Better Offline Hater Season: Victoria Song & Alex Cranz
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Feb 25, 2026 
Victoria Song, Verge journalist who exposes wellness marketing and sketchy health tech, and Alex Cranz, writer critiquing fitness and AI coaching, spar over wearable claims, gray‑market peptides, and the limits of AI coaches. They call out dubious supplement studies, inconsistent device readings, privacy risks from datafied bodies, and the rush to quick fixes like GLP‑1s.
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Wellness Became A Marketing Umbrella
- The word wellness has become a marketing umbrella that often hides grift and unproven products.
- Victoria Song explains her beat shifted from evaluating tech to calling out snake oil like gray-market peptides sold on TikTok.
Question Clinically Backed Claims On Supplements
- Don't trust the phrase "clinically backed" on supplement marketing without checking sample size and methodology.
- Victoria Song dissected AG1's studies and found tiny samples (≈30 people) and inconsistent methodology behind their claims.
Wellness Label Lets Companies Skip FDA Hurdles
- Companies label features "wellness" to avoid costly FDA clearance while offering diagnostic-like readings.
- Victoria Song used Whoop's blood-pressure feature and Aura's lobbying for a new regulatory category as examples of blurred lines.