Layne Norton Is the Internet’s Guardian of Truth
IT’S A CLASSIC setup of his: Layne Norton, PhD, picture-in-a-picture, as a wellness influencer’s clip plays. “Can we just say, right here, right now, that we’re done with calories?” the wellness influencer Mindy Pelz says to an unseen podcast host. Pelz is smiling, shaking her head, and leaning forward for emphasis. “Calories don’t tell us anything about our hormonal health … calories are outdated,” she says, both arms shooting out as if she were quick-drawing at high-noon, mala beads coiled on her right wrist.
As the clip of Pelz continues, Norton shifts his weight from foot to foot, wound tight, in a fitted black T-shirt, a vein protruding from his massive left biceps. He withholds comment, his eyes still adhered to the phone screen he’s viewing.
“Blood sugar, on the other hand, absolutely tells you how quickly you’re going to age,” Pelz says. “If you’re going to store fat, if you’re going to balance hormones …”
Then, 54 seconds in, Norton rubs his face in mock exasperation. Or maybe it’s real exasperation. No matter how many times he explains the science of energy balance (“calories in, calories out”), there’s always someone like Pelz who dismisses evidence with a hand wave and evangelical-like self-assurance. And if you’re one of Norton’s 1.1 million @biolayne followers on Instagram, you know what’s coming next. The clip of Pelz cuts and Norton stands in front of a white background, addressing the viewer directly.
“No, it’s not outdated,” he starts, and then goes on to cite the deep bank of research dedicated to the study of calories as they relate to health. Over the next five-ish minutes, Norton drops words and phrases like “meta-analysis” and “clinically relevant” as studies flash up on the screen. His tone is firm, a weary parent saying Look, if I have to tell you one more time.
To close his video, Norton lands on a glaring problem not just with Pelz’s evidence-free claims, but with her total lack of credentials. “She’s not an endocrinologist, she’s not a nutrition expert, she’s not a medical doctor,” Norton says, with a sick-of-it mic drop: “She’s a chiropractor.”
Norton, 43, is exasperated because, unlike Pelz, he’s an actual expert who studied and worked hard for his degree in nutritional science. Norton is weary because even though he’s been attempting to fight nutrition disinformation through his social channels since 2018, the opportunities keep on coming. And Norton is sick of it because you probably are too. The pushiness of half-truth preachers can feel overwhelming. But where many academics have chosen to opt out, Norton is putting his neck out. Debunking internet hucksters has become a calling he never expected yet has fully embraced.
In an age where pseudoscience has been weaponized and nutritional literacy is plummeting, the stakes are high for Norton. He’s fighting back against a flood of disinformation. His fans say Norton is a guardian of truth. His critics say he’s an asshole, ego-maniac, and carries biases from his days of doctoral research. And even close colleagues wonder how much good he’s actually doing.
Norton says he’s heard it all, and he’s going to keep fighting, according to his own code of conduct. “You punch up, you don’t punch down” he says. Punching down would be bullying—and he knows all too well what comes from that.
From Pain to Gains
WHEN YOU SIT down with someone whose upper arms look like pythons trying to digest cantaloupes, it’s hard to visualize that person as a skinny, four-eyed teenager. Especially when you’re sitting in the family room of his bayside mansion in Tampa, looking out on rows of yachts and the open water beyond.
Norton says he was diagnosed with ADHD when he was six, which right from the jump made him different and weird. “I was really into sharks, and I wanted to be a shark biologist,” he says. Which, yes, is an unusual passion for a kid to have in Evansville, Indiana.
In Norton’s case, his mistake was trying to hang with popular kids who didn’t want a shark nerd to lower their brand value. “I think that’s why I got singled out, if I had to guess,” he says. “I kept trying to reach up.” Norton has told his followers about the abuse he suffered: Regularly being cornered by four or five kids and beaten senseless. A school counselor told him he just had low self-esteem. His mom told him not to fight back and ignore the bullying, which only made things worse. Both people, he knows now after working with a trauma therapist who diagnosed him as an adult with PTSD, minimized the issue.
