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July 31, 2026 Hello, Here’s your recap of Examine’s July 2026 updates. You are currently receiving monthly deliveries of our weekly newsletters. If you want to hop back on to weekly deliveries, just click here.
📅 Top 5 Study Summaries for July 2026July 9, 2026
The Study Summaries marked with ✏️ are Editor’s Picks, which provide more details about the study, mention related studies, and include helpful graphics. How eating a lot of oatmeal improves cholesterol levels A bowl of oatmeal is a tried and true way to start the day, but what would happen if you followed up with another bowl at lunch and another bowl at dinner? According to this study, the answer is a substantial reduction in LDL-C… in as little as 2 days! The effect of exercise on depression ✏️ In this meta-analysis, exercise reduced depressive symptoms a bit in the short term, regardless of type or intensity, but the effect seemed to fade once exercise was stopped. Surprisingly, exercise performed comparably well to antidepressants and psychotherapy in the studies that made this comparison. Omega-3s were associated with faster cognitive decline — and fish oil quality might explain why Omega-3s are often touted as good for the brain, but this study tells a different story. The participants who took omega-3 supplements actually showed a faster cognitive decline than those who didn't. That doesn't necessarily mean that omega-3s are harmful; one potential culprit is oxidation in commercially available fish oil, which may interfere with brain energy metabolism. Exercise for improving cardiometabolic health: What time of day is best? ✏️ The results of this meta-analysis suggested that exercising regularly in the afternoon or evening may modestly lower blood pressure and blood glucose more than exercising in the morning. However, some studies had important quality issues. Based on the available evidence, the best time to exercise is still the time at which you can do it consistently. Are vegetable oils and seed oils inflammatory? ✏️ In this small crossover trial, the participants consumed foods with soybean oil (high in omega-6s) or palm oil (low in omega-6s), and neither clearly affected inflammatory biomarkers. Although this study alone doesn’t prove that seed oils and vegetable oils are safe, the findings align with evidence from many other trials that these oils don’t promote inflammation.
So, did you find something of interest? If not, please reply to this email to let me know which topics you’d like us to tackle. And if you’re ready to stay on top of the latest research, you can try out a free 7-day trial of Examine+ or a 14-day free trial of Examine Clinician Edition.
4 most common reasons for weight loss plateausJuly 16, 2026
When I used to work as a personal trainer and fitness coach, weight loss plateaus were one of the most common frustrations I saw. For many clients, losing weight felt suspiciously easy at first. We’d usually increase protein, reduce portion sizes, add a few training sessions per week, and the pounds would start coming off. Then, a few weeks or months later, the scale would grind to a halt. And that’s when the confusion began. From the person’s perspective, nothing had changed. They were still trying, still “on the diet”, and still doing the workouts. But under the hood, quite a few things had changed. The good news is that plateaus are common, normal, and usually explainable. However, they’re rarely caused by one thing. More often, they come from a mix of biology, behavior, environment, and sometimes plain old measurement confusion. So let’s dive straight into the most common reasons for weight loss plateaus! 1. Your body burns fewer calories after weight loss When you lose weight, your body becomes smaller, and a smaller body generally burns fewer calories. For example, in a 2009 randomized controlled trial in 48 adults with overweight, two weight loss diets (one inducing a smaller and one inducing a larger caloric deficit) reduced body weight by about 13 and 24 pounds, respectively, after 3 months. However, total daily energy expenditure (the number of calories burned per day) also dropped by about 450 and 630 calories, respectively. Some of this adaptation is to be expected, because a lighter body costs less to run. However, a small part of it may also come from metabolic adaptation (scientifically known as “adaptive thermogenesis”) where the body burns fewer calories than predicted from weight loss alone. So the same diet that worked at the beginning will likely stop working later, as what used to be a solid deficit will gradually become maintenance, or close enough to it that weight loss becomes painfully slow. The takeaway: a weight loss plateau may simply mean your old calorie target no longer creates the same deficit.
