Health Claims

Scientists found 11 types of bacteria in the blood that weren’t known to be linked to heart disease or gum problems—and these bacteria were much more or less common in people with early signs of clogged heart arteries than in healthy people.

Correlational

People with hardened arteries have fewer of certain types of bacteria in their blood than healthy people — and this difference is too big to be just random chance.

Correlational

People with severe calcium buildup in their heart arteries tend to have less of a specific bacteria called Fusobacterium nucleatum in their blood than people with healthy arteries.

Correlational

Bacteria from gum disease can sometimes escape the mouth and show up in the bloodstream—even in people with healthy hearts—suggesting they might travel from your gums to other parts of your body.

Descriptive

If you eat the same amount of food with the same carbs, fats, and calories—but just change how many AGEs (chemicals formed when food is cooked at high heat) are in it—for six weeks, your blood sugar, cholesterol, and related body signals don’t change. So, those cooked-food chemicals probably don’t mess with your metabolism in the short term.

Causal

Eating more of the kinds of foods that have extra AGEs—like grilled or fried meats—for six weeks doesn’t seem to raise the levels of a specific marker in the blood or urine of healthy middle-aged and older adults, meaning those foods probably don’t make your body’s AGE burden much worse than it already is.

Descriptive

Eating more or fewer AGEs—chemicals found in grilled or fried foods—for six weeks doesn’t seem to change inflammation levels in healthy people aged 50 to 69, so short-term diet changes like this probably don’t affect body-wide inflammation.

Descriptive

If you're a healthy adult between 50 and 69 and you eat less of certain grilled, fried, or processed foods for 6 weeks, your body shows about 11% less of a harmful compound in your blood and 44% less in your urine—meaning what you eat really can lower this marker of aging and inflammation.

Causal

Eating lots of or very little of certain foods that have AGEs (like grilled or fried foods) for six weeks doesn’t seem to change how well your small blood vessels work in healthy people aged 50 to 69.

Descriptive

Eating too much fructose—like the sugar in soda and sweet snacks—can make liver scarring worse if you already have fatty liver disease, but cutting back on fructose can help your liver get healthier.

Correlational

In people with fatty liver disease, the liver makes way more of its own fat from scratch than it should, but the fat we eat or that’s in our blood doesn’t change — it’s the liver’s internal fat factory going into overdrive.

Mechanistic

When your liver processes fructose (a sugar found in fruit and soda), it burns through energy really fast, makes a waste product called uric acid, and this can damage the liver’s power plants and cause fat to build up—even if your insulin levels are normal.

Mechanistic

Even if your body isn’t using insulin, eating too much fructose (like in sugary drinks) can still trick your liver into making more fat — thanks to special molecular switches called SREBP1c and XBP1s.

Mechanistic

Eating a lot of sugar like high-fructose corn syrup makes your liver produce more fat than eating a lot of fatty foods does, and this happens in both people and mice.

Mechanistic

People with fatty liver disease make more of their own fat inside the liver than healthy people—about 23% of the fat in their liver comes from this internal process, compared to just 10% in people without the disease.

Quantitative

When mice eat a lot of fructose (like in sugary drinks), their liver turns on a special enzyme called ACSS2 that helps turn gut bacteria’s waste product (acetate) into fat, making the liver store more fat.

Mechanistic

When scientists removed the good bacteria from mice’s guts, the mice made way less fat from fructose (like sugar in soda), even though they still processed the sugar the same way — proving that the bacteria’s waste product, acetate, is the main building block for making fat in the liver without using the usual pathway.

Mechanistic

When mice slowly eat a lot of fructose (a sugar found in fruit and soda), their livers start making more fat using two different biological tools—ACLY and ACSS2. To stop the liver from making extra fat, you have to block both tools at the same time.

Mechanistic

When mice eat fructose (a sugar found in fruit and soda), their liver turns on genes that make fat—even if you block the usual ways the body processes sugar or remove gut bacteria. It’s like fructose itself has a secret signal that tells the liver to start making fat.

Mechanistic

When mice eat a lot of fructose (like in sugary drinks), their gut bacteria make a chemical called acetate, which their liver uses to build new fat—without needing the usual pathway, and this acetate ends up being a major source of the fat’s building blocks.

Mechanistic

People with knee arthritis who tried a special anti-inflammatory diet for 9 weeks through video calls said they loved it—86% wanted to keep doing it and found it easier than doing physical exercises.

Descriptive

When people with knee pain switched to an anti-inflammatory diet, they ate less bread and sugar, more olive oil and nuts, and kept their total calories and protein the same.

Quantitative

People with knee pain who ate an anti-inflammatory diet lost about 3 kg and their BMI dropped by 1 point, even though they weren’t told to eat fewer calories.

Quantitative

People who are overweight and have knee pain can stick to a healthy eating program done online with little trouble—almost everyone showed up and followed the plan, which means doing nutrition advice over video calls works well for them.

Descriptive