The Alia Crum Studies

Alia Crum is a Stanford researcher who keeps running studies that should break everyone's assumptions about how the body works.

She gives people the same milkshake with different labels — and their hormones respond differently. She tells hotel housekeepers their work counts as exercise — and they lose weight without changing anything else. She shows people different videos about stress — and it changes the hormones their bodies produce under pressure.

The pattern across all three: what you believe about something changes what your body does with it. Not as a metaphor. As a measurable biological event.

This three-part series walks through each experiment and what it means for how you think about food, movement, and stress.