How companies manipulate science
Can you believe chili crisp cures IBS?
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Chili crisp is a culinary win.
Tao Huabi, founder of the überpopular Chinese chile crisp brand Lao Gan Ma, is a billionaire thanks to her delicious creation. Born in a poverty-stricken village, she was entering her teenage years when the Great Chinese Famine struck in 1959. Illiterate and uneducated, Huabi tinkered with wild plant roots trying to figure out what was edible, what worth eating.
After a difficult marriage, tending to a sick husband and two children, she started slinging rice curd and vegetables in a street stall after her husband passed away. She opened her first restaurant in 1989, slinging noodles coated in spicy hot sauce with a unique addition of soybeans. Truck drivers loved it, spreading word around Guiyang. Five years later she started focusing on what would become Lao Gan Ma.
A “good things happen to good people” story is as heartwarming as her chili crisp, which I consume by the barrel. I’ve tried competitors, including Roy Choi’s Momofuku Chili Crunch, which he tried to trademark—and failed miserably. I put his near the bottom of the list: boring, lifeless, tepid. Fly By Jing is overhyped and bland, though it does have decent kick.
I didn’t expect to write about chili crisp for a health column until journalist Scott Carney tagged me in a post yesterday.
Carney later qualified that Andrew Huberman did not endorse the company; they just lifted a quote from him for their marketing materials.
Regardless, Redbloom provides a cautionary tale of how companies pretend to be scientifically validated when the truth is anything but. Visiting their marketing website, you’d think they’ve created an amazing product—one with medicinal benefits.
As we’ll see, it’s all a mirage. Let’s start with the language. In clinical trials,
Standardization refers to the use of consistent, uniform methods and formats for collecting, analyzing, and presenting data across different studies. Redbloom has only conducted one study, at least according to their website. Their claim makes no sense. They seem to be confusing standardizing a diet with a standardized trial, which are different things.
Monitored means someone was overseeing the trial to ensure its quality, integrity, and compliance with regulatory standards. You don’t have a clinical trial without monitoring, so it’s not exactly something to brag about. Safety monitoring is part of monitoring, but it’s not the totality of it. Again, they’re confusing terms by focusing on symptoms here.
Quality feedback serves as a mechanism for ongoing enhancement of trial conduct and to ensure that the trial followed the prescribed protocol. Given the size of this study—31 participants in a 6-week protocol—this is also not out of the ordinary. “Qualitative” feedback is not the same as “quality” feedback, however. One refers to the trial participants, while the latter deals with study protocols, so again they’re mixing of terms if quite confusing.
We’re already in murky territory. The actual study only raises more eyebrows. A few key points about the study itself:
Small sample size (16 patients), which limits the generalizability of the results and may have affected the ability to detect significant changes in overall IBS symptoms.
Incomplete blinding. Most patients experienced mild abdominal burning after chili ingestion, so the researches admit the blinding process was ineffective. This contradicts the notion they conducted the “gold standard” of empirical studies.
The study focused on IBS-D patients only, so results may not apply to other IBS subtypes. Yet their marketing site makes it seem as if it’s effective for all IBS sufferers.
The chili dose used may not have been optimal; the researchers suggest that a higher dose might be necessary to improve overall IBS symptoms.
Six weeks may not have been long enough to observe long-term effects of chili ingestion on IBS symptoms.
The study did not assess the impact of chili ingestion on quality of life or psychological factors associated with IBS.
Yet the company takes no issue with labeling their product “medicine.”
This is a classic example of presenting an aura of science without actually presenting credible scientific results. The company leverages pseudoscience around additional ingredients—they call lion’s mane and MCT oil “super foods”—while presenting science-seeming charts like this:
Which is filled with meaningless jargon. Redbloom is not alone in this tactic. I broke down how AG1 uses the same exact techniques to avoid actually discussing the lack of evidence a few months ago:
At the very least, AG1 includes a disclaimer on their website stating that their statements have not been evaluated by the FDA, and that the site is “for informational purposes only.” Of course, this is in a 6-point font at the bottom of the page, whereas the headlines make all sorts of health claims. This is a failure of regulation.
Redbloom offers no such disclaimer. Incredibly, consumers can buy their chili crisp with an HSA or FSA account—pre-tax dollars earmarked for items specific to health. Yet the one study above should not allow them to state their product can “heal the gut.”
I’m guessing Redbloom, like many others supplements and food companies that make health claims, place links on their site in hopes that consumers will simply read the flashy headlines, notice that studies are linked to, and never read them. Sadly, this tactic works.
The problem is that some of us actually do read them, and understand the contradictions between the research and the health claims.
We shouldn’t need to do this, however. Regulatory bodies overseeing health claims are hamstrung with too much leeway and not enough oversight. And given the deregulatory stance of the incoming administration—one that wants to dismantle, not strengthen, health agencies—we’re going to have to rely on our science literacy skills to navigate the glossy world of wellness marketing for the foreseeable future.
The onus of health claims shouldn’t have to rely on consumer literacy. But that’s the reality we face in a deregulated market economy.