Who I am

I’m Izzy, a biological sciences undergraduate with a particular interest in human health.

Health and wellness content is now unavoidable. It’s constantly fed to us on social media, and the next viral trend, product, habit or exercise is always on the horizon. Repeatedly, I watched incredibly intelligent people around me buy into wellness trends based solely on reels, TikToks and adverts they’d seen, without any real evidence to support them.

That’s not a criticism. Almost nobody has the time, or the desire, to work through hundreds of long, arduous research papers just to decide whether it’s worth buying some magnesium supplements.

Through my studies, I started to notice how much of what I was seeing online wasn’t actually backed by science. So I began doing the research behind the most popular health trends myself. Research for Friends started life as a file on my desktop containing the notes I made on my findings, so I could share them with friends and help them decide which of the trends they’d seen online they actually wanted to take part in.

Over time, those notes developed into a series of short summary articles, each looking at the good-quality evidence behind a different trending health or wellness claim and explaining it in ‘normal’ English. The research papers are all cited at the end so you can read further if you want to.

I should be clear that I’m not a medical professional and I’m not giving health advice. I believe health is completely personal, and if something is working for you and isn’t harming you, keep going, evidence or no evidence. The aim is only to show how much of the wellness space is marketing rather than science, and how easily the two get confused. I want people to have the full picture of the science behind a trend, so they can make decisions about their health informed by the research rather than the advertising.

My philosophy

I try to keep my personal opinion out of the summaries I write and let people come to their own conclusions about what’s worth it and what isn’t. But between my degree, this research, and overcoming a number of serious health conditions myself, one thing keeps resurfacing: balance matters more than almost anything else. Too much or too little of anything causes problems, and unfortunately today’s culture rarely rewards moderation. We’ve built a generation who feel they have to track and maximise every part of their health – which is enormously profitable for everyone selling into it.

When it comes to health, mastering the basics of a varied diet, regular movement you enjoy, enough sleep and social connection is what really makes a difference. That’s not to say tongue scrapers, cold plunges or the rest of it are harmful, or even that they don’t work. It’s just that they’re the fine detail, and it’s easy to lose the bigger picture among them.