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.
You don’t have to get all of your vitamin D from food
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.
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.
Easy ways to add vitamin D to your diet
Eat more fatty fish
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
Other animal products that are good sources of vitamin D
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
Eat more fortified foods
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.
Influencers’ inventive recipes for high-protein dairy product have boosted trade by 40% for one producer
If you peered into a UK fridge in the late 1970s, it is more than likely you would have found a pot of cottage cheese tucked between the prawn cocktail and sherry trifle.
A popular “diet food” at the time, demand waned in subsequent decades as the high-protein, low-fat wonder food fell out of fashion. But 50 years on from its heyday, cottage cheese is making a comeback in the UK, and has become an unlikely hit with health-conscious Gen Z.
Driven by a wave of social media influencers sharing inventive recipes for the dairy product, which is made from milk curds, UK retailers are reporting significant increases in sales, while producers are struggling to keep up with demand.
“It’s come from absolutely nowhere,” said Robert Graham, managing director of Graham’s Family Dairy. “Since May of last year, when there was a TikTok craze that went on, cottage cheese sales for us are up 40%.”
The company said the growth in production, the equivalent of an extra 2m kilograms a year, means it is looking at ways to increase output, including an initial growth plan to invest £5m to bolster its production facilities.
“We are considering new factories because cottage cheese production is almost full,” said Graham, whose company supplies big retailers such as Co-op, Morrisons and Aldi.
Dairy company Arla is also benefiting from the cottage cheese rush, reporting a double-digit increase in sales in the last three months, while Marks & Spencer experienced a 30% increase compared with last year, and Waitrose reported a 22% year-on-year rise.
Rib-eye steak “is viscerally and primitively satisfying to me,” said Dr. Shawn Baker, who was instrumental in the online rise of so-called “meatfluencers.”
According to TikTok, freezing your bread makes it healthier. I’m told by various creators on the platform that “something great happens when you freeze your bread,” that “diabetics should freeze their bread,” and even that freezing your bread makes it “keto friendly.” There’s a grain of truth to the idea, but the people promoting it are missing some big caveats.
What the TikToks say
According to several health-focused TikTokers:
Freezing your bread changes the structure of the starch in the bread (true) .
This in turn reduces the glycemic index of the bread by 31%, or 39% if you also toast it (true for homemade bread but not store-bought, according to one study).
A lower glycemic index is considered to be better for people with diabetes (true but not the whole picture).
Therefore, freezing bread lowers your risk of metabolic disorders (potentially sort of true but not really supported by existing literature) or prevents you from gaining fat (not supported at all).
Different TikTokers each have their own take on why freezing bread is good for you: some focus on blood sugar management for diabetes, some on weight loss, and so on. The guy claiming that freezing bread makes it “keto friendly” made me chuckle, because it’s still bread and still mostly made of starch, whether you freeze it or not.
What is resistant starch, anyway?
The main macronutrients in our diet are carbohydrates (carbs), fats, and protein. The category of carbs includes sugars, starches, and fiber. Starch is the main component in the foods you think of as carbs. White bread, potatoes, and white rice, to name a few, are mostly made of starch.
Starch is made up of chains of glucose, and glucose is a sugar. It breaks down pretty quickly into glucose when we eat it. But there isn’t just one type of starch: there are many. And some of those starches are called “resistant starches” because they take a little longer for our body to digest. We can’t always break them down in our stomach or small intestine. Instead, we have to wait for the bacteria in our large intestine to break them down and produce nutrients we can absorb. (This also arguably makes resistant starch a type of fiber, and a prebiotic.)
So where does freezing come in? Well, when starch is cooked in the presence of water, it changes shape and becomes gelatinized. After cooling, it can become retrograded. This retrograded starch doesn't have the same structure as the original starch, and it’s considered to be resistant to digestion (making it, specifically, resistant starch type 3).
Frozen bread isn't the only food that contains resistant starch. Cooking and cooling rice or potatoes can produce it as well; many starch-containing foods also have some resistant starch naturally.
What is the glycemic index?
The TikTokers often focus on the effect that resistant starch can have on your blood sugar, and they'll point to studies that measure the glycemic index.
