Questioning Wellness Myths: What Xand van Tulleken's Make Me Well Teaches Students About Evidence

How can you tell if a viral health claim is supported by evidence? Treat it as a reportable claim and trace it: find the original study, ask whether 'linked to' means 'causes', check who funded the research, and name the evidence before you assert anything. In Make Me Well, Xand van Tulleken applies that habit to wellness myths; a Guardian review describes the book as dismantling the spurious science behind modern snake oils, from collagen to turmeric. The skill is timely: UK headlines are asking whether seven cups of tea a day is 'linked to better heart health' — precisely the kind of claim to interrogate, not repeat.

Treat Every Viral Claim as a Reportable Claim

The first shift for student writers is attitude. A wellness myth is not just a wrong fact to laugh at; it is a claim with an origin, a source and a history, which makes it reportable. A Guardian review of Make Me Well describes van Tulleken setting off into what it calls the wild west of wellness and dismantling the spurious science behind modern snake oils, from collagen to turmeric. Notice the method underneath the tone: he does not simply say a claim feels silly. He goes looking for what the claim is based on, and that search — not the mockery — is what makes the writing evidence-based. Mockery alone proves nothing; a traced origin, checked against the actual source, is what lets you assert or reject a claim in print.

Our exercise, the claim card: pick one health claim from your social feed this week and fill in five lines — who says it, what exactly they assert, what study or authority they point to, what that source actually measured, and what remains unknown. If you cannot complete a line, write 'unverified' rather than guessing. The point of this exercise is honesty about gaps, not instant debunking. A claim card you cannot finish is still a result: it tells you the claim is circulating ahead of its evidence, which is itself worth reporting carefully. Do one card per week and keep them in a notebook; over a term you will build a personal archive of traced and untraced claims, and the untraced pile is usually the bigger one.

Find the Original Study Before You Write a Word

A headline is attention, not evidence. This week, UK trending searches have been asking what a new study found about daily tea drinking and heart health, with headlines reporting that seven cups a day was 'linked to better heart health'. From those headlines alone, you cannot know what kind of study it was, who was followed, for how long, or what was measured. So the fact-checker's first move is unglamorous: find the original paper or the organisation behind the claim, and read at least the abstract. If you cannot locate the source, that limitation belongs in your paragraph — 'a widely shared headline cites a study we could not trace' is a factual sentence, and often the most honest one available.

Our exercise, the trace drill: take the tea headline and spend thirty minutes trying to find the underlying research — the journal, the authors, the funder, the sample size. Write down every step of your search, including dead ends. Then write two sentences stating only what you could verify, hedged accordingly. This drill trains the most valuable habit in fact-checking for students: separating what a headline says a study found from what you can personally confirm the study found. Most viral wellness myths collapse at exactly this step, long before any statistics are needed, because the headline turns out to rest on a conference poster, a press release or nothing findable at all.

'Linked To' Is Not 'Causes'

Correlation versus causation is the oldest trap in health reporting, and the word 'linked' is where it hides. The Guardian review offers a useful case: it notes that in the early 2000s, big studies were linking vitamin D not just to bone health but to cancer, heart disease and dementia — a range van Tulleken, quoted in the review, calls dizzying. Yet the same review notes that even the NHS website advises that everyone should consider taking a daily dose during autumn and winter. The lesson is not that vitamin D is a myth; it is that 'linked to' headlines can race far ahead of what evidence supports, even around a supplement with cautious, mainstream advice behind it.

Our exercise, the causation checklist: whenever you meet an 'X linked to Y' claim, ask four questions in order. Was this a controlled experiment or an observational study? Could something else — income, age, overall diet — explain the link? Did the study test what the headline claims, or something narrower? And who paid for the research? Write your answers as sentences, not ticks. Then rewrite the original headline so it states only what the evidence supports, even if the result is duller. 'Tea drinkers in one study had better heart outcomes' is weaker prose but stronger journalism, and dull accuracy beats vivid overreach every single time.

Name the Evidence, Then Practise Writing It

The final habit is naming your evidence in your own prose. Strong evidence-based writing does not hide behind 'studies show'; it says which study, how strong, and who disagrees. When you write about wellness myths, attribute every load-bearing claim: 'a Guardian review describes...', 'the review quotes van Tulleken calling the range of proposed problems dizzying'. Hedge honestly where the record is thin, and never let a vivid sentence outrun your sources. Readers trust writers who show their working, and showing your working is also the best defence against repeating a claim you never checked in the first place.

Our exercise, the evidence-named draft: write a 300-word piece on one wellness claim, where every factual sentence names its source in the sentence itself. Then swap drafts with a classmate and act as each other's fact-checker, marking any claim that lacks a named source. If you want a wider audience for work built this way, the Cosmopolitan Writing Award accepts rolling entries with no shared closing date, submission is free, valid AI feedback is private, and any AI assistance must be disclosed while the work remains primarily your own contribution. Evidence-led nonfiction is exactly the kind of writing such practice is designed to build.

Sources