Health Claims

Men over 60 who have more lycopene (a red pigment in tomatoes) in their blood tend to have thinner artery walls, which might mean their arteries are less clogged up — so eating more tomatoes could help keep their heart healthy.

Correlational

Taking a daily garlic supplement for a year doesn’t make the hard, calcified buildups in the arteries of people with type 2 diabetes get bigger — so it’s not causing their blood vessels to stiffen as a side effect.

Descriptive

The soft, fatty parts of artery plaques — visible as dark spots on heart scans — are especially dangerous for people with diabetes because they’re more likely to burst and cause heart attacks.

Descriptive

People with type 2 diabetes who aren’t taking aged garlic extract tend to develop more dangerous plaque in their heart arteries over a year, and this plaque buildup goes up by 57%—which means their risk of a heart attack is likely rising naturally over time.

Quantitative

Taking a daily garlic supplement for a year doesn’t seem to shrink the overall gunk in the heart arteries of people with type 2 diabetes—but it might specifically reduce the soft, dangerous kind of gunk that’s more likely to cause heart attacks.

Quantitative

For people with type 2 diabetes, taking a specific type of garlic supplement every day for a year may help shrink dangerous fatty buildups in the heart arteries, while those not taking it saw those buildups get worse.

Correlational

Even though lycopene (a red pigment in tomatoes) can soak up harmful chemicals in a test tube, it didn’t stop those same chemicals from damaging bad cholesterol in a lab experiment—so it didn’t work as a shield here.

Mechanistic

Some early, small studies suggest that men with high cholesterol might get more heart blood flow benefits from a special kind of olive oil than women do—but we can’t be sure yet because the study wasn’t big enough.

Correlational

Eating extra virgin olive oil may help people with high cholesterol get better blood flow in their tiny blood vessels, helping their tissues use oxygen more efficiently—likely because it boosts a helpful molecule called nitric oxide and reduces harmful body stress.

Mechanistic

If you have high cholesterol and drink a little extra virgin olive oil every day for a month, your resting heart rate might drop a bit and your lower blood pressure number might go down a little too — which is good for your heart.

Causal

When people with high cholesterol eat a smaller amount of olive oil that’s richer in natural plant compounds, their blood pressure drops more and their blood vessels work better than when they eat a larger amount of oil with fewer plant compounds—even if the total amount of plant compounds is the same.

Causal

Eating extra virgin olive oil every day for a month can help your tiny blood vessels work better, especially if you have high cholesterol—your blood flows more easily and your body uses oxygen more efficiently.

Mechanistic

Two major diabetes groups say eating fewer carbs or cutting calories for a short time can help people with type 2 diabetes lose weight, but they don’t officially say you can ‘cure’ diabetes this way.

Descriptive

People who’ve had type 2 diabetes for a shorter time, have lower blood sugar levels, and aren’t on insulin are much more likely to reverse their diabetes with any of the three main methods: surgery, very low-calorie diets, or low-carb diets.

Correlational

If you have type 2 diabetes and eat very few carbs (like less than a slice of bread per meal) while getting ongoing support from a doctor or coach, you might lower your blood sugar so much that you can stop taking diabetes meds—and for many people, that improvement lasts a year or even two.

Correlational

If an obese person with type 2 diabetes eats only 600–850 calories a day for a few months, about half of them will no longer have diabetes after a year—and about a third will still be diabetes-free two years later, especially if they lost a lot of weight early on and haven’t had diabetes for very long.

Quantitative

When very overweight people have weight-loss surgery, many of them stop needing diabetes medicine within months—even before they lose a lot of weight—because their body starts using insulin better and their gut sends out helpful signals. About a third to almost half still stay diabetes-free five years later.

Mechanistic

Some people’s triglycerides go down when they take omega-3 fish oil, but others don’t see any change—not because they’re not taking it right, but because their genes make them respond differently. So, we might need blood tests or genetic scans to figure out who will actually benefit.

Mechanistic

EPA and DHA are two types of omega-3 fats that work differently in your body—one might calm inflammation, the other might change how your body stores fat—and that’s why some studies show benefits when you take them together, but others don’t, depending on which one you use alone.

Mechanistic

You need to take a lot of fish oil—3 grams or more per day—to significantly lower triglycerides; smaller doses don’t work well unless you already have very high levels.

Quantitative

People with very low levels of omega-3s in their blood have a much higher chance of dying suddenly from heart problems than those with high levels.

Correlational

DHA, a type of omega-3, makes the good cholesterol (HDL) bigger and the bad cholesterol (LDL) less dense, which may be healthier for your arteries—EPA doesn’t do this as much.

Quantitative

Taking a lot of DHA (a type of omega-3 from fish oil) every day can drop your bad blood fats by about a quarter to a third—if you already have high levels—but EPA (another omega-3) doesn’t work as well, so DHA is the better choice for lowering triglycerides.

Causal

When older male rats eat more DHA—a healthy fat found in fish—their brains produce less of a protein that normally trims brain connections too much as they age, which might help them keep their memory and thinking skills longer.

Mechanistic