Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Whether someone has genes that might make them better at burning fat or carbs, or how much insulin their body makes after eating sugar, doesn’t help predict if they’ll lose more weight on a low-fat or low-carb diet.
Descriptive
For people who are overweight, eating less fat or eating fewer carbs both lead to about the same amount of weight loss after a year — neither one works noticeably better than the other.
Most people who eat only meat do it because they want to lose weight, feel more energetic, or fix problems like allergies, skin issues, or stomach troubles.
Even though many people on a meat-only diet didn’t take vitamins, very few said they had new problems like hair loss, dry skin, or muscle cramps.
People eating only meat had very high 'bad' cholesterol but also high 'good' cholesterol and very low triglycerides — a pattern that usually means their bodies handle sugar well.
Quantitative
People with diabetes who ate only meat lost weight and lowered their blood sugar enough that most stopped taking their diabetes pills or insulin.
People who chose to eat only meat and animal products for at least half a year mostly said they felt better, had more energy, and their health problems like diabetes or stomach issues got better.
Your body has a built-in system to block extra cholesterol from eggs and make less of its own, so eating eggs doesn’t usually make your blood cholesterol go way up.
Mechanistic
When you eat more cholesterol, both your bad and good cholesterol go up together, so the balance between them stays the same—and that balance matters more than the total amount.
Correlational
For people with high blood pressure, eating eggs is linked to living longer—but eating cholesterol from meat or cheese isn’t, so eggs might have special health benefits beyond their cholesterol.
Eggs don’t just raise good cholesterol—they make the good cholesterol work better at cleaning up artery gunk.
Eating eggs doesn’t just raise your bad cholesterol—it changes the type of bad cholesterol to a bigger, less harmful kind that’s less likely to clog arteries.
Eating up to six eggs a week doesn’t raise your bad cholesterol or increase your risk of heart disease, even if you’re older, overweight, or have high blood pressure.
Dietary cholesterol does not increase blood cholesterol levels.
The worse someone with type 2 diabetes eats, the more likely they are to have multiple health problems—this pattern holds even between small differences in diet quality.
For people with type 2 diabetes, eating poorly doesn't seem to strongly raise blood pressure, unlike its clear link to high blood sugar and weight gain.
People with type 2 diabetes who eat the worst diets are much more likely to have multiple health problems at once, like high blood sugar, high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, and being overweight.
People with type 2 diabetes who eat unhealthy diets are more likely to have bad cholesterol levels than those who eat better.
People with type 2 diabetes who eat less healthy foods are more likely to be overweight or have high blood sugar than those who eat healthier.
Even though their bodies were sending out signals to burn fat (like stress hormones), the fat cells of rats on a low-protein, high-carb diet ignored those signals and kept storing fat instead.
Even though the rats had high levels of stress hormones that should make them burn fat, their fat cells had less activity in a key signaling pathway (ERK), which might be why they kept storing fat instead.
Even when scientists directly activated the fat-burning pathway inside the fat cells, the cells from rats on a low-protein, high-carb diet still broke down fat much less than normal.
Rats on a low-protein, high-carb diet had less of the special proteins in their fat cells that are needed to burn fat, which might explain why their fat isn't being broken down.
Rats that ate a diet low in protein and high in carbs had fat cells that didn't break down fat as well when stimulated by certain stress signals, even though their bodies were in a state that should make them burn fat.