Media Watch 5 August 2025

 

Judging by the quality of the discourse, it’s clear that most people don’t read public health articles beyond the headlines. In many ways, that’s a good thing. If people dug deep, it may result in a series of questions, like, “So, you’re saying my tax money was spent on that study?” “Wait, these people have the ears of our lawmakers?”, “Peer review is really broken, isn’t it,?” and so on.

There is a lot to hate about public health research. It’s not just the opportunity costs of having educated people run multi-year studies to confirm that water is wet. It’s also the narrowness of what gets funded, published, and distributed by the media.

Too often, funders implicitly dictate what they need, and the science part is just about retroactively fitting data around conclusions that recommend giving the government more power over our lives.

Real science—done by scientists, not savvy-careerists—is messy. It’s complicated, nuanced, and challenges rather than confirms assumptions. Nowhere is this better highlighted than in a recent Washington Times piece by the esteemed Fredrik Nyström, a professor of internal medicine and endocrinology at Linköping University in Sweden.

No More Mr. Nys Guy

There isn’t all that much room for heterodox thought in the modern scientific landscape. It’s a significant issue in public health because funding is so tightly tied to having the correct opinion. As Nyström’s article demonstrates, there is a lot of received wisdom around public health that doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny.

Science is meant to challenge our thinking. We all have models of the world and assumptions of how it works. But these assumptions aren’t worth much unless we test and challenge them to breaking point. When researchers do this, sacred cows are at peril, and that’s a good thing.

While Nystrom’s article looks at things like diet and exercise, it was the section on snus that caught our eye, in particular, a 2025 clinical study that looked at the impact of quitting snus after 12 weeks.

The study, linked here, involved adults aged 18-70 years old, who mostly had normal blood pressure and mostly used snus, though some used nicotine pouches.

After 12 weeks, users saw:

  • A 4lbs or 1.8 kg weight gain.
  • A rise in systolic blood pressure by about 3.7mm Hg.
  • No significant improvement in traditional metabolic risk markers, like blood sugar or cholesterol.

Researchers thought that quitting nicotine would reduce blood pressure and even reduce blood sugar and cholesterol. While Nystrom does not go that far himself, the study hints that it might have been better for participants to keep pouching if lower weight and systolic blood pressure were a priority.

The body is a funny thing. If you did a vox pop about whether training for a marathon or using snus was more likely to cause more heart damage, we know how the public would answer. However, according to Nystrom’s research, myocardial scarring is three times more common among marathon runners than couch potatoes.

Follow public health logic, and that means we should ban all marathons to “protect the hearts”. Back on planet earth, we can accept that everything comes with some pros and cons, life is messy and nuanced, and sometimes the primary voice you should listen to is yourself. If it works for you, do it. Life is for living.

Final thoughts

Ideologues need to crush down our rich and complex world into a flat space. But the real problems occur when they forget their 2D renderings are not an oversimplification. People like Fredrik Nyström are the antidote to these chancers. They help us face the world as it is so that we can make better choices for our bodies and our minds.

There are many shorthand beliefs about what constitutes a healthy life. The “healthiness” of breakfast, low-fat diets, nicotine abstinence, and long-distance running might have taken a few dings due to recent studies. The era of these bores trying to dictate how we live our lives is over.