Brian Wansink: Guess Who’s Conning to Dinner

Summary

Scamfluencers Podcast Episode Summary

Title: Brian Wansink: Guess Who’s Conning to Dinner
Release Date: February 17, 2025
Host/Author: Wondery
Description:
In this gripping episode of Scamfluencers, co-hosts Scaachi Koul and Sarah Hagi delve into the rise and fall of Brian Wansink, a once-celebrated food psychologist whose influential studies reshaped American eating habits—only to be exposed for academic misconduct. This episode meticulously unpacks Wansink's deceptive practices, the impact of his flawed research on the public and industry, and the eventual unraveling of his reputation.

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1. Introduction to Brian Wansink’s Controversial Career

The episode opens with an introduction to Brian Wansink, a prominent figure in food psychology whose research significantly influenced dietary guidelines and consumer behavior. Initially celebrated for his innovative studies, Wansink's work eventually came under scrutiny for methodological flaws and data manipulation.

Notable Quote:

• John Becker [00:43]: "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."

2. Early Life and Academic Pursuits

Wansink's journey began in northwestern Iowa, where his early experiences selling vegetables door-to-door ignited his passion for understanding consumer behavior. His academic path led him to Stanford University, where he pursued a PhD in marketing, focusing on "consumption framing and extension advertising."

Notable Quote:

• Brian Wansink [11:42]: "I think being boring is really unfortunate, but I think the scariest people in the world are people who are afraid to be boring."

3. Rise to Prominence and Influential Studies

Wansink gained fame through studies that, while initially groundbreaking, laid the groundwork for significant industry changes. One of his notable experiments involved the “bottomless bowl,” where students unknowingly consumed more soup due to a hidden refilling mechanism. This study underpinned his assertion that plate size dramatically affects portion control.

Notable Quote:

• Brian Wansink [18:15]: "There are too many variables in this for it to guaranteed mean anything."

4. Impact on Industry and Public Health

Wansink's research had far-reaching implications, including influencing the USDA's food pyramid and popularizing the 100-calorie snack pack. His studies were frequently cited by media outlets, cementing his status as a trusted authority on nutrition and consumer habits.

Notable Quote:

• John Becker [15:26]: "Brian helped popularize the 100 calorie snack pack."

5. Methodological Flaws and P-Hacking

Despite his success, Wansink's research methods were fundamentally flawed. He often engaged in p-hacking—manipulating data to achieve statistically significant results. This practice undermined the validity of his studies and led to misleading conclusions that impacted both policy and consumer behavior.

Notable Quote:

• John Becker [23:39]: "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."

6. Exposure and Backlash

Problems surfaced when Nick Brown, a dedicated data watchdog, began scrutinizing Wansink’s studies. Brown's team uncovered numerous inconsistencies and errors in Wansink's research, leading to a broader investigation of his work. The exposure was a turning point, revealing the extent of Wansink's academic misconduct.

Notable Quote:

• John Becker [34:29]: "Brian's conclusion was accepted as established fact, cited by 30 plus journal articles and over a dozen books."

7. Consequences and Institutional Response

As evidence mounted against Wansink, the academic community and public turned against him. Multiple studies were retracted, and Cornell University initiated an internal investigation. By the fall of 2018, amidst mounting pressure and evidence of misconduct, Cornell forced Wansink to resign, marking the collapse of his career.

Notable Quote:

• John Becker [42:29]: "It's nonsense. It's truly nonsense."

8. Reflection on Trust in Science and Public Manipulation

The hosts discuss the broader implications of Wansink’s actions, emphasizing the erosion of public trust in scientific research. They highlight how Wansink’s ability to manipulate data and maintain a facade of credibility allowed his flawed studies to influence millions, showcasing the dangers of unchecked authority in science.

Notable Quote:

• Sarah Hagi [50:23]: "If you have a tip for us on a story that you think we should cover, please email [e-mail]."

9. Conclusion: The Legacy of Brian Wansink’s Deception

The episode concludes by illustrating the long-term effects of Wansink’s misconduct on both the scientific community and public health policies. It serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of rigorous methodology and ethical standards in research, underlining how one individual's deceit can have widespread negative consequences.

Notable Quote:

• John Becker [50:42]: "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 lead."

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Key Takeaways

• Academic Misconduct: Brian Wansink’s career serves as a stark example of how p-hacking and data manipulation can lead to the dissemination of false scientific truths.

• Impact on Public Policy: Flawed research can significantly influence public health policies and consumer behavior, emphasizing the need for integrity in scientific studies.

• Erosion of Trust: The exposure of Wansink’s misconduct highlights the vulnerability of public trust in scientific research and the media's role in perpetuating unverified studies.

• Importance of Critical Inquiry: The episode underscores the necessity for skepticism and critical analysis in both scientific communities and public consumption of research findings.

