Truth in Fitness: Supplements, Peptides and Marketing

Why these three together

One skill, taught three times at increasing difficulty

Each of these courses works on its own, but they were written to stack. The marketing course gives you the reasoning framework using claims you can evaluate without any science background. The supplements course puts that framework against a real body of literature, where some products are genuinely well supported and most are not. The peptides course takes you to the hardest case, a category where the animal research is extensive, the human research is thin, and the products are largely unregulated.

By the end you are not carrying a list of approved products. You are carrying a repeatable process: find the claim, find the evidence behind it, work out how far the claim has travelled from that evidence, and decide what to do about the gap.

• Recognize how a technically accurate fact gets stretched into a promise the research cannot support.
• Tell the difference between a biomarker moving in a lab and a person getting stronger, leaner or healthier.
• Rank evidence honestly, from cell cultures and animal models up to randomized trials and meta-analyses.
• Spot funding bias, proprietary blends, survivorship bias and credential mismatch without needing a degree.
• Verify claims yourself through PubMed, journal DOIs and regulator databases rather than trusting a summary.

What is inside the bundle

Three courses, in the order they are meant to be taken

Each course can also be taken individually at no cost. Enrolling in the bundle simply puts all three in your account in the intended order.

The learning path

How the three courses build on each other

Who this bundle is for

For anyone tired of not knowing who to believe

No science background, nutrition coursework or research training required. Every technical concept is explained in plain language as it appears, and each course ends its lessons with a glossary.

This bundle may be a good fit if you:

• Feel worn down by conflicting fitness and nutrition advice and want a method instead of another opinion.
• Are spending money on supplements without knowing which ones are earning their place.
• Keep seeing peptides promoted for injury recovery, fat loss or anti-aging and cannot tell what is real.
• Want to evaluate an influencer's claim on its evidence rather than on their physique or follower count.
• Compete in a tested sport and need to understand contamination risk and prohibited-substance status.
• Coach, train or teach others and get asked these questions constantly.
• Want structured practice reading research before tackling a longer, more technical course.

The whole bundle is free, so the fastest way to judge whether the teaching style suits you is to enroll and read the first lesson.

Combined learning outcomes

What you will be able to do by the end

1. Apply a five-question evaluation framework to any fitness, nutrition or supplement claim you encounter, including products that do not exist yet.
2. Place a study on an evidence hierarchy and explain why a cell culture or rodent finding is hypothesis-generating rather than proof of human benefit.
3. Separate biomarker changes from outcomes that matter such as strength, pain, function, body composition and recovery time.
4. Rank the major supplement categories by evidence quality and explain where the returns flatten out for each one.
5. Read a supplement facts panel critically, recognize proprietary-blend red flags, and understand what third-party certification does and does not prove.
6. Summarize the human evidence gaps for BPC-157, TB-500, growth hormone and growth hormone releasing peptides, including what remains genuinely unknown.
7. Identify funding bias and study-quality problems and understand why apparent benefits shrink in higher-quality, independently funded analyses.
8. Verify a claim at the source using PubMed, journal DOIs, regulator databases and prohibited-substance lists rather than trusting a summary, including an AI-generated one.

Included with free enrollment

Sixteen lessons, six applied activities, one method

Meet the course author

Created by Chris Bigelow, M.S. Kinesiology

College educator in health and exercise science

Chris has more than 10 years of experience teaching health, kinesiology and exercise science at the college level at Bryan University. He built these three courses because the same questions come up in every class and every conversation, and because the honest answers are rarely the ones being advertised.

The courses do not sell supplements or peptides, recommend vendors, prescribe a training program or tell you which creators to follow. They teach a reasoning process you can apply to the next claim you encounter, and they point you toward a qualified clinician for anything individual.

Founder and owner of Innova Vita Fitness

Learn more about Chris and Innova Vita Fitness

About the AI activities

The lessons stand alone. The activities use AI as a tutor.

All sixteen instructional lessons are self-contained reading. You can complete every one of them and walk away with the core concepts without ever opening an AI tool.

The six applied activities are different by design. The case study documents are written to be attached to a free AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Qwen, which then presents the scenario and works through the questions with you one at a time. The research investigations use deep research modes, with free-tier access generally sufficient, and each guide includes manual alternatives through PubMed and Google Scholar if you would rather not use a subscription.

The courses are equally direct about where these tools fail. AI can fabricate citations, misjudge study quality and state weak findings with unearned confidence, which is exactly why every investigation guide insists you click through to the original source before believing anything, including anything the courses themselves told you.

Read our primer on how AI is used in our courses

Bundle questions

Frequently asked questions

Keep going

Where to go after the bundle

Marketing, supplements and peptides are three instances of one much larger pattern. If you want the underlying subject knowledge that makes evaluating any of it easier, the Complete Health and Wellness Foundations course introduces nutrition, exercise, weight management and chronic disease in a structured beginner curriculum, and its Module 9 goes deeper on source quality and reading a study abstract without a science degree.

You can also browse everything else in the free mini-course catalog or explore the Evaluating Health and Fitness Information hub.