One claim, properly investigated, about once a month
Health claims rarely start out as nonsense. More often something real gets simplified, repeated, and eventually stretched well past the research that supported it in the first place.
Fact Over Myth goes back to that research. Each issue takes a claim people are actually hearing, finds the studies behind it, reads the full papers rather than the coverage of them, and works out what the evidence can support, what it cannot, and which people the answer actually applies to.
I publish the search I ran and the studies I used, and I show how I graded them. When an important group was left out of the research, or a variable was never measured, I tell you that instead of filling the gap with an opinion that happens to sound reasonable.
Free, roughly once a month.
What an issue looks like
This one went out in September. I have shortened it here, but nothing has been smoothed over.
The claim
What’s the point? You’re just going to put it all back on.
I hear this from patients, and I hear a version of it from clinicians, usually as reluctance to start someone on a medication they might take indefinitely. Both versions are being used to answer a question the research was never designed to answer, which is whether treatment is worth beginning at all.
What was actually studied
In the STEP 1 extension, 327 participants were followed for a year after semaglutide treatment ended. They had lost about 17 percent of their body weight during treatment, and over the following year they regained roughly two-thirds of it. That finding is real and I am not going to argue with it.
There is a detail in the design that limits how much the study can carry, though. The medication and the structured lifestyle programme ended on the same day, so the trial describes what happened after both were withdrawn and cannot separate the effect of stopping the drug from the effect of stopping the support.
STEP 4 gets closer to the question. Everyone kept the lifestyle support and only the medication was randomised to continue or switch to placebo. Participants who continued lost a further 7.9 percent, and those switched to placebo regained about 6.9 percent. Regain after withdrawal holds up under the cleaner design, which is worth saying plainly.
Where the claim goes further than the evidence
These studies show that weight tends to return. They do not show that everyone regains everything, and they were not built to tell us whether starting was worthwhile for a particular person, which depends on that person’s risk and their alternatives.
There is also a comparison nobody has run: people who spent their treatment period building resistance training and a repeatable way of eating, against otherwise similar people who did not, followed after withdrawal. This is the point where it would be easy for me to fill the gap with something sensible-sounding, so I want to be careful. The comparison has not been made, which means anyone telling you confidently that what you build during treatment protects you afterwards is going beyond the evidence, including anyone selling coaching on that basis.
Verdict: partly true. Certainty: moderate. Each full investigation ends this way, alongside the search strategy, the included studies, the exclusions and the grading, so you can check the reasoning rather than take my word for it.
Sometimes the honest answer is: it depends who you mean
“Is protein bad for your kidneys?” sounds like one question. When I worked through it I found forty-five trials across two systematic reviews that reach different conclusions, because they studied different people.
In healthy adults, the randomised evidence does not show the harm the claim implies. In older adults trying to hold onto muscle, the risk runs the other way, since eating too little protein is the documented problem in that group. At earlier stages of chronic kidney disease, restricting protein did not clearly change outcomes. At the most advanced stages, a very low intake did reduce progression to dialysis, and that is the finding the whole myth grew out of. In diabetic kidney disease, both reviews excluded those patients, so I cannot answer it for them at all.
One sentence, five different answers. The distance between how a question gets asked and who it actually applies to is most of what I end up writing about.
How a verdict gets made
I use the same process on every claim, whether it is about creatine or the pyramids: find how people actually phrase it, trace where it came from, turn it into something a study could answer, run and publish a search, read the full texts, grade the evidence with the reasoning visible, work out who it applies to, name what has not been measured, say what would change my mind, and put a review date on it.
See exactly how a verdict is made →
Who writes this
I am Yaa Boakye, a registered dietitian and certified personal trainer. I did my MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, my post-baccalaureate nutrition training at Dominican University, my undergraduate degree at Northwestern, and my clinical training at UChicago Medicine Ingalls, including rotations in diabetes and kidney disease.
I have also worked the commercial side of health. I managed a supplement and vitamin portfolio sold to clinicians, ran a body-composition testing practice, and trained more than two hundred dietitians on the business side of their work.
That combination is part of why I started this. I have spent enough time around both the research and the marketing to be interested in the distance between what a study found and what eventually gets said about it.
What to expect
Roughly once a month. I would rather send one investigation worth reading than turn your inbox into a content calendar, so if I do not have something worth sending, I do not send anything.
The library and the newsletter are free. Sponsorships may appear occasionally and are disclosed at the top of the piece. Sponsors do not see an issue before you do, they do not review conclusions, and I do not take sponsorship from a company selling the category an issue is about.
When I get something wrong I correct it on the page and mark the date. Every entry also carries a review date, so you can see when I last looked at it.
Get the next investigation
One claim, the papers behind it, and the reasoning that connects the two. Free, roughly once a month.
Educational information only. Fact Over Myth does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or individualised nutrition care. Decisions about your medication or your diet belong with you and your clinician.
