Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Even though trans fats are bad for your heart, they don’t seem to make your body’s general inflammation much worse — so something else, like cholesterol, might be the main reason.
Mechanistic
Taking CLA supplements for three weeks doesn’t seem to change most common signs of inflammation in the blood, even though it might increase oxidative stress.
Descriptive
Eating a lot of trans fats for a few weeks slightly lowers one inflammation marker and raises another, but doesn’t change most others — so its effect on inflammation is small and mixed.
Taking CLA supplements for a few weeks may cause more damage to fats in your body, similar to how trans fats do, based on a chemical marker in urine.
Eating a lot of artificial trans fats for a few weeks makes your body produce more of a chemical that shows your fats are being damaged by stress, like rust forming on metal.
It’s not just being thirsty that makes mice eat salt—only when the angiotensin signal is present does turning on salt-craving cells make them lick salt, not when they’re just dehydrated.
If you remove most of the salt-craving brain cells, mice no longer seek out salt—even when they’re very low on it.
Causal
Only the salt-sensing brain cells get more active when salt is low—not other nearby cells—and they don’t get the signal from nerves in the gut, meaning they respond directly to hormones in the blood.
The same brain cells that sense low salt also have a built-in alarm for angiotensin, a hormone that signals low blood volume—so they respond to both signals together.
The salt-craving brain cells connect directly to a specific spot in the brain called the vlBNST—turning on just that connection makes mice drink salt water, even without other triggers.
Just turning on the salt-craving brain cells doesn't make mice eat salt fast—unless you also trigger the angiotensin signal, then they immediately start licking salt like crazy.
When mice are low on salt, certain brain cells in the back of the brain start firing on their own like a heartbeat, thanks to special sodium channels, and this makes them crave salt.
A fatty diet turns down the genes that move fats around in normal mice, but not in mice that don’t have the ApoE gene.
When mice eat a fatty diet, the genes that make brain fats shut down in normal mice and ApoE4 mice—but not in mice that have no ApoE gene at all.
Mice with the ApoE4 gene make less of the proteins that help create and move certain brain fats, even when eating a normal diet.
When mice with the ApoE4 gene eat a fatty, cholesterol-rich diet, their brains accumulate more saturated fats than when they eat normal food.
The fat directly on the heart makes more harmful molecules than the fat around the big blood vessels, even without any treatment.
When the fat tissue was given serotonin (a chemical that MAO-A breaks down), it made more harmful molecules—but adding methylene blue stopped some of that increase.
Correlational
In the fat around the heart and blood vessels of heart failure patients, the MAO-A enzyme is much more common than the MAO-B enzyme.
When heart and blood vessel fat from heart failure patients was treated with methylene blue, the amount of harmful reactive molecules (like hydrogen peroxide) it produced went down.
When fat tissue around the heart and blood vessels from heart failure patients was soaked in a small amount of methylene blue for a day, the levels of a specific enzyme (MAO-A) that makes harmful molecules went down.
When olive oil sits too long, its natural compounds break down into simpler molecules like tyrosol and 3-hydroxytyrosol, which are also found in other foods.
Clear plastic bottles let in light and air, which makes the healthy parts of olive oil break down faster—so they’re not good for keeping olive oil fresh long-term.
Storing olive oil in dark glass or a metal can helps keep its healthy compounds intact better than clear plastic bottles—metal cans produce the fewest bad breakdown products.