© Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
Vitamin D is hugely important to your health, and I don’t just mean bone health. Humans need vitamin D for immune function, cell growth and repair, and many other things. We get vitamin D from sunlight and from food, so let’s take a look at which foods have the most vitamin D.
Before I discuss food sources, I do want to address the issue of where vitamin D comes from in the first place. The primary sources are sunlight and food (and supplements), so if you get plenty of sun, you don’t need to worry about meeting your needs through food, and vice versa.
How much sun do you need to get enough vitamin D? That depends on your latitude on the Earth and how dark or light your skin is. For a benchmark, consider this study that compared sun exposure in Miami and Boston. In Miami in the summer, it only takes a few minutes for a person with a medium skin tone (the kind that tans easily but is still capable of sunburn) to get their vitamin D for the day. In Boston in the winter, bundled up, that same person might take two hours to get the same amount of vitamin D.
Health professionals generally agree that if you aren’t sure if you’re getting enough vitamin D from food and the sun, to just take a supplement. That’s going to be safer than trying to meet all your needs through sunlight, since the vitamin-converting rays of the sun are the same rays that can potentially contribute to skin cancer.
Getting more vitamin D through food is also an option—so let’s dig in.
There isn’t a ton of agreement on how much vitamin D we need, but the U.S. National Institutes of Health have decided that 600 IU (international units) is enough for pretty much everyone aged 1 to 70. If you’re older than 70, you should get 800 IU.
The daily value on nutrition labels is based on a target of 800 IU (the recommendation for elderly folks) so most of us can actually get away with just 75% of the daily value, instead of making sure we hit 100%.
Those international units exist because there are different forms of vitamin D found in food, and some have a stronger effect on the body than others. In general, 600 IU is equivalent to 15 micrograms of vitamin D, but using IU means you don’t have to keep track of which type of the vitamin is present in food.
Oh, and the recommendations of 600 or 800 IU assume that you are getting minimal sun exposure—they’re for the bundled-up person in Boston, not the sunbather in Miami.
Fish carry tons of vitamin D in their fat, so fatty fish like trout and salmon tend to be great sources of the vitamin.
If you'll allow me a small rant: Cod liver oil always tops lists of vitamin D sources, as if people are buying cod liver oil and taking spoonfuls of it like in old cartoons. (Maybe people do. If this is you, you can stop reading now.) I am going to proceed with my list as if cod liver oil did not exist. That said, if you really want to get your vitamin D this way, by all means, buy some one Amazon.
If you'd rather enjoy eating the fish you're consuming, here’s how much vitamin D is in different types of fish. All of these listings are from the USDA, and indicate the levels in a three-ounce portion of cooked fish.
Trout (rainbow, farmed): 645 IU
Salmon (sockeye): 570 IU
Tuna (light, canned): 229 IU (or 460 IU for a small can)
Tilapia: 128 IU
Fish sticks: sadly, only 1 IU
Several land animals also make enough vitamin D to be worth considering as a good source of vitamin D.
Chicken eggs: 37 IU each (the vitamin D is in the yolk)
Beef liver: 48 IU in a three-ounce cooked portion
Milk is famously a good source of vitamin D (the carton often says “vitamin D milk”). There is some vitamin D naturally present in the milkfat, so skim milk doesn’t usually have much vitamin D, but whole milk does—and it’s often fortified to bring those levels up even more.
Whole milk: 124 IU per cup
Heavy cream: 19 IU per ounce
A food is “fortified” with vitamins if those vitamins have been added to the food. A lot of people don’t drink milk, so several similar beverages are sold with vitamin D added.
Fortified plant milks: Check the label, but it’s often similar to whole milk. here’s a Silk brand soy milk with 120 IU per cup.
Fortified orange juice: Check the label, but here’s Simply Orange with 200 IU per cup.
Fortified cereals: Check the label, but even a sugary cereal like Cinnamon Toast Crunch has 240 IU per serving.
You get the idea. Plant-based foods don’t naturally have much vitamin D, but many common items like these are fortified. Between food, sunlight, and the “I don’t want to think about it” approach of just taking a vitamin D supplement, it shouldn’t be too hard to meet your needs.
