Timothy Caulfield

Timothy Caulfield

Timothy Caulfield is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. His interdisciplinary research on topics like stem cells, genetics, research ethics, the public representations of science and health policy issues has allowed him to publish over 350 academic articles. He has won numerous academic and writing awards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Trudeau Foundation, and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

He contributes frequently for the popular press and is the author of two national bestsellers: The Cure for Everything: Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash. Caulfield also has a strong social media presence and is the host and co-producer of the documentary TV series, A User’s Guide to Cheating Death. 

Twitter:  @CaulfieldTim
Instagram: @caulfieldtim

Perhaps you, like me, find yourself bewildered by conflicting claims about everything from the food you should eat, to the ‘five second rule’ if that food falls on the floor, to whether public toilet seats pass along terrifying diseases. Tim Caulfield masterfully, and humorously, walks you through all of the things you’re likely to encounter in a typical day and provides much needed sanity in a world of claims run amok. It also serves as an introduction to critical thinking for those who don’t know how to approach such questions, enabling all of us to make better sense of any new nonsense that comes forward.” –Daniel Levitin, author of Successful Aging

FESTIVAL BOOK

The Science of Celebrity. . . Or is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?

Over the past few decades, celebrity culture’s grip on our society has tightened. For Timothy Caulfield, a health science expert, this trend has had a measurable influence on individual life choices and health care decisions. In typical Caulfield manner, it isn’t enough to simply interview experts and read the current studies (which he does). He tries celebrity-recommended beauty routines and diets. After attending a modeling competition, he enrolls in an assessment/audition for a modelling agency in Hollywood. In his quest to understand the relationship between celebrity and culture and our individual health choices, he follows celebrity Twitter feeds, scans gossip blogs, and forces himself to read every issue-cover to cover-of People magazine, for an entire year. In this fun, factual book, Caulfield separates sense from nonsense and provides usable and evidence-informed advice about what actually works and what is a waste of money and time.

 

BE CURIOUSER

  • Has Timothy Caulfield become the Canadian nemesis of pseudoscience? The Globe and Mail
  •   Timothy Caulfield debunks celebrity health trends from gluten-free diets to colon cleanses Toronto Star

 

GET THE BOOK 

Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library 

 

Relax: A Guide to Everyday Health Decisions with More Facts and Less Worry

An entertaining and practical guide to getting through the day with less stress and better health.

We make thousands of decisions every day. Decisions about when to wake up, how to brush our teeth, what to have for breakfast, how to get our kids to school, the amount of coffee to drink, and on and on.

Making so many decisions is tough and can lead to fatigue and making poor decisions. And the more deliberate the decision, or the more we need to think about it, the more fatiguing the process. There are many social forces at work that make how and what we choose an unnecessarily anxious process. But it doesn’t have to be.

In Relax, health policy expert Timothy Caulfield takes us through a regular day and shows the underlying science behind our actions and habits. And he reveals that a lot of our decision-making is based on misinformation. Whether he’s studying cell phone use, bike commuting, or raw-milk cheese consumption, Caulfield shows that many of the things we believe to be healthier, safer, or just better, simply aren’t. With solid grounding in current and reliable scientific findings, the author points to a less stressful way forward – which means we can all afford to relax a lot more.

Insightful, sometimes controversial, and always entertaining, Relax is a surprising and liberating guide to modern life.

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library

DIVE DEEPER

  • Too good to be true: Timothy Caulfield on misinformation and trust in health. –The Toronto Star

ALL EVENTS WITH Timothy Caulfield

1 PM
Healing Factual Malpractice: Timothy Caulfield & Jillian Horton
Oct 01 @ 1 PM MT - 2:15 PM MT

DJD Dance Centre

111 12 Ave SE