Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
These spices don’t make you feel fuller, less hungry, or change what your body burns for fuel after eating.
Quantitative
Eating black pepper might lower your ‘good’ cholesterol, which could be a concern for heart health.
Eating horseradish can slightly slow your heart rate and raise your blood pressure a little, even though it doesn’t make you burn more calories.
Adding black pepper, ginger, or horseradish to food doesn’t make you burn more calories, feel less hungry, or eat less after the meal.
Adding mustard to food might slightly boost the body’s calorie-burning after eating, but the evidence isn’t strong enough to be sure.
When overweight people eat a low-fat vegan diet for 4 months, they eat way more fruits, veggies, beans, and whole grains—and much less meat, dairy, eggs, and added oils.
Descriptive
Switching to a low-fat vegan diet for 4 months helps your body use insulin better, which can lower your risk of type 2 diabetes—even if you don’t lose much weight.
Correlational
Cutting down on fats—especially added fats—in your diet for 4 months helps you lose body fat, even if you’re not eating fewer calories overall.
People who switch to a low-fat vegan diet for 4 months eat healthier overall, and this healthier eating is linked to losing weight, losing body fat, and improving blood sugar control.
When overweight people eat more beans and less meat for 4 months, they tend to lose more weight—especially if they eat lots of beans.
Eating sugar before a workout makes your body burn more sugar during the workout—but eating protein doesn’t change how much sugar you burn.
Causal
After working out, eating protein makes your body keep burning more calories—but it doesn’t make you burn more fat afterward. The extra calories come from somewhere else, like digesting the protein itself.
If you want to burn fat during your workout, eating protein before you start won’t hurt your fat-burning—eating sugar will. So protein might be a smarter pre-workout snack.
Eating protein before a workout makes your body keep burning more calories for an hour after you stop, but eating sugar doesn’t have that effect.
If you eat sugar before a 60-minute walk or light jog, your body burns less fat during the workout—but if you eat protein instead, it doesn’t hurt fat burning at all.
Most of the energy used when stepping over or into a hole comes from lifting and lowering your body’s center of mass—not from moving your legs back and forth.
People don’t just try to save energy on one step—they think ahead about the whole sequence of steps and pick the path that saves the most energy overall.
If the hole is wide but shallow, it’s easier to step down and up; if it’s narrow but deep, it’s better to jump over—people pick the option that uses less energy based on the hole’s shape.
After eating whole pea flour for a month, the body burned slightly more fat from a labeled oil over time than after eating the processed pea flour.
When you step down into a hole and then back up, most of your energy goes into climbing back out—like lifting yourself up a ladder—while stepping over spreads the effort between two steps.
Eating regular whole pea flour every day for a month didn’t change how many calories the body burned after meals, unlike the fractionated version.
People can look ahead and decide how to step over a hole without feeling it first—they use what they see to guess which way will use less energy.
After eating this pea flour daily for a month, the body seemed to burn slightly less sugar from food after meals, though the difference wasn’t strong enough to be certain.
When people walk over holes or gaps, they pick the easiest way to cross—like stepping over or stepping down and up—based on which one feels like it uses less energy, even if they can’t feel it until after they’ve decided.