TikTok loves a pithy rule for weight loss, and one of those is the 30-30-30 "rule" or "diet" (no relation to the 12-3-30 treadmill workout). As a morning routine, it’s not bad, actually—but as a weight loss hack, it makes bigger promises than it can deliver on.
Even though people call it a “rule,” 30-30-30 is just a routine that includes breakfast and a short workout. The idea of 30-30-30 goes like this:
Within 30 minutes of waking up,
You eat 30 grams of protein,
And then do 30 minutes of low intensity cardio.
The current trend may have gotten its biggest boost from a Gary Brecka video—the guy all over TikTok with TED Talk-style lecture clips who we last saw trying to convince us that vegetables are poison. He says that he got the idea from The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. It’s been a while since I’ve read that book, but a handout on Ferriss’s “slow carb diet” only mentions the first two bullet points, and he calls it the “30 in 30” rule. (To be clear, neither Ferriss nor Brecka are great sources of dietary or fitness advice. They both excitedly promote questionable weight-loss schemes—Ferriss’s diet cuts out bread, rice, potatoes, and all fruit—with only anecdotes to back up the claims that they work.)
Brecka says he’s “never seen anything in my life strip fat off of a human being faster than” 30-30-30, and while I can't comment on what Brecka has seen in his life, there is nothing special about 30-30-30.
I do like the advice to eat 30 grams of protein. Many people, when losing weight, focus on calories and forget about protein, which is important for maintaining muscle if you’re losing fat, and it’s important for keeping your body healthy in general.
Protein alone doesn’t maintain muscle, though. To maximize those benefits, you need to do some kind of strength training as well. That could mean working out with weights a few times a week or doing bodyweight exercises at home–so long as you choose exercises that are actually challenging enough to build muscle.
The amount of protein recommended here is good: 30 grams is roughly a third of what you’re going for if you want to get about 100 grams total over the course of the day. As I’ve explained before, 100 is a good number for most people to shoot for as a minimum when trying to build or maintain muscle. (Here is a more detailed guide, if you’d like more specific numbers based on your goals and body size.)
Do you need to eat your first 30 grams of protein first thing in the morning? No, you can get your protein at any time of the day. But there are some advantages to the schedule.
The most important thing, if you aren’t used to eating a lot of protein, is to just actually start doing it. If you have a breakfast with basically no protein and only about 15 grams at lunchtime, then you’ll have to stuff a ton of protein into dinner–and at that point, maybe it’s been a long day and you’re like, forget it, I’ll do better tomorrow. But starting with 30 grams of protein in the morning means you’ve got a head start on the day’s intake. Many people also find protein to be more satiating than other foods, meaning that you’ll have an easier time sticking to your plan for a healthy lunch.
One more advantage, even for people who find it easy to get enough protein, is that it can be good to spread your protein throughout the day. In theory, each protein-rich meal gives your muscles a signal to build (or maintain) muscle tissue, so the more of those meals you get in a day, the better. In reality, it probably doesn’t matter much as long as you get enough protein in total, but starting out with a high-protein breakfast can help with the total amount, too.
If you can't easily eat within 30 minutes of waking up, then don’t. There is no magical protein-consumption window that kicks off when you wake up each morning. You can eat breakfast whenever you like. And if eating a protein-rich breakfast doesn’t work for your schedule or tastes, you’re not missing out on anything important.
Here are a few examples of foods that contain 30 grams of protein:
Five eggs (scrambled, in an omelet, etc) or about a cup of liquid egg whites
A scoop of whey protein powder in a cup of skim milk
Half a chicken breast
About five ounces of turkey sausage
A five-ounce container of nonfat Greek yogurt with a half scoop of protein powder mixed in
You can mix and match, of course; an omelet with three eggs and a small handful of chopped chicken (plus some veggies) would fit the bill perfectly. And remember, there’s no law saying you have to eat “breakfast” foods at breakfast. If you have some leftover chili from last night, that’s a fine breakfast too.
