Cataracts is a cloudy area in the normally-clear lens of your eye. There are no early symptoms, and later symptoms include blurry vision, colors that seem faded, light sensitivity, double vision, and difficulty seeing in the dark and at night. Cataracts is so common that over half of adults over the age of 80 either have cataracts or have already had surgery to have cataracts removed.

Age-Related Macular Degeneration is deterioration of a part of the retina called the macula, which causes blurring and eventual loss of central vision. There are no early symptoms. Age-Related Macular Degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss in older adults, affecting at least 40% of American adults over the age of 85.

Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases in which there is damage to the optic nerve that can result in loss of peripheral vision, blind spots, and blindness. There are often no early symptoms, which is why about half of people with glaucoma don’t know they have it. It’s estimated that at least 2% of American adults over the age of 40 have glaucoma.

Diabetic Retinopathy Diabetic retinopathy is a relatively common complication of diabetes where high blood sugar levels damage the blood vessels of the retina over time. There are usually no early symptoms and later symptoms include blurry vision, floating spots in your vision, and blindness. It is estimated that more than a quarter of American adults with diabetes have diabetic retinopathy, and about 5% of diabetic Americans have vision-threatening diabetic retinopathy.

This article explains the links between common eye diseases and 12 different nutrients —including specific vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids, and phytonutrients. It’s important to clarify that while some nutritional supplements can have therapeutic value for some eye diseases, the primary focus of this article is on nutrients associated with reducing the risk of developing these eye conditions in the first place to emphasize the benefits of adopting nutrient-dense eating patterns as lifelong healthy habits (and not to create a list of supplements to buy).

In addition, eye health is influenced by many factors beyond food alone, especially older age but also including genetics, gender, ethnicity, alcohol and tobacco use, sun exposure, socioeconomic status, previous eye injury, and history of diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure. As a reminder, a nutrient-dense diet can improve health outcomes including reducing risk of many eye diseases, but it is not a guarantee, a cure, or a moral safeguard.

So, let’s actually start with risk factors for eye diseases, to create the appropriate context for our review of the nutrients that lower severity, progression, and occurrence.

Risk Factors for Eye Diseases

Advancing age is the single biggest risk factor for cataracts, age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma.

Other risk factors for cataracts include: diabetes, sun exposure, smoking and other tobacco use, obesity, family history of cataracts, prolonged use of corticosteroid

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Because this week’s Free Newsletter talked about the early evidence that vitamin B5 can improve rheumatoid arthritis symptoms, I want to share this downloadable handy-dandy 1-page summary of Top 10 Vitamin B5 Foods Fridge List as a perk for my paid subscribers. And, because blue cheese is a good (non-organ meat) source of vitamin B5, I’m sharing one of my favorite ways to enjoy blue cheese, a downloadable version of my recipe for Blue Cheese Vinaigrette.

📥Just for paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Top 10 Vitamin B5 Foods Fridge List - This 1-pager PDF guide lists the top 10 common whole food sources of vitamin B5, how much vitamin B5 you get per serving (and how much a serving is!), while highlighting a few other valuable nutrients each food provides.

• Blue Cheese Vinaigrette Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

For Paid Subscribers

Read more

Key Takeaways

✅Rheumatoid arthritis studies have shown that vitamin B5 can improve symptoms, especially morning stiffness and pain.

✅Cheese is my go-to example of a low nutrient density food that still fills an important nutritional niche and contributes to good health.

✅Not sure if you need to throw out that moldy cheese? Explanations are below!

✅For paid subscribers, your companion downloads this week are: Top 10 Vitamin B5 Foods Fridge List and Blue Cheese Vinaigrette. Check your inbox; they’ll be arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post).

Vitamin B5 and Rheumatoid Arthritis

🧬Pantothenic acid, also called vitamin B5, is a water-soluble B vitamin that, like other B vitamins, plays an important role in energy metabolism—breaking down the carbohydrates, fat, and protein we eat for use as fuel. B vitamins are also imperative for neurotransmitter production, cellular function, and a wide variety of organ functions.

Preliminary research suggests that pantothenic acid could improve symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. People with this condition generally have lower blood levels of pantothenic acid compared to healthy individuals, with the lowest levels correlating with the most severe symptoms. Other studies have shown that supplementing with the calcium pantothenate can improve rheumatoid arthritis symptoms, particularly morning stiffness and pain, however, the mechanisms behind these improvements aren’t clear, and more research on this topic is needed!

The richest sources of pantothenic acid include organ meats (especially liver and kidneys), red meat, shellfish, oily fish, dairy products, eggs, lentils and other legumes, mushrooms, avocados, seeds (especially sunflower seeds and flaxseeds), whole grains, and sweet potatoes.

Learn About Vitamin B5

Want to know the top 25 best food sources of this nutrient? Learn them here.

Get 15% DV Vitamin B5 with Blue Cheese

🧀Blue cheese is a generic term referring to several varieties of cheese characterized by blue, black, green, or grey veins or spots of mold. It can be prepared from pasteurized cow’s, goat’s, or sheep’s milk, and is ripened with cultures of penicillium mold. During production, an inoculum of Penicillium roqueforti is introduced into the cheese, and then it is left to age in a temperature-controlled environment for 2 to 3 months.

While not very nutrient dense with its Nutrivore Score of 130, blue cheese still has lots of valuable nutrition to offer us! A serving (1.5 ounces or about 1/3 cup crumbled) delivers 9 grams of protein, 21% DV vitamin B12, 17% DV calcium, 15% DV vitamin B5, 12% DV vitamin B2, 11% DV selenium, and 10% DV zinc.

Learn About Turnips

Blue cheese is the 483rd most nutrient-dense food! Learn the Top 500 Nutrivore Foods here.

Blue Cheese Vinaigrette Recipe

🥗 This rich vinaigrette is a delicious addition to your favorite salad. The layers of flavor from the aromatic shallots, blue cheese, and Dijon combined with the sweet honey and silky fattiness of olive oil give this salad dressing not only a flavor boost, but a nutrition boost to boot!

