"There's a lot of good data and science and knowledge that's locked in the ivory tower"

On bridging the translational gap between academia and the general population and the role of social media for science communication with exercise physiologist Alyssa Olenick, Ph.D.

Dec 06, 2023

I've been thinking about science communications a lot lately.

One of my favorite parts of my job is talking to really smart scientists and researchers and learning about the cool things that they’re doing in their labs.

Many of them recognize that there is a translational research gap—the gap between what happens in the labs and universities versus what the general public knows and understands and what can be applied to daily life. It’s something that also came up repeatedly at the Female Athlete Conference this summer—the gap between the latest science and what doctors, coaches, and athletic training staff know and how they advise athletes.

There’s a statistic that says it can take up to 17 years for scientific research findings to be incorporated into clinical practice.

That’s a long time.

And it may, in part, explain why there is so much pseudoscience in the fitness, wellness, and health industries. While it can take years to build up a scientific evidence base, people can share information on social media instantaneously. A TikTok or Instagram reel can go viral in a fraction of that time and spread misinformation.

We need good science communicators. But science communication is more than just communicating scientific concepts and research findings to the general public. At the heart of it, it’s about building trust too.

To better understand the translational research gap, the barriers and challenges academics face with science communication and where (and how) social media fits into the picture, I talked to Alyssa Olenick, Ph.D.

Alyssa straddles the academic and popular science worlds. She’s a postdoc and subject-matter expert in exercise physiology and she also runs a popular social media platform—@doclyssfitness—where she breaks down really complex topics and combats a lot of the noise in the wellness and fitness industry.

Alyssa

I'm Alyssa Olenick. I have a PhD in exercise physiology and I'm currently working as a postdoc studying metabolism and menopause. My research is largely in the areas of exercise metabolism and female physiology.

Concurrently, I have a large social media following where I run, promote, and support my business. I offer training programs that are strength-based and running-based. I do a lot of scientific communication and education in the areas of fitness health, and general human performance.

Christine

I remember the first time I came across your account on Instagram, it was a reel you’d posted calling out one of these Instagram girlies who was depicting female athlete health as an “Us Vs. Them” situation. I remember stopping to watch your reel and thinking, we need more of this. You were drawing attention to the nuances of a very complex topic that people were simplifying into a 15 second video.

Can you talk a bit about your use of social media? How you started and how it’s evolved over time?

doclyssfitness

A post shared by @doclyssfitness

Alyssa

I started my Instagram when I was in my masters program because I wanted to use it as a tool to get better at writing. It was a great platform for me to practice conveying ideas to people in a concise manner and just to write something every day. I'm not a journalist, an author or anything like that but scientists are writers. At the end of the day, a lot of our job is writing.

I used social media as a way to share what I was learning during grad school and my Ph.D. and documenting that along the way. I’ve always loved explaining the things that I'm nerding out about. It’s a fun way to practice teaching because they say you only understand things as well as you can teach them. It also allowed me to feel like the work I was doing in grad school could directly impact people and have a positive impact on the industry.

As a scientist, your impact is really slow and low unless you're like a big impact researcher. There's a lot of good data and science and knowledge that's locked in the ivory tower, so to speak, that the general population needs. We need people that have been on both sides of it to be out there communicating. Otherwise, it's just a bad game of telephone.

I’ve been very frustrated with the poor information in the fitness industry—the misinformation or just seeing people spin their wheels and doing things that are wasting their time. They don't know any better because of the content and information that's out there.

I didn’t do it with the intention of growing it into anything or starting a business. It was just a fun thing I did with grad school. But things evolved and I saw the opportunity to make some money on the side. The ability to make parallel income while being a grad student was really appealing. I can't pretend like that wasn't a thing.

Christine

With your social media, was there a point when you knew you were onto something that really resonated with people?

Alyssa

When I first decided to be more committed to growing my platform and starting my business, I started to see that people were interested in my kind of training style and what I have to offer. 2019 is when my page started to really grow and get a lot of engagement. That was probably when I started to catch a lot of strides with the growth and finding my voice within the madness of the industry.

Christine

You started to touch a little bit on this, but the internet, and especially social media, does a really good job at reducing everything to very simplistic terms. Everything needs to be a carousel of slides or a reel and we lose a lot of the complexity. You’ve been involved on both sides of this. From your perspective, how have you seen things change within the field of exercise physiology—and more specifically female athlete health and performance?

Alyssa

There used to be no conversation about female athlete health performance. I don't think anyone in sports science, besides maybe like one other person at that time, was talking about this stuff at all.