As with the protein, there's no special reason to exercise in the morning (and certainly not within some specific timeframe after waking up or after eating). But morning exercise works well for a lot of folks. Even I, a very-not-morning-person, get a definite mood and energy boost from a morning workout or a walk. And again, there’s that strategy of front-loading the stuff you don’t want to slip off your to-do list. Get your exercise in first thing in the morning, and it’s already done.
The exercise in the 30-30-30 “rule” is usually understood to mean low intensity cardio, specifically. This is what’s called “zone 2” cardio, or what used to be called the “fat-burning zone.” The advantages of keeping your cardio at a lower intensity include:
You’ll hate it less
It won’t make you as hungry as intense exercise
It won’t make you as tired as intense exercise
It’s best to do both easier and more intense exercise in general, but the lower-intensity stuff is great as a foundation, so if you can only do one or the other, start there. You’ll have an easier time building the habit, and you can sprinkle in the higher intensity stuff as an addition.
I see two downsides to the 30-30-30 routine. One is obsessing over the specifics, since there's absolutely no reason for any of the numbers to be exactly 30 or for the routine to be done in the exact way described. The other downside is the danger that you might believe the nonsense being used to justify it.
Let’s talk about the specificity first. I’ve seen people asking on Reddit what to do if they wake up at 4 a.m. but don’t actually get out of bed and begin their day until 6 a.m., or what they should eat because they can’t cook their usual breakfast within 30 minutes of waking up. The answer to all these questions is: It doesn’t matter. The 30-minute timeframe is made up to sound catchy. Nothing bad happens if you don’t make the deadline.
The same goes for the exact amount of protein. If you have 20 grams (just the yogurt, without the half-scoop of protein powder), are you ruining the weight loss magic? You're not, because there is no weight loss magic. You can move the other 10 grams to lunch, if you think it will be easier to get in your day’s protein that way.
And that brings me to the claims about why 30-30-30 is a weight loss hack. (It is not a weight loss hack.) Brecka’s video about 30-30-30 contains a number of dubious assertions:
It claims that you burn through your muscle glycogen (stored carbs) in 20 minutes. This may be truth-adjacent if we’re talking about extremely high-intensity exercise, done fasted, but it’s not going to be relevant to weight loss in any meaningful way. If you're an athlete who needs to do high-intensity exercise for more than 20 minutes, you’ll be paying attention to your fueling strategy anyway, most likely eating carbs before the workout to spare glycogen. The rest of us don't need to worry about this.
It claims that it takes three minutes to “liquify” lean muscle. I cannot come up with a single way of reading this claim that corresponds to known facts about human biology.
It claims that it takes five hours to turn fat into energy. Well, we’re constantly turning fat into energy (it’s our main fuel source while we sleep and when we’re sitting or resting), so it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to start up the fat-burning machine; it’s always running.
These numbers are thrown out as an explanation for why fasted cardio is bad for weight loss, but they don’t add up; even if we were burning muscle by doing an OrangeTheory class first thing in the morning, that doesn’t mean we’re putting on weight or failing to lose weight. Our bodies use many fuels throughout the day, and weight changes result from the total energy balance we’ve created (burning more than we eat, or vice versa)—not from which fuel we’re using at which time.
If 30-30-30 works, it’s likely because it’s helping you form a more sustainable habit. Half an hour of low-intensity exercise is easy to stick to, as we saw with “cozy cardio,” and it meets the guidelines for cardiovascular health. Eating protein with breakfast helps you get started on your protein for the day, which is also good for health. So if 30-30-30 fits your personality and your schedule, it’s a fine way to build some healthy habits. Just don’t expect it to melt the pounds off. Weight changes come from adjusting how much you eat relative to the calories you burn. And there are plenty of ways to do it that don’t involve following a specific morning routine.
If you’ll permit me a rant—I promise to make it fact-filled and interesting—I am sick of the articles that seem to pop up every few months claiming that we are all eating “too much” protein. They convey an inaccurate picture of how the body uses protein, and they demonize perfectly healthy meals that happen to be high in protein. It’s time to set the record straight.
