Assessing and discussing health claims can be difficult. Imagine a friend who tells you it’s important that you eat several servings of fish each week. Your plant-based lifestyle, they suggest, is putting you at risk of not getting all the nutrients you need to thrive. How would you respond? In an ideal scenario, you would … Continued

Moderate consumption of unhealthy food and beverages is frequently encouraged as a step in the direction toward better health outcomes. Is that true?

In a study published in 2020, researchers scored the diets of more than thirty thousand US children in the two- to nineteen-year-old range.[1] The nationally representative data, which came from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1999 to 2016, were scored using the goals of the American Heart Association (AHA), which include … Continued

It’s a common refrain: My kids won’t eat anything! Many parents report feeling concerned, stressed, or guilty because of the struggle to feed their kids healthy foods, especially vegetables.[1] These are unsurprising, innate responses. The drive to ensure our children get enough to eat and eat a wide enough variety to meet their nutritional needs … Continued

Is beef tallow healthy? Setting the record straight on all the press and speculation.

Although we all know on some level that the state of health in the US is not in a good place, it can be difficult to quantify exactly what that looks like. There are multiple layers of failure, and some are more immediately apparent than others. The physical challenges of living with disease are the … Continued

How have different proteins been measured historically, and are these measures useful when assessing the healthfulness of foods today? And, is animal protein high-quality?

I was reminded recently of the 2011 science fiction thriller Limitless, which tells the story of a struggling author, played by Bradley Cooper, who takes a drug that unleashes his full mental capacity for the first time. You might remember the premise—that we typically only use a small percentage of our brainpower—which I suspect could … Continued

Psychologists and sociologists have long known how important a sense of belonging is for overall welfare. “[It] is a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation,” write the authors of an article published in Psychological Bulletin.[1] Abraham Maslow, the psychologist famous for conceptualizing the hierarchy of needs, which he published in his 1943 paper “A Theory … Continued