Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Pasta with beans made the body burn more calories digesting the meal than whole-grain pasta, probably because beans have more protein.
Correlational
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.
Descriptive
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.
Drinking a large glass of water on an empty stomach can make your body burn a few extra calories, especially if you're overweight, because it tricks your cells into thinking they're hydrated and need to work harder.
If you drink water instead of soda, juice, or milk with your meal, you tend to eat less food overall, which can help you take in fewer calories.
This study only looked at young women — so we can’t say if drinking more water helps men, older people, or those who are severely obese.
Even though the study says water makes your body burn more calories, it didn’t actually measure whether that happened — so that part of the claim is just guessing.
Mechanistic
Overweight young women who drink more water for two months tend to have a slightly lower BMI, even if they didn’t change what they ate.
Drinking a large glass of water before each meal for two months is linked to a small but measurable drop in body fat measurements at the arm, belly, and thigh in overweight young women.
When young women who are overweight drink an extra six glasses of water a day before meals for two months, they tend to lose a little weight, their BMI goes down a bit, and their body fat measurements slightly improve.
Cooking nuts and other fatty foods may have helped early humans grow bigger brains and be more active because it gave them more energy from the same food — like getting a free energy boost.
Nutrition labels say raw and roasted peanuts have the same calories, but your body actually gets more energy from roasted ones — the current system doesn’t account for how cooking changes how well your body can digest the fat.
Quantitative
Cooking peanuts breaks open the tiny protective shells around the fat inside, making it easier for your body’s digestive juices to reach and break down the fat.
Crushing peanuts into butter doesn’t help your body get more energy from them — only cooking does. Mice that ate blended peanuts gained the same amount of weight as those that ate whole ones, even though the nuts were crushed.