For how we live.
TikTok's 'liquid gold' is real cow's first-milk, rich in antibodies and growth factors. But the robust human evidence sits in specific gut conditions, not the immunity, skin and hair benefits sold to healthy adults.
Manual lymphatic drainage is a real physiotherapy for swelling after breast-cancer treatment, where trials show modest, mixed benefit. For 'detoxing' or slimming a healthy body there is no evidence.
Compulsively scrolling bad news tracks with worse mental and physical health — but the strongest studies show association, not proof, and the scariest prevalence figure shrank by half on replication.
A randomised trial put a number on how much misinformation lowers vaccination intent. A systematic review mapped how common it is. And inoculation studies show the skill of spotting it can be trained at scale.
The puffy 'cortisol face' and the 'cortisol cocktails' sold to fix it lean on 'adrenal fatigue' — a condition a systematic review of 58 studies found no evidence for. True cortisol excess is a diagnosable disease.
Restrictive English schools cut phone use during the school day but not overall — and teenagers' wellbeing was no better than at schools that allow phones. What tracks with worse mental health is heavy, problematic use.
A subculture built on ranking faces sits directly on top of a recognised, treatable mental illness. The distress, not the jawline, is the part the evidence says to take seriously.
The looksmaxxing ideal of deep-set, tilted eyes has driven interest in canthoplasty — real eyelid surgery with reconstructive origins, and a complication record when it goes wrong.
The word covers everything from sunscreen to self-surgery. The low-risk end has real evidence behind it; the invasive end is where the harm sits, and the whole subculture carries a mental-health cost.
The claim that striking your face remodels the bone into a stronger jaw has no mechanism and no evidence. Blunt force to the facial skeleton is how oral surgeons see fractures and nerve damage arrive.
Hard chewing can enlarge the masseter muscle. But a bigger masseter widens the lower face — which is exactly what cosmetic clinics pay to shrink with botulinum toxin.
The technique claims that pressing the tongue to the palate will lift the cheekbones and sharpen the jawline. There is no controlled evidence it changes the adult facial skeleton.
Looksmaxxing assumes a measurable ideal face that also signals health. The research on symmetry, averageness and 'good genes' is far more mixed than the forums, or the filters, let on.
Two large re-analyses of the same public datasets found the association is real, negative and very small. A third review found the association is not even consistent between the Global North and South.
A 422-family cohort with a pre-ban baseline is the closest thing to a controlled test the world has. Researchers are also warning the law will make studying adolescents harder — including studying this.
The trend stacks mouth tape, magnesium, trackers and a 'sleepy girl mocktail'. Sleep physicians say one unglamorous treatment carries the evidence; most of the rest is theatre.