Every Claim We've Checked

Every claim on this site has been checked against the published research and given one of four confidence ratings. There are 232 of them so far, and this page is all of them, grouped by subject.

If you would rather browse by how confident we are, the Established, Supported, Preliminary and Unsupported pages do that instead.

What the four ratings mean

established (29)
Multiple good studies agree. Treat as settled.
supported (47)
Evidence is consistent, with known limits.
preliminary (81)
Early, small, conflicting, or animal-only. Not actionable alone.
unsupported (75)
We looked, and the evidence does not back the claim: either it was tested and did not hold up, or nobody has tested it and nothing that was tested supports it.

Sweeteners (11)

Sugar substitutes, and the studies people quote about them.

Supplements (56)

What the tub claims, and what the trials found.

Sleep, stress and recovery (18)

Sleep, stress, and the hours you are not training.

Meaning and connection (5)

Purpose, belonging, and the ways of living said to keep people well for longer.

Applied from the outside (15)

Saunas, ice baths, sweat suits, LED panels and compresses — things done to your body rather than by it.

Diets and eating patterns (16)

Whole approaches to eating, checked one claim at a time.

Blood pressure (11)

What raises it, what lowers it, and how to measure it at home.

Hormones (13)

Blood levels, what they mean, and what moves them.

Training (32)

Whether a given kind of exercise does what it is sold as doing.

Body composition (8)

What your body is made of, and what the scale can and cannot see.

Food and drink (47)

Individual foods, and the claims attached to them.

Guides

Round-ups built from the verdicts above. They carry no confidence rating of their own, because a guide is not a single claim — each entry inside links to the verdict that justifies it.

Best supplements for muscle growth — ranked by evidence tier. No products named, nothing for sale.
Best supplements for men — the same corpus, plus the testosterone shelf. The trials were mostly run on men, and it is still mostly bad news.
Best supplements for women — where the evidence is genuinely about women, and the much longer list where nobody reported it separately.
Best supplements for gut health — one item is settled, a fiber, and what it is settled for is cholesterol, not the gut. Two of the rows are not supplements at all.
Best supplements for muscle recovery — the best-evidenced recovery method on it is not a supplement at all.
Best supplements for weight loss — nothing on it reaches Established for weight loss, and the two with the best evidence are food.
Best supplements for sleep — exactly one entry is Supported for sleep itself, and what it buys is measured in minutes.
Healthiest sweetener — every claim here is a worry rather than a promise, so the ratings run backwards. The one people fear most cleared.
Healthy habits — the habit verdicts regrouped by what they act on, each with what it costs you in time, money and effort.

Our own data

Not round-ups. Each of these is a count the desk made itself, from its own verdicts and what it read behind them.

What health advice actually reaches people — we read the studies behind the claims, counted the YouTube views on them, and sorted the attention by whether the claim held up.
Who paid for the study — we record who funded the research behind every verdict, and compare how often each group’s claims held up.
Two kinds of “no evidence” — nobody ran the study, or somebody ran it and found nothing. Both get reported the same way, and only one of them means the claim is wrong.

Nothing here is medical advice. This is journalism — we read the research and report what it says. For anything about your own health, talk to a clinician.