How can these articles be so wrong? I think the authors are usually well-meaning, but their facts don’t support the conclusion. They tend to bolster their argument with statements that are true, like the fact that the RDA of protein is set at 0.36 grams per pound of body weight, that protein-boosted foods are trendy, and that it is possible to get plenty of protein while eating a vegan diet. But the framing and the conclusions don’t follow, because eating more than the minimum doesn’t mean that you’re getting “too much” protein.
As a refresher, protein is one of the three calorie-containing macronutrients (fats, carbs, protein) that make up our diets. Proteins are made of amino acids, and they are required for the growth, repair, and functioning of our body.
We can get protein from a variety of sources. Meats are particularly protein-dense; a chicken breast contains about 35 grams of protein. Other animal products, like milk and eggs, are also rich in protein. Plant-based foods tend to have less protein, but it’s not hard to meet or exceed protein requirements even on a vegan diet. Beans, grains, and soy products like tofu contain significant amounts of protein, for example.
If you’d like a cheat sheet on how much protein you’re supposed to eat based on your activity level, you can find one here. And that’s a good place to start dissecting this “too much protein” myth, because before we can declare an amount of protein to be “too much,” we need to understand how much is “enough.”
The government communicates targets for different nutrients to encourage us all to eat a healthy, balanced diet. These targets are the basis for the “% daily value” labels on the back of packaged foods, and for the nutrient makeup of school lunches. The RDA, or recommended daily allowance, is defined as “the average daily dietary intake level that is sufficient to meet the nutrient requirement of nearly all (97 to 98 percent) healthy individuals in a group.”
So how is that “nutrient requirement” determined? For protein, it is based on nitrogen balance. Humans break down proteins, excreting nitrogen, as part of the body’s daily function. If you eat enough protein (which contains nitrogen), the amount of nitrogen you excrete will be the same as, or more than, the amount you eat. In other words, if you aren’t breaking your own body proteins down (in excess of what you eat), then whatever you’re eating must be, in some sense, enough.
In this way of thinking, the RDA is the minimum to stay healthy. More is fine; less would mean that you may not be getting enough. For some nutrients, there is also an UL, or upper limit, telling you that more than a certain amount is too much. Upper limits are calculated for vitamins and minerals; there is no upper limit defined for protein.
Therefore, there is no official definition for “too much” protein. If somebody eats more than the RDA, they’re not eating too much; they’re just eating more than the minimum. You’re supposed to eat more than the minimum.
The RDA for protein is set at 46 grams per day for a 125-pound woman, and at 56 grams per day for a 154-pound man. That’s based on an RDA of 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram bodyweight, which works out to 0.36 grams per pound. So a 200-pound person would need 72 grams of protein per day.
This USDA report found that most adult men average between roughly 90 to 100 grams of protein per day, although men aged 70 and up only get about 80 grams of protein per day. Women tend to average around 70 grams per day, with those aged 70 and up averaging 62 grams.
Above the RDA? Yes. Too much? I don’t see any way of arguing that. And before you say that we’re getting almost double the recommendation, let's check the math. Those RDA numbers are for 125- and 154-pound people. On the other hand, the averages for what we eat are based on actual people, not ideals. The average American man is 200 pounds, and the average American woman is 171 pounds. That puts their RDAs at 72 and 62 grams per day, respectively. Relative to those numbers, the average woman is just barely beating the minimum; the average man is 20-25 grams over.
Again, there’s no need to stick to the minimum; going 25 grams over is fine. It’s probably better to go over than to just scrape by, and many of us arguably don’t get enough. Let me explain.
Let’s start with older adults. Not only does protein intake tend to decrease with age, older adults are vulnerable to issues that stem from a loss of muscle mass. People tend to lose 3-5% of their muscle mass per year starting at age 30, but strength training and protein intake can support maintaining our muscle, and thus likely prevent or reduce that decline.