This recipe has a higher Nutrivore Score than a simple balsamic vinaigrette, even with the addition of blue cheese. That gives you an idea of the hidden nutrients in this flavor-bomb ingredient.

See the Full Recipe

Add this recipe to your meal plan this week with Real Plans, the official Nutrivore meal planning app!

Nutrivore Mindset Corner

🧠Low nutrient density foods can still fill important nutritional niches and contribute to good health, and cheese is my go-to example.

One of the most important insights from the Nutrivore Score calculation is that the math makes it clear that all foods lie on a spectrum of nutrient density. There is no cusp above which a food is “good” and below which a food is “bad”. While any food with a Nutrivore Score over 150 contributes more nutrients than calories to the diet, there are plenty of examples of foods with lower scores that are still incredibly valuable sources of nutrients. Cheese has an average Nutrivore Score of 140 but is also the most concentrated food source of calcium, which an estimated 55% of Americans routinely fall short of the Estimated Average Requirement.

And cheese, in moderation, is good for us! A 2021 meta-analysis of 55 prospective cohort studies found that dairy consumption in general was associated with a 10% lower risk of stroke, a 4% lower risk of coronary heart disease, and a 9% reduced risk of hypertension (high blood pressure). A 2016 meta-analysis of 29 cohort studies showed that cheese reduced cardiovascular disease risk, and fermented dairy reduced total mortality risk, albeit by a modest amount (2% per 20 gram serving of fermented dairy or 10 gram serving of cheese).

Another great example is white rice, which is totally underwhelming from a nutrient density perspective, yet research has shown that white rice can indeed contribute to good health. This is thanks to its resistant starch content, which has significant prebiotic activity, meaning it feeds probiotic bacteria in our guts, greatly benefiting gut and, by extension, overall health. In a 2011 study of over 83,000 Japanese adults, steamed rice consumption was associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease in men, even after adjusting for other diet and lifestyle factors. The men who ate the most rice had a 30% reduced risk of coronary heart disease and heart failure, and an 18% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, compared to the men who ate the least amount of rice.

All this to say that it’s important to understand what balanced, overall healthy eating patterns look like, rather that judge the worthiness of each food by its numbers, even a number as insightful as the Nutrivore Score.

Learn everything you need to know about the Nutrivore philosophy in my book, Nutrivore: Eat Any Food, Get Every Nutrient, and Transform Your Health!

Grab a Copy!

Helpful Tip of the Week

💡If mold is used in the cheese-making process, why is it a problem when mold grows on my cheese at home?

The types of molds that give blue cheese, Roquefort, gorgonzola, camembert, brie, etc. their delicious and distinctive flavors and textures are carefully selected food-safe strains that are grown under tightly controlled conditions. That fuzzy blue corner on your cheddar, however, is a wild mold from the environment. It might be harmless, and it also might cause food-borne illness, not just due to mycotoxins but also to the possibility of pathogenic bacterial like salmonella and E. coli growing with the mold. And, there’s no way to tell just by looking at it or by its smell; so if you find mold on your cheese at home, here’s what to do…

For blocks of hard cheeses like cheddar, Parmesan, Swiss, or Gouda, you can generally cut away the moldy parts and the remaining cheese will be safe to eat. This is because mold usually can’t spread very far through the dense texture of hard cheeses. If you see mold, cut away at least 1 inch (2.5 cm) in every direction around the moldy area and discard that chunk. Be careful not to let your knife touch the mold as your cutting, which could spread mold spores into the as-yet-unaffected cheese.

For grated cheese, pre-sliced cheese, crumbled cheese and soft cheese like goat cheese, brie and cottage cheese, if you find mold, just throw the whole thing out. For cheeses made with molds like blue cheese, throw them out if they develop mold that looks different from normal.

This Week’s Companion Downloads

📥For paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Top 10 Vitamin B5 Foods Fridge List - This 1-pager PDF guide lists the top 10 common whole food sources of vitamin B5, how much vitamin B5 you get per serving (and how much a serving is!), while highlighting a few other valuable nutrients each food provides.

• Blue Cheese Vinaigrette Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

Check your inbox for the Companion Downloads arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post). You can also find them in the archive here. Thank you so much for supporting my work and Nutrivore!

Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Founder of Nutrivore

Calcium is the most abundant mineral in the human body, composing up to 2% of our total body weight—the vast majority of which is located in our bones and teeth. Along with its famous role in building strong bones, calcium serves as a second messenger in cell-signaling pathways.

Importantly, this nutrient functions as an electrolyte—a class of minerals that dissociate into charged particles (called ions) when dissolved in solution, making them capable of conducting electricity. On the whole, electrolytes help regulate fluid balance within the body, regulate nerve and muscle function (including the heart!), maintain a normal blood pH, and transmit nerve signals!

Calcium was first isolated in 1808 by Sir Humphry Davy (Britain’s leading scientist at the time, and also the inventor of the miner’s safety lamp!), who used electrolysis to isolate calcium from a mixture of lime and mercury oxide. But, humans have been using calcium long before we knew its chemical makeup! The Ancient Romans mixed calcium oxide with water to use as mortar for stone structures, and literature from the 10th century AD references plaster of paris (a mixture of calcium sulphate and dehydrated gypsum) to use for setting broken bones. The word calcium derives from the Latin calx, meaning “lime.”

Along with dairy products (particularly low-fat items), good sources of calcium are bone-in sardines, green vegetables (especially Brassica vegetables like kale, collard greens, turnip greens, bok choy, broccoli, and cabbage), and seaweed. Some other plant foods like spinach, rhubarb, and beans are also relatively rich in calcium, but also contain high levels of oxalate or phytate, which bind to calcium and inhibit its absorption. Other food sources include fortified foods like orange juice, soy milk, and certain cereals.

