Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
To accurately measure how many extra calories you burn after eating, it’s better to monitor you for a full day in a special room than to just check for a few hours after one meal.
Descriptive
Eating more protein makes you feel fuller for longer, which can help you eat less overall and avoid gaining weight.
Correlational
Drinking alcohol makes your body burn more calories during digestion — almost as much as eating protein — even though alcohol isn’t a nutrient your body needs.
Quantitative
Your body uses a lot more energy to digest protein than it does to digest carbs or fat — up to 30% of the calories from protein are used just for digestion, while fat barely uses any.
When you eat food, your body burns extra calories just to digest it — this extra burn is about 5% to 15% of your total daily calorie use, and it’s higher when you eat more protein or alcohol, and lower when you eat more fat.
When trained women lift heavy weights, thrusting the hips up with a barbell turns on the butt and hamstring muscles way more than doing a squat, but the front thigh muscle works about the same in both exercises.
After training, your tendons get a bit looser, so your muscles can start working sooner when you try to push, making you feel stronger faster.
Even though your nerves fire faster after training, they still respond to how hard you’re trying at the same rate—your brain’s control system didn’t get more sensitive.
Your muscles don’t fire faster when you start or stop pushing—only when you’re holding a steady push—after four weeks of strength training.
After four weeks of strong, held ankle lifts, your nerve signals to the muscle get faster during moderate efforts, making your muscle stronger without needing more muscle mass.
After four weeks of doing strong, held ankle lifts, your muscles start firing earlier when you try to push, so you can generate more force without your muscles getting bigger.
Protein shakes make you feel less hungry after eating, even though they don’t help you keep the weight off.
Mechanistic
Protein shakes make your body burn a little more calories at rest and after eating, but this doesn’t help you keep the weight off.
Taking extra protein shakes after losing weight doesn’t help you keep the weight off any better than eating the normal amount of protein in your daily diet.
Causal
When people eat more protein, their blood shows higher levels of a waste product called urea, which means their body is breaking down more protein than usual.
Instead of eating lots of white bread or sugary snacks, swapping them for lean protein like chicken or beans might help you manage your weight and stay healthier.
Some studies show that eating more protein helps people lose more weight and body fat, but not all studies agree on this.
Meals with more protein tend to make people eat less at their next meal.
Eating more protein makes you feel fuller for longer, so you’re less likely to snack or eat too much later.
Eating more protein makes your body burn a bit more calories just to digest it, compared to eating less protein.
When you eat more protein after losing weight, your body holds onto more muscle instead of breaking it down.
After losing weight, your body tries to burn fewer calories than it should — but eating more protein helps your body return to its normal calorie-burning rate.
When your muscles get really tired during a workout, your body has to turn on more muscle fibers to keep going — and that might help them grow bigger.
When your muscles swell up from fluid buildup during a tough workout, that pressure might send signals to your cells to grow bigger — even if you’re not lifting heavy weights.