A Supplement Is Not Held to the Standard Applied to Medicines
Two products can sit on adjacent shelves having passed entirely different tests. Knowing which gate each one came through changes…
Varun Kothari
Contributing writer, Bad Detox
Varun writes about diets and is bored of being asked which one is best.
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21 articles
No Known Side Effects Often Means Never Properly Studied
A blank safety section reads as reassurance. It usually reflects the absence of investigation rather than the presence of a clean…
Herbal Does Not Mean Gentle
Plants produce some of the most powerful compounds in pharmacology. Treating botanical origin as a safety guarantee gets the…
Who a Multivitamin Is Actually For
The most bought supplement in the world is neither the scandal nor the necessity it is presented as. The useful answer depends…
Collagen and What Your Stomach Does to a Protein
The collagen argument has one genuinely interesting piece of chemistry and one large unproven leap. Both deserve to be described…
Why the First Week of Any Diet Shows a Dramatic Drop
The scale rewards you enormously in week one and then appears to stop. Almost none of that first movement is what you were trying…
Detox Diets and Elimination Diets Are Not the Same Thing
One is a diagnostic procedure with a defined endpoint and a reintroduction phase. The other has no endpoint at all, which is why it…
Gluten: A Real Disease and a Fashionable Avoidance
Coeliac disease is a serious autoimmune condition with a clear diagnostic pathway. Removing gluten before that pathway is followed…
Superfood Is a Marketing Word, Not a Nutritional Category
No nutritional science textbook contains the term, because there is nothing for it to describe. It survives because it does an…
Intermittent Fasting: What Changes and What Stays the Same
The eating pattern is genuinely different, and the metabolic claims attached to it have outrun what has been shown in people. Both…
Why Personalised Nutrition Tests Outrun Their Evidence
A swab, a stool sample or a blood spot returns a personalised eating plan within days. The gap between what these tests measure and…
Cutting a Food Group Is a Cost, Not Just a Choice
Removing a category of food is treated as free, as though only the bad parts leave. Every removal takes nutrients, convenience and…
Why Before-and-After Photographs Are a Photography Skill
The transformation in the two pictures is often produced in a single afternoon. Every variable that changed between them is under…
Probiotics Are Strain Specific and the Label Rarely Is
Evidence for one bacterial strain does not transfer to another strain of the same species. That single fact explains most of the…
Vitamin D: A Real Deficiency With an Oversold Fix
The deficiency disease is genuine, treatable and unambiguous. Nearly everything added to that foundation since has come from…
Sold as Herbal, Containing an Undeclared Prescription Drug
Some supplements do work, and a minority of those work because a pharmaceutical was added without appearing on the label. This is…
Feeding Your Microbiome Without a Map to Follow
The gut microbiome is one of the most active areas in biology, which is precisely why products claiming to optimise it are ahead of…
Seed Oils and the Argument That Keeps Moving
The case against vegetable oils is built from laboratory chemistry, a ratio and a graph of two trends rising together. What it is…
Skipping Breakfast and the People Who Skip It
Studies linking breakfast to better health mostly compare two groups of people who differ in dozens of ways. The randomised…
Weight Regain Is the Result Diets Rarely Report
Almost every diet trial reports the loss and stops measuring around the point the regain begins. The long-term picture is genuinely…
Food Intolerance Tests and the Antibody That Means Exposure
These kits measure a real antibody with a real meaning, and that meaning is not intolerance. The result is a list of foods you have…