This article explains the biological roles of calcium, the interactions between dietary calcium and our risk of a dozen health conditions, symptoms and signs that we’re getting too little calcium, problems from too much calcium, how much calcium we need by demographic, and shares the top 25 best common whole food sources of calcium (20 of which are not dairy products!). Paid subscribers also can download a printer-friendly PDF version of this information below!

The Biological Roles of Calcium

Calcium’s two main functions are structural and regulatory: one, supporting skeletal health, and two, helping regulate

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Because this week’s Free Newsletter talked about selenium as one of many nutrients that seafood supplies, I want to share this downloadable handy-dandy 1-page summary of Nutrients in Seafood as a perk for my paid subscribers. And, because oysters is a great source of selenium and much more, I’m sharing one of my favorite albeit decadent ways to enjoy oysters, a downloadable version of my recipe for Oysters on the Half Shell.

📥Just for paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Nutrients in Seafood - This 1-pager PDF guide highlights key nutrients in seafood and their benefits, to give you a quick-reference for why three or more weekly servings of seafood (either fish or shellfish) is so good for you.

• Oysters on the Half Shell Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

For Paid Subscribers

Read more

Key Takeaways

✅Selenium has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease in several observational studies.

✅Oysters are an amazing source of so many nutrients, including selenium. They give liver a run for its money!

✅Almost all seafood options are safe to consume from a mercury standpoint, thanks to selenium!

✅For paid subscribers, your companion downloads this week are: Nutrients in Seafood and Oysters on the Half Shell. Check your inbox; they’ll be arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post).

Selenium for Cardiovascular Disease

🧬Selenium is a very unique nutrient. It serves as a component of the non-proteinogenic amino acids selenocysteine and selenomethionine, and also helps form over two dozen selenoproteins involved in reproduction, thyroid hormone metabolism, antioxidant defense, DNA synthesis, and immunity. It also helps protect against oxidative damage and (one of the coolest properties, in my opinion) it protects against mercury toxicity!! That said, it is one of the nutrients that you can get too much of, so being aware of your selenium sources is never a bad idea!

There is evidence suggesting selenium could help protect against heart disease. Across numerous observational studies, higher selenium status (as measured by blood selenium concentrations) has been associated with a significantly lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease. One meta-analysis showed a 15% risk reduction for every 10 mcg increase in blood levels. But, randomized controlled trials haven’t shown a consistent benefit for selenium supplementation on heart disease during long-term follow ups. So, it’s unclear whether these observational trends are due to dietary selenium intake or other diet, lifestyle, or genetic factors but more study would help to determine if there is a true link.

Learn About Selenium

Want to know the top 25 best food sources of selenium? Learn them here.

Get 161% DV Selenium with Oysters

🐟Pacific oysters have an impressive Nutrivore Score of 2255! Not only are oysters tasty, they are great for the environment too! These creatures are filter feeders with studies showing individual oysters are capable of filtering up to 50 gallons (189 liters) of water per day! This is why oyster reefs are gaining popularity as a means to restore ecosystems—by improving water quality, eliminating pollutants and providing habitats for hundreds of animals.

Per serving (4 ounces, measured raw), Pacific oysters offer 790mg of omega-3 fats, 767% DV vitamin B12, 201% DV copper, 174% DV zinc, 161% DV selenium, 157% DV vitamin B7 (biotin), 48% DV iodine, 33% DV iron, 32% DV manganese, and 21% DV vitamin B2 (riboflavin). Whew, that’s a lot of nutrients just from one small mollusk!

In fact, oysters give liver a run for its money in terms of nutrient density! (And oysters have a very similar nutrient profile, so a great option if liver is not your thing.) While fresh oysters are an decadent experience (see my recipe for Oysters on the Half Shell below), you get the same nutritional benefits however you enjoy them, including cooked from frozen or canned (which are definitely the most affordable options)!

Learn About Oysters

Pacific oysters are the 59th most nutrient-dense food! Learn the Top 500 Nutrivore Foods here.

Oysters on the Half Shell

🥗 There is nothing more delicious and fresh than the cool and juicy bite of a freshly shucked oyster! I love making this cucumber slaw for my oysters as it marinades in the fridge and adds a further tangy and fresh bite that just leaves you wanting more and more! Start off your summer patio BBQ with this refreshing appetizer, or bring to a potluck and be the talk of the party. Just remember to pack extra ice!

See the Full Recipe

Add this recipe to your meal plan this week with Real Plans, the official Nutrivore meal planning app!

Nutrivore Mindset Corner

🧠Whenever I talk about the benefits of seafood, I invariably get asked “what about the mercury???”, or similar question about PCBs, dioxins, lead, radioactive isotopes, microplastics, forever chemicals, food dyes, fish farms, bottom feeders, and sustainability/overfishing. I want to first honor that pollution concerns are absolutely valid and I support efforts to reduce pollution, protect the environment and ecosystems, and sustainable fishing practices. I also think that seafood wins in terms of the shear amount of misconceptions and misinformation about it. That’s why busting seafood-related myths take up such a big fraction of Chapter 10 in my book Nutrivore and why I address mercury concerns below. Here, in our little mindset corner though, I want to talk about the prevalence of food fear mongering on the internet, and what we can do to help protect ourselves.

Fear gets clicks, and dramatic claims spread much faster than nuanced science. Whenever you encounter a scary nutrition claim online, try to get curious instead of getting anxious. Ask yourself: Are citations to support claims being provided? Is this based on evidence in humans? Is the risk being put into perspective? Is the dose associated with the risk explained? Does this advice encourage me to eat a wider variety of nutrient-dense foods, or does it unnecessarily eliminate them? Does this advice sound like diet culture or does it encourage a balanced mindset?

It can also help to look at who is making the claim. Do they have relevant credentials or expertise in nutrition or health science? Are they citing credible sources, or relying on anecdotes and dramatic language? And importantly, are they trying to sell you something—like a supplement, detox, or more expensive alternative—as the “solution” to the problem they’re describing? A little healthy skepticism can go a long way toward protecting both your peace of mind and your relationship with food.

