Nutrition on NCW

Salt Is the Lever You Already Pulled

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Salt Is the Lever You Already Pulled
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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
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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

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Choose Your Oil by Temperature
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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
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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

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Boring Eight
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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
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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

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fatty Liver Is the First Domino
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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
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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

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ten Grams of Fibre, Ten Percent Less Risk
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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
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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

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cook It, Cool It, Eat It Cold
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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
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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

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Test First, Then Supplement
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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
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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

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Fish Oil Evidence Is Messier Than Either Side Admits
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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
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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

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two Weeks of Fibre Rewrote Their Cancer Markers
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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
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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

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Calcium Paradox Points at a Vitamin Nobody Names
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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
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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.

Eat the Same Thing Most Days

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Eat the Same Thing Most Days
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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
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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.

Normal on the Blood Test Isn't the Same as Fine

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Normal on the Blood Test Isn’t the Same as Fine
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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
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Several nutrients hide from the measurement used to find them.

Your Skin Is a Readout, Not a Surface

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your Skin Is a Readout, Not a Surface
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Up to 80% of visible facial aging is attributable to sun exposure rather than to the passage of time. Which means the multi-billion-pound industry treating the surface is largely working downstream of two things: ultraviolet light, and what’s happening inside your body.

Skin is rebuilt continuously, from materials you supply
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Your skin is not a static covering. Collagen and elastin are synthesised and degraded daily, and the raw materials come from diet while the rate of degradation is set by inflammation, oxidative stress, glycation and cortisol.

One Meal a Day Works Because You Eat Less

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One Meal a Day Works Because You Eat Less
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When 139 people with obesity were randomised to a strict eating window or plain calorie restriction for a year, the window added nothing measurable. Not to weight, not to body fat, not to metabolic markers. The fasting wasn’t doing the work. The calorie deficit was.

What the controlled trials actually found
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One Meal A Day means roughly 23 hours without food and everything consumed inside one hour. It sits at the far end of a dial that runs from constant grazing to maximal fasting, and its appeal is real: low insulin for most of the day, no calorie counting, and a lot of reclaimed time.

Your Arteries Stiffen From Ordinary Days

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your Arteries Stiffen From Ordinary Days
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Three hours of uninterrupted sitting measurably reduces your leg arteries’ ability to widen. Twice-daily antiseptic mouthwash raises systolic pressure by 2–3 mmHg within a week. Neither feels like a health decision. Both are.

Why stiffness is the variable to watch
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Arterial stiffness tracks with heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, and dementia risk. It’s not an abstraction — advanced calcification is visible on imaging as mineral deposited in vessel walls, sitting alongside bone in the same picture.

No Vegetable Unclogs Anything

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No Vegetable Unclogs Anything
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Nothing you eat clears an artery the way a plumber clears a drain. But three categories of vegetable, eaten consistently for years, measurably slow arterial ageing, keep existing plaque more stable, and lower blood pressure in controlled trials. That’s a smaller claim and a far better supported one.

Third: cruciferous vegetables
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Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts. People eating these regularly show less calcification and hardening in artery walls — the kind visible on an X-ray as faint parallel lines tracking a vessel, and conspicuously absent in people with healthy arteries.

Your Colon Keeps a Two-Week Memory

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your Colon Keeps a Two-Week Memory
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We talk about cancer risk in decades — smoking for twenty years, then lung cancer. The bowel doesn’t work on that timescale. Its cancer-risk markers move in days, in whichever direction you feed them.

The reversibility is the finding
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The demonstration is O’Keefe et al. (2015, Nature Communications): 20 African Americans and 20 rural South Africans swapped diets for fourteen days, with colonoscopies before and after. Inflammation, the rate of cell division in the bowel lining, microbiome composition, and butyrate levels all shifted — improving in the group moving to a high-fibre diet, deteriorating in the group moving to a Western one.

Protein Is the Most Underrated Drug You Already Own

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Protein Is the Most Underrated Drug You Already Own
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The official recommendation is 0.8 g per kilogram. The evidence for maintaining muscle through middle and later life points to roughly double that. That gap — between a floor designed to prevent deficiency and a target designed to preserve function — is one of the largest in everyday nutrition.

What actually ends independence
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The version of ageing people plan for is cancer or dementia. The version that arrives is quieter: no longer carrying shopping, no longer rising from a low chair unaided, no longer trusting yourself on stairs.

The Starch That Feeds Your Bacteria Instead of You

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Starch That Feeds Your Bacteria Instead of You
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In a randomised crossover trial, 40 g a day of resistant starch for eight weeks produced a mean weight loss of 2.8 kg — with no calorie restriction, against an energy-matched control starch. The mechanism wasn’t willpower. It was a change in which bacteria were living in the participants’ colons.

The fat that actually matters
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Visceral fat sits behind the abdominal wall, packed around the liver, pancreas and intestines. Unlike the subcutaneous fat you can pinch, it’s metabolically active — continuously releasing inflammatory signalling into portal circulation. It carries substantially higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, several cancers and cognitive decline.

Creatine Is a Multiplier, Not a Source

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Creatine Is a Multiplier, Not a Source
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Across 22 randomised trials in older adults, creatine plus resistance training added about 1.37 kg of lean tissue over training alone. That’s a real effect and a small one — and it’s zero if you aren’t lifting anything.

What it actually is
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Creatine is a compound your body already makes, mostly in the liver, and tops up from meat and fish. Plants contain virtually none, so vegetarians and vegans run lower stores and often notice supplementation more. The supplement itself is synthesised, so it’s vegan-suitable.

Nutrition on NCW

Salt Is the Lever You Already Pulled

Salt Is the Lever You Already Pulled #

Start with what salt actually does #

Choose Your Oil by Temperature

Choose Your Oil by Temperature #

The ratio that shifted underneath us #

The Boring Eight

The Boring Eight #

Why a short list beats a perfect diet #

Fatty Liver Is the First Domino

Fatty Liver Is the First Domino #

The liver is a metabolic organ before it is a detox organ #

Ten Grams of Fibre, Ten Percent Less Risk

Ten Grams of Fibre, Ten Percent Less Risk #

One of the few cancers your plate genuinely influences #

Cook It, Cool It, Eat It Cold

Cook It, Cool It, Eat It Cold #

The two fats that actually matter #

Test First, Then Supplement

Test First, Then Supplement #

Why clean eating doesn’t guarantee sufficiency #

The Fish Oil Evidence Is Messier Than Either Side Admits

The Fish Oil Evidence Is Messier Than Either Side Admits #

What the big trials actually found #

Two Weeks of Fibre Rewrote Their Cancer Markers

Two Weeks of Fibre Rewrote Their Cancer Markers #

The experiment #

The Calcium Paradox Points at a Vitamin Nobody Names

The Calcium Paradox Points at a Vitamin Nobody Names #

The finding that should have changed the conversation #