan, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of the original femme fatale, the spy who was Mata Hari. A famous dancer turned World War I secret agent, accused of seducing Allied officers to uncover their plans. But was she a temptress or a scapegoat for French failures? Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Was Mata Hari early and ad-free on Audible.

• 7:12Sarah Hagi?

  From Wondery, I'm Sarah Haggie. And I'm Sachi Cole. And this is Scamfluencers.

• 7:26Sarah Hagi?

  Brian Wansink used his PhD in marketing to advertise himself as a food psychologist and ride the pop science and fad diet waves of the early aughts to worldwide fame. His quirky studies changed the shape of the USDA food pyramid and paved the way for the 100-calorie snack pack. But the science behind Brian's studies was thin at best. And when a council of bad-boy data nerds and a scorned cookbook writer turn up the heat, they prove that this crook needs to get out of the kitchen. This is Brian Wansink: Guess Who's Conning to Dinner.

• 8:08Sarah Hagi?

  Before he was a pop sign superstar, Brian was a kid growing up in northwestern Iowa in the late 1960s. At eight years old, Brian is a skinny boy with deep-set blue eyes and a mop of blonde hair. And he's dragging a wagon down a dusty country road. Brian normally lives with his parents in Sioux City, but he spends his summers at his aunt and uncle's farm in rural Iowa. And one of his main chores is selling vegetables door-to-door. From the time he's born, food is central to Brian's life. His dad works in a bakery, and Brian's favorite night of the week is Friday, when the family watches Jeopardy while eating their favorite dish: popcorn and M&Ms. Through his work on the farm, Brian is learning how to sell food, too.

• 8:53Sarah Hagi?

  Brian has been extra motivated to sell more food lately. His aunt and uncle recently told him that they've had to cut back on things like going to the movies because grain prices are so down. So in Brian's eight-year-old mind, if he wants to see more movies, he's gonna have to push this corn. Oh, wow. What a shrewd capitalist. Yeah, and Brian is a goofy kid who loves to have fun and tell jokes, all good qualities for a salesman in training. He also pays close attention to his customers and their habits. And he's noticed something interesting. While some houses on the block buy lots of vegetables from him, there are other neighbors who are completely uninterested. He starts to wonder why one family buys veggies while another family with similar lives and values

• 9:38Sarah Hagi?

  treats this food like toxic waste. Brian is determined to solve this puzzle. He wants to find a way to convince these uninterested customers that he's selling what they want. And he carries this passion with him even as he grows up and goes to college. He knows that fruits and vegetables need to have a good spokesperson, and he thinks he might just be the man for the job.

• 10:01Sarah Hagi?

  A couple of decades later, it's 1990 in Palo Alto, California. Brian is now 30 years old, and he's squeezed into a cubicle at one of Stanford University's libraries, studying like crazy. Brian's hard at work on his PhD thesis in marketing. Take a look at a photo of Brian from around this time.

• 10:20Scaachi Koul?

  Yeah, he looks like a sweet little nerd.

• 10:22Sarah Hagi?

  Yeah, you know, stuffed up in an office, stacks of papers. Looks like he's studying, eh?

• 10:27Scaachi Koul?

  Yeah, very academic.

• 10:29Sarah Hagi?

  Well, Brian has become absolutely obsessed with the world of academia. He finds the people and ideas to be intellectually stimulating, and he really believes in his thesis. It's titled "Consumption Framing and Extension Advertising." And he later says it explores, quote, "situation-specific attitudes toward food." In other words, why don't people like veggies? But Brian is not doing well in school. The nitty-gritty of studying is difficult for him. It's boring. What he really wants to be is a pracademic, someone whose research can make a difference in the real world. Here's Brian, years later, describing his insecurities at this time on the Sad Truth

• 11:14Sarah Hagi?

  podcast.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  I've always been kind of afraid of being boring, of being boring at parties or being boring in other places. You know, if somebody comes up to you and says, "What do you do?" It's like, "Well, I do M Turk studies. Let me tell you about them." And she's like, "Ah." Right, right.

• 11:29Scaachi Koul?

  I think being boring is really unfortunate, but I think the scariest people in the world are people who are afraid to be boring.

• 11:37Sarah Hagi?

  Yeah, I don't think things necessarily always need to be fun.

• 11:40Scaachi Koul?

  Yeah, like, let's start with being normal, and then we can be fun.

• 11:44Sarah Hagi?

