Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Even doing a huge number of leg sets—over 50 a week—didn’t make anyone’s muscles shrink, which means there might be a very high limit to how much training your muscles can handle without losing size.
Descriptive
Even though the guys doing the most workouts looked like they might have grown a little more, the difference wasn’t big enough to say for sure that more sets = more muscle.
Correlational
Even if you do a lot of leg workouts, your thigh muscles grow about the same amount whether you do 20 or 50 sets a week—just doing any consistent training makes them bigger.
Causal
Doing a lot more leg workouts—over 50 sets a week—doesn’t make your thigh muscles grow bigger than doing 20–40 sets a week, even if you train for 12 weeks.
If you slowly add more sets to your leg workouts every two weeks, you’ll get stronger in the squat than if you keep doing the same number of sets the whole time.
Taking strong cholesterol drugs to get LDL very low doesn’t make you more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than taking standard doses.
Even when cholesterol is driven down to very low levels, it doesn’t raise the chance of bleeding in the brain — at least not in the first few years of treatment.
People who take strong cholesterol-lowering drugs to get their LDL very low don’t stop taking them more often because of side effects than those on regular doses.
Getting cholesterol extremely low doesn’t seem to make people more likely to get cancer, stroke, diabetes, liver problems, muscle issues, or cataracts — at least not in the time frame studied.
When people lower their 'bad' cholesterol to very low levels using strong medications, they have fewer heart attacks and strokes than those with higher cholesterol levels.
Eating less saturated fat, like from butter and red meat, tends to go along with lower levels of 'bad' cholesterol in the blood.
Whether you're a man or woman, young or old, swapping fats in your diet seems to affect your heart disease risk in the same way, according to this analysis.
Eating foods rich in monounsaturated fats, like olive oil or avocados, doesn't seem to make heart disease risk higher or lower based on this analysis.
Swapping out some fatty foods for bread, pasta, or sugar might slightly increase your chance of having a heart problem, but doesn't seem to change your risk of dying from heart disease.
If you swap out a little bit of butter or fatty meat for foods like nuts or vegetable oils, you're less likely to have a heart attack or die from heart disease.
The study found that what kind of fat is inside the bad cholesterol matters more for heart disease than how big or small the particles are.
In one type of monkey, healthy fats made the bad cholesterol particles bigger; in another type, they made them slightly smaller — showing the effect isn't the same in all animals.
Monkeys that ate more polyunsaturated fat had less plaque buildup in their heart arteries, no matter what species they were.
When monkeys ate more linoleic acid (a healthy fat), the fat inside their bad cholesterol particles changed — less of one type and more of another, which might be less harmful.
When monkeys ate more healthy fats like linoleic acid instead of saturated fats, their blood cholesterol levels dropped by about a quarter, no matter the species.
Mice without FFAR4 develop plaques with bigger dead-cell cores as their disease gets worse, which might mean FFAR4 helps keep plaques from becoming dangerous.
Even though the overall size of the plaque in the heart’s main artery didn’t change in mice without FFAR4 after 16 weeks, the dead-cell core inside got much bigger — meaning the plaque became more dangerous even if it didn’t grow.
After eating a high-fat diet for 8 weeks, male and female mice without FFAR4 had smaller artery plaques in the aortic sinus, but not in the aortic arch — suggesting FFAR4 might affect early plaque growth differently.
Male mice without the FFAR4 receptor develop bigger artery plaques in one specific area (the aortic arch) after eating a high-fat diet for 16 weeks, but female mice don't show this difference.