Drinking strong coffee before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds

>15 men participated in the study

This is no where near the number of participants that would be needed to make such a broad claim

As soon as a saw N = 15 then I realized this is pathetic empirical evidence. How does this even get published?

Counterpoint: the investigators used a crossover design, where each participant acts as their own control. Since within-subject variation <<< between-subject variation, this makes the effective sample size much, much higher than it would seem at first. In terms of efficiency, their design’s potentially equivalent to a vanilla parallel-arm trial with close to 100 subjects (or more) in each arm. So, you definitely can obtain solid evidence from N=15 (or less), if your study is carefully designed.

Sample size is only a very small part of the overall methodological picture—design matters too.

well as long as you have a heading..

Experiments have been conducted this way since forever - just 3 days ago I was reading richard feynman's book where he talks about this issue as well - basically the people who try to run experiment properly take longer and are pushed away and never get published or cited, whereas the poorly conducted experiments which show results aligned with what would make headlines get all the attention.

This is why I take any studies, experiments, trials results with a big grain of salt.