  Well, before he gets to being fun, he first needs to finish his PhD. People won't listen to Brian Wansink as much as they'll listen to Dr. Wansink. All of this is on Brian's mind one day when he goes for a run at a nearby track. While there, he runs into a colleague he admires and envies. This guy was just offered tenure as an assistant professor despite only publishing one paper. Brian has to know his secret, and what this professor says next will completely alter Brian's career. He says it was all thanks to, quote, "cool data," basically creative studies that tell an interesting story. This unlocks something for Brian.

• 12:27Sarah Hagi?

  If he can turn his studies into compelling narratives, he can advance his academic career and reach a bigger audience. If he's going to convince the country at large to eat healthier, he has to make a name for himself first, even if cool data isn't exactly true data.

• 12:47Sarah Hagi?

  It's October 2007, almost two decades since Brian had his world rocked by the promise of cool data. And tonight, he's giddy. He's waiting behind a pink velvet curtain at Harvard University. Brian's wearing wire-rimmed glasses and dressed in a cornflower blue shirt with a clashing red apron. He's waiting to take the stage in a grand Ivy League theater and receive an award for his work. But this isn't your typical award ceremony. These are the AIG Nobel Awards, a satirical prize for scientists who deserve credit for achievements that, quote, "first make people laugh and then make them think." Other winners tonight include someone who studied the health effects of sword swallowing

• 13:31Sarah Hagi?

  and an Air Force lab for their research on a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other.

• 13:39Sarah Hagi?

  Good company to keep, eh? That is literally a 30 Rock joke, that Jack Donaghy, working at GE, they develop a mist that makes everybody gay.

• 13:52Sarah Hagi?

  I know that these awards are sort of intended to encourage creative approaches to science and find different solutions, but it also seems like it generates like meme science? Like nonsense science, pop science? Yeah, and I feel like also because Brian really wants to be famous, this is exactly the type of thing that makes him relatable. So of course, he was there at the award ceremony. As crazy as it all sounds, the stage is filled with people wearing costumes, and the trophy Brian's eagerly waiting to accept has what looks like a chicken trying to swallow a giant egg on top. Brian's come a long way since his early Stanford days. After barely getting his PhD, he bounced around from university to university. He wasn't a great student,

• 14:36Sarah Hagi?

  and it turns out, he wasn't a great professor either. He kept getting turned down for tenure and consistently got bad reviews from students. But then, in 1996, he ran an experiment showing that if you gave people one big bag of candy, they'd eat it all during a movie. But if you gave people four little bags of candy, they'd stop eating after one or two. So he called Nabisco with his findings and told them that if they packaged their food in smaller bags, people would still buy them, and they could make a higher profit. Yes, Brian helped popularize the 100-calorie snack pack. Sarah Haggy, the way I, in the throes of several eating disorders,

• 15:18Sarah Hagi?

  relied on nothing but the 100-calorie snack pack. Ah, this guy's a supervillain in my home. I mean, yeah, these things were everywhere. I would say every so often, we get a scammer that's like, has inadvertently guided something fundamental about our lives, and this is a weird one. Yeah, and that study got him the juice he needed to get a job at the University of Illinois. Once there, he established the Food and Brand Lab, which is devoted to studying nutrition/advertising/psychology. Brian kept publishing these studies and married a cordon bleu-trained chef who cooks him and their two kids gourmet meals at home. After about six years in Illinois,

• 16:00Sarah Hagi?

  Cornell lured him and the lab to their campus in upstate New York. In his late 40s, Brian finally beats the last academia boss and gets tenure. He also spends the early 2000s making a name for himself outside of his nerdy scientific circle. This is an era of endless fad diets, and Brian has been telling people something radical. They don't actually have to change what they eat because it's their environment that's making them fat.

• 16:28Scaachi Koul?

  Wow, I have PTSD.

• 16:30Sarah Hagi?

  I'm sorry.

• 16:32Scaachi Koul?

  This story is secretly about all of the like bullshit diet stuff we were hearing when we were 12. It's every Oprah episode, every Dr. Oz episode, every single book was about this. This was the beginning of the slow creep of weight loss turning into wellness because it has to do with your brain.

• 16:51Sarah Hagi?

  Yes, exactly. And this discovery is from one of Brian's splashiest studies so far. What he calls the bottomless bowl experiment. Like any artist with a distinct style, a Brian Wantzing study has a certain flair to it. He starts with a logical sounding concept, but then presents it in a unique provocative way. In the bottomless bowl study, Brian and his colleagues served grad student soup. But they secretly installed a Looney Tune style piping system under the table, which discreetly kept the students' bowls full without their knowledge. Brian found that students eating from the trick bowl, which never looked empty, just kept eating.

