Twenty-eight trials say psyllium lowers LDL cholesterol. Six say it takes off 4.6 pounds, and the company that makes Metamucil counted them. Semaglutide moved 28.
Swallowed, castor oil has a confirmed receptor mechanism and trials in thousands of people. On your abdomen there is exactly one study, and it found bowel movements unchanged.
Across 25 studies and 1,876 people, forest therapy reduced stress with an effect size of 0.71 — larger than most things we check. Nearly every outcome was self-reported by people who knew exactly where they had been.
A 2026 scoping review searched four databases for human studies of the carnivore diet and found nine — small, short, and without control groups. In the one that measured blood before and after, median LDL rose 63%.
Heavy phone use and poor sleep travel together across 63 studies — and every one of them was observational, so nobody has established which is causing which. The reviewers say so themselves.
Melatonin is recognised as first-line therapy for insomnia and buys you about seven minutes. It is also not FDA-approved for anything — and when 31 supplements were measured, content ranged from 83% below the label to 478% above it.
The features that actually send an endocrinologist looking for high cortisol are physical and measurable — striae over a centimetre wide, bruising from nothing, weakness getting out of a chair. The reference says history and examination are often insufficient even in a clinic.
Vitamin D works if you are deficient — strongly, for bone. The enormous trials reported as finding nothing largely enrolled people who already had enough, and two 2026 papers disagree about what that means for the heart.
Methylene blue is a real drug with one FDA-approved use — an antidote for a poisoning that stops blood carrying oxygen. It is now sold in dropper bottles for energy, and the standard clinical reference records fatal cases alongside serotonergic drugs.
The National Institutes of Health keeps a reference entry on sea moss. Its opening line says no medicinal value has been proven, and it lists arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury among what the seaweed absorbs from the water it grew in.