Weight loss is not only a math problem. It is also a “your brain and hormones have opinions” problem. After dieting, the body does not passively accept a lower weight. Several systems shift in ways that make dietary adherence harder over time. Satiety-related hormones such as leptin and PYY tend to decrease, whereas ghrelin, a hunger-related hormone, tends to increase, causing you to feel hungrier and less satisfied after meals, and be more interested in food. This is where biology and behavior start teaming up against you. Stronger hunger, cravings, stress, emotional eating, social situations, and easy access to tasty foods can make sticking to the plan harder over time. That may show up as slightly bigger portions, extra snacks, weekend drift, or more “just one bite” moments. This decline in adherence consistently shows up in clinical trials. For example, in one randomized controlled trial of 322 adults with obesity, self-reported adherence to low-fat, Mediterranean, and low-carbohydrate diets dropped from about 81% in month 1 to 69% in month 12 and 57% by month 24. In another 1-year trial, adherence to Atkins, Zone, Weight Watchers, and Ornish diets dropped from about 65% at the start to about 30% after 1 year. Importantly, this doesn’t mean you are weak or undisciplined. It just means that long-term dieting is hard, and the longer it goes on, the more biology, psychology, food environment, and plain old life start pushing back. The takeaway: dietary adherence often declines because the diet gets harder, not because the person got weaker.
Another sneaky reason weight loss can slow is that people may unconsciously compensate by moving less while dieting. This does not necessarily mean skipping workouts or cutting them short. It can mean fewer steps, more sitting, poorer posture, and less fidgeting — the everyday non-exercise movement often referred to as non-exercise physical activity, or NEPA. The calories burned from this movement are called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT. The evidence here is mixed, so it would be too strong to say that diet or exercise programs cause all people to move less, but in a 2018 systematic review, compensation was observed in 15 out of 36 studies, with declines in NEAT, NEPA, or both. Notably, the reduction in NEAT tended to be larger in people who lost more weight, suggesting that greater weight loss may trigger more energy-conserving behavior. The takeaway: caloric restriction and weight loss can make your body try to conserve energy by unconsciously moving around less.
Sometimes the plateau is not a true fat-loss plateau, but a scale-weight plateau, where fat loss may still be happening, but the scale is not showing it yet. Body weight is not just body fat. It also reflects things like water, glycogen, and whatever is still making its way through your digestive system. That means short-term changes in carbohydrate or sodium intake, meal timing relative to weigh-ins, constipation, and menstrual-cycle phase can all affect scale weight regardless of changes in body fat. Scale weight can also miss progress when your body composition is changing, especially if you are resistance training. You may be losing fat while gaining muscle (or “body recompositioning”), in which case your waist may be getting smaller, your clothes may be fitting better, and your strength may be increasing, while the scale has “nothing to report”. Expectations also matter. Many people expect weight loss to be linear and continue at the same rate as the first few weeks, but early loss is often faster because of initial water and glycogen changes. After that, progress usually slows and becomes noisier. That does not mean the plan has stopped working. It more likely just means the first few weeks gave you an overly optimistic preview. The takeaway: a plateau may reflect scale noise, body recomposition, or unrealistic expectations rather than stalled fat loss, especially if you are resistance training or comparing current progress to the faster weight loss often seen in the first few weeks. So, if the scale has stopped moving, don’t panic or immediately declare your metabolism dead. A weight loss plateau usually means the plan, the tracking, or the expectations need a closer look. Plateaus are annoying, yes. But once you understand why they happen, they become something to troubleshoot, not a reason to quit! One final note: medical conditions and medications can sometimes affect weight loss too, so if progress feels unusually resistant or something doesn’t add up, it may be worth discussing with a healthcare professional.
AI is tricking people into buying supplementsJuly 23, 2026
A few months ago, I was looking for alternative ways to make ginger-honey-lemon tea, since I can’t chop ginger due to tears in my wrist joints. One particular AI tool was really helpful … until it randomly suggested ginger and fiber supplement brands. It soon “confessed” as to what was really going on (confess is in quotes because LLMs are text prediction algorithms, not humans):
My uncle texted me a YouTube video in March, in which a very real looking cardiologist spent an hour facing the camera and lecturing about heart disease. Here’s the text exchange:
The video he sent had millions of views, then got taken down after few months later. Of course a bunch of copycat AI videos sprung up with the same exact phrasing, preying on older people. We may be at the point in history where those with dubious ethics can most easily take susceptible people’s money. Heck, you could probably ask AI how to swindle people via supplements and it would eventually give in and tell you a detailed plan. I wonder if Examine should make a guide to help combat this even a little bit? Or an advocacy site, coalition, or something else? We have limited time and money so the chances aren’t super high, but if you think it’d be helpful we could consider something. I doubt it's possible to reverse course as a society, so just make sure that your loved ones don't fall for these kinds of tricks. If you found this email helpful, let me know and I’ll keep that in mind for future emails.
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