• 17:32Sarah Hagi?

  And in the end, they didn't report feeling any more full, though they'd eaten way more soup. So he concludes that the size of the plate is a huge factor in how much we eat off it.

• 17:44Sarah Hagi?

  This study changed everything for Brian. It's the reason why he's here at Harvard, waiting to receive his Ig Nobel Award. It's a silly prize, but it's still surprisingly respected in academic circles. Real Nobel laureates hand out the awards, and Brian is thrilled as he reads his acceptance speech.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Oh, say can you see my soup bowl refill? But because it's not empty, I keep eating still. I've eaten 14 ounces, but little do I know, there's a tube in the bottom and I've got six quarts to go.

• 18:18Scaachi Koul?

  This is obnoxious. There are too many variables in this for it to guaranteed mean anything.

• 18:24Sarah Hagi?

  But this is the kind of study that then begets like, so many women I know only eat their meals off of side plates because they think they're supposed to eat off of smaller plates. Well, you gotta tell them about Brian. You gotta tell them it's all thanks to Brian. Ugh. Brian is riding high as someone who can get national media attention for his work, like the study about joy of cooking, which he publishes a couple of years after the Ig Nobel ceremony. He claims his studies show that the cookbook recipes have increased in calorie count over the decades and is contributing to the obesity problem in America. And, two years after that, he publishes another landmark study. He's trying to prove that he can get middle schoolers to eat healthier just by rearranging their lunchroom. Through his lab at Cornell,

• 19:09Sarah Hagi?

  Brian's been working with the federal government to institute, quote, "smarter lunchrooms" across the country. And the government is paying his lab $5.5 million to do it. Brian sets out to show that putting out a fruit bowl and moving vegetables to the front of the lunch line will help increase the sale of healthy foods. He also wants to see if kids will reach for healthy foods if they're renamed to sound more appealing, like calling carrots "x-ray vision carrots" or calling a healthy bean burrito "a big bad bean burrito." That would work on me, I fear. That's just marketing. Yeah, I mean, it's not something that you need $5.5 million to figure out. Yeah.

• 19:51Sarah Hagi?

  And of course, not all of Brian's predictions are spot on. While he thought moving vegetables up front would increase sales by 11%, sales actually decreased by 30%. But even with sketchy results, the Smarter Lunchroom program is instituted in almost 30,000 schools. While Brian's projects aren't necessarily bad, they're definitely not reliable. But he's preaching them as fact and making a lot of money in the process. Brian is living the good life. He's helping people eat better with his simple, science-backed advice and getting lots of attention for it. But Brian's methods have a touch of madness. And not all the people working for him agree with how he's reaching his conclusions.

• 20:37Sarah Hagi?

  It's the fall of 2013, and Uzge Sigurci, a young Turkish PhD student, is sitting in a kitchen framed by a two-way mirror. This is the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, and Uzge is so excited to be here. She's a petite young woman with soft features and great eyebrows, and she's finally starting to learn the ropes of food science. She's sitting in Brian's lab, so you can imagine, this isn't your typical academic setting. First of all, there are pictures of him lining the hallways. One standout portrait features Brian in his red apron and trademark wire glasses, sporting a white liquid mustache. He's in Cornell's version of a Got Milk ad.

• 21:21Sarah Hagi?

  In the years since his Ig Nobel win, Brian has become a behavioral psychologist legend. All this despite not having a degree in psychology. Still, he's in high demand. He was hired by Google to help employees avoid gaining weight from all the cafeteria's free food. He was even appointed to the USDA to help develop national nutrition policies, including the MyPlate guidelines that tell Americans what to eat on a daily basis. Brian's success is all thanks to the frenetic research at his lab. In the previous year alone, Brian authored, or co-authored, more than 30 articles, almost three a month. To put this in perspective, most universities ask

• 22:04Sarah Hagi?

  that their professors publish one or two articles per year. Most of their professors don't even write the one or two a year. That is way too much work. Nobody could clear through that much work in a month. Yeah, it is unusual, but Brian seems to look out for his employees. In Uzge's short time at Cornell, he's helped her get some of her own articles off the ground. Earlier that summer, Brian gave Uzge an assignment. He sent over an old dataset and asked her to examine the results and see if she can find something useful. The data was from an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet he'd observed over six years ago. He already asked a postdoc at Cornell to take a look at it, but she didn't think the data was publishable,

• 22:48Sarah Hagi?

  so Brian asked Uzge to give it a try. Uzge scoured the data over and over, but she couldn't find any patterns. Still, Brian asked her to keep trying, and his encouragement started to sound like a threat. Sachi, can you read his message to Uzge?