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Scamfluencers masterfully dissects the rise and fall of Brian Wansink, presenting a detailed narrative that not only exposes his fraudulent practices but also invites listeners to reflect on the broader implications for science, policy, and trust in expertise.

Transcript

[Sarah Hagie]

Wonder plus subscribers can listen to Scamfluencers.

[Sachi Kol]

Early and ad free right now.

[Sarah Hagie]

Join Wondery in the Wondery app or Apple Podcasts.

[John Becker]

Wondery Sachi, Even as a very esteemed journalist, do you sometimes get caught up in believing something because you see a headline that says Study Show?

[Brian Wansink]

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 almost 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 the study.

[John Becker]

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. 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. 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. 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 why We Eat More Than We Think, and spent time as a White House appointed head of the USDA center for Nutrition Policy and Promot. 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?

[Brian Wansink]

Yeah. It's two books. It's two versions of Joy of Cooking. One is the older one and One is the 2006 one. The 2006 one is obviously bigger and he looks like a jock. Like, 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.

[John Becker]

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. 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.

[Brian Wansink]

This is precisely the kind of mistake I would always be afraid of making as a reporter because I'm so bad at math, I know I would do some calculation poorly and fuck up like this, and then people would have to tell me I was wrong.

[John Becker]

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. 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.

[Brian Wansink]

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[John Becker]

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[Brian Wansink]

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[John Becker]

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[Brian Wansink]

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[John Becker]

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[John Becker]

From Wondery I'm Sarah Hagie. And I'm Sachi Kol. And this is Scamfluencers. Come and give me your attention forever.

[Brian Wansink]

Learn my lesson.

[John Becker]

Turn my speakers to 11.

[Brian Wansink]

I feel like a legend.

[John Becker]

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 legend. Before he was a pop signed superstar, Brian was a kid growing up in northwestern Iowa in the late 1960s. At 8 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. 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 going to have to push this corn.

[Brian Wansink]

Oh wow. What a shrewd capitalist.

[John Becker]

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 treats this food like tox 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. 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.

[Brian Wansink]

Yeah, he looks like a sweet little nerd.

[John Becker]

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

[Brian Wansink]

Yeah. Very academic.

[John Becker]

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 podcast.

[Uzge Sigurci]

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 and you say, what do you do? It's like, well, I do Mturk studies. Let me tell you about them.

[John Becker]

And she's like, right, right.

[Brian Wansink]

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

[John Becker]

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

[Brian Wansink]

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

[John Becker]

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 enbies. 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. 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. 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 IG 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 and an Air Force lab for their research on a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Good company to keep, eh?

[Brian Wansink]

That is literally a 30 Rock joke that Jack Donaghy working at GE. They develop a mist that makes everybody gay. 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.

[John Becker]

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 awards 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, 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.

[Brian Wansink]

Sarah Haggie. The way I, in the throes of several eating disorders, relied on nothing but the 100 calorie snack pack. Ah, this guy's a super villain in my home.

[John Becker]

I mean, yeah, were everywhere.

[Brian Wansink]

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.

[John Becker]

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 slash 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, 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.

[Brian Wansink]

Wow, I have ptsd.

[John Becker]

I'm sorry.

[Brian Wansink]

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.

[John Becker]

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 Wansink 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 students soup. But they secretly installed a looney tunes 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. 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. 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.

[Uzge Sigurci]

Osei, 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.

[Brian Wansink]

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

[John Becker]

Well, you gotta tell them about Brian. You gotta tell him. It's all thanks to Brian.

[Brian Wansink]

Blech.

[John Becker]

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 Cornel, 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.

[Brian Wansink]

That would work on me. I fear that's just marketing.

[John Becker]

Yeah. I mean, it's not something that you need $5.5 million to figure out.

[Brian Wansink]

Yeah.

[John Becker]

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. 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. 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 labor. 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 that their professors publish one or two articles per year.

[Brian Wansink]

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.

[John Becker]

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 data set 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, so Brian asked Ozge 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?

[Brian Wansink]

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 data set.

[John Becker]

Work hard.

[Brian Wansink]

Squeeze some blood out of this rock. Bad. Bad. That is not how this works. You cannot be creative with data. Not like this. That's super spooky.

[John Becker]

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 blonde 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, 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. Ozge's 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, Ozge 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.

[Brian Wansink]

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[John Becker]

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[Brian Wansink]

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[John Becker]

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[Brian Wansink]

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[Brian Wansink]

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[John Becker]

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[Uzge Sigurci]

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 going to weigh about nine pounds more than their neighbor who doesn't. The typical woman who has breakfast cereal sitting on the counter is going to weigh 21 pounds more than the neighbor who does it.

[Brian Wansink]

So this is like nonsense and really hard to prove. But one thing with these studies is you have to rely on people 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 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. Sarah.

[John Becker]

Yeah, I, 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. 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. Behind the scenes, Brian is working with web developers to come up with a product. But he may have over promised 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.

