Nineteen people ate 441 calories a day less without being told to, purely from moving protein from 15% to 30% of their meals — with the appetite hormones pushing the other way. But when 38 foods were ranked head to head, the most filling was a boiled potato, and water content predicted fullness better than protein did.
Soluble fibre supplements produced about 2.8 lb more weight loss on average across 22 trials — an average, not a prediction for any one person, and most of those trials paired fibre with a calorie-restricted diet. The Lancet's 25–29 g/day target comes from a review that excluded supplement trials entirely.
13 trials, 606 people, and a real dose-response — but an I-squared of 94%, meaning the trials flatly disagree, and no figure you could act on. Meanwhile the famous green coffee claim of 17.7 lb 'with or without diet and exercise' came from a study whose weights were altered. It cost $3.5 million and was retracted.
Ten adults did the same 14-day diet twice: once on 8.5 hours' sleep, once on 5.5. The scale showed the same loss both times. On short sleep, 55% less of it was fat and 60% more of it was muscle. A separate 80-person trial found sleeping longer cut intake by 270 calories a day, with no change in what people burned.
22 randomised trials say brisk walking takes off about 4.7 lb — and 5.7 lb of fat, because fat-free mass went up at the same time. The famous step target is not a finding: it is the name of a Japanese pedometer sold in 1965.
Studied at up to 30 g a day for five years, in groups from infants to the elderly. The kidney scare has a real source: creatine raises serum creatinine, the marker doctors read as kidney function — while the kidneys' actual filtration rate stays put. The gauge moved, not the engine.
54 randomised trials, resistance training against people doing no exercise at all, nobody dieting: body fat percentage fell 1.46 points and fat mass fell about 1.2 lb. The percentage moved further than the fat did — because muscle was going on while fat was coming off, and a bathroom scale reports that swap as zero.
Across 21 studies, the people who lifted and did cardio still built a large amount of muscle — less than lifting alone, but nowhere near losing any. The cost is real and it depends on how much you do, and running causes it while cycling mostly doesn't.
Twenty-one trials longer than eight weeks, screened from 23,441 records: a trend toward benefit, and a confidence interval that includes zero. Then the FTC found the marquee study's subjects had been told to diet and exercise — while the press release said they hadn't.
6,421 people across 29 countries, measured by doubly labelled water: energy expenditure is flat from 20 to 60, even during pregnancy. It falls about 0.7% a year after that. The decline is real — it just starts four decades later than everyone thinks.