• 23:05Scaachi Koul?

  Yeah, he said, "This cost us a lot of time and our own money to collect. There's got to be something here we can salvage because it's a cool, rich, and unique dataset. Work hard, squeeze some blood out of this rock."

• 23:19Scaachi Koul?

  Bad. Bad. That is not how this works. You cannot be creative with data, not like this. That's super spooky.

• 23:27Sarah Hagi?

  Yeah, you're exactly right. This is a big science no-no. What Brian is describing is P-hacking. P-hacking sounds like a made-up coding term you'd hear in a bad 90s movie, but it's essentially a sneaky way to manipulate data until it's been contorted into something statistically significant. If you focus on enough unique variables, like hair color, for example, or people with any belly buttons, eventually, you will find a correlation. Maybe you discover that blond men eat more pizza than brunette women, but when you have to force it this hard, it's not science. This also runs extremely counter to the scientific method we all learned in middle-school science class. In legitimate studies,

• 24:12Sarah Hagi?

  scientists propose a hypothesis first and then collect data to see if it's true. Collecting data and then reverse-engineering a discovery is seen as unethical. Uzge is supposed to be learning how to be a great scientist, but her boss seems to be teaching her exactly the opposite. However, he can help her get published, and he has so much experience. Uzge probably figures he must know what he's doing. After all, he's a guy who updated the food pyramid. Uzge spends months twisting Brian's data as far as it will go. And in return, he offers to co-author five papers that he thinks have the potential to be, in his words, "cool." As her internship at Cornell ends,

• 24:56Sarah Hagi?

  Uzge probably looks back on her time there with pride. She helped Brian add to his towering collection of published work, but in doing so, she unwittingly knocked over the first domino that will cause his whole empire to come crashing down.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent her life exposing powerful people. Then, in 2017, she was killed in a car bombing. I'm Stephen Gray, and for the past nine years, I've been trying to find out who wanted her dead. That search took me to Malta through secret companies, organised crime, and eventually to one of the island's richest and most powerful men. Now, after years of waiting, this trial has finally happened. But when the verdict came in, the case took a turn that almost no one had expected. In a brand-new update to the multi-award-winning podcast Who Killed Daphne?, I'm returning to Malta to find out how we got there and where the search for the truth goes next.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  Listen to the new episode of Who Killed Daphne? wherever you get your podcasts, and you can hear the full six-part investigation from the beginning, ad-free, with Audible. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app and by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 26:15Scaachi Koul?

  You stepped out for your morning jog, except it's not your usual morning jog. You started listening to an epic sci-fi book on Audible. Thirty chapters later, you've accidentally run a half marathon. You've lost track of how far you've run, somewhere just past the city limits. You can't stop. You have to find out what happens next. Then it's over. The universe seems bigger. You feel different. You feel like you have no idea where you are. Audible. Stories that speak to you.

• 26:54Sarah Hagi?

  It's August 2014, and Brian's enjoying a sunny day on the Cornell campus. He's wearing a tanned suit and standing in front of a camera. But this isn't a new segment promoting his latest study. He's actually taping a pitch for his Kickstarter campaign. Brian's raising money for a weight-loss programme meant to accompany one of his latest books, Slim by Design. It's an appealing product. He's selling personalised programmes to help people lose two pounds per month, and they can still eat junk food. Promises like this are backed up by Brian's hundreds of published studies. By now, Brian is a pro at publishing them. He comes up with a media-friendly idea, collects some observations that more or less

• 27:39Sarah Hagi?

  fit the narrative, and gets it published in a low-tier journal. And his claims are catnip for the media. Listen to this example from a Dr. Oz appearance in 2014.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  What makes a fat kitchen? Well, so we found that the typical person who has just potato chips sitting out anywhere on the counter, visible, is gonna weigh about nine pounds more than their neighbor who doesn't. The typical woman who has breakfast cereal sitting on the counter is gonna weigh 21 pounds more than the neighbor who doesn't.

• 28:09Sarah Hagi?