I do think prior to the blow up of reels, people were a lot more willing to actually sit and read a longer, more detailed post and were interested in learning and understanding stuff. I really enjoyed that period of time in 2019, even 2020 and summer 2021.

But that started to drift and that switch was when a lot of this female physiology stuff became trendy and gimmicky and started to really blow up. You get into the territory of the quick-fix, simple-answer, 15-second video culture and it was like a perfect storm for spreading misinformation, mixing together virality with appealing to people’s wants and needs and the struggles they were facing.

There was nobody that was in this field or niche out there clarifying or defending or talking about these things from the side of science and data. There's a ton of amazing researchers in this area, but they're not on social media. Maybe a few researchers that have a lot of name recognition in the industry on the side of nutrition, hypertrophy and strength training. But it was a wide open field, but also that made it wide open for anybody to say anything.

Christine

It feels like it's something that is so prevalent within the wellness and fitness industries in particular. These fields are seemingly ripe for pseudoscience because people feel neglected by the healthcare system. They’re struggling with issues and want answers.

I'm curious why is it easier to believe the misinformation even when presented with a scientific paper or someone like yourself, who has a science background and is literally doing this research.

Alyssa

I think the struggle is that when trying to disseminate good information, if you use nuance and don’t give an absolute takeaway, for one, the consumer has a lot of leeway to interpret it based on their own lens. This has been very interesting to me. I’ll share my take on cycle syncing or something like that and it’s very nuanced, middle-of-the-ground take, and people will interpret the same piece of content in two different ways because of the lens they see the world through.

I think that it's also that a lot of people kind of know what they're looking for, and people that are spreading misinformation are speaking in the language of the consumer. So consumers will identify with something [they might see in a piece of content]—those are my struggles or those are symptoms or issues I have—so I must have this thing and this solution must work for me.

It's playing into people's desire for simple solutions and simple answers. Everyone's tired. Everyone feels like garbage. They just want to feel better and want the easy thing to do. That’s human nature. And they may have been ignored or dismissed, which happens to a lot of women. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that it requires the consumer to have some mental resistance.

But the consumer also doesn't have the skills to interpret if their favorite hormone coach has better information than me. They just don't know. Then you have a lot of people who do have credentials and high levels of training and education who are saying things that are maybe not the best. So how are they to know who to trust?

And especially with the way the internet works now where we’re seeing the misinformation magnified because it’s viral. People just copy, paste, and repeat what other people are saying—because it gets views and clicks—and you start to see more and more of the same thing. Most of the stuff these people are sharing is so overgeneralized that it's probably going to make people feel better, at least a little bit, so they get “instant results” so they trust it more.

When you add a good looking influencer with the aesthetic content who looks a certain way, it adds another layer of appeal because we’re visual creatures and social media is a visual app. Whether or not they realize it or not, there’s a perception that if I also do these thing, I will also look, feel, and be perceived that way. It's very complex.

I wish I could remember the statistic but it was something like for every piece of misinformation, somebody needs to see good information an obscene number of times to combat that.

Christine

What advice do you have for people in terms of how to evaluate the social media message and information they come across? How can you tell whether it’s something reasonable or someone you can trust?

Alyssa

It's hard. You can’t say only trust X, Y, Z people because there are people who have advanced levels of training who will play into these things. It's even harder when it’s these people who are spreading that misinformation and so people are like, wait a second, why should I trust you instead?

It's hard for the consumer because they just don't have the language to know when something's crappy versus not. Someone can use a bunch of big words that sound really good and are convincing and you just don't know, right? Like, you don't know that that actually isn't physiologically feasible.

I tell people to be really cautious and critical if something sounds too good to be true, if people are giving very generalized solutions to complex problems.

Start developing critical thinking skills. Get them to start noticing the trends of what most logical people are saying and the things that seem to appear to work. When you see come across something that’s counter to that, ask, does this make sense? Don't be afraid to ask people: What's the mechanism? Why does that work? How does that work? What data or evidence do you have for that?

Usually, people who are sensical will be willing to explain their stance to you or be able to defend it whereas other people will quote a book or dismiss people having research. I’ve seen this in the female physiology space where people say there isn’t data on this because we’re left out [of the research] which is just a lazy answer.

That’s where the role of science communicators or “debunkers” comes in. A lot of my peers are constantly debunking things. There’s probably a time and place for it because you can use specific examples to show people what this looks like, what they’re doing to market to you (the messages, language, and trends), and then help them understand why this does or doesn’t work this way. They can then take those skills and apply it to things they see in the future.

