Browse the evidence

Food processing methods such as heating, cooling, and mechanical fractionation significantly alter the structure and digestibility of starch and NSPs, affecting their functional and health properties.

Be aware that how you prepare plant foods changes how your body uses them. Cooking gelatinizes starch, making it more digestible, while cooling can create resistant starch. Processing can also break down fiber, affecting its health benefits.

Cortisol circadian rhythm contributes to decreased insulin sensitivity in the evening, as elevated morning cortisol is associated with high insulin sensitivity, while lower evening cortisol coincides with reduced sensitivity.

Your natural cortisol rhythm affects how sensitive your cells are to insulin. Morning cortisol helps keep you sensitive, while the natural drop in the evening contributes to reduced sensitivity. This is a normal physiological pattern, not necessarily a sign of 'stress' in the negative sense.

Consuming eggs does not significantly increase plasma total cholesterol or cardiovascular disease risk in healthy individuals, contradicting historical dietary guidelines that restricted egg intake due to dietary cholesterol content.

You can include eggs in your diet without fear of raising your cholesterol or heart disease risk. Eggs are a high-quality, affordable source of essential nutrients. If you have specific metabolic conditions like diabetes or hypercholesterolemia, consult your doctor, but for the general population, eggs are safe and beneficial.

Eggs provide high nutritional value and bioactive compounds that support health across the lifespan, including benefits for satiety, immune function, and potential disease prevention.

Eggs are a nutrient-dense food suitable for all ages. They provide essential proteins, vitamins, and bioactive peptides that support immune function and overall health. If you have an egg allergy, consult a specialist, as many children outgrow it.

GLP-1 receptor agonists lower blood glucose and HbA1c in type 2 diabetes by stimulating glucose-dependent insulin secretion, inhibiting glucagon secretion, slowing gastric emptying, and reducing food intake, with effects preserved in diabetic subjects unlike GIP.

GLP-1 receptor agonists (like exenatide/exendin-4 and liraglutide/NN2211) are effective injectable treatments for type 2 diabetes. They work by mimicking a gut hormone to boost insulin when blood sugar is high, slow down digestion, and reduce appetite. Unlike older gut hormones (GIP), GLP-1 works well even in people with established diabetes. While they require injections and can cause nausea, they significantly lower blood glucose and HbA1c.

DPP-IV inhibitors lower blood glucose in type 2 diabetes by preventing the degradation of endogenous incretins (GLP-1 and GIP), offering an oral alternative to injectable GLP-1R agonists.

DPP-IV inhibitors are oral medications that work by stopping the body from breaking down its own natural glucose-lowering hormones (incretins). They are effective in lowering blood glucose and HbA1c in people with type 2 diabetes. They offer an oral alternative to injectable GLP-1R agonists, though they may be less potent.

One week of insufficient sleep (approx. 5.7 hours per 24 hours) disrupts the human blood transcriptome by reducing the number of genes with circadian expression profiles and decreasing their circadian amplitude.

Consistently getting less than 7-8 hours of sleep for even one week changes how your genes express themselves, specifically dampening the natural daily rhythms of immune and metabolic genes. This makes your body more vulnerable to stress and inflammation. Prioritize consistent sleep duration, not just occasional recovery.

Prior insufficient sleep significantly increases the number of genes that respond to subsequent acute total sleep deprivation, indicating an intensified stress response.

If you are already sleep-deprived, staying awake for an extra day (acute sleep loss) triggers a much larger inflammatory and stress response in your blood than if you were well-rested. This suggests that chronic sleep debt makes you biologically more sensitive to acute stressors.

Insufficient sleep alters the phase and waveform of circadian gene expression, narrowing the window of peak expression for night-active genes and shifting the timing of immune and metabolic gene clusters.

Sleep restriction doesn't just reduce the amount of 'good' gene expression; it changes WHEN those genes are active. This misalignment can disrupt the timing of immune responses and metabolism, potentially contributing to health issues even if total sleep time is recovered later.

Estrogen deficiency during menopause causes a shift in fat distribution from subcutaneous to visceral (abdominal) adipose tissue and promotes metabolic dysfunction, which can be mitigated by estrogen replacement therapy.

If you are a postmenopausal woman experiencing rapid abdominal weight gain, this is likely driven by the loss of estrogen, not just your diet. While lifestyle changes are always important, the paper suggests that Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), particularly transdermal estrogen, may help reverse this specific visceral fat accumulation and improve metabolic health in women under 60, provided the benefits outweigh individual risks like breast cancer.

Estrogen promotes fat oxidation and reduces lipogenesis in muscle and liver, and increases uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) in brown adipose tissue, thereby enhancing energy expenditure.

Estrogen helps your body burn fat more efficiently by activating enzymes that break down fatty acids and by making brown fat burn energy as heat. This is why women typically store less visceral fat than men before menopause.

High consumption of animal-derived and processed foods is consistently associated with a gut microbiome profile characterized by higher abundances of Firmicutes, Ruminococcus species of the Blautia genus, and endotoxin synthesis pathways, which are linked to pro-inflammatory states.

To support a less inflammatory gut environment, prioritize plant-based foods and fish over processed and red meats. This shift is associated with a microbiome that produces beneficial short-chain fatty acids rather than endotoxins.

