There is a particular kind of confident sentence worth learning to spot: the mechanism story. It explains, often elegantly, how an ingredient could work — this compound influences that pathway, which affects this process, so the result should follow. The story is satisfying. It is also not evidence that the result actually happens.
Mechanisms are explanations, not outcomes. They describe a plausible route from cause to effect. But biology is crowded, and a route that exists in principle can be blocked, bypassed, or overwhelmed by everything else happening at once. A pathway that lights up in a dish or in isolated cells may behave entirely differently inside a whole, living person.
Watch for the substitution. When a write-up is heavy on how something works and light on what happened when people took it, the mechanism is doing the work that a result should be doing. The more detailed and confident the 'how,' sometimes the thinner the 'whether.' Elaborate mechanism language can be a tell that the outcome data is not there to lead with.
This does not make mechanisms useless. They are how researchers decide what is worth testing, and a finding with no plausible mechanism is rightly treated with caution. The error is directional: mechanism supports a hypothesis, it does not confirm a result. Reasoning forward from 'it should work' to 'it works' skips the only step that counts.
A practical filter helps. When you read a mechanism explanation, mentally append the phrase 'in theory.' This compound supports that process, in theory. Then ask what was observed in actual people, for how long, at what amount. If that part is vague while the mechanism is vivid, you have learned where the evidence is thin.
Honest mechanism writing keeps the tense right. It says a pathway is plausible and that whether it translates into anything a person would notice is a separate question still being studied. That sentence is less exciting than a confident causal chain, and far more likely to be true.