The glycemic index is a number that scientists can give a food based on how much it spikes people’s blood sugar when they eat a small portion of just that food. To be clear, this isn’t a test of people eating sandwiches or dinners or breakfasts. Instead, they’ll eat (for example) 50 grams of bread, and their blood glucose measurements will be compared to the blood glucose measurements when someone was given 50 grams of a reference material (either pure glucose, or sometimes they’ll use white bread as the reference food).
If you’re interested in keeping your blood sugar at a more even level, as many people are if they have diabetes or other blood sugar issues, you may want to avoid big spikes of blood glucose. That’s where knowing the glycemic index of different foods can help. Brown rice has a lower glycemic index than white rice, for example.
There are, indeed, studies showing that resistant starch can reduce the glycemic index of a food, and there are studies showing that freezing bread can increase the level of resistant starch in the bread. So what are the TikTokers missing? A couple big things, it turns out.
This may not even happen in store-bought bread
The biggest caveat on the advice in the TikToks is that the study they all quote, the one that found freezing bread reduces its glycemic index by 31%, only found that reduction in homemade bread.
The researchers also tested store-bought bread, and found that freezing it didn’t significantly change its glycemic index. Toasting it did reduce the glycemic index by about 18%, though.
Those researchers speculate that the lack of an effect for store-bought bread is due to dough conditioners and improvers, additives that are used in factory-produced bread to help them mix better and keep from going stale. Those additives might be preventing the formation of resistant starch as a side effect. That said, they only tested one homemade recipe and one type of store-bought bread, so there could be other differences due to the type of flour or other factors.
The TikTokers promoting this hack aren't specifying that it's for homemade bread. Often they talking about freezing while they point to a loaf of bread that looks store-bought.
The difference is still very small
Sometimes freezing your bread is recommended as a way of reducing the calories in the bread. If you can’t fully digest it, you’re getting fewer calories out of it, right? That’s technically true, but it’s not likely to make much of a difference.
In this study, for example, resistant starch made up 1.1% of the dry weight of fresh rolls, and 1.3 to 1.6% of the dry weight of frozen rolls. In a typical slice of white bread, that would correspond to a difference of 0.1 gram of carbohydrate. Carbs are generally understood to contain 4 calories per gram. So you’re saving less than one calorie if these numbers are representative.
There are better ways to manipulate glycemic index
Remember when I mentioned, above, that the glycemic index is calculated in a lab scenario, not in actual meals? If your goal is to cause less of a blood sugar spike, you’re better off thinking about what you’re having your bread with than whether the bread itself was frozen or not.
For example, here’s an international table of glycemic index values. Relative to pure glucose, a French baguette has a glycemic index of 95. But a French baguette with chocolate spread has a glycemic index of 72. In other words, you can reduce the glycemic index of bread by 25% just by adding chocolate spread!
I say this not to seriously argue that chocolate spread makes bread healthier, but to point out that lowering the glycemic index doesn’t automatically make a thing healthier or better for you. And if your goal is, specifically, to lower the glycemic index of a food, then you can do that by adding other foods to the meal. Bread with butter, for example, would be expected to spike your blood glucose less than bread alone or bread with jam.
To take an even bigger-picture perspective on this, I’ve often said that when you’re comparing two very similar things (like which vegetables are healthiest) you owe it to yourself to step back and ask if there’s a bigger choice worth paying attention to. Are you eating that bread as part of a PB&J, or a grilled chicken sandwich with vegetables? That’s a much bigger difference than a few granules of resistant starch.
If you want to start tracking how many calories you eat—whether for weight loss, weight gain, or just out of curiosity—here’s a primer. Calorie tracking is pretty easy once you’ve gotten the hang of it, but getting started can be confusing. With the right tools and the right habits, however, you’ll be on top of your own personal calorie numbers in no time.
What are calories and why do people count them?
Calories are a measure of energy. The more exercise you do, for example, the more calories you need to fuel that activity. Everything you eat has a calorie number attached to it (whether it’s on a label or not). In general, we eat about the same number of calories we burn.
Amazingly, our bodies can keep us at a roughly steady weight by making us hungrier if we haven’t eaten enough calories today, or making us feel full if we’ve had a lot. That said, consistently eating less than you burn results in weight loss; eating more than you burn results in weight gain.
How do I know how many calories I should eat?
Most of the time, you should eat roughly the same number of calories each day that your body burns. That number varies from person to person. A 4’9”, 100-pound woman who only does light exercise might burn 1,440 calories per day. A six-foot, 280-pound man who does heavy workouts twice a day might burn 4,309. Most of us are somewhere in between, in the 2,000 to 3,000 calorie range.
