Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
As rats get older, their brain’s hunger control center changes — it becomes more inflamed and less able to regulate appetite, even before they eat bad food.
Descriptive
Older male rats get fatter than younger ones when they eat lots of sugary, processed carbs—and giving them DHA (a fish oil ingredient) doesn’t stop it, which means the extra weight gain isn’t caused by brain inflammation that DHA usually affects.
Mechanistic
Giving old male rats a little bit of fish oil (DHA) in their sugary diet helps them remember better and keeps their brain from getting too inflamed from eating too many refined carbs.
Causal
Older male rats that eat a lot of sugary, processed carbs for a month start to forget things better and show signs of brain inflammation—this might be why aging brains get worse when we eat too many junk foods.
Taking statin pills doesn’t seem to make the fatty buildup in your neck arteries bigger or smaller, or change the space inside the artery—even after a year or more of use.
Correlational
Taking statin pills for over a year can shrink the fatty, dangerous core inside artery plaques in the neck, making them less likely to rupture and cause a stroke.
Taking a daily fish oil supplement with about 5 grams of omega-3s for a month may lower both the good and bad immune cells in the blood of people with severe obesity — but we don’t yet know if this is helpful or just a side effect.
People with severe obesity have more of both helpful and harmful immune cells floating in their blood than people who are lean, meaning their immune systems are more active in complex ways.
Taking a daily fish oil supplement with specific amounts of EPA and DHA for a month may help the energy factories inside certain blood cells work better in people with moderate obesity.
Taking aged garlic extract might slow down the hardening of your heart arteries and help lower your blood pressure by making dangerous fatty buildups in your arteries more stable and less likely to cause a heart attack.
Doing supervised, short bursts of intense exercise like sprinting or cycling hard for six months can shrink the fatty buildups in your arteries—just as well as, or even better than, taking cholesterol-lowering statin pills.
Cutting back on carbs—like bread, pasta, and sugar—can fix type 2 diabetes, help you lose weight, lower blood pressure, and clean up a fatty liver, even if you don’t change how many antioxidants you eat.
Eating too many sugary processed foods like soda, candy, and white bread can spike your blood sugar, make your body less responsive to insulin, and create harmful stress in your cells—which together can inflame your body and damage your blood vessels.
Eating fish or fish oil rich in EPA and DHA omega-3s may help make dangerous fatty buildups in your arteries more stable and less likely to burst, by calming down harmful inflammation and helping your blood vessels relax better.
Drinking or cooking with extra virgin olive oil may help your blood vessels work better, lower body-wide inflammation, and make your body respond better to insulin—kind of like a healthy oil that keeps your insides running smoothly.
Flavonoids, which are natural compounds in fruits and veggies, help keep your arteries clean by stopping white blood cells from sticking to artery walls and turning bad cholesterol into plaque.
Eating foods with plant sterols—like fortified margarine or nuts—helps lower your 'bad' cholesterol because they block your gut from absorbing too much cholesterol, so your liver makes more receptors to clean up the leftover cholesterol in your blood.
Eating foods rich in lycopene, like tomatoes, may help protect your blood vessels by mopping up harmful molecules that cause damage, which could keep plaque from building up in your arteries.
When the inner lining of your arteries gets damaged, bad cholesterol (LDL) slips in and gets oxidized, which tricks your body into sending in immune cells that create fatty buildup—leading to clogged arteries.
If you're overweight and over 55 with a high risk of heart disease, you're about a quarter less likely to stick with the Mediterranean diet for three years than someone your age who isn't overweight.
Even though the FDA says these supplements should be the same every time, the red yeast rice pills you buy at stores like Walmart or CVS can have wildly different amounts of the active ingredient—so sometimes they might work, sometimes they might not.
Depending on which brand you buy, you might be getting almost no cholesterol-lowering medicine—or more than a prescription pill—just by following the label instructions.
Some red yeast rice supplements sold in U.S. stores don’t have any of the active ingredient (monacolin K) that’s supposed to help lower cholesterol, while others have wildly different amounts—from almost nothing to a lot—so you never know what you’re really getting.
In the U.S., you can buy melatonin pills without a prescription, but they’re not checked like real medicines—so some pills might have way more or less melatonin than the label says, or even contain weird stuff you didn’t sign up for.