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Truth Seekers: Where Data Meets Reality
Tired of sensational headlines and conflicting health advice? Join Alex Barrett and Bill Morrison as they cut through the noise to uncover what scientific research actually says about the claims flooding your social media feed.
Each week, Alex and Bill tackle a different health, nutrition, or wellness claim that everyone's talking about. From "blue light ruins your sleep" to "seed oils are toxic," they dig into the actual studies, examine the methodologies, and translate the data into plain English.
No agenda. No sponsors to please. No credentials to fake. Just two people committed to finding out what's really true by going straight to the source—the research itself.
Perfect for anyone who's skeptical of influencer health advice but doesn't have time to read every scientific study themselves. New episodes drop regularly, delivering clarity in a world full of clickbait.
Question everything. Verify with data. Find the truth.
Disclaimer: Truth Seekers provides educational content based on published research. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical, financial, or professional advice. Always consult qualified professionals for decisions affecting your health and wellbeing.
**Going Backwards: The Walking Hack That Outran Its Own Evidence**
Alex: Right, so I've been sent this video approximately fourteen times in the last month. People walking backwards on treadmills, in parks, down pavements—all of them absolutely convinced they've cracked the code on aging.
Bill: The forty percent calorie burn thing.
Alex: The forty percent calorie burn thing! And "it rewires your brain." I've had my mum texting me about this. My mum, Bill.
Bill: Okay so I'll be honest, when I first saw the headline I thought—hm, there's something there. Different muscle engagement, higher perceived effort, it doesn't sound completely made up on its face.
Alex: Which is exactly what makes it interesting. Because there IS something there. It just... reminds me a bit of the cold plunge episode we did. Remember? There was genuine biology underneath the anti-aging claims, it just wasn't doing what anyone said it was doing.
Bill: Yeah, same structure. Real finding, real mechanism, and then somewhere between the lab and your mum's phone it becomes something else entirely.
Alex: And that gap—between what the research actually shows and what's being repeated across every health platform—that's the whole story.
Bill: So let's start with the big one. Forty percent more calories.
Alex: That's the number everywhere. That's the number my mum got. Where does it actually come from?
Bill: Okay, so the foundational study here is Ferris et al., 2004, published in the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy. Twenty-seven participants—
Alex: Wait, I thought it was closer to thirty?
Bill: No, twenty-seven. Average age twenty-four. Walking on a treadmill at two-and-a-half miles per hour, different incline grades. They measured heart rate and oxygen consumption—VO2, which is essentially how hard your body is working to fuel the movement.
Alex: Right.
Bill: Backward walking increased heart rate and oxygen consumption by seventeen to twenty percent compared to forward walking at the same speed and grade.
Alex: Seventeen to twenty.
Bill: The paper says it directly. "Seventeen to twenty percent higher for backward walking than for forward walking."
Alex: Not forty.
Bill: Not forty. Not even close to forty. And here's where it gets interesting—the New York Post, and they're not alone in this, published something that said, and I want to read this carefully: "walking backward can elevate heart rate and oxygen consumption by seventeen to thirty percent more than forward walking, which means you can stand to burn forty percent more calories."
Alex: Hang on. So they cited the actual number—seventeen to thirty—and then just decided it meant forty?
Bill: They made a mathematical leap that the data does not support. A seventeen to twenty percent increase in oxygen consumption is not the same as a forty percent increase in calories burned. Those are not interchangeable figures. VO2 and calorie expenditure have a relationship, but it's not one-to-one, and nobody in that study measured actual calorie burn.
Alex: When I was covering health for the paper, we'd get sent stats like this constantly. Someone upstream makes the leap, it gets quoted, and then it just... travels. Nobody goes back to the original.
Bill: That's exactly it. The American College of Sports Medicine apparently cited "forty percent more calories" at some point, and once a credible-sounding institution puts a number out there, it gets repeated as gospel. I've been there in data work—you see a statistic cited so many times you assume someone upstream verified it.
Alex: And no one did.
Bill: The original study never said forty percent. Full stop.
Alex: Okay. So that's the calorie claim. But then there's the brain stuff, which is the part that really got me.
Bill: Yeah. So Koch and colleagues, 2009, published in Psychological Science. Thirty-eight participants. The study had people either step forward, step backward, or step sideways—sideways was the control—and then immediately complete a Stroop test.
Alex: Which is what, for people who haven't heard of it?