The Dietary Guidelines include a note that “About 50 percent of women and 30 percent of men 71 and older fall short of protein foods recommendations.” Meanwhile, a study found that older adults who don’t meet the recommendations are “more likely to be limited when stooping, crouching, or kneeling, standing or sitting for long periods, walking up 10 steps, preparing meals, and walking for a quarter mile.”
So even if it’s true that the average adult gets more protein than recommended, there are clearly a lot of elderly folks who don’t. These are the same people who have more issues functioning in everyday life. This may be a chicken-and-egg situation—was the functional decline a cause or an effect of the change in their diet?—but this sure does not seem to be a group of people who should be eating less protein.
There’s another large group of people who benefit from more, not less, protein: people who are pregnant or lactating. Instead of 0.36 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight (62 grams for a 171-pound person), the RDA for people who are pregnant or lactating is 0.5 grams/pound (so, 86 grams of protein per day).
When you’re pregnant, you also have higher caloric needs, so the increased total amount of food makes it easier to get the higher protein amount. Still, it makes more sense to spend your energy on making sure you’re getting enough protein, rather than worrying about getting too much.
You knew we heading in this direction (I say between reps of barbell squats, wiping protein shake off my lips): People who exercise should get more protein than just the RDA.
While the fear-mongering “too much protein” articles sometimes mention that bodybuilders or elite athletes need their protein, they tend to hand-wave this away as a special concern that doesn’t apply to normal people. But I think it’s worth a closer look—and honestly, this situation applies to a lot more people than just a few athletes.
Officially, there isn’t an RDA for athletes; people who exercise can stave off malnutrition with the same 0.36 grams per pound as everyone else. But that doesn’t mean that the RDA is the best target to aim for.
The International Association of Athletics Federations, which governs track and field competitions, recommends that most athletes who are maintaining or gaining weight eat 0.59 to 0.77 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. That’s 101 to 131 grams for the average 171-pound woman, and 118 to 154 grams for a 200-pound man.
A group of organizations including the American College of Sports Medicine largely agrees, recommending a range from 0.54 to 0.9 grams per pound for all athletes whose weight is stable or gaining. That includes people who do endurance training like distance running, as well as strength athletes whose exercise involves mainly lifting weights. Those ranges would go as high as 153 grams for our 171-pound woman, and 180 grams for our 200-pound man.
You don’t need to be an Olympian to consider yourself an “athlete” in this sense. If you’re training for a half marathon, you’re doing plenty of distance running, and should fuel accordingly. And if you’re “just” lifting weights in the gym, but taking it seriously enough that you’re training regularly and working hard, you should consider eating in these ranges as well.
Dieting to lose weight is not only a popular American pastime, it’s also arguably good for at least some of your health. If you’ve been on a diet recently, or if you’re planning to go on one, you aren’t a person who should settle for the RDA either.
Research shows that protein intake (and strength training—they go together!) is important to maintain muscle mass when we’re losing weight. After all, you’re aiming for fat loss, not trying to get your muscles to waste away.
For example, this study found that diets ranging from 0.48 to 0.72 grams of protein per kg of body weight (that’s 82 to 123 grams for our 171-pound woman, 96 to 144 for our 200-pound man) resulted in less weight regain after the diet, and helped people to maintain muscle mass and feel more full while they were dieting.
And if you’re losing weight and exercising? The IAAF recommends that athletes who are “undertaking high-quality weight loss” need at least 0.72 grams per pound of bodyweight, and possibly as much as 1.09 grams per pound. That would be 186 grams for a 171-pound athlete, or 218 grams for a 200-pound athlete. Most people won’t need to go that high, and it’s unclear whether athletes need to go that high. But I’m including these numbers so you see how high the ranges actually go.
Ultimately, weight loss is widely understood to be more effective and have healthier results with higher protein intakes rather than lower ones. When people focus on just eating less, without thinking about what their diet actually consists of, it’s easy to forget about protein. But the evidence suggests that you should increase protein when you’re decreasing overall calories.
This is a common talking point in those articles about “too much” protein, and it’s sort of true—but it also doesn’t mean what you think it means.