I discuss calorie burn a little more here. Even though food labels use a 2,000-calorie diet to calibrate their “daily values” of various nutrients, the truth is that we each burn a different number of calories, and most of us burn more than 2,000. (The average for adults was, years ago, calculated to be 2,350. The FDA ended up going with 2,000 in part because they thought a round number was easier to understand.)
So if you would like to lose weight, you’ll want to eat slightly less than you burn. If you want to gain weight—as many people do when they’re trying to gain muscle—you’ll want to eat more calories than you burn. A good rule of thumb is to subtract 200-500 calories from what you burn, and that will be a good number for weight loss. Do the opposite if you’re trying to gain.
Now that you understand the logic, you just need a starting estimate of how many calories you burn. If you already track calories, you can probably figure this out by what you usually eat when your weight is stable. Otherwise, plug your information into a TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) calulator like the one at tdeecalculator.net. Remember that any calculated number is only an estimate, and ultimately you’ll find out whether it’s correct by noticing what happens to your weight when you eat that number.
How do I find out how many calories are in a food?
The easiest way to get a calorie number for a food is to look at its label. Or if your food doesn’t have a label, search for the name of the food plus “calories” and pay attention to the serving size and the source of the information. For example, when I google “apple calories,” I get a result telling me that a medium apple, about 3 inches in diameter, is 95 calories. The source is given as the USDA, which maintains a database of common food items. Here’s the entry for apples. It defaults to a 100-gram serving, but you can change the “portion” dropdown to show you the medium apple.
When you’re eating at a restaurant, calorie counts are sometimes shown next to each food item. If they aren’t, check the restaurant’s website, or search the restaurant’s name plus “nutrition information.” Often there’s a PDF hidden somewhere on their website with a bunch of calorie counts—and, often, other information like protein and carbohydrate content.
That said, there’s a simpler way that people usually use when tracking calories: You use a calorie tracking app.
What is the best calorie tracking app?
There are tons of good (or at least not horrible) calorie tracking apps out there. Cronometer is my pick: It’s got all the features you need even in the free version, and it’s goal-neutral, so you can use it whether you’re trying to gain weight, lose weight, or neither.
The most popular calorie tracking app is probably MyFitnessPal, which is baffling because it’s easily the worst one out there. The calorie information is often inaccurate, the interface is pretty in-your-face about weight loss whether you’re interested in that or not, and basic features like the barcode scanner are only available in the paid version. We have a roundup of alternatives to MyFitnessPal here.
When you use a calorie tracking app, you’ll search within the app for the food that you just ate (or that you’re about to eat). At first you’ll find this practice clunky: You’ll have to choose the right item from the database, and then try to figure out how large a serving you just ate. Packaged foods are easiest to track, which adds an extra wrinkle if you’re also trying to eat more whole or homemade foods. Bear with this, though: Habits are skills, and as you develop all the mini-skills that make up calorie tracking, the habit becomes second nature.
How do I select an accurate serving size for the food I’m tracking?
As you gain more practice, you’ll get pretty good at eyeballing serving sizes. But as you’re getting used to it, make a habit of measuring or weighing food when you can. At this point I can pretty accurately eyeball the difference between a cup of rice and a half-cup of rice, for example. I know that a three-ounce serving of meat is about the size of a deck of cards, or a little smaller than the palm of your hand (depending, I suppose, on how big your hand is). A “serving” of peanut butter is two tablespoons; measure this out at least once so you can get a sense of whether your usual serving is more or less than that.
To be more precise, you can start using a food scale. This makes your life easier in so many ways. For example, you can:
Place your toast on the scale, zero it, and then spread on the peanut butter. Weigh the peanut-buttered toast, and you’ll know exactly how many grams of peanut butter you used.
Weigh out your desired portion of chicken, vegetables, or anything else you’re eating.
Portion a meal equally by weighing the whole thing, and then weighing each portion so that it contains ¼ of the total (if you’re making a four-serving meal).
Place a container of, say, yogurt on the scale, and zero it. Then you can scoop yogurt from that container into the blender as you’re making a smoothie. This requires a “negative tare” feature, but it’s great for when you’re adding ingredients to containers you can’t weigh directly, like a blender or a pot on the stovetop. You just weigh the container the food is coming from.
