Processed meat carries an 18% higher colorectal cancer risk per 50 g a day — and two reviews covering four and six million people concluded the absolute effects are 'very small' with low-certainty evidence. Both are true. Here is why, what IARC's Group 1 actually means, and why steak is a different question.
Pooled across 72 measurements, instant oatmeal scored 75 on the glycaemic index and granola scored 56 — the breakfast with the health halo performs worse than the one people feel guilty about. The real, regulator-approved oat claim is about cholesterol, at 3 g of beta-glucan a day, and it saturates there.
Researchers measured urine pH across citrus juices: orange and grapefruit alkalised it, and lemon didn't — the ritual picked the wrong fruit. But lemon does have a real, evidence-backed use. It's kidney stones, it's for people who already get them, and orange juice may be better at it.
The famous PREDIMED trial was retracted from the New England Journal of Medicine and republished — and the nuts arm did just as well as the olive oil arm. Across 92,000 people over 28 years, olive oil beat butter and margarine handily. Against other vegetable oils, no significant difference at all.
Canola is rapeseed bred low in erucic acid — the name literally means Canadian oil, low acid. The FDA ban people cite was against mustard oil, not this. Even in the rat studies the heart lesions were judged 'not related to erucic acid per se'. And in 13 head-to-head trials, canola lowered LDL more than olive oil did.
Cut dietary linoleic acid by 90% and tissue arachidonic acid doesn't move — the inflammation mechanism fails at step one. But the two recovered BMJ trials showed no mortality benefit and one showed higher deaths, which the reassurance articles never mention. Here is the whole file, including what's wrong with both halves.
On an ordinary diet your muscle creatine is already 60–80% saturated, and supplementing fills the rest. Which is why one biopsy study found a six-fold difference in response to the identical dose — the people who gained most started with the most room. Loading only changes how fast you arrive.
Pooled across 143 randomised trials: body mass up 1.9 lb, fat-free mass up 1.8 lb, fat mass unchanged, body fat percentage down — with the studies essentially all agreeing. And the bloat everyone complains about traces to a loading phase that a 1996 study showed was never necessary.
The whole scare rests on one 2009 study of 20 rugby players that measured DHT and never looked at anyone's hair. The 56% rise it found moved men from 0.98 to 1.53 nmol/L — the normal range is 0.8 to 3.5. In 2025 a trial finally examined hair directly for 12 weeks and found no difference at all.
Same trial, same 59 people, same 40-gram dose: lactitol caused severe symptoms across the board and maltitol caused no laxative effect at all. Both are labelled sugar alcohols. Europe's regulator set a limit on erythritol for diarrhoea — not clots — and refused to drop the warning label. And the erythritol and xylitol heart scares came from one dataset.