Six small one-year trials found aged garlic extract slowed a number on a heart scan; five came from one Los Angeles lab, and at least five had money, capsules or staff from the extract's maker. Total plaque did not shrink in either trial that measured it, and the one long trial that counted heart deaths found no fewer.
Eleven randomised trials of Akkermansia supplements for weight or blood sugar are small and split: the largest, 142 adults, missed its main goal, and the clearest result was 4.4 lb less weight regained after a diet. Four reported GLP-1, and they disagree. The cancer link is a stool finding, and the one such trial to report results had nine patients and no comparison group.
In trials of adults with constipation, two or three kiwifruit a day added roughly one to three complete bowel movements a week to where people started, about what a fiber supplement did, over four weeks. The one randomised trial against a dummy found no clear difference across everyone in it. No trial of the fruit we found reported the first 24 hours, and a kiwifruit marketer paid toward every gut study of the whole fruit on this page.
At a normal weight, a large waist went with higher death rates in big studies; a high body-fat reading did so less consistently. The breast cancer study that best fits the videos' "three-fold" found 1.9 times. Small trials moved the fat; none counted the deaths.
Cooling cooked rice, pasta or potatoes turns a little of the starch resistant to digestion. Of the 28 single-meal trials we found and could read in people without diabetes, 15 found a clearly smaller blood-sugar rise, 11 found no clear difference and 2 reported no test result for it. The peak often barely moved, and no trial of chilled food alone that measured blood sugar lasted longer than a day. Resistant-starch supplements are a separate, weaker story.
Six of seven kinds of exercise cut visceral fat across 84 randomised trials, and in one eight-month trial it fell 6.9% while weight fell 2.6%. The green tea sold to shrink it was tested mostly by companies that sell tea. Of three trials we read with no company among their authors, two found no change and one, a small trial alongside exercise, found less.
Yes, for the fat: in a year-long randomised trial, 64% of people on a lifestyle programme had liver fat back under the line that defines the disease, against 20% on usual care, and liver fat starts falling within days of eating less. The scarring, which is what predicts how the disease ends, is a slower and smaller story.
A seller told buyers that 90% of Americans have parasites. In 129,732 rounds of parasite testing doctors ordered at a national laboratory, 1.7% found one that causes disease. We found no trial of a cleanse in people without an infection; herbs tried on people who had one gave mixed results, and against the drug they mostly lost.
A widely watched caregiving channel says stress keeps caregivers' cortisol high, and another of its videos puts their extra risk of dying at 63%. That figure came from strained spouses in one 1999 study. In the large studies since, caregivers died less often than similar non-caregivers. What rises, consistently, is depression and stress.
After a spouse dies, the survivor's death rate ran about two-thirds higher for three months: against the still-married in an American study, and against people's own usual rate in a British one. Then the excess shrank, and in plain numbers it is small. Broken heart syndrome is real; when a painful emotion set it off, grief among them, about 1 in 100 patients died in hospital.