The Nuzzo Letter

On December 19, 2024, the United States (U.S.) Bureau of Labor Statistics published their annual press release on fatal occupational injuries . The release, which amounts to a brief report, is 10 pages long. In the first sentence of the report, the Bureau states that there were 5,283 fatal work injuries in the U.S. in 2023. The Bureau then displays the results in a bar graph, labelled “Chart 1.” C...

On December 4th, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare (UHC), was purposely gunned down in Manhattan outside the New York Midtown hotel. The alleged assassin, who is now in custody, is Luigi Mangione. Taylor Lorenz is a former Washington Post journalist, who is known for making various irrational and unhinged remarks about social and political issues. A few days after the murder of Thompson, Lor...

On October 13, I received an email from a master’s student of exercise science at the Shanghai University of Sport in China. The student’s name was Mingyue Yin. Mr. Yin invited me to co-author a consensus paper about minimal dose exercise training. Minimal dose exercise training, which I have discussed previously at The Nuzzo Letter , is an amount of exercise that does not meet recommended exercis...

On October 28, I shared data at The Nuzzo Letter showing that substantially fewer men than women vote in elections for United States (U.S.) president . This has been the case dating back to at least 1964. Each election, women make up roughly 53.5% of those who vote, while men make up the other 46.5%. In 2020, 68.4% of the adult female population voted compared to 65% of the adult male population....

“I would not want to be president and would not vote for a woman president. A woman cannot reasonably want to be a commander-in-chief. I prefer to answer the question by outlining what a rational man would do if he were president.” That was Ayn Rand’s answer to an article-interview question that asked her and 15 other prominent women in 1968 about what they would do if they were President of the U...

In June, the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance published a survey study on the history of exercise science. The survey, titled “ Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Essential Papers in Sports and Exercise Physiology ,” was conducted by two accomplished exercise scientists – Jos de Koning and Carl Foster. de Koning and Foster asked 52 male and female exercise science acade...

Previously, at The Nuzzo Letter, I explained that the White House’s Initiative on Women’s Health Research would be allocating 100 million dollars to work being done by women’s health researchers and startup companies. Now, we know more details of where that money will go. The Office for Research on Women’s Health , in coordination with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issued a Notice of Sp...

On November 13th of 2023, the Biden White House and its Gender Policy Council announced the creation of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. On February 23rd of 2024, the White House revealed the initiative would start with an investment of $100 million dollars into work being done by women’s health researchers and startup companies. The $100 million dollars adds to the oodles of...

In March of this year, I shared a story about one of my research papers that was found to be so disagreeable to a women on the journal’s editorial team, that she decided to resign from her position in protest to the editor’s decision to accept my paper for publication. The paper was finally published online earlier this month, and what follows is a description of the content that one woman found s...

Let us pretend that you are asked to perform five consecutive sets of resistance exercise with a one-minute rest between each set. You can choose whatever exercise you like, and you can lift whatever weight you like, but the weight must be the same for all five exercise sets, and you must try to perform as many repetitions as possible during each set. For example, you might choose the biceps curl...

[Skip to the end to see all the photographs!] In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments Act into United States law. The broad aim of Title IX was to ensure, within federally funded educational institutions, that individuals were not discriminated against based on their sex. Men and women were to receive equal opportunities to participate in educational programs,...

There are many reasons why one should want to maintain adequate muscle strength throughout life. Greater muscle strength correlates with reduced risk of all-cause mortality , reduced risk of falls , better ability to perform activities of daily living , and better recoveries after hospital admissions . The most effective way to maintain or improve one’s muscle strength is by participating in resis...

In Story 5 of my personal experiences with ideological drama in academic peer review, we learned how an editor can hold a paper under review unnecessarily, culminating in a total review time of almost two years. Such delays hinder important data from being shared quickly with the public and with other researchers. Story 6 – the last story in this series – is similar to all the preceding stories in...

In Story 4 of my personal experiences with ideological drama in academic peer review, we learned how incompetent and biased editors and reviewers slow the review process. This then delays findings, which go against their beliefs, from being published. We also learned of the increased tendency for such delays to occur when the research in question deals with sex or gender. In the case of Story 4 ,...

In Story 3 of my personal experiences with ideological drama in academic peer review, we learned how editorial safetyism, caused by a worry to publish something that might be deemed “controversial,” delays important and corrective information from being published. We also learned that this occurs when the topic being discussed has to deal with sex or gender. Story 4 is another example of the issue...

In Story 2 of my personal experiences with ideological drama in academic peer review, we learned of a peer reviewer at the journal Sports Medicine who rejected one of my papers because I presented data to support my position that volunteer self-selection bias might be a contributing factor to fewer female than male participants in certain exercise research trials. The reviewer stated “Data be damn...

In Story 1 of my personal experiences with ideological drama in academic peer review, we learned of an editorial assistant who resigned from her post because the journal she worked for decided to accept for publication my forthcoming paper on Woke medicine. This was certainly an unusual and dramatic tale, but the story I am about to share, Story 2, is my most concerning experience with peer review...

Academic peer review is the process by which professors critique their colleagues’ research to determine whether the research is of sufficient quality to be published in a journal and thus made available for public consumption. Contemporary peer review is littered with many issues. It is often slow. Some submissions might take several months to a year or more to proceed through the review process....

History is important. It helps to place contemporary issues in their proper context. It can help us to appreciate the things that we currently have, when those things are better than they were in the past. History can also provide the motivation or yearning for something better, when things in the moment are not as good as they could be. Either way, history informs. Recently, while searching for i...

Let’s pretend for a moment that I am your personal trainer or strength coach. I advise you that for your Monday workouts, I want you to perform the following exercises: the arm curl, the overhead press, the hamstring curl, and the heel raise. I then advise you that for your Thursday workouts, I want you to perform the biceps curl, the shoulder press, the knee flexion, and the calf raise. Thus, for...

On January 9th of this year, the Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men , headed by Dr. Warren Farrell, published an open letter addressed to the President and First Lady of the United States, calling for more attention to boys’ and men’s health issues. The letter is available online and also displayed below. As a member of the Coalition, and one of the architects and co-authors...

A news report on January 13th revealed that the Australia Football League, or AFL, is implementing a new policy where player body weights will no longer be listed in the official season guide. This may come as a surprise to many of you who closely follow sports and know that body weight is a descriptive metric of players that has been reported for many years in various sports. So, why the change?...

Our letter: “Women and men report unequal interest in participating in exercise research” Their reply: “Reply to Nuzzo and Deaner: “Investigator bias” is a potent influence on the underrepresentation of women research participants in biomedical research” Their paper: “Underrepresentation of women in exercise science and physiology research is associated with authorship gender” Our survey study: “M...

Women as participants in research trials continues to be a hot topic. In one previous post , I presented data showing that, even though we often hear claims that women are underrepresented as research participants, data from the Office on Research on Women’s Health clearly show this to be untrue. Their data show that each year women comprise more than 50% of participants in research trials that ar...

These days, it is not too difficult to find an academic paper or news article that states that women are “underrepresented” as participants in medical research trials. In fact, in this week’s press release from the White House, in which it announced the creation of a White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, the underrepresentation of women as participants in health research was mentioned...