When you eat more food than your body needs, your body can store it as fat. That’s true no matter what the excess is made of—protein, carbs, fat, or even alcohol. The protein you eat gets used for many different things in your body. You can build it into muscle tissue, use it for growth and repair of different kinds of cells, and so on. You can also use it for energy—basically, burning it for the calories.
So if you were eating a perfectly balanced diet, and then decided to add an extra 100 grams of protein per day, then sure, a lot of that protein would be used for energy, and since we’d have excess energy, it would get stored as fat.
But if you ate more protein, and that protein replaced other foods in your diet, then there would be no excess calories to store. Nobody is saying you should chug a couple of protein shakes on top of your regular diet. They’re saying (I’m saying) that you should plan your meals and snacks to include more protein.
For example, if your regular lunch is a turkey-and-cheese sandwich with a side of chips, you could improve the protein content of your diet by adding more turkey to the sandwich and replacing the chips with an apple. Same total calories, but more protein. As long as your total calories for the day aren’t in excess of your needs, the “extra” protein won’t get stored as fat.
In general, high protein diets don’t have any serious health consequences. There’s a major exception, though: in some medical conditions, you may be told to limit your protein intake to protect your health.
For example, people with chronic kidney disease are often advised to use the RDA (0.36 grams per pound of body weight) as a maximum rather than a minimum. Your kidneys play a role in processing protein for excretion, so a lowered protein intake reduces the amount of work that a damaged kidney has to do. That said, once a person with chronic kidney disease begins dialysis, they may be advised to increase their protein intake for better health now that their body has help to handle the higher levels.
People with certain other disorders, like phenylketonuria and homocystinuria, may also be advised to eat a low protein diet. Obviously, if you have one of these conditions, you should be getting your dietary advice from your medical team (ask for a referral to a dietitian!) rather than from general articles on the internet.
Besides those known medical issues, the occasional findings about eating “too much” protein tend to fit into the “X is good for you/X is bad for you” ricochet news cycle. They’re not holistic assessments of protein in general on health in general, but rather specific research questions that are still being figured out.
For example, this study found that a high protein (and high fiber) diet seemed to slightly worsen one measure of insulin resistance; but it also improved metabolic health and body composition. The researchers concluded that the subjects’ body chemistry was probably just responding appropriately to the changed nutrient content of their diet. A few years later, a study of high-BMI women with insulin resistance saw improvements to their insulin resistance on a high protein diet.
Or to take another example, a study earlier this year found a link between high protein diets and atherosclerosis. But if you look at what the researchers were actually studying, they were looking at how leucine (one amino acid found in protein) affects the mTOR biochemical pathway in certain types of white blood cells. By the way, that mTOR pathway is involved in a lot more body processes than atherosclerosis, and does a lot of good things too.
So are these results interesting, and worth further study? Definitely. Worth changing protein recommendations? Only if this effect turns out (1) to actually lead to worse health outcomes, and (2) to outweigh the known benefits of higher protein. The body of evidence doesn’t support lowering protein recommendations, nor adding an upper limit.
So if protein is good for us, and most of us can’t really get “too much,” why are so many people arguing that we’re overdoing it?
I think part of the reason is just misunderstanding (the writers don’t tend to have a background in nutrition and especially not in sports nutrition), but more often, I think they’re talking about a different issue entirely.
Often the “too much protein” stuff is just a way of talking about the environmental effects of meat consumption or dairy farming. People making this argument are trying to pry the double cheeseburgers out of our hands and reassuring us that we’ll be okay. I don’t think an attack on protein is an appropriate way to make that point, since plant-based proteins exist and are a fine alternative. But I understand where they’re coming from.
Ultimately, if you’re trying to make the argument that we’re eating “too much” protein for our health, you really can’t do that without some evidence that we’re eating so much protein that it’s harming our health on a widespread level. And that evidence just doesn’t exist.
To understand that point, just look at the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This is the master document that tells us what we should be eating and what government programs should be funding. The goals include reducing rates of heart disease and diabetes, and making sure people get enough vitamins. There are Key Recommendations to limit certain nutrients—specifically sugars, saturated fats, sodium, and alcohol. There is no recommendation to reduce your intake of protein.
