Nutrition Diva

885. You need choline every day. Nobody can tell you exactly how much. There's no RDA for choline, because there isn't enough data to set one. What we have instead is an estimate — and it traces back largely to a single study that enrolled only men. The numbers for women were scaled down from there, mostly by body size.

Choline is an essential nutrient a lot of people have never heard of. Your liver makes some of it, but not enough, so the rest has to come from food. It's needed to build phosphatidylcholine and the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and it plays an outsized role in brain development before birth and in early childhood.

Monica walks through what's known and what isn't:

• Why choline gets grouped with the B vitamins even though it isn't one
• What severe deficiency does to the liver, and what recent research links low intake to in older adults
• Why there's no RDA for choline, and what an Adequate Intake is actually based on
• How estrogen changes the picture, and why premenopausal women may need less than men rather than more
• Why pregnancy may call for more than the current recommendation, and why most prenatal vitamins leave choline out or include very little
• What ACOG advises for women who are pregnant or trying to conceive
• Where choline shows up in food, from egg yolks and liver to soybeans, mushrooms, and cruciferous vegetables
• Why falling short of the Adequate Intake isn't the same as being deficient
• The prostate cancer findings, and why a nutrient that supports healthy cell division can behave differently in someone who already has cancer
• The TMAO question, and why fish raises TMAO more than eggs or beef do
• Who might reasonably consider a supplement, and why more isn't better

Choline Content of Common Foods

Nutrition science you can trust, in plain English.

Have a food or nutrition question for a future episode? Email nutrition@quickanddirtytips.com. To book Monica for a live or virtual event, visit wellnessworkshere.com.

New to Nutrition Diva? Check out our special Spotify playlist for a collection of the best episodes curated by our team and Monica herself!

Follow Nutrition Diva on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter for more diet and nutrition tips.

Find out about Monica's keynotes and other programs at WellnessWorksHere.com

Nutrition Diva is a part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.

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884. Your doctor can write you a prescription for a statin or a blood pressure medication. What if they could also prescribe fresh vegetables, and your health insurance paid for them?

That’s one of the central ideas behind the Food Is Medicine movement, and cardiologist Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian is one of its leading voices. In his new book, “Food Is Medicine: Healing Our Bodies, Nourishing Our Minds, and Transforming Our Food System,” he argues that diet is the leading driver of chronic disease in the US and that it can also be part of the treatment.

Monica Reinagel, MS, LDN, talks with Dr. Mozaffarian about:

• What “food is medicine” means, and what it doesn’t
• How produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals and groceries work, and how they differ from SNAP
• Promising results from pilot programs serving people with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure, and high-risk pregnancies
• Why opening grocery stores in food deserts didn’t change how people ate
• What car safety and anti-smoking efforts can teach us about changing the food system
• How much nutrition training doctors need, and where registered dietitians fit in
• Why a healthy diet is more about adding good food than cutting out bad food

Nutrition science you can trust, in plain English.

Have a food or nutrition question for a future episode? Email nutrition@quickanddirtytips.com. To book Monica for a live or virtual event, visit wellnessworkshere.com.

Related episodes:

735 – A provocative new study on ultra-processed foods

334 – Is the Mediterranean Diet all it's cracked up to be?

New to Nutrition Diva? Check out our special Spotify playlist for a collection of the best episodes curated by our team and Monica herself!

Follow Nutrition Diva on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter for more diet and nutrition tips.

Find out about Monica's keynotes and other programs at WellnessWorksHere.com

Nutrition Diva is a part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

883. You've probably been told to skip broccoli, garlic, spicy food, sushi, peanuts and even your morning coffee while breast-feeding. How much of that advice holds up?

Monica Reinagel, MS, LDN, sorts fact from folklore on what to eat and what to avoid while nursing. She covers the colic theory about cruciferous vegetables, the open question of whether eating peanuts during breast-feeding affects a baby's allergy risk, and the NIH ESCAPE trial now testing it.

In this episode, Monica explains

• Whether cabbage, broccoli and garlic really cause gas and colic in breast-fed babies
• Why spicy food doesn't harm breast milk, and how your diet shapes your baby's food preferences
• What the research says about peanuts during breast-feeding, and why early peanut introduction cuts allergy risk
• How much caffeine and alcohol are considered safe, and how long to wait before nursing
• Why the pregnancy rules on sushi and soft cheese don't apply while nursing
• Which fish to choose, how many extra calories and fluids you need, and what to know about vitamin D for baby

References

Maternal Versus Infant Vitamin D Supplementation During Lactation: A Randomized Controlled

Trial - PubMed

Randomized trial of peanut consumption in infants at risk for peanut allergy - PubMed

Prevention and Treatment of Peanut Allergy - PubMed

Related episodes

• 261: Can diet and nutrition help you get pregnant?
• 281: How much weight should you gain during pregnancy?

New to Nutrition Diva? Check out our special Spotify playlist for a collection of the best episodes curated by our team and Monica herself!

Follow Nutrition Diva on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter for more diet and nutrition tips.

Find out about Monica's keynotes and other programs at WellnessWorksHere.com

Nutrition Diva is a part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

882. Someone in your office comes back from vacation with a box of soups and shakes and announces they're doing a five-day fast. Except they're eating.

Fasting-mimicking diets are unusual among viral wellness protocols in that there is a real body of peer-reviewed research behind them. There is also a company selling the five-day kits, founded by the researcher who developed the protocol and funding many of the trials. Both of those things are true at the same time.

In this episode, Monica breaks down what the research actually shows:

• What the five-day protocol involves, including the calorie targets and why it's deliberately low in protein
• What "fasting mimicking" means, and which effects of a multi-day fast it's trying to reproduce
• The 2017 trial in 100 healthy adults, where participants lost about five and a half pounds over three months but saw no change in blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, or inflammation
• Why the subgroup findings are interesting and why they aren't proof
• The 12-month trial in people with type 2 diabetes, where 40% reduced their diabetes medication compared with 5% in usual care
• What the cancer research has shown in mice, what it hasn't yet shown in people, and why anyone in treatment needs their oncology team in the conversation first
• Why the claim that five days can make you two and a half years biologically younger is the weakest part of the evidence, and what happened to the third of participants whose scores got worse
• Whether you can replicate the protocol without buying a branded kit, and what you might be giving up if you do
• What the dropout rates in these studies say about how doable this really is

New to Nutrition Diva? Check out our special Spotify playlist for a collection of the best episodes curated by our team and Monica herself!

Follow Nutrition Diva on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter for more diet and nutrition tips.

Find out about Monica's keynotes and other programs at WellnessWorksHere.com

Nutrition Diva is a part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.

Related Episodes

788: intermittent fasting

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699.What's the latest guidance on how much protein we should eat, and what sources of protein are best, especially as we age? In response to a New York Times article released this week, we are bringing back this episode form 2023, with a fresh introduction from Monica.

New to Nutrition Diva? Check out our special Spotify playlist for a collection of the best episodes curated by our team and Monica herself!

Follow Nutrition Diva on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter for more diet and nutrition tips.

Find out about Monica's keynotes and other programs at WellnessWorksHere.com

Nutrition Diva is a part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.