He endured the abuse until his teens, when Norton turned to the gym to help stop the bullying (and, okay, get girls, he admits). By the time his training turned serious, after the usual starts and stops, he was no longer skinny—and he was no longer picked on.
The transformation he experienced in the gym reinforced something about his character: If he stayed dedicated to a practice, he’d see results. “I’d always been a pretty hard worker,” he says, going back to when he won a trophy for being the most improved player on his youth baseball team. “It was the first time it occurred to me that I could work hard at something and get better.”
Norton, with his mother, after winning his first bodybuilding competition.
Norton took this mentality into his first bodybuilding contest in 2001, when he was 19. Joe Klemczewski, PhD, his former coach, remembers when they first met. “Dr. Joe” was well-known in Evansville as a gym owner, nutrition coach, and natural (“drug-free”) bodybuilder. “I was a serious academic running a serious health and fitness operation,” Klemczewski says. “It wasn’t your typical Gold’s Gym. So here comes this 19-year-old strutting in with his 300-Pound Bench Press Club T-shirt.” That meeting was the catalyst for two formative events in Norton’s early life.
First, with Klemczewski’s help, Norton won the teen division of the Mid-America Muscle Classic, which was a big deal. Second, Norton was so impressed with the 32-year-old Klemczewski’s success as a coach that Norton blurted out, “I want to do what you do.” Klemczewski responded: “A good first step would be, go to school. Figure it out. He did, and the rest is history.”
Again, Norton leaned on his ability to dedicate himself; to focus on doing something hard. In 2005, Norton began working on his doctorate in nutrition science at the University of Illinois. The next year he coauthored the first of several studies about protein and earned his pro card as a natural bodybuilder.
In the background, Norton was a prolific contributor to bodybuilding forums. He estimates he wrote more than 100,000 posts in the 2000s, and answered “way more” than 100,000 emails. Knowing of Norton’s competition success and scientific expertise, people valued what he had to say. That same year, he began charging for online coaching. Clients trusted him—and his advice produced results. “By the time I finished graduate school,” in 2010, “I was making really good money from coaching,” he says. “I thought, I guess I don’t have to get a real job. I can just do this.”
He moved to Tampa, did a series of bodybuilding contests, and even entered a few powerlifting meets. Competitive lifting, at first, was a way for Norton to stay motivated in the gym during the long offseason between bodybuilding shows. But then, he says, “I started hitting numbers I didn’t really imagine at the time.” In 2014, when he pulled a 683-pound deadlift to win a national championship, “part of me was like, ‘Fuck this bodybuilding shit,’” he says. “The feeling I got … I just started chasing that.” A year later, he set a world record with a 668-pound squat.
By that point, Norton had achieved a trifecta of success in academics, athletics, and coaching. He’d survived intense bullying, come to dominate a sport, and found a way to help people. He’d dedicated himself, despite the odds, and pulled through. It was an awe-inspiring résumé for a gym rat. But he would eventually learn that success had a price.
The shattering
IT WAS 2017, and Norton’s world was collapsing around him.
Years of training hard and heavy was taking a vicious toll on his body. He had multiple herniated discs in his lower back, and partial muscle tears in both hips and his left adductors. At times the pain was so overwhelming he struggled to stand up.
Norton was also going through a divorce from his first wife after starting a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife. (Yes, he’s called it an affair.) When he tried to get his then-girlfriend involved in his business, his partners blindsided him with a demand to sell his shares to them at a fraction of their actual value. “We ended up with a number both sides were unhappy with, which is a good settlement,” Norton says.
In 2018, Norton was only slowly working his way back into the gym, which had been a sustained emotional outlet for him for more than a decade. He’d been posting on social media—YouTube and Instagram, mainly—for a few years, but “There was literally no plan,” he says. “I’d always done debunking stuff, but it was never structured. It was like whack-a-mole. Something pops up and I’d bop it.” But he had one major advantage: practice. The bro-science claims—magic diets, cure-all supplements—were the same ones he’d seen on forums for years, just with more flash.
Starting in late 2018, in what would be a turning point in his career, Norton focused his ad hoc takedowns of fitness and nutrition bullshitters into a more regular effort. In posts he initially called Fuckery Friday, and later changed to What the Fitness, he’d find an influencer saying something wildly misrepresentative of the science. Then he’d break their flimsy argument into tiny pieces.
