The claim fails against the available evidence.
Moon face is a real sign — of a condition affecting 1.8 to 3.2 people per million a year. And cortisol's link to belly fat, measured across 146 cohorts and 34,342 people, comes out at a correlation of 0.10.
A physiologist searched exhaustively for the study behind eight glasses a day and found none. The likeliest origin is a 1945 figure for total water — most of which was meant to come from food — and the nearest thing to a source says six.
Americans search for sleep hygiene well over 100,000 times a month. The insomnia guideline advises clinicians against using it as a standalone treatment — and when 241 trials were pulled apart to weigh each ingredient, it scored 1.01. Nothing.
Cochrane pooled 86 trials and 162,796 people: little or no difference to dying or to cardiovascular events, at high certainty. The one trial that cut heart events used a 4-gram prescription against a disputed placebo, and the atrial fibrillation risk is clearest at those doses.
Twelve men trained both arms for 15 weeks, one arm recovering in a bath of exercise-induced testosterone and growth hormone. The arm with no hormone spike grew 12%. The hormone-bathed arm grew 10%. Two larger studies from the same lab found no link with testosterone either.
Researchers took the top 16 testosterone and 16 erection supplements at the most popular US online retailers, pulled out their 37 ingredients and found 105 trials — but “no whole supplement products have published RCT evidence.” And reports of better libido fell 91% once untrustworthy reviews were filtered out.
In healthy men aged 19 to 39 the harmonised normal range is 264 to 916 ng/dL: the man at the top has three and a half times the man at the bottom. One reading under 300 is not a diagnosis; the guidelines ask for two early-morning tests and symptoms. And in 197,883 men, time of day moved the number more than decade of life did.
The US military now screens every service member over 30. The Endocrine Society’s guideline recommends against routine screening of men in the general population, at its strongest grade. And a glucose drink pushed 15% of men with normal testosterone into the hypogonadal range.
Pooled across 15 randomised trials of berberine and barberry, people lost 1.9 lb more than a comparison group. Semaglutide, in the trial that made it famous, beat placebo by 28 lb. Both are measured the same way, from the best evidence available for each.
Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil genuinely harmed people: when 11 New York counties restricted trans fat in eateries, hospital admissions for heart attacks and strokes fell an extra 6.2%. The FDA has since banned it. The fear outlived it and reattached to the oil that's left, which is usually soybean, as the ingredient list will tell you.