Who Paid for the Study? All 63 Claims We Called Silent Had an Answer.
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 173 claims, that column has turned into a description of the health literature itself.
It did not stay the description we started with.
| Nobody said who paid | 0 | 0% | |
| A company with a stake was named | 122 | 71% | |
| Funded, and nobody named profits from the answer | 51 | 29% |
There is no longer a claim on this page where we could not find out who paid for any of the research. There used to be dozens, and the next section says what happened to them.
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.
We have proof of that from our own files. In September 2026 an independent review of our older verdicts sent us back to the papers, and by 10 October 2026, 63 claims this page had counted as silent turned out to carry a funding statement we had missed — in a paper’s acknowledgements, a trial registry, a correction notice. Those pages were corrected in public, and they are counted where they belong now.
That is the lesson that matters to you, because it is the same position you are in: a funding line that looks missing is often one nobody has read yet. 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 173 topics, and we choose claims that look worth checking. This is a description of our corpus, not a random sample of medical research.
Then we checked the obvious story
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 | 44 of 122 | 36% | |
| Funded, and nobody named profits from the answer | 21 of 51 | 41% |
Claims whose research named a company with a stake in the answer held up less often than claims funded where nobody named profits from the answer (36% against 41%).
And it goes further than the average. Of the 26 claims we rate Established — the strongest rating we give, meaning multiple good studies agree — 19 of them rest partly on research that a company with a stake in the answer paid for, wrote, supplied or advised.
They are: do you need a b12 supplement, foods that lower cholesterol, how to reverse insulin resistance, is maltodextrin bad for you, how to lose visceral fat, can fatty liver be reversed, do statins raise blood sugar, sit to stand test, tirzepatide versus semaglutide, body recomposition, caffeine before a workout, how to lower blood pressure naturally, psyllium husk, how much protein to build muscle, creatine, how to increase testosterone naturally, do eggs raise cholesterol, 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.
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 thought we were in on 63 claims, until we went back to the papers.
Whether disclosed-industry research holds up more often than research nobody said anything about can no longer be tested here: re-reading found a funding statement on every one of the claims we had counted as silent, and none are left. The last section of this page says what that does to the finding.
The best record in the table belongs to research funded where nobody named profits from the answer, which held up at 41%.
Hold this loosely. The commercial group has 122 claims in it and the funded-independently group has 51. Those are small numbers, the topics were chosen by us, and a gap this size can move a lot as verdicts are added or corrected — this one already has, and the end of this page says by how much. 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.
- 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 173 verdicts underneath it. A blank we admit to is the only thing that makes an empty silent group mean something.
The finding this section was built on can no longer be tested. We said that if the company-funded group kept growing and its advantage over the silent group disappeared, what we had found was small-numbers noise. Re-reading has since found a funding statement on every one of the claims we counted as silent, so there is no silent group left to compare with. Company-funded claims held up less often than claims funded where nobody named profits from the answer (36% against 41%, on 122 and 51 claims). We are saying so here rather than quietly deleting the section.
It has already moved, so here is by how much. When this page last counted before re-reading every funding note, on 24 August 2026, the gap was 50% against 32%, on 18 commercially-funded claims out of 107. That group now stands at 122 — new verdicts, and older pages where a second, independent reading found funding or conflicts of interest we had missed — and the silent group is empty. Research funded where nobody named profits from the answer now holds up more often than company-funded research, at 41%. So the comparison this history tracked can no longer be made, and we say so here rather than keep printing it.
And the thing we most wanted to be wrong about: the share of claims where nobody said who paid. It is now zero, and it fell because we went back to the papers, not because the papers changed. A missing funding line is still the gap that would close fastest if journals and the people quoting them simply carried it 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.