Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
If you swap out meat and dairy for carbs like bread and pasta, you might live shorter, but if you swap them for beans, nuts, and lentils, you might live longer.
Correlational
Whether you cut fat or carbs, if you eat the same number of calories, you’ll lose about the same amount of weight.
Eating too much white bread, sugary snacks, and soda is linked to higher chances of developing insulin problems, bad cholesterol, and body-wide inflammation.
Eating more fiber and whole grains like oats, brown rice, and beans seems to help your body handle sugar better, keep your weight in check, and lower your risk of heart disease.
The lower your 'bad' cholesterol (LDL-C) goes, the less likely you are to have a heart attack or die from heart disease—and this benefit is even bigger if you’ve already had a heart problem before.
Lowering 'bad' cholesterol by a certain amount reduces your risk of heart attacks and strokes — and it doesn’t matter if you use statins or other pills like ezetimibe; they both work about the same to protect your heart.
Quantitative
If you lower your 'bad' cholesterol by about 1 point (from around 3.16 to 2.16), you cut your risk of heart attacks, strokes, or needing heart surgery by roughly a quarter—no matter if you use statins or other drugs that work the same way.
Just because a diet is plant-based doesn’t mean it’s healthy — eating lots of veggies and nuts is good, but eating lots of sugary drinks and white bread is bad, even if they’re plant-based.
The more healthy plant foods you eat, the lower your risk of dying — and the more unhealthy plant foods you eat, the higher your risk. It’s a straight-line relationship.
People who eat a lot of unhealthy plant foods like sugary drinks, white bread, and fries have a higher chance of dying early than those who eat fewer of these foods.
People who eat mostly healthy plant foods like whole grains, fruits, and nuts have a lower chance of dying from any cause compared to those who eat fewer of these foods.
People who eat more plant-based foods like vegetables, fruits, and whole grains tend to live longer than those who eat fewer of them.
When healthy young men ate the same number of calories but swapped carbs for fat for just three days, their body’s response to sugar changed—blood sugar went up, insulin came out slower, and a gut hormone went up.
Descriptive
Even though the body released more of a sugar-controlling hormone after eating fat for three days, blood sugar still went higher—meaning the hormone wasn’t strong enough to fix the problem.
Mechanistic
After eating mostly fat for three days, the pancreas of healthy young men released less insulin right after they drank sugar water, even though their blood sugar went higher.
After eating mostly fat for three days, healthy young men released more of a gut hormone (GLP-1) that helps control blood sugar when they drank sugar water, even though their blood sugar still went higher.
After eating just three days of mostly fatty food instead of carbs, healthy young men had higher blood sugar spikes when they drank a sugary drink, meaning their bodies handled sugar less efficiently.
Kids who eat more calcium-rich foods tend to have less body inflammation, but this doesn’t seem to help their blood sugar control.
Kids going through puberty tend to have worse blood sugar control, even if they’re the same weight as younger kids.
Kids with more belly fat tend to have more inflammation and worse blood sugar control, even compared to other obese kids.
People with prediabetes who used the online low-carb program saw their blood sugar drop a little and lost about 6 pounds on average.
People with type 2 diabetes who used the online low-carb program saw their blood sugar drop by about 0.6% and lost around 6 pounds on average.
The more lessons people finished in the online low-carb program, the more their blood sugar dropped and the more weight they lost.
People with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes who finished most of a free online low-carb program lost about 4 kg on average, while those who didn’t finish lost almost nothing.