  So this is like nonsense and really hard to prove. But one thing with these studies is you have to rely on people's self-reporting, and people are really unreliable about saying what they ate, how much they ate, when they ate it. So if all these studies are based off of self-reporting, that's really weak data. And this stuff is also coming at like the height of all this infotainment around weight loss, like Dr. Oz was always talking about this stuff. Remember, he was always talking about these like beans that would help you lose weight? So much so that we have actually done a Dr. Oz episode, Zara? Yeah, I remember those beans, and I wonder where those magic beans went? And I guess also this kind of shows how desperate everyone is for some kind of answer.

• 28:53Sarah Hagi?

  At this point, Brian is shifting into an infotainer, even ropes his grad students into doing comedy sketches based on his research, anything to get more attention for his work and himself. This Kickstarter project is Brian's latest effort to raise his profile, but the Slim By Design program doesn't take off. And it's not because the project goes unfunded. Brian quickly meets his goal of $10,000. However, the only thing participants lose on this program is their money. After the Kickstarter ends, donors reach out to Brian for months, requesting the plans they paid for. And he keeps telling them the same thing: The plans will be sent out soon. But soon never comes.

• 29:36Sarah Hagi?

  Behind the scenes, Brian is working with web developers to come up with a product, but he may have overpromised. The project isn't finished by the time he goes on sabbatical, so he basically gives up on the program and just ignores any emails about it. This feels like one of the last gasps of the scam artist. Like, he went from trying to influence people like on a bigger scale, on a systems-wide scale, and now he's just scamming people one-on-one. It's just such a far strange turn from academia. It's like, puerile, almost. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it is just kind of pathetic. And also, that Kickstarter is something that could never work on a huge scale with one guy doing everything.

• 30:20Sarah Hagi?

  It's literally not possible. And at the time, Brian receives surprisingly little backlash. His reputation is strong enough to protect him. Surely, a world-renowned scientist wouldn't rip people off intentionally. So Brian's career continues undisturbed. But like many egomaniacs before him, Brian makes a grave mistake. He decides to start a blog.

• 30:47Sarah Hagi?

  It's the winter of 2017, and Nick Brown is sitting in his office in the Netherlands. He's British and in his 50s with a mustache and wispy gray hair. Nick is very online, and he's made a lot of internet friends over the years. In fact, he recently received a message from one of them telling him to check out a blog from a Cornell scientist named Brian Wansink. But it's not because Nick is a particular fan of food psychology. It's because Nick is what's commonly called a "data thug." By day, Nick is working on his PhD in psychology, but by night, he is a statistics watchdog. Basically, for fun, he and his friends fact-check outlandish-sounding studies.

• 31:30Sarah Hagi?

  It really bothers him when bad studies get published, and especially when they make headlines. So he and his friends relish the opportunity to debunk these studies by creating statistical models that can identify P-hacking or seemingly impossible mathematical results. Last year, Nick helped debunk several studies from a prominent French psychologist, including ridiculous claims like "men are more likely to help women if their hair is down" and "that women tend to give their number to men if it's a sunny day."

• 32:02Sarah Hagi?

  Because of his extracurricular work, Nick regularly gets tips about shoddy science from all over the world. So he probably expects more of the usual junk when he starts reading Brian's personal blog. The post in question is titled, "The Grad Student Who Never Said No." And as Nick reads on, he's shocked. In the blog, Brian describes his work with a Turkish PhD student, Usy. Brian details how he asked her to rearrange his data until she could find a useful conclusion. And one of the five papers she produced from this insufficient data got a lot of play. It's all about how men eat more in the presence of women, a Brian Wansink classic. Brian even goes as far as criticizing another postdoc who worked in his lab

• 32:47Sarah Hagi?

  and refused to rework the data. But what shocks Nick the most is that Brian isn't using this example as a cautionary tale. He's framing this obvious scientific fraud as an inspiring message to encourage students to just keep trying. Brian praises Usy as a hard worker and infers that another postdoc in his lab was being lazy and distracted by, quote, "Facebook, Twitter, Game of Thrones, Starbucks, or spinning class." OK, so he is now admitting publicly that he is pee hacking. He's just saying it now. Yes, and Brian will later claim that he didn't know what pee hacking was. And he tries to frame this as a blog entry on, quote, "deep data dives."

• 33:31Sarah Hagi?

  But he can't hide what his blog makes obvious. He lacks a basic understanding of scientific rigor. And considering all the federal programs he's influenced, that is deeply concerning. From halfway across the world, Nick begins to wonder. If Brian is admitting this kind of malfeasance out in the open, what kind of sketchy work is he doing in private?

• 33:55Sarah Hagi?

