You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.

Today I am chatting with Christine Yu, author of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes.

Christine is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports science and women athletes. Her writing has appeared in Outside, The Washington Post, Time, and other publications. And friends, her new book is fascinating! It is full of “holy shit” moments, like the fact that even though you’ve probably thought since middle school gym class that of course, men are the faster stronger athletes, women actually outperform men in ultra marathons and all the other bananas endurance events that are arguably the hardest physical challenges that human beings can undertake. 

Christine also unpacks why sports science has ignored women’s bodies for so long and the very real harm this has caused. This is such an important episode if you are a woman who exercises in any capacity, or if you are parenting a child athlete. But even if neither of those categories apply to you, I promise this is such a good and fascinating and often enraging conversation.

PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)

If you order Up to Speed from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

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Episode 114 Transcript

Christine

I’m a journalist and I cover sports and science and health. And I’m the author of the book Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes, which just came out in May. I live in Brooklyn with my husband and two kids. I tend to report on women’s sports and sports science and this intersection of the two of them. It has been lots of fun.

Virginia

And we are here to talk about the new book, which is so smart. It’s so impeccably researched. As I was reading it, I just kept thinking, holy shit, holy shit. Like, why don’t people know this? Why is this not more widely known? So, thank you. It is a real gift of a book. 

Christine

Thank you! Your “what the heck?” reaction was, frankly, what I felt when I actually started to think about this a little bit more. As someone who reports on science and health all the time, you read all these studies but you have these short deadlines, and you’re just like, “I need studies to look at and read.” It made me feel like I wasn’t doing my job. Like, how could I miss or not even think about the implications of all this? I felt like my personal guilt went into this a lot.

Virginia

I relate. I did a lot of fitness reporting in my women’s magazines days. And we were just accepting some really limited science as fact and running with premises that were not borne out by the research. 

Christine

On the one hand, we have been hearing so much about how medical research doesn’t include women. But as someone who grew up playing sports and is still fairly active, I’m really trying to understand what that means for girls and women in the long term. How does that affect, sure, athletic performance — but really long-term athletic development, health, wellbeing? Because what I was uncovering were all of these issues that we don’t talk about, we don’t really understand, and we don’t communicate to girls and women about. And yet they have long-term health repercussions on bone health, on cardiovascular health, on everything. 

Virginia

Mental health..

Christine

Yes! And w