Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
People who eat a lot of highly processed foods like chips, sugary snacks, and frozen meals tend to eat more calories and gain more weight than those who eat whole foods, even when they’re not trying to.
Correlational
Eating a lot of fat and a lot of sugar together is worse for your liver than eating just fat or just sugar — they team up to cause more damage.
Whole-food sandwiches have way more fiber — like 3 times more — which might make your body work harder to digest them and absorb fewer calories.
Mechanistic
Even if both sandwiches have the same calories, your body absorbs almost 10% more usable energy from the processed one because it doesn’t have to work as hard to digest it.
Quantitative
Even though one sandwich is made with real ingredients and the other with processed stuff, people feel just as full after eating both — so the extra calories burned after the whole-food sandwich isn’t because they felt fuller.
Descriptive
Your body keeps burning calories longer after eating a sandwich made with real ingredients than one made with processed stuff — about an extra hour.
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.
Giving extra carnitine (a natural compound) to animals that eat a lot of fructose helps their livers burn fat again and reduces fat buildup — hinting it might help people too.
Fructose causes chemical changes (acetylation) on key fat-burning proteins in liver cells, making them less active — like putting grease on a gear so it doesn’t turn properly.
Fructose turns down the liver’s main switch (PPARα) that tells the body to burn fat, and it also reduces the level of a critical enzyme (CPT1α) needed to get fat into the mitochondria to be burned.
When people eat a lot of fructose (like in sugary drinks), their liver has a harder time burning fat for energy, especially if they're also eating a lot of fat — which can lead to fat building up in the liver.
After two weeks of intermittent fasting, certain muscle signaling molecules changed—GSK became more active and mTOR less active—but these didn’t translate into changes in how the body used sugar or muscle protein overall.
After two weeks of skipping meals intermittently, the body burns fewer calories at rest—which could make you gain weight if you keep eating the same amount.
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.
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.