  It's February 2017, about three months since Brian's "rise and grind" blog post about never giving up. Since then, he's been besieged by criticism. First, it was politely phrased digs from colleagues, many in the blog's comments. He did his best to reply, trying to defend himself as the comments came in. But everything shifted when he got a message from Nick Brown asking to see the original data. This request gave Brian pause. Nick is renowned in the online scientific community for exposing the junk studies of popular academics. So Brian tells Nick he can't share the data, calling it "a privacy issue for his participants." Brian thought that this was the end of it,

• 34:39Sarah Hagi?

  but his refusal just made Nick and his team of science cops more suspicious. So they dug into what was already available and then publicly released their results. Nick and the data thugs dissected four of the studies Brian mentioned in his blog. They titled their article "Statistical Heartburn" and referred to Brian's studies as "The Pizza Papers." In his blog, Brian talked about five students that all used the same dataset. And Nick found that not only did Brian cherry pick variables, but he's also suspiciously bad at math. He didn't even calculate the averages of his data correctly. Nick and his crew didn't even need Brian's raw data to find problems with his studies.

• 35:22Sarah Hagi?

  His papers are riddled with obvious mistakes. Either he's a scientist who can't do basic math, or Brian's been purposely cooking his books. I don't know which one would be worse. Probably the second one, but the first one's still pretty bad. Yeah, it's not two things you want associated with your work as a scientist, period. No, no. And soon, the media starts to notice Brian's shortcomings as well. Two weeks after Nick's post, The Cut publishes an expose. The headline is damning. "A popular diet science lab has been publishing really shoddy research." And this isn't some niche academic journal. This is in New York Magazine. Ryan goes on the offensive to try and save his reputation and his career.

• 36:07Sarah Hagi?

  He posts a response on his now infamous blog, highlighting all the ways he's hoping to rectify the situation, which includes running the numbers again to confirm his outcomes. But privately, he's fuming at the sudden negative attention. He sends an email to friends and coworkers, saying this whole thing is being blown out of proportion. Okay, his numbers were a little off, but he claims he's now being cyberbullied because of it. Ryan has spent years building a media following and a national reputation. He's already survived his Kickstarter scandal, and he's hoping he can survive this, too. He'll just have to put on his marketing hat, like he's done so many times before, and spin this into a palatable story.

• 36:52Sarah Hagi?

  Now, it's just a question of whether the public will swallow it.

• 37:01Sarah Hagi?

  Journalist Tristan Redmond goes where no son-in-law should ever go, deep into his wife's family history, digging up the cold case of who murdered her great-grandmother. Because, I should mention, he thinks the murderer might actually be the beloved family patriarch. For the best binge-watch series, like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:21Scaachi Koul?

  A trucker merges onto the I-10 in New Orleans. He checks his mirrors. The lane is clear. And then, boom, impact. A pickup truck, seemingly out of nowhere, scrapes down the side of his 18-wheeler, multiple passengers inside. One man flees the scene. And the driver of the pickup? He doesn't seem all that upset. It didn't feel like a regular accident, because it wasn't. Across the city, truckers are getting sideswiped, all on the same stretch of the same freeway. And behind many of the cases is one person, a Hollywood stunt woman turned personal injury lawyer named Vanessa Moda. This podcast is a story about fake accidents that lead to real consequences and a scheme that ends in betrayal and murder.

• 38:06Scaachi Koul?

  Listen to Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

• 38:29Sarah Hagi?

  For a while, Brian thought he could survive the backlash from his blog post by laying low. But the many errors in the pizza papers led Nick and his data cops to look at Brian's larger body of work. And it turns out buzzy articles about buffet prices weren't the only problem. In a study that helped create Brian's federally-funded lunchroom program, he straight-up misreported his own data. Brian said that 11-year-olds would rather pick an apple with an Elmo sticker on it than a plain cookie, proving that a change in environment would help students eat healthier. Except, the test wasn't done on 11-year-olds like Brian claimed. He used preschoolers instead. I mean, do 11-year-olds give a shit about Elmo?

• 39:14Sarah Hagi?

  No. No, they don't. Over the course of six months, BuzzFeed publishes several articles with emails that show Brian manipulating data. In the emails, Brian encourages slicing and dicing the numbers to find conclusions, something that will, quote, "go virally big time." Studies like these got Brian on TV, helped him sell books, and gave him the chance to shape important federal nutrition programs. But many of them were built on his ego, not hard science. By February 2018, Brian has had five articles retracted. And then, he opens up Twitter and sees a foodie's worst nightmare, a takedown tweet thread from Joy of Cooking editor John Becker.

