The WHO guideline covers 'all synthetic and naturally occurring' sweeteners and names stevia in the same list as aspartame — natural is written out as an exemption on purpose. And stevia has about a third the randomised trial evidence of aspartame, so the confidence people feel about it is not coming from a deeper evidence base.
The 2023 study behind 'sweetener damages DNA' is real, competently run and industry-free — and every experiment in it happened in a dish. Its own authors write that the health effects 'are not yet known'. That sentence did not make the coverage.
The WHO advises against non-sugar sweeteners — as a conditional recommendation, on evidence it grades low certainty, from a harm signal that is observational, in a document that names reverse causation itself. Meanwhile 17 randomised trials found swapping sugary drinks for sweetened ones took off 2.3 lb, while swapping for water did nothing.
Canning doesn't destroy the omega-3s — canned pink salmon carries more than a gram per 100 g. But albacore packed in oil holds 0.24 g against 0.86 g for the same fish in water, because the fat dissolves into the oil and the oil goes down the sink. Figures pulled from USDA FoodData Central, with the FDA/EPA mercury lists alongside.
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 It cost $3.5 million and was retracted.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.