Christine

Do you think that's part of your job to call out these messages and debunk misinformation?

Alyssa

I have a love-hate relationship with the constantly of calling out of other people's videos, debunking, and stitching because I think it can sometimes be volatile. It can be exhausting. For many people, it's just entertainment. It plays into that the algorithm’s extremism and it always wants to promote things that are a little bit more argumentative or combative.

But, it is our job to vet and communicate good information and be mindful of what we put out there.

I go back and forth on because there is that virality component to it and that content reaches more people. But most people are just like, yeah, get 'em. They want it for entertainment rather than actually gaining something from it. But then I feel like as a creator, it ends up creating more arguments and problems for you that get in the way of just communicating and making good content.

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Christine

The other thing people often ask me is, what are good accounts to follow? For me, the ones that come to mind are you, Kelly McNulty, Stanford FASTR. Those are accounts that I trust, that are science-backed and evidence-based.

At the same time, from my perspective, there seems to be this sense that translational science may not be sciencey enough for academia. Or that social media is not be like a good use of your time. Can you talk to me a little about that like that?

Alyssa

I struggle with that a lot, maybe more than even some of my peers because I have like a bigger footprint in the industry at this point in time.

There's this weird, new imposter syndrome I have where I'm like all of my other peers are more established researchers or professionals. But they're not getting the reach and exposure or opportunities I'm getting because I have a digital footprint. That digital footprint also takes a lot of time and effort to do and put out there.

I often joke that I'm like Hannah Montana. I have my research science life and then I have my social media life, and I don't marry them a lot. I'm very, very aware that how you portray yourself on social media in a way that will get views, engagement, and likes plays on trends that might be considered unprofessional in academia. It looks distracting from doing actual good research and being an actual good researcher and scientist. It looks unprofessional. But it is productive. It's may actually have more immediate impact. You need both.

It’s still feels taboo to really invest in your platform rather than just cross posting or getting opportunities because your name spreads from your research. There is a little bit of shame and embarrassment for me like it's not as prestigious. That if I do decide never to go back to academia after I finished my postdoc and decide to be all in on this social media/business/consulting/whatever you want to call this thing, that it's a lesser path or I failed, even though it's becoming more common and accepted.

The academic world sometimes is too much in their bubble and unaware of what's going on in the industry or with the general public that I think they lack the understanding of what is actually needed or what humans are actually struggling with. Sometimes they lack this understanding of what your work can actually mean for people beyond the lab.

Christine

I feel like that's the piece of it that I've always been really curious about because there's so much amazing work that is going on in the labs. But, as you said, it's kind of locked up in this ivory tower and there’s that lack of translation, of getting information out, and social media feels like a way to do that more immediately.

What can scientists do better to disseminate their research? Should that be part of their job beyond just academic writing, beyond just publishing in journals?

Alyssa

I struggle with this from two perspectives. One, academics are overworked to begin with, especially female academics. I never want to come off across saying that, scientists need to be doing X, Y, and Z on top of service and research and teaching and mentoring.

One reason that a lot of people communicate their science to begin with is to promote their work because then you get more citations. But academia doesn’t allow for flexibility in terms of what’s considered successful versus not, like if your tenure, promotion, or research productivity wasn’t just measured by your science publications and grants but also your scientific communication, speaking events, maybe social media-type stuff, media interviews. I think it would help a lot if there was more weight placed on those activities and they were considered as a productive use of your time.

A lot of my peers who have left academia and have large social media followings. They are probably making more impact on a day-to-day basis with the work that they're doing on social media than any one paper is going to make in 17 years. And you know, at the end of the day I struggle with that a lot. Is my time better served doing this writing and publishing if I'm not going to be at a big R1 institution doing huge, important impactful trials? Or saying, here's the data that really incredible people are doing and here's how to apply and make it work for you?

I think that may change as we grow. Social media is becoming more of a norm in our lives and a lot of these old school academic thoughts of what's professional versus not, what's a distraction versus not are changing. A lot of scientists are leaving academia, they're not doing postdocs, they are not staying in research positions, because of the structures within it. And just as much as people want to be influencers, there's an edge to being a famous science communicator now or having a big platform. There are perks and it’s appealing. So I do think we'll see more of this as we go in the next few years.

What happens with me and some of my peers who aren't in academia, I feel like we end up doing all these interviews all the time because a lot of those people [in academia] don't have the time. I feel like it's more of an obligation to say yes to every magazine that asks for an interview because who are they gonna ask otherwise?

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