High consumption of plant-based foods (nuts, oily fish, fruit, vegetables, cereals) is associated with a higher abundance of short-chain fatty acid (SCFA)-producing commensals (e.g., Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Roseburia hominis) and pathways for acetate/butyrate synthesis, which are linked to mucosal protection and anti-inflammatory effects.

Increase intake of nuts, oily fish, fruits, vegetables, and cereals. These foods feed beneficial bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids, which protect the gut lining and reduce inflammation.

Heart rate monitoring provides a convenient and relatively inexpensive objective measure of energy expenditure, but its accuracy is limited by inter-individual variability in the HR-VO2 relationship and differences in movement efficiency.

Heart rate monitors are a convenient and affordable way to estimate energy expenditure, but they are not perfectly accurate for everyone. To get the best results, you should calibrate the monitor to your own body through a sub-maximal exercise test. Be aware that HR monitors are less accurate for upper-body exercises if calibrated on lower-body exercises, and during rest or light activity.

Administering low-dose leptin to restore circulating levels to pre-weight-loss values reverses the metabolic, autonomic, and neuroendocrine adaptations (increased muscle efficiency, decreased energy expenditure, and reduced sympathetic tone) that promote weight regain in humans.

If you have lost weight, your body fights back by becoming more efficient and slowing your metabolism. This study suggests that replacing the leptin hormone lost with fat tissue (to levels you had before losing weight) can reverse these 'starvation mode' adaptations, potentially helping you maintain your weight loss without needing to eat less or exercise more than your body naturally demands.

Psychosocial stress, particularly the anticipation of high demands or effort, causes impaired sleep characterized by shortened duration, fragmentation, and reduced slow-wave sleep (SWS).

If you are stressed, your sleep will likely suffer, especially if you are anticipating difficult tasks. This is driven by physiological arousal (cortisol, heart rate) and cognitive worry. To mitigate this, try to reduce the cognitive load of anticipating work demands before bed, as this anticipation is a primary driver of sleep fragmentation and reduced deep sleep.

Impaired sleep acts as a stressor itself, increasing levels of traditional stress markers like cortisol and exacerbating the effects of initial stress.

Poor sleep doesn't just make you tired; it puts your body in a physiological state similar to being stressed (high cortisol, inflammation). Prioritizing sleep is therefore a direct way to lower your overall stress burden.

Supplementation with 150 mg/day of quercetin for 6 weeks significantly reduces plasma concentrations of atherogenic oxidised LDL in overweight subjects with high cardiovascular disease risk traits.

For individuals with metabolic risk factors, 150mg of quercetin daily for 6 weeks can significantly lower oxidised LDL, a marker linked to heart disease risk. This benefit occurs even though quercetin has low bioavailability, suggesting its metabolites are effective. This is a specific benefit for high-risk individuals and not necessarily seen in healthy, normotensive populations.

Untreated thyroid dysfunction (both hyper- and hypothyroidism) impairs metabolic control in diabetic patients, exacerbating glycemic instability and increasing the risk of microvascular complications.

If you have diabetes, your thyroid health directly impacts your blood sugar control. Untreated thyroid issues (even subclinical ones) can make your diabetes harder to manage. You should be screened for thyroid dysfunction (TSH, TPO antibodies) regularly, and if found, treating the thyroid issue is essential to achieving stable glucose levels.

Subclinical hypothyroidism (SHypo) is more prevalent in patients with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) than in the general population and is associated with an increased risk of diabetic microvascular complications.

If you have Type 2 Diabetes, you are nearly twice as likely to have subclinical hypothyroidism compared to someone without diabetes. This condition is linked to a higher risk of eye, kidney, and nerve complications. Regular thyroid screening is part of comprehensive diabetes care.

Group exercise and home exercise are equally effective for knee and hip OA, and patient preference should guide the choice of delivery mode.

You can choose between group classes or home exercises based on what you prefer, as both are effective. There is no clear superiority of one over the other, so pick the option that fits your lifestyle and keeps you motivated.

Socioeconomic disparities exist in dietary improvements, with higher-income and higher-education individuals showing greater improvements in macronutrient composition and diet quality.

If you have limited resources, focus on the most impactful swaps: reducing added sugars and increasing whole grains. These changes are achievable and contribute to overall diet quality, even if progress is slower than for higher-income groups.

Self-report sleep quality questionnaires (specifically PSQI, AIS, ISI, MSQ, JSS, LSEQ, SLEEP-50, ESS) demonstrate good internal reliability and construct validity, making them suitable for clinical and epidemiological screening despite objective measures like polysomnography being impractical.

Use validated self-report questionnaires like the PSQI or ISI to assess sleep quality. They are cost-effective, easy to administer, and provide reliable data for screening poor sleepers in both clinical and research settings, especially when objective measures like PSG are not feasible.

Weight loss improves histological disease activity in NASH in a dose-dependent manner, although more than 50% of patients fail to achieve the target weight loss.

Losing weight is the most proven way to improve liver health in NASH, and the more you lose, the better the result. However, getting there is hard for many people, as half of patients in studies didn't reach the target weight. Focus on sustainable, gradual weight loss rather than extreme measures, as even partial loss helps.