Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Drop sets on the Tonal machine let you finish your workout faster because you don’t rest as long between sets — so you get more muscle growth for every minute you spend lifting.
Causal
After 10 weeks of hard lifting, your arms only get a tiny bit bigger — less than the thickness of a penny — no matter which method you use.
Quantitative
Even with fancy machine tech that automatically lowers weights, drop sets don’t make your arms grow more than regular lifting — the machine doesn’t give you an edge.
If you’re short on time, using drop sets on a smart machine can build your arm muscles just as well as traditional lifting — you just need to spend less time doing it.
Even though one method showed a tiny bit more muscle growth, it was so small that it wouldn’t make any noticeable difference in how your arms look or feel.
Both ways of lifting weights — regular sets and drop sets — make your biceps and forearms a little bigger after 10 weeks, by about 2%.
Descriptive
Even though drop sets don’t build much more muscle overall, they do it faster — you get the same tiny muscle gain in less time, which is great if you’re short on workouts.
Doing regular weightlifting reps with full rest between sets builds a tiny bit more arm muscle than doing drop sets on a smart machine, but the difference is so small it doesn’t really matter in real life.
Consumption of hyper-palatable processed foods, even at matched meal frequency, leads to adverse metabolic outcomes (e.g., elevated insulin, insulin resistance, increased adiposity) compared to whole, unprocessed foods.
Assertion
Reducing meal frequency from six to three meals per day is associated with a significant reduction in daily carbohydrate intake.
Prolonged overnight fasting (>18 hours) is associated with lower body mass index due to reduced total daily caloric intake.
Eating fewer than three meals per day is associated with lower body mass index (BMI) compared to consuming three or more meals per day.
Central adiposity and metabolic dysregulation (e.g., leptin resistance) can reduce appetite and lead to decreased meal frequency, creating reverse causation in observational studies.
Low meal frequency is correlated with unhealthy lifestyle behaviors (smoking, physical inactivity, heavy alcohol consumption), which independently contribute to central adiposity.
Muscle protein synthesis remains elevated for several hours post-exercise without requiring frequent meals to maintain muscle mass.
If most people in the study don’t have high blood sugar to begin with, intermittent fasting doesn’t make much of a difference in their long-term average blood sugar.
Intermittent fasting is easier to stick with than strict dieting because you don’t have to count calories—you just eat during certain hours.
Intermittent fasting helps the body use insulin better—about as well as a common diabetes pill called pioglitazone—without needing to take medicine.
People with metabolic syndrome who follow intermittent fasting see a small drop in their HDL (good) cholesterol, which might not be ideal for heart health.
People with metabolic syndrome who try intermittent fasting see their blood pressure drop a little bit, which is good for their heart health.
People with metabolic syndrome who follow intermittent fasting see a tiny but real drop in their triglyceride levels, which means their body is handling fat better.
After a few months of intermittent fasting, people with metabolic syndrome see a small drop in their LDL (bad) cholesterol, which is good for heart health.
People with metabolic syndrome who try intermittent fasting see a small but real drop in their total cholesterol levels after a few months.
After a few months of intermittent fasting, people with metabolic syndrome lose about an inch off their waist, which means they’re losing dangerous belly fat.