Health Claims

Cooking nuts and other fatty foods may have helped early humans grow bigger brains and be more active because it gave them more energy from the same food — like getting a free energy boost.

Descriptive

Nutrition labels say raw and roasted peanuts have the same calories, but your body actually gets more energy from roasted ones — the current system doesn’t account for how cooking changes how well your body can digest the fat.

Quantitative

Cooking peanuts breaks open the tiny protective shells around the fat inside, making it easier for your body’s digestive juices to reach and break down the fat.

Mechanistic

Crushing peanuts into butter doesn’t help your body get more energy from them — only cooking does. Mice that ate blended peanuts gained the same amount of weight as those that ate whole ones, even though the nuts were crushed.

Quantitative

When you cook peanuts, your body can absorb more of the fat inside them, so you get more energy from the same amount of peanuts — mice that ate cooked peanuts gained more weight than those that ate raw ones, even when they ate the same amount.

Quantitative

When you eat protein before a bike ride, your heart beats faster than if you hadn’t eaten — but you don’t feel like you’re working harder, and you still ride just as hard.

Causal

Whether you eat carbs, protein, or nothing before a bike ride, you don’t feel hungrier during or after the ride — your appetite stays about the same.

Causal

Eating protein before a hard bike ride doesn’t make your body produce more harmful stress molecules than eating carbs or riding on an empty stomach — your cells aren’t more damaged.

Causal

Whether you eat carbs, protein, or nothing before a hard cycling workout with short bursts of maximum effort, your power output stays the same — your body can still push hard regardless of what you ate beforehand.

Causal

If you're a trained cyclist and want to burn more fat during a moderate ride, eating a protein snack before you start works just as well as riding on an empty stomach — but eating carbs before you ride cuts down on fat burning.

Causal

These diets can sometimes cause dangerously low blood sugar or dangerous acid buildup in the blood, so they should be done with a doctor’s guidance.

Correlational

The more you move each week while dieting, the more fat you tend to lose, even if you’re eating the same amount.

Correlational

Combining keto diet with skipping meals two days a week helps overweight people lose more fat and weight than doing either one alone.

Correlational

Skipping food two days a week (but not starving) for 3 months helps overweight people lose a bit of fat and weight, on average about 3.5% body fat and 2.8 kg.

Correlational

Eating mostly fats and very few carbs for 3 months helps overweight people lose fat and weight, on average about 5% body fat and 3.5 kg.

Correlational

After losing weight, whether you eat low-carb, medium-carb, or high-carb doesn’t change how much you move around — people stay just as active no matter what diet they’re on.

Descriptive

After losing weight, people on low-carb diets have less of the fullness hormone leptin than those on high-carb diets, which might make them feel less full.

Causal

After losing weight, people on very low-carb diets have higher levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin than those on high-carb diets, which might make them feel hungrier.

Causal

For every 10% less carbs someone eats after losing weight, their body burns about 52 extra calories a day — like adding a short walk to their daily routine.

Causal

After losing weight, people who eat very little carbs burn about 190 more calories per day than those who eat a lot of carbs, even when they’re eating the same amount of food and not exercising more.

Causal

Extra TFAM in mouse muscles makes their mitochondria slightly leaky (mild uncoupling), which helps them stay stable and not collapse when flooded with fat—this keeps them from making too many harmful free radicals.

Mechanistic

Extra TFAM in mouse muscles turns on a cellular energy sensor (AMPK), which then activates genes (PGC-1α, PPARβ) that help the muscle take in more sugar and burn fat better—improving how it responds to insulin.

Mechanistic

When mice have extra TFAM in their muscles, their mitochondria become better at using fat for energy and less efficient at using sugar—so they prefer to burn fat instead of glucose.

Mechanistic

Extra TFAM in mouse muscles helps their mitochondria produce less harmful free radicals and makes more natural antioxidant defenses, which keeps the muscle cells from getting damaged and helps them respond better to insulin.

Mechanistic