Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
The journal Nutrients has the most studies and is most often referenced by others in research about the Mediterranean diet and diabetes.
Descriptive
More and more studies about the Mediterranean diet and diabetes have been done over the last decade, especially in countries like Spain, Italy, the US, China, and Greece.
Scientists study how much arsenic in food might harm people, and this helps create smart rules to make food safer by reducing arsenic.
Arsenic sometimes gets into our food from nature or pollution, and the rules in the US don't cover all foods well, even though we know it can be bad for our health.
Eating certain foods regularly that contain a chemical called inorganic arsenic might raise your chances of getting bladder, lung, and skin cancer. For example, it could lead to thousands of extra cancer cases each year in the U.S.
Causal
This claim says that when breast cancer tumors have more insulin receptors, they tend to be bigger, more aggressive, and have more estrogen receptors. It suggests that insulin might be playing a role in how breast cancer grows and develops.
Correlational
In breast cancer, only the cancer cells have insulin receptors, while other nearby cells don't, showing these receptors are specific to the cancer cells.
In simple terms, this means that in breast cancer tissues, the parts that respond to insulin still work normally, which might help the cancer cells grow or function.
Breast cancer tissues have much more insulin receptors than healthy breast tissues, which might mean these receptors play a part in how breast cancer develops.
Quantitative
Drinking sugary drinks might increase your chance of getting cancer because of the sugar they contain. For every extra spoonful of sugar you drink daily, your cancer risk could go up by 16%. When scientists looked just at the sugar part, the link between sugary drinks and cancer disappeared, which points to sugar as the main reason for this connection.
Drinking diet sodas and other artificially sweetened drinks doesn't seem to raise your cancer risk based on this study, but they didn't look at people who drank a lot of them.
Drinking more fruit juice every day might raise your chance of getting cancer by 12% for each extra 100 mL you drink, because it has a lot of sugar like soda does.
Drinking more sugary drinks might raise the chance of getting breast cancer, especially in younger women who haven't gone through menopause. For every extra small cup (100 mL) per day, the risk goes up by about 22%.
Drinking more sugary drinks, like soda and fruit juice, might raise your chance of getting cancer by 18% for every extra 100 mL you drink each day, according to a big study that followed over 100,000 adults in France for about 5 years.
Uterine cancer deaths have been rising each year, and Black women are much less likely to survive it than White women, showing the biggest gap in survival between races for any common cancer.
More people are surviving cancer now than in the 1970s, especially blood cancers, because of better treatments like immunotherapy.
Fewer men were diagnosed with prostate cancer after doctors stopped recommending routine PSA tests, but now rates are going up again, especially for advanced cancer.
For the first time in 2021, more women under 65 got lung cancer than men under 65, likely because women started smoking later and had a harder time quitting compared to men.
This means that for people under 50, women get cancer more often than men—about 82% more often. This is mostly because breast and thyroid cancers are becoming more common in women, while cancer rates in men have actually gone down a little bit.
Native Americans are more likely to die from certain cancers compared to other groups, with death rates from kidney, liver, stomach, and cervical cancers being two to three times higher than those of White people in the US.
Fewer people in the U.S. are dying from cancer now than in the past, mainly because fewer people smoke, cancer is caught earlier, and treatments have gotten better.
Studies suggest drinking soda might slightly increase cancer risk, but the evidence isn't very strong and the actual number of extra cancer cases would be very small. It's hard to be sure because the studies have limitations.
In 2022, almost half of all cancer cases that could have been avoided around the world were lung, stomach, and cervical cancers, because things like smoking and infections that we can control played a big role in causing them.
This claim says that smoking causes more cancer worldwide than any other risk factor we can change, responsible for about 15 out of every 100 cancer cases. Infections come next at 10 cases, and alcohol at 3 cases.