Who writes this

By Ronen Shapiro · Last reviewed 2026-08-05 · How this is sourced

Most health sites either have a doctor on the masthead or hope you do not ask. This one does neither. Here is who is behind it, what that means for how you should read it, and why everything is cited.

I am not a clinician

My name is Ronen Shapiro. I built SURVIVE. I am not a doctor, a dietitian, or an exercise physiologist, and nothing on this site should be read as though I were. I am saying that at the top rather than burying it, because the alternative — an anonymous health site that lets you assume — is worse.

So why trust any of it?

You should not trust it on my say-so. That is the point of the citations. Every claim on this site links to the paper it came from, so the thing you are trusting is the study and your own reading of it, not me. Where the evidence is a cohort study rather than a trial, the page says so and describes an association rather than a cause. Where popular advice is not supported, the page says that too — the women's training page spends most of its length on claims the evidence does not back.

Why I built it

I wanted to track the handful of things with genuinely strong human evidence — sauna, cold, VO₂ max, sleep, strength, protein — and I could not find an app that showed the research instead of asserting it. Most habit trackers let you log anything and tell you nothing. This one only tracks protocols with published human evidence, and shows the study behind each.

Why the women's pages take up so much room

I am a partner, a father of two daughters, and my mother's son. The women in my life have been handed worse information than the men in it — more confident, less evidenced, and more often something being sold to them. Female physiology is genuinely more complex, and that should mean more access to good research and better tools, not less. That is the gap I would like this to close, even slightly. It is why the women's section is the largest on the site, and why most of it is spent on the claims the evidence does not support rather than on the ones that would be far easier to sell.

What it does not do

It does not diagnose, prescribe, or advise on medication or hormone therapy. Those decisions belong with a clinician who knows your history. The coach feature refuses medical questions in code rather than relying on the model to decline, because prompting alone was measured and was not reliable enough to ship.

How it is funded

It is free, there are no ads, and nothing on the site is a paid placement. No supplement company, equipment maker or lab has paid for a mention. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on this page before it appears anywhere else.

Corrections

If you find a claim that misreads its source, or a citation pointing at the wrong paper, I want to know — that is a real error and it gets fixed. Three citations on this site named the wrong journal until a review caught them; they were corrected rather than quietly deleted. See how this is sourced for the standing rules.