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On March 27, 2019, PepsiCo sent CrossFit, Inc. a cease-and-desist letter regarding the artwork accompanying Professor Tim Noakes’ Hyponatremia of Exercise series. CrossFit, Inc. created the image for this series exposing Gatorade’s deadly marketing campaign. The artwork served to elucidate Gatorade’s hydration myths, not advertise or indicate a commercial good or service. As such, it fell solidly within CrossFit’s fair use rights. CrossFit will not comply with PepsiCo’s demands and is prepared to defend its rights to the full extent of the law. CrossFit also will continue to shine a light on the fatal consequences of the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries’ efforts to make a profit through the corruption of the health sciences—including nutrition, exercise, and hydration.

For three decades, Tennessee levied an unjust “amusement tax” on small gyms, including Tennessee’s 150+ CrossFit affiliates. No more, following extensive lobbying by CrossFit, Inc. and the efforts of Tennessee’s affiliates to push back against this arbitrary penalization of their business model.

Professor Tim Noakes highlights key moments in the evolution of official drinking guidelines from 1880 to 2007, focusing on various organizations’ departures from sound scientific practices in the 1980s and ‘90s. He reviews, in particular, the American College of Sports Medicine’s Position Stands of that era, as well as the U.S. military’s similar acceptance of the Zero-Percent Dehydration Doctrine despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting the associated drinking guidelines. As evidence of the danger of these recommendations mounted, the U.S. military began to revise its position. The sports drink industry, however, continued to overlook the risk of overhydration. As Noakes comments, “When commerce becomes involved in science, the rules of proper scientific conduct soon change.”

The knee joint is comprised of four bones: the femur, patella, tibia, and fibula. They combine to create one of the least structurally stable joints in the body. Accordingly, the knee can only move safely in a limited range and pattern of motion, unlike the shoulder or the hip.

This famous 1984 TIME cover article was published soon after the results of the Lipid Research Clinics Coronary Primary Prevention Trial (LRC-CPPT) were released. The article cemented the idea that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat were linked to heart disease and should be reduced in the American diet. It broadly illustrates the landscape of heart disease thinking and practice at the time, which centered on the well-established diet-heart hypothesis.

The 1982 Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT) was a multimillion-dollar trial to test the effectiveness of a complex intervention in reducing heart disease mortality. The trial randomized 12,866 high-risk men aged 35 to 57 years old into two groups: a special intervention (SI) group that received “stepped-care treatment for hypertension, counseling for cigarette smoking, and dietary advice for lowering blood cholesterol levels”; and a usual care group that had access to “usual sources of health care in the community.” There was no reduction in overall mortality in the intervention group, despite reductions in blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and smoking rates. While the combinatorial nature of the trial makes it impossible to understand the impact of any specific piece of the intervention, the trial failed to demonstrate that a diet-based, cholesterol-reducing intervention could reduce overall mortality. Funded alongside the Lipid Research Clinics Coronary Primary Prevention Trial, MRFIT ostensibly was funded (≥$200 million) to provide insights into effective heart disease treatments but did not successfully deliver such insights.

In 1972 and 1973, a large National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant funded the Lipid Research Clinics Coronary Primary Prevention Trial (LRC-CPPT) to substantiate the then-emerging understanding of modifiable heart disease risk factors (alongside the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, or MRFIT). The trial randomized subjects to either cholesterol-lowering cholestyramine or placebo for an average of 7.4 years and observed a significant associated reduction in heart disease morbidity and mortality. The trial became one of the most important pieces of evidence cited in support of the diet-heart hypothesis and was used to support the claim that a 1% reduction in cholesterol reduces coronary mortality by 2%. However, the effects of lowering cholesterol with cholestyramine cannot be extrapolated to the effects of lowering cholesterol by other means, such as diet.