• 39:59Sarah Hagi?

  Remember John? Back in 2009, his family was the target of Brian's study on cookbook calorie counts. At the time, John tried to do damage control, but it was his word against Brian's reputation. Since then, John's been doing his own research. And now, he's bringing the receipts to the official Joy of Cooking Twitter account. And he's not holding back. John blasts Brian for not understanding the concept of serving sizes and for comparing the calorie counts of gumbo to a veggie broth. Of course, gumbo will have more calories. Then, John turns his attention to the system that let this happen in the first place. Sachi, can you read what John wrote?

• 40:41Scaachi Koul?

  Sure. "Brian's conclusion was accepted as established fact, cited by 30-plus journal articles and over a dozen books. His letter is brilliant from a marketing perspective, his academic specialty, by the way. Aimed squarely at media outlets on the hunt."

• 40:55Sarah Hagi?

  For a new obesity culprit.

• 40:57Scaachi Koul?

  Yeah, this is the exact kind of pop science that you would get in a press email that you would write about because it does sound nice. And it's the kind of junk science that people can understand. And it feels like it's offering you approachable solutions. But it's nonsense.

• 41:13Sarah Hagi?

  It's nonsense. It's truly nonsense. And amazingly, through all of this, Brian has still been teaching. Cornell protected him for a long time, defending his errors as simple mistakes. After all, he brought a lot of money and recognition to the school after working there for more than a decade. He couldn't have been all that bad. But by the fall of 2018, about two years since Brian's infamous blog post, Cornell is finally ready to admit their mistake. Having even one study retracted is a huge taboo in academia. And with this new round of retractions, Brian is now at 13 total. Most of his now-retracted articles were conducted at Cornell.

• 41:56Sarah Hagi?

  And that's not exactly the kind of attention the school wants. They announced that an internal investigation has found Brian guilty of committing academic misconduct and that Brian will resign at the end of the school year. Brian has been taken down by data bros and journalists, called out on Twitter, and lost his job. And yet, despite all of this, he's still wondering if he can come back for seconds. It's April 2013, almost four years since Brian's forced retirement from Cornell. He's sitting at a desk in a large living room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and track lighting. And once again, he's reinvented his style. No more glasses or baggy tan suit.

• 42:40Sarah Hagi?

  Today, he's wearing a black turtleneck under a camel-colored blazer, and he's getting ready for his first TV interview in a long time. Since his retirement, Brian's been trying to keep busy. He worked in the research department for a self-help, meat-social-science company, but that didn't last very long. He worked on a book about professional growth for a while, but it didn't go anywhere. Right now, he's writing a blog post that gives advice to professors and students called Tips for PhDs. But it just doesn't have the same kind of engagement as his previous blog. And maybe that is a good thing. In a real Bill Clinton move, he gets most of his joy from playing the saxophone in a Motown cover band called Explosions.

• 43:25Sarah Hagi?

  And no, it's not spelled in a normal way. It's spelled in a way you can't even imagine. And yes, he's actually pretty good at the saxophone. Still, he craves something cooler. Nothing measures up to that cool, cool Data. I just think that wanting approval for something so lame is embarrassing. Like, you want to be known as the cool Data guy? That sucks. Yeah, I mean, it sucks, but it's unfortunately a real type of guy that is super famous, as we know. Yes, he really exists, and he's ruining the world. Well, recently, Brian got a spark of hope that his career might not be completely behind him. An email from a TV producer showed up in his inbox,

• 44:09Sarah Hagi?

  inviting him to pre-tape an interview for a local news show. And Brian is thrilled. So here he is, getting ready to return to his roots and promote his research. Brian's mission throughout his career has been simple: to convince people to eat healthier. He's eager to talk to this news crew and spread his gospel again. It could be just like old times. Here's a clip from that show.

• 44:41Sarah Hagi?

  That is Brian's voice dubbed for a Georgian language morning show. One of their reporters wanted to talk to Brian because she lost weight after reading his book Slim by Design. Brian's overjoyed to hear that his work helped this reporter and to soak up the recognition he sorely missed. Even though Brian's work might have helped some people, he ultimately cared more about the spotlight it gave him. In an era when trusting the science is more important than ever, what's even more important is that the science is right to begin with. And unfortunately for Brian, when you put the health of your career ahead of the health of the public, you always end up hungry.

• 45:21Sarah Hagi?

