Why did Huberman endorse Susanna Søberg's bad science?

About a year ago Andrew Huberman introduced a Danish biologist to the world, naming her the most important expert on brown fat and cold exposure in the halls of medicine. She had written only two papers on the topic, and only one in a reputable journal, but Susanna Søberg quickly became a household name to ice bathers all over the world who were looking for scientific backing for their icy dips. I was pretty excited by the credibility that Søberg brought to the table, but when I started actually looking at her famous paper in Cell Reports Medicine, things stopped adding up. Her claims about the underlying mechanisms of how brown fat burns calories were so far off the scientific consensus that it was jaw dropping. Throughout her paper she repeats time and time again that her instrumentation is not on par with the gold standard, and that her results should "be taken with caution." She kicked off a cold water swimmer from her study when he didn't produce enough heat, and worried it would throw off her results, and in the conclusion of her paper she straight up admits "we cannot conclude whether winter swimming per se results in increased cold-induced thermogenesis." All of this to say, after reading her article, I really had to wonder how it got published in the first place.

But that's not even where the problems stopped. Shortly after her appearance on The Huberman Lab came out Søberg left the scientific world altogether and started an online training course where she sells her video certifications in cold water swimming for $2500 a pop. This is the very definition of a conflict of interest. How are we supposed to believe in scientific results when the scientists directly profit from a positive signal?

The article in Cell Reports was hardly the only case of Søberg conducing bad science. Recently a comment on the crowdsourced science watchdog PubPeer noted that another study of hers--this one on binge drinking and liver enzymes--had nonsensical data. Somehow a graph that was supposed to have 8 data correlations only had 7. It didn't make and sense.

All of this to say, while Søberg might be a great person to encourage people to jump into ice water, her scientific claims aren't based on the science she purports them to be.

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