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How I Check My Sources

Last updated: October 4, 2026

This site gives health-related numbers, so the references behind them have to be real. In early October 2026, about three months after launch, I checked every reference in the 14 articles against PubMed, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's index of medical papers. This page explains what I found and what I changed.

What I found

There were 32 distinct references. Roughly half needed some kind of fix:

  • Real paper, wrong details. The right study, but with the wrong title, authors or journal. These I corrected.
  • Two papers mixed together. Authors from one paper, a title from another. I worked out which paper the sentence relied on and cited that one.
  • No paper I could find. I could not match these to any real study, so I removed the citation and softened or rewrote the sentence that leaned on it.
  • A sentence that described the paper wrongly. One article said higher training frequency gives a small advantage for muscle growth when total volume is the same. The paper it cited found no significant difference. I corrected it.

Examples

  • A review that recommends 2.3 to 3.1 g of protein per kg of lean mass during a diet was credited to the wrong authors and journal. It is Helms, Zinn, Rowlands and Brown, in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2014. It studied lean, resistance-trained athletes, and the articles now say so.
  • A whey protein review was described as being about fullness. It is actually a meta-analysis of body composition (Miller, Alexander and Perez, 2014), so the sentence now describes that.
  • A 2019 paper on weight loss and muscle did not exist under that title. I replaced it with a real review on preserving muscle during weight loss (Cava, Yeat and Mittendorfer, 2017) and reduced the claim to what that review supports.

How I checked

  1. Searched PubMed by author and keywords, not by exact title. Exact-title searches fail on punctuation and give false "not found" results.
  2. Compared title, authors, journal and year with PubMed's record, and opened the abstract for the studies I rewrote sentences about.
  3. Where I could not identify the paper beyond doubt, I did not guess. I removed the citation and changed the sentence.

What I have not verified

  • I have not read every paper in full. I checked bibliographic details for all references, and read the abstracts of the ones where I changed what an article says. A sentence can still describe a real paper slightly wrongly.
  • Books and reports that are not in PubMed (the Dietary Reference Intakes, the FAO protein quality report, India's food composition tables) were checked by title and publisher, not figure by figure.
  • I am not a dietitian or a doctor. See the medical disclaimer.

Found a mistake?

If a figure, a reference or a sentence looks wrong, please email me with the page and what you think is wrong. Corrections are the most useful messages I get, and I will fix what is wrong and say so here.