Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Hot and cold rooms change what kinds of food you crave, but they don’t make you worse at tasting or smelling food.
Descriptive
If you give people the option to pick cold food when it’s hot and hot food when it’s cold, they’ll eat the right amount to stay balanced—even if their body wants different things.
Correlational
Your body releases slightly more hunger hormone when it’s cold and more fullness hormone when it’s hot, but these changes don’t make you eat more or less.
Even though your body feels different in hot or cold rooms, you don’t feel hungrier or less hungry—your appetite stays the same.
When it’s hot, people eat more cold dishes and drinks; when it’s cold, they eat more hot, hearty meals—even if they don’t eat more calories overall.
Because hops make gut cells release fullness signals in a lab dish, scientists think they might be used in supplements to help people feel less hungry and fight obesity.
When it’s hot, people want colder and lighter foods more; when it’s cold, they crave warmer and fattier foods—even if they don’t eat more overall.
Hops have bitter chemicals (called alpha and beta acids) that can bind to special taste receptors found in gut cells in a lab dish.
Spending a full day in very hot or very cold rooms doesn’t make people eat more or less food overall, even though their bodies react to the temperature.
When scientists block certain proteins and channels inside gut cells, the hop extract can't make those cells release fullness hormones anymore.
Mechanistic
When special taste receptors in gut cells are activated by hop compounds, the cells release more signals that tell your body you're full, and this happens because calcium levels inside the cells go up.
A hop extract makes certain gut cells release hormones that make you feel full and reduces the hormone that makes you feel hungry, by activating special taste receptors in the gut.
This is the first time anyone has tracked how the yellow pigments in perilla oil change during processing—and they found that the main one, lutein, vanishes completely when the oil is bleached.
When perilla oil is treated with alkali (neutralization), it loses the most phytosterols—more than any other step—meaning this part of processing really strips away a valuable nutrient.
Even though phenols and phytosterols are often thought to be healthy antioxidants, in this lab test of perilla oil, they didn’t seem to help at all in fighting free radicals.
In lab tests, the vitamin E-like compounds (tocopherols) in perilla oil are strongly linked to its ability to fight free radicals in two different ways, while the yellow pigments (carotenoids) are only linked to one of those tests.
When perilla seed oil is processed for commercial use, it loses most of its natural antioxidants—especially lutein, which disappears entirely during one step—and other important compounds like phenols and tocopherols are also reduced.
Corn oil made the chickens’ blood and arteries richer in certain healthy fats, while animal fat made them poorer in those fats — but this had nothing to do with how much cholesterol was in their blood.
As chickens get older, their blood cholesterol goes up — but that doesn’t tell you how bad their artery damage is. You need to watch them for years to really understand how diet affects their arteries.
Scientists used computer modeling to guess how this plant peptide might interact with oil molecules to stop them from spoiling.
Since sea lions and human babies both have the same waxy coating, maybe our ancient ancestors spent time in water—like sea lions—before evolving into modern humans.
Adding fat to the chickens’ diet didn’t change their blood pressure — so high blood pressure probably isn’t why their arteries got damaged.
The seeds of this desert plant might be a new, untapped source for making natural ingredients that keep oils from going bad.
Only a few animals—like sea lions, otters, and moles—that live in wet places have a special oil called squalene in their skin, which might help them survive in water.