Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Skipping meals intermittently for two weeks didn’t change how the body uses sugar, fat, or muscle protein in healthy, lean people—even when their insulin levels were raised.
Descriptive
If this theory is right, cutting sugar or taking a pill that blocks fructose might help stop or slow Alzheimer’s—but we don’t know yet.
Eating too much sugar, white bread, or salty food might trick your body into thinking it’s starving, which could over time harm your brain and raise Alzheimer’s risk.
The same body response that helps you survive famine might also cause the brain energy problems and inflammation seen in early Alzheimer’s.
What used to help humans survive famines—slowing down metabolism and storing fat—might now be causing Alzheimer’s because we’re always eating sugar and never getting a break.
When your body detects low food supply, it switches to a survival mode by using fructose to slow down your metabolism and store energy, so your brain gets more sugar.
Cooking eggs makes the protein inside much easier for your body to use—raw eggs waste more than half their protein.
Well-done beef gives older people more usable protein than rare beef, but the opposite is true for younger people.
How you turn milk into yogurt or cheese changes how fast your body absorbs the protein—stirred yogurt lets protein in faster than firm cheese.
Breaking down protein into smaller pieces before you eat it makes your body absorb the amino acids faster and triggers more insulin release.
Adding lemon juice to white pasta didn’t make blood sugar rise less after eating, even though people thought it might.
Correlational
Pasta with beans made the body burn more calories digesting the meal than whole-grain pasta, probably because beans have more protein.
Surprisingly, eating regular white pasta caused a smaller spike in blood sugar than eating whole-grain pasta, pasta with beans, or pasta with lemon juice.
After eating whole-grain pasta, the body burned fewer calories digesting the meal than after eating pasta with beans, even though both meals had the same number of calories.
Eating whole-grain pasta made people feel fuller and less hungry after the meal than other types of pasta, even when all meals had the same calories.
After eating a carb-heavy meal, your body keeps burning extra calories for at least two hours, with the biggest boost happening in the first half-hour.
Your brown fat only helps burn calories after you eat carbs—not after you eat protein or fat.
Eating a fatty meal doesn’t make your body burn much extra energy, and your brown fat doesn’t seem to play a role in that process.
Eating a high-protein meal makes your body burn more calories afterward than eating carbs or fat, but this effect doesn’t depend on how active your brown fat is.
After eating a carb-heavy meal, people with more active brown fat burn about twice as much extra energy as people with less active brown fat, which might help with managing body weight.
Even skim milk can make you gain more weight than water if you drink it instead of water, because it makes you eat more and burn less fat, even though it’s low-fat.
If you're already eating less or don't drink many sugary drinks, swapping water for them won't help you lose weight—because you weren't drinking many extra calories to begin with.
If you're trying to lose weight and you drink over a liter of water every day, you might lose more weight—even if you're eating the same amount—because it helps your body manage insulin and stay hydrated.
When you drink water instead of sugary drinks, your body burns more fat, especially if you haven’t eaten recently or are doing light exercise, because sugar in drinks stops your body from burning fat.