New Leaf Functional Nutrition

06/02/2026

Yummy salad for summer !

06/02/2026

05/30/2026

The Longevity Egg Muffin Cups are packed with protein, fiber, healthy fats, omega-3s, leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, and epinutrients that help support healthy aging, methylation, and healthy gene expression.

Inside:
🥚 Eggs for choline + methylation support
🐟 Wild salmon for omega-3s
🥬 Spinach + broccoli for folate + polyphenols
🍄 Mushrooms for ergothioneine + immune support
✨ Turmeric for anti-inflammatory support

They’re simple, meal-prep friendly, and designed to nourish your biology, not just fill you up.

One of my favorite strategies for healthy aging? Making nutrient density easier and more convenient.

Comment EGG MUFFIN for a link to the recipe!

05/29/2026

This is fascinating! I’m using a paper filter from now on with my gold filter 👏🤓

Unfiltered coffee raises your LDL cholesterol. Filtered coffee does not. The bean is identical. The only thing that changes is whether the brew passes through paper.

Coffee oil carries two diterpenes, cafestol and kahweol. They survive in French press, espresso, boiled, and Turkish coffee, and a paper filter traps almost all of them. That single step is the difference.

Once in your body, the diterpenes lead the liver to clear less cholesterol from your blood, and LDL climbs. Cafestol is one of the most potent cholesterol-raising compounds in the diet, and the effect shows up in controlled human trials, not just observational data. The diterpenes nudge triglycerides up too.

How much you get depends almost entirely on the brewing method. Per cup:

Unfiltered or boiled: about 4.4 mg
French press: about 2.8 mg
Espresso: about 1.2 mg
Paper-filtered drip: about 0.08 mg

That is roughly a 55-fold difference between an unfiltered cup and a paper-filtered one of the same coffee.

The long-term data points the same way. In 508,747 Norwegians followed for about 20 years, filtered coffee drinkers had lower mortality than people who drank no coffee at all. Unfiltered drinkers saw little or none of that benefit, and in men over 60, heavy unfiltered intake was associated with higher cardiovascular death. The risk tracked cholesterol: it grew when cholesterol was removed from the statistical model.
One honest caveat. That the LDL rise happens is well established. The exact molecular step, how the diterpenes lower cholesterol clearance, is still being worked out.

If your LDL is a concern, this is one of the easiest levers you have. You do not have to give up coffee. You just have to run it through paper.

Naidoo et al., Nutr J, 2011
Urgert et al., Eur J Clin Nutr, 1995
de Roos et al., J Intern Med, 2000
Tverdal et al., Eur J Prev Cardiol, 2020

05/29/2026

Everyone talks about cutting sodium. Almost nobody talks about adding potassium. The evidence says the latter may be just as (if not more) important
A WHO-commissioned meta-analysis pulled together 22 randomized trials and 1,606 participants. The headline number: in adults with high blood pressure, increasing potassium intake dropped systolic blood pressure by an average of 3.5 mmHg. In the subset of studies where intake reached 90 to 120 mmol per day (about 3,500 to 4,700 mg), the drop was 7.2 mmHg.

Important caveat the meta-analysis flagged: this effect was only seen in people with hypertension. In normotensive adults, the BP change was not statistically significant. The same paper also notes there was no clean dose-response relationship established between the two effect sizes. Two data points, not a smooth curve.

The mechanism is straightforward. Potassium does two things at once. It signals the kidney to excrete more sodium in urine by inhibiting a sodium reabsorption channel called NCC in the distal tubule. It also relaxes vascular smooth muscle directly by opening potassium channels in the arterial wall, which hyperpolarizes the muscle cells and reduces vascular tone. Two mechanisms, one ion.

The stroke data is even more compelling. Across 11 cohort studies and 127,038 adults, higher potassium intake tracked with a 24% lower risk of stroke. That is association data, not RCT-grade causation, but it lines up with what the trials show for blood pressure.

Now the intake gap. The 2019 National Academies set adequate intake at 2,600 mg per day for women and 3,400 mg for men. NHANES data puts the US adult average somewhere around 2,300 mg. Most people are below target, and the gap is bigger for women in absolute terms.

Closing it is not complicated. One banana delivers about 420 mg. One baked potato with skin gives you 925 mg. One cup of cooked spinach is 840 mg. One cup of white beans is 1,190 mg. Adding one of those to an average day gets most adults into the target range.

Cutting sodium is fine if you do it. Adding potassium does something on its own.

Aburto et al., BMJ 2013
NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, 2024
USDA FoodData Central

05/28/2026

Not all carbs are created equal!

You can create fiber inside food that didn't have it before. The trigger is temperature.

When you cook starchy food, water enters the starch granules and the long amylose and amylopectin chains unfold. This is gelatinization, and it's why hot rice, hot pasta, and hot mashed potato are so easy for your body to digest. The chains are loose, exposed, and your digestive enzymes break them down within minutes. Your blood sugar rises fast.

When you cool that same cooked starch, the chains do something interesting. They realign and partially recrystallize into a tightly ordered structure called retrograded starch. Your digestive enzymes can't break the crystals as efficiently. The starch reaches your colon largely intact, where your gut bacteria ferment it into short-chain fatty acids including butyrate. Resistant starch is especially butyrogenic compared to other fibers. The FDA and AOAC classify retrograded starch (resistant starch type 3) as dietary fiber for nutrition labeling purposes. Same molecule. Different physical structure. Different physiology.

