Who Paid for the Study? On 60 of 107 Health Claims, We Could Not Find Out.
Who paid for the study behind the last health claim you believed?
It is a fair question and an almost impossible one to answer casually. The funding statement is at the bottom of the paper, the paper is usually behind a paywall, and the article that told you about it rarely mentions either.
So we have been writing it down. Every verdict on this site carries a funding line — who paid for the research — filled in by reading the papers. After 107 claims, that column has turned into a description of the health literature itself.
It is not the description we expected.
| Nobody said who paid | 60 | 56% | |
| A company with a stake was named | 18 | 17% | |
| Funded, and nobody named profits from the answer | 29 | 27% |
On 60 of 107 claims — 56% — we could not find out who paid for the research at all. Not a suspicious funder. Not a buried conflict. Nothing. The question simply has no answer in the material.
What that number does and does not mean
Our funding field says “not stated in the sources read”, and the wording is deliberate. That is a claim about our reading, not about the world.
The money might well be disclosed somewhere — in a supplementary file, a trial registry entry, or the full text of a paper we could only reach as an abstract. What we can tell you is that a person reading the sources a claim actually rests on, the way we read them, would not find it.
That is still the number that matters to you, because it is the same position you are in. But it is not the same as saying the funding was concealed, and we are not saying that.
One more limit, the same as on any page here: we chose these 107 topics, and we choose claims that look worth checking. This is a description of our corpus, not a random sample of medical research.
Now the part that surprised us
The expected story here writes itself. Industry pays for the research, industry gets the answer it wants, and the claims backed by company money are the rotten ones.
So we checked. Here is how often the claims in each group held up.
| A company with a stake was named | 9 of 18 | 50% | |
| Funded, and nobody named profits from the answer | 14 of 29 | 48% | |
| Nobody said who paid | 19 of 60 | 32% |
Claims whose research had a named commercial funder held up more often (50%) than claims where nobody said who paid (32%).
And it goes further than the average. Of the 13 claims we rate Established — the strongest rating we give, meaning several independent lines of evidence agree — 3 of them rest partly on research funded by a company that sells the thing.
They are: psyllium husk, how much creatine to take, does creatine make you gain weight. We rated them Established anyway, because the evidence is strong and the funding is disclosed in the papers where you can weigh it.
| Does creatine make you gain weight | established |
| How much creatine to take | established |
| Psyllium husk | established |
| Sugar alcohols | supported |
| Fiber | supported |
| TRT | supported |
| Oatmeal | supported |
| Protein for weight loss | supported |
| Walking after meals | supported |
| Apple cider vinegar | preliminary |
| Ashwagandha | preliminary |
| Coffee | preliminary |
| Erythritol | preliminary |
| Detox teas | unsupported |
| Fat burners | unsupported |
| Waist trainers | unsupported |
| Creatine and hair loss | unsupported |
| Krill oil versus fish oil | unsupported |
So should you ignore industry-funded research?
No — and the reason is the whole point of this page.
Industry money is a known quantity. Silence is not.
When a paper tells you the manufacturer paid for it, you have something to do with that. You can read the result more carefully, look for whether anyone independent replicated it, notice if the outcome that got measured is not quite the outcome being sold. The disclosure is doing its job: it hands you a reason to be careful.
When nobody says anything, you get none of that. You cannot weigh a conflict you cannot see, and you cannot rule one out either. That is the position we were in on 60 of 107 claims.
Why would disclosed-industry research hold up more often? Our best guess is dull: companies mostly fund research on things that already work well enough to sell. Nobody runs an expensive trial on sea moss. They run them on creatine and psyllium and oats — products with something to demonstrate. Industry-funded research is also the most scrutinised in the field, which is exactly why its funding is so well documented.
Hold this loosely. The commercial group has 18 claims in it and the funded-independently group has 29. Those are small numbers, the topics were chosen by us, and a gap this size could move a lot with another twenty verdicts. We are telling you what our table says, not what the field does.
What to actually do with this
The useful habit is not “check whether it was industry funded”. It is one step earlier:
Can you find out who paid at all?
- If an article cites a study and does not tell you who funded it, that is a missing field, not a neutral one. It is the single most common gap in health writing, and it is invisible precisely because nothing appears where the information should be.
- In the paper itself, look at the very end. Funding and competing interests are almost always the last two sections before the references. They are usually two sentences long and they are frequently the most informative part of the document.
- A named industry funder is more informative than silence. It tells you where to be careful. Silence tells you nothing, and it is far more common.
- Watch for the gap between who funded the study and who is quoting it. A supplement brand citing independent research is a different situation from a supplement brand citing the trial it paid for, and both get written up the same way.
What we are watching, and what would change our minds
This page recounts itself every time we publish. So here is what we have committed to, in advance.
The funding field is never guessed. Where we could not find out, it says so. If we ever filled that field with a plausible assumption, this page would be worthless and so would the 107 verdicts underneath it. A blank we admit to is the only thing that makes the 60 meaningful.
The finding that would overturn this: the gap between 50% and 32% closing, or inverting, as the corpus grows. It rests on 18 commercially-funded claims today. If that group doubles and the advantage disappears, then what we found was the small-numbers noise we just warned you about, and we will say so here rather than quietly deleting the section.
And the thing we would most like to be wrong about: that 56% figure. It is the highest number on this page, it describes an absence rather than a finding, and it is the one that would improve most if journals and the people quoting them simply carried the funding line forward. It costs nothing. It is two sentences.
The four ratings used above are the same ones on every verdict here, and we wrote down how we read a study so you can see what earns each one. The companion to this page measures something different from the same corpus: what health advice actually reaches people.
Nobody pays us to reach a conclusion. There is nothing for sale on this page, and there never will be on a page that carries a verdict.