[Brian Wansink]

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.

[John Becker]

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. It's. That'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. 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. 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. 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, Ozge. 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 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 uzgay 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.

[Brian Wansink]

Okay, so he is now admitting publicly that he is P hacking. He's just saying it now.

[John Becker]

Yes, and Brian will later claim that he didn't know what P hacking was. And he tries to frame this as a blog entry on, quote, deep data dives. But he can't hide what his blog makes obvious. He lacks a basic understanding of scientific rigorous, 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? 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. 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 refer to Brian's studies as the pizza papers. In his blog, Brian talked about five students that all used the same data set. 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. His papers are riddled with obvious mistakes. Either he's a scientist who can't do basic math, or Ryan's been purposely cooking his books.

[Brian Wansink]

I don't know which one would be worse. Probably the second one, but the first one's still pretty bad.

[John Becker]

Yeah, it's not two things you want associated with your work as a scientist, period.

[Brian Wansink]

No.

[John Becker]

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. Brian goes on the offensive to try and save his reputation and his career. 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. Brian 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. Now it's just a question of whether the public will swallow it.

[Sarah Hagie]

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[John Becker]

I feel like 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? No.

[Brian Wansink]

No, they don't.

[John Becker]

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 afuti's worst nightmare. A takedown tweet thread from Joy of Cooking editor Jon Becker. 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 bro. 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? Sure.

[Brian Wansink]

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 for a new obesity culprit. 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, like, junk science that people can understand and it feels like it's offering you approachable solutions, but it's nonsense.

[John Becker]

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, 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. 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 meets 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. And no, it's not spelled the 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.

[Brian Wansink]

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.

[John Becker]

Yeah, I mean it sucks, but it's unfortunately a real type of guy that is super famous as we know.

[Brian Wansink]

Yes, he really exists and he's ruining the world.

[John Becker]

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

[Brian Wansink]

It's funny cause 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 twerking these weird studies that he was making up in his basement.

[John Becker]

I feel like it speaks to this need that everyone has to like, understand what food is doing to us. 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 so pervasive and so annoying. First of all, that's not enough snacks.

[Brian Wansink]

It's never enough snacks.

[John Becker]

And then they tried turning the 100 calorie snack pack into like skinny Oreos. Remember that?

[Brian Wansink]

I do remember that, actually. Yeah, I do.

[John Becker]

It was messed up.

[Brian Wansink]

His interpretation of the data was also so simplistic and so rooted in calorie count. You eating 100 calories versus you eating 200 calories.

[John Becker]

It's kind of a negligible difference.

[Brian Wansink]

And there are so many variables into like, what kind of calorie is it?

[John Becker]

How much energy does it give you?

[Brian Wansink]

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.

[John Becker]

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 assigned to. I don't know if a study's correct. Why was I responsible at 22. For repeating garbage. Yeah.

[Brian Wansink]

Like, somebody hands you this study and they're like, can you just write up a brief about this? You're not even really tasked with thinking about it that critically.

[John Becker]

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. Of what is considered rigorous or not?

[Brian Wansink]

Yeah.

[John Becker]

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.

[Brian Wansink]

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, be it like a food company or someone like Bryan 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 lead. It's like you have to engage with yourself. And that sucks. And I'm not doing it either.

[John Becker]

I think. You know what? Just do what you can to stay alive.

[Brian Wansink]

Just stay alive.

[John Becker]

Don't be so hard on yourself. It's not always easy to know what yourself supposed to eat. It's hard to feel healthy and the metrics are always changing. Just eat.

[Brian Wansink]

I think we all need to think about ourselves a little less probably.

[John Becker]

Yes. You know, people have been eating for centuries. You don't have to reinvent the wheel here. You know, you're right. This is Brian Wansink. Guess who's conning to dinner. I'm Sarah Haggie.

[Brian Wansink]

And I'm Sachi Kol. If you have a tip for us on a story that you think we should cover, please email [e-mail] we use many sources in our research. A few that were particularly helpful were Stephanie Lee's reporting for Buzzfeed News, Jesse Singel's reporting for the Cut and A Credibility Crisis in Food Science by James Hamblin.

[John Becker]

Kyle Rabi wrote this episode. Additional writing by us, Sachi Cole and Sarah Haggie. Olivia Briley and Eric Thurm are our story editors. Fact checking by Lexi Peary Sound design by James Morgan. Additional audio assistance provided by Augustine Lim. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for freesond Sync. Our managing producer is Desi Blaylock. Our senior managing producer is Callum Plews. Janine Cornello and Stephanie Jens are our development producers. Our associate producer is Charlotte Miller. Our producer is Julie McGruder. Our senior producers are Sarah Enny and Ginny Blume. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer, Beckman, Marshall Louie and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondery.

[Brian Wansink]

If you like Scamplancers, you can listen to every episode early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey.