Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
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.
Causal
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.
Correlational
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.
Descriptive
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.
After eating this high-fiber pea flour for a month, the body’s natural boost in calorie burning after meals was smaller than when eating regular white flour.
Eating a high-fiber pea flour every day for a month made the body burn slightly fewer calories after meals compared to eating regular white flour.
Working out on an empty stomach in the evening makes you feel less motivated, less energetic, and less satisfied afterward — and you can’t perform as well during intense parts of the workout.
When you work out in the evening without eating beforehand, your body burns more fat and less sugar for energy during the workout.
Skipping a meal before working out in the evening makes people eat less overall during the day, even if they feel hungrier right after exercising.
Even though the whole-food sandwich had a bit more protein (which burns more calories), that alone couldn’t explain why it burned almost twice as many calories — so the processing must be the real reason.
Mechanistic
The sandwich made with real bread and cheese has about three times more fiber than the one made with white bread and processed cheese — and that extra fiber might make your body work harder to digest it.
Quantitative
Even though one sandwich is made with real ingredients and the other with processed stuff, people feel just as full after eating both — so the difference in calorie burning isn’t because one makes you feel fuller.
Your body keeps burning calories longer after eating a sandwich made with real ingredients than one made with processed stuff — about an extra hour.
Eating a sandwich made with real bread and real cheese burns almost twice as many calories during digestion as one made with white bread and processed cheese, even if both have the same number of calories.
Human physiology is evolutionarily optimized to minimize energy expenditure during metabolic processes.
Assertion
Individuals with low body fat tend to habitually consume whole foods and maintain hydration in fasted states without conscious dietary effort.
Post-fasting gut microbiome remodeling requires exogenous prebiotic and probiotic support to restore metabolic and immune homeostasis.