Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
If you drink water instead of soda, juice, or milk with your meals, you tend to eat less food overall, which can help you take in fewer calories.
Correlational
When people eat high-protein, low-carb ultra-processed foods, their bodies burn more fat and protein for energy and store less fat, compared to when they eat normal-protein ultra-processed foods.
Causal
When people eat high-protein, low-carb ultra-processed foods, their bodies release more hormones that tell them they’re full (PYY and glucagon) and less of the hunger hormone (ghrelin), which may explain why they eat less.
Mechanistic
Even though people still ate more calories than they burned, eating high-protein, low-carb ultra-processed foods made them much less likely to store excess energy as fat compared to normal-protein ultra-processed foods.
Eating ultra-processed foods with more protein and fewer carbs makes your body burn about 130 extra calories per day just to digest and process the food, even if you’re not moving more.
When healthy young people eat ultra-processed foods that are high in protein and low in carbs, they naturally eat about 200 fewer calories per day than when they eat ultra-processed foods with normal protein and carbs—even if both meals taste the same.
How much water someone drinks doesn’t seem to directly affect the level of a key water-regulating hormone in their blood.
People who don’t drink much water may burn slightly fewer calories over the course of a day, especially in populations living in hot, dry climates.
People who drink less water tend to eat less food later, even if they’re not hungry or trying to diet.
Higher levels of a hormone linked to water balance (copeptin) are tied to the body burning less fat and more sugar, even when hydration levels are accounted for.
When people drink less water, their bodies tend to burn more fat and less sugar for energy, even if they’re not trying to lose weight.
Even though people liked the whole-food sandwich more, that didn’t make their body burn more calories — so the calorie-burning difference isn’t because of taste.
The processed sandwich has way less fiber than the whole-food one — about one-third — which might make it easier for your body to digest and burn fewer calories.
Quantitative
Even though your body burns more calories digesting a sandwich made with real ingredients, you don’t feel any fuller than if you ate one made with processed ingredients.
Descriptive
Eating a sandwich made with real bread and real cheese burns almost twice as many calories during digestion as one made with white bread and processed cheese, even if both have the same number of calories.
The studies on these supplements are too messy and unreliable to say for sure if they help overweight kids — we can't trust the results much.
These supplements don't reliably help kids improve their cholesterol or triglyceride levels — the studies show no clear benefit.
These supplements don't seem to help kids with overweight or obesity lower their blood sugar or insulin levels — the studies all show no clear benefit.
Giving kids probiotics or synbiotics doesn't reliably help them lose weight or lower their BMI — the studies all show mixed or no results.
Giving kids who are overweight special fiber supplements might help them lose a little weight or lower their BMI a bit, but we can't be sure because the studies are messy and not very reliable.
In this disease, the energy factories (mitochondria) in muscle cells are all piled up near the center (nucleus) instead of spread out where they’re needed, and this same pattern is seen in actual patient muscle tissue.
Only the muscle cells in the dish had the big, weird mitochondria—even the nearby skin-like cells looked normal, meaning the problem is unique to muscle tissue.
In this disease, the proteins that split mitochondria are low, but the ones that glue them together are normal—so the problem isn't that everything is out of balance, just that splitting is broken.
The muscle cells from this rare disease patient make less of the energy molecules (like ATP) and have slower energy production cycles, meaning their muscles probably don't have enough fuel to work properly.