Most health advice answers the question “does this work?” That is the wrong question, and answering it well is why so much good advice is useless. The right question is whether a thing is worth what it asks of you — and once you ask that instead, the list comes out in a very different order.
“Works” is not the same as “worth it”
Zone 2 cardio works. The evidence for aerobic fitness is about as good as evidence gets in this field, and nobody serious argues about it. It also asks for something like 150 minutes a week, forever, which is why most of the people who know it works still do not do it.
Morning sunlight also works. It costs nothing, takes ten minutes, and you can do it while drinking the coffee you were going to drink anyway.
Every ranking we could find scores those two on the same axis: effectiveness. On that axis they both come out good, and the list tells you nothing you can act on. So we score a different thing. We score what an intervention is worth relative to what it takes out of you — your money, your time, and your willingness to still be doing it in March.
That one choice produces everything else about this site, including the parts that earn us nothing. When the denominator is what a thing takes out of you, free wins a great deal of the time — which makes the top of this list a poor place to sell anything, and we do not try to.
The four numbers
Every intervention gets four scores, one to six, where six is always the good end. Impact: how much it changes things for an ordinary person, not for a responder in the best study. Effort: whether you will still be doing it in three months. Cost: what it takes out of your account, once and ongoing. Time: what it takes out of your day.
The score is impact squared, divided by everything the intervention asks of you. Squaring impact is a judgment, not a discovery. We think something twice as useful is worth more than twice the trouble, and we would rather write that down in a sentence you can argue with than bury it in a weighting nobody sees. It is the single most arguable line in the whole system.
The catalogue runs from 0.06 to 9.0. Morning sunlight is the 9.0. Detox cleanses are the 0.06.
How sure we are is a separate number
A score is not a claim about proof. It is a claim about leverage, and the two come apart constantly, so we grade them separately and show both.
Something can be well evidenced and still not worth it — that is most of the expensive end of wellness. Something can be thinly evidenced and still worth trying, if it is free and safe and the downside is ten wasted minutes. What is never acceptable is a high score resting on nothing, so every card carries its grade, its citations, and a written note of what we do not know. There are 103 of those citations across the catalogue. Some cards rest on two, and we would rather you saw the number than didn’t.
We changed the formula, and twenty of twenty-four rankings moved
The first version of this list weighted the three costs unevenly, and in places by feel. Effort sat in the numerator as a kind of ease while money and time sat underneath as burdens, which paid an effortless thing twice for the same property. Impact ran from one to six while the costs summed to as much as twelve, so a cheap, instant, low-impact thing could outrank a high-impact one. At one point blue light glasses computed above comprehensive blood work.
So we rewrote it, treating effort, money and time the same way, and re-ran the whole catalogue. Twenty of the twenty-four published interventions changed position.
Strength training went from seventeenth to ninth. Zone 2 went from fourteenth to seventh — both had been punished for a time cost the old shape was counting twice. Nose breathing fell the other way, seventh to fourteenth. The only thing that has never moved is morning sunlight, which has been first under every version of the formula we have written.
We are telling you this because a ranking that has never changed is either finished or not being checked, and ours is neither. The order on this site is the output of a formula you can read, applied to numbers you can see. When we change either one, the list changes, and we will say so here rather than quietly restacking the page.
The floor
Four things in the catalogue are marked overhyped: celery juice, blue light glasses, most nootropics, and detox cleanses. They are not there as a joke. They are there because a list that only recommends is a shopping catalogue, and the useful half of a ranking is the bottom of it.
It is also the half that costs us something to publish, which is roughly the point.
What this does not claim
This is a ranking, not a prescription, and it is built for a healthy adult with no particular condition — which describes nobody exactly. It cannot know what you have already tried, what you are being treated for, or what you would actually keep doing. The four numbers behind every card are our judgment, argued about and written down, not measurements; two careful people could score the same intervention differently and both be defensible. Nothing here is medical advice, and where a card and your clinician disagree, your clinician knows things about you that we do not.