Everybody wants to be your guru. Everybody wants to be your mentor, your advisor, your all-knowing friend who will lead you in the path of good health, mental stability, and emotional resilience.

I know this is shocking (not), but many such people have their own best interests in mind, not yours. To convince you otherwise, they may attempt to prove their guru-ability by quoting studies that support their claims.

“Science has proven that if you follow my new, super-duper plan (available for the nominal fee of $19.99 a month), it will change your life for the better. Your (spouse, children, cat, Internet followers, school administration, house plants, customers, lawn, dishes, hair, laundry, gastrointestinal system, neighbors, bank) will love you.”

Here, in the form of questions, is a small toolkit to help determine if a wannabe guru’s claim is jewel or junk.

Tool one. Are there sensational headlines about it? Often a claim is made to look fantastic so people will click and read more. Or buy a magazine in a checkout aisle.

Tool two. Is a claim based on a news article? Articles are often written by people who wouldn’t know valid research if it slapped them in the face. Try to find the original research, not an article about it.

Tool three. Could there be a confusion between correlation and causation? There has recently been a spell of hot weather. At the same time, there was a decrease in the number of ninjas. Therefore, a shortage of ninjas is causing the hot weather.

Tool four. How big was the sample size and how long was the test? The fewer people or things tested and the shorter the test period, the more likely that the research is junk.

Tool five. How were the subjects chosen? If a study shows that people everywhere prefer strawberries to peaches, but the test subjects were all visitors to a strawberry recipe website, then, uh, no.

Tool six. Was there a control group? That is, was there a randomly selected group that did not receive the substance or experience being tested? And were the results of the test subjects compared to the control group?

Tool seven. Was the testing blind? Did subjects know if they were in a control group or not? If no one knew which group they were in, it was blind testing, which is a good thing.

Tool eight. Could the research be reproduced by others? If your experiment shows that Vitamin D gives people X-ray vision, then other researchers should be able to come up with the same revealing results.

Tool nine. Was the study or experiment peer reviewed? That is, did other scientists read the study before it was published and state that it appears to be valid research? Some “scientists” avoid having their work peer reviewed because they know it is biased or faulty or that their findings are junk. Lack of peer reviews is an alarm bell hard to silence.

There are additional tools, but these nine provide a good start in sorting the gurus from the grime.