Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
When mice are low on salt, certain brain cells in the back of the brain start firing on their own like a heartbeat, thanks to special sodium channels, and this makes them crave salt.
Mechanistic
A fatty diet turns down the genes that move fats around in normal mice, but not in mice that don’t have the ApoE gene.
Descriptive
When mice eat a fatty diet, the genes that make brain fats shut down in normal mice and ApoE4 mice—but not in mice that have no ApoE gene at all.
Mice with the ApoE4 gene make less of the proteins that help create and move certain brain fats, even when eating a normal diet.
When mice with the ApoE4 gene eat a fatty, cholesterol-rich diet, their brains accumulate more saturated fats than when they eat normal food.
The fat directly on the heart makes more harmful molecules than the fat around the big blood vessels, even without any treatment.
When the fat tissue was given serotonin (a chemical that MAO-A breaks down), it made more harmful molecules—but adding methylene blue stopped some of that increase.
Correlational
In the fat around the heart and blood vessels of heart failure patients, the MAO-A enzyme is much more common than the MAO-B enzyme.
When heart and blood vessel fat from heart failure patients was treated with methylene blue, the amount of harmful reactive molecules (like hydrogen peroxide) it produced went down.
When fat tissue around the heart and blood vessels from heart failure patients was soaked in a small amount of methylene blue for a day, the levels of a specific enzyme (MAO-A) that makes harmful molecules went down.
When olive oil sits too long, its natural compounds break down into simpler molecules like tyrosol and 3-hydroxytyrosol, which are also found in other foods.
Clear plastic bottles let in light and air, which makes the healthy parts of olive oil break down faster—so they’re not good for keeping olive oil fresh long-term.
Storing olive oil in dark glass or a metal can helps keep its healthy compounds intact better than clear plastic bottles—metal cans produce the fewest bad breakdown products.
Even if you remove most air from olive oil, some healthy compounds still break down—but if air gets in occasionally, they break down even more.
When olive oil is stored for a long time with air or light, its natural healthy compounds break down into different chemicals, some of which are less beneficial.
Just chewing gum after colon surgery helps your bowels start working again, whether the gum has nicotine or not.
The amount of nicotine in the gum might have been too low to have any real effect on bowel recovery or inflammation after surgery.
People who chewed nicotine gum after colon surgery said their pain was a bit less on day 3, but they also got more pain medicine through their spine, so it’s unclear if the gum itself helped with pain.
Quantitative
Even though nicotine is thought to calm inflammation, chewing nicotine gum after colon surgery didn't lower any of the blood markers of inflammation compared to regular gum.
After colon surgery, using nicotine gum doesn't seem to cause more heart problems, infections, or deaths than regular gum.
Chewing nicotine gum after colon surgery doesn't help your bowels start working again any faster than chewing regular gum.
The more methylene blue you add, the more hydrogen peroxide the mitochondria make—up to 25 times more at the highest dose tested.
In mice, methylene blue fixes energy problems only if they’re caused by a specific broken part (Complex I)—not if another part (Complex III) is broken. This is different from what was seen in guinea pigs.
When the first step of energy production is blocked, methylene blue can help mitochondria make energy again—but when the second step is blocked, it can't help at all.