What a Surrogate Endpoint Is and Why It Flatters a Product
Most nutrition and supplement research measures a marker rather than an outcome. Sometimes the marker tracks the thing you care…
Reading the Evidence
Sample sizes, funding, preprints and how to read a study cited at you.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
A Mechanism in a Dish Is Not an Effect in a Person
Shown to kill cancer cells in the laboratory is the most reliably misleading sentence in wellness writing. Bleach does that too, at concentrations nobody could survive.
More in Reading the Evidence
Regression to the Mean Makes Almost Anything Look Like It Worked
People try a remedy when they feel worst, and things that are unusually bad tend to get less bad. That statistical fact has…
Statistically Significant Does Not Mean Big Enough to Notice
The phrase sounds like an endorsement and is closer to a technical footnote. It concerns whether an effect exists, not whether it…
What a Study of Twelve People Can and Cannot Show
Small studies are the backbone of supplement marketing and the weakest form of trial evidence. They are not worthless, and they are…
Preprints, Peer Review and What Each One Guarantees
Peer reviewed is treated as a stamp of truth and preprint as a warning label. Both descriptions overstate what the process actually…
Relative Risk and Absolute Risk Are Different Numbers
A fifty per cent increase sounds alarming and can describe a change almost nobody would act on. The two ways of reporting the same…
The Placebo Effect Is Real and Smaller Than Advertised
Placebo is invoked to explain everything that alternative medicine does and to defend it at the same time. What it actually moves…
Animal Studies, Dose and the Body-Weight Problem
A compound that extended life in mice is a reason to keep researching and not a reason to buy anything. The dose alone usually…
Publication Bias and the Trials You Never Get to Read
The published literature is not a random sample of the research that was conducted. Studies finding nothing are systematically…
Why Nutrition Research Is So Difficult to Get Right
Nutrition headlines reverse themselves so often that people have stopped listening. The reason is not incompetence but a set of…
How to Read a Study Someone Has Waved at You
Somebody has sent you a link and a confident summary. Ten minutes with the paper itself will usually tell you whether the summary…