His end-of-week videos soon became appointment viewing for his growing audience. In 2019, Norton deconstructed the controversial pro-vegan movie The Game Changers and the hundreds of thousands of views pushed him into the social mainstream. His followers ballooned and Norton knew where to take his career next.
Cracking the code
YES, AS VEGAN keyboard warriors pointed out on that Game Changers takedown, some of Norton’s PhD research was supported by grants from dairy, egg, and beef associations. But Norton has—and still does—regularly critique pro-meat mega-influencers, such as Paul Saladino, MD, author of The Carnivore Code. Today, as long as Norton doesn’t feel like he’s “punching down,” he doesn’t consider anyone exempt from a takedown. “Does it make sense for me to pick on Johnny the Personal Trainer who said something dumb that five people saw?” Not really, he says. He’s after bigger targets.
For instance, Norton has criticized UCSF professor and bestselling book author Robert Lustig, MD, after he insisted that sugar is addictive, even though no solid research supports the claim. He’s come after Eric Berg, DC, for telling his 13 million YouTube subscribers that eating bread is part of a global conspiracy against your health. Norton has even challenged Oprah over some of the junk science she endorses.
Finding a takedown subject is actually the easy part, Norton says. There’s a reliable way to tell if someone is a genuine expert or just wants you to believe they are: “Listen to how people talk,” he says, rather than to what they’re talking about. Hucksters, like those aligned with the dark side of the Force, deal in absolutes. “Best. Worst. Always. Never.”
Another tell: “If they claim they’ve got some kind of big secret, that’s another giveaway.” After all, what are the odds that a random person on the internet figured out something that’s eluded the world’s top scientists, working with cutting-edge technology? The same goes for someone who claims to have found hidden knowledge deep in the stacks of a university library. Norton says that’s “a telltale sign of somebody being full of it.”
For the debunking itself, Norton has devised what he calls a perfect formula. After finding someone with a huge platform who he believes says something stupid about a hot topic, he tries to hook the viewer immediately.
Often, like with the Mindy Pelz calories clip, he leads with the most shocking stuff from the influencer’s post. Then, usually after 30 seconds or so, Norton jumps in to offer commentary before the audience gets bored and moves on. And while the formula works (Norton usually pulls 100k+ views on his takedowns), even his most popular videos net far less attention than the people he’s antagonizing. “I’ve never really had anything go super-viral and get millions of views,” he says.
Those views matter because, as he says, “the content is made to get eyeballs,” with the goal of funneling potential customers to his businesses. In addition to online coaching, he’s part owner of Outwork Nutrition, a supplement company, and Carbon, a diet app. He also has a training app called Workout Builder, two coaching certification programs, and a research review called REPS. Norton’s candid about his objective: making as much money as he can without crossing ethical boundaries. For example, he won’t sell a potentially lucrative supplement like branched-chain amino acids because he no longer believes there’s enough evidence of their value.
Despite having so many commercial enterprises, Norton knows he’s not the right person to actually run them, at least in terms of managing employees or poring over spreadsheets. “That shit gives me anxiety,” he says. “For me to do what I’m good at, I need to be a little insulated from the day-to-day stuff.” What Norton says he’s good at is fighting the never-ending battle against bogus health claims and the bad-faith actors who make them.
But is what Norton good at doing actually doing the world any good?
The battle
ERIC HELMS, PHD, has known Norton since 2005, when they first interacted on those bodybuilding forums. Like Norton, Helms is a competitive drug-free bodybuilder who eventually became a scientist, coach, podcaster, and entrepreneur.
Helms says he’s seen dramatic changes in the online information environment over the past 20 years, and he knows the challenge of arguing with evidence. “It takes so much more effort to debunk misinformation than it does to create it,” Helms says.
Because algorithms reward clickbait titles and audiences prefer emotionally charged deliveries, credible coaches and scientists end up playing on the same field as charlatans and hucksters. Often the audience doesn’t have the tools to figure out which is which, says Helms.
