How to decide which health advice to trust?
Dr. Anupam Jena on who to believe and why
Levels <[email protected]>
Share
Levels presents an interview with Dr. Anupam Jena, a Harvard Medical School professor, on how to evaluate health advice and make informed decisions. He shares five key takeaways for sorting through conflicting evidence and deciding what to trust. Dr. Jena's approach emphasizes considering absolute benefits, study populations, and potential harm.
What the raw message shows
From the headers
- Sent with
-
SendGrid See it in the headers
Across Levels's email
- Sends
- About 3 a week
- DMARC
-
Enforced, reject
Mail failing authentication is refused.
The copy
375 words · about 2 min to read · 2 buttons
How to decide which health advice to trust?
How to decide what to do when evidence is thin or conflicting
Maybe it's the cold plunge everyone at your gym won't stop talking about. Maybe it's the statin your doctor mentioned, or a supplement making the rounds in your group chat. You go looking for a straight answer and find a stack of studies that contradict each other, plus experts who read them in completely different ways.
Dr. Anupam Jena works in exactly that mess. He's a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital, an economist, and host of the Freakonomics, M.D. podcast. We asked him how he personally sorts through shaky evidence and decides what's worth trying and who to believe.
Button Sort through the noise →
Five Key Takeaways
1. Treat any single study as a nudge, not a verdict.
Even a rigorous trial tells you whether something helps people on average, not what it will do for you. Look for the absolute benefit, too, since an impressive percentage can hide a very small real-world change.
2. Big labels don't guarantee a finding applies to you.
A meta-analysis built from weak studies is still weak. A randomized trial tested on a few hundred people at one specific dose may not hold up in everyday life.
3. Ask who the study was done in before asking who paid for it.
Whether the research involved humans or cells, and whether chance decided who got the treatment, matters more than the funding source or the institution's name.
4. Your own experiment counts, if you run it honestly.
Ask what would have happened if you'd done nothing, and repeat the test before you trust the result. Placebo effects are real, so a harmless habit that makes you feel better isn't automatically worth dropping.
5. Start with harm, not effectiveness.
Jena's first question is "could this hurt me?" If the risk is low, he then weighs the data, the biological plausibility, and what it costs to try.
Button Read the full conversation with Dr. Jena →
Looking to understand more about your metabolic health?
Explore our health news and advice site, Metabolic Insights
228 Park Ave South, PMB 63877, New York, NY 10003
The words as text: what a screen reader can follow, and all there is when images don't load.
What the headers say
Read from the message's own headers, as it arrived.
- Came from
-
o3.m.dripemail2.com
· 167.89.40.148
SendGrid's sending servers
- SPF
- Pass for drip.levels.com
- DKIM
-
- Pass signed by levels.com
- DMARC
-
Pass for levels.com
Policy: reject
- Unsubscribe
-
One-click
Meets the Gmail and Yahoo rule for bulk senders.
- Complaints
- No feedback-loop header
Show all 17 headers Hide the headers
As received, minus the delivery side: the archive's own addresses show as [recipient], its mail servers as [receiver], signatures are left out and unsubscribe links trimmed to their host.
Route
- Received
- from o3.m.dripemail2.com (167.89.40.148) by [receiver] (cloudflare) id nngdD2vAni0A for <[recipient]>; Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:00:51 +0000
- Received
- by recvd-d7fb98f7f-hk88m with SMTP id recvd-d7fb98f7f-hk88m-1-6AC7B771-199 2026-10-08 15:32:01.896293704 +0000 UTC m=+772266.786170149
- Received
- from MTMxMTA3NDc (unknown) by geopod-ismtpd-107 (SG) with HTTP id CNl8KeEOTYiuABzxBWLAvQ Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:32:01.876 +0000 (UTC)
Authentication
- Received-SPF Authentication result
- pass ([receiver]: domain of [recipient]@drip.levels.com designates 167.89.40.148 as permitted sender) receiver=[receiver]; client-ip=167.89.40.148; envelope-from="[recipient]@drip.levels.com"; helo=o3.m.dripemail2.com;
- Authentication-Results Authentication result
- [receiver]; dkim=pass header.d=levels.com header.s=s1 header.b=gGSG0CK4; dmarc=pass header.from=levels.com policy.dmarc=reject; spf=none ([receiver]: no SPF records found for [email protected]) smtp.helo=o3.m.dripemail2.com; spf=pass ([receiver]: domain of [recipient]@drip.levels.com designates 167.89.40.148 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=[recipient]@drip.levels.com; arc=none smtp.remote-ip=167.89.40.148
Platform
- X-Drip-SendingAccount
- 4080355
- X-SG-EID Identifies SendGrid
- u001.79kJZC85z/WE9t9nOmpiHosf7qU1Au+mrKy3jytIn8sMbSWRTgBdv9q1OykY6JKWPsetuycYJyc0+6SccAPSSM45wEr7xAA09zgE1fb0B658onxGbp7oglUzCOhTAoX6jeWFY1bSmzZESh6B0mQhiEg0xxCudEi1mlLW7fkvORh618AcbiBEw21FiYat/g4/sFUcmvnIsi0GWd6dXcaSoXQWKVn1ct2QD7xpTSQgs8Q=
- X-SG-ID Identifies SendGrid
- u001.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
- X-Entity-ID
- u001.dEl2Z4sQ4dqI57TjhSSBBA==
Unsubscribe and feedback
- List-Unsubscribe
- <mailto:…@unsubscribe.dripemail3.com>, <https://unsubscribe.dripemail3.com/…>
- List-Unsubscribe-Post
- List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
Message
- Content-Type
- multipart/alternative; boundary=412338168fd47b86e1c917546beb7fa0bf251aba87fbd64076f995a03b67
- Date
- Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0000 (UTC)
- From
- Levels <[email protected]>
- Mime-Version
- 1.0
- Message-ID
- <CNl8KeEOTYiuABzxBWLAvQ@geopod-ismtpd-107>
- Subject
- How to decide which health advice to trust?
More from Levels
All 23 emailsSimilar campaigns from other brands
Different brands running the same play. Compare any of them side by side.
Archived for reference and commentary. Levels, its logos and content are the property of their respective owners; Inbox Archive claims no affiliation and has disabled all links. If you own this content and would like it removed, get in touch.