Podcasts, Golf, Grifts, and OA
The health claim—OA—podcast dance shows how we've abandoned the public
Scott Carney of “Magnetic North” has been doing a stellar job critiquing the quasi-scientific claims of Athletic Greens, now known as AG1. Not only did he help pressure their CEO to depart by revealing his criminal past, but he helped head off the media juggernaut AG1 had become by sponsoring more than 14,000 podcast episodes across nearly 800 podcasts, spending $2.2 million per month at one point — Carney’s critiques seemed to correlate with a lot of customers canceling their powder delivery subscriptions, possibly to the tune of $45 million in lost recurring revenues for the company.
Corporate sponsorship in scientific journals has a long history that runs the gamut from acceptable to shameful. Market research has shown repeatedly that practitioners in various fields want to know what’s going on with commercial offerings. At its worst, sponsors may be perceived as biasing claims. The full range continues to this day in journals with “custom publishing” and “native advertising” programs. To be clear, it’s not journals at their best, but it mostly stays in the professional space.
But what if you’re a wellness company looking for an easy, cheap, and non-obvious veneer of scientific credibility to non-professional consumers? You can place articles quickly and reliably in OA journals and special issues.
In 2023, AG1 used both Frontiers and MDPI as cost-effective media buys to construct the “science-backed” pillars supporting their marketing edifice. In 2024, AG1 also published an OA paper in an Elsevier journal, where the research was benign enough to generate an APC invoice but showed nothing definitive, and where the authors disclosed, to their credit:
The funders [AG1] were involved in the design of the study, in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to publish the results.
The goal here isn’t using science to discover new things. The goal is to use scientific publishing’s OA-enabled soft spots and B2B infrastructure to certify sales and marketing claims in the wellness space so that B1 can use B2’s article for B2C claims, as AG1 is doing.
AG1 is not alone. There are plenty of others in the wellness space blaring dubious health claims based on marginal papers.