Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
When men with slow-growing prostate cancer take a gut-health supplement with good bacteria and fiber along with the fruit/vegetable extract, their PSA levels don’t just rise slower—they actually start to go down, which is a big improvement.
Causal
Taking a daily supplement made from fruits and vegetables like pomegranate and turmeric can slow down the rise of a cancer marker called PSA in men with slow-growing prostate cancer, which might help them avoid harsh treatments.
Calling SDA just 'digestion cost' ignores how the body uses food to grow—it’s more complicated than that.
Descriptive
Maybe the energy spike after eating isn’t about digesting food—it’s about how well the body uses the nutrients to build muscle and tissue.
Sometimes, animals that burn less energy after eating aren’t growing better—they’re just not absorbing their food well.
There’s no solid proof that animals that burn less energy after eating grow bigger faster—even if they eat the same amount as others.
After eating, animals' bodies burn more energy—but scientists aren't sure if that's because they're digesting food or growing, especially in cold-blooded animals like fish and lizards.
People with high triglycerides process fat differently than those with normal levels when eating a low-fat, high-carb diet — their bodies use different fat sources and clear fat slower, which may explain why this diet raises their triglycerides more than it does in others.
When people eat a low-fat, high-carb diet, their body burns less fat for energy overall, which might help explain why fat builds up in the blood.
In people with high triglycerides, a low-fat high-carb diet changes where the fat in their blood comes from — but scientists still can't explain where about 1 in 5 of those fat molecules are coming from.
When people with high triglycerides eat a low-fat, high-carb diet, their blood shows more leftover fat particles from meals, which might clog up the system that clears fat from the blood.
Eating a diet low in fat and high in carbs makes the body less able to clear fat from the blood, causing triglyceride levels to rise sharply.
In people with obesity who don’t have diabetes, fat cells still respond normally to insulin — the high fat levels are just because they have more fat tissue, not because their fat cells are broken.
Obese people re-store more fat inside their cells at rest, and insulin doesn’t slow this process down as much as it does in lean people.
Insulin reduces fat burning in the blood the same way in obese and lean people, but obese people still burn more fat overall because their bodies are burning fat stored inside cells — not just from the blood.
In people with obesity, insulin doesn’t reduce fat release from fat tissue as well as it does in lean people — but if you account for how much fat they have, insulin works just as well.
People with obesity have more fat circulating in their blood at rest, and their bodies are breaking down and re-storing fat at a faster rate than people without obesity.
Eating the New Nordic Diet might help the body use insulin better by making the liver produce more ketones and sugar from non-carb sources when fasting, which could help prevent type 2 diabetes.
People eating the New Nordic Diet had different chemicals in their blood than those eating the usual Danish diet — especially more from plants and fish, and their bodies started using fat and sugar differently when fasting.
People who ate a diet rich in fish, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains lost more weight than those eating the usual Danish diet, and certain chemicals in their blood showed why — some helped burn fat, others didn’t.
Correlational
Plant compounds in foods like berries and tea may help lower blood sugar and inflammation in type 2 diabetes by changing the gut bacteria to produce helpful substances.
Mechanistic
Some compounds made by gut bacteria (not the bacteria themselves) have shown promise in mice to help with blood sugar and inflammation, but we don’t yet know if they work in people with diabetes.
The livers of mice with less Cideb burned more fat for energy, producing more ketones and running their energy factories (mitochondria) faster.
When Cideb was reduced, the mice’s livers made less new fat from scratch, which helped them store less fat overall.