  Tachi, I feel like this was a particularly triggering episode for many reasons.

• 45:31Sarah Hagi?

  It's funny because I knew some of these pieces in abstract. There's so much bullshit we believe about our bodies, about diets, about what we eat, about how we should eat, that comes from just like this guy. And it makes me mad that there's so much stuff around diet and weight loss that is just like from some random guy who was just torquing these weird studies that he was making up in his basement. I feel like it speaks to this need that everyone has to like understand what food is doing to us. Mm-hmm. And yeah, he's one guy who created all of these studies. But this is like one drop in the ocean that is guys like him talking about food and fad diets and portion sizes. I just can't believe he was the one responsible for the 100 calorie snack pack, which is

• 46:16Sarah Hagi?

  so pervasive and so annoying. First of all, that's not enough snacks. It's never enough snacks. And then they tried turning the 100 calorie snack pack into like skinny Oreos. Remember that? I do remember that, actually, yeah, I do. It was messed up. His interpretation of the data was also so simplistic and so rooted in calorie count. You eating 100 calories versus you eating 200 calories, it's kind of a negligible difference. And there are so many variables into like, what kind of calorie is it? How much energy does it give you? Yeah, what did you do with it? What did your body do? What's your medical history? There's just too many variables and he was just feeding into the dumbest part of the most basic science we have about bodies and weight.

• 47:02Sarah Hagi?

  It's also really interesting because he was kind of giving people something they wanted so badly that they weren't willing to question it, which is that like you can still eat whatever you want and lose weight or be healthy. And it's like you can't make an ultra-processed food healthy, no matter how small you make it or how little you eat of it. I could totally see a news aggregation job I have being like, oh, this is a perfect story. Just if AP or whatever source already reported on it, then it must be true. Therefore, you can report on it. Like, I'm not a scientist. I don't know if a study is correct. Why was I responsible at 22 for repeating garbage? Yeah, like somebody hands you the study and they're like, can you just write up a brief about this? You're not even really tasked. But thinking about it that critically.

• 47:45Sarah Hagi?

  I think it also has to do with this idea that anything that's published in an academic journal must be true. Because who am I to question what a scientist can put in an academic journal without knowing that there are varying degrees of what is considered rigorous or not? Yep. If anything, this shows me that there has to be like a true cohort of real science journalists who are able to parse through these things and know what is bullshit and what isn't. Yeah, there's a reason why people are like really checked out about their health. Because there's so much nonsense in this conversation and people just don't want to engage. I get it. I don't really want to either. Because it's full of people who are lying to us in order to sell something,

• 48:29Sarah Hagi?

  be it like a food company or someone like Brian who's just like making shit up. I think unfortunately, the lesson is like, you're just gonna have to read. You're gonna have to read and go to the doctor and talk to your doctor and think about like what kind of life you want to live. It's like you have to engage with yourself and that sucks. And I'm not doing it either. I think, you know what? Just do what you can to stay alive. Just stay alive. Don't be so hard on yourself. It's not always easy to know what you're supposed to eat. It's hard to feel healthy and the metrics are always changing. Just eat. I think we all need to think about ourselves a little less, probably. Yes, you know, people have been eating for centuries. You don't have to reinvent the wheel here, you know? You're right.

• 49:21Sarah Hagi?

  This is Brian Wansink. Guess who's conning to dinner? I'm Sarah Haggy. And I'm Sachi Cole. If you have a tip for us on a story that you think we should cover, please email us at [email protected]. We use many sources in our research. A few that were particularly helpful were Stephanie Lee's reporting for BuzzFeed News, Jesse Single's reporting for The Cut, and A Credibility Crisis in Food Science by James Hamblin. Kyle Rabi wrote this episode. Additional writing by us, Sachi Cole and Sarah Haggy. Olivia Brylee and Eric Thurm are our story editors. ...by Lexi Peery. Sound design by James Morgan. Additional audio assistance provided by Augustine Lim. Our music supervisor is Scott Velazquez for Frieson Sync. Our managing producer is Desi Blaylock.

• 50:06Sarah Hagi?

  Our senior managing producer is Callum Pluse. Janine Cornelo and Stephanie Jens are our development producers. Our associate producer is Charlotte Miller. Our producer is Julie McGruder. Our senior producers are Sarah Enney and Jenny Bloom. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marshall Louis, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondery.

• 50:35Sarah Hagi?

  Follow Scamfluencers on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Scamfluencers ad-free by joining Audible.