Most catalogs stop searching when they stop finding. This one stops when the enumeration is exhausted — which is not the same thing, and the difference is the whole point of this page.
The rule
A refusal is a grade, and absence is not evidence. “We found no human trial” and “no human trial exists” are different statements, and only one of them can be earned. Earning the second one means running the search in every language the field actually publishes in, and continuing until new sources stop changing grades — not until the search feels finished.
English-only searching produces a predictable error: it reports an absence that is really a blind spot. A compound studied in Chinese pharmacology journals, a toxicology finding published in German, a clinical correction in Persian — none of these appear in an English query, and a catalog that never ran one will confidently tell you the evidence does not exist.
What that looks like in this corpus
Across the 1,803 pages published here, 108 carry a source in a non-Latin script — quoted verbatim, in the original, alongside its translation and its identifier. The pathway pages carry the densest concentration, because that is where a mechanism is argued and where a foreign-language primary source most often settles it. Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Russian sources all appear in the corpus and can be read in place.
A worked example: the acetyl-CoA carboxylase sweep
The question was simple: is there grade A evidence — a randomized human trial — for any dietary ingredient acting on acetyl-CoA carboxylase? English returned nothing. That is the moment most catalogs would either drop the pathway or quietly grade it on weaker evidence.
The sweep ran instead in six languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, German, Persian and Korean. Each one returned something the others did not.
- German surfaced Soraphen A, a myxobacterial ACC inhibitor whose development was discontinued — verbatim, “Aufgrund von toxikologischen Studien mit Ratten, die auf ein teratogenes Potenzial hinwiesen, wurde die Entwicklung abgebrochen” — development halted on evidence of teratogenic potential in rats.
- Japanese, from the Japanese Society of Toxicology, surfaced PF-05175157, a dual ACC1/ACC2 inhibitor in pharmaceutical development, showing developmental toxicity in both rat and rabbit embryo-foetal studies.
- Chinese framed ACC inhibition explicitly as drug development rather than nutrition.
- Korean returned a laboratory reagent catalogue — the compounds are research tools, not foods.
- Persian produced an unrelated but material correction: that conjugated linoleic acid moves body composition rather than body weight, which changed how this site is allowed to describe it.
The verdict only became sayable after the sixth language. There is no grade A dietary driver for this mechanism anywhere in the world literature — and the reason is not a gap in the searching. Potent ACC inhibition is pharmacology, and two structurally unrelated compounds that got far enough to be tested were both halted on embryo-foetal toxicity. That is a positive finding about the field, recovered from what looked like an absence.
It also settled how the pathway is built here. The ingredients carried on it are dietary-level and the lane claims the biological machinery rather than a drug effect — a distinction that only became visible because the search did not stop at English.
Why this is published
Because the alternative is a catalog whose silences cannot be interpreted. When this site says the evidence for something is preclinical, that is a measurement, not a shrug. When it says no human trial exists, a reader is entitled to ask how hard anyone looked. This page is the answer, and the evidence that argues against us is published for the same reason.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.