Greens Plus

10/10/2026

Apple pectin has real cholesterol data behind it, and the doses are larger than any supplement gives you.

In crossover trials in mildly high-cholesterol adults, 15 g a day of pectin was given with food for four weeks. A follow-up arm at 6 g a day found LDL 6 to 7% lower with high-ester, high-molecular-weight citrus pectin.

Six grams. That is most of a scoop of greens powder on its own, before anything else goes in.

So when pectin appears on an ingredient list at 200 mg, it is there for the list. Ours included.

10/08/2026

We used to publish a list of eight "high-risk" GMO crops, and we implied that the risk was to the person eating them. That was wrong and we have taken it down.

The list came from the Non-GMO Project, a certification program. In its own definition, a high-risk input is one where a genetically modified version is widespread in the supply chain, so an ingredient from it is likely to contain GE material unless the chain is segregated and tested.

That is a sourcing likelihood, not a health finding. Two completely different claims, and the label rarely separates them.

10/06/2026

Roasted mushroom quinoa risotto. Serves four, no arborio, no thirty minutes of stirring.

Roast the mushrooms with olive oil for 10 to 15 minutes until they go dark and concentrated, then fold them through cooked quinoa. The roasting is the whole trick. Mushrooms that have not been roasted are just wet.

It is the first of five plant-forward recipes we put together that do not read like health food.

Which one should we cook and photograph next?

10/03/2026

Chia does not cause weight loss. The two best-controlled studies gave overweight adults 25 to 50 grams a day for ten to twelve weeks and found no change in body weight or body composition against placebo.

What chia does have is a genuinely unusual profile: very high fiber, a lot of plant omega-3, more calcium than you would guess.

And one safety note almost no marketing mentions. In 2014 gastroenterologists reported a case of esophageal impaction after a man swallowed a tablespoon of dry chia seeds and then drank a glass of water. Chia absorbs many times its weight. Hydrate it before you swallow it, not after.

10/01/2026

Sucralose is not sugar with something removed. It is sugar with three chlorine atoms substituted onto the molecule, which is what makes it roughly 600 times sweeter and largely resistant to digestion.

FDA approved it for 15 specific food categories in 1998 and as a general-purpose sweetener in 1999. Human pharmacokinetic work published in 2000 followed radiolabeled sucralose through the digestive tract, so the basic question of what happens to it has an actual answer.

We do not use it. That is a formulation choice, not a safety verdict, and it is worth being precise about the difference.

09/29/2026

The refrigerator is where a lot of produce quietly gets worse.

Tomatoes are chilling-sensitive below 10C, which is warmer than any home fridge. Past about six to eight days at 5C they lose texture and flavour and do not get it back.

Potatoes have the opposite problem. Store them too cold and their starch converts to reducing sugars, which is what drives acrylamide formation when you later fry or roast them. Industry guidance keeps potato storage above about 43F for exactly this reason.

Meanwhile the fridge itself should be at 40F or below, and most people have never checked.

What is in your fridge that should not be?

09/26/2026

One cup of blueberries carries about 364 mg of anthocyanins.

For scale, total flavonoid intake among US adults runs around 200 to 250 mg a day, and anthocyanidins are about 5% of that. So a single cup of blueberries is several times a typical day's entire anthocyanin intake.

That is the rare case where the ordinary supermarket version of the food is the dose used in the research. No powder, no extract, no capsule required.

Frozen counts.

09/24/2026

A serving of greens powder weighs 8 to 10 grams. That is the entire budget.

So when a tub lists thirty ingredients, ask what is left for the thirtieth after the first three have taken their share. Usually a few milligrams. Enough to print, not enough to do anything.

Here is the test case. In a 2012 randomized trial in JAMA, 154 people took silymarin three times a day for 24 weeks at doses far above anything in a supplement, and their liver enzymes and viral load did not differ from placebo. If it did nothing at that dose, it is doing nothing at 30 mg inside a blend.

We make greens powder. Count the ingredients on ours too.

09/22/2026

About 5% of the US population reaches the fiber Daily Value of 28 grams. Not 50%. Five.

The interventions that move this are not the ones people expect. A 2019 Cochrane review looked at whether simply changing how available and how close something is changes what people eat. Moving a drink further away was enough to reduce how often it got picked.

Which means the fruit bowl on the counter is not a cliche. It is the intervention.

What is the one thing you keep visible that you actually eat?

01/02/2024