Health Claims

If you're overweight and have painful knees from arthritis, following a healthy, anti-inflammatory diet—like eating more whole foods and omega-3s while cutting back on sugary carbs—over 9 weeks might help reduce your knee pain, make it easier to move around, and improve how you feel overall.

Correlational

If you cool and reheat white rice, people with type 1 diabetes say it still tastes, smells, and feels just like fresh rice—so it’s totally fine to eat it this way as part of their diet.

Descriptive

Eating cooled rice instead of hot rice makes blood sugar rise faster in people with type 1 diabetes—peaking in 35 minutes instead of 45—which might help their insulin work better at the right time.

Quantitative

If you cook rice and then chill it in the fridge for a day, it turns into a type of starch that doesn’t spike your blood sugar as much—this could help people with type 1 diabetes manage their blood sugar better after eating.

Causal

If you have type 1 diabetes and use an insulin pump that gives you the same amount of insulin no matter what you eat, eating cold rice can make your blood sugar drop too low after meals—because your body absorbs less sugar from cold rice, but you still get the same insulin dose.

Causal

Chilling rice overnight and reheating it before eating makes your blood sugar rise much less after the meal because some of the starch turns into a form your body can’t digest easily.

Causal

Eating walnuts can make the 'bad' cholesterol in your blood healthier by filling it with good fats, without making it more likely to cause damage—like adding armor instead of fuel to a fire.

Mechanistic

Eating walnuts instead of other healthy fats like olive oil may lower a dangerous blood fat called lipoprotein(a) in men with high cholesterol—but it doesn’t seem to help women the same way.

Causal

If you swap out a little bit of the healthy fats in your Mediterranean diet (like olive oil) for walnuts, your bad cholesterol (LDL) and overall cholesterol go down a bit—which might help your heart.

Causal

Scientists found that when they fed sugar-coated proteins to certain immune cells, the cells got inflamed—but adding a substance that traps bacterial toxins (LPS) calmed them down, even though there was almost no LPS around. This makes them wonder if the inflammation was actually caused by tiny, unnoticed LPS leftovers, not the sugar-coated proteins themselves.

Mechanistic

When certain cooked or processed foods trigger inflammation in immune cells in a lab dish, blocking a specific protein called RAGE doesn’t help calm it down—so something else must be causing the problem.

Mechanistic

Some cooked or processed foods with burnt or browned proteins can trigger inflammation in certain immune cells in a lab dish, but not all of these foods do — so some are more likely to cause trouble than others.

Descriptive

Eating foods rich in polyphenols (like berries, tea, or dark chocolate) didn’t seem to lower inflammation markers after a heart stent, based on this study’s findings.

Correlational

Eating more omega-3s (like fish oil) and fewer omega-6s (like vegetable oils) might help reduce inflammation and blood clotting risks in heart patients after a stent, and it’s not just about getting more omega-3s—it’s about the right mix of both.

Correlational

People with heart disease who eat more omega-3s—like those found in fish—tend to have lower levels of two blood markers that show inflammation, which might mean omega-3s help calm down their body’s inflammatory response.

Correlational

If you live in Tehran and want to eat less toxic stuff from your rice, try washing it really well and letting it soak in water for five hours before cooking it — this might help wash away harmful metals.

Causal

Washing and soaking rice helps reduce harmful lead and cadmium to safe levels, but it doesn’t cut down arsenic enough to make it safe from cancer risk.

Quantitative

Soaking your rice for longer—like 12 hours instead of just 1—can wash out more of the bad stuff like arsenic and lead, making your rice safer to eat.

Correlational

Washing rice before cooking and using lots of water (like boiling it like pasta) removes more harmful metals like arsenic and lead than just cooking it in a small amount of water — so rinsed cooking is better at making rice safer to eat.

Quantitative

Wheat that has more of a natural compound called gallic acid tends to absorb less arsenic — like the gallic acid is blocking arsenic from getting in, helping keep the grain safer to eat.

Correlational

If you eat a lot of rice and wheat and cook with water that has arsenic in it, computer models suggest you might be over 80 times more likely to get cancer than the average person in the U.S.—but this is just a prediction, not something scientists have actually seen happen yet.

Quantitative

When wheat grows in soil with lots of arsenic, it makes more of certain natural chemicals (like benzoic and caffeic acid) that might help it deal with the poison—so the more arsenic it absorbs, the more of these chemicals it produces.

Correlational

Washing your rice and wheat with three times as much water as grain before cooking can wash away some harmful arsenic, which might lower your chance of getting cancer if you eat these foods every day.

Correlational

Scientists found that shorter, stockier types of wheat and rice soak up about half as much toxic arsenic from the soil as the tall, slow-growing kinds—so breeding these shorter crops could help people in dirty areas eat safer food.

Correlational