Dr. Danielle Belardo, MD

05/22/2026

Progress >>> perfection. Don’t make perfect the enemy of good. Making small changes in your diet can add up to big health benefits over time 🫶
Thanks for interviewing me on one of my favorite topics!

05/16/2026

Whether you’re looking to add more fiber or protein to your diet, legume pastas are a major win for everyone, no matter what your dietary pattern. The bean pastas I eat have more protein per calorie than a steak, with the added benefit of fiber, low in saturated fat, and zero cholesterol. I recommend incorporating bean pastas into all of my patients diets, whether they are a 75 year old woman or my professional athlete patients playing in the NBA and NFL.

I am not affiliated with any of these brands, these just happen to be some of my favorites 🫶 Enjoy!

05/13/2026

Fibermaxxing… I love hearing it’s now a TikTok trend, but the vegans know, I am the OG of fibermaxxing 🫰 IYKYK 🌱
Thanks for covering this topic!

05/08/2026

https://www.businessinsider.com/cardiologist-eats-90-grams-fiber-breakfast-lunch-dinner-2026-4

Here's how a plant-based cardiologist hits the recommended daily fiber target for women before she's even had lunch.

12/10/2025

The framing of “nutrition and lifestyle versus guideline-directed medical therapy” is a classic false dichotomy often promoted by the wellness/supplement industry that collapses a multidimensional risk-reduction strategy into an either-or narrative unsupported by evidence.

High-quality randomized trials, cohort studies, and Mendelian randomization consistently show that cardiometabolic risk is cumulative and multifactorial; interventions acting on different causal pathways produce additive, not competing, benefits. Lifestyle modification remains foundational, yet its effect sizes, while meaningful, in certain patients may not achieve the magnitude or durability seen with therapies targeting specific biological drivers of disease such as LDL-mediated atherogenesis.

Conversely, pharmacologic therapy without lifestyle optimization leaves substantial modifiable risk unaddressed. Modern prevention frameworks and guidelines explicitly integrate both domains because the totality of evidence demonstrates that outcomes improve most when nutrition, physical activity, weight management, and smoking cessation are paired with therapies proven to reduce hard endpoints.

Presenting them as oppositional is a tactic of the wellness industrial complex that is methodologically flawed, ignores well-characterized sources of confounding, and undermines the very principle of evidence-based medicine: aligning interventions with the causal architecture of disease to maximize absolute risk reduction.

12/10/2025

Clinical atherosclerosis is the end result of a disease that develops slowly over many decades.

Atherosclerosis is often a silent asymptomatic disease until it suddenly presents as a myocardial infarction (heart attack), or as chronic ischemia, angina or claudication.

Sudden plaque rupture can be fatal 1/3 of the time.

So you might wonder - well how early does heart disease begin if it stays silent for so long?

The PDAY Study on the Natural History and Risk Factors of Atherosclerosis in Children and Youth studied 3,000 subjects who died between ages 15 and 34 due non cardiac reasons.

The study found
1. Atherosclerosis begins in *childhood*
2. Young adults often have “significant” lesions
3. Even at young ages, the risk of atherosclerosis is associated with risk factors such as hyperlipidemia, to***co, obesity, abdominal circumference, diabetes, and hypertension

Recent PDAY studies have shown that a significant number of advanced coronary artery lesions have microscopic qualities associated with susceptibility to rupture and that coronary artery disease risk factors are associated with the development of these characteristic microscopic qualities.

The PDAY archive continues to provide an important resource for new investigators throughout the world that contribute to the understanding of atherosclerosis, the underlying cause of most cardiovascular disease and the leading cause of debilitating illness and death in this country. The PDAY findings emphasize the need to modify risk factors in young people to re**rd the development of atherosclerotic lesions, particularly clinically significant lesions. Thus, true primary prevention of atherosclerosis must being in childhood or early adolescence.

It’s never too early to focus on prevention.

10/08/2025

Many thanks to the New York Times and brilliant journalist Ashwin Rodrigues for featuring me in this important piece on the risks of supplement overuse and the culture that fuels it, alongside my brilliant colleague

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/well/doctors-supplements.html

When the New York Times reached out, I was thrilled that Ashwin wanted to include real patient stories (privacy protected, of course). So often, our discussions about evidence-based medicine on social media focus on data, research, statistics and confidence intervals, and of course guidelines, all essential… but through Ashwin’s dynamic storytelling, this piece brings the human side of science to life.

I’m grateful to contribute to a conversation that helps people navigate health misinformation with clarity, empathy, and evidence.

We know that supplements when used outside of deficiency or guideline indication (ie folic acid in women of childbearing age, B12 for those who are plant based, vitamin D for individuals in certain regions, to name a few) do not lead to any benefit, and can have significant harm. If a supplement truly delivered the benefits its promoters claim, it wouldn’t be sitting in an influencer’s link in bio - it would be in the clinical guidelines. And that’s the point. The wellness economy thrives not on rigorous evidence, but on aspiration and fear, turning unproven hope into a business model far more profitable than proof ever could be.