Health Claims

If you sleep 75 more minutes, move more intensely for 12.5 extra minutes, and eat a bit healthier each day, you might cut your risk of dying from any cause in half—especially if you're middle-aged or older.

Correlational

Eating better by itself won’t cut your risk of dying from any cause by 10%, but if you also sleep better and move more, then eating well helps make a real difference.

Causal

If you get better sleep, move more, and eat healthier, your chances of living longer go up way more than just adding up the benefits of each one separately.

Causal

People who sleep just the right amount, exercise moderately to vigorously, and eat well are 64% less likely to die from any cause compared to those who don’t do any of those things well — especially if they’re middle-aged or older.

Correlational

If you sleep 15 minutes longer, move a bit more, and eat a little healthier—like adding half a serving of veggies or skipping one piece of processed meat a week—your risk of dying from any cause might drop by 10%. Small changes together could make a big difference for your health.

Correlational

Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and eating healthy foods can protect your heart just as well as taking medicine.

Causal

Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and eating healthy foods can protect your heart just as well as taking medicine.

Causal

Eating healthy, nutritious food can help lower your chances of having heart problems like heart attacks or strokes.

Causal

If you exercise hard for more than 42 minutes every day, you’re less likely to have heart problems later on.

Causal

If you sleep 8 to 9 hours every night, you’re less likely to have heart problems later on.

Causal

When a mouse gets suddenly scared or stressed, its body first releases energy chemicals from muscles and fat within two minutes, and then about 15 to 30 minutes later, its liver starts making sugar to keep the energy flowing.

Mechanistic

Using a tiny tube in a mouse’s artery to measure blood flow is more reliable than cutting its tail, because tail cutting stresses the mouse and gives wrong numbers.

Causal

Cutting a small piece off an animal’s tail releases chemicals from the damaged tissue, which messes up the blood test results by making it look like there are more of these chemicals in the body than there really are.

Mechanistic

When mice are suddenly handled and stressed, their bodies quickly make certain energy fuels—like lactate and fatty acids—because their fight-or-flight system kicks in. This claim says that giving mice the same stress hormones (epinephrine and norepinephrine) makes them produce those same fuels just as fast, proving it’s the hormones, not the stress itself, doing the work.

Mechanistic

When mice haven't eaten, their blood has more lactate than any other fuel molecule—even more than sugar—and their body uses this lactate as the main fuel to power their cells, even when they're not stressed or in danger.

Mechanistic

When you handle fasted mice suddenly, their bodies panic and burn sugar too fast in their muscles, causing a big spike in two chemicals (lactate and pyruvate) in their blood—this messes up science tests that measure metabolism using a tail blood sample.

Mechanistic

Just because some modern tribes don’t eat fish doesn’t mean our ancestors didn’t need it—those tribes only moved inland recently, while our big brains evolved over millions of years near water.

Descriptive

People think our big brains evolved because our ancestors ate lots of fish and shellfish from the shore — these foods have special nutrients that help brains grow, and you can’t get as much of them from plants or land animals.

Causal

Eating foods with a type of omega-3 called ALA (like flaxseeds or walnuts) won’t give your body enough of the important omega-3 called DHA—even if you take big supplements of ALA or another omega-3 called EPA.

Mechanistic

Babies need to get DHA directly from their food—like breast milk—to grow healthy brains. Babies who are breastfed have about half again as much DHA in their brains as babies who only drink formula without DHA, even though their bodies can try to make DHA from plants.

Causal

Your brain needs a specific fat called DHA to grow properly, and if you don’t get it from food, your body can’t make enough on its own—so eating foods with DHA can help prevent serious brain problems, especially in babies and kids.

Causal

In women who can’t get pregnant, their egg-supporting cells sometimes don’t respond well to thyroid hormone—and this seems to go along with lower levels of proteins needed for fertility.

Correlational

When baby mice don’t have the DIO3 enzyme, too much thyroid hormone builds up in their blood—especially if they got the broken gene from their dad—and this messes up their testicles and hormone signals.

Mechanistic

In mice and rats, a specific protein called THRA is the main way thyroid hormone works in the testes. If this protein is missing or broken, the damage caused by too much thyroid hormone goes away—meaning THRA is needed for the hormone to affect the cells that make sperm and testosterone.

Mechanistic