How We Research
Every Guide
The actual standard behind every page on this site — not a mission statement, a process.
Anyone can write "evidence-based" on a website. It doesn't cost anything and it doesn't prove anything. After three decades of watching customers get burned by confident claims that fell apart under one Google search, I built Pines Nutrition around a stricter rule: if we can't point to where a claim actually came from, we don't publish it.
This page lays out exactly what that means in practice — how we source citations, how we handle ingredients where the science is genuinely mixed, and what we refuse to do no matter how good it would look on the page.
Every Citation Is Verified Before It's Published
Every study referenced on this site is checked directly against PubMed (or the journal itself) before it's linked — the study has to actually exist, actually say what we're citing it for, and actually be reachable at the link we give you. We don't work from memory and we don't guess at a PMID or a URL.
In the Sources & References section of a guide, the citation links the study title, not the author's name. That's deliberate: it means the link goes straight to the paper you can actually read, not just a name you'd have to go search for yourself.
We Say When the Evidence Is Mixed
A lot of supplement sites only publish the studies that make an ingredient look good. We don't. If a Cochrane review or a head-to-head trial comes back underwhelming, that goes in the guide too — because leaving it out isn't "staying positive," it's misleading you.
Our bitter melon guide reports a trial where it produced a real blood-sugar effect against metformin — and, in the same breath, a 2012 Cochrane review that found no statistically significant benefit over placebo overall. We call that what it is on the page: "genuinely mixed evidence." Not a spin, not a workaround — just what the research actually shows.
The same goes for safety. When a popular ingredient carries a real risk — like kava's documented hepatotoxicity cases, or an interaction with a common medication — we put it in the guide next to the benefits, not buried in fine print at the bottom.
Not All Evidence Is Equal
A single mouse study and a large human clinical trial are not the same kind of proof, even though both technically count as "research." We try to be explicit on every page about which kind of evidence backs a given claim:
What We Never Do
No made-up dosages, percentages, or study results. If we can't verify a figure, we don't state it — we describe the finding in plain language instead.
Every PubMed link on this site was opened and confirmed before it was published. None are guessed or auto-generated.
We don't diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent anything on this site. We use "may support" and "research suggests" because that's the honest phrasing.
Ingredient rankings and recommendations reflect the evidence, not which link pays the highest commission.
Reviewed by Someone Who's Actually Done This
Every guide on this site carries a byline for a reason. Research alone doesn't catch everything — knowing which questions real customers actually ask, which claims salespeople actually lean on, and which side effects actually show up in practice comes from time spent behind a counter, not just a database search. That's the second check every page goes through.
Meet Yannis LopezWe Update Pages When the Evidence Changes
Nutrition science moves. A guide we published last year can be missing a study that came out last month, and a claim that looked solid five years ago can get walked back by newer, better-designed research. Pages on this site carry a "last updated" date, and when we're made aware of new evidence — or find that we got a detail wrong — we go back and fix it. We'd rather correct a page than leave a mistake live because nobody noticed.
Browse the Guides Built This Way
Every ingredient page follows the same standard — verified sources, honest framing, no fluff.
Browse the Directory →