There’s no question the Layne Norton you see in his videos is authentic. Helms says it would be “nearly impossible” to “present a persona totally uncomfortable for you” for any length of time. But at the same time, Helms doesn’t see it as especially effective in the fight against disinformation. “I don’t think Layne’s content persuades people with strong beliefs contrary to the evidence,” he says, although “it probably helps to protect people” who’ve only recently been exposed to inaccurate or dishonest information and aren’t yet red-pilled.
Norton, frankly, is fine with that. “The amount of information we get daily now is incomprehensible,” he says. His goal is to reach whatever part of the audience remains persuadable and help them understand not just what the evidence shows, but what types of evidence we should trust. And, yes, Norton says he hears at least once a week from people who say he’s making a difference. “A common comment is ‘I used to hate you but over time you just made so many good points, I changed my mind,’” he says.
Still, Helms says, “False beliefs are hard to challenge [if they become] ideologically rooted.” If you try, you may end up hardening their beliefs, especially if you make them feel they’re being scolded, talked down to, or otherwise bullied.
Bullied.
Online, Norton has been called everything from “abrasive” to “asshole.” At least one influencer, Thomas DeLaurer, who Norton initially criticized, has modified his views. (Norton now considers DeLaurer a friend.) But most of social media hasn’t been so considerate.
“There’s nothing anyone can say to me that’s worse than what I’ve said to myself,” Norton says. And he recognizes that the self-focus that makes him a great lifter—Norton is now hitting 340 on the bench and deadlifting 650—can be detrimental to his relationships.
“Layne wakes up gritting his teeth, ready to punch somebody,” says Klemczewski, Norton’s former coach. As Klemczewski sees it, Norton considers himself the guardian of truth. “He believes he’s doing it to save the people, trying to teach them the right way to eat and live.”
Yet there’s a softer side to Norton too. Spend enough time with him and you also hear a lot about his family. His 11-year-old son, who has special needs and his eight-year-old daughter, who paints his fingernails before every big powerlifting meet. (He won the first time she did it, “So now it’s a good luck charm,” he says). His parents, who are experiencing age-related health issues. His grandfather Bob, who survived the Battle of the Bulge and who loved to make people laugh. Oh, and his cats, Jay, Midnight, and the incongruously mellow Chad.
What you won’t hear is any excuses for personal and professional failings, or envy toward anyone whose audience or income is larger than his. Nor would he want anyone to envy his success. “It’s too easy to look at some aspect of someone’s life and say, ‘I want that,’” he says. “You can’t just pick the part of their life you want. People’s best and worst characteristics are right up against each other.” It’s an idea Norton is trying to apply to himself.
“That’s the next phase of life,” he says. “Getting that stuff right. I don’t want my tombstone to read ‘Layne Norton, Powerlifter.’”
Instead, he says he wants something to the effect of “Here lies someone who worked hard to improve the world—but also showed up for people he cared about.”
If that sounds mushy to you, Norton’s adamant that he’s committed to the greater good, especially now. MAHA has brought with it an era where “truth” is squishier than ever.
An era in need of a guardian.
Ignorant or lying? Here’s how to spot the difference.
“Misinformation” and “disinformation” are often used interchangeably in online discourse. But there’s an important difference.
“Misinformation is unintentional,” says Eric Helms, PhD, an exercise scientist at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. It often comes from someone using outdated information. “Science updates itself, and some of the conclusions from decades ago are later proven wrong. “Disinformation, on the other hand, is deliberate.”
Common forms of disinformation include phony accomplishments or credentials, manipulated before-and-after photos, and false claims about study citations. More insidious is what Helms describes as “contrarian info that’s wrong but sells because it leverages controversy and anti-establishment fervor.”
So what do you do if you detect someone promoting mis- or disinformation?
Helms recommends starting with a charitable interpretation of their intent. Reach out to them privately with your reaction to their content. “Ask if you interpreted it correctly,” Helms says. “Sometimes they’ll hear you out, and sometimes they won’t.”
Conversely, he says, if you’re pretty sure the other person is lying, and it’s in their commercial interest to continue lying, “there’s no upside to interacting,” publicly or privately.
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