At the end of the day, there’s no one single red flag that automatically identifies an influencer or health claim as untrustworthy. Instead, watch for the collection of yellow flags. They can help you decide whether a claim deserves your mental or emotional energy, or whether it’s best to scroll on.

Learn everything you need to know about the Nutrivore philosophy in my book, Nutrivore: Eat Any Food, Get Every Nutrient, and Transform Your Health!

Grab a Copy!

Helpful Tip of the Week

💡What about the mercury in seafood? Amidst the many health benefits of seafood is one well-publicized risk: potential contamination with an organic form of mercury called methylmercury (as well as other toxins, such as PCBs and dioxins). In fact, pregnant women are advised to limit seafood consumption to just two 6-oz servings per week over fears that mercury will cause brain damage to the developing fetus. But, are these concerns based on sound science?

It turns out, there’s more to the story than meets the eye! The high micronutrient content of seafood comes to the rescue here—specifically, the trace mineral selenium. Among selenium’s many roles is an ability to bind irreversibly with mercury, in turn reducing its absorption and preventing its harmful effects in our bodies. In fact, the selenium in seafood can help protect us from mercury exposure from other sources beyond the seafood itself!

The only exceptions to this rule are the top-predator fish from contaminated waters, in which the methylmercury accumulation is higher than their selenium content. Mercury levels in these fish can be quite high not only due to absorbing mercury from the water, but also from biomagnification, where mercury accumulates from the organisms that these fish consume. Luckily, the list here is fairly short: fish with potentially unsafe mercury levels are king mackerel, marlin, pilot whale, shark, tarpin, tilefish, and swordfish (although some studies show that swordfish is okay!).

What’s more, the majority of commonly eaten seafood is actually quite low in methylmercury to begin with. The vast majority of ocean fish and approximately 97% of fresh water fish are low in mercury and/or contain enough selenium to protect against its effects. Extremely safe seafood varieties include shellfish (including oysters, clams, scallops, mussels, crab, shrimp, and lobster), anchovies, salmon, trout, herring, haddock, pollock (Boston bluefish), sole, flounder, Atlantic mackerel, and lake whitefish.

Ultimately, increasing your dietary intake of selenium is a great way to protect yourself from mercury exposure from food sources or from environmental factors. Along with seafood and seaweed, selenium is abundant in Brazil nuts, mushrooms, onions, sunflower seeds, and meat and poultry (especially the liver!).

This Week’s Companion Downloads

📥For paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Nutrients in Seafood - This 1-pager PDF guide highlights key nutrients in seafood and their benefits, to give you a quick-reference for why three or more weekly servings of seafood (either fish or shellfish) is so good for you.

• Oysters on the Half Shell Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

Check your inbox for the Companion Downloads arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post). You can also find them in the archive here. Thank you so much for supporting my work and Nutrivore!

Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Founder of Nutrivore

Cancer can originate in nearly any part of the body, with different types classified based on their tissue of origin. Some cancers, like leukemia, do not form solid tumors but instead affect the blood and bone marrow. Cancer risk is determined by a combination of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors, and while some risk is inherited (i.e., specific gene mutations that increase risk of certain cancer types), most cancer incidence occurs due to an accumulation of mutations acquired over a lifetime. Early detection and preventive measures can significantly improve survival rates and treatment outcomes.

While research bases for less common cancers are still developing, there has been some amazing discoveries and studies completed on the most common cancer types, which have culminated in treatment, lifestyle supports, and alternative therapies that have been shown to improve outcomes.

This article explains the links between cancer risk and 30 different micronutrients (including some with complex relationships to cancer risk, so not straightforwardly just decreasing risk across the board)—including specific vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids. This long list of nutrients is not meant to imply that you should track or optimize each one individually. Rather, it illustrates the value of nutrient-dense, diverse eating patterns, which naturally provide these nutrients by emphasizing a wide variety of mostly whole foods. For my best resource on what this looks like day-to-day, I recommend grabbing a copy of my book, Nutrivore. And for a structured program to help you improve diet quality while quitting diet mentality, check out my Nutrivore90 Online Course. I also want to be clear that while a nutrient-dense diet is associated with a lower risk of developing many types of cancer, nutrition cannot eliminate cancer risk, nor should these nutrients be viewed as treatments for cancer.

In addition, cancer risk is influenced by many factors beyond food alone, including genetics, age, environmental exposures, infections, hormone status, body weight, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption, sun exposure, and chance. A nutrient-dense diet can meaningfully reduce the risk of many cancers and support overall health, but it is not a guarantee, a cure, or a moral safeguard.

So, let’s actually start with causes of and risk factors for cancer in general and the most common cancer types, to create the appropriate context for our review of the nutrients that lower occurrence.

Predominant Cancer Types in the United States

Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the most common types of cancer in the U.S. include breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, and skin cancer. These cancers have varying risk factors and strategies for prevention and early detection.

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women, with about 300,000

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Because this week’s Free Newsletter talked about the link between fiber intake and IBS, I want to share this downloadable handy-dandy 1-page summary of Nutrients for Gut Health as a perk for my paid subscribers. And, because green beans are a great, affordable and versatile source of fiber, I’m sharing one of my favorite ways to enjoy them, a downloadable version of my recipe for Simple Roasted Green Beans.

📥Just for paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Nutrients for Gut Health - This 1-pager PDF guide lists all the nutrients that reduce risk of diseases of the gastrointestinal system along with top food sources, to give you a quick-reference for foods to add if gut health is a concern for you.

• Simple Roasted Green Beans Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

For Paid Subscribers

Read more

Key Takeaways

✅Fiber is arguably the most important nutrient for gut health, and low-fiber diets are believed to be the cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).

✅Green beans are a great source of fiber, vitamin K and vitamin C. Plus, they’re affordable and versatile. They also happen to be one of the easiest food crops to grow and are perfect for beginner gardeners and small spaces!

