Salt Is the Lever You Already Pulled # Cutting salt lowers blood pressure by about 4 mmHg. That’s real, and it’s also most of what fifty years of public health messaging has offered. The bigger untouched lever is insulin — which tells your kidneys to hold sodium regardless of how little you eat. Start with what salt actually does # Blood pressure comes from three forces: how hard the heart pumps, how much fluid is in circulation, and how constricted the arteries are. Salt acts on exactly one of them — volume. Sodium pulls water into the bloodstream, plasma volume rises, and pressure follows. In people with well-functioning kidneys, the excess sodium is excreted and pressure normalises.
Choose Your Oil by Temperature # There is no single best cooking oil. There’s a right oil for cold dishes, a right oil for everyday frying, and a right oil for high heat — and the most consequential fat in most people’s diet isn’t the one in their kitchen at all. It’s the reused oil in cheap eat-out food. The ratio that shifted underneath us # Humans evolved eating omega-6 and omega-3 fats in roughly equal measure. Simopoulos and others have documented that Western diets now run that ratio at approximately 20:1, with some estimates in the 15:1 to 17:1 range.
The Boring Eight # The foods that do the most for long-term health are cheap, unglamorous, and eaten on repeat. There’s no exotic ingredient on this list. The active mechanism is repetition. Why a short list beats a perfect diet # Two or three of these eaten daily, permanently, does more than an immaculate diet followed for six weeks. The failure mode in nutrition is almost never that people don’t know what’s healthy — it’s that the plan is too complex to survive a normal week.
Fatty Liver Is the First Domino # Roughly three in ten adults worldwide have fat in their liver. Most don’t know. It produces no pain, and the early symptoms get filed under stress, age, or a bad night’s sleep — while the organ that regulates your blood sugar quietly stops doing it properly. The liver is a metabolic organ before it is a detox organ # Popular health writing treats the liver as a filter. That framing is why people miss what’s happening to it. The liver’s more consequential job is regulating fuel: storing glucose, releasing it when you need it, packaging fats, producing bile. When fat accumulates inside liver cells, that regulation degrades first — long before anything shows up as liver disease.
Ten Grams of Fibre, Ten Percent Less Risk # Pooled across studies covering close to two million people, every additional 10 g of fibre eaten daily was associated with roughly 10% lower colorectal cancer risk — with no threshold where the benefit stopped. Most people in the UK and US eat about half the recommended minimum. One of the few cancers your plate genuinely influences # Colorectal cancer is unusual in how responsive it is to diet, weight and activity. A large share of cases are considered preventable through those three levers, which is not something you can say about most cancers.
Cook It, Cool It, Eat It Cold # In a four-month randomised trial, people with fatty liver disease taking resistant starch cut liver fat by 9.08% — and 5.89% of that persisted after adjusting for weight loss. You can manufacture the same compound at home by cooking potatoes or rice and putting them in the fridge. The two fats that actually matter # Not all body fat carries the same risk. Two kinds do most of the damage: visceral fat, packed around the organs, and liver fat. Both sit upstream of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and both can be substantial in someone whose weight looks unremarkable.
Test First, Then Supplement # The most expensive supplement is the one solving a problem you don’t have. Someone can eat well and train consistently for a decade and still show deficiencies on blood work — which is the entire argument for testing before buying, and against copying anyone else’s stack. Why clean eating doesn’t guarantee sufficiency # It’s possible to do the fundamentals properly — real food, adequate sleep, consistent training — and still come up short on specific markers. That’s not a moral failure or evidence the fundamentals don’t work. It reflects a few structural realities: limited sunlight at northern latitudes for much of the year, declining mineral content in agricultural soil, and a food supply skewed heavily toward omega-6 fats.
The Fish Oil Evidence Is Messier Than Either Side Admits # Two large randomised trials found standard-dose fish oil didn’t prevent heart attacks or strokes in healthy people. That’s the strongest argument against the capsule — and the popular follow-up claim, that it also causes atrial fibrillation, turns out to apply mainly to doses far above what’s in the bottle. What the big trials actually found # Two major randomised controlled trials tested standard-dose omega-3 against placebo — one following around 25,000 generally healthy adults, another around 15,000 people with diabetes. On heart attack, stroke and premature death, neither found meaningful benefit over placebo.
Two Weeks of Fibre Rewrote Their Cancer Markers # Twenty Americans ate a rural African diet for two weeks. Twenty rural Africans ate an American one. Colonoscopies before and after showed both groups’ bowel cancer risk markers moving — in opposite directions. Fourteen days. The experiment # The study is O’Keefe et al. (2015), Nature Communications, and its design is what makes it unusually persuasive. Two populations were chosen precisely because their bowel cancer rates diverge so sharply: African Americans sit at roughly 65 cases per 100,000, rural South Africans at under 5 per 100,000. That’s about a thirteen-fold gap between groups that are genetically similar — which points hard at environment rather than inheritance.
The Calcium Paradox Points at a Vitamin Nobody Names # The same person can have thinning bones and hardening arteries at once — calcium leaving the skeleton and arriving in the vessel wall. Adding more calcium doesn’t fix that. It’s a routing problem, and the protein that does the routing needs a vitamin most people have never been told about. The finding that should have changed the conversation # Bolland et al. (2010, BMJ) pooled 15 randomised, placebo-controlled trials covering more than 12,000 participants over 40, all taking at least 500mg of calcium daily without co-administered vitamin D. The meta-analysis found calcium supplementation associated with increased risk of myocardial infarction — commonly cited at around a 30% relative increase.
Normal on the Blood Test Isn’t the Same as Fine # Standard blood panels are built to catch late-stage disease, not early depletion. Which is why people spend years being told everything looks normal while feeling steadily worse — and why the correct instruction for most of what follows is test, don’t guess. Why the tests lag the symptoms # Several nutrients hide from the measurement used to find them.
Eat the Same Thing Most Days # You make roughly 200 food decisions a day. Each one costs something, and the account is empty by evening — which is exactly when discipline is supposed to hold. The people who stay lean mostly stopped deciding. The argument is about systems, not food # Almost every diet is a set of rules applied by willpower, and willpower is a depreciating asset across a day. By 9pm — after work, commuting, children, and a few hundred small decisions — the resource the plan depends on is gone. This is why so many otherwise disciplined days end badly, and why the failure feels like a character problem when it’s really a design problem.
