The name is not decorative. Sacapuntas is the Spanish word for pencil sharpener, the small tool that gives a blunt pencil its point back. It is also an almost exact match for my own surname: Spitzer denotes the same object in German. That is deliberate. The idea behind it is equally simple. With a sharpened point, things can be described more precisely and distinguished more clearly.
Sacapuntas Publishing works on health, nutrition, and consumer health, and it keeps three things apart that ordinarily run together: what counts as established, what is currently developing, and what remains speculation.
Health claims travel faster than the research they rest on. A single observational study becomes a headline. The headline becomes a marketing message. And at some point the sample size, the limitations, and the funding source have quietly dropped out of the story.
The opposite failure is just as common and almost nobody notices it. A promising technology, a new method, an early clinical result gets declared the next breakthrough or written off before anyone has established what it might be good for.
Sacapuntas Publishing examines both movements critically. Not to slow innovation down, but to look at it more closely. What does the evidence support today? Which developments are likely to shape the health and consumer health of tomorrow? And what remains open, scientifically and in regulatory terms, before any of it proves itself in practice?
Why this work matters
Four decades are enough to see the same pattern recur under changing names. A nutrient, a medicine, a technology, or simply a new way of doing things shows promising results in the laboratory or in early studies. By the time this becomes a public debate or a line of text on a package, the careful qualifiers have disappeared. In which population? At which dose? Under which conditions? Compared with what baseline?
I have spent most of my working life inside that process. In laboratories, where findings originate. In industrial research and development, where they become products. At the regulatory science level, which determines what a company is permitted to claim publicly. And in clinical research and real-world evidence, which test whether an intervention does anything meaningful in the everyday lives of ordinary users. Few people know all four of these stages.
What moved me from observing to writing was not only how often good marketing passes for good science. It was equally the experience of how hard genuine innovation is to recognise while it is still taking shape.
Scientific progress rarely arrives as a finished answer. It emerges along a chain: mechanistic research, animal models, observational data, controlled trials, real-world evidence, regulatory decisions, and finally the practical experience of the people who actually use the products. Every stage can make something essential visible. Every stage also has a reach beyond which it says nothing. Something is lost when this whole sequence is compressed into a headline. And something else is lost when an early development fails because it is not yet as well evidenced as one that is twenty years older. Missing time is not the same as missing effect.
So this is not about final verdicts on individual claims. It is about retrieving the missing context and asking where the science is moving. What is genuinely new about it? Which problem might it solve? What evidence would it take to judge that? What could stand in the way? And who is affected if it works: consumers, health professionals, researchers, companies, regulators?
I do not offer a final answer to every question in health and nutrition, nor do I predict the future. Honest science usually provides neither. The aim is narrower and, I believe, more useful: to assess the existing evidence critically and, when considering new scientific or technological developments, to distinguish credible potential from mere expectation. What do we know? How confidently do we know it? What is changing? And what scientific, regulatory, or practical conditions would have to be met for a promising approach to become a viable application?