✅Choosing green beans instead of the “highest-scoring” vegetables is still a win because variety is part of what makes our overall diet nutrient-dense.

✅For paid subscribers, your companion downloads this week are: Nutrients for Gut Health and Simple Roasted Green Beans. Check your inbox; they’ll be arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post).

Fiber for Irritable Bowel Syndrome

🧬Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a diagnosis of exclusion, and refers to gastrointestinal symptoms—such as constipation, diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, and gas—without a clear cause such as IBD, celiac disease, diverticular disease or stomach ulcer. It’s estimated that 11% of people globally are affected by IBS. IBS is believed to be primarily caused by low dietary fiber causing an unhealthy gut microbiome.

Fiber is a type of complex carbohydrate that our body can't digest and instead is a food source for the beneficial bacteria and other microbes that inhabit our digestive tract. Fiber also regulates peristalsis of the intestines (the rhythmic motion of muscles around the intestines that pushes food through the digestive tract), stimulates the suppression of the hunger hormone ghrelin (so we feel more full), lowers cholesterol, and slows the absorption of simple sugars into the bloodstream to regulate blood sugar levels and avoid the excess production of insulin.

Fiber supplements have shown limited utility in IBS symptom management, likely because 1) fiber diversity is also extremely important, as very small differences in fiber structure can change which gut bacteria are supported; and 2) probiotics are additionally required to improve gut microbiome composition.

We get fiber diversity when our fiber comes from whole food sources. While pulse legumes and certain fruits and veggies stand out as being particularly fiber rich, all whole plant foods—whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds—contribute fiber to our diets.

Probiotics supplements containing Bacillus coagulans have the best track record for IBS, but Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus acidophilus have also been shown to be very beneficial. These strains are commonly found in many fermented foods—like yogurt, sauerkraut and kimchi—and probiotic-enriched foods.

Learn About Fiber

Want to know the top 25 best food sources of fiber? Learn them here.

Get 2.7 g Fiber with Green Beans

🫛Green beans, also known as French beans, string beans, snap beans, wax beans, or Phaseolus vulgaris L. (for us science nerds) are odd-ball members of the legume (Fabaceae) family. Compared to most other legumes, green beans (and fresh peas) are harvested for their fresh pods, as opposed to dried seeds as in other legume varieties such as lentils or black beans. As such, their “seeds” are soft when raw, and due to their unripe or immature state, are lower in mineral binding phytates.

A serving of green beans is standardized to 1 cup, measured raw. When you cook them, they reduce in volume: 1 cup raw green beans is roughly equivalent to a little more than 3/4 cup boiled green beans. A serving of green beans delivers 2.7 grams of fiber (an impressive amount for a non-starchy veggie!), 36% DV vitamin K, 15% DV vitamin C, and 46 mg of antioxidant polyphenols. They have a Nutrivore Score of 605!

Learn About Green Beans

Green beans are the 215th most nutrient-dense food! Learn the Top 500 Nutrivore Foods here.

Simple Roasted Green Beans Recipe

🥗 Fat, salt, green beans and heat—it’s a magical combination that creates Simple Roasted Green Beans. If you are looking for a simple side dish that can be thrown together quickly, this is it! You can scale this up or down very easily, and is delicious alongside any protein including steak, pork, fish or even chicken!

If you want to play with the seasoning, swap regular salt with truffle salt, garlic salt, or your favorite seasoning blend. It turns a simple vegetable into something amazing, and is packed with nutrients like fiber, vitamin K and and vitamin C.

See Full Recipe

Add this recipe to your meal plan this week with Real Plans, the official Nutrivore meal planning app!

Nutrivore Mindset Corner

🧠The Nutrivore Score is a measurement of nutrient density, scientifically defined as nutrients per calorie. It’s a simple number that can tell us the quality of the calories in a food. But, there are many important things that the Nutrivore Score can’t tell us. It doesn’t tell us what nutrients are in a food; it doesn’t tell us whether eating that food regularly improves health outcomes; and it doesn’t tell us whether the nutrients in that food fill nutritional gaps in our own diet or simply increase our intake of nutrients we were already getting enough of. So, the Nutrivore Score should never be the only metric we use for food choice.

Green beans are a great example. With their middle-of-the-road Nutrivore Score of 605, there are so many more nutrient-dense vegetables that we could choose. This makes it easy to get so wrapped in the gamification of meals, swapping out each component for a more nutrient-dense option, that we forget the value of dietary diversity, arguable the most important hallmark of a healthy diet. We also forget the value of affordability, convenience, and flavor! I enjoy green beans. They’re versatile enough to add to just about any dish, and I find it easy to eat a huge pile of them, which helps me reach my daily vegetable serving goals. Plus they’re so abundant in my garden right now that I’m freezing them for winter just so that I don’t have to eat them every day. Could I choose something more nutrient dense? Sure. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record: let’s not let perfection be the enemy of the good.

And remember, that every vegetable family offers its own special collection of phytonutrients and fiber types, so there’s actually more health benefit from mixing it up than there is from always going for the most nutrient dense. So, if green beans are the vegetable you like, have access to, and can afford, that’s awesome!

Learn everything you need to know about the Nutrivore philosophy in my book, Nutrivore: Eat Any Food, Get Every Nutrient, and Transform Your Health!

Grab a Copy!

Helpful Tip of the Week

💡Green beans are one of the easiest plants to grow! They grow best from seed and don’t like being transplanted, which means you don’t need to worry about up-potting seedlings! They grow best in warm weather (it’s not too late to plant them in most zones right now, and they produce very quickly), in full-sun, and in well-drained soil. They don’t need fertilizer and are a nitrogen-fixing plant, so they can actually improve growing conditions for neighboring plants. They don’t need pruning, pole varieties will climb up a trellis, fence or even strings all by themselves (no training required), the blooms are pretty, and they’ll keep producing until the first frost.

