Early, small, conflicting, or animal-only. Not actionable alone.
Pooled across 72 measurements, instant oatmeal scored 75 on the glycaemic index and large-flake oats 53. Regulators have signed off on oats for cholesterol, at 3 g of beta-glucan a day, not for weight. On weight, pooled trials of beta-glucan from oats and barley found about 2 lb at best, and the newest, in overweight adults, found none.
The 2023 study linking erythritol to heart attacks came with a real mechanism — more reactive platelets, more clotting in animals. But the cohorts measured erythritol in blood, not diet, and your body makes its own: plasma levels track metabolic disease and fall after weight loss. Marker or cause is genuinely unresolved.
Swapping sugary drinks for diet ones took off 2.3 lb across 17 randomised trials, and swapping for water did nothing. But the Framingham study found daily cola drinkers had 3.7% lower hip bone density — and diet cola looked the same, so switching does not buy you out of that one.
The WHO guideline covers 'all synthetic and naturally occurring' sweeteners and names stevia in the same list as aspartame — natural is written out as an exemption on purpose. And stevia has about a third the randomised trial evidence of aspartame, so the confidence people feel about it is not coming from a deeper evidence base.
The WHO advises against non-sugar sweeteners — as a conditional recommendation, on evidence it grades low certainty, from a harm signal that is observational, in a document that names reverse causation itself. Meanwhile 17 randomised trials found swapping sugary drinks for sweetened ones took off 2.3 lb, while swapping for water did nothing.
The famous 30% metabolism boost works out to about 24 calories, and two later labs could not reproduce it at all. What two randomised trials do support is duller and more useful: a glass before meals, for a couple of pounds over twelve weeks.
If you’ve been training hard, eating well, and still watching belly fat cling to you, has someone told you the culprit is your cortisol rhythm? Here is what the research behind that idea can and cannot say. A 2017 meta-analysis…
You know the routine: hard session, decent dinner, a couple more messages under bright lights, one last episode. You sleep seven or eight hours and still wake up flat. The first heavy set bites, “easy pace” doesn’t feel easy, and…
A randomised trial in 120 older adults found a year of aerobic exercise grew part of the hippocampus by about 2%; memory improved as much in the stretching group. The 'four times faster' figure comes from mouse cells in a dish, and the phrase does not appear anywhere in the paper it is credited to. It entered at the press release.
You lose about a pound and a half in an hour and the researchers called it 'bodily fluids' in their own conclusion. The one trial that randomised people found sauna added no significant fat loss on top of exercise — but with 15 per arm, it couldn't have detected much.