You can publish anything you want on the Internet. You could, for instance, pick apart a very small and limited 2013 medical study about the benefits of green tea and make a bold claim that Green Tea Helps Prevent Sunburn. Green tea, however, is not a substitute for broad spectrum SPF.

"You could drink five gallons of it before you go to the beach and you're still going to get sunburned," says Darrell Rigel, a clinical professor of dermatology at NYU. "It just doesn't work like that."

You see, the Internet is a vast trove of nutritional and medical malarkey. "Just about every new medical fad on the Internet is crap," Steve Davis, a Rhode Island-based doctor, tells us. "You should be skeptical."

In an effort to keep you from following some other off-the-wall advice—like, uh, the Nazi diet?—we talked to a few doctors about how you can  tell if the next sketchy-sounding health news is garbage or for real.

Two Words: Peer ReviewedWhen you're reading an article about, say, ancient grains, make sure the study being cited has been peer reviewed. That means the research has been vetted by experts in the same field. It wasn't just some rogue study. "Peer-reviewed journal articles are the golden rule when looking for scientifically sound information," says Megan Miraglia, a New York-based registered dietitian.

Keep an Eye Out for Commercial BiasIf a study about sports drinks was conducted by the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, there's likely some murky profit motive. It's not like a large international corporation is going to underwrite a study that will discount its own product. "Nowadays, especially when it's on the Internet, it's some company doing a study and they do ten studies—and one of them actually shows that their product does such and such," Davis says. "Then that's the one you hear about! The study that comes up with the result is the one that gets published."

Check Your SourcesIf an article quotes someone with questionable credentials, that person's answers are likely equally suspect. "If the source is a personal trainer, yoga instructor, nutritionist (as opposed to registered dietician) and no information is given about his or her training and education, that too, should encourage you to take a deeper look and not swallow the premise whole," says Leslie Carr, editor of The Doctor Will See You Now (a website that wades through loads of bunk studies).

Sweet, Simple, or Sensational Conclusions are a Red Flag"Oversimplifying is a problem," Carr says. "Most of the health studies out there are correlational—they show that the chances of living longer or dying sooner went up or down when people did X, Y, or Z. That does not prove that X, Y, or Z causes the health improvement or risk. So I'd look for that caveat or qualification regarding the limits of the findings. If I saw that, I'd at least think the writer was trying to cover the topic honestly, without oversimplifying or sensationalizing."

Turn on Your Bullshit Detector"Does the whole thing seem kind of absurd?" Davis asks. "Is this really just preposterous to begin with? Is it contradictory to other things that have been shown in the past?" If so, there's a good chance the research is bullshit. Unless it says you should soak for twelve to fifteen minutes in a freezing-cold ice bath after your workouts—then it's legit. We promise.

Related Stories for GQHealthHealth