The numbers across foods:

White rice (Sonia et al., 2015, Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition). Researchers measured resistant starch in three preparations: freshly cooked, cooked and cooled at room temperature for 10 hours, and cooked and refrigerated at 4°C for 24 hours then reheated. Resistant starch went from 0.64 g per 100 g (fresh) to 1.30 g (room temp cooled) to 1.65 g (refrigerated and reheated). The clinical follow-up was a randomized crossover in 15 healthy adults. The cooled-and-reheated rice produced a meaningfully lower glucose response than the freshly cooked rice. Same calories, same ingredients.

Potato (Larder et al., 2018, Food Research International). Boiled potatoes cooled for 24 hours at 4°C had up to 114% more resistant starch than potatoes cooled for one hour at room temperature. The exact magnitude varies by cultivar.

Pasta (Hodges et al., 2019, Foods). Randomized crossover comparing freshly cooked pasta, cold pasta, and reheated pasta. Reheated pasta produced a smaller and faster-resolving glucose curve than freshly cooked pasta. The mechanism is the same starch retrogradation that happens in rice and potato.

A few honest caveats. First, "your enzymes can't break the crystals" is a simplification. Pancreatic amylase has reduced activity against retrograded starch but isn't blocked entirely. Some still gets digested. The functional shift is meaningful, not absolute. Second, the magnitude of the cooling effect varies by food, by cultivar, by cooking method, and by cooling time and temperature. Longer cooling at lower temperatures (24 hours at 4°C beats 10 hours at room temperature) produces more retrogradation. Third, repeated extreme reheating can partially reverse retrogradation, but normal microwave or stovetop reheating does not.

Practical implication. If you eat rice, pasta, or potatoes regularly, cooking a batch and refrigerating overnight before reheating roughly doubles the resistant starch content of the same food. Your post-meal glucose response is lower. Your colon gets more butyrate. The fiber on the nutrition label is what was in the raw ingredients. The fiber you actually consume depends on how you cooked and stored the food before eating it.
Same food. Different temperature history. Different physiology.

Sonia et al., Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2015 Hodges et al., Foods, 2019
Larder et al., Food Research International, 2018

05/26/2026

Fun party recipe !

05/26/2026

Apple cider vinegar has built an entire wellness category on a real effect attributed to the wrong ingredient. The glucose-lowering data is genuine. The apple has nothing to do with it.

The acetic acid is what does the work, and any vinegar at the same concentration produces the same effect.

The original Johnston et al. study (Diabetes Care 2004) gave insulin-resistant and type 2 diabetic adults a vinegar drink before a meal containing 87 g of carbohydrates and saw postprandial glucose drop 64% in the insulin-resistant group and 19% in the diabetic group. The sample was small (n=29 crossover) but the effect size was large.

Ostman et al. (Eur J Clin Nutr 2005) ran the dose-response experiment. They served white bread with vinegar at three levels of acetic acid (18, 23, and 28 mmol) to healthy adults. Both glucose and insulin responses fell as acetic acid content rose. The effect tracked the acetic acid content, not the vinegar volume.

The 2017 meta-analysis by Shishehbor et al. (Diabetes Res Clin Pract) pooled the controlled trials. Vinegar consumption with a meal reduced postprandial glucose AUC (SMD -0.60, 95% CI -1.08 to -0.11) and insulin AUC (SMD -1.30, 95% CI -1.98 to -0.62). The effect is consistent and the magnitude is meaningful.

The mechanism is well-characterized. Liljeberg and Bjorck (Eur J Clin Nutr 1998) showed in healthy adults that adding vinegar to a starch meal delayed gastric emptying and that this delay tracked with the improved glycemic response. Slower emptying means slower carbohydrate delivery to the small intestine, which flattens the glucose curve. A secondary mechanism is inhibition of disaccharidase activity by acetate at the brush border. Neither depends on the source of the acetic acid.

The longer-term data is much weaker. Johnston et al. (Food Funct 2020) ran an 8-week trial of daily red wine vinegar in 45 adults at risk for metabolic complications. Fasting glucose and insulin sensitivity improved significantly, but body mass, waist circumference, and visceral fat did not change. The viral "ACV for weight loss" claim has thin support.

Two practical implications. First, if you want the postprandial effect, you need liquid vinegar at roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons. The dose has to deliver around 750 to 1500 mg of acetic acid. White, red wine, rice, and apple cider vinegars all work. Second, the gummies and tablets are a problem. Johnston et al. (J Nutr Metab 2022) tested commercial vinegar tablets head-to-head against liquid vinegar and found the tablets failed to lower postprandial glucose to the same degree.

The mother, the fermentation, the apple, the brand. None of it is the active ingredient. The acetic acid is.

Johnston et al., Diabetes Care 2004 · Liljeberg and Bjorck, Eur J Clin Nutr 1998 · Ostman et al., Eur J Clin Nutr 2005 · Shishehbor et al., Diabetes Res Clin Pract 2017 · Johnston et al., Food Funct 2020 · Johnston et al., J Nutr Metab 2022