Bush beans don’t need a trellis and can grow in very limited space. I like to plant them around the edges of my vegetable garden, and in any small empty spaces, to make the best use of every square inch of soil. You can also grow them in pots! I prefer to plant purple and yellow varieties, since they’re easier to see for harvesting than green varieties. And if you have a small trellis, try a long-bean variety (like yard-long beans, snake beans, or asparagus beans) for the most food per garden space.

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This Week’s Companion Downloads

📥For paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Nutrients for Gut Health - This 1-pager PDF guide lists all the nutrients that reduce risk of diseases of the gastrointestinal system along with top food sources, to give you a quick-reference for foods to add if gut health is a concern for you.

• Simple Roasted Green Beans Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

Check your inbox for the Companion Downloads arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post). You can also find them in the archive here. Thank you so much for supporting my work and Nutrivore!

Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Founder of Nutrivore

Folate, also called folic acid or vitamin B9, is an oft-discussed but commonly misunderstood B vitamin. “Folate” is a generic term that refers to both naturally occurring dietary folates as well as a synthetic version called folic acid, which is used in fortified food and supplements due to its enhanced stability during processing and storage.

Folate was first discovered in 1931, when a researcher named Lucy Wills identified a substance present in liver and yeast that could prevent rats and pregnant humans from developing anemia. Over the next decade, this nutrient was given a number of different names (including vitamin M, Lactobacillus casei factor, factor ‘S,’ vitamin BC, and norit eluate factor!) before finally being termed folic acid—deriving from the Latin word for leaf, folium, and referring to its initial isolation from spinach.

Like other B vitamins, folate is needed for producing healthy blood cells; it’s also required for healthy cell growth and function, and for making important genetic material like DNA.

Natural food sources of folate include liver and other organ meats, green leafy vegetables (like spinach and lettuce), asparagus, avocados, Brussels sprouts, legumes (including peas and lentils), eggs, beets, citrus fruits, orange juice, strawberries, pomegranates, broccoli, nuts, and seeds. Many processed grain products like cornmeal and breakfast cereals are also fortified with folic acid.

This article explains the biological roles of vitamin B9, the difference between folate and folic acid, the interactions between dietary vitamin B9 and our risk of over a dozen health conditions, symptoms and signs that we’re getting too little vitamin B9, how much vitamin B9 we need by demographic, and shares the top 25 best common whole (non-enriched) food sources of vitamin B9. Paid subscribers also can download a printer-friendly PDF version of this information below!

The Biological Roles of Vitamin B9

Unlike some of the B vitamins, which can have hundreds of functions in the body, the

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Because this week’s Free Newsletter talked about thiosulfinates as powerful phytonutrients for lowering cardiovascular disease risk, I want to share this downloadable handy-dandy 1-page fridge list of the top 10 thiosulfinate foods as a perk for my paid subscribers. And, because garlic is the best source of thiosulfinates, I’m sharing one of my favorite ways to eat a ton of garlic in one sitting, a downloadable version of my Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic recipe.

📥Just for paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Top 10 Thiosulfinate Foods Fridge List - This 1-pager PDF guide lists the top 10 common whole food sources of thiosulfinates, how much thiosulfinates you get per serving (and how much a serving is!), while highlighting a few other valuable nutrients each food provides.

• Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

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Key Takeaways

✅Thiosulfinates are the class of phytonutrients that make allium vegetables so tasty as well as so beneficial for cardiovascular health.

✅Garlic contains the most famous thiosulfinate, called allicin. You can boost allicin content by chopping or crushing your garlic and letting it sit for ten minutes before adding it to your dish.

✅Garlic is an easy ingredient to add to meals to boost intake of nutritive compounds, but there’s lots of other foods that offer impressive nutrients even when we consume them in very small amounts.

✅For paid subscribers, your companion downloads this week are: Top 10 Thiosulfinate Foods Fridge List and Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic. Check your inbox; they’ll be arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post).

Thiosulfinates for Cardiovascular Health

🧬Thiosulfinates are the compounds responsible for the distinctive pungent flavor of allium vegetables (such as onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, and chives) and they provide diverse beneficial effects, including powerful anticancer properties as well as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antithrombotic effects.

Thiosulfinates are excellent for reducing cardiovascular disease risk, by lowering total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, by inhibiting the enzymes involved in cholesterol and fatty acid synthesis, and by reducing platelet clumping and abnormal clot formation. A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis (including 81 cohort studies and over 4 million subjects!) found that the highest versus lowest consumption of alliums was associated with a 67% lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, a 33% lower risk of coronary heart disease mortality, and an 11% lower risk of stroke!

Learn About Thiosulfinates

Want to know all the best food sources of thiosulfinates? Learn them here.

Get 81 mg Thiosulfinates with Garlic

🧄Thanks to its phytonutrient content, especially thiosulfinates—along with having impressive amounts per calorie of vitamin B6, vitamin C, manganese, copper, selenium, and fiber—garlic has a sky-high Nutrivore Score of 5622, making it one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet!

While at least 19 beneficial thiosulfinates have been identified in various alliums, the most famous example is allicin, produced by the conversion of the alliin in garlic by alliinase when the garlic is sliced or crushed. Allicin has well-established anticancer and antitumor, cardioprotective (including reducing hypertension and hyperlipidemia as well as improving circulation), antibacterial, antifungal and antiparasitic properties in addition immune modulating properties.

A 2019 umbrella review of meta-analyses likewise found that garlic consumption had a powerful cholesterol-lowering effect—with eight weeks of garlic consumption leading to a 17.2 mg/dL drop in total cholesterol levels.

And while fresh garlic has higher levels of thiosulfinates, garlic powder is also a great choice! For example, a 2014 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found that garlic powder (in doses ranging from 300 mg to 1400 mg daily, for a period of seven days to one year) lowered triglyceride levels by 15.83 mg/dL, LDL cholesterol levels by 8.11 mg/dL, fasting blood glucose levels by 17.30 mg/dL, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels by 4.34 mmHg and 2.36 mmHg, respectively.