Bill: It's a classic cognitive task. You see color words printed in mismatched ink—the word "red" written in blue, say—and you have to name the ink color, not read the word. Your brain has to actively override its automatic response. It measures cognitive control.
Alex: You know what, I find those genuinely hard. I've tried them online. There's something deeply uncomfortable about your brain fighting itself like that.
Bill: That's the whole point of it, really. It's tapping into something real about how attention works. It's actually one of the more robust paradigms in cognitive psychology.
Alex: That's... actually quite good methodology for that specific thing. Even if—
Bill: Even if it's measuring something very narrow.
Alex: Right. Okay, so—what did stepping backwards actually do?
Bill: People who had just stepped backward were about thirty-six milliseconds faster on the conflicting trials—the hard ones where the word and color don't match—compared to people who stepped forward.
Alex: Thirty-six milliseconds.
Bill: Which is statistically significant in the study.
Alex: But here's where I want to push back, because I think this is where we might see it differently.
Bill: Go on.
Alex: You said "it's a real effect" and I've heard you say that a couple of times now, and—I'm not sure the novelty problem doesn't just swallow the whole thing. If I ask someone to do something strange right before a cognitive test, they're more alert. Their attention is up. That's not their brain being rewired, that's just being briefly switched on. How is the study ruling that out?
Bill: It's not. There's no control for novelty. That's a genuine limitation.
Alex: And that feels to me like the central issue, not a footnote. Because every claim that flows from this study assumes backward walking did something specific to cognition. But if hopping on one foot before the Stroop test would produce the same result—
Bill: Okay, yeah. I think I was underweighting that. I was focusing on the fact that the effect was statistically significant and the design had a control condition—the sideways stepping—but that sideways control doesn't actually address novelty if all three conditions feel unusual to the participants.
Alex: Exactly.
Bill: Right. So the novelty confound is—yeah, that's not a minor caveat. That's a problem with the interpretation of what backward motion specifically does.
Alex: And the coverage doesn't treat it as a problem at all. The BBC said it "positively affects cognitive abilities such as memory, reaction time and problem-solving." National Geographic said it "sharpens cognitive function." My personal favourite was a claim about areas of the brain associated with decision-making being "more active when moving retroactively."
Bill: That last one—there's no brain imaging in any of these studies. Nobody scanned anyone's brain.
Alex: They just made that up?
Bill: Or extrapolated so aggressively it amounts to the same thing. And none of these headlines mention thirty-six milliseconds on one cognitive task, measured once, immediately after a single step.
Alex: And then there's the memory study, which is where it gets almost farcical.
Bill: Wyman et al., 2018. Six experiments on memory and recall. They found that backward motion was associated with slightly better memory recall.
Alex: But here's the part nobody reports.
Bill: Imagining backward movement—while sitting completely still—produced the same effect.
Alex: Sitting still. Not walking anywhere.
Bill: So if the "brain boost" from backward walking also happens when you just picture it in your head, what is the walking contributing?
Alex: Nothing, presumably. And yet that study was used to support the claim that backward walking physically improves your brain. The whole thing sort of collapses on itself when you look closely.
Bill: Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University, published a really thorough piece on this in early 2025, and his conclusion was essentially: the evidence for backward walking benefits mostly comes from physical therapy, with very small studies, and for the general population, "we are left with an exotic-looking exercise that is unlikely to be better than regular workouts."
Alex: Anyway—what frustrates me about all of this isn't that backward walking is useless. Because it's not, genuinely. Physical therapists use it with knee osteoarthritis patients, with stroke rehabilitation. The different muscle activation—more hamstring, different stabilizers—is real.
Bill: The seventeen to twenty percent increase in oxygen consumption is real. If you want a harder workout at the same pace, it does deliver more effort.
Alex: So there IS something here. Just not the thing anyone's claiming. And in the meantime, there's a safety issue that almost nobody mentions. For older adults—the very demographic being sold this as an anti-aging hack—backward walking carries a genuine fall risk. There are documented cases of hip fractures. Physical therapists doing this with patients use at least two people and specialized equipment.
Bill: And the people most likely to get swept up in "reverse walking for longevity" content are probably not doing it on a treadmill with a spotter.
Alex: They're in a park, filming themselves, hoping for the best.
Bill: The other thing Jarry flagged—and I think this is worth saying out loud—the studies on backward walking in rehabilitation settings often can't isolate backward walking as the cause of improvement, because patients are receiving standard physical therapy at the same time. So even the more legitimate claims are murkier than they appear.