Protein shakes can end up chunky or lumpy if you don’t mix them right. That’s why a shaker bottle does a better job of mixing whey into milk than simply stirring with a spoon. A blender works even better, if you’re up for cleaning a blender when you’re done. But there is a better option: a handheld frother.
To be clear, this is for drinks where you are mixing a powder into a liquid. (If you want ice and fruit in your protein shake—a smoothie, rather than a simple drink—you’ll still need a blender. But you knew that.) As far as I can tell, it works with any powder and any liquid. I’ve tested the frother, and found it gives excellent results with:
Collagen powder and coffee (or tea)
Whey powder and water
Clear whey and water
Hot cocoa and milk
Various supplement powders in, well, anything
Embarrassingly, I didn’t think of this on my own. Supplement companies like MUD\WTR and Beam include a handheld frother in their starter packs. In fact, the only reason I own a frother in the first place is that MUD\WTR sent me one with some samples once in hopes I would review the product. (My review: I don’t like it.)
First, get yourself a frother. These are simple handheld gadgets that are priced about the same as a shaker bottle, about $7-10 on the low end, and going up to roughly infinity since these are a Fancy Coffee Accessory. The cheap ones will do fine for our purposes. Get one that is powered by AA batteries or that you charge over USB.
Next, get your liquid ready. The first time you do this, make sure to use an oversized container. The liquid will rise as you turn the frother on. But if you use, say, eight ounces of liquid in a 16-ounce container, you'll avoid a surprise mess.
Add the powder to the liquid, insert the frother, and turn it on. (Unless you’re using clear whey, which tends to gum up the frother; better to insert the frother first and then add the powder.) If you hold the frother in the center of the cup, you’ll get a whirlpool effect that sends the liquid up toward (or over) the rim of the container, hence my warning. Once you’ve done this a few times, you’ll figure out how to do it with less mess. Angling the frother and holding it against the side of the cup tends to keep the waves down. You can also pulse the frother a few times instead of having it on continuously, which cuts down on the waves even further.
It only takes five to 10 seconds to mix yourself a smooth, creamy protein shake—or hot cocoa, or whatever else your smooth-beverage-appreciating heart desires. Take a few more seconds to wash the business end of the frother; a brief swish with a soapy sponge under running water is usually all you need. And then enjoy your perfectly mixed drink with nothing besides your cup to clean up later.
© Dr. G. Moscoso/Science Source
How cool would it be if we could prevent sunburn and skin cancer without sunscreen—just by eating certain natural foods? It’s a really attractive idea, which explains why it’s all over TikTok. Too bad it doesn’t actually work.
The food-as-sunscreen TikToks don’t always come out and say it, but they’re trading on the established myth of sunscreen being somehow bad for us. (You don’t want to know how many “akshully, sunscreen causes cancer” statements I had to scroll through while researching this article.)
As I’ve written before, this is not some kind of sensible risk management messaging. It’s complete nonsense. The harms of UV exposure are concrete and well-documented. The harms of sunscreen are unproven, mostly guesswork, and the occasional legitimate concern is on the level of “hey, it would be helpful to have more research to know if some types of sunscreen are safer than others.” This stuff is absolutely not on the level of “avoid sunscreen because it’s bad for you.”
You don’t have to take it from me. The American Academy of Dermatology has a page on sunscreen safety in which they summarize the evidence like so: “Scientific studies support the benefits of wearing sunscreen when you will be outside.”
The TikToks about natural sun protection give a laundry list of foods, saying vaguely that they protect from sun damage. Sometimes they’ll recommend a specific supplement. But they never go into detail about the things that are important to know when recommending a preventative treatment, like:
What dosage is needed to get the intended results?
Has this actually been tested in humans?
How much protection does the food or supplement give you, and how was that measured?
Does the protection start working immediately, and if not, how long does it take?
Does the effectiveness vary from person to person?