Learn About Garlic

Garlic is the 12th most nutrient-dense food! Learn the Top 500 Nutrivore Foods here.

Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic

🥗 This garlic-heavy side dish is so amazingly sweet and delicious thanks to the slow roasting of many garlic cloves. Roasting garlic reduces their pungent-ness and makes them sweet and tender. You will not only be getting the benefits of thiosulfinate-filled garlic, but you will also have the added health promoting properties of carotenoids, vitamin B6 and vitamin C that come along with the winter squash varieties.

What a better way to enjoy the fall, squash season than by jazzing up your autumn table with this show-stopping side dish.

See the Full Recipe

Add this recipe to your meal plan this week with Real Plans, the official Nutrivore meal planning app!

Nutrivore Mindset Corner

🧠When we think about improving diet quality, it’s easy to focus on the big changes—hitting five servings of daily vegetables, adding seafood to the menu, or building breakfasts around the Nutrivore Meal Map. But some of the easiest wins come from the smallest additions. This week’s newsletter highlights the benefits of garlic, but there are many other examples. Garnishing your dinner with just one tablespoon of parsley provides roughly half the Daily Value for vitamin K. Sprinkling one tablespoon of chia seeds over your breakfast yogurt bowl or lunch side salad adds three and a half grams of fiber plus two and a half grams of heart-healthy alpha-linolenic acid. And here’s a fun one: adding 2 tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder to your morning smoothie will add four grams of fiber and 13% DV magnesium.

This is one reason I often talk about easy additions as much as I talk about major dietary shifts. Fresh herbs, spices, garnishes, mushrooms, nuts and seeds, seaweed, citrus zest, and other nutrient-dense ingredients can up the nutritional value of meals without changing what you’re eating. Over the course of a week, those small additions can add up to a surprisingly broad spectrum of beneficial nutritive compounds.

The Nutrivore mindset isn’t about chasing perfection, it’s about looking for opportunities, like adding garlic to your roasted vegetables, sprinkling parsley over dinner, mixing lentils into your ground beef, or tossing a handful of herbs into a soup. Small changes don’t just add up, they compound.

Learn everything you need to know about the Nutrivore philosophy in my book, Nutrivore: Eat Any Food, Get Every Nutrient, and Transform Your Health!

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Helpful Tip of the Week

💡This week’s tip requires just a bit of science… An interesting thing about thiosulfinates is that they aren’t even formed until the vegetable is damaged, for example sliced, crushed or chewed. This is because their precursors—antioxidant and immune-modulating S-alk(en)yl-L-cysteine sulfoxides (like alliin, the dominant sulfoxide in garlic)—reside in storage cells whereas the lyase enzyme alliinase that metabolizes sulfoxides is found in bundle sheath cells. When the cell membranes are damaged, alliinase and sulfoxides mix, forming a variety of thiosulfinates.

Alliinase is quite heat stable plus some of our gut bacteria produce enzymes with similar biological activity, so we don’t have to crush alliums before eating to benefit from thiosulfinates (see for example, the recipe above!). That being said, when it comes to garlic, we do get significantly more allicin production when we smash, chop, grate, or crush fresh garlic and then let it sit for ten minutes or so at room temperature before adding to whatever dish we’re creating! It’s an easy way to get even more health benefit from an ingredient we’re already consuming.

What I do is always start my meal prep with garlic (if the dish I’m making calls for it, of course). If a recipe calls for grated or crushed garlic, I do so into a bowl and set aside until I need it. If a recipe calls for sliced or chopped garlic, I first smash the clove with the side of my knife, then slice or chop and set aside until I need it. I don’t worry about it being exactly ten minutes, sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less, either way, I’m getting extra benefits from allicin production! And if the dish calls for whole roasted heads of garlic, I don’t worry about it and I skip this step.

This Week’s Companion Downloads

📥For paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Top 10 Thiosulfinate Foods Fridge List - This 1-pager PDF guide lists the top 10 common whole food sources of thiosulfinates, how much thiosulfinates you get per serving (and how much a serving is!), while highlighting a few other valuable nutrients each food provides.

• Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

Check your inbox for the Companion Downloads arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post). You can also find them in the archive here. Thank you so much for supporting my work and Nutrivore!

Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Founder of Nutrivore

Chronic fatigue (or pathological fatigue) however, refers to fatigue that is persistent, often debilitating, and not relieved by rest. It may last for months and impair a person’s ability to function in daily life. In the most extreme form, it is diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (also called myalgic encephalomyelitis, ME/CFS). ME/CFS is characterized not only by profound fatigue, but also post-exertional malaise (worsening of symptoms after exertion), unrefreshing sleep, cognitive impairment, orthostatic intolerance, and other systemic symptoms.

According to a 2021–2022 National Health Interview Survey report, about 1.3 % of U.S. adults had physician-diagnosed ME/CFS (i.e. chronic fatigue syndrome) at the time of interview. In absolute numbers, that corresponds to approximately 3.3 million Americans living with ME/CFS. The prevalence increases with age up to a point (peaking in adults 50–69 years) and then declines in older age groups. Women are significantly more affected than men: about 1.7 % of women versus 0.9 % of men report ME/CFS. Among racial/ethnic groups, non-Hispanic White adults have a somewhat higher reported prevalence (≈1.5 %) compared to Hispanic (0.8 %) or Asian non-Hispanic (0.7 %).

Because many cases likely remain undiagnosed, the true prevalence may be higher.

This article explains the links between pathological fatigue and 8 different nutrients —including specific vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids. It’s important to clarify that while nutrient-dense eating can meaningfully support energy levels—and in some cases help alleviate pathological fatigue—the primary focus of this article is on nutrients associated with reducing the risk of developing pathological fatigue in the first place.

