How we're funded and what we refuse

The site is paid for out of our own pockets (the hosting, the database, the email, and a great many evenings) and by readers who choose to give once or monthly. Nobody else pays us for anything.

That's how we mean to keep it: a small amount from the readers who choose to give keeps the site free for everyone who doesn't. It's the way readers already fund the sources they trust most: a few give a little so everyone can read. If we ever add a membership, it will be pay-what-you-want.

A site that explains evidence has exactly one asset, which is your trust. Every way of selling that trust (a sponsored page, a paid seal, a commission on the products we grade, an ad that follows you around the web) is a way of spending it. So we've written the rules down, in public, so you can hold us to them.

1. The evidence is never for sale. Nobody who gives us money can commission a page, see it before you do, change a word of it, or stop it from being published. Not members, not partners, not anyone.
2. Topic pages are brand-free. Our articles are about ingredients, foods, chemicals and technologies, not products. Where a brand name is the only way people know something, we name it to explain it, never to sell it, and no article links to a shop.
3. No advertising and no ad tracking. No display ads, no sponsored posts, no "presented by". No third-party trackers, pixels or advertising cookies on any page. Any analytics we run count visits without identifying visitors; the privacy page has the details.
4. No paid seals, rankings, testing or free samples. We don't sell badges, "recommended" labels or places on a list, and we don't test products for a fee. If we evaluate a product, we buy it at retail, like you would.
5. No money from the industries we cover. Supplement, food, filter, cookware, chemical, pesticide, plastics, pharmaceutical and telehealth companies, and the trade groups that speak for them, can't fund us in any form: not sponsorship, not licensing, not ambassador deals with anyone who works here.
6. Membership buys convenience, never answers. When membership exists, it will pay for conveniences like alerts and bigger quotas. Every topic, at every depth, with every citation, stays free for everyone. Cancelling will take one page and no guilt trip.
7. Readers stay the majority. Readers will supply at least half of our revenue, and no single organisation will supply more than a tenth of it. If either line is ever crossed, we'll say so publicly and explain what we're doing about it.
8. Licences sell service, not opinions. If an app, clinic or company pays to use our data, they're paying for a maintained feed and uptime, not for a say in what it says. Licensees can't quote us selectively or use our name in their marketing, and companies in the industries we cover can't be licensees at all.
9. Everyone who writes here declares their interests. Authors and reviewers publish conflict-of-interest statements, and none of us takes pay, equity or gifts from companies in the categories we cover.
10. AI answers are labelled. Anything on this site written by an AI says so, cites the PubMed IDs behind it, and never names a brand.
11. Corrections happen in public. Every change to the evidence is recorded with a reason, and every page links to its own edit history. When we get something wrong, we fix it where everyone can see, and we don't quietly delete the mistake.
12. We publish the money every year. What came in and from what kind of source, what it cost to run the site, how many people read it, and the offers we turned down.
13. Affiliate links: none. We don't earn a commission when you buy something we've mentioned. Not on supplements, not on filters, not on anything. If we ever wanted to change that, we would ask our supporters first and label every such link, but we have no plans to.

If you think we've broken one of these rules, we want to hear it from you first. Email hello@whatshealthyandwhy.com, or challenge the page in question. We'd rather be corrected than be comfortable.