Press ESC to close

Health evidence, longevity research and real-world experiments

Independent review and synthesis of published research on nutrition, supplements, sleep, wellbeing and everyday health, with sources and uncertainty made clear.

Mind & Well-being

Can a Country Make You Happier? Happiness Rankings Explained

Finland once again tops the world happiness ranking. One can imagine a person reading this news at a kitchen table in Helsinki, looking at the...

Read the Article
40 min read

Latest Articles

Sleep & Recovery

Coffee Can Follow You Into Sleep

Falling asleep easily does not tell you everything about coffee’s effect on your night. Dose and timing matter—and decaf offers a way to keep the...

Read the Article
20 min read

From the evidence

Key takeaways from recent research on Mike's Balance.

Supplements

Do You Need Electrolytes Every Day? What the Evidence Shows for Healthy Adults

Electrolyte drinks can change short-term fluid retention. But do healthy adults benefit from drinking them every day? We followed the evidence.

Read the Article
28 min read

THE BIGGER PICTURE

The Number Is Real. But What Does It Measure?

A body-fat scale reads electrical impedance, not body fat. A facial-age model reads pixels, not biological age. An ORP meter measures redox potential, not dissolved hydrogen. Moving from a sensor reading to the answer we want requires a validated model or an independent measurement. Three different articles pose the same question: what was actually observed?

3 Signals measured
3 Target quantities

An estimate is not a direct measurement.

THE UNEXPECTED FINDING

The Beaver That Challenges a Simple Diet Story

In a literature compilation covering 68 bird and mammal species, humans were listed at gastric pH 1.5 and North American beavers at pH 1.7. Beavers mainly eat plants. The numbers challenge the idea that highly acidic stomachs belong only to meat-eaters. But the species values came from different studies, and the evolutionary explanation remains uncertain.

pH 1.5 Human stomach
pH 1.7 North American beaver

Separate studies, not a controlled comparison. Lower pH means greater acidity.

Recent Articles