In addition, fatigue is influenced by many factors beyond food alone, including genetics, age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, hormones, sleep, infection, and environmental exposures. A nutrient-rich diet can improve health outcomes including reducing risk of pathological fatigue, but it is not a guarantee, a cure, or a moral safeguard.

So, let’s actually start with causes of and risk factors for chronic fatigue and fatigue, to create the appropriate context for our review of the nutrients that lower severity and occurrence.

Chronic Fatigue Causes and Risk Factors

The causes of chronic fatigue and ME/CFS are not fully understood. In fact, the condition is considered multi-factorial and likely results from the interaction of biological, psychological, and environmental factors.

Some of the hypothesized or associated mechanisms include:

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Because this week’s Free Newsletter talked about the link between vitamin B12 intake and depression risk, I want to share this downloadable handy-dandy 1-page summary of Nutrients for Anxiety and Depression as a perk for my paid subscribers. And, because ground beef is a great source of vitamin B12, I’m sharing one of my favorite ways to enjoy it, a downloadable version of my recipe for Italian Fennel Beef Sausage.

📥Just for paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Nutrients for Anxiety and Depression - This 1-pager PDF guide lists all the nutrients that reduce risk of anxiety and depression along with top food sources, to give you a quick-reference for foods to add if mental health challenges are a concern for you.

• Italian Fennel Beef Sausage - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

For Paid Subscribers

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Potassium is the third most abundant mineral in the human body, and is present in all plant and animal tissues; in fact, it’s necessary for every living cell to function. It was first isolated in 1807 by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (who also discovered sodium, calcium, magnesium, strontium, and barium!), when he electrolyzed the element from the ashes of plants, or potash (which is also where potassium got its name!). Intriguingly, a small fraction of potassium atoms (about 0.012%) in the form of potassium-40 are radioactive, and even led to the development of the “banana equivalent dose” (BED)—an informal measurement of ionizing radiation exposure, used to illustrate how radioactive something is in comparison to one banana. (For example, a single dental X-ray produces as much radiation as about 50 bananas!) However, the amounts of radioactive potassium we ingest through food aren’t enough to cause harm to our bodies; in fact, we’re already a little radioactive due to the potassium all living creatures naturally contain.

Importantly, this nutrient functions as an electrolyte—a class of minerals that dissociate into charged particles (called ions) when dissolved in solution, making them capable of conducting electricity. On the whole, electrolytes help regulate fluid balance within the body, regulate nerve and muscle function (including the heart!), maintain a normal blood pH, and transmit nerve signals!

Good sources of potassium include leafy green vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, melons (such as cantaloupe), bananas, apricots, plums, prunes, oranges (and orange juice), potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, avocados, mushrooms, and legumes (especially lentils, kidney beans, white beans, and soybeans). Many nuts and seeds also have a high potassium content, including pistachios, almonds, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, and even acorns! And, dairy products—particularly low-fat dairy like milk and yogurt—have a relatively high concentration of potassium.

This article explains the biological roles of potassium, how potassium regulates blood pressure, the interactions between dietary potassium and our risk of 4 major health conditions, symptoms and signs that we’re getting too little potassium, how much potassium we need by demographic, and shares the top 25 best common food sources of potassium. Paid subscribers also can download a printer-friendly PDF version of this information below!

The Biological Roles of Potassium

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Because this week’s Free Newsletter hinted at folate as a health multitasker, I want to share this downloadable handy-dandy 2-page Vitamin B9 Fun Factsheet as a perk for my paid subscribers. And, because pomegranate is a great source of vitamin B9, and pomegranate molasses concentrates all of the nutrients in pomegranate, I’m sharing one of my favorite ways to enjoy pomegranate, a downloadable version of my recipe for Pomegranate Molasses-Glazed Salmon.

📥Just for paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Vitamin B9 Fun Factsheet - This 2-page PDF guide summarizes all the most important information about what vitamin B9 (folate) does, top food sources, and how much we need for each demographic group. This fun factsheet also explains the difference between natural folates and folic acid!

• Pomegranate Molasses-Glazed Salmon Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

For Paid Subscribers

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This article explains the links between pregnancy and fetal development and 13 nutrients that support healthy pregnancy progression, placental function, fetal growth, and infant development—including specific vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids. However, this article is intended for educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as medical advice. Nutrient needs during pregnancy can vary substantially based on factors such as age, genetics, preexisting health conditions, medications, pregnancy complications, dietary restrictions, and whether a pregnancy involves multiples.

In addition, nutrition is only one of many factors that influence pregnancy and fetal outcomes. Access to prenatal care, overall health status, environmental exposures, stress, sleep, physical activity, smoking status, alcohol intake, and socioeconomic factors can all play important roles. A nutrient-dense diet can meaningfully support maternal and fetal health, but it is not a guarantee, a cure, or a moral safeguard. Always discuss significant dietary changes or supplementation during pregnancy with a qualified healthcare provider.

So let’s actually start with risk factors for pregnancy complications, so we can create the appropriate context for the role of nutrition in preventing them.

Risk Factors During Pregnancy

Several factors can increase the risk of complications during pregnancy:

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Because this week’s Free Newsletter talked about Conjugated Linoleic Acid as a really neat naturally-occurring trans fat with anti-inflammatory properties that may be beneficial in rheumatoid arthritis, I want to share a downloadable handy-dandy 1-page summary of Nutrients for Autoimmune Disease as a perk for my paid subscribers. And, because beef (especially grass-fed) is a great source of CLA, I’m sharing one of my favorite ways to enjoy steak while balancing it with fruits, veggies, and phytonutrient-packed herbs, a downloadable version of my recipe for Grilled Peach and Steak Salad.

📥Just for paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:

• Nutrients for Autoimmune Disease - This 1-pager PDF guide lists all the nutrients that reduce risk of autoimmune diseases along with top food sources, to give you a quick-reference for foods to add if autoimmune disease is a concern for you.

• Grilled Peach and Steak Salad Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.

For Paid Subscribers

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