Does the protective ingredient break down over time, and is there a way to refresh its protection (equivalent to reapplying sunscreen)?
What are the downsides to the food or supplement when used in the recommended dosage?
For actual, FDA-approved sunscreens, there are answers to all of these questions. For the foods recommended on TikTok, there are not. Instead of this fully fleshed-out information, we just get statements like “Eat watermelons, tomatoes, walnuts, carrots…”
If you look into the research, none of it really supports the claims the TikTokers are making (or implying). For example, here is a study showing that an antioxidant found in walnuts can protect human skin cells from some of the effects of UV damage. Sounds promising, until you realize that the skin cells were not in humans, but rather are a human-derived mutant cell line (sounds weird, but it’s a very normal thing in science labs). The researchers made a walnut extract and combined it with the cells in cell culture plates, which are basically teeny-tiny test tubes. So to review: This study did not involve people, eating, walnuts (as a food), sunlight, or sunburn.
Here’s a more relevant study: Light-skinned, non-smoking volunteers ate 40 grams of tomato paste (about three tablespoons) along with 10 grams of olive oil every day. After 10 weeks, they showed less reddening of the skin in response to exposure to a UV lamp. That’s promising! Very cool! Heck, if you felt inspired and wanted to start eating tomato paste (going through a little can of it every 4 days), I wouldn’t stop you.
But pay attention to what the study didn’t find. It doesn’t tell us what results people with lighter or darker skin tones would get. It doesn’t tell us how this protection changes (or doesn’t) over time—would you get the same results at the end of the summer as at the beginning, if you used this as your only sun protection?
And, most importantly, it only found that the people who used tomato paste got less reddening of the skin. The tomato paste didn’t completely prevent sunburn. The TikTokers are talking about these foods as if they are magic potions, or get-out-of-sunburn-free cards. Even the most promising studies don’t back that up.
If there’s one thing wellness TikTokers love, it’s selling supplements. Supplements are cheap for manufacturers to make, easy to ship, straightforward to explain (“X is good for Y”) and anybody can throw up an affiliate link in their bio to get a cut of the profits.
And so it is with these allegedly sunburn-preventing supplements. The hot one right now is Heliocare, which of course has a “brand affiliate” program. It’s made from a fern called Polypodium leucotomos, and there is actually research (!) supporting the idea that it may help a little bit to lessen sunburn.
But, as with the tomato studies, the results are at the “hmm, kind of interesting” level. This isn’t something that will let you ditch your sunscreen if you’re being at all responsible about it. I’m looking at the graphs in the paper’s results, and honestly I’m not sure if I can see a difference in redness at the later timepoints. If the supplement only delays how long it takes for a sunburn to show up, that doesn’t seem very useful. (I might actually wonder if it’s worse, since that could lead you to stay out longer before you realize how bad a burn you’re developing.)
Again, a statistically detectable difference in redness is not the same as completely (or even mostly) preventing sunburn. It’s also worth noting that the dosage of Heliocare (one 240-milligram pill per day) is less than what was used in the study (7.5 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, which works out to be 528 milligrams for a 154-pound person, or over two pills’ worth). If you take three pills per day, that $34.99 bottle will only last you 20 days. I’m not seeing the advantage over just applying sunscreen normally.
The wellness project claims to help users make ‘smarter food choices’ based on ‘world-leading science’. But many scientists claim its fee-based services are no better than generic advice
“Your body is unique, so is the food you need.” This is the central credo of personalised nutrition (PN), as professed by its leading UK advocate, the health science company Zoe. Since its launch in April 2022, 130,000 people have subscribed to the service – at one point it had a waiting list of 250,000 – which uses a pin prick blood test, stool sample and a wearable continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to suggest “smarter food choices for your body”.
Like other companies working in this space, Zoe has all the hallmarks of serious science. Its US equivalent Levels counts among its advisers many respected scientists, including Robert Lustig, famous for raising the alarm about the harms of refined carbohydrates such as sugar. Zoe is fronted by King’s College London scientist Tim Spector and claims to be “created with world-leading science”.
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© Illustration: Guardian Design
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