Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
If young guys who don’t work out much eat a plant-based or meat-based diet with the same amount of protein and lift weights for 12 weeks, they’ll gain about the same amount of leg muscle and strength.
Correlational
If you're a guy who lifts weights, getting a bigger spike in amino acids after your workout doesn't actually help you gain more muscle or get stronger over time.
Causal
If you're a guy who lifts weights, drinking a protein shake after your workout with mostly fast-digesting protein gives your body more of a key muscle-building amino acid—leucine—than a shake with mostly slow-digesting protein.
Mechanistic
If you're a guy who lifts weights, drinking a protein shake after your workout with different mixes of fast- and slow-digesting milk proteins — like whey and casein — gives you about the same muscle and strength gains, even if your body processes the amino acids differently.
We're not sure if eating protein before bed helps older people build stronger muscles, even though it might help their bodies make more muscle overnight — we just don’t have enough long-term studies to say for sure.
Eating protein before bed might help young guys build muscle and get stronger when they lift weights for 10 to 12 weeks, but it doesn’t seem to work as reliably for older men.
Drinking a protein shake with 20-40 grams of casein right before bed might help your muscles repair and grow overnight — even if you worked out earlier in the day.
There's a type of diabetes called Type 5 that happens because poor nutrition as a kid changes how the body handles sugar later in life.
Not getting enough nutrients early in life can mess up how your body handles blood sugar and insulin, and those changes can stick around for a long time.
If kids don't eat well when they're young, it can mess up their body's metabolism for life and raise their chances of getting something called Type 5 Diabetes later on.
Brain cells grown in a lab tend to die easily when they don’t get enough oxygen, nutrients, or when they’re stressed by the lab environment or immune reactions.
When pigs eat a plant-based meal with synthetic B12 (cyanocobalamin), their bodies don't seem to absorb it — there's no measurable amount showing up in their gut system compared to a meal without it.
Quantitative
Giving B12 shots to milk-making cows doesn’t make the milk any better at delivering B12 to pigs’ guts — the pigs absorb about the same amount either way.
In pigs, heating or filtering cow's milk doesn't change how well vitamin B12 gets absorbed in the gut — it's the same whether the milk is raw, pasteurized, or microfiltered.
Pigs absorb way more vitamin B12 from cow's milk than from a lab-made version, and they don’t absorb the lab version at all — their bodies only seem to take in the natural kind.
Chorizo doesn't have enough of certain important amino acids for little kids under 3, so even though it's close, its protein quality just misses the 'excellent' rating.
Pork cuts like tenderloin and coppa give your body better-quality protein than other types like ribs, shoulder, or sausages, based on how well your body can use the amino acids in them.
Prosciutto gives your body more of the essential building-block proteins it needs than other pork products, for both young kids and older people.
Pork—whether it's chops, ham, or sausages—has really high digestibility, meaning your body can absorb and use over 90% of the essential amino acids it contains.
Most pork meats like prosciutto, ribs, and bratwurst are great sources of high-quality protein for people over 6 months old, but chorizo might not be quite enough for kids under 3 because it's low in certain important amino acids.
We know that eating a lot of red and processed meats is linked to higher cancer risk, but scientists still don't fully understand how exactly that happens in the body.
Eating red meat might increase your risk of getting colon cancer — scientists aren't totally sure, but there's some concerning evidence and a good biological reason to think it could be harmful.
Eating processed meat can cause cancer, especially in the colon, and scientists have enough proof to say this — even if they're still figuring out exactly how it happens.
A lab-made version of a human immune peptide can kill germs at very low doses and is safer for skin cells than many current preservatives, so it might be a good natural option for keeping cosmetics clean.
Descriptive