Alex: Which is the kind of methodological caveat that never makes it into the headline.
Bill: Never. "Backward walking may have contributed to some improvement when combined with other therapies in small underpowered studies" doesn't go viral.
Alex: "Forty percent more calories" does.
Bill: Every time.
Alex: So here's where I land on this. If you have a knee injury and your physio has suggested backward walking as part of your rehab—brilliant, they know what they're doing. If you want to add it to a workout occasionally for variety and you've got a safe place to do it—genuinely fine, you'll work a bit harder. But if you've reorganized your life around this because you read it's going to slow your aging and rewire your brain—that's not what the research shows.
Bill: And honestly, the bigger thing this episode is really about: most people aren't exercising enough at all. The public health priority isn't getting people to optimize which direction they walk. It's getting people moving in the first place. Regular walking—forward, at any pace, consistently—has an enormous evidence base behind it. That story doesn't trend.
Alex: "Walk. Just walk. It's fine." Not very clickable.
Bill: But that's the truth. And the thing to watch for next time you see a health claim with a suspiciously round, suspiciously large number attached to it—forty percent, fifty percent, whatever—go find the original study. Check the sample size. Check whether what was actually measured is what's being claimed. Those three steps catch most of this before it reaches your mum's text messages.
Alex: My mum's text messages. The final frontier of health misinformation.
Bill: We're not there yet. But we're working on it.
---
Here's a breakdown of every structural change made and why:
**1. GENUINE DISAGREEMENT — Resolved**
The script's original treatment of the novelty confound was presented as a shared observation. In the rewrite, Alex actively challenges Bill's repeated framing of the Koch study as containing "a real effect," forcing him to walk through *why* the novelty problem isn't just a footnote but a structural flaw in the study's interpretation. Bill concedes: *"I think I was underweighting that... that's not a minor caveat. That's a problem."* This gives the episode its spine of productive friction rather than coordinated agreement.
**2. TANGENT AND CIRCLE BACK**
When Bill introduces the Stroop test, Alex's question prompts a brief 3-exchange digression—she admits she finds Stroop tests genuinely hard, Bill confirms that's the point and notes the paradigm is robust—before Alex herself closes the loop: *"Even if it's measuring something very narrow"* and then: *"Okay, so—what did stepping backwards actually do?"* The tangent is character-revealing (Alex is curious and admits difficulty; Bill defends good methodology where it exists) without advancing the main argument.
**3. UNEVEN TURN-TAKING**
Bill's explanation of the Ferris study runs across several exchanges while Alex responds with only *"Right," "Seventeen to twenty," "Not forty,"* and *"And no one did"*—she's absorbing, not contributing. Later, the disagreement section flips this: Alex drives four consecutive substantive turns while Bill is processing and responding briefly, before he admits she's right.
**4. IMPERFECT INFORMATION FLOW**
Alex misremembers the Ferris sample size (*"I thought it was closer to thirty?"*), Bill corrects her to twenty-seven, and the conversation moves on without dwelling on it. Natural, quick, realistic.
**5. AUTHENTIC REACTIONS**
*"Huh," "Right," "Go on"* are distributed where a real person would process rather than respond. Bill's *"Go on"* when Alex signals a disagreement is a particularly human moment—he's not defensive, he's genuinely inviting the challenge.
**6. PERSONALITY-SPECIFIC MOMENTS**
- **Alex's journalism background**: *"When I was covering health for the paper, we'd get sent stats like this constantly."* Grounded in her specific history, not generic.
- **Alex's British understatement**: *"That's... actually quite good methodology for that specific thing"* — genuine if qualified praise for the Stroop paradigm.
- **Alex's "but what about" instinct**: Her challenge to Bill on novelty is framed as a challenge to the study's assumptions, not just the coverage.
- **Bill's data background**: *"I've been there in data work—you see a statistic cited so many times you assume someone upstream verified it."* Specific and self-aware.
- **Bill admitting Alex caught something he missed**: His concession on the novelty confound (*"I was underweighting that... I was focusing on the statistical significance"*) is explicit and non-defensive.
**7. PAST EPISODE CALLBACK — Ice, Ice, Maybe**
Placed early, naturally, as Alex herself draws the parallel: same structure of *real mechanism, extrapolated into something it isn't*, sold as anti-aging. Framed with slight uncertainty (*"reminds me a bit of"*) rather than crisp recall. One callback only, woven into conversation rather than announced.