Grounding Sheets: Engineers Measured the Current. It Was Nanoamperes, and It Only Tracked You Moving.

Almost every argument about grounding is about whether it works.

Hardly anyone checked the step underneath — whether the thing it depends on exists at a size that could do anything.

In 2014 some people did.

The measurement nobody in the category quotes

An electrical engineering department at the University of New Hampshire — a professor, a senior lecturer and three undergraduates — built low-noise instrumentation for the job and measured the current flowing between a grounded human body and the earth. About forty measurements, under varied conditions [1].

They had no product in this. It is an engineering department measuring an electrical claim.

Current does flow. That much is true and the paper says so.

It is nanoamperes. A nanoamp is a billionth of an amp. For scale, the nerve impulses your own body runs on are thousands of times larger than that, and they are happening constantly whether you are touching a sheet or not.

And when the engineers looked for a signal inside the current — some pattern that might correspond to a biological process — the only thing they could find was you moving. In their words: there did not appear to be any information in the exchange except information about subject motion [1].

So the current tracked the subject shifting on the bed. That is the measured content of the connection the product is sold on.

Then somebody tested the outcome, independently

In 2022 a group put ten elite runners through running-economy tests in two pairs of shoes: ordinary training shoes, and shoes with a conductor element under the insole. Twenty minutes at a fixed intensity on a dirt track, shoe order randomised, oxygen use, heart rate, lactate and perceived fatigue all recorded [2].

Running economy is just how much oxygen it costs you to hold a pace. Grounded, it was 50.9. Ungrounded, 51.1. Those are the same number [2].

No difference on any physiological measure. No difference on any perceptual one either — the runners could not tell.

And here is the part worth slowing down for. Four of the authors work for adidas. Normally that is a reason to read a result sceptically, and normally we would say so.

Not here. A shoe company’s own researchers tested a shoe feature and published that it did nothing. An industry tie is a reason to read carefully; it is not a reason to throw out a null result that runs against the sponsor’s interest. If anything it makes this the most trustworthy outcome study in the file.

So where do the positive results come from?

A small and unusually concentrated literature.

The foundational review — the one that proposed contact with the earth’s surface electrons as a health intervention in the first place — was published in 2012 [3]. It carries a disclosure, and we are going to quote it rather than characterise it:

“G. Chevalier, S. T. Sinatra, and J. L. Oschman are independent contractors for Earthx L. Inc., the company sponsoring earthing research, and own a small percentage of shares in the company.” [3]

That is the authors’ own statement, printed in their own paper. They declared it, which is what a disclosure is for, and it is the same thing we report on every source here — including the creatine position stand written partly by people who consult for creatine companies.

What it tells you is not that anyone was dishonest. It tells you that the field’s founding document and the field’s commercial interest are not independent of each other, and that who paid for a study is a question worth asking here more than usual.

The best positive trial has sixteen people in it

It is a randomised controlled trial, and it is the strongest study on the supportive side, so it deserves a fair hearing [4].

Sixteen massage therapists, six weeks. One week ungrounded, four weeks grounded while working and while sleeping, one week ungrounded again. They filled in standard questionnaires on pain, physical function, mood, fatigue and sleep. The setting was a wellness centre in California [4].

The therapists reported less pain, better physical function, more energy and lower fatigue while grounded [4].

Sixteen people, self-reported outcomes, and a first author who — per the disclosure above — holds shares in the company sponsoring the research. None of that makes the result wrong. All of it makes it a starting point rather than a finding.

And PubMed holds no systematic review of earthing at all. There is no point at which somebody independent gathered this literature up and graded it.

What the AI is telling people, and who is selling it

We pulled the pages Google’s AI Overview cites to answer “grounding sheets”. Twenty-five domains.

Cleveland Clinic is in there. So is WebMD. So is PubMed Central.

So is Amazon. So is a mattress brand, and a bed retailer. And so are sites whose names are their business model — premiumgrounding.com, betterearthing.com.au, begrounded.co.uk, earthingharmony.com.

We are not going to publish a precise count of how many are selling, because we would have to defend it domain by domain and some are genuinely ambiguous. What we can say is that the answer a reader gets from the top of the search results is assembled substantially from pages with a grounding product to move.

Why this is rated Unsupported rather than Preliminary

Because those are different findings and the difference matters.

Preliminary is the rating for “nobody can tell yet” — the evidence is animal-only, or too small, or genuinely conflicting. We use it a lot and we are not shy about it.

Unsupported means we looked and the claim was not there. That is this one. The mechanism was measured, by people with nothing to gain, and came back at a billionth of an amp that tracks you rolling over. The one independent outcome test came back flat. The supportive results are small, self-reported, and come substantially from people who disclosed a financial stake in the answer.

What would change it? An adequately powered trial with an objective outcome, run by somebody who does not hold shares in a grounding company. That study is not hard to run. It is conspicuous that after fourteen years and a large market, nobody has published one.

What we would actually do

If you have one and you sleep better on it, keep using it. We mean that. A placebo effect on your own sleep is a real experience even when the mechanism is not real, and nothing here says otherwise. What we object to is being charged for a mechanism that has been measured.

Do not buy one for inflammation. That is the claim doing the commercial work, and it rests on a literature whose founding paper discloses a shareholding and whose best trial has sixteen people in it.

Be suspicious of any product sold on a mechanism instead of an outcome. “Electrons neutralise free radicals” is a sentence that sounds like chemistry and functions as marketing. When the outcome is easy to measure and the seller is talking about the mechanism, the outcome usually got measured and came back dull.

And walking barefoot on grass is free. Whatever grounding does or does not do, the version that costs nothing has exactly the same evidence behind it as the version that costs a bedsheet.

This is journalism about research, not medical advice. How we read a study · Red light therapy · Cold plunges · Lymphatic drainage massage