Our commentary
Nutrition For Mortals, the podcast made by dietitians Matt Priven and Jen Baum, spent 45 minutes on adrenal fatigue in an episode re-released on 29 July 2026, and the reporting is theirs. Baum bought and read the book that named the condition — Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome, by James Wilson, a chiropractor and naturopath — walked through its cartoon symptom list and its self-diagnosis quiz, and set that against the 2016 systematic review of 58 studies that found no meaningful cortisol difference between people said to have adrenal fatigue and healthy people. One disclosure: we worked from a supplied machine transcript, not the audio, so anything attributed to the hosts here is as that transcript renders it.
Their trace stops in 1998. It doesn't end there.
The man who named it still sells the cure
AdrenalFatigue.org, read on 6 August 2026, is a working storefront, footer reading "2026 Copyright Dr. James L. Wilson's AdrenalFatigue.org". Its "Adrenal Fatigue" category lists nine products, each captioned "Formulated by Dr. James L. Wilson" — among them Adrenal Fatigue Protocol®, Cortisol Stress Reset® and Adrenal Rebuilder®, a "Multiglandular including adrenal cortex for stress and adrenal support". Every claim carries an asterisk down to the FDA disclaimer at the foot of the page.
We are describing a sequence, not a motive. The same person defined the condition, wrote the quiz that diagnoses it and sells the multiglandular that treats it, and the shop is still trading. Endocrine News reported in 2017 that the "Adrenal Fatigue Quartet" ran to about $200 for a 30-day supply at minimum recommended doses; we have not re-checked current prices. Wilson's own site, per that article, says he coined the term in 1998; our sources disagree on when the book appeared, so we are not putting a year on it.
The category has a second problem. Akturk and colleagues (2018, Mayo Clinic Proceedings) assayed twelve supplements sold for energy and "adrenal support": all twelve contained detectable triiodothyronine, and none declared thyroid or steroid hormones on the label. Baum says "studies" have found this — what we could locate is that one analysis, of twelve products bought in 2016, and we read only the abstract. It is alarming and it is a single small sample. The Endocrine Society warns that unnecessary adrenal hormone supplements can suppress the gland's own function and trigger an adrenal crisis.
Where the 80% came from
The episode plays Josh Axe claiming about 80% of the population will struggle with adrenal fatigue, and Priven flags on the spot that the figure is invented. We can add where it came from. A 2015 post on the blog of ZRT Laboratory, a company that sells hormone testing, refers to "the estimated 80% of adult Americans who at some point in their lives will experience some level of adrenal fatigue" and attributes the estimate to Wilson's book. No study, no link. None is possible, either: the Endocrine Society states flatly that "There is no test that can detect adrenal fatigue." An author's assertion about his own coinage has been recirculated for a quarter of a century until it acquired the grammar of a statistic. Two limits: we traced it to the book via the blog post, not to the book itself, and we did not trace Axe's own sourcing.
Three places we'd push back
The 2016 review concludes that "adrenal fatigue is still a myth," which is stronger than its design supports. Its own authors flag heterogeneous, mostly descriptive studies and poor assessment of fatigue, and not one of the 58 used the insulin tolerance test, the gold standard for HPA-axis integrity. That is absence of evidence, which is enough here.
On coffee, Baum argues that habitual drinkers adapt to the point that their bodies stop releasing cortisol. Lovallo and colleagues (2005) — an abstract-only read for us — ran 96 healthy adults through a double-blind crossover at 0, 300 or 600 mg a day and found cortisol responses "reduced, but not eliminated, in healthy young men and women who consume caffeine on a daily basis." Their practical advice survives that; the mechanism as stated doesn't.
The passage Priven reads as "a 2017 article by the Endocrine Society" is Eric Seaborg's feature in Endocrine News, the Society's magazine, quoting Lynnette Nieman — journalism, not a position statement, though the Society's patient page says the same thing.
Their most underrated point
Baum's claim that the food-and-cortisol link nobody discusses is restriction rather than sugar has a randomised experiment behind it: Tomiyama and colleagues (2010) found that restricting women to 1,200 kcal a day for three weeks raised total cortisol output with a medium effect size, and that it was monitoring intake in a food diary, not restricting it, that raised perceived stress. Keep the hedge that coverage of this study routinely drops — the authors say the rise "may reflect a biological freeing of energy that is entirely non–stress-mediated."
One last thing in our sources that the episode never says. Theodore Friedman, quoted in Endocrine News: under stress the adrenals work harder and make more cortisol, not less. The physiology runs the opposite way to the diagnosis — a cleaner refutation than any of the epidemiology, and it lands where the hosts do: the tiredness is real, and the man selling the fix for it is the problem.