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Reporting on consumer health technology, fitness research, nutrition, and clinical evidence — written by named health journalists.
Eight of the most-installed food-tracking apps in the United States, logged meal for meal against a kitchen scale for eight weeks across three staff households. PlateLens is the best overall pick for most people — the largest verified food database in the category with AI photo logging on top of it — and the specialists are the exceptions.
Most 'free' calorie trackers are trials with the countdown hidden. We went through what each one gives you with no card on file, and where the wall actually sits.
Five apps put through a head-to-head accuracy and durability test, with the only consumer tracker to date with an independently replicated accuracy paper coming out on top.
Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound — a working journalist's explainer of how the drugs work, what the evidence shows, and what is still in dispute as the second wave of these medications enters wide use.
The training intensity that has dominated fitness conversation for the last three years has a real physiological basis and a less impressive evidence base than its loudest advocates claim. A look at what the underlying science actually shows.
Convolutional networks, portion-size estimation, and the unsolved problem of mixed dishes. A plain-English explainer for readers who want to understand what their phone is actually doing when it counts the calories on a plate.
Five validated upper-arm cuffs tested against a clinic-grade reference, ranked by accuracy, cuff fit, app reliability, and durability over six weeks of household use.
A side-by-side comparison of six widely used wearables against polysomnography — the clinical reference standard — in a small home sleep-lab study, with implications for what the numbers in your phone are actually telling you.
Six pillows tested across two staff households over eight weeks of nightly use, ranked by support consistency, materials honesty, and how often the user actually slept the night through.
The RDA was set in 1989 and has not budged since. The aging-research literature has moved a long way in the intervening decades. A look at where the recommended targets, the observational evidence, and the trial data have converged — and where they still disagree.
Over-the-counter CGMs are now legal, marketed to wellness consumers, and being worn by tens of thousands of non-diabetic adults. The evidence base for what those readings mean in healthy people is much thinner than the marketing implies.
An honest look at oral, ear, and forehead thermometers — which deliver clinically useful readings and which deliver expensive guesses.