Your calorie tracking app should have a way of creating a recipe. Add in the ingredients, and make sure to say how many servings the recipe makes if you’re cooking for a group or making multiple servings for meal prep. Make sure to include all the ingredients, including cooking oil and condiments.
How do I count calories in a meal somebody else made?
If you don’t know exactly what’s in something, you can guess. The easiest way is to look up a restaurant food that is similar and eyeball the portion.
What do I do if there’s an oil or sauce with my food and I don’t eat all of it?
Unfortunately there’s no easy adjustment to make here. Maybe you’re leaving a ton of calories behind, but it will be hard to separate that out mathematically from the other components that you did eat. In this case I just pretend I ate the whole thing, sauce and all. If there’s a ton of sauce and I’m sure I’m leaving lots of calories behind, I’ll log it as 0.9 instead of one serving.
Do I need to track everything, every day?
There are no food-tracking police (thank god), so no, you don’t have to do anything. But if you’re trying to get a roughly accurate estimate of how many calories you eat each day, you really should log everything, as much as you can. If you snack on a cookie, put a cookie into your app.
I’ll sometimes skip an entire day of tracking, but I won’t log a partial day. If I eat 1,200 calories before dinner, and then go to a party and eat 15 different little things that are impossible to accurately track, I might say “fuck it” and delete the whole day. But I wouldn’t leave it at 1,200, because looking back, it will seem like that entire day was only 1,200 calories. If I know I ate more than usual and I want to make sure my tracking shows it, I'll pick a placeholder like a restaurant meal (my app actually has an entry for "Thanksgiving") and log whatever gets me, say, 3,000 calories of that.
Along the same lines, it’s tempting to not log things you think you “shouldn’t” be eating, but this backfires. In reality, if I’m eating 2,500 calories and only logging 2,000, I would look at my app and think, wow, I’m eating 2,000 calories and not losing weight. I would start to feel like I needed to eat even less than 2,000, and I might fall into one of those vicious cycles of restricting myself to smaller meals and then finding myself eating more untracked “cheat” meals. This is not a healthy way of eating, and tends to get worse over time. Instead, I log it all. If I know I’m eating 2,500 calories and not losing weight, I would be able to appreciate the fact that my body can put 2,500 calories to good use every day. I would then eat slightly less—maybe 2,200—and see if that might be a more effective and sustainable approach.
Or to put it another way: if you log everything, you can be honest with yourself and kinder to yourself. You just have to look at the numbers as neutral data, not as a judgement on whether you’re being “good.”
Enlarge/ Night view of company logos in Nestlé Avanca Dairy Products Plant on January 21, 2019, in Avanca, Portugal. This plant produces Cerelac, Nestum, Mokambo, Pensal, Chocapic and Estrelitas, among others. (credit: Getty | Horacio Villalobos)
In high-income countries, Nestlé brand baby foods have no added sugars them, in line with recommendations from major health organizations around the world and consumer pressure. But in low- and middle-income countries, Nestlé adds sugar to those same baby products, sometimes at high levels, which could lead children to prefer sugary diets and unhealthy eating habits, according to an investigation released recently by nonprofit groups.
The investigation, conducted by Public Eye and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), says the addition of added sugars to baby foods in poorer countries, against expert recommendations, creates an "unjustifiable double standard." The groups quote Rodrigo Vianna, an epidemiologist and professor at the Department of Nutrition of the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil, who calls added sugars in baby foods "unnecessary and highly addictive."
"Children get used to the sweet taste and start looking for more sugary foods, starting a negative cycle that increases the risk of nutrition-based disorders in adult life," Vianna told the organizations for their investigation. "These include obesity and other chronic non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes or high blood-pressure."
Intermittent fasting, aka time-restricted eating, can help people lose weight—but the reason why may not be complicated hypotheses about changes from fasting metabolism or diurnal circadian rhythms. It may just be because restricting eating time means people eat fewer calories overall.
In a randomized-controlled trial, people who followed a time-restricted diet lost about the same amount of weight as people who ate the same diet without the time restriction, according to a study published Friday in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The finding offers a possible answer to a long-standing question for time-restricted eating (TRE) research, which has been consumed by small feeding studies of 15 people or fewer, with mixed results and imperfect designs.
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